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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1229712452394hsw-sysk-survive-plane-crash.mp3 | How to Survive a Plane Crash | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-to-survive-a-plane-crash | Although you're much more likely to die in an auto accident, odds are you're more afraid of flying -- but why? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to find out. | Although you're much more likely to die in an auto accident, odds are you're more afraid of flying -- but why? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to find out. | Thu, 25 Dec 2008 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=360, tm_isdst=0) | 19002176 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. This is stuff you should know. And I'm I'm Josh Clark and that's Chuck Bryant. Right, Chuck? That's a very formal introduction, Josh. I like it. Should I loosen up a little bit? Yeah, you're good, Chuck. Remember, we're talking about the worst way to die in a podcast. Several podcasts back, and I said for me, the worst way to die would be a plane crash. Right. Because you're on your way down and you're fully aware the whole time, probably, of what's about to happen. I can't think of anything worse than dying in a plane crash, personally with a bunch of strangers. Yeah. You don't want to die with people you don't know. No way. Okay, so one of the reasons I said that was because I've had a terrible experience on a plane, and nothing really untoward happened. Like, there wasn't a lot of turbulence or anything like that. But I found out the hard way that I'm actually afraid of flying. Okay? Most of the time when I fly, if I fly at all, it's to Europe or to Mexico or something like that. So it's a long flight, okay? I'll take a colada pin and drink some scotch, and then that's it. I wake up, and I'm where I'm supposed to be. It's like a time travel machine to you? Pretty much. And it works like a champ. Right. But the thing is, I'm never conscious or at the very least, cognizant or doing anything but drooling the whole way. Right. You're that guy. Right. Well, on the way back, actually, from Mexico, we had a layover in Miami. I had no pharmaceuticals, and I think it was a cash bar flight. I didn't have any money. Yes. What's the point? I just shelled out, like, half of my life savings for this flight from Miami to Atlanta, and you can't give me liquor for free. Right? Right. All right. So, anyway, this perfect storm of horribleness transpires, and I'm in the air, and all the way from Miami to Atlanta, I'm just completely convinced over and over again the plane is about to go down. Right. And I was actually looking up how fear works, right? Right. And I found out that when you have a fear response, there's two things going on, okay? Number one is this real quick knee jerk reaction that alerts you to danger. And our old friend the fight or flight response perks up. And then you've got a more thoughtful process that takes a little longer, that's really analyzing context and stuff like that. And then if it concludes you're not in danger, it tells your hypothalamus to settle down, be rational. Right. Okay. And then you calm down. Right. But this kept happening over and over and over again. So for 3 hours, it was like every 20 seconds, I was crossing the hill of a roller coaster. Wow. It was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. So a lesson learned. As far as I'm concerned, I'll never travel unprepared again. But it turns out, from what I understand, that the chances of me actually going down in a plane, these facts and figures don't make me feel any better at all, but rationally speaking, I have very little chance of going on a plane. Don't, right. Yeah. You want to know the number? Are you speculating? No, I know that. You know, I was setting you up right there. Yeah, that's a good one. I appreciate that. You're welcome. Your chances of dying I'm sorry, not even dying. Your chances of even being involved in an airline crash are one in 11 million. And when you compare that to your chances of actually being killed in a car, and this is the one you always hear, airline versus car or one in 5000. But for some reason, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm not driving the plane, so I have no control over it. And the car, I can maybe steer my way out of it. Do you think that's what it is? Well, that's one of the big reasons it's not me thinking this. People study this, and the lack of control has a huge part of place, as well as the fact that negative bias. So a plane crash gets a lot of coverage. Sure. So it seems like they're dropping out of the sky with regularity because they don't cover the news. The news doesn't cover car crashes like that? No. You're definitely not going to see that on the NBC Nightly News. No, that's true. I've got another way of looking at it with numbers. Okay. Do you know you would have to fly on an airline every day for 35,000 years to be guaranteed that you're going to be in a plane crash? That is becoming that is an awesome status. That one came from AirDisaster.com, and that is a site that I would never recommend anyone go to. If you have a fear of flying. Yeah. Or if you don't, because you soon will. Yeah, exactly. I like to fly. That doesn't freak me out at all, actually. I don't like to fly. I hate to fly, but has nothing to do with fear of crashing. What is just the long process of it. Yeah, the process. Taking your shoes and the security checks. I hate that. And being stuck on the plane next to people and touching strangers, and people are obnoxious and it smells. I hate it, man. You're not a club rubber. You don't like touching strangers? No. All right, well, good to know. It's a little by little. Club rubber. I've never heard that. I'll explain it later. Okay, well, all right. We understand that there's very little chance that you're going to get into a plane wreck. True. But they still happen. It does happen. Some people have a much closer relationship with fate and coincidence and chance than others. So let's say one of our listeners finds himself or herself in a plane that's going down. Right. There are some things that you may or may not want to do. And actually, before you even board, when you're booking a ticket, there's some stuff you want to take into consideration. Right? Very true. Well, like what? Well, before we get to that real quick, people should know just because your plane crashes doesn't mean you'll die either. You're so reassuring. I know. In fact, between 19 82,000, there were 568 crashes in the US. And more than 90% of them survived. That's crazy. Most of these, I have to say this, where take off and landing crashes. But of the 26 extreme crashes, and I think that means you're at 33,000ft, and then you go to 0ft, you have more than 50% chance of surviving. That even I would lose my mind. Yeah. I would lose my mind as I was walking away from that. You would. So having said that, if you are on a plane and you're a fan of ours and you're going down, we feel very bad for you for future you, unless you're actually listening to this on a plane that's going down. If so, hats off to you. Right? You've really achieved the trifecta. I don't know what the other two things are, but they're the other ones. The first thing most people want to find out about is there a safest seat? Yeah. And is there? Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask the FAA, their official stance is, no, there's not a safest seat. Oh, sure. Exactly. That's what I think is they can't really say that because people be like, I'm not sitting there. Exactly. I don't want to sit in anything but the safe seat. Exactly. This is a death seat. But people study the stuff like you wouldn't believe in. Popular Mechanics, Great magazine did a study and over a 36 year period, they studied date of plane crashes, commercial jet crashes in the United States, and passengers in the rear of the plane are, in fact, by their data, 40% more likely to survive than those towards the front of the plane. Pretty significant. Yeah. So I guess any of you guys out there who are about to book plane tickets, look for the back of the plane. Look for the back of the plane. Don't listen to this podcast. Die. Right. People like sitting up front, though, because you get the deboard. Is that a word you can disembarked? Disembark off the plane quicker. And no one likes staying in that long line where everyone yeah, but man, if your stuff down, they also die. Which one is it? You have to here. Bye bye. Bye bye. Like, a few more times than the people in the front. But you're going to survive as a plane goes down. True. So I've got some tips for you, though. If you're on a plane before the crash ever happens, there's a few things you can do to improve your chances. Yeah. You ready? Yes. And this is something actually, after I wrote this article, I started doing this stuff. Did you really? Oh, yeah, man, definitely. I don't believe in bad luck and jinxes, but I thought I was jinxed. Really? I wrote this? Yeah. I'm the guy that wrote the article, and then I'm going to be the one, ironically, that perishes from 33,000ft. So once you're on board, get to your seat, find the exit row. This is a no brainer, but here's a little trick. What you want to do is you want to count how many rows are between you and the exit row and submit that number in your head, even if you're hopped up on pharmaceuticals in Scotch. So if you count eleven rows to the exit row, a lot of times you might be in the dark, you might be underwater. Think about that. Now you can feel the seats and feel 12345 up to eleven. And then you take a left or a right and you're at your exit. Right. And don't be misled by a detached arm. If you're in the dark, know the difference between a detached arm and a plane seat. Right. I did not put that tip in the article. I should have. The crash position has changed over the years, and not a lot of people know this. Yeah. What's the deal? Did you get an impression of why the crash position changed? Well, my hope is that it's to make it more likely that you'll survive. Yeah, I doubt it. I hope there weren't politics or money behind it or anything like that, but I think you used to put your head between your legs and cover between your knees and cover your head. Yeah. Now it's not true. What you're supposed to do is you're supposed to extend your arms hands. Cross your hands over each other and put them against the seat back in front of you. And then put your head against the back of your hands. So you've got your arms stretched out and pressed against the seat in front of you and your head resting on the back of your hands. That's the new official press position. Yeah. Now I could actually see the lobby of the Inflight Magazine Publishers Association having that changed. You're going down like, wow, I can get that for that cheap. I want to know who does the artwork on those things. It's awesome. It's always the same. And there's probably one dude in Vermont that does all that artwork. For what? For the inflight little brochure you get oh, the columnist, hindu cows, people, the graphics. I love that drawing, but yeah, it's very swing standard. Sure. Here's a little tip for you. Before you get on the plane, you should dress appropriately. That sounds silly. If you're going to Maui, you want to have on your Hawaiian shirt and your flip flops. But after a plane crash, there's flasks everywhere, there's jet fuel, there's fire. You're going to want to be covered. So you should never wear open toe shoes. You should wear long sleeves and long sleeve shirt as well. It makes sense if you're smart. Many people want heed this advice, though, because, like I said, they want to be comfy on the transcontinental flights. If you have a family, say you and your wife have three kids, three or four kids and you're getting on the plane, you want to divide the responsibility up between the parents. Sure. Because it's a lot harder for one like the father to try and wrangle four family members and you might get separated. So dad's in charge of little Timmy and Johnny and mom is in charge of sue and Jane. Yeah. And if you have a lazy spouse, you may want to reconsider flying as a family. Right, that's a good idea. Everything may be on your shoulders. Yeah. And listen, and this is a big one, listen to the pre flight instructions. I know that's typically, I guess you're trying to get your scotch. I'm annoyed with the people on both sides of myself, but this is when you need to be listening, because all planes are different and there actually are some variations in instruction depending on what kind of yeah, I never knew that, actually. I thought it was all the same. So it's good advice. If the oxygen mass drops, you're in trouble. Put it on yourself first. If you love your wife more than life itself, you may have an instinct to put it on her, but you have to save yourself first before you can save anyone else. Is the general thinking. Wow. Yeah. So those are Darwinistic that last. Yeah. Save yourself. Save yourself so you can save others. Right. Okay. Well, Chuck, as you were saying, there's a substantial percentage of people who are in serious crashes that have survived. Right. And one of them was one specific one was made into a movie. One plane crash. Right, yeah. What was it called? Survive. You're talking about the alive? Yes. There's some Ive, I think it's alive. Okay. The Uruguayan rugby team, you want to tell them about that? Well, I thought you were okay, well, actually, this is your favorite story. It's a great story and it's a great movie too, actually. The Uruguayan soccer team probably should have known rugby team, I'm sorry, they probably should have known. They were on a plane for Chile and they were in the Andes mountains, which is like just they should call this thing the Widowmakers. There's a lot of crashes in them. And it was Friday, October 13. If there's a day to not fly, it's that day. Why is that? Friday the 13th in October. That's a bad day. Yeah, it sounds good. Sorry. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So the plane goes down, right. There's 45 people on board. It's not just the rugby team, but there's some others, and basically for, I think, 72 days. Well, the survivors, some of them slowly died off. I think twelve initially died in the crash, and then over the course of time, another ten died over the next 72 days. They didn't have any food or anything, so they ended up, very famously, resorting to cannibalism. Right. Which is where they were confined. Yeah. I love cannibalism. And the movie was alive. We hear rumors that there may be a follow up documentary about it coming. They're unsubstantiated, but keep an eye out for it. I think there has been a previous documentary at some point, too. Yeah, well, they just had some reunion, I believe. What was it? The maybe 25th reunion or something? Or the 35th reunion, because a lot of these guys are still alive and they reunited for I Don't want to ever Be Around you people again tour. Right, exactly. All right, so what other things can you do to maybe stay alive besides cannibalism, unless you're forced to resort to it? Right. Well, let's say your plane has crashed and you're on the ground. The first 90 seconds is vital. The golden what they call that golden time. Okay. And airlines are responsible for getting everyone off in those 90 seconds. That's the goal for the airline industry. So that's what you really need to be concerned about. There's going to be fire, potentially jet fuel, nasty stuff burning. So you want to get down low because the fumes from the stuff is more likely to kill you than being burnt. Sure, yeah. What are airplane seat covers made of? Exactly? Not good stuff. Nothing you want to put in your pipe and smoke, you know what I'm saying? So you've got all this nasty, toxic stuff in the air, so you want to get low, just like, teach you at home, stop, drop and roll. Yeah, I think it's if you're on fire, but they teach you to get down to go under the smoke. Right. Same principle here. If you do make it off the plane, which is the ideal scenario, you want to get the heck away from there because it could blow up. Any number of things could happen. So you want to get as far away from the plane as you can safely, and get behind something. If there's something there, there's a huge rock or a big tree. I mean, you just want to try and shield yourself in case there's a big explosion. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And do not try and get your baggage off your carry on bags. Good. What if you have your pet on board? Boy, you're asking the wrong guy. I would try and save my pet, sure, but they say no matter what it is, leave it behind. It's not worth it, man. I wasn't anticipating that. Yes, that would be your brother. You really caught me off guard there for sure. Yeah. Luckily, my pets don't fly, so I won't ever have to deal with that. They also say don't drink. I saw that and I was, no, I just can't. Okay. I can't fly normal, right? Yeah, that makes sense. I don't like to drink aboard a flight. I don't know. I don't like it. So you have the pressure, and maybe it's the expense. And those little bottles. I don't get it, too. I love this little bottle. They also say not to inflate your life vest until you're outside the cabin, because yes, it can restrict your movement, which you don't want when you're running out of a plane on fire. No, you don't want to be at the exit, and then your lifestyle gets hung on the seat before the explosion. Yeah. And I think that's about all the tips I have for you. Well, you know, I do have one more thing, Chuck. People who survive plane crashes actually tend to score better on emotional quotient tests, things like post traumatic symptoms, than people who have not been in plane crashes. They actually score significantly higher. There was a 1999 Old Dominion University study of 15 crash survivors across the United States, and these people just basically had a more positive outlook on life and didn't show the signs of stress. Like, these people who served as a control group flew, I think, five times a year or more and who had never been in a plane crash. That makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. They theorized that it was because they'd been through this huge ordeal and they kind of learned not to sweat the small stuff. Yes. Seriously. It makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah. And people, again, who had shown control, who are in control, as you were suggesting, they actually had the highest score of all if they thought of themselves as having stayed in control or maybe helped somebody off the plane. Apparently, you just cannot have a better outlook on life than if you've helped someone off a burning plane when you survived a plane crash. Wow. Let's seek it out. I wish I knew what that feeling felt like. Yeah, kind of, but at the same time, kind of like kind of not. Yeah, exactly. There's just one more quickie, Josh. I've never let these listeners go. I would be remiss if I didn't say that. Try to stay calm. That's the number one thing you can do, because panic people can't even unbuckle their seatbelt many times because they're in such a state of panic. And stay calm. Yeah. If you can, Chuck, you may have just saved some lives. Wow. You should feel good about yourself. Well, if we have any plane crash survivors that survive because of my advice, please let me know. And I might feel like that guy that saved the person from the burning. Yeah, talk about a positive outlook on life. And before we let you go, let us just give you a little peek at what Chuck and I think is the coolest article on site. It's called? Do we really get wiser with age? Yes, it is. By our colleague, writer Molly Edmunds, who is just a dynamo. And her article, she's a dynamo. She really is. And her article is super cool, too. So both Chuck and I give that one a thumbs up and strongly recommend it. And you can find that article how to Survive a Plane Crash. Chuck's written a whole slew of survival articles, and you can find them all by typing some clever words into the search bar@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houstofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housestofworks.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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." | |
c36b76e8-5460-11e8-b38c-13cbf3672eb0 | SYSK Selects: How Crack Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-crack-works | Back in the mid-1980s a new and extremely potent drug hit the scene: crack cocaine. In short order, America was in the grip of both a sweeping addiction and a state of hysteria over use of the drug and the social consequences of crack, like crack babies. Let's take a look back at the receding wave of the crack epidemic and its lasting legacy on America in this classic episode. | Back in the mid-1980s a new and extremely potent drug hit the scene: crack cocaine. In short order, America was in the grip of both a sweeping addiction and a state of hysteria over use of the drug and the social consequences of crack, like crack babies. Let's take a look back at the receding wave of the crack epidemic and its lasting legacy on America in this classic episode. | Sat, 20 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=201, tm_isdst=0) | 45432244 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, everybody, if you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hello, everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen our episode, How Crack Works. And boy, oh, boy, does the title ever say it all, because we really explain how crack works. So enjoy how crack works. 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. Jerry's over there. And this is stuff you should know. Kerry just waved like she's waving at the audience that isn't here. She's waving to the world. A little weird. She may be on something. Josh, you know what's whack? Zack attack from Safe by the bell. I don't even know what that is. You don't know what Saved by the Bell is what's wrong? No, I know what that show is, but I never heard of the Zack Attack. It's just Zack being Zack. Got you. That is whack. Yeah, well, never mind. I thought Crack was whack, but the Zack Attack is truly whack. No, I disagree. I was going to say, no, it's not right, because that's actually a pretty good show, but okay, yeah, Crack is whack. What's next? We're, like, eminent up in here. We're what? We're like, Eminem up in here. Yeah, I guess so. Refer to our hip hop episode now, people. No, I'm just saying, people, if they're confused about why we sound so stilted in Square, just go listen to hiphop. And that explains everything. People like that one. Surprisingly. Yeah, it's a good one, man. We got a good email from a Facebook post from a graffiti artist. Oh, yeah, good stuff. Nice. I can't remember his tag, but it was, like, really nice. But he was complimenting us, or he was just saying, hey, no. He's like, hey, I'm a graffiti artist, and here's my work. Nice. And I was very impressed. And he is not on crack. No, because he's not whack. Right, exactly. So, Chuck, I have a little intro. Great. Just if you'll bear with me. The year was 1985. Okay. I was 14. Okay. What is it? One year p. BG. Yeah. Very early on, cocaine, which is a drug that had been sweeping the nation for about ten years by then yeah. Was up to $150 a gram. That's thanks to the demand and the available income of its well heeled yuppie users who are willing to spend that kind of money on it. Sure. It's very much an expensive, white, upwardly mobile person's drug. Cocaine was sure. Wall street. Yeah. And there were, at the time, articles that kind of said, cocaine is probably not that addictive. We shouldn't worry that much about cocaine. It's not a very big deal. Yeah, it was mostly, like I said, a white drug. That same year, 1985, a new drug hit the scene. It was cheap, five to $10 a pop. It gave you a very quick, very intense high, short lived, and it swept through lower income african American areas of the United States. And all of a sudden, we had a problem. An epidemic. Yes. Because it was cocaine in a different form. Yeah. The country went crazy for it. And not only was it cocaine in a different form, it was cocaine being used by a different demographic that, as we'll see, America has always been threatened by and always made legislation to dampen drug use among yeah, it's pretty interesting when you dig into this stuff. And so in 1985, when people started to get worried, nancy Reagan became concerned. And when Nancy Reagan became concerned, as usual, she started to lie. And we will get into what allegedly might have happened and why crack might have been introduced in this country, because some people think it was the US. Government straight up CIA. Yeah, that's a really good point. So what you're referring to is Gary webb's dark alliance article, right? Yeah. Series of articles and now book from 1996, I believe. Gary webb was an investigative journalist for the San Jose mercury news, and they had a front page story where he basically figured out the connection between the CIA and the cracker epidemic that started in, I think, 1984 in Los Angeles. Yeah. South central. There's a dude named freeway Ricky Ross who's still around, I think. Oh, really? Yeah, and he was the largest cocaine distributor, african American cocaine distributor in La. He was big time. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he had a new product called crack. And it became very popular very quickly. And Gary Webb, in 1096, traced the origin of this epidemic back through Ricky Ross, back to some Nicaraguan freedom fighting gorillas that were backed and trained and possibly commanded by the CIA. Are we getting into this? Should we just go ahead and dive in? Let's just dive in. Do you want to? Yeah, why not? Okay. All right, here's the deal. In Nicaragua Central American country in the 1930s. Man named Nastasio Samosa took power. And then about 40 years later, in 1979, the people revolted overthrew him and they were called the Sandinistas. Yes. So, you know, the whole Contra Sandinista war in Nicaragua that raged in the seventies and eighties, that's what we're talking about. Yes. And the Sandinistas were communist, and that didn't fly so well with the US. Who had long cherished Nicaragua for their farmland and like to have a tow in their pond, so to speak. Oh, yeah. And so Communism there didn't fly. And so they said, you know what? I think maybe we should fund the Contras, maybe give them a little bit of financial assistance. Yeah. And the contrast weren't just one group that was like an umbrella term for any democratic or anti communist group that was trying to paramilitarily overthrow the socialist leadership in Nicaragua. That's right. So we decided to help fund their civil war. And the problem was that there wasn't a lot of dough that we could say, like, hey, let's use this money to do this. Yeah, because it was a secret war. There was no congressional approval. It was a proxy war with the Soviet Union at the time. So some allege that this is when the Reagan administration and the CIA got together to literally introduce cocaine dealers and cocaine to South Central and crack cocaine to spread throughout the ghettos to raise money and use that money to fund the contrast. So here's the thing. That was never proven, and Gary Webb never, ever said he did not. He didn't say that the government directly introduced it on purpose or with the aim of creating an epidemic in the ghetto. He found connections between the CIA and drug lords right. Specifically Ricky Ross on one end. And then the CIA backed and possibly commanded the Nicaraguan Democratic force. Yes, this Contra force. So their business, their group was funded entirely from cocaine sales and trafficking. And they all went to this guy, Ricky Ross. And there's no way that the CIA didn't know about this. Yeah, well, we'll get back to Web in a second. But in the 80s, when the whole Iran Contra thing broke out, there was the Kerry committee who did some investigating. The Carry Committee report from John Kerry obviously found that, quote, the Contra drug links included payments to drug traffickers by the US. State Department of Funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras. And then later on, there was an internal CIA investigation in the 90s where they found that there is no evidence that the CIA actually brought drugs into the United States. However, these are all quotes however, during the Contra era, the CIA worked with a variety of people to support the contra program. And let me be frank, there are instances where the CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who are alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity. Right. So basically the internal investigation said, well, there might have been some people we were dealing with that were doing this. And as it turns out, we didn't really do much about it. Right. So as far as you can go without hyperbole and it's still pretty shocking. Sure. The CIA backed, trained and possibly commanded at least one guerrilla group the Nicaraguan Democratic Force and the Nicaraguan Democratic Force. The FDN sold cocaine to freeway Ricky Ross. Freeway Ricky Ross is where the crack epidemic originated. Yep. And so just to finish up with Web, though, after he wrote this Dark Alliance series, he was shunned by mainstream press in the United States. Sadly, all three of the major newspapers the La times, New York Times, and I guess was the Washington Post came out. Not only Sean, they, like, tried to discredit him. Oh, yeah. They wrote articles. They put 17 reporters and 20,000 words to a three day rebuttal of Dark Alliance. That was the La Times. Yes. Rather than pick up the story, they tried to demolish it. And Webb New York Times suggested he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong. He already had one Pulitzer Prize at this point, I think, for something else. And the Mercury News defended it for a little while and then backed off and apologized. He ended up quitting and committed a very weird suicide in which he shot himself in the head twice. Yeah. Who knows? Obviously, if you get on the Internet, there are tons of outlets that say, well, obviously it's not a suicide, it was a murder. So who knows about that? Other people have said, no, it does look kinky, but the first shot wasn't fatal and he was able to do it twice. Who knows? Draw your own conclusion. That's some raw nerve right there. But he claimed that there were people like he saw what he thought were CIA people climbing up his fire escape and stuff the previous days and who knows? All I'm saying is they're making a movie about it with Jeremy Renner this summer. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Great. Good. I'm glad I ran across him when I wrote an article on America's Army. Jeremy Renner? No, Jeremy Webb. Yeah, he wrote an expose. America's army. It's a video game, and it's basically like a training game for the army where you can play this free game, but you sign up to be contacted if you're any good at it, the army contacts you. And he did this it's like a recruiting tool through video games. But the army categorically denied that's what it was, but that's obviously what it was. And Gary Webb, one of the last exposes on that. And we should mention that today all three of those major news outlets all say, boy, we kind of got that one wrong. Yeah, we shouldn't have done that to Gary Webb. Maybe we shouldn't have driven Gary Webb to a possible suicide. Yeah. 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. 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. So Gary Webb did all this investigation, did all this legwork and connect to the dots pretty well. But there's still this maddening question, tantalizing question. Who invented crack? It came out of nowhere. And so to kind of answer that, which we can't, we have to look at how crack is made. And to look at how crack is made, you have to go back a lot further than the 1980. You have to go back to the 1880s and actually a little further before then. When cocaine first was introduced to the United States after it was isolated, the Alkaloid was isolated from the coca plant in the mid 19th century. Yeah. And that's when it was isolated. For centuries, people in South America were wise to the fact that if you chew on this plant, it will give you some go juice and you can work more. Yeah. And people still chew the heck out of it. Yeah. So it was no secret to the South Americans. But like you said, it was the mid 1880s when it was actually isolated and became an abused narcotic drug. Right, but first you could buy it all over the place. You could order it through catalogs. Doctors can prescribe it. Sigmund Freud was an ardent prescriber of it, and it was a very popular drug found in tonics. Coca Cola. Sure. For real. That's not a myth. And cocaine was everybody loved it for a while. Yeah. Well, not until they still loved it and still do today, I imagine. Circles. But in 1914, it was made illegal with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Right. Do you remember I said earlier that everything like this crack has a real history of it, shows the history of racism in regards to drug laws. So the Harrison narcotic act outlawed opiates and cocaine for the first time in the United States, and it was based on concerns like Chinamen were luring white women to their dens of iniquity in Chinatown through opium, and Southern blacks were sniffing cocaine, and it gave them superhuman strength, and they were raping white women as a result. So those two things were passed, and we have federal legislation from 1914 as a result of those kind of fears. And if you keep that in the back of your mind and then pay attention to the drug policy, that comes out later on from track. It's been going on since then and it continues to today. Are you saying a pattern emerges? A pattern emerges. So cocaine is cocaine powder. You have to actually manufacture it. You don't find a cocoa plant and, like, not shake it shake it and white powder falls out. It makes a good a tinkling sound on all. It is made by dissolving the paste, the cocoa paste in a mixture of hydrochloric acid and water. Then you add some potassium, salt, separate out the bad junk, maybe add a little ammonia, and then the powder is separated out and you've got cocaine powder. Cocaine. And from there, you can sniff it, you can add a little water to it and inject it. Or you can make something called freebase. Yeah, I never quite understood what freebase was. I thought free basing was a thing. It is. Yeah, but free basis also, it's a noun and a verb. Right, okay. Free basis. Free bass. You see, I've been doing it wrong. You've verb the noun. Okay, this stuff doesn't work. I don't know what everybody's so excited about. So with freebase, you take cocaine and you add something highly flammable, say, ether. And after you dissolve the cocaine in ammonia, you add ether to it and then you smoke it, but you're smoking something that has, like, a highly flammable solution involved. Yeah, tell that to Richard Pryor. Yes. In 1980, when he was filming Bust and Loose, he caught himself on fire. He was smoking free base and drinking 151 proof roam one night, and I think he was doing it in his garage, too. So it was UN ventilated and he caught fire. Yeah, but you know what? There's also reports that he set himself on fire on purpose. Oh, really? That he poured the stuff all over his head and let him match. Oh, you want a little cuckoo self emulation? I think that may be the right story now. I just saw a documentary on him, and I think that's what they say. I'm so glad you just corrected me mid podcast. Do you know how many emails you prevented from I mean, that was the long stories that he freebased. And I think he even came out later and said, yeah, I was free basing, but I also purposely set myself on fire in the ravages of a free basing binge. Got you okay. So free basing. It was a thing at least as early as 1980, but it was difficult to do. Multi step process, and you needed something like ether. Ether is not the easiest thing to get your hands on. Sure. And dangerous, obviously. Sure. But there was a way to smoke cocaine, and freebase was the way to do it. But that never really got a big foothold in any demographic in the country. It was just kind of a thing that some people like Richard Pryor did. Right. Looking for a more intense high, I guess. Then all of a sudden, mysteriously, out of nowhere, there is crack cocaine. Yeah. Crack is also manufactured, but it doesn't require something like ether or anything flammable. No. You dissolve it in a mixture of water and either baking soda, sodium bicarbonate or ammonia, and you boil it up, separate it out into the solid, cool it down, and then break it up. And you've got your little whiteish or tan crack. Rocks. Right. And if you buy it on the street, supposedly they range in size from zero one to 5 grams. Yeah. The DEA says between 75 and 90% pure cocaine. So it's quite a rush for you. Sure. Because it's so easy to make crack from cocaine. Like, nobody imports crack across the border into the US. It's all coke that comes into the US. Right. And then Wesley Snipes converts it into crack and a factory operated and run by naked people because he doesn't trust them. What was that? New Jack City. Oh, man, I was like, played. I forgot all about New Jack City. That was a great movie. It was. And they call it crack because it makes a crackling sound. That's the baking soda when you put the fire on it. And speaking of put the fire on it, that's how you do it. You have a little I mean, there's different kinds of pipes, but the most often cracked pipe you will see is the little straight shooter. Little glass tube. Yes. I find them on my dog walks in my neighborhood. Do you really? Still today? Yeah, crack is still around. It's not like it went anywhere. Okay. You thought, oh, they got that problem all under control. So you have the crack in one end and then a filter of some kind, like a steel wool or something in the other. You heat it up with your lighter yeah. On the outside of the glass tube. Or you can, I guess, hit it with the flame. But I think if you light it under the glass tube, that's generally the way to do it, I think. Yeah. It vaporizes it. That's right. And you smoke it, and pretty much immediately you're going to feel the effects. It's an immediate rush that lasts only about ten or 15 minutes. And that's something that I didn't used to know. I learned it a few years ago, but I had no idea. I thought a crack high was, like, a couple of hours or something. No, I think it's one of the shortest highs on the market, which is, I guess, why it's so addictive and dangerous rampant. Because you come down and you're like, I'd like to do that again. Exactly. Because every 15 minutes it's a short high. But it's also an extremely intense high, too. It's addictiveness, or potential for addictiveness is really high. Yeah. And so I know this article summarized very nicely for you exactly how it reacts with the brain. And so don't you go ahead and just lay it on people. All right. It has to do with dopamine as we know. Yeah. Dopamine. It's like your pleasure center. It's the basis of the reward system that we have, which is how we learn to eat and how we learn to have sex, to reproduce. We feel good when we do certain things, so we want to do it again. And the basis of that is dopamine. Right. So in the brain, the way it functions normally is neuron will release dopamine, and it will travel to a neighboring neuron, causing it to fire and release a pleasurable sensation. And then that dopamine molecule travels back to the original neuron via a transporter and is reabsorbed. So it's a little thing and then goes back home. And it's good. Right. There's a certain finite amount of pleasure humans are designed to experience naturally. Yeah. Because when we say reabsorbed I said that a lot. I don't think people understand that means, basically, it turns that off again. Right. It does its thing and it's done. Yeah. It doesn't do its thing and do its thing and do its thing and do its thing. It does its thing once and goes back to the original neuron. Exactly. Sit on the couch and this little neuron waits to be released again. Let me know when you have sex again or eat something or eat some pizza. Yeah. So with crack or other drugs that target the dopamine system, they interrupt the process. Crack specifically interrupts the process of reuptake, or reabsorption. So you're smoking the crack. Right. And it triggers this dopamine release a flood. Yes. But crack attaches to the transporter, which keeps the dopamine from being reabsorbed, which means it's just floating around in the synapse, the area between two neurons, like hitting that one neuron again and again and again. And it does it all throughout the brain or all throughout the ventral tegmental area. And you have this long well, not long, but you have this very intense, pleasurable sensation. Right. So basically, the re uptake. They just shut that down. So you're out there on your own, just pleasure floating around. Yes. Your brain is a big pleasure center. And then after, I guess, five to 15 minutes, like, the crackers off and the dopamine is taken up once more. That's right. And the high is over and you are left going, I want to do that again. Exactly. I guess we should talk about some of the effects of crack use. Obviously, just like with cocaine, any kind of stimulant like that, or amphetamine, you're going to be at risk for heart attack. Yeah. Sometimes on the spot. And because you smoke it, too, like, it has real potential for problems with your respiratory system and your cardiopulmonary system in general. Yes. Stroke is also a risk. It's going to make you very energized at first, although your senses may be heightened temporarily. Your heart rate is going to shoot through the roof. Your pupils are going to dilate, your temperature is going to rise. You're going to be pretty anxious or irritable as you start to come down. And then you could be really aggressive, and you could be more prone to start a fight with a cop. You feel like you have superhuman strength or some crazy stuff to a passerby on the sidewalk because you have a bunch of gunk on the corners of your mouth. That's true. If you have it with alcohol, that's not a good combination because that produces a chemical called cocaethylene. Yeah. It lived up. This is the thing. It's like toxic is all. Get out. Well, the crack or cocaine and alcohol produce a third drug, basically a hybrid drug that's more than the sum of its parts, and it creates a longer lasting, intense or high from crack. But it's also really toxic to the liver. Really bad for you. Yeah. As if alcohol itself wasn't. Yeah. And it's not like you have to do anything to it or to get this thing. Like, you just drink and smoke crack. Right. And your body does the rest. Your metabolism breaks the stuff down and creates this coca ethylene. It's like alcohol and cocaine. Right. So, as we said, it's super addictive. And of course, all this stuff, whenever you hear about drugs being addictive, it's all dependent on the person. Of course, one person might smoke crack and never want to do it again. One person might be hooked immediately. Yeah. It all depends on your susceptibility to addiction, which varies greatly. For sure. I remember learning when I was a kid that you smoke crack once and you're addictive for life. Yeah, I heard that about heroin, too. Yeah. But there is a very high potential for abuse with crack because it's short term. Short high, but an intense high. Yeah. And we don't want to say, like, crack is not addictive, but we don't want to spread the misinformation once you're hooked for yes. Which was really big in the Nancy Reagan war on drug era. Like, a lot of misinformation was put out there just to scare people. Yeah. So we're talking about it being addictive. It's addictive because of the effect that it has on dopamine. Yeah. But it's also deletrious to your health because of the effect that it has on your dopamine reward system. Well, yeah. And I know we've covered this in other drugs. If you do enough drugs like this, it rewires your brain to the point where it just isn't working the same any longer. You need it. Your brain has some sort of sensor in there that's like, okay, there's way too much dopamine going on. This person should not be feeling this much pleasure. So I'm going to just stop producing as much dopamine naturally. It doesn't need it. I'm going to destroy the dopamine that's floating around in the synapses. I'm going to reduce the level so that now, when you stop smoking crack, the let down is way worse because you don't have as much natural dopamine as you did before you started smoking crack. And so your craving, your desire for crack to get back up is much more intense, much higher. Yeah. And here's the thing with crack, which is a little weird. Many times you need to smoke more and more of it because of what you were just talking about, because you need to get that high. But sometimes it will actually make you more sensitive to it, and you will get super high off crack, even as an addict, super quick, and you could super die instantly, which I'm not sure if they've reconciled how it can do both of those things depending on who you are. Well, I think it's the same thing. It's like some people get addicted to it immediately and other people take longer. Yeah, but I'm just talking about how it affects you. But I guess it's the same with alcohol because some hardcore alcoholics take a long time to get drunk, and some get drunk, like, really quickly. Right? Yeah. So I guess it's the same deal. I guess it'd probably have to do with metabolism. Metabolism, right. I guess so. Once you are fully addicted, if you stop smoking crack, which, by the way, I think I speak for Chuck, too, and I say we highly recommend it if you smoke crack to stop smoking crack. Yeah. And if you haven't started yet, then just keep that up. Yes. Do not start smoking crack. No reason to. If you listen to this podcast after you became addicted to crack, if you withdraw from crack, you're going to experience a pretty big come down in general. Yeah. Severe depression, anxiety, cravings. You're going to be not fun to be around. You're going to be really irritable and anxious and exhausted, yet agitated all at the same time. Yes. The good news is that your brain will eventually restructure itself to return its dopamine levels back to normal or somewhere near normal, so you won't be depressed or withdrawn or anxious or irritated irritable for the rest of your life. It's just while you're undergoing withdrawals. That's what it's going to be like. And it won't be pretty. It won't be pretty. No. And there's no medication designed to specifically treat crack. And most therapies are pretty standard rehab. Therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches you how to basically go through life resisting the temptation of smoking crack. Right. How to disassociate maybe triggers places you go. Yeah. Just from that lifestyle. Yeah. Just to decouple your mentality from being addicted to standard rehab treatment. Pretty much. And we covered that extensively in addiction. There's another type of treatment that I hadn't heard of called contingency management. Had you heard of that? No, I hadn't, actually. It's apparently fairly popular for crack treatment. Well, what is it? Well, basically, you are rewarded for not smoking crack, which I'm sure goes over really well with Republicans. Where's my reward? Exactly. I haven't smoked crack ever. Well, you haven't been addicted. You have to be addicted. So you're given, like a voucher or something. You make it, like, 30 days. You get a free movie ticket or something. Like you're given stuff to incentivize. Yeah, incentivize. Not doing crack. And I'm sure stuff that is healthy, good for you, distracts you from thinking about crack, that kind of thing. I hadn't heard of that before this article. Give someone a movie ticket. You did good today by not smoking crack. Here's a movie ticket. Right. I always like the street terms. We should go over those real quick because 90% of street terms, I think, are probably just made up by the media. Yeah, I always feel like they probably just call it crack or rock. Right? Or they call it bossa or French fries. Or real tops. Or Glow. Glow. Wasn't that the drug? And strangers with candy. Was it jerry, like, rubbed on her gum. And they call it, like, Glow, probably. That was great. Rock sand. That's my favorite. Yeah. Hot cakes. CDs. Where is that? Candy? Sugar, yam. Jelly beans. I guess that kind of makes sense. Jelly beans and French fries make sense. French fries does? Yes, because doesn't it look kind of like little pieces of French fries? Yeah, it makes more sense than basa or real tops. Here's one. There's no way that anyone in the history of humanity has ever called crack. This Electric Koolaid. Yeah, they got the wrong drug there. Yeah, that would be acid from the famous book. What is that? I don't know. I think those are newspaper writers who've never been on the streets. The kids today are on the Electric Koolaid. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? 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If you were caught with 1 gram of cracked cocaine, you would get as much time as someone caught with 100 grams of cocaine powder. Yes. And let's go back over this. In 1985, a gram of cocaine, powdered cocaine, cost $100, $150. And it was extraordinarily favored predominantly by white people. Yes. Crack comes along 1985, five to $10. Cheap, intense, high, and it becomes favored by African American, statistically speaking. Yeah. So some might allege that the US government actually had a hand in introducing crack to the ghettos and then made stiffer sentencing once people were addicted to crack to put and I'm not saying crack users are like. Awesome people and people should do this. But it's a non violent crime. And they were being put in prison for the same amount of time as white counterparts who may be raped and murdered people. A hundred to one ratio, you get caught with 100 times the powdered cocaine to get the same sentence as somebody caught with 100 of that amount of crack. That's right. But it's not like that anymore. Well, hold on. There is one other thing, too. There are mandatory minimum sentences that were extraordinarily harsh just getting caught five years with a little bit of crack on you. Any amount of crack, I believe you got five years automatically. Yeah. Five years. That was the mandatory minimum for possession. Five years in prison for nothing else. Like you could just be walking down the street and get caught with crack and never have committed another crime in your entire life. And you would get five years in prison for that. And that was from the anti Drug Abuse Act of 1009, which screams Nancy Reagan. Yeah. And that was a big deal. It was the law of the land until 2010. Yeah. And finally, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reverted the ratio to one to 18 instead of one to 100 by weight and got rid of that mandatory minimum. And now Attorney General Eric Holder is actually trying to get some retroactivity in these sentences and not trying to they are actually releasing some people from prison. I remember we talked about that in the presidential pardon episode. That was something that a lot of people were calling for, was blanket pardoned. Nonviolent crack users who had been busted under this mandatory minimum. Here's an idea. Rehab somebody. But even still, there's still a skew in the ratio between crack and cocaine. Probably arrests. No, not just that. The sentences I guess it's still an 18 to one ratio. It used to be 101, but it's still 18 to one. And people are like, why not just make it one to one? It's cocaine and it's cocaine. Exactly. What's the problem here? So, yeah, there's been a long history of, I guess, racism, just put plain and simple. There's really no other way to put it. Racism among drug laws. Yeah. And since they introduced the retroactivity releases, they've reduced 7300 sentences for an average of 29 months per inmate and saved American taxpayers $530,000,000 in the process. Other people will say, you're letting drug offenders out on the streets. Why are we doing this? There are two sides, obviously, opinion wise, to that story. Right. We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that people are upset about it in some circles. Oh, sure. It's not like it's a great idea. Categorically yeah, there's problems with it, for sure. Can we talk about crack babies? Yeah. That was another thing that came out of the 80s, was the so called crack baby. Like, there was a huge part of this crack epidemic. Wasn't just addiction, it was babies being born addicted to crack. And thanks to a paper from 1985 by a guy named Doctor IRA Chaznoff, the crack baby fear started sweeping the nation. I mean, huge, man. There's a New York Times video that you can go watch. It's, like, ten minutes long called Retro Reports. Is that what it was called? Yeah, it was really good. And it basically kind of brought and I remember now, back in the 80s, peter Jennings on the nightly news saying that babies and it's not Peter Jennings, of course. It's whoever wrote the story. It was Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, it was People, Time, Newsweek, basically saying these babies are being born addicted to drugs. It will ultimately cost crack babies will cost the United States $5 billion. Yeah. They were saying it was going to be a lost generation, a nation of kids who you can't rehab. The babies are aloof, they shake, they avoid eye contact. They avoid eye contact with their own mothers, which proves that they're going to be antisocial deviance when they grow up. Yes. And this is not like we're not rewriting history, man. It was, like, hardcore stuff that they were saying. One quote was, they will not be able to hold a job or form meaningful relationships. Right. So they were expected to completely overwhelm the education system, maybe not even have an IQ of 50, is the other quote. Yeah, and then completely overwhelmed social services. So basically, there's this whole generation of kids that were expected to be totally messed up because their mothers had smoked crack while they were pregnant, and so women were having their kids taken away from them. Some women were arrested. Yeah. And the guy, the doctor who wrote the original paper, dr. Irishnoff, started to very quickly back off of his original statement which he's still today. He admits he was pretty mouthy and not very savvy, pretty media naive, I guess you could say for sure. And he said he would give these long winded statements and then the press would just pick out like, the juiciest part. And this guy single handedly created the crack baby myth because it never panned out in any way, shape or form. And what they were saying was like the twitchy babies that you're seeing on TV when they're talking about the symptoms of being a crack baby, that's premature babies. Like, you take any premature baby who's premature for any reason, and they're going to display these symptoms that are supposedly associated with crack babies. Yeah, they did. The US government sponsored a 25 year study of crack babies. Not a two year study or a five year study, 25 years. They followed these babies up into adulthood is now over. The funding ran out and they found that by age four, the average IQ of cocaine exposed children was 79. The average IQ for the non exposed children was 81. When it came to readiness, at age six, about 25% in each group scored in the abnormal range. Basically all of the findings said it's the same as these other kids. But here's the deal. They weren't doing the study against crack babies and white suburban kids. They were doing it against a like model, which was other poor black kids, basically, that were not crack babies. And they said they are all below average. So the deal is it's poverty, right? It's not crack cocaine. They're scoring the same as non crack babies and they're all scoring lower because of poverty and basically bad postnatal care through adulthood. Right. You might not have any problems, physiologically or not, or cognitively from being exposed to crack in the womb, but if your mom's still smoking crack after you're born, you're probably not going to get the best care from your parents as possible. Yeah. And they did find in that same study that children that were being raised in like a supporting, encouraging house, even in poverty stricken conditions, tended to excel. Right. So it was poverty, they found out, and postnatal care, like you said, and being born premature. Yes. But the crack baby thing never happened. It was another example of hysterics. So right about now, I want to say, if it sounds like Chuck and I are being cavalier, have been cavalier with the idea of crack, we're not being cavalier with crack or addiction. That's nothing to take lightly. Right. But I think what's created a bit of a freneticness or passion maybe in this one, is just this idea that we are able to look back now 30 years on and say, wow, America was genuinely hysterical and it's something to be amazed by and a little disconcerted with too. Yeah. Of course you should not take cocaine or smoke crack when you're pregnant. No doctor on earth is going to say that's a good thing. Right? But the crack baby was a myth. And the one Emory professor that was in that New York Times researcher in the New York Times video came out and said, you know what? Alcohol does much more physical damage and is much more widespread as an abused drug during pregnancy than crack or cocaine ever is. But they're not locking ladies up that are pregnant for drinking, and the reason they were doing it back then is because they were poor black women. Right. We should say, though, the crack epidemic also, while the sentences were stiffer, the amount you got caught with was 100 times smaller to get the same wrap as getting caught with powdered cocaine. There was something that came out of this crack epidemic that was a real threat, and that was the rise of the modern innercity gang, at least as far as we know. It like Crypts and Bloods and folks and all those guys, they came out of this era. They were able to buy the guns that they bought and fight the turf wars that they fought because they had this incredibly addictive drug that they could sell and control pretty easily in their hands all of a sudden. So where that came from, who knows? But the big problem with the crack epidemic that you can trace directly back to it is the rise of the modern gang. Wow. Drug gang. So, in summary, crack. Whack. Yeah. Crack babies, myth. Crack sentencing laws. Whack. Whack. Gary Webb. Very nice. I got nothing else. Okay, perfect. Chuckers, how about you take us out with some listener mail? All right. This is from Rebecca, and it is about PTSD police chase. I've been a fan of you guys since the inception. I've listened to every episode. I always wanted to write in. Until now, I didn't have a reason. Listening to the Police Chase podcast made me want to share my story. Years ago, I was a victim of a police chase. Some teenagers had stolen a car and were pursued by the cops. I'm not sure what caused them to pursue at high speeds, but they did. The chase resulted in the kids T boning my car. When I was stopped at a red light. The kids tried to take an incredibly sharp turn, essentially a uturn, onto another road, and they're going way too fast. The chase escalated to an on foot chase, and it actually did end in arrest. I ended up having to be cut out of the car with the jaws of life. Only suffered minor head injuries despite my car being totalled. As a result of the incident, I began having anxiety and PTSD symptoms that were triggered by police sirens and intense stress. I had to receive treatment similar to some of what you discussed in the PTSD episode. All is well now. It didn't take too long with therapy to overcome everything. I just wanted to share the downside to police chases. I don't think that incident required a high speed chase. The result could have been much worse. Wow. I really wish that police would stop to think before they pursued for minor crimes and would get fined even or have some sort of penalty for causing accidents with innocent bystanders. And that is Rebecca. Thanks, Rebecca. I appreciate you sharing that. Sorry that happened to you. Glad you're doing better. Yeah. If you want to share a personal experience from something that we have talked about in this episode or another one, you can tweet to us s yskpodcast facebook. Comstuffystnow stuffpodcastworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffynow.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 amazonandtalopets.com." | |
a61dab36-5462-11e8-b449-6fda746b3a50 | Can Anarchism Work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-anarchism-work | Teenage punks going through a phase probably come to mind when you think of anarchists, but anarchism is a legitimate political philosophy based on the idea that governments are unnecessary and do more harm than good. Could we actually live without them? | Teenage punks going through a phase probably come to mind when you think of anarchists, but anarchism is a legitimate political philosophy based on the idea that governments are unnecessary and do more harm than good. Could we actually live without them? | Tue, 26 Jun 2018 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=177, tm_isdst=0) | 58778506 | 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 Burns 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 housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and this is getting to be kind of normal, but it's just us today. Jerry's fine. She's not in the hospital. She's just checked out. She's not in hospice? No, she's just been busy lately. So everything will be back to normal soon, she said. Guys, ten years is all you get from me. I know. Seriously. Kind of since that anniversary. She doesn't care. Checked out. As I said. We're kidding, of course. But speaking of not issues, but isms let's talk about anarchism. Chuck. Yeah, this one was interesting. I think I pitched this one a long time ago. And you never did it for some reason. I think it just probably came at a time when we just didn't have enough time to do it. Yeah, I think you're right. But this was interesting because anarchism can be a lot of different things. Yeah. I think a lot of people have the idea that anarchism is anarchy and that the whole point of it is to just basically demolish all institutions, descend into lawlessness, disorder, chaos. Yeah, exactly. Where you just take what you want and you kill somebody and it's fine or whatever. That's not the point of anarchism. That is the definition of anarchy. But anarchy is not what anarchists are actually out for. There's like a couple of threads in there that are the basis of that. Like, it's not just a complete mischaracterization, but it's just so off base that you might as well just be talking about something totally different. Yeah. And there are many, many forms that anarchism can take, and there are many schools of thought, and there's no way we're going to touch on all of them, but we're going to do what we do, which is a nice overview of some of them. Yes. So our apologies to all and our kits for what we get wrong. But I do want to put a call out. Any follow up info I am totally open for, so send it our way. Any corrections, anything like that? Yeah, totally. So there are a few things, like you said, there's a lot of different varieties of anarchism, but there are a couple of tenants that any variety of anarchists would agree with. Like, this is the basis of anarchism. Right. So anarchism, we should say, also is like it's a political thought, it's a philosophical, political idea. And the basis of the idea, no matter how you approach it is that humans are better off governing themselves than they are in creating lasting institutions, where they send people to those institutions to make decisions for them. Right. So the power structure as it exists is not doing us any favors. It's even worse than favors. Favors. And that a truly free and equal society. And, you know, it dips into communism and socialism here and there, and we'll cover all that. But that is sort of the goal, like you said, just to down with these government authorities and elected officials. It should be run by the people in full. Yes, exactly. It's really as simple as that. Right. I mean, that's the basis of anarchism, that you're better off without them. Not that they even can be good. Most, like, dyed in the wool anarchists will say, like, no, any artificial institution that's created by humans to govern other humans is necessarily bad. It creates disorder, it creates chaos. It is run by violence. Like, they will point out the whole way that the system has kept going is through the threat of violence. Yeah. It's hard to argue with a lot of this, to be honest. Totally. Yeah. It makes a tremendous amount of sense. I think, really there are two things going against anarchism in practice today. One, the longstanding image that was developed at the end of the 19th century and beginning the 20th century that didn't do it any favors. The image of the terrorist anarchist, which we'll get to. And then two, the fact that there hasn't been any longstanding examples of this to point to. Right, but that's not to say that there are examples of actual anarchism I'm sorry. In practice that have been successful. It's just that no one's ever been able to do it, like, on a massive national level yet. Right. Unlike the community scale, we've seen it and currently see it, which we'll get to that stuff, too. But, yeah, you're right. It's probably too late with the world as it is. Not properly. There's just no way you could do that today. Well, there's a lot of people who would disagree with you about that. Yeah, sure, right. You're like, okay, go do it, and I'll come over when you got it up and running. But the very word anarchism is the Greek in its root. anarchia means without rulers or without authority. But this article is pretty good, actually. Who wrote this one? Patty kyger. Patrick Kyger. Was it Kyger or Kygar? Kyger. The R is invisible. Okay. But he points out that the aim is social change at its heart. Yeah, that's another good point. I've left that part out. That's ultimately the goal. The point is you can do all this stuff. You can get all the services that you get allegedly from government institutions, from your friends and neighbors and community. And that the point of anarchism, is to enact that change. Now, don't wait for it. Don't go petition for it, just go do it and constantly be doing it to make your society better. Yeah. And sometimes, depending on where you're coming from with your group, there may be a little environmentalism thrown in or a little even religion thrown in. There's other philosophies that are comorbid or can be comorbid. Anarchism feminism is one that they pointed out, too. Which one? Feminism. Oh, sure. And I ran across that a lot, that there's a lot of people that equate feminism and anarchism as feminism is just in and of itself a type of anarchism because feminists have a proven track record of just going and doing being the change that they want to see in the world rather than waiting around for it or asking for it. One example I ran across with the rape crisis centers of the 70s that sprung up because the establishment just didn't take violence against women very seriously, and women set up clinics to handle this themselves. That was a big time feminist move in the it is, in its heart, constantly progressing socially. That's an anarchistic tactic, I guess. Well, yeah, and it seems like, depending on where you lay your head as an anarchist, you might want to concentrate more on economy. Other people might want to concentrate more on the like, how to overthrow the authority and see, like, it's interesting when you look at, like, let's say, the mutualism school where they're all about the workers controlling their own factories, controlling the land, or the anarchical communist who say, no private property for anyone. It's like a big, giant commune, and no one competes for anything. Are there schools of anarchy where they tackle everything? It seems like they're getting very specific, I think, because these came out of the minds of people who had very specific views on this stuff. Right. Like you said, communism and anarchism cross paths here, there, and there's even a variety of them combined because they do share some qualities. Right. But the idea of communism let me put it like this. Liberalism is the idea that people should be free and equal. Communism is the idea that people should all have the same access to everything they need, and that it's the state that is meant to support that stuff. With liberalism, it's the state that's meant to make sure everybody is treated equally and everyone is free. Anarchism says, yeah, we totally agree. Free and equal. We want everybody to have everything that they need. But it's the state that we disagree with you guys on. So that's the real distinction between communism and liberalism and anarchism is that they all kind of have the same ideal, which is freedom, equality, equal access to everything, resources, that kind of stuff. But whether or not there should be a state or you need a state to do this is the big distinction between those. And I think that's where the kind of the narrow mindedness comes from on some of these that makes sense. Thanks. I think so when it comes to how to get rid of the current establishment, I guess you would say there are many schools of thought on that. One is called the anarcho syndicolis. And I looked into this a bit more. I think many modern anarchists find this to be a bit old fashioned, but this is the idea that it's called a direct action system where the labor unions affect the change and they want to abolish the wage system. And by direct action, that means sort of what you're talking about at the beginning, which is instead of electing someone, even the head of a labor union, to go take care of something, we do it ourselves. Right. That's like direct representation or direct democracy rather than representative democracy. Right, sure. Another way of putting direct action is where, like, those rape crisis centers that feminists created in the 70s, if you go and just create the rape crisis center as if there's no such thing as the state, you just go take care of it yourself. That is inherently anarchistic in nature because you're just ignoring the state. You're just going and solving the problem yourself. Right. If you went out and protested that the state needed to provide rape crisis centers, you're doing the opposite of an anarchistic direct action in that by protesting, you're petitioning the state, and by petitioning the state, you're legitimizing its power. You're saying you have the power. I'm asking you to use it for this. With anarchism, it's like we're not even recognizing that you have the power here. We're just going to go do it ourselves. Yeah, good luck with your capitalist or communist or whatever experiment. We got this handled ourselves. Yeah. And you can go about it through means of nonviolence or violence. Anarchism is one of the schools of thought where it's really all over the map, from violent revolution to hippie communes. It's really interesting. Yeah, there's definitely like a pacifist anarchism for sure. I think that's actually, from my understanding, that's a significant portion of anarchists that violent anarchism, actually it is still around. Like you see the black block at protests, which I read up on that. That definitely deserves its own episode at some point in time. But you know, the people wearing like, balaclavas or masks of some sort throwing Molotov cocktails or breaking windows addressed in all black, that's actually not a group, that's a tactic of protests. And some of them are anarchists, but not all anarchists are black block. Right. There's a big distinction in that sense. So there are anarchists out there who do believe in violence, at least against property, if not against people. But I really think that they're in the minority and that most anarchists believe in direct action. Just going and doing it yourself or some sort of peaceful change, either within the system or just outside of the system. Yeah. And there's a social theorist from Germany named Andreas Vital, and he said he kind of breaks it down into two main groups, which is social anarchism and libertarian anarchism. Obviously, the libertarian anarchism is all about the individual person and make sure that it just kind of takes it down to that person level as far as freedom goes, even at, like, the expense of society, right. Where social anarchism is all about the society. That's the one that leans more toward socialism and communism. Yeah, that's more like creating, like, a harmonious community that cares for itself, that doesn't have any leaders. The idea behind that is that organizations will just happen, right. If you have a need, people will just come together and solve the need, and then the organization will just dissolve as the need is fulfilled. You don't have to create a permanent structure to fulfill that need, whether it's there or not, that people can be elected into and basically grift from. Yeah. And not to jump ahead too much, but that whole idea is kind of one of the founders of anarchism. In the mid 18 hundreds in France, a man named Pierre Joseph Pruton. That was one of his things that he wrote in his book, What His Property Is. That his feeling is that in one of his key theories is that when this vacuum is created by getting rid of the government institutions, it will just sort of work itself out. Right. That people will take care of people and that it's actually the organizations and government and the constant threat of violence that is actually the problem. Not that people need to be kept in line by those things. It's a radical idea and a big risk that it will be like I mean, he even uses the word spontaneous, like spontaneous order will happen. But again, and I'm sorry to keep going back to the same well, I don't want to use up some of the ones down the line, but the rape crisis center is a good example of that. There was a need in the community, and it was fulfilled, and there's still a need. So they're still around, but there's nobody getting fat and rich off of the rape crisis centers that sprung out of the 70s. Same thing with protecting LGBTQ, I think. IP, is that right? I'm sorry for everybody I'm leaving off there, but I definitely know it up to Q for sure. There's a lot of violence against kids like that who have been kicked out of their homes and live on the street. So crisis centers have developed to take care of them, too. There is actual real life things you can point to where people do this kind of stuff. There's people who work at nonprofit groups. They don't make much money, but they're there because they're trying to make their society better. They're trying to make their communities better. Like, that's a real life example of what this guy is saying would happen spontaneously. It actually does happen again, the question, Chuck, is could you administer hundreds of millions of people like this? And the answer is probably not. But those hundreds of millions of people probably wouldn't be connected in any way, shape or form. Aside from the fact that we're all humans. If there was no larger federal government keeping everyone together or even a state government, they would probably dissolve into hopefully harmonious communal bands. That's the ideal version of anarchism. See, I think they might dissolve into those bands, but I don't know if it would be harmonious within the bands or outside of the bands or between them, I think between them. So I totally agree with you and I think this is kind of an unspoken thing of anarchism at the very least, as far as I whittled down to, it's been unspoken. But I'm sure they talk about it a lot. If you live in an anarchistic society or group or whatever, you've got to be able to back that up. So the impression that I have is that wouldn't mean that you are violent, but they would be more than willing to defend themselves against outsiders. Right. And there's actually a group in Chiapas, the Zapatistas, which was an indigenous Indian movement in Mexico in the 90s that's still around today. I've heard of them. They were so remember the guy with the face mask who smoked a pipe? Commodant Marcos? It's still added today. And there are anarchist villages in Chiapas, Mexico that have been self sufficient since the 90s that you would not want to go in and mess with them. But they've got it going on. They have equality. There are women who are like commanders in their defense forces. They have their own schools. They're set, they're fine, they're doing just fine. But they're also heavily armed. Well, I mean, did you ever watch the Wild, Wild Country documentary? No, I still haven't yet. Well, we won't dive into that, but yeah, I don't want to ruin anything. Okay, let's take a break, all right. And we'll go watch that real quick together. We'll be back in 12 hours and we'll talk about that famous anarchist symbol in a bit of history right after this. All right, dude. So anyone who's ever owned a skateboard probably scribbled the anarchist symbol on their notebook when they were twelve, not knowing what it meant. This has actually only been around since about the 1960s, which kind of surprised me. Yeah, I guess I didn't think of when it would have come up. I guess I assumed it just came about the moment I noticed it. It's like a youngster in the proposed by a group called Anarchist Youth of Paris in the 1960s. They needed the logo up and that was very kind of recognizable. It made sense. The Black Flag is also another symbol of anarchist dating back to the 19th century and of course the band Black Flag. That's where they got their jam. Had no idea about that one until today or yesterday. About the band. Yeah. I mean, I knew about Black Flag, but I didn't know where they got their name. Yeah. And I think it means more than that to them, but they definitely I don't know if they died in the wall anarchist, but they certainly didn't shy away from screaming about it. No, not at all. God bless Henry Rollins. But the point of the Black Flag from what did you say, the 1880s? Yeah. The point of the Black Flag was that it was meant to be all the colors of all the flags in the world. If you put the presence of all colors, is the color black? Yeah, man. So it kind of like melds them all together and I guess discredits all of them by doing that, it absorbs them all. All those pretty flags just divide us, man. Melt them down, make it black. Wow. You sound just like Black Flag. All right, so let's go back in time a bit to perhaps the origins of Anarchism and the Chinese philosopher Lao TSU founded Is. Do we say it with a D? Taoism? Yeah. Okay. That's what I thought, even though it's spelled with a T. And his whole jam was that people live in harmony with each other, with nature. That's how we get to happiness, is to live in balance. And of course, in India, the holy men there were espousing some of the same philosophies of giving up property for spiritual enlightenment. And then, of course, Greece. You had philosophers in Greece that were not big fans of government interfering with what they had going on, which is interesting. Right. Specifically Zeno yeah. Who is also going to go on to colonize Earth. That's Xenu. Oh, got you. X-E-N-U. Yeah, I know you're just kidding. I knew the X. I didn't realize it was A-U-I was being serious about the O. I think it's Z new. I think you might be right. Let me check the tattoo on my lower back. Does that say Zenu? Yeah, it does. Weird. Why is it in a whale tail? So Zeno's whole thing, too, was that if people are good enough, then we don't even need cops in courts, which is kind of crazy. Is it, though? Well, I mean, that's the whole thing that we were talking about. Like, the whole idea of this stuff working out is not one person breaking bad, because as soon as one person does, one person gets a little taste of power, then it's corrupted. Yeah. Again, though, I think that comes from the idea that the community takes care of itself, police itself. I think the members of the community would not be very happy about that, especially with social anarchism. And I don't know what they would do. I don't know if they would just move and leave the guy out or cast them out. I don't know what you would do in that situation. There are a lot of prickly things like that you could only work out in theory. Now, although maybe it has happened in some of the experiments that have gone on by now, but I don't know. But I don't think that it would necessarily spoil the whole system. I have a pretty dark, cynical view of stuff like this now. Well, I've seen that actually in reference not your cynical view specifically, but that if you do have kind of a dim view of humanity and that we are generally dark and generally greedy, generally all the bad stuff, then yeah, you would probably not think that Anarchism would work. But if you have this idea that humans are genuinely positive, peaceful people who just want to be happy, that if you remove these institutions, that would be allowed to shine and a lot of the problems would come out. One way I saw it put was, yes, there's a lot of cheating under the capitalist system. In democracy, it's just about any form of government cheating can happen. Right. The writer I was looking to put it like a lot of these people, especially in capitalism, are forced to do jobs that they don't want to do. They spend the hours of their lives doing things they don't want to do. How would that behavior change? How would their personality change if it was just like, go do whatever you want to do, man. No one's telling you what to do. Go learn to farm and make your own food, or go learn to juggle for money and buy food. Who cares? Go do it. Would that person cheat other people anymore? I don't know. Yeah. Here's my thing, because I am a pretty positive person. Sure, I know yours. And I do think that people are mostly good, and you could probably assemble a pretty great community by and large, but it doesn't take many as my whole deal. You get two or three people in there and it starts to sour and they get a little power grab and they talk another person or two into it, and then that ruins it. So I think an unpleasant minority could spoil it for a group of otherwise just delightful anarchists. Right. The happy kind. Right. Okay. So back to history. Yeah, because I think we could have this conversation like five more times and we're still going to arrive at the same point. We just don't know. We don't know what would happen. It sounds like what you're describing is the beginning of a civil war in this little community. Yeah, maybe. All right, so like you said, back to history. We made it as far as Zenu and Zeno specifically, who basically was the first one to at least elucidate the ideas behind Anarchism, which was, maybe we don't need the state, maybe we're better off without it. Right. And then not a lot happened until the 17th century. Yeah. And this is a classic case of what did you expect to happen when in England, these peasant farmers got a collective together? They called themselves the Diggers, and they said, not the Duggers. Not the Duggers. And they said, we are tired of this, all the turmoil that's going on here. We have a civil war going on, and we're going to try and live without the government, and we're going to cultivate our own land and start our own kind of radical group out here. This guy named Gerard Winnstanley great name, who was the founder, he was a Christian radical, and he put out a pamphlet in 1649 called Truth lifting Up Its Head Above Scandals and talked about power, corrupting property incompatible with liberty, all the kind of hallmarks of anarchism. And what happens? The community gets larger and larger, and then the government says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Crush that. We can't have this at all, right? And that's what happened. The government, the landowners, they said, you guys can't camp together anymore. Go away. And the diggers, they disassembled. We've seen it in our own country anytime. Oh, yeah. And I'm not going to argue for the virtues of Branch Davidians or preppers like at Ruby Ridge, but if there's one thing our government doesn't like is people kind of hold up in their own trying to do their own thing, then they have guns, right? They don't even like it when they don't have guns. Look at Sukati Park. They were basically flaunting urban camping laws, and they came in with the cops and riot gear and busted the place up, at least in the US. And in a lot of Europe, too. The experiments in anarchism don't have a very long lasting effect because they do tend to attract a lot of followers, especially when they rise up, as they tend to when the ruling class is really squeezing the working class. Yeah, sure. When the conditions that part of the whole reason we live with the government, at least initially, was because there was that social contract, right? I'm going to give up a little bit of my liberty. I'm going to give up a little bit of my freedom in return for all these services and protections that the government affords. Well, when the government kind of stops giving you all that stuff it's supposed to give in return for you giving up your freedom and your liberty, you start rethinking how much freedom and liberty you want to give up. And as a result, when anarchists come along and start telling you, hey, man, there's another way changing your mind to think like this, it gets kind of popular, and so as a result of state comes crashing down on it and says, no, stop talking about that. Everybody go to jail. Well, yeah, I mean, that's why you have and we'll talk a bit more about this, but things like the battle in Seattle and Occupy wall street. Who? I don't know if they are. They registered anarchist. Do they have their little cards? They had a lot of anarchist stuff going on and there are plenty of anarchists there. But I think they were so anarchist that they wouldn't even say that they were anarchist. That would be too much of a label. That's funny. I'm not making fun of them. No. So the diggers might have been squashed, but about 120 years later in England, those ideas sort of lived on with an English philosopher named William Godwin, who, once again, someone rises up, probably stands on that little box in Hyde Park and says, the government is corrupt inherently, they're a bad influence and we need a decentralized society. And his whole idea was Little small autonomous Communities, which to me makes a little bit more sense than trying to win the world over. Right? Yeah. And he was the first one to really write down, like, anarchist thought. Right. Godwin was he? From what I understand, if Zeno wasn't, this guy was really the first one. OK. Not necessarily the first to practice it, but he was the first one to start writing down the tenets of anarchism. But it wasn't until that guy, Peter Joseph Prudon, who you mentioned earlier, came along about 50, 60, 70 years after Goodwin or Godwin, the world's first self proclaimed anarchist, came along. Yeah. And interestingly, he came from a very poor family of peasants and won a scholarship to study in Paris. So he had a little bit of his feet in both worlds when he wrote his book. Are you going to read the French version? Cascase Lapropriate? What is property? In which it contained the very famous still with anarchist line, property is theft. And that was one of the big catchphrases. And it's still a big catchphrase with the anarchist anarchist groups, yes. It's frequently a punchline in anarchist jokes. And I said, property is theft. And he was the one that I mentioned earlier that he sort of had this radical idea that if the government leaves, spontaneous order would come about, would it just emerge? So he did believe that property was theft, but to Prudent, there was a distinction between, say, somebody owning their own plot of land that they cultivated, owning their own home, owning, something like that. He had a big problem with people owning the things that workers used to make wealth from. Right. People extracting wealth from the work of others and not actually doing anything themselves. Yeah. Which is the way you say it. The current system that we live in now, it's called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is just basically using all the power of the state, or a significant portion of it, to further the interests of corporations, of the people who extract wealth from the people who actually produce the work that's neoliberalism at court that also deserves its own episode from us someday. And that was what Prudent, although the word. Wasn't coined at the time, but that was what he really had an issue with and what basically anyone even remotely anarchistic has a problem with his neoliberalism. Yeah. And he buddied up with a couple of important figures, historical figures. One, Carl Marx, who at the time was just a little German economist trying to make good. He was not yet the father of communism. And then another guy named Mikhail Bakunin, who was a disciple of Prude Homes, but was also an anarchist. And he was different in that he came actually from nobility in Russia and he was one of these who wanted to leave his privilege behind. Yeah, he definitely walked the walk, for sure. Like he said, so long life of privilege, I'm going to become an anarchist. Anarchy he did. But he is where anarchy takes a very dark turn. Sure, it wasn't fully vested in him, but it definitely began with him because he was the guy who basically said and he ended up splitting from, I think, Prudon and Marks. Definitely Marks. He was the guy that said, there's only one way to get this going, and that is you have to smash the state. The state is not going to give up its power. These bureaucrats aren't going to be like, you know what? You guys are right. The people who own the capital aren't going to give up their position, their wealth. It's just not going to happen. Right. And the only way to deal with this is to basically wage war against the current system and then replace it with an anarchist system. And he definitely diverged from Prudon and marks, I believe. No, he's a little more closely tied to Marx. So is Prudent that he really diverges from in that respect. Yeah, Prudon was the one that was like, hey, little by little, we can just shift away from this government in a gradual sense, right? And Beckoon was like, no, we need to go and stomp in there and smash it with violence. Right. Prudent was like, well, wait, let's all just smoke some grass and talk this out. Yeah, but Cooney definitely had a little more he was a little more aligned with Marks because in the 1860s, they were cofounders of the first International Working Men's Association, right, that they try their gym was they wanted to free workers in European countries from what they considered to be exploitation, low wages, bad condition, stuff like that. Again, like the ruling class squeezing the working class. And Anarchism suddenly starts to get a lot more followers. And that was a real big problem, at least for the power in the west, in Europe and the United States. Anarchism got really popular for a little while, and specifically the branch espoused by Berkeley. And then later on, after he died, his follower, Peter Kropotkin. I think I nailed that. Yeah. Kropotkin. Yeah, that was close. Really took up this violent, basically terrorism. There's no other word for it. Anarchist terrorism. It was the tactic they took on and cropped and said you could with a single attack, make more propaganda than 1000 pamphlets. And the whole point was to start bombing everything, just destroy the state by creating foment and chaos. And it was a really bad time to just be the average person walking around America or Europe because you might get blown up by a bomb that somebody playing it on Wall Street or something like that. Yeah. And actually you're kind of right. I see now that after they established that International Workingman's Association, bacon and Marks eventually clashed and sort of their ideas diverged as well. But I think you were right, it wasn't necessarily the violence thing. It was Mark thought that you had to have this very strong state to control everything and distribute it equally among people. And Baquanan was like, you're nuts, Marks, you're nuts. Yeah. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, well, we're going to travel stateside right after this. All right. So like I said, anarchism is starting to get a lot of followers, but it's that like the most dangerous, violent period in the history of Anarchism and it really had a big effect. Chuck like it was very much died in the wool. Terrorism, bomb making, bomb throwing assassinations. Yeah. Get this in less than ten years, anarchists killed the President of the United States, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the King of Italy and the Empress of Austria Hungary. I know, right. In ten years, that's just unimaginable. And so the state, quite understandably, said, we're going to crack down on you anarchists. And the United States in particular was successful with the earliest by jailing immigrants. They really overreached and said, you know, a lot of anarchists are immigrants, so we're just going to start jailing immigrants that we even suspect are anarchists. There was a riot previous to that in the 19th century in Chicago. The Haymarket, right, the very famous one. Yeah. Man, this has got a lot of tangential shows. We maybe should do one on the Haymarket affair in general, but this 1886, cops came in to break up a meeting, an anarchist meeting in Chicago and Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown, there were riots that happened, six cops and a bunch of other people died. And even though they never fingered the actual bomb thrower, they just went in there and basically said, all right, you ate are very prominent anarchists, so we're going to convict you all of this murder, of these murders. And I believe that was what, four of them were actually hanged? Yeah. And that was just completely corrupt, justice wise. Those guys weren't ever actually they had not thrown a bomb, they hadn't created a bomb. They were just scapegoats. They were hung because they were anarchist leaders. Who through the bomb? Does no one know? They think that probably it was a paid agent provocateur from the other side. Oh, wow. Possibly like one of the Pinkerton detectives who are also super active. I don't know if it's the predominant view, but I've heard that plenty of places that is a real possibility, that it wasn't even an anarchist, that this was an anarchist meeting and this gave them, the cops, a reason to break it up. It was the antifa. And then you talked about it. President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist. Leon I would say Zol goes. That's pretty good. Go ZAR. Silence. Z-O-L. We'll just call him Leon. And yeah, he assassinated McKinley. He went to Go. And again, he was another immigrant. And of course they shouldn't have rounded up immigrants. But it is interesting in that most of these major prominent anarchists were immigrants. But of course it was a time of immigrants too, for sure. So that's a lot to do with it. But he went to meet McKinley in like a public thing where there was like a greeting line and had a pistol in his hand covered with a hanky. And McKinley reached out to shake his hand, he shot him once and it ricocheted off his coat button, shot him again and it lodged in his stomach. I don't know much about McKinley, but as everyone descended upon this Leon guy, McKinley said, go easy on them, boys. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And he died of infection from the gunshot wound, I think less than a week or maybe nine days later. And Leon was executed in short order. Yeah. Electric chair. And I imagine it's not like modern day electric chairs are great, but I imagine when a 19 one was pretty brutal. I would guess so. 5 volts for 500 hours. Yeah, I know. It took three zaps to get them. Although I would guess actually it's probably even faster. I don't know. I could see it going either way. Like back then, they were just like, well, we executed an elephant, so let's use that amount. Right, exactly. Yeah. And it would just sometimes go off by itself. Right. So there was one other thing I want to point out. There was a steel strike that you and I have talked about before. It was in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and I don't remember what episode it was. Unions. Yeah, I'll bet it was because there were unions. Striking. And remember there's like that whole anarchist syndicilism, which is basically like using unions as the source of anarchist power. There was one of these strikes going on and the Pinkerton showed up for that one. It was definitely Pinkertons. And they killed like eight striking workers. So an anarchist named Alexander Burkeman shot he wasn't even the owner of the steel mill, I don't think, but he was an industrialist, henry Clay Frick. And he was executed, I believe. But aside from assassinating Frick. He had the distinction of being the love interest of another prominent anarchist. A much more prominent anarchist named Emma Goldman who we would be remiss not to mention she was an early feminist anarchist pioneer writer who was just really laid a lot of stuff out her writings are collected on the internet but she was also very much involved in the early movement for female controlled birth control interesting yeah which I don't think she made an appearance in that episode but definitely you can't talk about anarchy without mentioning Emma Goldman so she and Burkemen were an anarchist power couple pretty much they were the branch alina yeah is that still a thing? No. They were the Tristan Thompson and Khloe Kardashian of anarchism we also should mention Sacco and Venzetti this was in 1000. 920 that two immigrant anarchists from Italy Nicolasako and Batolume they were for sure anarchist but they were by all accounts wrongfully convicted of killing a payroll clerk and a guard at a robbery in Braintree. Massachusetts in 1920 and this was a very big deal I think like maybe it was just after 19. 20,000 people went to Boston Commons in protest that's a lot of folks in 1920 together in support of these two anarchists immigrants who people feel like it didn't get a fair shake yeah well. Supposedly even before they were convicted the guy who was there when it happened confessed to it and he was part of. I think. The morelli gang amafia group that had actually carried out this crime it was just that the officials in this area were like we want to get rid of these two anarchists we'll just pin this on them and execute them and that's what happened and there was a huge that's just in Massachusetts bombs went off in New York. Paris. Buenos Aires in protest of this execution but the government was like. What are you going to do? They're dead now yeah executed 1927 and many years later michael Dukakis is a belief governor of Massachusetts finally tried to write that wrong historically by driving a tank down the highway in their honor that's funny so Chuck. The anarchism kind of died out there at least the very violent terrorist branch of Anarchism died out around this time in the little before that it kept going actually fairly peacefully for a while in Spain and there were anarchist villages all over Spain right before the Civil War and the Civil War was the fascists who had assembled in Morocco and were supported by Hitler and Mussolini came pouring into Spain and managed to overrun the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War so the fascist one. They had a lot of help again from Hitler and Mussolini and the Franco regime took over Spain but for a little while there anarchism not the violent kind but the peaceful communal kind of anarchism had been successful in Spain for a little while yeah and then years later in the United States in the 1960s the whole counterculture sort of brought back at least some of the ideas of anarchism. If not outright anarchism through activism. And even one of the groups, a hippie activist group was called, they called themselves The Diggers after that group from England. The Anarchist Cookbook of course, came out in the early nineteen s, seventy s. Very famous, legendary, infamous even cookbook. They gave recipes on how to make bombs and weapons and stuff, how to make drugs from toothpaste. Yeah, all kinds of cool stuff. And if you've ever been to college, someone at one point was like, man, yeah, get The Anarchist Cookbook. Check this out. We'll smoke some grass and read The Anarchist Cookbook? I was like, you say grass? 67 I don't even think it was hippin. 67 I think dorks have always said grass. But the guy who wrote it, William Powell said later on he renounced all of it, tried to get it taken out of print. But the publisher, of course was like, you don't own these rights which is still making money on it. That Chuck, is an anarchist nightmare. Sure, it happened to this William the under the thumb of an organization making money off of something you don't believe in anymore. Right, but that was originally your idea, right? And your work. I'll bet that guy hasn't slept since like 1992. And of course, once the Internet was born some of these ideas started coming back up because all of a sudden information could be exchanged so freely and people on the outskirts of the fringes of society who felt like they didn't quite fit in and wanted to be anarchist could get in the chat room. Well, yeah, some of them. But it's a mistake in painting them with that brush. Like there are definitely normal people who you would not suspect are anarchists, that are actually anarchists. They have those views again, they like work in nonprofits, they work in the rape crisis centers. That's what they do with their life. They use old computer monitors rather than buying like the latest one or anything like that. There's just like a lot of different, I guess, lifestyle choices you can make that are actually anarchistic within the larger society and I think there's a lot more people doing that than one might suspect. And again, it is like you said, in large part because the Internet makes it so easy to go find these other ideas and it's so frequently and I think this is why I really enjoyed researching this episode so much. It's so easy on the internet to go find a different way of thinking. Yeah, there's something really joyful in finding a way of thinking that you've never really thought about before or seeing the same things, but in a totally different light. That's just probably the greatest gift the internet's given us. And this definitely falls within that list. Well, yeah, I mean, some people say even that the rewilding movement and living off grid at its heart is anarchistic. Yeah. Amon Bundy and his whole crew. They very much denied being anarchist, but they were totally anarchist and still are. They were one of the successful ones. Yeah, there's something attached to that word that I could see some groups not wanting to be associated with, but when they describe it, they're like, no, we're not anarchist. We just want to live out here by ourselves and hunt and gather and grow and stuff and not have a government over me telling me what to do. Right, yeah. You're an anarchist. Right. I just want to reuse an old computer monitor. Right, anarchist. Sorry, pal. Yes. And then famously, also, again, as we mentioned before, zukati park and Occupy Wall Street taking over that park and just setting up basically in anarchist commune. And it wasn't just anarchist. There were a lot of protests. There are a lot of different groups with a lot of different agendas. But they refused to centralize, they refused to elect leadership. And that, I mean, is at its core, like they said, our core our core tenant is anarchism. So it was an anarchist experiment, at least. And there's a really good article in Al Jazeera called Occupy Wall Street's Anarchist Roots. It's by a guy named David Gray, who is an anthropologist, but he's also personally an anarchist, and he's really easy to read and really does a great job of putting out what anarchism is. And that was one of the better ones I found of his. Yes. So check that one out for sure. All right, so we've kicked this around between each other here, whether or not this could work. But smarter people than us actually put thought into this stuff, and they write books on it and articles in the Atlantic on it and stuff like that. And there are some examples you can point to because, like I said, you can't point to any large scale examples of this you can point to, like, small communities. For instance, in Denmark. I've heard of this before, Christiana. It's not a person, but it's a place. It is an 84 acre, some say utopia, within Copenhagen that kind of popped up in 1971 when a bunch of squatters and hippie artists who like to smoke grass took over some abandoned buildings on a military base that was no longer in use, said, this is a free zone. We're not under your authority, Denmark. And more and more people came. And because it's Denmark, 47 years later, it's still around. And the government did not squash it. In fact, the government said, you know what? Why don't we just sell you that land for below market value? And they were like, great. Yeah. So they took him up on it. And now Christiana is a free anarchist zone within Denmark. Could you imagine this happening in the United States? No, and I think that's a really good point, Chuck, because Denmark is known as the model of representative liberal democracy. Yeah. So they're like, close enough to the cusp of Anarchism anyway, that yeah, it could happen in Denmark, but no, that's not going to happen in the United States. I wonder if Danish government officials were like, jeez, I don't know if this is the best idea, but everyone's looking at us and we are Denmark, right? Like, we kind of have to allow this. Everyone's looking at us. Unless someone says no. Is anyone going to say no on record? All right, fine. Okay, fine. Just give us some money for it. Okay. 47 years later, they finally spoke out. I'd like to check it out, man. I bet you that's a fun place to go hang. I'm sure it's pretty cool. I'm sure it says everything's covered in murals and everything, but that's pretty great. Yeah. One of the things that I found kind of interesting from this article, though, is Somalia. Yeah, for sure. That actually serves as an argument for both sides of the coin. Right. Like, a lot of people point to Somalia and say, look, there's your example of what happens when you don't have a state running things, because Somalia's government collapsed in 1991 and it was never replaced. There's, like, local warlords, there's pirates, there's extremists, there's religious extremists. And then there's also, I think, clans and tribes and communities and groups living in peace. And you can actually point to the living conditions today and say there are factors that are better than it was before Somalia's government collapsed. So, yeah, there's lawlessness, there's pirates, there's warlords, but there are also, like, a lower infant mortality rate. The life expectancy is longer than it was before the government collapsed. There's more access to sanitation. And so if you're an anarchist, you would point to this and say, actually, Somalia has a lot of evidence that people can take care of themselves without the government, that Anarchism isn't across the board worse than any government at all, that there are some governments that are worse than no government. And Somalia is a pretty good example of that. Well, yeah, because in Somalia's case, it was a corrupt dictator in place, so conditions were just abhorrent. Conditions still aren't great. It's not like everyone's packing up to move to Somalia, but as you said, there are literal facts and figures that show that it is better than it was in some ways under this dictatorship at least. Really interesting. You got anything else? Well, we should mention Greece real quick. Oh, yeah, because Greece has been undergone a lot of really interesting changes over the past 15 years or so. And they have a lot of refugees coming in from Syria and a lot of social services have gone under. Anarchists stepped in, apparently in Athens at least, they took over 15 buildings anarchist did, and turn them into shelters for 3000 refugees. Wow. And said that these unauthorized, unauthorized housing are better than the camps that you guys are setting up. Government. They're terrible. They're dirty. They're not safe. We're providing food and medicine, and our places are safe. These centers that we have are safe. So that's one kind of other small, interesting example. Yeah. Still today, right? I don't know. I'm not sure. I got to look into that. So I just want to sign off and saying, like, I'm not espousing one thing over another, necessarily. Sure. I think it's up to each person to make up their own mind. And if this caught your interest at all, I would encourage you to go read more about it, because you could spend the rest of your days reading about anarchism and still not even get through half of it. But I'll bet along the way you would develop your own ideas about the whole thing, whether positive or negative. Yeah. And at the very least, I hope we cleared up some myths about what that word is, because I think it's a lot different than people think. For sure. And hey, if you live in Christiana in Denmark, send us a note and send us an invitation. And I might just come there one day and check out what that jam is all about. I might retire there one day. We could do a show there. That'd be awesome. Yeah. Like 75 people. Yeah, for free. That would be pretty cool. Well, they could pay us an old computer monitors. Yes. And magic mushrooms. If you want to know more about anarchism again, go out on the Internet and read all about it. But you can start by typing that word in the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yeah. I'm going to call this a very polite way to talk to us about how we talked about suicide at various times. And this is at a time when just this past week, in real time, we lost Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. They took their own lives. And it's called the big resurgence in people talking about suicide and how we talk about suicide. Anytime someone a big, high profile person takes their own life, it's going to be in the news. So it's on everyone's mind right now. So I want to thank Jared for writing in so kindly. Hey, guys. Before I say anything, I want to thank you both for what you do, your long fan, and can't tell you how much joy and fulfillment you brought to my life after listening to the episode of Frida Kahlo. I think I might actually have a way to contribute to the knowledge sharing your show is all about. In the episode, the topic of suicide was brought up a few times. I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of the most updated guidelines to how to most safely talk about suicide. So he says this, use preferred language that has died by suicide or took his or her own life. Don't say committed suicide, because the idea there is if I remember correctly from another email is that committed indicates that it is a crime. Yeah. Is that right? Yes. From what I remember, and apologies for saying this, one of those things is so ingrained is how you say it committed suicide that it's just hard to retrain my brain. Yeah. Saying died by suicide, it's tough, but we can retrain ourselves to say that. Yeah. And we're trying to. He said, also exclude details about method, location notes or photos from the scene. And then finally, don't try to guess or infer the cause of suicide. Simply indicate that suicide is always caused by multiple factors. Yeah, good point. Yeah, those are all really good points. And I learned from reading this. So he said he thought he passed along not as a critique, but rather as a way to share information with two people who constantly seem to be doing whatever good that they can. Thanks, guys. That is from Jared. Thanks, Jared. That was very nice of you. It sure was. And I got the impression from his email, and if not his, from another person who wrote in, to say very similar things, that the point of all that, is to not help any contagiousness that it has. Sure. Because apparently it's very contagious. We need to do an episode on that. But now I'm scared to death about saying the wrong things. Yeah. The greed. But we'll tackle it. Okay. So in the meantime, what was his name? Jared. Jared, thanks again. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, I'm at Joshua and Clark on Twitter and on Instagram, and Chuck is all over Facebook these days. He's at Movie Crushpod. He's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He is at stuff you should know, right? Is that the official one? Correct, sir. And then you can send us all an email, including Jerry, to stuffpodcast athouseofworks.com. And as always, just go visit us at our home on the web, stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and 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 earlier. Download the app today." | |
2051e185-b92d-46c7-bea9-aeca0150ee1f | The Maya Civilization | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-maya-civilization | After inspiration from Chuck's recent trip to the Yucatan, the fellas dive into the Maya Civilization.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | After inspiration from Chuck's recent trip to the Yucatan, the fellas dive into the Maya Civilization.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 07 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=188, tm_isdst=0) | 51660663 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, chuck here. Before we get going with the show, I want to plug a little podcast appearance that I made especially for the old movie Crushers. I was on a movie podcast called it Too Scary, Didn't Watch, and it is a lot of fun on. And the basis of the episode, basically, is three very funny women who one of them likes to watch horror movies, and the other two hate to watch horror movies. So one of them watches them and then tells the other two about it. And it's really a lot of fun. It's become one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to, and I reached out to them, and they were kind enough to have me on as a guest. So you get to hear me completely recap the horror movie or kind of edge of your seat thriller horror movie, Don't Breathe. And I had a really great time on the show. They're wonderful, they're funny, and we have a lot of laughs. So check out and just subscribe it's. What I say? Listen to? Too scary. Didn't watch. And check out my episode on the movie Don't Breathe, which just came out a couple of weeks ago. All right, on with the show. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry is here too. And that makes this stuff. You should know the anthropology edition. That's right. And I would argue our maybe fourth Maya adjacent podcast. There's no need to argue, Chuck. Well, we did the Mayan calendar. Yes. The world ending in 2012. I mean, we did that back then, right? Yeah. That's the benefits of having a show run this long. Actually, I think we did that in 2010. That's how I mean but leading up to right. Yeah. Not after the fact, because that would be very us. And then, of course, we did our episode where we traveled to Guatemala, sort of like our two part travel diary sure. Toast where Jerry spoke. And Guatemala is partially where the Mayan people lived and live. So maybe we should just start out by since I said lived and live, dispelling some myths. Well, hold on. We did another one last December. I believe the climate cause the fall of the Maya civilization. All right, so this is the fifth one easily, maybe 100th. I'm not sure I lost count since you were talking. Well, I was inspired because, as you know, I just recently took a trip to Cantonarou in Mexico, and it's awesome. Mayan temples. And so there's a couple of episodes coming out of that trip because it was just one of those inspiring trips where when you go someplace where your endorphins are firing and your brain is doing things that usually doesn't do, those are the best trips. You come back wanting to eat different foods and talk about different things. And I love those trips. We're in Captain. I didn't get any clothes. But we did get Ruby a couple of cafe. Really pretty traditional Mexican dresses. That's cute. Does she like them? She loves them because they are colorful and have flowers embroidered and stuff. Totally. Yeah. So there are a lot of different groups that lived over the millennia in Mexico and Central America. But the Maya stand out in particular for a number of reasons. They had one of the most developed alphabets or systems of writing ever in the ancient history of Central America or mesoamerica. They came up with zero independently almost 1000 years before it was introduced to Europe. Europe didn't come up with themselves like it was introduced, but the Mayans figured it out independently. They also had some really top notch calendars which we talked about in that one episode that were based on really advanced astronomical observations. Not to mention they also have the romance of having lost civilizations, like entire cities swallowed up by the jungle and lost for 1000 or more years. That's like, so mine. So for all those reasons and more, they definitely kind of just stand out in a field of pretty interesting cultures, if I may say so. Yeah, I think that's why we keep going back to them. They just fascinate me the more I read about them. And at some point I've heard it's a decent movie, but it's not the most accurate. But I was reminded today of the Mel Gibson directed film Apocalypto. Man it's almost a snuff film, dude. I saw the one human sacrifice scene and I'm like, I can't really handle this. It's awful. It's super realistic. It's way too graphic. Director oh, yeah. He's super obsessed with violence. It's crazy. Have you seen we were heroes? No. I thought he did hacksaw Ridge. I don't know if he did or not. I know he definitely did. We were heroes about the early days. We Were Heroes. Is that what it was called? Yeah, the early days of Vietnam. And it's like brains blowing out onto the camera lens in front of me. I think Hacksaw Ridge was supposed to be really violent too. Yeah, it's just occurred to me. I don't know if I've seen any Mel Gibson directed film. We Were Heroes. No. We were soldiers. One of the two soldiers. We Were Soldiers. Meet me in St. Louis. I think that's the name of it. I don't know. Lethal Weapon. Super violent. But some of the myths we can dispel. First of all, I kind of teased one out that the Maya are still around. It's not like people talk about the fall of the Mayan civilization. It's not like a meteor came down and did the dinosaur treatment on them. There are still Maya today and some would argue that their civilization didn't really collapse so much as just became sort of a suburban sprawl in a way. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them speak some of these ancient languages and tongues that have been around for a very long time. They carry on a lot of the ancient traditions that were passed down. So, yeah, it's definitely inaccurate to say that the Mayan civilization just went away, just disappeared. It just dispersed instead. That's right. It is also incorrect to just say the Maya, where this one sort of unified, historic people that we can talk about as being one thing. We're talking about a lot of different, like, dozens and dozens of cities and city states that, you know, they had a lot in common. Sure. And they did trade with each other and did some of the same things, but they also were at war with each other almost constantly between themselves. And you can't just and we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of years. Like, there are different, very specific periods of Mayan culture. And depending on when you're talking about, some cities may be bigger than others, others may be not quite as large yet. So you can't really just say, I believe Libya helped us with this one. I think. Yes. She got from a website called Mexico, or with an E, they said just saying the Maya is trying to invent a name for the French, the Italian, the Spanish, and the Romanian people all as one. It's just they were not just one people. No. And they didn't see themselves as one people. They probably saw themselves as members or citizens of their particular city state. But the reason that we today, and researchers and archaeologists who investigated the Maya to begin with, considered them one group is for two reasons. One, they inhabited a really specific geographical location, covered southern Mexico, Guatemala, parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize, yucatan Peninsula, specifically. Yeah, in that area, not kind of spread out like that was the Maya's area. And then number two, even though they considered themselves separate and not like members of the same whole group that inhabited that area, they exchanged, like you said, they traded they exchanged ideas, scientific breakthroughs, art. So their culture, to those of us on the outside, looks like one homogenous cohesive culture, when really it was a bunch of different cultures influencing one another and creating kind of this mediculture that we consider the Maya today. Right. I talked about the different periods that we can talk about. The first one was the Pre Classic period, and we'll talk a little bit about each of these. But the Classic period is going to be most of the focus. That's sort of the golden age of the Maya. But in the Pre Classic period, this is where they started to get involved in agriculture. They started to cultivate through burning land. And as we covered in the episode on how they went away, I believe we talked about burning crops as being you know, a lot of people think that was significantly bad for them in the long run overpopulation, to be sure. And eventual food shortage when they had a food surplus for so long. But they started out, as always, with the three sisters growing those beans and maize and squash. And then the Middle Pre Classic, we're talking about 1000 to 300, they started spreading out a little bit in that territory. The same territory that would eventually be like the Classic most robust Mayan cultures. Sure. And they also, at that time in the Middle Pre Classic about 2300 years ago, that's when they started to build, like architecture. Not the stuff that you would see in the Classical period, but it was like the beginning of it, literally the foundation, because they actually started they built new structures over old structures, but this is kind of where it was born. Yeah. And all this, if it sounds like it's happening very organically, is because it did. Lydia points out that these city centers in the city states, it wasn't some and we know now more than we ever have before. We got a lot of stuff wrong over the years, science and archaeology, but we're pretty squared away. At least we're up to date on the latest truths about the Maya. But I think they used to think they were so organized, they would plan out these cities, but they really sort of grew organically because they were good at what they did and they could really farm the heck out of the land and support a lot of people. So it just sort of happened organically. They clearly were a culture that knew a good idea when they saw it. So like an elevated highway, a causeway that's wide and can afford a bunch of traffic between one city state to another, that's just a good idea. So if you build one, the other city states can say, what other city states can we link to? And before you know it, basically every city state, and I think there were four great ones in total at the height of the Maya Classical period are connected by causeways. So of course today it looks like surely this was planned, some great centralized government plan this out and they must have been amazing. Now, there's another way to do it. It's almost like an emergent property of a hive mind. A bunch of people know a good idea when they see it and they put it to use and over time it just builds up and up and up and become so complex that it looks to people that come later. Like it couldn't have possibly happened organically, even though it did. That's right. And we've talked a little bit before about the size of these I guess people have called them empires, but these civilizations, there were about 40 cities in total. I mean, you said four. Within that there were all these smaller cities, each of these, and they're not sure, so the number ends up being a bit of a swing. But 5000 to 50,000 people and total maybe up to 15 million people. They've done studies that found I believe it was, like, double the size of medieval England at the time and far more densely populated than medieval England. Like legitimate cities. Yeah. Did I say four? I meant to say 40. Oh, did you say four? No, I think you said I said four. No, you did say four, but I thought you just met. There were four main areas. No, I might have misunderstood that. There were at least 40 great cities. That was what I was trying to say. I think you said four, but yeah, we'll go wrong. One of the things that made the city so striking, though, Chuck, was the elaborate architecture. And because it was all made from well, not all of it, but a lot of it was made from cut limestone blocks, which, by the way, they used harder stones to cut the limestone because in the area that the Maya occupied, there's no metals that are easily accessible. There are also no draft animals. So they did everything with, like, stones, basically, and with human labor, not with animal labor. So what they did is all the more impressive when you realize that because they built these huge temples and huge pyramids that are just amazingly well designed and well built, so much so that they still survive today. But then, on top of it, when you start to investigate the way that they're oriented you're like, oh, my goodness. Each of these staircases is completely in line with each of the four cardinal directions. How do they do that? Or if you stand on this one temple at Cheetzanitza and you look at the other three temples, depending on whether it's a solstice or an equinox, the other temples are in line with the rising sun. How did they do that? So, yeah. So in addition to just the visual amazement that you get, the kind of intellectual amazement of how they were designed and planned is even more impressive. Yeah. And you can stand on these things because they're still there. A lot of the civilization is gone now, but if you go down to the Yucatan Peninsula and you visit to Loom or someplace like that, I highly encourage you to take one of those tours and go see these temples. We're not exactly sure what they were. We think that their temples sometimes they're called palaces, but it's pretty clear from the size of the rooms that they weren't for the hierarchy. It was a very hierarchical society. But they don't think, like, the kings lived in these temples that are still these pyramids that are standing. It was probably for ceremonies. This may have been where, I guess, we have to talk some about the ritual sacrifice. This is where a lot of that took place as well. Yeah. Particularly the temples and the pyramids. We should talk about sacrifice at some point in time and we'll pepper it in okay, but something you talked about I want to kind of flush out a little more is the hierarchical society. So again, there wasn't one great central government that organized all these city states. In some of the city states, not all. There was a strong centralized government, a leader, a priestly class, a divine king or something, who ruled over that city state with an iron fist and by divine right and could say, I'm going to kill your kid, to sacrifice them for a bountiful harvester, for more rain, or something like that. It was that level of control, that level of hierarchy, and it was really rigid. But again, to kind of underscore how each of these cities was kind of independent in its own kind of thing. Not all of them had a hierarchical structure like that. Yeah, I think that's one reason it seemed like I saw a couple of documentary documentary videos. Hi. I am new to Earth. I'm new to Earth. It seemed like they were always at war with one another. And I think that was just sort of the nature of the hierarchy of these places. It just seems like these kings were always at war with another king over something. Yeah. And apparently the first researchers who started to investigate the Maya, I think it started in 1830 when Europeans first started to well, I don't want to say that because the Spanish were aware of them. When, say, western Europeans include Spain, you are new to Earth, too. Northern Europeans. How about the English? The English first stumbled upon Mayan cities from that point on, for a very long time, researchers just assumed that the Mayans were this really advanced, intelligent, peaceful culture. Right. And it wasn't until later that we started to find more and more things like fortresses, battlements, defensive walls that were like, oh, actually there was a lot of warfare. And then as we got to know more and more and cracked their language, we're like, oh, wow, this is a deeply violent group of cultures that really killed a lot of one another in some really brutal ways, too. Right. But we did mention they also traded with one another. So it wasn't like there was just a guarantee that their closest neighbor they were going to do battle with, they traded all kinds of things. They traded it's an area very rich in jade, apparently, obsidian, obviously, things that are a little more commonplace, like salt and seeds and grains and things like that, they would trade. But copper and jade and obsidian were sort of the money things that you would trade. And they traded, like you said at the beginning, they traded ideas and cultural ideas and they traded art with one another. They had a lot of influence. And this was in one of the documentary videos that I saw online. The Olmec civilization was a civilization that they really borrowed from or not borrowed from, but we're influenced by I guess. Yeah. The Olmec I was reading are considered one of six pristine civilizations, meaning they just grew up out of whole cloth. They weren't influenced by other civilizations or other groups. How many? Six, including, I think, the Sumerians, I think maybe the Egyptians. I can't remember a few others. But the old mechanic, the old Mecca, considered a pristine civilization, which is pretty cool. Yeah. So I say we take a break and come back and talk about the religion and the science of the Maya. What do you think about that, Chuck? Let's do it. So you mentioned religion and science. We'll talk about that. Now, previous to the break, you mentioned the priestly class. Yeah, from what I saw, the priestly class was basically the highest class under the ruling class. And I guess in a lot of older civilizations, that's sort of the case is the religious leaders had so much influence and were just under the king and had a lot of influence on the king as well. But there was that pre sleep class who organized these ceremonies and these rituals. They were the ones who developed the mathematical system and the astronomy that we talked about. And they were able to accomplish some pretty amazing things, not only with math and their alphabet, but with astronomy. They were able to accurately predict solar eclipses. And this is in, I guess, depending on which period you're talking about, like, thousands of years ago. Well, I think we've entered the classic period, which I think was from the second century to the 9th or 10th century Ce. Okay, so that's when most of the astronomy and the math and sort of sciences were advanced. Yeah, but yes, but again, for comparison, at this time, England is in smack in the middle of the Dark Ages, right. While the Mayan priestly class are predicting solar eclipses and can accurately track Venus transit around the sun. So they use this information, this astronomical information, their ability to use math, like extensive calendars, they use that for those rituals and to basically reinforce their priestliness, like what we would recognize as mathematicians and astronomers today. Imagine if an astronomer said, this comment is going to pass by Earth in two days. It's going to be amazing. And also the sun god will be driving it like a chariot. So everybody don't leave your house that day. Right. You're really on the money on one part of that. Right, but I mean, that's kind of like what their priestly class did. They were right, but the interpretation was wildly different from what we interpret things as today. Yeah, they had a solar calendar, and again, we did a whole episode on the Mayan calendar, but it was very advanced for the time. They had 18 months on their calendar, 20 days per month, with a five day unlucky period each month, which is pretty funny. I love that. No, I think that was every year there was a five day unlucky period. Oh, it was once a year, not once a month. I think so. I think so. I didn't do the math check. I'm no Mayan priestly. Class guy. And then they also had an overlapping calendar, a 260 day sacred calendar. This had 13 cycles and 20 named days. And as we all know, in 2012, the minds never said that the world was going to end in 2012. This was just Internet hocusum, basically, because their calendar was ending. Yeah, it wasn't like made up entirely from scratch, like the ole mech civilization. It was based on a misinterpretation and misreading, an exaggeration. In 2012, the Mayan Long calendar reset. It was a thing. And to the Maya, that may have included some sort of apocalyptic thing, but it wasn't like the end of the world. It was like a resetting of the world order as we understand it. And that got turned into the world is ending. Starring John Kuzak. Should we talk about the creation story? I think we should. It's pretty cool. There were a couple of sacred texts that survived, as we'll see later. A lot of their written history was burned by Christian missionaries who said, you don't need that stuff anymore. You're going to be like us, very sadly. But there are some texts and codices that survived. And a couple of them, the Popovoo and the Chillum Ballam, had these creation stories wherein there was a god of wind and sky called Hurricane. Hurricane. Sound familiar? And there was a siba tree planted on the Earth to create space between the Earth and sky for people and animals and plants and things to grow. And humans came third after the plants and animals. But in the text, it said that they were made out of mud. Sound familiar? And they could speak, but could not think or move. It sounds like a lot of modern day Americans. Yeah. All they could say is, Please kill me. So the god said, no, that's not good. So they destroyed them with water. Then they tried again and created a man from wood and woman from reeds. And they were sort of like functional humans, evidently, but were immortal and didn't have souls. So the god said, well, that's no good. Yeah. They got them with boiling water, right? Yeah, that'll do if you're made of well, I thought if they were made of mud, that would do. But I guess wooden reed spoiling water would, in their mindset, would kill it. It sounds more torturous, but it didn't kill all of them because some people survived. Some of the reed and woodpeople turned into monkeys. Also very interesting. Yes. In terms of, like, evolutionary theory. And then finally they got it right in their minds. They created what we think of modern humans in their creation story, from maize dough and their own blood. But then the gods thought, hey, they're a little too scary smart, so they might threaten us one day, but we won't destroy them. We will just cloud their minds and their eyes and make them not as smart. Right. And that's their creation story. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. They had a pantheon of gods, much like the Greeks had, that were dedicated to, like, a sky god, a rain god. There were, like, more than one creator god. It depends on what period of the Maya civilization you're talking about, which one was more important than another. One might be a little more important to one city state than another. So they kind of just jockeyed in and out of importance. But they were still generally the same pantheon. And again, in addition to art and other ideas, their religion was traded amongst themselves and with outside groups as well. That's right. Like, they would trade gods. Right? Yeah. Like, I'll trade you a rookie chall for 88, tops. Cucu con. This next part really sort of gets me going intellectually, is when we talk about their system of agriculture, they've they were great farmers. Some say too great, and that they over farmed. I guess that would make them not great farmers because they know about over farming, but they were really good at making things grow. And depending on where you were, which Mayan culture you were talking about, it could be very dry if you weren't near water. If you were inland. And they have rainy season and your dry season, they have to contend with that dry season. And they did so by building these huge underwater cisterns that would collect enough water to basically last them about half of a year. Yeah. So, like, every built structure was engineered so that anytime it rained during the rainy season, that water got channeled right into the underground cistern. And it wasn't just carved out of limestone chuck I mean, it was they carved it out of the bedrock and then covered it up, but they also covered it with stucco so that it would be waterproof and could hold enough water to keep everybody going for the rest of the year. So cool. They had aqueduct in one of the cities. I would pronounce that Palink polenke. Polenke. Okay. You say that as if you know for sure. I've heard the word before. Polenke. Plus, it's more fun to say than pollink. That sounds like an Internet challenge from several years ago. I like that. Yeah. I don't know. I've never done an Internet challenge. I always think it's funny when they pop up. Yeah. So the Pelink challenge went away, but the Polynque, they had a system of aqueducts. And they actually, in my mind I don't know what the Chinese were doing. It seems like they invented everything, but in my mind, they created water pressure. They're the first people I heard of to create water pressure. Right. Using, like, a drop in elevation and a narrow conduit, it forced the water through. Yeah. And then little kids would just dance and play in front of it. No, that wastes the water. There's also, like, great use of filtration, too, which is amazing if you think about it. But at Tacal, they use zeolite and quartz. Zeolite is kind of like a clay, like silicate and quartz as quartz. The thing is, neither one of those are found at Tacal. They're found kind of far away. So they were purposely put in their water reservoirs. And the reason why that's so impressive is because the new elite and quartz are used today to filter microbes out of water. Amazing. Yeah. And they figured it out. They think probably they just realized that the natural aquifer around the zeolite corey tasted better, was clearer, that kind of thing. So they just CoriED the zeolite and moved it over to their own reservoir. It's possible. It's pretty good gas. We just don't know for sure how they got the idea. We just know they didn't. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this seems like just brilliant innovation. And a lot of it seems like just good common sense. Yeah, it really does. They knew a good idea when they saw one. That's right. They also had irrigation canals, they had tiered agriculture fields that were cut into the hills. So it would prevent erosion, it would prevent flooding, and water would just sort of drain down like a beautiful champagne fountain. Yeah. I mean, that's terrace farming. And that's been invented multiple times by different cultures independently. It's just, again, a really good idea. Wonderful idea. They also invented or at least employed raised beds for farming. So if they wanted to keep things a little dryer, they would build a raise beds and then you could still have wildlife underneath. Aquatic wildlife. Yes. I think they were actually doing aquaculture, too, like they were raising the fish and the turtles in that the swampy area next to that, next to the raised beds. Wonderful idea. So they also did what you mentioned before, slashandburns called milpa. It's where you take a section of rainforest, cut it down, leave the vegetation and the trees in place and burn them there. And then the resulting ash covers the dirt and you plant directly into the ashy dirt. You don't till the soil. And it's really, really good at fertilizing an area without any kind of input. Certainly no fossil fuel based industrial inputs. And it keeps the land going for about two to three years. But then after that, it gets depleted, which means that you have to take that plot of land and leave it fallow for about 15 years. So if you do some pretty quick back of the envelope math, you have to have a tremendous amount of land to cycle through so that you can leave each spot fallow for about 15 years. You either need a lot of land or very low population. And that's one of the reasons why some people say we must. Have covered it in our episode from back in December, but some people say that's what led to the decline of the Maya. They over farm, they over slashed and burned their population got too big to support through slash and burn agriculture because it just requires too much land because of the fallow period you have to have. Was that December 2021? I believe so. I mean, the years are running together these days, so it's possible. It's really crazy. I would have guessed that was seven years ago. I'm pretty sure it was December 2021. Another thing that they did was sports ball. Yeah, I don't know what it is, Chuck, but talking about this particular game has always annoyed me. Why? I don't know, but I've always hated this game because we talked about it before. We have? Yeah. Plus, I mean, it's a big any time you talk about the Maya, you can't not talk about it. Why would it annoy you? I don't know, annoying you that they did it? It's just an annoying game, I feel like. Okay, well, they had a ball game called either pocketoc or pocketalk. Like, I'm of the belief that most of these sports games are pretty similar. Soccer, hockey, basketball, American football, they're all sort of the same, which is they sort of simulate war. Like, here's our side, here's your side. We're going to try and go on your side and do something, and you're going to try and come to our side and do something, and we're both going to try and prevent one another from doing that thing, whether it's putting a puck in a net or a soccer ball in a net or a basketball in a hoop or a football in any end zone. And this may or may not take place during a ten cent beer night, too. But they had a game all long winded way of saying they had sort of the proto version of this game where they have been able to sort of reconstruct how it might have been played. Except they did not use these, a little rubber ball that they use by mixing latex with juice from a morning glory vine to make it bouncier. And they wore padding like you would in football, American football. That's news to me. I didn't realize that they wore padding. Does that annoy you? It's okay, I'm neutral on that. And then the key here with this game, though, what makes it so different is they didn't use their hands or their feet. They would use their mainly their hips, I think, but their elbows and their knees as well, to move this ball until you in a very kitditch like move, quidditch like move, throw it through two stone rings, you almost just got us torn to pieces. I'm really glad you corrected yourself. Yeah. Maybe it's the it's quidditch, right? Yeah, I believe so. Now it's close. Quidditch. Quidditch. So maybe it's the use of the hips it just seems really painful and that they should have been like, this really hurts. Let's try our hands or our feet instead. It seems intuitive to use hand and feet yeah. And not hips. There's no other game in the history of games as far as I know, and I know a lot about games that use the hips, but it's twister. They did. Or maybe golf. It's all in the hips. I've been playing a lot of golf again lately. Oh, you have? Yeah, I got back into it after, like, a 20 year layoff. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Are you still loving it? I'm having fun. It's a lot of fun. That's good way to spend some time with friends. That's what Tiger Wood says, and he also says must dominate. All right, let's take a break and let's come back and talk about the supposed fall of the civilization right after this. Okay, so we talked about all these different periods, and the end of the 9th century is typically considered the end of the Maya classical period. What you referred to earlier is the golden age of the Maya, and for a lot of people, that equates with the fall of the Maya civilization, that was it. That's when their cities were abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle. That's when their ideas and thoughts and languages and culture were lost. That was when the Maya became a lost civilization. And like we said at the outset, that's just not true. I mean, the Maya is still around today, but in addition to it being more of a dispersal than a fall, that didn't happen all at once to all of the Maya city, depending on where you were, the Maya territory, some of those cities not only kept on going just fine, new ones were developed, like, way after this supposed fall of the Maya civilization. Yeah, that's really interesting to me. In fact, we get Maya I don't think we said from Maya pan, which is one of the last ones, and that was founded in 1263. So this was after the supposed fall of the Mayans in the Classic period. One of them, in fact, the last one to fall, which is in modern day Guatemala today, was almost in the 18th century. It was in 1697 when the Spanish finally took the final Mayan city, basically. And we mentioned the Spanish because they were the big reason why things stopped. There was a dispersal for sure, but when the Spanish came and the Christian missionaries came is when things got really ugly, and they basically said, we're going to squash your culture, we're going to take away your language, we're going to burn your written history, and you're going to be like us now, right? You're going to be Roman Catholic and you're going to like it. And as we learned in Guatemala, the modern Maya and the Maya from this colonial period got into syncretism, which is where they took their original traditional religion and meshed it with the forced upon them Roman Catholicism so that they associated saints with specific deities, like Mashimo, the Maya deity who helped me quit smoking. Yeah, good old Mashimo. Yeah. He was associated with St. Simon. And you would go to him and say, I have this vice I need to get rid of. Please help me, Mashamo. Give him a cigarette and some, I think, manioc root wine or liquor and light a candle and he would take care of you. I forgot all about mushroom. Oh, how could you? That was when? It was a year ago. Yeah, that was a long time ago. And we obviously shout out our friends at Coed, the charity organization that we've been working with for years, who got us down there to begin with. So just go check out their work and sponsor a kid. Give them access to books and education. Yup, coed uc.org. Right? Yeah, go check them out. So you said that the Spanish missionaries, the Franciscans in particular, were the ones who came in after the leading tip of the spear, the conquistadors, who would come in, slaughter a bunch of people, subjugate them, and then the Franciscans would come in and rebuild them in the European style and voice the Spanish language on them, Roman Catholicism on them. And that the Maya kind of adapted with syncretism. Right. But one of the big ways you get rid of somebody's culture is getting rid of their writing. And I think you said it earlier, but the Franciscans burned almost every book, as far as we know, except four of those codices were burned, destroyed by Spanish missionaries in the colonial period when they were trying to subjugate and convert the Maya. Which is extraordinarily sad because it just makes you wonder how much history and Cosmological thought was just totally lost forever through that. Yeah, I mean, they wrote a lot of books, and those quotas were made from fig tree bark, and they were folded accordion style. And there's some of that stuff that's carved into monuments that you can still see, some of it's painted on walls and pottery that you can still see that survive. But just those four survived. And these were basically post just after the end of the Classic period. So there is good stuff in there about prophecies in medicine and their history and astronomy and science or religious rituals and stuff like that. But again, like you said, who knows how much we would understand if they hadn't just torched everything? And then the surviving stuff, the surviving writing and the hieroglyphics at Mayan system of writing that was so developed, it wasn't cracked until not that many years ago, I think the 21st century. And there's a really great Nova episode on PBS called Cracking the Maya Code. And it's just almost like this thriller where, like, a group of linguists got together and figured out what it meant without a rosetta stone, nothing like that. They just had to make conclusions and assumptions and they finally figured it out. But one of the other things that happened to one of the remaining kind of bits of written information was on the Hieroglyphic stairway at Copan, another great city. One of the temples, Chuck, was a pyramid, and it had the staircase. And the staircase was made of limestone blocks with hieroglyphics carved into it that told the story. But unfortunately, the first archaeologist who excavated it back in 1930 disassembled the staircase to examine it. And when they put it back together again, I guess they realized that they hadn't noted where it was originally, so they put it out of order. So whatever it was trying to say is lost to history forever, thanks to archeologists. And they said, it says there's a lady who knows all that glitters is gold, and as she winds on down the road, and they're like, no, it's all out of order. There's something about a bustle in your hedgehog that doesn't make any sense. It still doesn't make sense. Not really. The colonial period that came much later, the indigenous languages were discouraged is one way to say it kind of squashed is another way. And then finally, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a revival of the Maya in Guatemala to basically say our language is important, our cultural rights as indigenous people are important. And they made some concessions. They're not officially, I believe Guatemala still has not accepted any of the indigenous languages as official co languages like it does with Spanish. But they are acknowledged they're part of the national identity in Guatemala and believe that you can receive public services in your native language tongue. Even though they're not official languages, they still guarantee that that's really something. And that also actually comes after a genocide. There was a genocide against the Maya by the Guatemalan army, which presumed that the typical indigenous Maya in Guatemala supported the gorillas in the late 70s, early eighty s, and something like 2000 Maya indigenous Maya were killed between 1000 981,983 and another one and a half million just disappeared and are presumed to have been killed. And they keep finding, like, mass graves. That definitely underscore the fact that they were killed. So almost 2 million people were killed in three years in tiny little Guatemala. So much so that there was a substantial hit to the Maya population in that country. But they managed to hang on and stay around and maintain links to their traditions still. Yeah. I mean, if you go there today, you will see traditional mind people. Sometimes the women might be wearing the traditional clothing, which is beautiful. Eat some of that food is my advice. Sit down with some of them. Have a conversation, if you can. Sure. I guess we should finish up with a little bit about human sacrifice. Sure, why not? Instead of that lovely note. Yeah. So there's a great article in the Economist called who did the Maya Sacrifice? And there was another one in Reuters called Ancient Maya Sacrifice. Boys, not Virgin Girls. Study. But there was this notion that sacrifice happens in numerous ways. There was bloodletting sometimes, there was the ball game that we spoke of a lot of times. They would play the game against another city state and someone in that city state would die if they lost and be sacrificed. Sometimes they would sacrifice children like you spoke of. They would throw them in the cenotes, which are the swam in them when I was in Mexico. And it's an amazing experience, but to know that that kind of thing happened there was a little sobering to say the least. But the underground pools in these caves and there's no way getting around it, you know, they sacrifice people and so they, you know, they definitely did it when it war. They would a lot of times sacrifice someone from another city state to sort of appease the gods and not their own. But they thought, maybe we can find out who these people were and there's a lot of gobbledygookki science that we won't get into and how they did it, but they looked at their teeth and from examining the teeth and the isotopic ratios, they're able to basically determine where people came from depending on the enamel of their teeth. And what they ended up finding out was what they called. It was anywhere and everywhere were who these people were. Half of them were locals, about a quarter were from some distance, others were from hundreds of kilometers away. And there were children, there were boys, there were girls, there were adults. It was sort of all over the map. So I think they were hoping for sort of like a tidy little answer there and they did not get one now. But didn't they say that it was ultimately mostly younger boys, like teenage boys? Well, that was the Reuters study and that was when they would specifically, I think, throw children in the cenotes to call for rain. I think they used to think that those were they sacrificed virgin girls. And what they found out that was because I think they had J jewelry and things like that, right? But they said no. They found out that they were in fact mostly young boys, right. And they would throw them in the ce notes because those were considered portals to the underworld and they were sacrificing not just for rain, but also just to keep things going. Like they believed that the gods were nourished by human blood and by sacrificing humans. The sun would come up, crops would grow, night would come and turn into day again. The world would just keep functioning as a matter of nourishing the gods with human blood. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely something to keep in mind when you go to tour and swim in a cenote you should always sort of respectfully think about that kind of stuff, I think. Yeah. And don't look down. Don't look down. You're down already. Don't look up. That's where the bats are. Did you go scuba diving in it? No, we went on a great tour. It ended up being just the three of us and this one other woman, this very nice lady from Dallas. And we were the only ones down there. And our guide was this awesome dude. And it's like Caving. You go deeper and deeper and deeper about the knee deep in water, this cool, beautiful, perfectly clear water with blind fish all around you. And then you get to the sort of the swimming hole part. There are other scenarios down there that you can scuba dive in and zip line in and the inner tube, and there are tons and tons of people. But this one was way off the beaten path and very quiet and very private and more of a historical, educational type of tour. It was great. Yeah. Little known fact, maya invented the zipline so that they could zip line in the saints. But he gave us these waterproof flashlights to see our way around, and I was floating. He gave us about 30 minutes just to sort of swim and float in this one main swimming cavern. And they electrified it down there. They had these colored lights. It was really spectacular cool. But I was laying there and I was floating, and I saw these big sort of look like portals, these little indentations in the ceiling above me. I was like, I wonder what's in those. And I turned on the light and it was like 20 bats just hovered and sort of shaking and shivering together. Oh, wow. And there is no more natural instinct than to get out from under that hole. Like a bat is going to just fall on you. Like, no, they fly. But your instinct is like every time one of us walked under, one was like, oh, I don't want to be under that. It's very cool, though. Yeah, that is cool, man. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, Chuck's got nothing else. I don't have anything else. And since that's the case, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this our second kidney donation email. We did one in our last episode we just recorded, and this one is from a kidney donor, and it's pretty great. He discovered our podcast six years ago and said about seven years ago, I had the opportunity to sign up to donate my kidney to a stranger. I was fortunate enough to be a universal donor. Our blood type was a match and the ride started. It took blood work every two weeks for four months to get cleared. I met the recipient and his family. They had two young kids, so it made my decision that much easier and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Some interesting facts. The remaining kidney can grow up to 20% larger to make up for the missing friend. I don't think we said that. No, I didn't know that. I was also curious at the time how they decided which one to take. They scoop out the one that has the longest ureter because it makes for an easier transplant. Wow. Here's another one. One part that was not mentioned is the six inch incision at the waistline where the surgeon reaches in almost elbow deep to grab the kidney. Wow. Isn't that something? Yes. Hopefully very clean arms. He said he made the mistake to watch a video surgery video after he had it done. Yeah, it's probably better than I did before. He said, now that I'm a living donor, I'll be at the top of the waiting list if I ever needing a kidney. Not sure if this is the case everywhere, but would help others if it would help others that are on the fence about it to know that. And our seven year transplant anniversary is in May, so I had to write in and give kudos for the great episode. And that is from Shane Green in Candy in New Hampshire. And Shane, we usually don't do shout outs, but I think the rule now is if you give a kidney and you get some shoutouts because Shane wrote back after I said he was going to be on listener mail and said, please shout out the Dartmouth Hitchcock transplant team. Please shout out donate life, which helped pay for Shane's bills while he was out for five weeks. Very nice. And most importantly, my family that backed me up, my lovely wife Brie and my daughter Maeve. We are all listeners and our anniversary is coming up soon. That's fantastic. That's from Shane Green. He sent a picture of him and big Mo, his transplant friend. He was six foot six. That's why they call him big Mo. And it's just a great story. It's amazing you did that, Shane. Yeah. Shane way you go. You definitely get shouts out anytime for that. Just right in. Next time you're like, I'm in the move for a shout out. Yeah, I had a nice cheesesteak yesterday. Exactly. If you want to be in touch with us like Shane did and let us know something amazing you did, we might give you a shout out, too. Who knows? You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
06d2f3da-3b0d-11eb-a810-5bd213bb1936 | Space Weather - What's That?! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/space-weather-whats-that | Did you know space has weather? It’s true! In our solar system, tons – literal tons – of highly charged gas and magnetized particles spew from the surface constantly, causing all sorts of weird stuff here on Earth. So far, nothing too bad has happened. | Did you know space has weather? It’s true! In our solar system, tons – literal tons – of highly charged gas and magnetized particles spew from the surface constantly, causing all sorts of weird stuff here on Earth. So far, nothing too bad has happened. | Tue, 05 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=5, tm_isdst=0) | 46608381 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck. Brian over there, and Jerry's not here, but we're going to make it through somehow in this edition of Stuff You Should Know. I'm going to call this one Chuck the Icarus Edition, because we made it through the sun podcast just hanging on by our fingernails before and through just an astounding act of hubris, we're going to do another sun related episode. Yeah, we talked about a lot of the stuff in the sun one. Yeah, we did, but I don't think we went anywhere near into this kind of detail. So I'm feeling okay about redoing this, doing something that's like, kind of a redo a little bit. Are you feeling okay? I'm feeling great. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. I don't know if I would say I'm feeling great, but that's good that you are, at least. So we're talking about the sun, believe it or not, and we're talking about a specific thing on the sun called solar flares, which you may have heard of, but you may not know much about, unless apparently you've already listened to our sun episode. But we'll talk a little bit about solar flares. But one of the things that I think is extraordinarily interesting about solar flares is they belong to a larger category called space weather. And I am just as jazzed as can be about the idea of space weather, aren't you? Not as jazzed as you, I don't think. But I do think this is pretty neat stuff, and I'm glad we're getting a chance to make it more clear than we did before. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm sure we talked about this before, but it was probably extremely confusing. So, yeah, we're going to clear all that out. So space weather, especially stuff that comes from the sun, comes mostly from the surface or the atmosphere of the sun, which is extraordinarily active. It's extraordinarily hot. So hot, Chuck, that the surface of the sun is made of plasma, which a lot of people consider the fourth state of matter. It's like a gas, but it's a special kind of gas where the particles are as jazzed about being alive as I am about the idea of space weather. That's right. They're supercharged, and when they are moving around, they create something called magnetic fields. Not the band, the thing, even though it is a great band name and a great band, and they are going to magnetic fields have their own effect on all these particles and what's going on up there. Yeah, so the energetic electrons that have been stripped from the atoms creating electrons and ions, which have a charge, they create magnetic fields, and then the magnetic fields they create have an effect on them so that they tend to follow these magnetic field lines. But this stuff is so energetic and so hot that the magnetic fields that develop aren't like this kind of orderly lines that keep their distance, you know, nice and tidy like you imagine, like a magnetic field to exist. Like these things are like roiling, curling, twisting. It's just a big orgy of magnetism up there. That's the only way to put it. That's it. I had no choice but to say it like that. Yeah. And then this stuff is going on. It's called solar activity, and it depends on when you're observing the sun. It's going to be more or less active. There's a cycle, it's called the solar cycle that happens about every eleven years when the magnetic north and south pole switch. And within that cycle there's something called a solar maximum, which is the period kind of where the biggest show is going on. Yeah. There's also a solar minimum, but the solar maximum is we're in solar cycle 25, apparently, and the solar maximum is coming up in 2025. That's very appropriately. And so as we're reaching the solar maximum, there's going to be a lot more of what people call sunspots. By people, I mean astronomers, of course, and sunspots are these kind of darkish areas on the surface of the sun. They can be little tiny dots, they can be kind of big, but they look really small and they look dark. And the reason they look dark is because they're relatively cool compared to the rest of the surface that's around them. But even still, they're super duper hot and they're still pretty bright, comparatively speaking. Yeah. Like a sunspot is about 6500 deg Fahrenheit because we're talking about the sun. So cool is a relative term here. Right. And as far as bright goes, it's about ten times as bright as a full moon. So if you go out at night in a full moon and it kind of feels like a little cool daylight, a sunspot is about ten times brighter than that. Right. So you shouldn't go looking at these things. No, that's a really good thing to say. We're talking about a lot of stuff that's going to make you want to look at the sun. Don't do it. Just go online and look at pictures of this stuff on the sun. Or videos even. We have videos, thanks to the good people at NASA, but the sunspot. So it really just goes to show you how hot and bright the surface of the sun is that these things seem cool and dark by comparison. And huge. Yes. And they are really big, so the width of them can get to be up to 30,000 miles across, which is about the width of Neptune, which is huge, or about four times the width of Earth. And still they look super dinky compared to the sun. And the reason that these things are cooler, Chuck, is because they're spots of magnetism that are so strong that they keep the heat inside the sun from poking out right there. That's how strong the magnetic energy is in these areas. Yeah, and that's right. And because they're magnets, they form in little pairs like little buddies, and they appear on the surface of the sun. And what we're actually looking at, if you can go to NASA or whatever, like you said, and see a picture of a sunspot, what you're looking at is sort of like the two ends of if you think about these magnetic lines, they're these magnetism. It's like a filament, like a rope. Just picture them twisted up, basically running beneath the sun surface and there are some really, really cool pictures of stuff. And then one end of this sunspot is positive, the other end is negative. And they sort of act like rings of a tree a little bit. As far as astronomers can observe these things. The first sunspots of each cycle are in the middle latitudes and then they start moving around during the cycle so they can kind of see where you are in the solar cycle by where and how many of these sunspots there are. Yeah. So the closer to the solar maximum you are, the more sunspots they're going to be and the closer they're going to be to the equator. So they tell a lot about where the sun is in its solar cycle. But the thing is, when these magnetic field lines twists and curve and turn, they actually can interact with other magnetic field lines. And when that happens, when they cross, kind of like the proton streams crossing in Ghostbusters, when that happens, something called a solar flare happens. It's an event on the sun. And it is such a huge, magnificently, energetic event that it actually can affect Earth, things on Earth, because it's just so massive and such a huge release and sudden release of energy. I had a Ghostbusters ref penciled in later on, if you believe that. Oh, I can't wait to hear it. It's been a long time when we both have two or we both have one each. It has. And it's been a while since we listed dates by the years before, since Ghostbusters came in. Mine has a date attached to it. You'll just have to wait. I can't wait. What a great episode this is shaping out to be. So these explosions, the magnetic fields are driving these explosions. And if you're lay people like us, you can either look at this as something that's kind of simple to look at on its surface, or if you really want to get into it, it's pretty complex and not easily understood. But the simple answer is, because we're talking about magnetic fields, is that these adjacent fields are pointing in opposite directions and they basically wipe each other out and that releases all this magnetic energy and all that heat kind of everywhere that surrounds it. It just goes spew energy, heat shooting at you from the sun, right? Sure. So people have figured this out finally. That has to do with the lines of magnetism interacting with one another and annihilating one another. But there's a big mystery attached to this. There was for many years, and that is that. Okay, so we understand magnetic annihilation, but to this point, we thought it took about 10,000 years for two opposite magnetic fields to annihilate one another. What we're talking about here, the solar flares, they annihilate one another and release all this energy in a matter of minutes, maybe an hour sometimes. So that doesn't quite job. And I think back in the 50s, some scientists started proposing a type of magnetic energy release called magnetic reconnection. And that is where magnetic field lines are so twisty, turny, Rivy and energetic that they can actually rip a field line, like a magnetic field line can rip apart and then reconnect with some neighbors when that happens, it's called magnetic reconnection. And they think that that is the kind of energetic release that would account for a solar flare. Yeah. And this can cause all kinds of problems for things in space and for people on Earth, even, which we'll get to that stuff in more detail a little bit later. But the point is, these things are super hot. They burst out to the Sun's corona, which, if you remember from our sun episode, that's the outermost atmosphere of the sun rarefied gas is all over the place out there. And this is super hot stuff. Like, normally, the temperature in the corona is about a few million degrees Kelvin, but inside that flare, we're talking ten to 20 million degrees Kelvin. And we always like to think of things in terms of either Big Macs or hydrogen bombs. And in this case, it's got to be hydrogen bombs. The amount of energy released during a solar flare is about it's. Millions of 100 ton hydrogen bombs all at once? Yeah, all at once. That's a really important point, too. And I feel like a real schmo for not having calculated that in Big Mac. I don't know how calories that's got a good size now. You could do calories. Yeah, but what's the calorie of a solar flare? I don't know. I didn't look. And I feel like a jackass for not having looked. Well, they go down easy. I know that. Yeah, they do. So they're big, huge releases of energy and they're releases of radiation. They release radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, and that includes the visible light spectrum. So these things just turn into these enormously bright flares, which is where the name comes from. And we've figured out how to classify. And there's a classifying system for solar flares that's a lot like the Richter scale in that there's class ABCM and X. That's not really like the Richter scale. What's like the Richter scale is that each of those classes is ten times more powerful than the previous class. Yeah. So like, an X is the highest. That is ten times an M, 100 times a C. And then once you get to X, they didn't go Y and Z. They just said, let's stick with X and then let's start cool. Sure, it sounds totally cool. And then let's start attaching numbers to them so you can have X 1234 and so on. Yeah. And so each of those letter grades has a one to nine scale. But X is so huge that X's scale goes beyond nine. And I think the biggest one that they've ever caught so far that's ever been recorded burned out the sensors that were recording it. And the sensors were overloaded at X 28. And they did some calculations after the fact, and they figured out that it may have been an X 45 flare back on November 4, 2003. Yes, this was a big deal. It was something called the Halloween Storms of 2003, which is kind of a fun way it happened because it was in October and near Halloween, so all the astronomers got excited. And this one was a little bit weird because although it was near the solar maximum, it was two to three years after the peak. And they said, NASA said it's generally a quiet period, so they got really excited. There were 17 major flares in that Halloween storm, and it was wow, that's something that is really going to get the white coats pretty charged up. It totally is. An X 45. That's just astounding and I did a little bit of derivative calculation. Technically, it would be a five. You know, I saw weird different numbers, too, though. I saw that the sensor cut out at 15. The estimate was x 28. It's really hard. NASA even had conflicting information. I think we should point this out. You just set us up for a COA that I wanted to include. So there's two things. There's a lot of disagreement on exactly what a solar flare is and the difference between that and coronal mass ejections, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And it's not necessarily a disagreement in astronomy. It's a disagreement among people who report on stuff like astronomy and don't fully understand what they're talking about. So we ran into that quite a bit. So if we get something mixed up, please forgive us. And then secondly, when we're talking about some of these incredible events in physics terms, people who are in the field of physics understand what they're talking about to one another, but they have a great reputation of not figuring out how to explain it to the rest of us. And so they'll put it in different terms. And so when you're researching this stuff, you're like, is this describing a different thing than this over here, or is it just two different people describing the same thing two different ways? Because they're not describing it in the true physics way, because I wouldn't understand. So we ran into that a lot, too. Did you? Yeah, and it's frustrating to literally see two different things, both from NASA gov. Right. On two different pages. But who are we to call out NASA? I think we just did. We'll call out Space Force. Sure. But the point is this all of that really underscores the fact that our understanding of the dynamics of the sun are still really early and premature, and we're still figuring a lot of stuff out, including classifying the differences between solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Yeah. And the light show and the fun that the astronomers had in the Halloween storms of 2003 was immense, no matter whether it was X 28 or X 45. That's right. They partied either way. They sure did. They surely did. Check. They had a little bit of peach snaps and went to bed at 1030, toasted some half a shot of brandy and then went to bed. That's right. Prove us wrong, nerds. Prove us wrong. I say we take a break and then come back and talk about those coronal mass ejections that I teased. Sure. Okay. We'll be right back, everybody. All right. So I was saying that it's difficult sometimes to discern the difference between a solar flare, which is a huge burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum all at once, which, by the way, takes just a matter of minutes, eight minutes, to be exact, to reach Earth, because we're talking about carriers of the electromagnetic force, which can travel at the speed of light. So it's eight minutes at the speed of light from the sun. Right, right. Coronal mass ejections are something different. Even though they seem to be associated with solar flares in a lot of cases, they also seem to be able to kind of stand on their own, too. Either way, they're impressive in their own right? For sure. Yeah. I think if you are talking in terms of visual excitement, like, a coronal mass ejection is like a full on Grateful Dead concert, whereas a solar flare is like when John Mayer played with members of the Grateful Dead. That's mean. I was going to say it's just an Instagram video lesson of John Mayer teaching you some Grateful Dead lick. Well, but solar flares are more magnificent than that, so man, that's mean. Sorry, john Mayer, if you're listening. I'm not sorry. Josh is sorry. He's a nice guy. He apparently I've seen some stuff, like, of him teaching people how to play Grateful Dead guitar stuff, and it's really hard what he's doing. Sure. My hats off, right? Man, I feel weird. I just apologize to John Mayer on the studies should know episode about solar flares. You didn't see that coming? No, it wasn't in my notes. So with coronal mass ejections, at least these are not necessarily just bursts of radiation like a solar flare is. They do have some radiation attached, but their big thing is particles. Highly charged, super energetic particles, that it shoots like buckshot toward the Earth at incredible speeds. I mean, they get accelerated very close to the speed of light, not the speed of light. And there's a big difference between the speed of light and close to the speed of light. So it takes about three or four days usually for stuff that's shot out by a coronal mass ejection to reach Earth. But when these things go off on the sun, like you said, they're rather impressive. Yeah. Like if you were looking at this stuff with a telescope, and high powered telescope that is, I don't think you could well, can you see any of this stuff with anything you have at home? And I've got a pretty good telescope, but it's for nighttime viewing only. So with the I think you can see coronal mass ejections, I think solar flares your best with a radio telescope or an Xray telescope, but the x ray telescope would have to be outside of Earth's magnetosphere. Do you have a telescope? Yeah. It's not a radio telescope. No, we've never scoped it up in conversation, and I would be surprised if you didn't, but I'm glad to know you do. We do have one. Yeah. So flares, like, if you were looking through an x ray or a radio telescope at a solar flare, it'll look cool, it'll look like a flash of light. But those chronal mass ejections are really impressive. Big eruptions, the height can be many times the size of the Earth shooting out into space. Like you said, they're kind of like a bell from the sun that actually releases part of the sun. It's like a bubble of plasma that's just enormous, often billions and billions of tons in mass just coming right at the Earth, full of these incredibly charged particles. And they're so big, so massive, and the plasma that they are made of is so energetic that they actually have their own magnetic fields like the sun or the Earth. So when they finally do come in contact with the planet, our planet, weird things start to happen because its own magnetic field and all of the charged particles within the plasma contact our own magnetosphere and then also our atmosphere, which is almost designed to deter the worst effects of those things coming at us from the sun. Yeah. So our magnetosphere, that's our little first layer of protection that would be like, although I was about to say, like wakanda's protective shield. That may be more like the ionosphere, but the magnetosphere is that first protection, and it's going to kind of brush away as many of those charged particles, these protons, that are shooting out as possible. And because of solar wind, though, it's got a shape to it, the magnetosphere has sort of a compressed side that faces the sun. It's got a little dip near the poles of the Earth where some really magnificent stuff is going to take place as we'll see in a minute. And then it's got this tail end that flows out from the back and the Earth's magnetic field is going to block these particles from most of the surface. The solar wind is going to push them along toward that tail. And then that dip at the poles is where you're going to see these really brilliant auroras. Yes, but the magnetism, the magnetic energy from the coronal mass ejection, can be so energetic that it can actually push on the sunside, the day side of the Earth's magnetosphere. It's closest to the sun. Push on it so much that it actually contorts the night side, the tail end that trails off into space, impresses it together, so that when it comes together, the Earth's own magnetosphere becomes energetic and quivery. And then when it goes back to its normal energy state, it releases a bunch of energy in the form of light. And when that happens, the auroras that tend to congregate the poles can actually show up all over the planet, basically even very close to the equator. Yeah, which is crazy. And we'll talk about some of the bigger ones and some of the surprising places they showed up. So that's the magnetosphere I mentioned, the ionosphere, that's sort of, I guess, a secondary protection that is another high layer of the Earth's atmosphere. And that's going to stop all the radiation because it's giving out a tremendous amount of radiation. And if the ionosphere wasn't doing his job and it wasn't there, we would be in big trouble. We'd be toast. I mean, these are incredibly energetic, fast traveling particles close to the speed of light, and they would just shoot right through the tissue in our bodies and do all sorts of damage because they would probably knock all sorts of electrons off of our atoms that make up our cells and our tissue. And we would either develop cancer over the long term or just drop dead from a big enough dose of this stuff. So thank goodness for the ionosphere. It saves us like John Mayer saved the Grateful Dead, just in case he's still listening. There's like a percentage of our audience. It's like, yeah, man. Preach. And there's a percentage that is like, oh, my God, I have to turn this off. And then I'd say the vast majority are like, who's American? Exactly. See the guy that dated Jen aniston probably, yes. So you got the magnetosphere, you got the ionosphere, and for the most part, these things are capable of absorbing the worst of the Sun's belches and flare ups and everything under normal circumstances. But even when it is protecting life on Earth, like us animals and the plants and the plankton and the whales, that kind of stuff, life here on Earth, there are things that we humans have developed that can be affected by this space weather, by these geomagnetic storms. Yeah, I guess. Should we talk about the Carrington event? One of the most exciting events. I thought it was pretty exciting. Yes, it's pretty good. So this is 1859. This kind of thing now is pretty magnificent. But I imagine 1859, astronomers were just really knocked out by something like this. They said Zeus is beer. Yeah, exactly. This is sort of late summer, August, September, and a big solar storm they later called the Carrington Event became the strongest one on record. And this is named for a man named Richard Carrington. He was an astronomer, one of England's best at the time. And he was in his observatory and he was hanging out and it was a sunny day and he was working with his telescope and he's projecting this image of the sun on a screen and drawing. There were cameras at the time, but I guess the most, I don't know, accurate or efficient way to capture what he saw was to draw the stuff that he's observing. And that's what he was doing on September 1859? Yes. And while he was drawing the stuff, he saw that some of these sunspots that he was mapping, I guess, started to grow really, really bright. And he got really excited because he'd been doing this for a while and this wasn't something he'd seen before. So he jumped up and he ran to get a friend who was going to witness this big mistake. Yeah, he said he was gone for a minute, tops. And when he came back, he found that these brilliant flashes of light had already started to weaken. Can you imagine? He was a little bummed about this, but he and he and his buddy still watched these flares, like, go get lower and lower and then turn into pinpoints and then vanish. So what he saw, he was the first person to record a solar flare. No one had ever seen anything like it before. And that was at 11:23 a.m.. It was done, it finished. And then nothing. That was it. Until the wee hours of the morning, later that night. The morning of the next day, later that night, which I always just find endlessly confusing. What, did it take that long? No, that night is the next morning. For some reason, it just breaks my brain every time I realize how sad that is to admit. Yes. So in the wee hours, the skies put on a light show all over the Earth. Red, green, purple, auroras. Very brilliant, very exciting. Newspapers. You could read the newspaper at night. They saw this stuff in Hawaii. El Salvador. In the Bahamas. They saw the auroras in the Bahamas. Isn't it nuts? That is nuts. There were towns, neighboring towns that thought, like, Shelbyville was on fire, springfield thought Shelbyville was on fire, and vice versa. There were birds chirping because they thought it was dawn. There was a brick mason crew in South Carolina that got up and they were like two beers in going to work. When they realized that hey, it's the middle of the night. Right? And they looked at each other and said, man, this is 125 years before Ghostbusters. Oh, nice. Very nice, Chuck. Yeah, well, it seemed canned then because I premeditated. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. How about this? I'm going to give you a huge hearty surprise laugh and we'll edit out the conversation before. How about that? Are you ready? And they all looked at each other two beers in and said, ghostbusters won't even come out for another 125 years. What? Oh, my God. I did not see that coming. Dude, how long has it been since we talked about it? I don't know. That's perfect. And we'll just fix that all in editing. That's great. Thanks, Chuck. I need a couple of beers myself. So one of the other things that really went haywire was the telegraph system, right? Yeah. Because this is 1859, and the telegraphs, they were the leading edge, not bleeding edge. You taught me that. That's totally wrong. The leading edge of technology, of telecommunications at the time. And these telegraph lines depended on currents being sent over wires. And so those wires were overloaded by this geomagnetic storm. So much so that sparks were shooting off of the telegraphs. Operators were getting shocked and burned. The telegraph paper was catching on fire when it was nearby. It was very much like a movie. All this is happening all over the world at the same time. It's just crazy. It's very early morning of the next day after the Carrington event. Right. So one of the things that got me was they unplugged the batteries to these things, the telegraphs, and they found that the wires were still so energetic with electricity from the geomagnetic storm that they could still send telegraphs even though they had no power of their own. They were able to send telegrams over the telegraph line even with that disconnected from the batteries. That's the fact of the show to me. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Let me have that one. I mean, they must have thought it was haunted or something. I think so. Sure. The plug is unplugged and it's still working. They're like Zeus's beard. This is crazy. There's another thing too. Some telegraph operators couldn't send telegraph even though the lines were active, because the magnetism in these currents was so strong that the armature, the thing that they tap up and down was like fused to the plate beneath it. It was just the magnetism was so strong and it wouldn't move. I thought you were going to say they thought it was possessed. So they probably left the room screaming. They did. We got the third one in there. Should we take another break? Almost. So one other thing. Let's just wrap the Carrington event up real quick. Okay? All right. So 10:00 A.m., the effects of this whole crazy event are done and it gets talked about. This is a worldwide event, but it's. Kind of like treated as a scientific anomaly, right. People understand what happened and what caused it and why it happened over the years, as we learn more and more about solar flares and coronal mass ejections. But it didn't become apparent that this Carrington event was actually a harbinger of real much bigger problems that could happen to us alive on Earth today. Until the maybe we'll take a break, Chuck, and come back and talk about how that could be problematic right after this. Great. All right. So the world changed a lot between the Carrington event in the mid eighteen hundred s and in the 1970s, when scientists had a much bigger handle on what this kind of thing meant, and in the whole world was very dependent on electric power, you might be surprised to learn. Right. And they knew like, hey, if we had another Carrington event today, it could be a big deal and we'll get to this later, but we got a lot of metal on this earth, and we use the Earth to ground everything, basically with ground wires. And that creates a unique problem, potentially, if we had another event like this. Yeah. The fact that we chose to use the Earth as the ground to where our grounding wires go from our electrical components tie into a metal rod that's driven into the Earth, so that whenever excess electricity is generated by the electronics that we use, it gets distributed through the grounding wire to the Earth where it dissipates. That makes all of our electronics vulnerable to a geomagnetic storm. Because in a geomagnetic storm, the ground itself can become magnetized. And even more than that, Chuck, we've buried a lot of metal infrastructure, from like pipes to cables to all sorts of metal stuff is snaking through the ground right now. And when the ground becomes magnetized in a geomagnetic storm, it can carry really powerful currents through all the infrastructure, up through the grounds, through the grounding wires, into our electronic components, including things like power transformers, and overload them to the point where they fail catastrophically. Yeah. And this sort of happened in August 1972. There was a big, big solar flare that knocked out our long distance phone communication across Illinois. So that was just sort of an early example of like, hey, this can actually have a real effect here on Earth. And that was a big one. It took, I think, about 15 hours to hit Earth, whereas it usually takes two to three days. It also set off these it was during Vietnam, obviously, and we had magnetic sea mines and harbors around Vietnam. It exploded those. So I don't know if they were supposed to be like, secretly there and if that was kind of like, oh, sorry about that, or if they knew that they were there and they just went off. But either way, that was a pretty scary scene. It was. And apparently it was a mystery for a long time until somebody finally figured out why those sea mines all went off. They connected it to that coronal mass ejection, I believe. Yeah, but you can imagine, like, all the damage that could occur. Like, even if you're just talking about the electrical grid, if it really blew out, it wouldn't be just like a blackout. Like, it would destroy parts of our electrical grid such that it would take it's not like, hey, let me go out and fix this over a few hours during a snowstorm. It might take weeks or months or even up to a year if we had a big enough blast to the grid. Yeah. Because it is by necessity, our electrical grid is interconnected. So if one part of it gets overloaded, that can overload other parts that are connected. And if you have a whole city without power for, let's say Los Angeles went out of power for a month, what would happen? What would be the outcome of that? You couldn't do anything. And when you start thinking like that, you start thinking about, oh my God, think about all the stuff we do that requires electricity. Everything we do requires electricity in some form or fashion. And so to be without electricity in a major city or multiple major cities for even a couple of weeks is just unthinkable. But that's the level of vulnerability we're at because of the way that our electrical components are set up. Because they're grounded. Yeah. And not just like a chain reaction, apocalyptic kind of activity, but just monetary loss, like the economic and financial damage. For the city of Los Angeles to be without power for a month would be astounding. Right? So there's stuff they could do. They could fit some very critical transformers with Resistors and Capacitors, but these things are like hundreds of transformer, so that's just too much money. So they're not doing that. No, they're not. And I wonder if there's going to be, like, some close call that makes everybody be like, okay, we need to invest this in our infrastructure, or are we going to figure out some other means of backup system? I'm not sure that it happens to, like, Topeka, and then everyone says, hey, if this happens in Topeka and they lost several hundred dollars, that's really mean. I was going to say, do you think Topeka would do it? Do you think that would convince anybody? I don't know. I'm so sorry, Topeka, but you get my point. If it happens somewhere sort of in a smaller area than the big cities might say, hey, that means it could happen to us, the people who really matter. Right. The coastal elites would stroke their beards and truck their tongues. Yes. There doesn't seem to be a lot of initiative right now to figure this out. We're just kind of sitting ducks in a weird way. I don't think it's anything to lose sleep over, but it's really surprising like, the more I dug into this, the more I was like, this could kind of be a thing someday. And it's not just the electrical grid here on Earth alone is all that would be affected by that. Things we rely on out in space, like satellites. A bad enough geomagnetic storm could affect satellites in a lot of ways, so our GPS systems would be messed up. So if you use GPS for really important stuff like, say, landing an airplane, you could be in big trouble. And if you're also on planes, the high frequency radio communications they use to stay in contact with the ground, especially when they're out over the ocean or something like that, that can be disrupted by a solar flare or a cronal mass ejection, too. Yeah, or what about a satellite? Maybe that is there are thousands of satellites up there, but if a radio satellite went out, it would be bad, but people could live. But what if it affected a satellite that's in charge of aiding in national defense? Things could get a little bit scary if those satellites were down or there's spacecraft up there, and they use satellites to help orient themselves and keep themselves safe. Yeah. There's an ISS, although the ISS supposedly is protected, right? Yeah. The big threat to astronauts from coronal mass ejections and solar flares is when they're out on spacewalks, when they're doing labor, say outside the ISS or something like that, just like here on Earth. If we didn't have the ionosphere or the magnetosphere, we would be in big trouble. Astronauts can be in big trouble. The ISS orbits within the Earth's magnetosphere, but it's beyond the ionic. They are a little more exposed. On the ISS, it's shielded, so they're not nearly as exposed. But out on a spacewalk, if it were a really bad cronal mass injection, they could be in a lot of trouble. Yeah, like Sandra Winterface in that movie. Exactly. What is her last name? I can't remember. Sandra Bernhardt? No. Sandra Bullock. Sandy Duncan. Sandra Bullock. Bullock, yeah, right. Sandra Bernard in that movie. Space trot. Space craziness. Did you like that movie Gravity? Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. I've only seen it once. Me, too. I don't know if I would have cast her necessarily, but that's fine. Or George Clooney. I don't think I would have cast either of them. I mean, I had some issues. I mean, it was a magnificent looking movie, but I think in the end I had some issues with the story and the script being not good enough for how great of a movie it was trumped up to be. Was that the guy who did The Revenant? I think so, yeah. So you and I went and saw the Revenant in Hawaii once. We were on vacation because what else is there to do in Hawaii on vacation but go see movies? And we saw The Revenant and this person next to us was there by himself. And he was so upset by Tom Hardy's character and just how evil he was that this guy was, like, telling him he was the devil. He had his hand up at the screen and was praying against Tom Hardy. He was really affected by Tom Hardy's character, which made the movie, like, even more thrilling because we would look at the movie and then we would watch this person reacting to the movie, too. So it was something to see. Yeah, I saw that once as well. And I saw it on tour with you. Either. It was either Phoenix or San Diego. I don't always have to look at the dates, but I just remember there being palm trees. I think it was San Diego, maybe when we did a show at the Spooky abandoned church. Man, I'm convinced still to this day that that's the church from The Prince of Darkness. That John Carson movie. That was a weird show because that was the one I know you remember. That guy sat on the front row and shot the whole thing with a video camera. And he looked like he was mad, too, like he was documenting evidence or something to use against us. We both were like I think we were so caught off guard, we didn't know what to say. Can we call this guy and say, sir, can you please put away your camera? Yeah, so we just sold it on. Yeah, we were pinned down by the unrelenting glare of the lens. Then he went back to his apartment and showed it on TV to his roommate, who was the Tom Hardy guy. Right. And that guy was like, these guys are the devil. I'm praying against them. Oh, man. All right, so, yes, back to the show. Where are we? Oh, here's the deal. We're talking about astronauts and satellite operations and GPS. This isn't stuff that we've just said, well, this probably could happen. A lot of it is, but this actually has happened. We mentioned the thing in Illinois with the phone systems and then in the 2003, that CME that did disrupt satellites and that did disrupt high frequency radio communications that aviation relies on and that did blackout. A city in Sweden. Malmo. Everyone says no. Not Malmo. Yeah, Malmo. This the kind of thing can happen. It does happen. It just never happened on such a massive scale. They figured out from looking at Arctic ice cores, apparently highly energetic particles leave remnants in nitrates frozen in the ice at the poles. And by examining these cores, they can see how bad or how often or how many solar flares have hit Earth in the past. And they figured out that the Carrington event is like a 500 year solar flare. And it happened about 100 and 5170 years ago. Hopefully, we're in the clear. The key is we're still figuring out the dynamics of the sun and solar activity. So we're not exactly certain that maybe we're not due for 1000 year solar flare. We're just starting to figure this out. But we are figuring it out. That's step one. And we also actually have space weather forecasters here on Earth. At NOAA and at the National Weather Service, there are people whose job it is to track solar activity and to predict things like coronal mass ejections and solar flares so that people can like utility companies can maybe take steps to mitigate the worst effects eventually. I think right now we've got like eight to ten minute heads up, so that's not enough. But as we get to understand it a little more, we'll have more warning time and astronauts can plan their spacewalks when they're out doing future space colonies. This is all going to come into play for that too. Yeah. So hopefully they can get that up to at least over an hour. That would help. Sure. So again, it's nothing to lose sleep over. That's not the point of this episode. It's more just kind of like, gee whiz, this is amazing. By Zeus's beard, I've never heard of anything like that. The old fourth reference. Yes, surprising fourth one. Did not see that coming, did you not? You got anything else? I got nothing else. Alright, everybody checks that he's got nothing else. So that's it for this episode, which means it's time for listener mail. Let me see here. I've actually got quite a few today, which is in abundance. We've been getting more than usual, haven't we? Yeah, we've been getting good ones. All right, I'll choose this one. I'm going to call it Rush Girl. Hey, guys. I've been a long time listener, but I've never had a reason to write until your recent Fort Knox episode. In it, you refer to the joke you had made about women not liking The Three Stooges. By the way, I got a little grief for that and also support for that. Weirdly. Chuck made the comment that it wasn't like he had said something true, but they're like there being no women Rush fans. I immediately laugh because my future mother in law is the biggest Rush fan. I love this lady. She and my fiance have a bond over this band. In contrast, I thought the band was made up just for the movie. I love you, man. Wow. Yes. Meghan did not know Rush was a real band. She thought that was a fake band in a movie. Megan, you have a whole world ready to open up to you. Yes, you do. I guess that they fit the trope. According to my fiance, they call female Rush fans Getty corns, which sounds made up, but he swears it's true. Getty corn? I don't get that. Like a unicorn maybe? Oh yeah, exactly. Or it could be candy corn. No reference. Like the gettyle unicorn mash up. I like that. I didn't get that until just now. So thank you. Sure. At any rate, I can recognize the joke, and I'm not coming after you for that. I just found it funny that all the stereotypical male bands you could have picked, you chose my mother in law's favorite. Thanks for all you do. Your podcast has gone a long way toward helping me distress after a day of teaching during COVID. And that is from Megan Power. And, Megan, thank you and big ups to your mother in law for being a getty corn. Yeah. Not to be confused with candy corn. No. Well, if you want to be like Megan and let us know how we just totally blew your mind somehow or other, we'd love hearing that stuff. You can put it in an email and wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
The Empty House | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-empty-house | It's Halloween, and Josh and Chuck are ready to creep you out with this year's spooky story, Algernon Blackwood's scary short story, The Empty House. Tune in, turn down the lights and prepare for chills to run down your spine as they read this classic bit | It's Halloween, and Josh and Chuck are ready to creep you out with this year's spooky story, Algernon Blackwood's scary short story, The Empty House. Tune in, turn down the lights and prepare for chills to run down your spine as they read this classic bit | Wed, 30 Oct 2013 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=303, tm_isdst=0) | 38924263 | audio/mpeg | "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 small, 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. 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 Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios Ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, The Series and Zombies. Three plus. Don't miss national Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. 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Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Chelsea, chuck Bryan. It's very spooky. It's Halloween. This is the holiday episode. Christmas holiday episode are my favorites of the year. Yes. It's a tradition now. I love tradition. Yeah. Custom. Yeah. You want to explain what we do each Halloween in case people aren't in the know? We like to read a scary story for Halloween. The first few years, we read public domain scary stories. H. P. Lovecraft Eggrell and Poe So, Chuck, if you remember, last year we held a horror fiction contest. Yeah. And we came up with the winner. There was a sweet 16. You can actually go read them on stuff you should know.com. All 16 of them are awesome. And then we had like a leg wrestling competition. And the guy who came out on top was Brett S. Arnold with his really awesome story signed Forever and ever. Yeah. Thank you. Strong leg, Josh. I didn't like wrestle. I just watched. Oh, that was mean. Tracy? Yeah, you don't remember? This is awkward. It's crazy. Like Tracy moves really fast. And she was strangely agitated, too. Like she really had something against you. Anyway. Brett S. Arnold one time forever and ever. If you haven't heard that, go back and listen to it. It's very creepy. Jerry did some excellent sound design, but this year we are not holding another contest. Don't we? No. Even though it was great, it was a lot of reading. That's right. And then this year we're back at it, reading a very scary short story from the early 20th century written by a writer named Aldrin Blackwood, who is fantastic. Yeah. You get a name like Algebra and Blackwood, and you were born to write short story horror. Exactly. Where you're going to find like a church of Satan or something like that. Yeah, he probably tried both. He's a good writer. More positive than you'd think. Yes. And this is a good one just to set it up. It's about a haunted house and a couple of people venturing through this haunted house. And it's creepy as age. It is. So we're going to get to it. Gerry is going to lay down the sound design and we're going to scare the socks off of you. Happy Halloween to you guys. Turn the lights down. And here we go with the empty house by Al Jean Blackwood. Certain houses, like certain persons, managed somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them. They may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile, and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being that they are evil willy nilly. They seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts, which makes those in their immediate neighborhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased. And perhaps with houses, the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof long after the evildoers have passed away that makes the goose flesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evildoer and of the horror felt by his victim enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terrorstricken without apparent cause. There was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to rain within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood crowded into a corner of the square and looked exactly like the houses on either side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbors, the same balcony overlooking the gardens, the same white steps leading up to the heavy black front door. And in the rear there was the same narrow strip of green with neat box borders running up to the wall that divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses. Apparently, too, the number of the chimney pots on the roof was the same, the breadth and angle of the eaves, and even the height of the dirty area railings. And yet this house in the square that seemed precisely similar to its 50 ugly neighbors was a matter of fact entirely different, horribly different. Wherein lay this marked invisible difference is impossible to say. It cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination. Because persons who had spent some time in the house. Knowing nothing of the facts. Had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again. And that the atmosphere of the whole house produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror. While the series of innocent tenants who had tried to live in it had been forced to decamp at the shortest possible notice. Was indeed little less than a scandal in the town. When Shorthouse arrived to pay a weekend visit to his aunt Julia in her house on the seafront at the other end of town, he found her charge to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating boredom. But the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple skin wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition. The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other visitors and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special object. Something was in the wind, and the something would doubtless bear fruit. For this elderly Spencer aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as willpower, and by hook or by crook, she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she saddled close up to him as they paced slowly along the seafront in the dusk. I've got the keys, she announced in a delighted yet half awesome voice. Got them until Monday. The keys of the bathing machine, or? He asked innocently, looking from the sea to the town. Nothing brought her so quickly to the point as feigning stupidity. Neither, she whispered, I've got the keys of the haunted house in the square, and I'm going there tonight. Shorthouse was conscious of the slightest possible tremor down his back. He dropped his teasing tone. Something in her voice and manner thrilled him. She was in earnest. But you can't go alone, he began. That's why I wired for you, she said with decision. He turned to look at her. The ugly, line, enigmatical face was alive with excitement. There was the glow of genuine enthusiasm round it like a halo. The eyes shone. He caught another wave of her excitement, and a second trimmer, more market than the first, accompanied it. Thanks, Aunt Julia. He said politely. Thanks awfully. I should not dare to go quite alone, she went on, raising her voice. But with you I should enjoy it immensely. You're afraid of nothing, I know. Thank you so much, he said again. Is anything likely to happen? A great deal has happened, she whispered, though it's been most cleverly hushed up. Three tenants have come and gone in the last few months, and the house is said to be empty for good. Now, in spite of himself, Shorthouse became interested. His aunt was so very much in earnest. The house is very old indeed, she went on, and the story, an unpleasant one, dates a long way back. It has to do with the murder committed by a jealous stable man who had some affair with the servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep he crept upstairs to the servants quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue, through her bodily over the banisters into the hall below. And the stable man was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder. But it all happened a century ago, and I've not been able to get more details of the story. Shorthouse now felt his interest thoroughly aroused, but though he was not particularly nervous for himself, he hesitated a little on his aunt's account. On one condition, he said at length. Nothing will prevent my going, she said firmly, but I may as well hear your condition that you guarantee your power of self control if anything really horrible happens. I mean that. You're sure you won't get too frightened, Jim? She said scornfully. I'm not young, I know, nor are my nerves. But with you I should be afraid of nothing in the world. This, of course, settled it, for Shorthouse had no pretensions to being other than a very ordinary young man, and an appeal to his vanity was irresistible. He agreed to go instinctively. By a sort of subconscious preparation, he kept himself and his forces well in hand the whole evening, compelling an accumulative reserve of control. By that nameless inward process of gradually putting all the emotions away and turning the key upon them. A process difficult to describe, but wonderfully effective as all men who have lived through severe trials of the inner man. Well understand later, it stood him in good stead. But it was not until 10:30, when they stood in the hall, well in the glare of friendly lamps and still surrounded by comforting human influences, that he had to make the first call upon the store of collective strength. For once the door was closed and he saw the deserted, silent streets stretching away white in the moonlight before them. It came to him clearly that the real test that night would be in dealing with two fears instead of one. He would have to carry his ants fear as well as his own. And as he glanced down at her sphinx like countenance and realized that it might assume no pleasant aspect in a rush of real terror, he felt satisfied with only one thing in the whole adventure that he had confidence in his own will and power to stand against any shock that might come. Okay, little recap here. Got a dude and his aunt checking out this haunted house that she has the keys to. Apparently, a guy killed a lady there years before, a century ago. And it sounds like this Short House guy is handsome and brave. Yes. And I'm the aunt. You're the aunt. Okay. All right, here we go. Slowly they walked through the empty streets of the town a bright autumn moon silvered the roofs, casting deep shadows. There was no breath of wind, and the trees in the formal gardens by the seafront watched them silently as they passed along to his ansicational remarks. Shorthouse made no reply, realizing that she was simply surrounding herself with mental buffers, saying ordinary things to prevent herself thinking of extraordinary things. Few windows showed lights, and from scarcely a single chimney came smoker, sparks. Shorthouse had already begun to notice everything, even the smallest details. Presently they stopped at the street corner and looked up at the name on the side of the house, full in the moonlight and with one accord but without remark, turned into the square and crossed over to the side of it that lay in shadow. The number of the house is 13, whispered a voice set aside, and neither of them made the obvious reference but passed across the broad sheet of moonlight and began to march up the pavement in silence. It was about halfway up the square that Shorthouse felt an arm slipped quietly but significantly into his own and knew then that their adventure had begun in earnest and that his companion was already yielding imperceptibly to the influences against them. She needed support. And a few people are picturing Josh and I arm in arm and Josh wearing a dress. Then you're right on the money. It's like a gray wig with a bun. Yeah. This is Anthony Perkins and mom. Exactly a few minutes later, they stopped before a tall, narrow house that rose before them into the night, ugly in shape and painted a dingy white shudderless. Windows without blinds stared down upon them, shining here and there in the moonlight. There were weather streaks in the wall and cracks in the paint, and the balcony bulged out from the first floor a little unnaturally. But beyond this generally forlorn appearance of an unoccupied house, there was nothing at first sight to single out this particular mansion for the evil character it had most certainly acquired. Taking a look over their shoulders to make sure they had not been followed, they went boldly up the steps and stood against the huge black door that fronted them forbiddingly. But the first wave of nervous system is now upon them, and Shorthouse fumbled a long time with a key before he could fit it into the lock at all for a moment, if truth were told, they both hoped it would not open, for they were a prey to various unpleasant emotions as they stood there on the threshold of their ghostly adventure. Short, house, shuffling with a key and hampered by the steady weight on his arm, certainly felt the solemnity of the moment. It was as if the whole world, for all experience, seemed at that instant concentrated in his own consciousness, were listening to the grading noise of that key. A stray puff of wind wandering down the empty street woke a momentary rustling in the trees behind them, but otherwise this rattling of the key was the only sound audible, and at last it turned in the lock, and the heavy door swung open and revealed a yawning gulf of darkness beyond. With a last glance at the moonlit square, they passed quickly in, and the door slammed behind them with a roar that echoed prodigiously through empty halls and passages. But instantly, with the echoes, another sound made itself heard, and Aunt Julia lean suddenly so heavily upon him that he had to take a step backwards to save himself from falling. A man had coughed close beside them, so close that it seemed they must have been actually by his side in the darkness. With the possibility of practical jokes in his mind, shorthouse at once swung his heavy stick in the direction of the sound, but it meant nothing more than solid air. He heard his aunt give a little gasp beside him. There's someone here, she whispered. I heard him. Be quiet, he said sternly. It was nothing but the noise of the front door. Oh, get a light, quick, she added, as her nephew, fumbling with a box of matches, opened it upside down and let them fall with a rattle onto the stone floor. The sound, however, was not repeated, and there was no evidence of retreating footsteps. In another minute they had a candle burning, using an empty end of a cigar case as a holder, and when the first flare had died down, he held the impromptu lamp aloft and surveyed the scene. And it was dreary enough in all conscience, for there is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house, dimly lit, silent and forsaken, and yet teneted by rumor, with the memories of evil and violent histories. They were standing in a wide hallway. On their left was the open door of a spacious dining room, and in front of the hall ran ever narrowing into a long dark passage that led apparently to the top of the kitchen stairs. The broad, uncarpeted staircase rose in a suite before them, everywhere draped in shadows except for a single spot about halfway up, where the moonlight came in through the window and fell on a bright patch on the boards. The shaft of light shed a faint radiance above and below it, lending to the objects within its reach of misty outline that was infinitely more suggestive and ghostly than complete darkness. Filtered moonlight always seems to paint faces on the surrounding gloom, and his short house peered up into the well of darkness and thought of the countless empty rooms and passages in the upper part of the house. He caught himself longing again for the safety of the moonlit square or the cozy, bright drawing room they had left an hour before. Then, realizing that these thoughts were dangerous, he thrust them away again and summoned all his energy for concentration on the present. Aunt Julia, he said aloud severely, we must now go through the house from top to bottom and make a thorough search. The echoes of his voice died away slowly all over the building, and in the intense silence that followed, he turned to look at her in the candlelight. He saw that her face was already ghastly pale, but she dropped his arm for a moment and said in a whisper, stepping close in front of him, I agree. We must be sure there's no one hiding. That's the first thing. She spoke with evident effort, and he looked at her with admiration. You feel quite sure of yourself. It's not too late. I think so, she whispered, her eyes shifting nervously towards shadows behind. Quite sure. Only one thing. What's that? You must never leave me alone for an instant. As long as you understand that any sound or appearance that must be investigated at once. For to hesitate means to admit fear that is fatal. Agreed, she said, a little shakily after a moment's hesitation. I'll try. Arm in arm, shorthouse, holding the dripping candle and the stick, while his aunt carried the cloak over her shoulders, figures of utter comedy to all but themselves, they began a systematic search, stealthily walking on tiptoe and shading the candle lest it should betray their presence. Through the shutterless windows they went first into the big dining room. There was not a stick of furniture to be seen, bare walls ugly mantelpieces and empty grates stared at them. Everything they felt resented their intrusion, watching them, as it were, with veiled eyes. Whispers followed them, shadows flitted noiselessly to the right and left. Something seemed ever at their back, watching, waiting an opportunity to do them injury. There was the inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of way again. The whole dark interior of the old building seemed to become malignant presence that rose up, warning them to desist and mind their own business. Every moment the strains on the nerves increased. So you hear what's going on now? They're in this house. Yeah, they're checking it out. It's dark, and yet they both have this impression that they are not alone, that this house is watching them and resent their intrusion. Yeah, and the aunt is clearly a burden, I should point it out. Yeah, but she's like, you know, really trying to hang in there. That was her idea, let's give her credit. Out of the gloomy dining room they passed through large folding doors into a sort of library or smoking room, wrapped equally in silence, darkness and dust. And from this they regained the hall near the top of the back stairs. Here a pitch black tunnel opened before them into the lower regions, and it must be confessed they hesitated, but only for a minute. With the worst of the night still to come, it was essential to turn from nothing. Aunt Julius stumbled at the top of the dark descent, ill lit by the flickering candle, and even Short house felt at least half the decision go out of his legs. Come on, he said preemptively, and his voice ran on and lost itself in the dark, empty spaces below. I'm coming, she faltered, catching his arm with unnecessary violence. They went a little unsteadily down the stone steps, a cold damp air meeting them in the face. Close in maladorous. The kitchen into which the stairs led along a narrow passage was large with the lofty ceiling. Several doors opened out of it, some into cupboards with empty jars still standing on the shelves, and others into horrible little ghostly back offices, each colder and less inviting than the last. Black beetles scurried over the floor, and once, when they knocked against the deal table standing in the corner, something about the size of a cat jumped down with a rush and fled, scampering across the stone floor into the darkness. Everywhere there was a sense of recent occupation, an impression of sadness and gloom. Leaving the main kitchen, they went toward the scullery. The door was standing ajar, and as they pushed it open to its full extent, aunt Julia uttered a piercing scream, which she instantly tried to stifle by placing her hand over her mouth. For a second Shorthouse stood stock still, catching his breath. He felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice. Facing them directly in their way between the door posts, stood the figure of a woman. She had disheveled hair and wildly staring eyes, and her face was terrified and white as death. She stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the candle flickered and she was gone, gone utterly, and the door framed nothing but empty darkness. Only the beastly jumping candlelight, he said quickly, in a voice that sounded like someone else's. It was only half under control. Come on, Aunt. There's nothing there. He dragged her forward with a clattering of feet and a great appearance of boldness. They went on, but over his body the skin mood, as if crawling ants covered it, and he knew by the weight on his arm that he was supplying the force of locomotion for two. The scullery was cold, bare and empty, more like a large prison cell than anything else. They went round it, tried the door into the yard and the windows, but found them all fast and securely. His aunt moved beside him like a person in a dream. Her eyes were tightly shut, and she seemed merely to follow the pressure of his arm. Her courage filled him with amazement. At the same time she noticed that a certain odd change had come over her face, a change which somehow evaded his powers of analysis. There's nothing here, Auntie, he replied aloud quickly. Let's go upstairs and see the rest of the house. Then we'll choose a room to wait up in. She followed him obediently, keeping close to his side, and they locked the kitchen door behind them. It was a relief to get up again, and the hall there was more light than before, for the moon had traveled a little further down the stairs. Cautiously they began to go up into the dark vault of the upper house, the boards creaking under their weight. On the first floor they found the large double drawing rooms, a search of which revealed nothing. Here also was no sign of furniture or recent occupancy, nothing but dust and neglect. In shadows they opened the big folding doors between front and back drawing rooms and then came out again to the landing and went upstairs. They had not gone up more than a dozen steps when they both simultaneously stopped to listen, looking into each other's eyes with a new apprehension across the flickering candle plane from the room they had left hardly 10 seconds before, came the sound of doors quietly closing. It was beyond all question. They heard the booming noise that accompanies the shutting of heavy doors, followed by the sharp catching of the latch. We must go back and see, said Shorthouse briefly, in a low tone, and turning to go downstairs again. Somehow she managed to drag after him, her feet catching in her dress, her face livid. When they entered the front drawing room, it was plain that the folding doors had been closed half a minute before. Without hesitation, shorthouse opened them. He almost expected to see someone facing him in the back room, but only darkness and cold air met him. They went through both rooms, finding nothing unusual. They tried in every way to make the doors close of themselves, but there was not wind enough even to set the candle flame flickering. The doors would not move without strong pressure. All was silent as the grave undeniably. The rooms were utterly empty and the house utterly still. Its beginning, whispered a voice at his elbow, which he hardly recognizes his aunt. He nodded acquiescence, taking out his watch to note the time. It was 15 minutes before midnight. He made the entry of exactly what had occurred in his notebook, setting the candle, in its case upon the floor. In order to do so, it took a moment or two to balance it safely against the wall. Aunt Julia always declared that at this moment she was not actually watching him, but had turned her head toward the inner room, where she fancied she had heard something moving. But at any rate, both positively agreed that there came a sound of rushing feet, heavy and very swift, and the next instant the candle was out. But the Shorthouse himself had come more than this, and he had always thanked his fortunate stars that it came to him alone and not to his aunt too. For as he rose from the stooping position of balancing the candle, and before it was actually extinguished, a face thrust itself forward, so close to his own that he could almost have touched it with his lips. It was a face working with passion, a man's face, dark with thick features and angry, savage eyes. It belonged to a common man, and it was evil in his ordinary, normal expression, no doubt, but as he saw it alive with intense, aggressive emotion, it was malignant in a terrible human countenance. There was no movement of the air, nothing but the sound of rushing feet stalking their muffled feet, the apparition of the face and the almost simultaneous extinguishing of the candle. All right, so the s is hitting the fan. The poopoo is hitting the fan at this point, yeah. He could have kissed this ghost. Yeah, and they've seen what? Possibly he's a stable man, an angry man, and maybe even the woman he murdered. Maybe so. And there's cats. It's always scary. I hope it's a cat. It was something the size of a cat. Yeah, they're still in here. Here we go. In spite of himself, Shorthouse uttered a little cry, nearly losing his balance as his aunt clung to him with her whole weight. In one moment of real, uncontrollable terror, she made no sound, but simply seized him bodily. Fortunately, however, she had seen nothing, but had only heard the rushing feet, for her control returned almost at once, and he was able. To disentangle himself and strike a match. The shadows ran away on all sides before the glare, and his aunt stooped down and groped for the cigar case with a precious candle. Then they discovered that the candle had not been blown out at all. It had been crushed out. The wick was pressed down into the wax, which was flattened as if by some smooth, heavy instrument. How his companion so quickly overcame her terror shorthouse never properly understood, but his admiration for her self control increased tenfold and at that same time served to feed his own dying flame, for which he was undeniably grateful. Equally inexplicable to him was the evidence of physical force they had just witnessed. He at once suppressed the memories of stories he had heard of physical mediums in their dangerous phenomena. For if these were true and either his aunt or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered stores of gunpowder. So, with as little reflection as possible, he simply relit the candle and went up to the next floor. The arm in his trembled, it is true, and his own tread was often uncertain. But they went on with thoroughness, and after a search revealing nothing, they climbed the last flight of stairs to the top floor of all. Here they found a perfect nest of small servants rooms with broken pieces of furniture, dirty cane, bottom chairs, chest of drawers, cracked mirrors and decrepit bedsteads. The room had low, sloping ceilings already hung here and there, with cobwebs small windows and badly plastered walls, a depressing and dismal region which they were glad to leave behind. Man are they going to make it out? I don't know, Chuck. All right, let's find out. It was on the stroke of midnight when they entered a small room on the third floor close to the top of the stairs and arranged to make themselves comfortable for the remainder of their adventure. It was absolutely bare and was said to be the room then used as a closed closet into which the infuriated groom had chased his victim and finally caught her outside. Across the narrow landing began the stairs leading up to the floor above and the servants quarters where they had just searched. In spite of the chilliness of the night, there was something in the air of this room that cried out for an open window. But there was more than this. Shorthouse could only describe it by saying that he felt less master of himself here than in any other part of the house. There was something that acted directly on his nerves, tiring the resolution, enfeebling the will. He was conscious of this result before. He had been in the room five minutes, and it was just in the short time that they stayed there that he suffered. The wholesale depletion of his vital forces, which was for himself the chief horror of the whole experience. They put the candle on the floor of the cupboard, leaving the door a few inches a jar so that there was no glare to confuse the eyes and no shadow to shift about on walls and ceiling. Then they spread the cloak on the floor and sat down to wait with their backs against the wall. Shorthouse was within 2ft of the door onto the landing. His position commanded a good view of the main staircase leading down into the darkness and also of the beginning of the servant stairs going to the floor above. The heavy stick lay beside him within easy reach. The moon was now high above the house. Through the open window they could see the comforting stars, like friendly eyes watching in the sky. One by one the clocks of the town struck midnight, and when the sounds died away, the deep silence of a windless night fell again over everything. Only the boom of the sea, far away in Lagubrius, filled the air with hollow murmurs. Laughed as you're in big trouble, undulated and say delete. Inside the house the silence became awful, awful, he thought, because any minute now it might be broken by sounds of portending terror. The strain of waiting told more and more severely on the nerves. They talked in whispers when they talked at all, for their voices aloud sounded queer and unnatural. A chilliness, not altogether due to the night air, invaded the room and made them cold. The influences against them, whatever these might be, were slowly robbing them of self confidence and the power of decisive action. Their forces were on the wane, and the possibility of real fear took on a new and terrible meaning. He began to tremble for the elderly woman by his side, whose pluck could hardly save her beyond a certain extent. He heard the blood singing in his veins. It sometimes seemed so loud that he fancied it prevented his hearing properly certain other sounds that were beginning very faintly to make themselves audible in the depths of the house. Every time he fastened his attention on the sounds, they instantly ceased. They certainly came no nearer. Yet he could not rid himself of the idea that movement was going on somewhere in the lower regions of the house. The drawing room floor, where the doors had been so strangely closed, seemed too near. The sounds were further off than that. He thought of the great kitchen with the scurrying black beetles and of the dismal little scullery, but somehow or other they did not seem to come from there either. Surely they were not outside the house. Then suddenly the truth flashed into his mind, and for the space of a minute he felt as if his blood had stopped flowing and turned to ice. The sounds were not downstairs at all. They were upstairs, upstairs somewhere, among those horrid, gloomy little servants rooms with their bits of broken furniture, low ceilings and cramped windows upstairs, where the victim had first been disturbed and stalked her to death. And the moment he discovered where the sounds were, he began to hear them more clearly. It was the sound of feet moving stealthily along the passage overhead, in and out among the rooms and past the furniture. He turned quickly to steal a glance at the motionless figure seated beside him to note whether she had shared his discovery. The faint candlelight coming through the crack in the covered door threw her strongly marked face into a vivid relief against the white of the wall. But it was something else that made him catch his breath and stare again. An extraordinary something had come into her face and seemed to spread over her features like a mask. It smoothed out the deep lines and drew the skin everywhere a little tighter so that the wrinkles disappeared. It brought into the face, with the sole exception of the old eyes, an appearance of youth and almost of childhood. He stared in speechless amazement, amazement that was dangerously near to horror. It was his aunt's face indeed, but it was her face of 40 years ago, the vacant, innocent face of a girl. He had heard stories of that strange effect of terror which could wipe a human countenance clean of other emotions, obliterating all previous expressions. But he had never realized that it could be literally true or could mean anything so simply horrible as what he now saw. For the dreadful signature of overmastering fear was written plainly in that utter vacancy of the girlish face beside him. And when, feeling his intense gaze, she turned to look at him. He instinctively closed his eyes tightly to shut out the sight. Yet when he turned a minute later, his feelings well in hand, he saw, to his intense relief, another expression. His aunt was smiling. And though the face was deathly white, the awful veil had lifted and the normal look was returning. Anything wrong? Was all he could think of to say at the moment. And the answer was eloquent, coming from such an old woman. I feel cold and a little frightened, she whispered. He offered to close the window, but she seized hold of him and begged him not to leave her side, even for an instant. It's upstairs. I know, she whispered with an odd half laugh, but I can't possibly go up. But Shorthouse thought otherwise, knowing that in action lay their best hope of self control. He took the brandy flask and poured out a glass of neat spirit stiff enough to help anybody over anything. That's a good move. She swallowed it with a little shiver. His only idea now was to get out of the house before her collapse became inevitable. But this could not safely be done by turning tail and running from the enemy in action was no longer possible. Every minute he was growing less master of himself, and desperate, aggressive measures were imperative without further delay. Moreover, the action must be taken towards the enemy, not away from it. The climax, if necessary and unavoidable, would have to be faced boldly. He could do it now, but in ten minutes he might not have the force left to act for himself, much less for both. Upstairs, the sounds were meanwhile becoming louder and closer, accompanied by the occasional creaking of the boards. Someone was moving stealthily about, stumbling now and then awkwardly against the furniture, waiting a few moments to allow the tremendous dose of spirits to produce its effect, and knowing this would last but a short time under the circumstances, shorthouse then quietly got on his feet, saying in a determined voice, now, Aunt Julia, we'll go upstairs and find out what all this noise is about. You must come to it's what we agreed. He's got a little whiskey in his belly. Yes. He's a little drunk, and he's like, Get your butt up here. You drugged me into this. Yeah. Brandy saved the day again. He picked up his stick and went to the cupboard for the candle. A limp form rose shakily beside him, breathing hard, and he heard a voice say, very faintly, something about being ready to come. The woman's courage amazed him. It was so much greater than his own. And as they advanced, holding aloft the dripping candle, some subtle force exhaled from this trembling, white faced old woman at a side that was the true source of his inspiration. It held something really great that shamed him and gave him the support without which he would have proved far less equal to the occasion. They crossed the dark landing, avoiding with their eyes the deep black space over the bandages. Then they began to mount the narrow staircase to meet the sounds, which minute by minute grew louder and nearer. About halfway up the stairs, Aunt Julius stumbled and Shorthouse turned to catch her by the arm. And just at that moment there came a terrific crash in the servant's corridor overhead. It was instantly followed by a shrill, agonized scream that was a cry of terror, and a cry for help melted into one. Before they could move aside or go down a single step, someone came rushing along the passage overhead, plundering horribly, racing madly at full speed, three steps at a time, down the very staircase where they stood. The steps were light and uncertain, but close behind them sounded the heavier tread of another person, and the staircase seemed to shake. Shorthouse and his companion just had time to flatten themselves against the wall when the jumble of flying steps was upon them, and two persons with the slightest possible interval between them dashed past at full speed. It was a perfect whirlwind of sound breaking in upon the midnight silence of the empty building. The two runners, pursued and pursued, had passed clean through them, where they stood and already worth a thud. The boards below had received the first one, then the other. Yet they had seen absolutely nothing. Not a hand or an arm or a face or even a shred of flying clothing. Then came a second pause. Then the first one. The lighter of the two, obviously the pursued one, ran with uncertain footsteps into the little room with Shorthouse and his aunt had just left. The heavier one followed. There was a sound of scuffling, gasping and smothered, screaming. And then out on the landing came the step of a single person treading wageily. A dead silence followed for the space of half a minute and then was heard a rushing sound through the air. It was followed by a dull crashing thud in the depths of the house below. On the stone floor of the hall, utter silence reigned. After nothing moved. The flame of the candle was steady. It had been steady the whole time and the air had been undisturbed by any movement whatsoever. Palsied with terror, Aunt Julia, without waiting for her companion, began fumbling her way downstairs. She was crying gently to herself when Shorthouse put his arm around her and half carried her. He felt that she was trembling like a leaf. He went into the little room and picked up the cloak from the floor and arm in arm, walking very slowly, without speaking a word, or looking once behind them, they marched down the three flights into the hall. In the hall they saw nothing, but the whole way down the stairs they were conscious that someone followed them step by step. When they went faster, it was left behind. And when they went more slowly, it caught them up. But never once did they look behind to see. And at each turning of the staircase they lowered their eyes for fear of the following horror they might see upon the stairs above. With trembling hands, Shorthouse opened the front door and they walked out into the moonlight and drew a deep breath of the cool night air blowing in from the sea. Wow. They made it out. Yeah. And sounds like the stable man threw the girl over the banister once again. I have a feeling he does that every night. You think so? Or at the very least on the anniversary of the night of the murder. Yeah, in the house. Gust work. Yeah, creepy stuff. Good stuff. Good one. Congratulations. Congratulations to you too, sir. Jerry. Fine, Shorthouse. Jerry can't wait to and you're a fine aunt. Aunt Leaf. Shaky lady. Sure, Jerry can't wait to hear the sound design. It's always a treat for us. Yeah. And everyone out there. If you like this, Algernon Blackwood has a lot of other good stuff. Check it out. And have a really happy Halloween. Yeah. Be safe out there. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. 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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-06-sysk-one-hit-wonder.mp3 | SYSK Selects: What Makes a One-hit Wonder? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-what-makes-a-one-hit-wonder-1 | The term "one-hit wonder" gets thrown around a lot, and - yes - you probably are using it correctly, but Chuck Bryant went to the trouble to really define what makes a one-hit wonder in the article this episode is based on. Join him and Josh as they get t | The term "one-hit wonder" gets thrown around a lot, and - yes - you probably are using it correctly, but Chuck Bryant went to the trouble to really define what makes a one-hit wonder in the article this episode is based on. Join him and Josh as they get t | Sat, 06 Jan 2018 05:00:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=5, tm_min=0, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=6, tm_isdst=0) | 26887408 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I chosen how One hit wonders work, which originally published in March of 2013. And this is the episode where we help heal the world by pointing out that professional musicians who crack the Top 40 once in their careers still have feelings and don't much appreciate being called one hit wonders. So maybe take that little bit of advice and put it in your pipe and smoke it and go for it from that point on. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles, Debbie, chuck Bryant. Say something. Yeah, I didn't even say say something funny. I just said, say something. I know. I froze. Yes. It's all right, man. It's good quality in a broadcaster to freeze up on the air and a professional talker. Yeah. How are you doing? I'm great. Freezing. I'm good. Man, this is a fun, goofy little topic, and we haven't done one like that in a while. This is a fun article written by a guy named Charles W. Bryant, a writer for the site. Yeah. I will go ahead and say one thing I was disappointed in in this article, and I would still like to see someone tackle this in documentary style. Maybe. Is the psychology of being a one hit wonder, like, what it does to your psyche? Yeah. Is it better to have that one hit and fade away and at least you had that, or is it better to have never? I just would be real curious to see a series of interviews with One Hit Wonders to see how they feel about it. You're saying is it better to have hit and lost than never to have hit at all? Exactly. And I couldn't really find anything on that. I'm sure there's one or two who listen to the podcast, and if you do write in, let us know how it is we're interested. Libaga. Yes. The very least. Lubaga. Listens. The fake Lubaga. So it's chuck, I wanted to commend you for this article because this is a tough one with How Stuff Works articles. We typically take a topic that has a lot of research done on it. It's very well defined, and then we deconstruct it. This one is like, I looked on the Internet, and if you type in One Hit Wonder, there is, like, zero scholarly work done on it for good reason. Yes. I mean, it's interesting, though, too. Like, you brought up the psychology of being a one. Yeah. There shouldn't be anyone ever done a study like that. It's all just lists. And I actually did find one good website. It's called Onehitwondercentral.com, and they have everything, and you can play, like, every song they have it by year. Awesome. Who. The one hit wonder was from the maybe 50s. Some of the greatest songs to me are some of the One Hit Wonders sure. And, I mean, that's the point. Hit wonders just something that everybody liked at one time. We just didn't like whatever else they were making. Right. Yeah. At least as a large collective group. Anyway, back to me commending you. Okay. You had to take something that was really amorphous that everybody knew and we knew if you got wrong and whip it into shape, like a definable shape and you got it right, I think you did a great job. Thank you. Nicole. So the first thing you pointed out was that no one is 100% certain of the origin of this phrase. That's right. But we figured out that it first came in print. Right. Well, that's what Phrases.org says, and I couldn't find anything to dispute it, but a writer there wrote the sentence in July 77 about abba. Instead of becoming what everyone expected, a one hit wonder, they soon had a string of hits behind them. And although the website phrase.org does say it appears to have already been a used phrase, but this is the first time they've seen it in print. Right. And there actually is, like, a definition for one hit wonder. Like there's a hit I guess you could find a hit, and it's got to be on the because we're so American centric. Sure. It has to be on the Billboard Top 100 and specifically in the Top 40 to be considered a hit. Right? Yeah. Technically, for like, when most people there have been books written about one hit wonders, and that's usually what they say. Okay, so that wasn't just you or anything. I thought it was a great definition. No, it's a good definition, but that's the generally held definition. But then that's where it gets really blurry, as we are about to find out. Right. In many ways, yeah. You make a point that there's a lot of one hit wonders by that definition who are legendary musicians like Jimi Hendrix one hit. Janice Joplin. One hit. Garth Brooks as Chris yeah. That's his only Billboard hit. Yeah. Billboard Top 40 hits. He had country hits. He just lived on the top ten. But yeah, in the mainstream Top 40, his only hit was Chris Gaines with the haircut and the bull patch, man. Yeah. I don't know what song it was, even. I don't either. Beck yeah. The Dead. The Dead, the White Stripes, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop Devo, some iconic bands and musicians that have only had one hit. And then you've got artists who never had that hit but are still considered one hit wonders, because what you end up realizing is, despite the definition of what a hit is, a one hit wonder is something different. It's just an artist and a song who captured something for a moment in time. It doesn't matter if it was a Top 40 hit. Right. Like you say. Wala voodoo's. Mexican radio. Absolutely. It's not a Top 40 hit. No. But that's definitely a hit. Sure. In the Zeitgeist. Did you put it? Absolutely. Who else? I'll melt with you. Modern English the weather, girls, it's raining men. You would say all of these are definite one hit wonders. And none of them had Top 40 hits. Right. But sticking to the strict definition, that still works, too. Right. Like the penguins. Earth. Angel. Yeah. In the in the had summertime Blues by Blue Cheer But they really spent blue on their one thing. Their one shot was covered in blue. Blue cheer did summertime blues. Green Tambourine. Remember that song? No. Green Tambourine. It was very, like, psychedelic. No. And the Lemon Pipers, it's one of those songs where sort of like in the 70s, argent, hold your Head up. Everybody knows that song. Yeah, that's a good one. But I bet 99 people out of 100 have never heard of the band Argent. No. They probably think, oh, wouldn't that be Guess who? Or wasn't that in Joe Dirt? Or yes. Was it? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. I never saw that movie. What? I never saw Joe Dirt. Oh, man. Such a great, like, keep your chin up movie. It is so good. You really can hate David Spade. You can hate all of that kind of comedy. But that movie has such it's got heart. It's a cute movie. Well, I had friends it's on Netflix streaming. Yeah. I had friends that worked on it. And that's where I have my Gary Busey insider story. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I think I told you he was supposed to play the father. And if you'll notice in the film, he does not play the father. No. It's done by one Fred Ward. Yeah. So Gary Busey was on set for a day and it didn't work out. He made it I wish I could tell the whole story. He made it into Black Sheep with Chris Farley and David Spade seeing that. Yeah. He was like the crazy guy who lived in a school bus in the woods. It was the party's born to play. Exactly. Please don't come to our office. Gary Busey. All right. So that was the that's generally when the rock era in the 50s is when people say, you can start talking about things like one hit wonders. Yeah. Like not some guy who had one big band hit in the 1930s. Although I'm sure they were there. Sure, that's true. There has been one song that was a one hit wonder for two bands, which is interesting. Oh, yeah. Funky Town. Really? Yeah. Lips Incorporated. And then I don't know if you remember pseudo Echo. They did a version of that in 1986. No, it was a little more electric and upbeat. And that was a bona fide Top 40 hit as well. People couldn't get enough of Funky Down. I hope that whoever wrote that really cashed in. Yeah, I do, too. All right. Now, the 60s was the Green tambourine. 70s songs like Spirit in the sky by Norman Greenbaum. That's a good song. It was an Apollo 13. One took over the line. I literally wrote shudder next to that. Oh, you hate that song. It's pretty bad. Brewer and shipley and then Seasons in the sun. Great song. Terry Jacks. Never heard of the guy. No. Have I? And you also make the point that the 70s were lousy with disco one hit wonders. And in our disco episode, we talked about why because it was all producer driven rather than artist driven. Exactly. I didn't even bother to, like, list any in here. Yeah, you can just name a disco song and there you have it. The course. You had bands like Soft Sells, Tainted Love and omiki. You're so fine, Tony Basil I Want Candy by Bow wow taja Gu Remember what song? I don't remember. Is that who that was? Sushi Shai. Yes. So the eighties was lousy with it. But a lot of those songs are great songs. And a lot of the artists in the 80s were popular in other countries and are known as one hit wonders here in the US. Like, I was reading an article on, I think, cracked maybe about one hit wonders, and they were saying, like, AHA had taken on Me, which was a hit here in the United States, but that was it. But they're like one of the top 50 grossing bands of all time worldwide. Yeah, well, and AHA falls into another weird category, which is a band that's known as a one hit wonder who actually had a quieter second hit. Oh, really? Yeah. They had a song called The Sun Always Shines on TV. That was like, a top 20 hit, I think. Wow. I don't remember that one. Nobody does. They're good, though. Now. They're awesome. And then remember right said Fred, I'm too sexy. Huge in England. Yes. I'm Too Sexy was actually only hit number two in England. They had another one that hit number one. But here in the States, I think it hit number one here. I think so, too. And then that was it for Right Side Fred. The same with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Oh, yeah. They were really big in Europe. And Gary Newman. Yeah, that was a good song, though. That song holds up. Cars. Go back and listen to cars. Yeah, that dude was a good musician. Well and he was hugely popular and still like tourists today. So he's one of those guys that's like, please don't call me one hit wonder. I've had a long, successful career. Right. Look at my house. It's a car. No, I think it's like a mansion. He lives in his car. Safest. Got you. He can lock all his doors. Falco and Nina were really big in German speaking countries. Yeah, I could see that. But had the 99 red balloons. Balloons. Loose balloons. And then Falco's rock me Amadeus. Yeah, huge hit here. It didn't occur to my young brain that that wasn't from the Amadeus soundtrack, because, remember, it came out at about the same time as the movie. Oh, yeah. I just thought it was part of the soundtrack. It's a movie soundtrack. Well, the point with this, though, is that one hit wonder is sort of a derogatory term to throw on an artist. So a lot of these people are, like, in America, like, you jerks, I was huge in Europe or maybe some other country. Yeah. Who cares so much for your one hit, the 90s. Crash Test. Dummies. Remember those dudes? Well, that was the song. Oh, yeah, that's right. The Macarena. Even though I don't even like to count that song. What about Faith? No more's. Epic. Yes. See, that's a band that hugely critically popular and had a big cult following. But yeah, just the one hit. Epic. That was the name of it, right? Yeah. You want it all, but you can't have it. I remember hearing that song the first time. This is the coolest thing I've ever heard. Yeah. And that lead singer, what's his name? Mike something. He's, like, super respected. He's been in other bands. Yeah. Like Mr. Bungle. Yeah. Has a big cult following. And not among colts. Even, like, among people who aren't in cults. All right, so that's music. That's an overview. Yeah. You make a really good point in this article, that one hit wonder, that derogatory term isn't just aimed at people, only in the music industry, although that's where the lion's share of it is, but it shows up in sports. You pointed out a couple of them. A couple of instances. Yeah. Well, if you have one hit in baseball, then you've been a complete and utter failure. But a couple of guys have had one hit, and that one hit was a home run, which is pretty cool. It's pretty interesting. Who was it? There was a guy named Chris Jelic whose name I recognize for some reason, and I don't follow the Mets or anything, but I guess I just saw that bit of trivia before that he had one hit and it was a home run. Yeah, maybe so. There's a guy who didn't have a hit named Eddie Goddell, but he had one plate appearance in a 1951 game for the Yankees, and he was a little person. Oh, yeah. And they put him in against the St. Louis Browns, and he drew four consecutive balls and got a walk. Really? Yeah. And his jersey is in the hall of Fame. You can't see me doing this right now. I'm rubbing my face. His number was one eight. Really? Yeah. But he was, I guess you could say, a one hit sports wonder. It was kind of a fun story until then. Yeah, that was his jam. That's what he got paid for. And that's I mean, he was aware that he was a little person, so money off it. What about the art world design world. There's a very famous person yeah. Harvey Bell. Yeah. Who has the perfect name for what he did. Why is it the perfect name? Harvey Bell. It sounds like the creator of the smiley face. Yeah, the iconic 70 smiley face. He created that as a marketing campaign. It sounded like an internal morale campaign for State Mutual Life Insurance Company. And it took off. I don't know if the company made the money or what, but he was paid $240 for it and he never had another artistic hit. And I looked to see if there were any other artists who were considered one hit wonder. I found some, but I didn't recognize any of them. I did recognize one Grant Wood, the painter of American Gothic. Oh, yeah. He painted that and he won all sorts of prizes. Became like this cause celeb, like all over the art world. And the media started digging into his life and realized that he was a middle aged bachelor. He lived at home with his mother and sister and wanted to know more about that. All of a sudden, he just really couldn't handle the limelight. And it's pretty sad story. Interesting. I think I read an article about it on metal floss. It was worth reading. So he never painted again or I don't think he ever kind of went for the gusto if he didn't just stop painting altogether. I don't remember the end of the article. Well, the art world certainly has a lot of people super famous for a single painting, but they may have been very revered in other areas. Right. Like Faith No More. That's right. There's faith no more of the art world. I told you all the scream this last trip to New York. Oh, yeah. And you were like me? Yeah. I can see what you're talking. I mean, like you build something like that up in your head, you see it everywhere. And then just to see the real one, it's either going to go one of two ways. Sure. You're going to be underwhelmed or amazed, you know? I completely agree. And that's been what's happened to me with art, because you know how I feel about art. I know how you feel about art. I love it. What about books? Yeah. To Kill a Mockingbird. Yeah, that's the one most often cited as the one hit wonder because Harper Lee wrote one book. Yeah, that's one of those rare ones where I actually think the movie is better than the book. Oh, yeah. And I love the book. It's one of my favorite books of all time. And I hadn't read it in a while, and I went back and read it and then I watched the movie shortly after. I was like, holy cow, the movie is better than the book. Yeah. Me, Gregory Peck. I mean, talk about one of the best casting, but all of those actors were amazing. Every single one of them. It's good stuff. She wrote the one book and she worked on a second for a while. Come along. Goodbye. But shelved it then in the 1980s, she started another book and never finished that one either. I guess she just procrastinated. I don't know. I don't know if anyone has an answer why she never wrote again. Same with Salinger. Yeah. Catcher in the Rye. That was it. Except he wrote short stories, too. But, I mean, he never published another novel. Yeah. And I will never know. And John Kennedy tool. Sure. Confederacy of Dunces. How often do you think about that book? Just in your normal life? I don't know. Almost never, maybe. Yeah, a couple of times a year, maybe when it's like a movie in the works that never happens. I was thinking about that movie or that book yesterday. Oh, really? And I hadn't read this article yet. Have you read it? No. Yeah, it's good. I think a lot of people have these expectations because it's known as this genius work after this guy committed suicide. And it is really good, but I don't think it's like one of the greatest books of all time or anything. Yeah. So what happened to him? Do you know? No, I've never read the book. I don't know much about it. I know it's kind of like a wacky Southern Gothic kind of novel. He lives with his aunts, I think, or something like that. Yeah. This crazy character in Louisiana. It's always grabbed my attention because it's just like a perfect title. And then the guy's name is perfect as well. John Kennedy Tool. Yeah. Or the character the author got you. Well, he killed himself. He was clearly now suffered some sort of mental illness and could not get published. And that drove him to eventually commit suicide in 1969. His mother made it her life's work to get it published and did so in 1980. And then his second book was published, the Neon Bible, I think, in 1986. And that was made into a movie. So he's not a one hit wonder then? Well, Neon Bible wasn't a huge hit. Got you. But, yeah, I would say he's a one hit wonder. And you also bring up movies too, man. Yeah. And on books again. Sylvia Plath is on here for the bell jar. I kind of wish I hadn't put that in here. Because she was a well known poet. That's why I hadn't mentioned it. But she did write the one book. And then what, she did stick her head in the oven or something? I don't know how she killed herself. I think Virginia Wolfe drowned herself. Right. Sylvia Plated herself. She hung herself, I think. Did she? That sounds right. I remember that scene in Wonderboys where Toby Maguire rattles off the famous celebrity suicide. It was really great. That was a great movie. Joseph Heller with Catch 22. Yeah. That's certainly a one hit wonder. So yeah. Movies. I mean, there are more directors and actors that you could even mention that had one hit, but legit super hits. People like Michael is it chamino or Cemino? Samino, I think. Although if you're speaking in the Italian, it'd be chamino. Chamino. Yeah. He did. The Deer Hunter, of course. Yeah. One Best Picture in four other Academy Awards. Did he mow? Huh? Did he mail that's what they tell him when they were making them play Russian roulette. Diddy mouse? Yeah. Except they probably scream it. Yeah. That scene was so intense. I saw that. Very young. Very young to be seeing that movie in retrospect. Like, it made an impression on me. Oh, yeah. Huge. But yeah. He famously made Heaven's Gate as his follow up, which was one of the notorious disasters along with Ishtar and Water World. Was heaven. Skate a Warren Beatty movie, too. Or is that heaven? Kin white. He was in heaven. Kin white and ishtar. So what about Heaven Gate? What was that about? I think it was a Western, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. And it was just a notorious failure and a very expensive one. And then Jamie? No. Never. He made a few other movies, but you haven't heard of many of them. He did Year of the Dragon was, like with Mickey Rourke was the only other notable movie that was supposed to be a good one. Yeah, but it was far from a hit. I got you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And then my favorite, Steve Gordon, one of my favorite movies of all time. I have not seen it. You didn't see Arthur? Not only have I not seen the original Arthur, I haven't seen the remake that includes our friend Hodgman as a candy store manager, I believe. That was terrible, by the way. Not Hodgman's bit. Hodgman was great, but the remake was really bad. And it was so sad because Arthur is one of those movies that I hold very dear to me. And Steve Gordon wrote and directed it and then died afterward. It was the only movie he ever made by his own hand. No, I think he had a heart attack or something and died young. But youngish. And it was just so like it was a gut wrenching experience watching the remake for me. Why did you watch it? Like, for example, I think Red Dawn is one of my favorite movies of all time. There's not a chance that I will ever see the remake of Red Dawn. Well, I'm not either. And I learned after Arthur. So that's the one that taught you the lesson. Yeah. I'm not going to watch anything that was really precious to me if they rebooted or remake it again. Never again. It sounds like Hodgman tell you a valuable lesson. Yeah. And I like Russell Brand, and I thought they made Helen Mirror and John Gilgood's character and was just enough of a spin. And I was like, well, that could be interesting. But then everything about the movie was just some new little spin to make it different. And I was like, hey, let's make the man a woman. Let's make the white guy puerto rican. It was like Louis Guzman. It was bad. So bad. I got you. Yeah. Well, that's it for Arthur. Yes. If you want to learn more about Arthur, you can type that word in the search bar. Isn't that what this podcast is about? I forgot. Yeah, it's arthur one hit wonders suddenly more. That's what it was. You should read this article by chuck. It's a good one. You can type one hit wonders in the search bar howstofworks.com? And it will bring up this article again. Commendable article. Thanks, sir. And I said commendable. So it's time for word from our sponsor. Now it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this. We're going to give this guy's wife a tongue lashing. Oh, jeez. What did you do? Let's see. Okay. Dudes have been an avid listener since shortly after its inception. I'm a huge fan, especially enjoy listening to it while I'm stressed out. It always soothes my nerves to hear your banter. Over the years, I've tried to convince my now wife Elizabeth to listen. Oh, I know this one. Unfortunately, she's always insists that you two are stoners and that your ritty riparte is contrived. It's so far off, she makes me change over to this american life or radio lab. Great chose which her podcast I download to fill the time between stuff you should know releases. I've repeatedly informed her that you guys are not stoners. You've done frequent podcasts on the LFX of drugs and this is not convinced or still listen with envy when you read letters during listener mail about couples who enjoy listening together. That's so sad. If I'm not mistaken, one pair even became engaged during a listener mail segment. Yeah, we don't know about that yet. I'm not vouching for that. It recently struck me that perhaps if you were to give elizabeth a shout out at the end of the show, she might be impressed enough to become a fan as well. You could say hi to Elizabeth at the end of the show. You'd be contributing to my marital blitz. So wait a second. You realize what's going on here? We're being manipulated. Yeah. To say hey to somebody who doesn't even like us. I know. I feel like there should be some money exchanged for this. Well, no, I feel instead of saying hi to elizabeth, but she needs to get a tongue lashing for these baseless accusations of us sitting around, like, in a garage smoking marijuana. Smoking marijuana and just like, talking. Yeah, it's BS. That's someone who's never listened to the show. We have banter. We might go off on tangents. We might say like 5 million times in a sentence, but we're not sitting around smoking weed just rambling. Yes, we're just relaxed. A lot of work goes into the show. Sure. So. Elizabeth. Mellow out, dude. Yes, seriously. Maybe you need to go in the garage. So, anyway, this guy is a neurologist, and he said the alien hand syndrome part struck close to his heart. Awesome. And, Devin, if this doesn't do it, then Elizabeth can just go listen to this American Life and radioactive. Yeah, let her hang out with Ireglass. Cool. And I'm sorry for your marriage, because it is clearly headed in the wrong direction. I think we had her until just that last sentence right there. No, she's great. I'm sure she'll tune in. We'll find out. Let us know. Devon, will you? If you want us to say something specific to somebody you know, we very well might do it. If you ask, we have before you can tweet to us at syscast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushouldnow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And you can always find us at our home on the Internet stuffyoushorenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena 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." | |
2a86adc4-3b0f-11eb-a672-b71749195389 | The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-chowchilla-bus-kidnapping | The largest ever kidnapping case in the United States went down in the small town of Chowchilla, CA. Learn all about it today.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | The largest ever kidnapping case in the United States went down in the small town of Chowchilla, CA. Learn all about it today.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 08 Feb 2022 14:27:47 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=14, tm_min=27, tm_sec=47, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=39, tm_isdst=0) | 53383081 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, before we get started, you're very happy to announce that Josh and I are in Jeopardy tonight. That's right. We get our very own category. Stuff you should know. We had a hand in shaping the clues, which are all from Stuff You Should Know episodes. And that was super fun to work with them. They were awesome, by the way. And then we got to present they brought a video crew to Atlanta and jumped in the podcast studio. And we're on camera presenting our very own clues in our very own category. This is definitely a bucket list thing for both of us, and we're super excited. So it airs tonight. If you are listening to this live on Tuesday, February 8, it is the prime time collegiate tournament, so check it out tonight on ABC, our big, big debut on Jeopardy. Like I said, it was super fun, and we're so proud of this. After all these years, we finally got the call we've been waiting for. So check it out tonight, everyone. All right, on 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 Bryant. And Jerry is here. And this is stuff you should know. You know what I've been singing for two days? Wheels on the bus go round and round no, that's pretty good guess, though. Chow Chilla. I can't get it out of my head. The Godzilla song. Now, all I'm saying, over and over is chow chilla. That's a great song. Do you remember who played it? Was that like Edgar Winner or Johnny Winner? I don't know. I think it was one of the Winners. Okay. That's my guess. Okay. The Long Winters. Definitely not the long winters. Okay, so, Chuck, we're talking about a piece of Americana true crime history that I had no idea about, actually. And I noted, though, because of the timing and because of the location, I hit up my beloved former hippie aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and was raising kids and said, do you remember this? She said, oh, yes, I remember this big time. I bet she had kids that were about to be bus riding agency. She was not very comfortable with this whole jam. Yeah, it provided discomfort. Yeah, that's one way to put it. So did you even say what the name of it was? No, it's the Chocolate school bus kidnapping is what people usually refer to it as. Right. And I think this was a listener who sent this in. And I apologize because I usually make note of that, so I can shout them out, but I did not do so in this case. So I missed I know who this but, yeah, this was in still stands, according to the sources I saw as the largest domestic kidnapping in US. History. So my aunt says oh, yeah? She also said she was not very into it. I was not very comfortable by that. It's very disappointing. Yeah. The largest math kidnapping for ransom. I'm not sure why that's a qualifier. Yeah. I don't know. But yeah, I saw the same thing, too, that it still stands. And it was like the idea that the most of anything happened to this little town of Chocolate in the San Joaquin Valley about 150 miles southeast of San Francisco in and of itself is significant. But it was a really terrible, like, most of event that happened to this poor little town, as we'll see. All right, so should we just start on July 15, 1976? Yes. All right, we'll paint a picture for you. You already mentioned where it was between Fresno and San Francisco, out in a part of California that had some very small towns at the time. It's hard to imagine anywhere in California having 4600 people living there. But that was the case in the mid 70s in Chalchilla, and it was the next to the last day of summer school, and a bus was being driven after a because it was summer school, a little fun day trip to a swimming pool driven by 55 year old Ed Ray. Yeah, it was a farmer there in Choc Chill himself. Apparently, he bailed hay like nobody's business. He was married to a woman named Odessa who was a bank teller at the bank of America, and he was apparently quite happy being a farmer and then driving kids around on the school bus. Because even after this, he continued on for another dozen years as the school bus driver. That's right. He had only dropped off a few kids at this point, and there were 19 girls and seven boys on board from five to 14, and notably the 14 year old, because he will factor in pretty heavily here. His name was Mike Marshall. He wasn't even supposed to be on that bus. He usually got picked up by his mom, but he got busted the night before with some beer, and his mom said, to your punishment, he got to ride that school bus home tomorrow. And after school or after the trip, apparently he was like, I don't even know what bus to take because I don't do this. But he knew who Ray was, and so he went to Ed Ray and said, hey, man, I don't know if this is my bus or not, but you take me home, and Ed Ray is Ed Ray. So you went sure. On board. Thank goodness he said that. Yes. So after that third stop, there were 26 kids and Ed Ray on board, and Ed Ray was continuing along his route, and he turned on to a street called Avenue 21. And as he turned on to Avenue 21, ed Ray found that there was a white van blocking the road, and apparently he started to go around it, and then, I guess, thought the better of it and wanted to stop and see if they needed any help instead. And when he did, he realized very quickly that he was actually being hijacked. Because when you see a man with a long gun and pantyhose on his head, you're probably being hijacked. That's right. The first thing he saw was this one guy who said, Open the door. And then he realized there were a couple of other guys, same Mo. I think they had shotguns with the pantyhose, and they said, Get in the back. We'll take over the driving from here. And if you watched the movie, did you see any of that? No, I haven't yet. We'll get to it. There's a Lifetime movie that came out of the Think 93. Looks like it was made in 83 somehow. That is on YouTube, and I highly recommend scrubbing through it. Okay. I wouldn't say watch the whole thing because I don't know if you'll be able to, but Carl Malden yeah. Played Ed Ray, and I don't know if it's true to the story, but he gave them a lot of guff about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm not sure if it happened in real life or not. It's a mold and improv if I've ever heard one. Yes. And I'm not getting out of my seat. Right. My feet hurt. So he eventually did, though, and they drove that bus, followed by the van for a bit and then eventually transferred those kids to that van and another identical van. I think we should point out a few smart things these guys did along the way because they mainly did dumb things. But the kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to the van so they wouldn't leave footprints. Yeah. In these vans. They had all the kids and Ed Ray in the vans now, two vans. And they had kind of, like, decked these vans out. It was kind of a shoddy manner of adding plywood partitions to keep the kids from getting out, from anybody being able to see. And I think they painted over the windows. And then they drove those kids around for 11 hours in the backs of those vans with no potty breaks, no food, no water, no nothing. They just drove them around for 11 hours in the middle of July in the San Joaquin Valley pretty mercilessly, before finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only 100 miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped. I think they just wanted to disorient the kids. Yeah. I think that was kind of smart as well, because they could have been 11 hours away if they managed to escape or something. One of the girls, years later, did say that she saw through a crack that they were up there with the AC go and drinking sodas and have a good old time. And the kids and Ed Ray are back there just suffering, just terrified, obviously, of what's going on. Right. That was Jennifer Brown Hide who said that and she's not very happy with this whole thing. It's still to this day from what I understand yeah, as you could imagine. So finally at 03:30 a.m. On Friday morning, they were hijacked around after 03:30 P.m. On Thursday, they finally stopped driving at 330 in the morning, Friday morning and they arrived at a Rock Corey they're in Livermore, California. Apparently, again, it's 100 miles away from Chocolate and this is what the kidnappers see, is the final destination for these kids until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money. And what they've done is bury a moving van line trailer. So like a huge moving truck, the trailer part of it, they buried it a total of 12ft underground and have covered it with 4ft of dirt and they've opened a whole put a ladder in and told the kids, get down there. And Ed Ray too. That's right. And as the kids were going down and this kind of points to the direction of how dumb these guys were and how unprepared they were, even though it turns out, would have planned this thing for well over a year. They wrote down their names and their phone numbers and contact and parents names not on a clipboard legal pad but on the back of a jack in the thebox wrapper. And then they took apparently some kind of piece of clothing from each kid because the idea was once again, is that they have many kids that should bring many monies and dollar bills their way. Exactly. And the fact that they're kids means that people do anything to keep them safe. So these guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with 26 kids that they're now holding hostage in a buried moving van trailer. And in the trailer they had done a little more than they had in the van. So they had peanut butter, Cheerios, some bread down there, some water, but definitely not enough to keep all those people alive for a very long time. They also thought of bathrooms. They made bathrooms in the wheel wells and they dropped a ventilation tubes with some fans to force air into the van. So there was fresh air down there, but not a lot from what I understand. Yes, that's right. And the one faithful mistake they made was that for their comfort, they included some old box springs and mattresses and stuff for them to sit on and lay on, which would end up being they're undoing. Should we take a break? I think we should, because now you've got 26 kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore, California at 330 in the morning. Not a good thing to happen. That's right. So we'll pick up with what's going on in Chalchilla right after this. All right? So in Chalchilla that bus doesn't come back, so obviously everyone freaks out pretty quickly an entire school bus full of kids and a very trusted man about town. It's a small town. People knew Ed Ray and he was a good guy by all accounts. They were all missing. So the very first thing that happens is they locate the school bus, which had been hidden with some bamboo and camouflage. But they did find the bus right away, which on one hand, that's good because they have a lead, on the other hand, that just sends this thing into the stratosphere as far as panic goes, because where are these kids? Yeah, and I saw also that the bus had basically no clues on it whatsoever. So it's like, we found the bus, but that doesn't help at all. So, yeah, I'm sure they were panicked by that. So it became pretty clear pretty early on that the Chao Chilla sheriff, a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help. So the FBI came to town. Apparently, they booked every one of the hotel rooms in the two hotels in town. They brought all the state law enforcement agencies, everybody just converged on this town to help out because it made national news almost instantaneously. I saw somewhere, Chuck, that like, this is during the Bicentennial. And the Bicentennial has been going on and going on and going on. And there was still Bicentennial stuff going on. And this stopped it like this kidnapping. News of this kidnapping stopped the Bicentennial celebration. Dennis Trek so that was the end of it, not just for this town, but for the whole country. Oh, yeah. I mean, this went right up to President Ford at the time, and obviously Governor Jerry Brown, they threw everything they could at it. The media descended upon Chow Chilla super fast. And because it's the media, you start getting these terrible stories about, like, well, maybe because they'd never caught Zodiac and this was just six or seven years, I think, after the final what would end up being the final killing. So they said maybe it was a Zodiac because they made reference. He made reference to wiping out a school bus. At one point, any tip that came in, they had to follow. There's a chew on the side of the road, so they have to track down that tip. There was a novel in 1958 called The Day the Children Vanished where the gang of people abduct a busload of kids just to bring people out of town and distract them while they robbed a bank. Ray's wife worked at the bank, like you said. They put a bank under surveillance. I don't know if I would describe it as a panic because the FBI was on the scene in the state California Bureau investigation. So they were doing good work, but there was a frenzy of activity. Yeah. And I think the sheriff had all the help he possibly needed to chase down all these leads and everything. But from what I saw, there was just not much to go on. They were just dead ends left and right. And so, like, there was just an enormous amount of panic and terror in the town. Families started converging on the firehouse, the local firehouse. For some reason, I'm not sure why, but it became like the meeting place for anybody concerned about the fate of the kids. And this is where news would first be broken, and I think the media probably hung around there too. So you can only begin to imagine how anxious the parents were and then the town and then apparently the whole country was anxious as well. And so it was really kind of surprising when all of a sudden, at about, I think about 08:00 p.m.. The next night. Saturday night. So the kids have been gone for almost carry the one about 30 hours. 32 hours. Something like that at this point. 32 hours of terror. When all of a sudden at that quarry. Some people are working and a man and a bunch of kids run over. And it turns out to be the kidnapping victims who just present themselves to a security guard at the quarry in Livermore who gets on the phone and says. We found them. That's right. Amazing. And you would think, well, pretty sensational story, but it was a very short span of time, and all the kids were fine. So why is it really a story? It's a story because as we'll see the trauma that they suffered emotionally and how it went down and who these people were and kidnapped them. But before we get to those dumb dumbs, let's talk about the escape. They were down there about 12 hours and running out of food and water. They had a lot of weight on this moving van roof, and those things aren't super strong. So this thing was kind of dented in and seemed like it might cave in, and they were worried that they just couldn't stay there, basically. And this is where the story I guess we'll cover both points of view, the immediate history and aftermath. Ed Ray saved the day because he was the only adult there. So obviously he was the one that broke those kids out of there. Years later, we mentioned Mike Marshall, the 14 year old that wasn't supposed to be on that bus, and he was far and away the oldest kid there and the most capable to help. Years later, after a while of the story of Ed Ray, he finally came out and said, you know, Ed Ray is a good guy. I want to disparage him. But, like, it was my idea, and I was the one that really led the charge to escape. And he was a big mess, kind of crying in his hands that they were doomed and dead. And he got on board and helped me, but it was really me. And the reason I kind of believe that after reading all the accounts, is it took many years for him to kind of come out with this. And it felt like he even felt bad for saying so. I think that Mike Marshall, in fact, did lead the charge to escape. Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry Park, who wrote a book called The Chocolate School Bus kidnapping colon. Why Me? And I don't know if he corroborated in that or in an interview later on, but he was there and he said that that's true. That's how it went down. On the other perspective, the fact that when Ed Ray lived the rest of his life, he stayed in Chowchilla. Most of those kids who've been kidnapped with them stayed in Chowchilla. When he was dying, those same kids, as adults now came and visited him at his bedside to say goodbye. There's plenty of opportunity for Little Town to start talking, whispers and that kind of thing. And that doesn't seem to have happened. He seems to have died considered a hero as well. So my take on it, Chuck, is that he may have been gloom and doom about their prospects to begin with. And maybe it really was Mike Marshall who said, no, we need to try to get out of here. But even Mike Marshall said after a while, once Mike Marshall started to try, ed Ray joined in and started helping. And that they might not have been able to drink. Yeah, they might not have been able to get out. I had a grown man not been helping them, like, push against this. Totally agree. I think we park our cars in the same garage here. Yeah, look at them. They're both shirts. So here's how they got out. They took those mattresses and stacked them up, and they took apart they kind of smashed one of the box springs, which are framed in wood, and they started using that wood is like a sort of makeshift crowbar to try. And what these guys kidnappers have done is they put some sort of iron plate. I've seen manhole, but it was some kind of heavy metal plate over the thing, along with two industrial tractor batteries, which are super heavy, and then dirt. So there's ended up being several hundred pounds kind of weighing this thing down, this escape hatch. But they were able, after hours and hours, to finally kind of use that wood to pry open just enough to where they see starlight and dirt leaking in. And with the help of Ed Ray and his manly man strength, they were able to climb out of there. Mike Marshall was. So Mike Marshall climbed out. And then from that moment on, apparently also, Ed Ray was really worried. I guess Mike Marshall was, too, but it was not a deterrent for him. But they were worried that there was at least one or more of the kidnappers hanging around with a gun to what was going on. So there was a good chance in their minds that they were going to poke through and just be shot on site. Sure. So they were worried about that. And luckily, when Marshall poked his head up, he saw that there was no one around there's nobody guarding it. It turned out that they had long since left. So Mike Marshall had Ed Ray start handing kids up to him and they got all the kids out, and then Ed Ray out and Mike Marshall ran into the woods to hide. So in case the kidnappers were still around, they just hadn't seen them yet and those kids were intercepted by them, at least Mike Marshall would be able to run away through the woods and get help. Very smart. But it turned out the kidnappers weren't there. And somebody, luckily, was still working at the quarry, I believe, including a security guard, when Ed Ray and the kids ran up and presented themselves. And then I guess the guy got on the phone and within moments of that happening, the news made it back to Chocolate that they'd all been found safe and they were all alive and generally unharmed. And Ed Ray was basically automatically hailed as a hero. Carl Maldon was certainly portrayed as the hero. Yeah. In the Lifetime movie. They said, do you have anything you'd like to say? And he said, Just let my feet hurt. And we again want to point out this was 36 hours from beginning to end, but these kids didn't know what was going on above ground. They were hot. They were stripping down to their underwear. Carl Maldon was in his underwear. Even in the movie, they were running out of food and water. So as a five to 14 year old, Ed Ray was in hysterics. You think you're going to die down there. So it may not have been a kidnapping that lasted days and weeks, but that doesn't minimize the trauma that these kids suffered down there. Completely not knowing what was going on above ground and daring to escape. Not knowing if they were all of a sudden that van was going to come speeding down the road after it took a while until they felt safe, I think. And then on top of that, chuck, you said it kind of earlier, but I think it really bears repeating. They were really worried that the roof of this thing was going to cave in. 4ft of dirt on top of a moving van. Roof that had been, in the perpetrators defense, had been reinforced with lumber, but not very well. That's a lot of weight pushing down on this. And if you see pictures of what the thing looks like from inside, I could see how they would have been very nervous that the thing was going to cave in on them and crush them. Yeah, like the pictures of it afterwards. That roof was in the process of caving in yeah, it was very nerve wracking. Of course, if that would have happened, the dirt probably would have caved in and gotten some of them dirty and then they could crawl. I hope so. Hopefully that's how it would happen. Who knows? But like I said, they didn't know what was going on down there. No, they didn't. But now they're free, they're safe, and the authorities go get them. The FBI, the sheriff, everybody is interviewing them. This is ours. More hours for the parents back in child chilla, having to wait. And then there was a Greyhound bus that went and got them and brought them back. It was pretty sweet. There was a lot of donations going on. Like, apparently Pacific Bell donated not just new phones, but new phone lines because there were so many calls being made by the authorities and by the press, which will factor in a second. Sure. The Greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning. I guess the FBI donated their time. Who knows? Now they get paid. Okay. There's just, like, a lot of banding together to support this town as they were going through this, and I just thought it was cool. There's a Greyhound bus that rolled up with everybody inside and they got off and they're like, I'm never getting on one of those again. Well, I did kind of wonder. I was like, maybe we should send like a few or not even vans. Send twelve cars. No buses, no vans. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I get what you're saying. Or just make them walk it's 100 miles. And of course, the kids got to go to Disneyland. That was a big one. They got a hero's welcome, they got a parade. We got to go to Disneyland. And as soon as the town went from the saddest place on Earth to the happiest place on Earth in the span of 36 hours yeah, they had a huge feast. I saw that Ed Ray won a vacation, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares, which is peak exposure in the mid seven. Sure. And Chuck, there's one other little fact that we have to say about this, that Robert Gule recorded a song called The Ballad of Chocolate Ray. It's so obscure, it is not on YouTube. Some either cursed or blessed soul put it on SoundCloud. Yeah, there's a cover version on YouTube from another person I couldn't find, but I recommend the SoundCloud delay version. It is a product of the 1970s in every way. It's unlistenable. I made it through most of it. Did you make it through all of it? I made it through most of it. And skip to the end. Okay. It was something else because it's sort of like disco, but it's also that very 70s saying when they wrote the story songs, like, about the kids jumping off of the Tatcha Hatchy Bridge or whatever. Not Tatcha Hatchy. What was it? Billy Joe McAllister. They wrote these songs in the 70s, these weird sort of folk story songs. A ballad? Yes, but not I mean, a ballad can be like a love song. These were, like, folk stories. I thought a ballad meant it was, like, told a story, maybe. But I think a ballads is love songs, surely, but a love story like the Air Supply wrote ball is they didn't write songs about Fokiro's jumping off the bridges. They should have. Sure. Well, I don't know. There's really nothing Air Supply could have done to have improved their game. They were pretty much they sound great. One of the best concerts I ever saw in my life was Air Supply in Jacksonville, Florida. Amazing. It was amazing. I said it before and I'll say it again. It was like the fabric of reality was coming apart at the seams and we were right there to witness it. It was so cool. I didn't know you took ecstasy at that show. I didn't. What's so significant about it? We were totally sober. Yeah. What was it about? Was it just songs from your childhood or something? No. Yes. That was part of it. It was great to hear all those songs and see them live. It was the chemistry between the two dudes. They still got it after all these years is really neat to see. But what really kind of made it unreal was it almost had the same feeling as, like, a really energetic tent revival. People were wandering down the aisles. You could tell they were moving. Not necessarily of their own will. They were being drawn toward the stage. It was bizarre. It was so cool to see. People were just out of their minds at this Air Supply show. I don't think any of them were on next to Sea, either. I think everybody was like, people were with their moms or with their kids. It was just a neat show. I'll never forget it, ever. Amazing. So go see Air Supply. I'm sure they're playing a third rate casino near you. Probably. They definitely do the work. For sure. They supply you with more than Air, though. It sounds like dude. And the guy's voice still is 100% as good as it was in the 70s, which is probably some bids the other day. Live vids of them recently. It's a good thing to do. Sit around, but definitely check out the song on SoundCloud. Oh, yeah. And listen to as much of it as you can. You won't make it all the way through. The Ballad of Chocolate. It's so bad. Now I understand why Elvis would shoot the TV. Whenever Robert Goulet came on, it was because of that Robert Gule. Is that why he shot the TVs? Yeah. Apparently. No one knows why, but whenever Robert Goule would come on, he would shoot his TV. Sometimes he'd get really mad and shoot his toaster or his oven or whatever. Wow. But he would. Shoot the TV. That's pretty good. All right, so these kidnappers, getting back to the story of the Chow Chilla school bus kidnapping, these guys were three real low rent scumbags who didn't have a penny to their name and were desperate for cash, right? In some ways, kind of. But they were also all three rich kids, if you can put those two things together. There were three rich white kids, one specifically Uber, the literal trust fund kid. Yeah, he was the ringleader. We're talking about Fred Woods, james Schoenfeld, who were 24, and then James younger brother Richard, who was 22, but Fred Woods. Frederick New Hall Woods. The fourth was the ringleader, and I guess you could call it the brains, if there was a brain behind this. But he came from a long line of California money. One of his ancestors was Henry Mayo Newall, who came in the 1850s to California. Part of Santa Clarita is newall California name for him. They made a ton of money in real estate speculation and railroads, and then eventually oil and ranching and had a several hundred million dollars family fortune. Yes. I read that they in the 70s, about 350,000,000 a year in the year, just that family doing nothing. And by the time this guy, Fred Woods IV, came along, there were generations of this family that had never worked a day in their life. So it's not like his parents truck it rich, and they remember their roots like their roots were just gob smackingly wealthy. That's what they knew. And apparently Fred was not particularly paid attention to by his parents, and it had some effects on him. And I saw also that he had trouble living up to his father's expectations for him, but do nothing blue blood. Yeah, but his dad's approval meant a lot to him. That's a terrible position for any person to be in, and I feel for him in that respect. And I also think, from what I saw, there was a New York Times article about him while I believe he was still at large, where he said that he's described as a loser in the headline. The New York Times calls him a loser at least says other people call him a loser in their headline. He was that kind of person, and again, it was the 70s, but he was also that kind of person. He was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents, from what I can tell, and also an education system that seems to have failed them, at least in the grammar portion. Yeah, we'll get to that. He didn't have a lot of friends. He never really had a ton of girlfriends, which is ironic, because he ended up being married four times, which we'll get to. He lived in a converted apartment in an outbuilding on the nearly 80 acre estate in Portala Valley, where his grandmother lived and his parents lived, even though they were traveling by themselves, usually he got a job at that rock quarry. Your first indication that they may not have had the smartest plan because his dad owned it and he was into cars. He collected cars with his money. The ringleader did. He had dozens and dozens of cars. His buddy James, who helped them, he was rich, too. Not that kind of rich, but his parents, his dad was a podiatrist, so they had doctor money. So they were doing pretty well as well. And they got into various businesses together. They had a used car business together. They never did super well, it seemed like, in any of their business ventures, because it seemed like they weren't super smart. Right. Another good descriptor is that Fred in particular loved his cars and he loved to shoot the windows out of his cars with his guns, which he also loved. Yeah, they had a lot of guns between them as well. I mean, it's sort of what you think. There are these rich kids who weren't paid attention to, they could do whatever they wanted and ended up getting into trouble. Fred had designs on being a film producer, and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the school bus kidnapping in the movie Dirty Hairy. And he said, hey, this would make a great movie, too, which we'll get to sort of the bow tie on that later on. But he and James ended up losing some money, about 30 grand on a housing deal. And depending on the reports you read, some people say they were desperate for money. But if you talk to James, he said, I wanted to buy a Ferrari with it because my neighbors had Ferraris and it was to keep up with the Jones situation. Yeah, that's exactly right. Fred was born into it and I think took money largely for granted. But James and Richard but James in particular, really kind of felt new to the area and didn't fit him because they didn't have as much money. I think their dad was punching above his weight class socioeconomically in the area that they moved to. And his son kind of suffered for it because they fell out of place because they just did not have anywhere near the kind of wealth that their peers had where they now lived. And that seems to have gotten to James. And that was his big motivation. I never saw Fred Woods motivation, did you? I mean, I think part of it had to do with that 30 grand in debt, but I think part of it, dude, is he was a bored rich kid in some ways. Right. Like, that may have been the reason. Yeah. And also, I have the impression that James and Rick Seanfeld were a lot more moral than Fredwood was. Apparently, in his journal, James wrote at the time that he was worried he was becoming immoral as they were, like, really planning this. And he and his brother were both Eagle Scouts. So I guess it is fair to say that they kind of fell under the influence of Fred Woods, who had no qualms about this whole thing. He convinced them to give up their qualms as well. Yeah. I think the last time I'll say the word smart thing that they did was when they were initially hatching the idea. They said, we saw in the news, California Save california has a $5 billion budget surplus, and we're not going to get money kidnapping a kid or even 26 kids from their parents to pay ransom. But if they were on a school bus, then it's the responsibility of the state of California, and they've got all this dough. So $5 million is chump change to them. Right. So if we get them on a school bus, then they're liable, and that's how we're going to get the most money. Yeah. So the calculation that they made was that nobody was going to get hurt. They knew that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids. They knew that California had a budget surplus. But even more than that, their insurance company, whoever insured the state, would end up actually paying that $5 million and that they were just basically taking $5 million from the state that the state didn't really need and that nobody was going to get hurt. And then that calculation, it really kind of reveals how much they did lose any kind of morality, which is they utterly failed to take into account, like, the psychological and emotional damage they were going to inflict on these kids and their parents and the town in general. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that because I think even in the end, they saw it as, like, not the biggest deal. Yeah. Because no one was hurt. And it was really quick, but, like, when I saw and eventually spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that the two brothers were eventually paroled, and we'll get to all that, but the news teams in 2015 were, like, following this guy around in a parking lot, asking him questions, and he's just trying to avoid it. And one of them was like, you do realize the trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood? And he just went, so I've heard, and then just, like, quickly ran away. So even to this day, they're trying to get them to realize that there was a real impact and the end result was trauma and PTSD. Yeah. And the reason it did and it had that impact and part of the problem for Cha Chilla, apparently Cha Chilla was just transformed immediately. If you're the victim of a crime, you wonder, why me? Especially a random crime, and this is a random crime perpetrated on a whole town. Like, Chachilla was a possible town among a number of towns in the area that those three traveled to and staked out and just kind of tried to figure out what the best victim would be for this crime and they just settled on Chow Chilla. They had no grudges against Chowchilla, they had no ties to Chow Chilla, but the problem was they didn't care about the people of Chow Chilla or how they felt about their children or what they were going to do to them, it was just a random. They chose them basically randomly. And Chow Chilla is the kind of rural farming town where people don't talk about their feelings. I get the impression that they still think that that's weak, it shows a sign of weakness. And so I don't really have the impression that the town has ever really processed this and that they've tried to forget. And then there's a lot of problems among the victims who are now in their 50s that have never really been resolved or worked out because the town just tried to carry on as if it never happened, basically from the get go. Yeah. I mean, some of them had very hard luck stories, getting into drugs, eventually getting better and going through rehab and treatment and writing books about it. Others say they don't trust people. They suffered nightmares for years, some continue to. Others have said that they don't even really remember much of what happened. I imagine if you're five years old you're not going to remember as much as a twelve year old. Obviously. Sure. So depending on your age group, you may have suffered some more obvious lasting damage, but they were all damaged. The way these guys got caught is well, I guess let's tell a little bit of that story during the investigation. One thing they found, and we'll put this in the dumb column on the property where Fred lived, they found a plan written out that said at the top plan they didn't even capitalize the P. Yeah, they wrote it out in pin. And they had a lot of ideas. They wanted to buy an X ray machine, I think they did, to X ray in case the ransom money was bugged. They had a larger plan. They had one plan about them, the state dropping the money from a plane in the Santa Cruz mountain at a specific drop site indicated by a series of lights. But they also had this larger plan of putting dummies in a plane with parachutes and it was sort of all over the map, this plan, over the course of a year and a half. Yeah. This really reveals, I think, a lot about them as well, that on that plan sheet it said one of the line items was burned. The plan they just didn't get around to that ransom note. Yeah, I think too. Yeah. And they had a lot of like scratch outs and misspellings and apparently it referred to Fred by name in the ransom note that they were planning to give to the authorities. Like really authorities. They were trying to sniff the authorities off the case, I guess, by posing or presenting themselves as a satanic group. And they said that their name was Bealezebub, but they misspelled Bealzebub. Yeah, they spelled it B-E-A-L-S-A-B-U-B which is just offensive to anybody who knows how to spell that word. If you misspell things in your ransom note, you're not going to do very well for yourself. Most likely. That's right. In the aftermath of the kidnapping, from when they buried the kids to when they left, the plan was call the Chow Chilla Police Department, demand your $5 million ransom. But the Chalchilla phone system was very small, and there were obviously when you kidnapped 26 kids and the media's descending every phone line was busy. They literally could not get through with their ransom demand. The kids escaped before they even got through with the ransom demand. Yeah, I think you said the donation from the phone company. They literally had to go in and install dozens of phone lines just so the FBI could operate effectively. Yeah. What did these guys do right afterward when they couldn't get through? They decided they needed to scram, that the jig was up and they needed to part ways, and they did. Fred woods was wildly enough to have come up with a passport with the name Ralph Nyder. And he traveled successfully to British Columbia, I think, Vancouver, under that fake passport. But then when he was there, he started writing to people. He had a friend who was, I think, in film school and said, hey, you should turn this into a whole like a whole movie. He said this is kidnapping. That I did. Right. Just give me some of the box office, I guess. But he said, be fair. He wanted a piece. He said, Be fair. But he spelled the F-A-R-E. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's just annoying me to no end. The misspellings. Yeah, but then he signed the letter, sent it as Ralph Snyder. He sent it as his alias. So the cops, the FBI tracked them within days to Vancouver and got the Royal Canadian amount of police to arrest him. I wonder if he knew the guy, though, in film school. I wonder if this guy was like, who is this? Who is Ralph Schneider? Or if he put in parentheses, that's my alias. This is Fred. Right. Don't tell the FBI, but he misspelled FBI. So Rick the younger, showing feld for his part, almost immediately confessed. He got home after the three of them met up and then split up, went home and told his dad what he did. His dad, because they had money again, his podiatrist got him a lawyer tooth. Sweet. And so that's why we don't know exactly that's one reason we don't know exactly what happened in those first hours afterward is because the lawyer kind of kept that all quiet. Although I did see a news report that said they took naps. I don't know if that's true or not, but I did see that it sounds right. It holds up if you put it up against everything else. And keep in mind, once again, they took these kids to a quarry that Fred Wood's dad owned and where Fred Woods worked. And the quarry security guard said when they were interviewed, said, well, yeah, last week, Fred and two other guys dug a big hole out there a few months before this happened. Like, I don't know, like a moving van sized hole. But the hole is gone now, so who cares, right, exactly. So Rick turned himself in, Fred got caught, james made attempts to cross the border into Canada himself, but apparently the Canadian authorities considered him a way too nervous, be way too vague about what he plan to do in Canada, and C, in possession of way too many guns to be led in the country. And apparently he tried two or three times using his own name to get in, and finally gave up and turned around. And I guess he had decided he was going to turn himself into authorities, but because of an all points bulletin on his license plate, he was picked up before he could turn himself in. Right. So they're all collected less than two weeks after it happened. Yeah. All right, well, let's take our last break and then we will kind of quickly go over the sentencing and what happened afterward, right after this. Alright, so they were collected? Yeah, they were collected and of course had their day in court. And the big thing that happened in court was whether or not these guys committed bodily harm on these children. Because if you committed bodily harm, then you have a sentence of life without a possible sentence of life without parole. If there was no bodily harm, then you could have life with parole. They ruled that they did suffer bodily harm. So they had stomach trouble, they had nosebleeds, some of the kids fainted and that counted. But in 1980, an appeals court reversed that ruling, said that is not bodily harm. And that made them eligible for parole. And since then, like I said earlier, the two shown Fell brothers have been released in 2012 and 2015. Right. Long after some observers who are involved in the case think that they should have been paroled. Especially Richard Schoenfeld. He was 22 at the time. He was basically there. I saw it described as a long for the ride, again, an Eagle Scout. He probably became an Eagle Scout three, four years before this happened. And he spent 39 years in prison. Yeah, I guess so. He got out in 2012. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So about 37 years in prison, his life from age 22. He spent the next 37 years in prison for basically hanging out with his brother and his brother's goofy friend, doing something really stupid. And a lot of other people said, yeah, and if you're going to let Richard Seanfeld out, you should really probably take another look at James Seanfeld, too, because he was more involved than his brother, but he was still no Fred Woods. And then you get to Fred Woods and people say, yeah, probably just he doesn't really deserve to be parole. Yeah. The other two were model prisoners, and they also had people that were active. I don't know if it was a prosecutor or investigator. I think the investigator for the case eventually advocated for parole. Both did, yeah. So some of the townspeople felt betrayed by that, but they did get out. Fred woods was not a model prisoner. He was still as shady as ever. You're not supposed to run businesses from prison, but he ran a gold mine. He ran a used car business. He ran a Christmas tree farm. He got married a few times. The reason he was finally outed was he was running a Christmas tree farm. And Michael Bianchi, who was managing that business, got injured on the job, and Wood said, I'm not going to help pay for the surgery. So Bianca said, all right, and he filed a state workers comp claim, and they got on the investigation and found out that woods was behind the operation. So when it comes time for parole, that doesn't look good. No. And I guess he's been denied parole 17 times so far, and he's up next in 2024. And a lot of people think he might never be paroled, actually. Well, he bought a mansion in Napoma, California, 30 miles from the prison that no one lives at. He did have a civil lawsuit in 2016 where he had to pay out money to the victims. That was described as, quote, enough to pay for some serious therapy, but not enough to buy a house, which is significant, too, because they did rule an appeals court ruled the 1980 that they didn't inflict bodily harm. But I wonder if that same appeals court would come to that conclusion in 2021, based on interviews with some of the people who are abducted, like Jennifer Brown Hyde, who I mentioned earlier, who's not, I think emotional harm would play in these days. Right. And there was definitely emotional harm. You talked about Larry Park, who was addicted to meth and crack before he finally found forgiveness and actually went and met with all three of the perpetrators and shook their hands and told them he forgave them and apparently changed his own life like that. If you haven't looked, Fred Ward said, hey, I could make you a heck of a deal on a used van. Yeah. No, Fred Ward took his watch when he shook his hand. Well, I was kidding. But my final little factoid is that used car lot had those two vans, and he held onto those because he thought they would be worth a lot of money as the kidnap vans yeah. Which they might be worth an extra few hundred bucks. I could see that. But I don't know if that's the crown jewel of your inventory. Nick Cage bought them. Right. And then you can go watch that movie from Lifetime in 1993 called They've Taken Our Children if you want to see Carl Maldon in his underwear, apparently. Bad movie. Bad song. I read also that Chocolate residents do not care for that movie, Chuck, because it was shot in Kansas. And anyone who knows anything about the San Joaquin Valley knows that Kansas is a poor stand in for that. So they're a little turned off by that movie, from what I understand. That's right. And the last thing I want to shout out Caleb Horton, who wrote an article on Vox, very in depth one called The Ballad of the Chow Chilla Bus Kidnapping. It's pretty good. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, it is. All right. The article, not the song. No. Okay. It's an article. An article. I got you. Okay. Well, since we worked out the misunderstanding, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. Let me see. How about racist ticketing? In our episode on Jaywalking, we talked about people in the black and Hispanic communities are ticketed more for Jaywalking. And this is from Valerie Mates in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hey, guys. You mentioned that black and Hispanic drivers are issued more traffic tickets than white drivers. This interesting issue. In Chicago, when they installed traffic cameras, they found that the cameras, despite being race neutral, still gave more tickets to black and Hispanic drivers. So of course, they wanted to study that. The experts found that more affluent neighborhoods are built with more features that would naturally slow down traffic. More sidewalks, more stop signs, more crosswalks, while poorer neighborhoods had fewer of those things. And the result would cars would be naturally would tend to drive faster in poorer neighborhoods since black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to live and be driving in less wealthy neighborhoods. In Chicago, they were more likely to be speeding and caught by traffic cameras, or so says the evidence, at least. Crazy. It's not just prejudice on the part of police officers that causes this discrepancy. It's actually a difference in how the neighborhoods are built systematically. But it was really interesting, and I agree. Valorie. Thanks for sending that in. Who was it again? Valerie Mates of Ann Arbor. Thanks a lot, Valerie. That's a great one. If you got a great one like Valerie does, we love little brainbusters like that. So you can wrap them up, spank them on the bottom, and send them off via email to stuffpodcast@iheartratradio.com. Stuff you Shouldn't 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." | |
a6be53c4-5462-11e8-b449-7beedbc3decf | Pando: Earth’s Oldest, Hugest Organism Is Trees! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/pando-earth-s-oldest-hugest-organism-is-trees | In Utah, lives a 106-acre stand of Quaking Aspen trees that are all genetically identical because they are all growing from the same massive root system. It’s Pando, the most massive, and almost certainly oldest (by far) organism on Earth. | In Utah, lives a 106-acre stand of Quaking Aspen trees that are all genetically identical because they are all growing from the same massive root system. It’s Pando, the most massive, and almost certainly oldest (by far) organism on Earth. | Tue, 13 Nov 2018 14:27:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=14, tm_min=27, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=317, tm_isdst=0) | 41151527 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstopworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. This is a current contemporary edition. Chuck oh, yeah, it is. Yeah, we're talking about Pando, and Pando has kind of made the rounds of the news lately. Current contemporary addition of a topic that could be tens of thousands of years old. Yes, that's right. Yeah. That's well put. Actually, did you know about pando? Yeah. You saw the news lately? No, I just previously knew about Pando. Oh, really? That's kind of awesome, because I knew about the giant mushroom out in Oregon, but I didn't know about pando. And now I do, and we'll get to it. But pando is not doing so hot right now. Spoiler. Yeah, that is a spoiler, isn't it? It's a sad giant forest. It is a genetically identical forest. So let's spell it out for everybody what pando is. You want to? Yeah. It's an aspen forest. Aspen trees, which, by the way, far and away the best looking trees. At least it's certainly one of them, depending on what you're out for as your tree fetish. Well, I tend to like the white papery bark with black eyes. That's usually the kind of tree I like. So aspen is for me. Yeah, aspens in general, before we get to what panda is, they're medium sized, they're deciduous. They're generally between 20 and 80ft high, about three to 18 inches in diameter. And like you said, they have that bark that's that sort of smooth, greenish white, yellowish white, gray or white. It's so pretty. And they have a little green in the bark from chlorophyll, which is kind of interesting for a tree. Yeah. From what I saw, unique among North American trees, that aspen bark actually is living. It's like tissue that actually produces chlorophyll and carries out some photosynthesis for the tree. And most other trees don't do that, but that explains why the bark is so unique, too. Yeah. So the aspen is known for a lot of things, but one of the things that their leaves produce, they're really thin and firm, almost round, about an inch and a half to three inches in diameter, with a little pointy apex. They looked kind of like a spade in a suit of cards or deck of cards. Yeah, sort of like that, for sure. Call a spade of spade. Sure. Unless it's an aspen leaf. Okay. But the sound that they make is really unique. If you're in the forest in a grove of aspen and the wind kicks up, it's a really unique and I say very calming experience because the stems are flat instead of round and perpendicular to the flatness of the leaf. Wow, that was a really great description. So the leaf kind of moves around on the stem in ways that leaves typically don't. It kind of trembles in the wind. Yeah, it's like a fluttery butterfly wing, almost. And then, because the leaves are sparse enough, you wouldn't just look at it and be like, look at how sparse that tree is. But compared to some other trees, say, like a maple or an oak or something, the space in between leaves is greater. And so that allows the sunlight to kind of come in through the canopy of the aspen. And when the wind blows and it gets all of those leads going, that has an effect on the sunlight, too. Yeah. So that sound, though, is specifically Pando is a quaking aspen. The sound that it creates is very unique. It's not even just like a regular calming of the wind through the trees. It's more like a quack. No, it's a pretty good aspen. Quaking aspen impression. Sounds like a duck. A lot of people confuse it for ducks. It's actually a pretty good aspen. So that's the aspen in general. But go ahead and drop it. Drop it on everyone's head what Pando is, because it's pretty remarkable. Are you letting me do it? Yeah. All right. So Pando is an aspen forest, an enormous aspen forest, 106 acre aspen forest. And you'd say, well, I could name the woods in my backyard todd or Jimmy. Who cares? Somebody gave a name to a forest. But no, there's something very special about Pando. Pando is not just a forest. Panda is a forest of trees that are all genetically identical because they all come from one massive root structure that forms by mass the largest organism on earth. Yeah, that's panda. \u00a313 million tons. And while we would love to say every single one of these, maybe up to 50,000 trees is connected, literally, some of them might not be. But we did learn through this research that you can be cut off if something happens to cut you off from the roots of your neighbor. You can still be considered part of that because you're still genetically identical, right? Yes. And so quaking aspens are kind of unique, at least as far as trees go, but not necessarily as far as plants go, and that they reproduce through something called vegetative reproduction. And it's pretty straightforward stuff. If you've ever seen, like, say, an Augustine grass or strawberry or something like that, it just sends out, like, a stem or something like that. And then the stem, once it gets to a certain point, starts to shoot down roots, and then it starts to grow like another section of the plant, but it's still kind of like a new plant growing out of the original plant's arm. It's all the same plant. It's one big organism. And that's how Pando has spread through this vegetative reproduction. Yeah. And this can happen underground. Like in the case of Pando, it's not like you see this horizontal fence of tree branches all along the ground. It's actually roots underground. Sometimes it can go like 100ft and say, I think I'd like to grow up now. Yeah, it feels like a good spot. Why don't you grow up? And there's a little sprout called a ram. It says I will watch. And Pando goes with the light. Yes. And it looks like its own tree, but whether connected or not, it's usually connected. It's the same tree. Right. So you said something that some of the trees in Pando might not actually be part of Pando. There's a couple of ways that can happen, like you said. One, they could be cut off physically, but even still, it's still considered part of the same group of trees, the same organism. And when you're talking about a stand of genetically identical aspen trees, they're called a clone, like a pack of them or stand of them. It's called a clone. So you can have physically cut off genetically identical trees that are still considered part of the same clone. But being a tree, panda can also reproduce sexually. And aspens are also kind of unique or peculiar in that they can reproduce vegetatively, but they also reproduce sexually, but they don't have the equipment for both sides of sexual reproduction on the same tree. So a tree is either male or female. And in the case of Pando, pando is a male, which is pretty interesting, too, I think, if that we're talking about the biggest organism on Earth, the most massive organism on Earth. But to know that it has a name and that it's a male just makes it all that more endearing. Yeah. And like you said, even though they do have flowers and sexes, they almost always reproduce vegetatively. Yeah. I think it's starting to become clear that they actually produce sexually more than we realize. But for a long time, that's basically it for aspen. Yeah. There are plenty of aspen groves and clones that are impressive, but this is one where everything kind of came together, and we'll talk about all those different things, but everything kind of came together in the right way to create something this massive. Right. Yeah. Panda lucked out, in other words. Yeah. They're not normally this impressive and large. No. One of the things about clone of aspen trees like Pando is that one of the reasons why they can get so huge is one that vegetative growth of vegetative reproduction. But also, when you're covering 106 acres of land, you've got a lot of different resources available to you, and you're interconnected. You're just one organism. And this whole thing makes me think, like, Chuck, what are we really talking about when we're talking about pando? Are we talking about the collection of individual trees that we typically see as individuals? Or are we really talking about the root system? Is that the real organism that we're referring to? Are you asking? A little bit. I think it's both. It's all the same, right? Okay. I guess it is all the same. But you tend to think of, like, an organism as like a tree is a thing, but a whole bunch of trees that are all connected to a root system that's just different in some weird way that I can't quite put my finger on. Yeah. I like to think that they're all just holding hands underground. Right. But it's all just one hand. Yeah, but like you were saying, like, the benefits of something like this is that they do have different access to different things depending on where they are in that forest. So, like, there may be three or four big old trees down near the water that are just sucking up water and sharing it with the trees near them. They can just send that right down the old shared root pipeline and say, I know you're thirsty over there, so why don't you enjoy this spring water? Yeah, exactly. It's delicious spring water. They can also shuttle nutrients around pando can from one area to another. And so, as a result, you'll find aspens in some really surprising places. They're really hearty and they show up everywhere, from wet rainforesty type areas to semi arid kind of brushland. They'll grow everywhere. And they have a huge range, too. You can find aspen in North America from Alaska down to Mexico and from Vancouver over to Maine. So they have a pretty good range and they've grown just about everywhere. Yeah, but they need a lot of sunshine. The one thing that the aspen does not like a shade, it's their kryptonite. It kind of is. Moist soil is the best. Plenty of sunshine and gravely slopes. Sandy, sandy ground is great, but they are pretty, pretty hardy as as long long as you don't have anything big that's creating a canopy nearby to block out that sunshine. Yeah. Because think about it, you've got some shoots that grew up and they're like, oh, I'm in a semiarid area now. I could use some water over here. And it just sends it from the wetlands. I just think that's amazing. It is. Josh love pando. Chuck Love. Message break. All right, well, now we're on the road driving in your truck. Why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? All right, Chuck. So we could probably stop here. And I'd stand by my statement about loving pando. I think panda is just an amazing, interesting organism, but I think all aspen stands are now all clones of aspen. These things are really cool, but we haven't even begun to scratch the surface and how interesting these things are. Yes. You want to talk about fire? I do, because this is one of the reasons why I love earth science. Like, everything fits together and everything has an explanation. And if you mess with one thing over here, something else way over here goes weird. I just love earth science for that. And this is a good example of it. Yeah. So in our forest fires episode, which I think was a great one. Go back and revisit that if you want to learn more about this kind of thing. But fire, as it happens, forest fires are kind of great for aspens. Yeah, they thrive in fire, pretty much. Not in fire. It's a little complicated, but it's actually very simple. So there's a few things that happen, like with fire. Supposedly a wild fire, when it reaches an aspen stand will sometimes die out. Yeah, because aspens actually don't burn very well. They have really wet leaves and their bark stays pretty moist too, and so does their branches, so they don't burn well. But they are sensitive to fire in that they kind of seems like kind of evolved to respond to fire, but not necessarily in the way you think they can burn, especially their canopy. Their tops can burn pretty badly. But the way that they react to fire is if fire comes through and wipes out some of their sprouts. Those little rabbits. The seedlings. Basically. That grow up from the root system. If fire wipes some of those out. Those things send like a hormonal signal to the rest of the tree saying we've got this area covered. We don't need any competition. Just keep the sprouts in check here. When those things are gone and those hormonal signals are lost too, the tree responds by shooting up many times the number of sprouts that were lost to fire and repopulates an area that's been ravaged by fire very quickly and comes to dominate it for the next 100, 200, possibly 1000 years. Yeah, 20 or 30 years is all it takes if an area has been wiped out by wildfire to get that aspen grove as plentiful or even more so than it was before. And they do this because while the conifer is sort of the enemy, we like to think all trees like each other and they probably do emotionally, but the conifer is what really provides that upper canopy that is really bad for the aspen. So during a wildfire, the aspen is fire resistant to a certain degree because, as you said, with the wetness of the leaves and twigs and branches. But those conifers go up like a match, so they're killed off first. A lot of times, like you said, the aspens are just left and they're like, great, we got rid of those jerky conifers over there and now we're good. But even if it does kill it all out, the aspens grow up a lot faster than the new conifers do. So they basically sort of beat them to the punch. Post wildfire, right? Exactly. And not just wildfires, they show up after like mud slides and rock slides and landslides and avalanches and everything you can think of that could wipe out a forest. If it's within the aspen's range, you're going to find aspen there first. And we were talking about how one of the things about it is that quaking, trembling sunlight that allows filter light through well, that obviously allows saplings of aspen to shoot up and grow. As you were saying, when the conifers come in, they block out that sunlight and so the aspen seedlings don't have any kind of chance at growing up. As the conifers start to interlude through the borders I think that's right. Interlope through the borders of the clone, the aspen clone, and then eventually make their way further and further in. And then if everything's going well for the aspen, and as is the case with nature, fire comes along, wipes all the conifers out, and the cycle starts again. And through this, an aspen clone can live for a very long time. As long as there's a cycle of fire that doesn't come too frequently and keep the aspen from growing back or come too infrequently and allow the conifers to really take over and kill off any new growth in the aspen clone. Yeah. If North America never had humans here and it was just allowed to do whatever happens, there would be a lot more fire suppression is a human thing because we like to put out fires for the most part. And if that had never happened, the United States would have I don't want to say it would be largely aspen, but there would be a lot of aspen forests and forest grows. Yeah. And the ones that are around still today, it would be in a lot better shape, for sure. Because, I mean, just another way to put it is aspen groves need fire to thrive. Yeah. Just as simple as that. It's really interesting. So one of the things that I ran across, I kept seeing was that a lot of the and I got the impression that it was like old timer stuff. And I was right that you can tell one aspen grow from another, like a clone from another clone, because they'll grow up against each other and sometimes intermingle. Sometimes in the spring, you can see the leaf formation kind of come out in certain ways. But really in the fall, you can see one has been cloned from another. One will have a brilliant gold, another will be like a scarlet red or something like that. And then in the fall, you can kind of see the boundaries between one aspen clone and another aspen clone. And for many years, that's just how they did it. And then genetics came along and they said, no, you're wrong about a lot of this. Yeah. So like the old timey, researchers would say, look at those 25 trees all grouped together. They have the same exact bright yellow color, so that's all one clone. And these guys over here are red. But like you said, when they actually finally got the technology to check that was not necessarily the case, and they'd walk away like kind of dusting their hands off. Fine. Going off to the no before, they were like, it was a fine day's work, using my peepers to tell one clone apart from another. Papers. I know that word. I came across it again. You remember that episode? Oh, yeah. I think that's one of the worst slang terms of all time. Leaf papers. One of the worst non offensive slang terms of all time. Yeah, that's a good call. Leaf peepers. Yeah. And the whole thing with the genetics, though, is for a while there, that was causing a little bit of well, I mean, just confusion, I guess. It wasn't like the end of the world or anything, but it was a little confusing because at one point, like 2030 years ago, the scientists were watching what they thought was that single clone of aspen, and they thought, oh my God, we've just learned something. This tree or this clone has actually changed sex. It's amazing. It's producing pollen this year, and last year it produced flowers and oh my God, what a breakthrough. And then now that we have genetic testing, they're like, oh, no, that's actually two different clones. Yeah. When they started looking at some of those trees more closely, like, yeah, they look alike, but actually they're not genetically identical. They're not part of the same aspen clone, but they could still be a direct descendant from that aspen clone, because remember, when aspens reproduce, they can do it one of two ways. Vegetatively, which produces trees that are genetically identical to other trees that have sprouted up from the same root system, or they can do it sexually and the seeds that come out are not genetically identical, so you can have offspring and genetically identical clones of the same tree all intermingled in the same little area. It's pretty fascinating. It is. And as far as age of these things, it kind of depends on where you are. Usually in aspen tree, you won't live more than 150 years, occasionally up to 200. In Colorado, where Pando is. I just love saying his name. I know, so cute. It's close to panda. That's why. That's definitely why. It's nice and fab on the end so it looks like it's got some chubby cheeks you just want to pinch. Probably does. As far as panda goes in Colorado, they usually don't get to be more than about 75 years old. And it's not like you can go to a clone either and pluck out what you think is the oldest tree and say, this is how old the clone is, because it may be the newest tree. That's why I'm like, okay, so is the organism really the root system if a tree just like, dies, I think around the area where Pando grows, in Utah, I think, on the Colorado front range is what it's called. Yeah, I said Colorado. I met Colorado Front Range. Colorado Front Range, yeah. So in that area, they usually live what we call trees. But what are really just stems growing up from Pando's root system. Those things live for about 75 years. The oldest aspens live for about 200 years. Pando is way, way older than that, even by the most conservative of estimates. Yeah, I mean, they say 13,000 years old to 80,000 years old. Yeah. And I think 13,000 is really hedging bets, because they're like, well, that's about when the last ice age ended. So pano probably couldn't have lived through that. But I was looking at ice sheet maps. There was not an ice sheet anywhere near where pandas going. So it's entirely possible with as hardy and resilient as aspen stands are, that pando is as far, far older than that. You mean the ice sheet map on your bedroom wall? Yeah. You just got out of bed and went, let me look at this again. Well, you haven't been over for a while. I have it pasted to the ceiling off, so I don't even have to get out of bed. Oh, man. Just lay there in point. I'm like, you're really getting efficiencies. So Laurentide kind of day. That's great. Yeah. And this one article you sent over that said in principle, clones may even be essentially immortal. But yeah, they hedged it within principle, it can die from disease like aspen. They're not like indestructible. There's all sorts of things that can hurt them because of their really soft bark. They're susceptible to boring insects and diseases that can come from that. A lot of birds that boar live in aspen, which I think is not bad for them, I'm not sure. So they can die. There's a lot of things that can kill an aspen grove, but if everything was going 100% right for it, there's no reason that it should die like a human. We can do everything right and we're still going to die someday. There's a certain number of times our cells are going to divide and they're going to stop, and we're eventually going to run out of dividing cells and then we die. Right? Yeah. That's not necessarily the case with an aspen clone. That's why they're saying, like, in principle, they are technically immortal, or they may be technically immortal, and they think that possibly pando is more than 80,000 years old. That's the high end. Although there's a kook at the university of Michigan who's saying something like a million I'm not back in that one. I love that. I'll go as high as $80,000. And doctor Barnes, we don't mean to call you a cook. We're just joking. We were joking. All right, well, let's take a break, hire an attorney, and we're going to talk about why panda is now in trouble, which is very sad right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. All right, chuck, like you said, I spoiled it for everybody. Already, but panda was dying. Yeah, that's not an overstatement. Yeah, it's very sad. Here's what's going on and here's what can go on really to any, I mean, pando is special, but any clone like this, pando is special. Pando is very special. There are a few things that can happen. We already talked a little bit about birds and blight and stuff like that. There's also disease. But human interaction has had a major toll on these forests. In the course, people were able to build homes within where pando is. And this 106 acres, people also want to go see these things that like, all right, well, let's put a campground there as well. And if you want a campground, you want toilets and you want plumbing and you want picnic tables, roads and parking lots and stuff like that, and water lines and all of this stuff. Even though they do as good a job as they can at preservation, it all takes its toll little by little with every new parking lot laid down on something like pando. So all of these things being built in the middle of pando, right in the middle of pando, they have had their effect. But it's probable that pando is kind of like, I'll just grow around, you fine. I'm not happy about it human, but I know you don't know any better. I'm pando, I'll just grow around. So that's fine. That's not what it is. That's strike one. But humans are not off the hook because it turns out that we're doing things in other ways. And that whole like earth science messing with something over here has having these effects over here that's going on with pando right now as well. Yeah. Cause one of the major threats, aside from wildfires that we're putting out is herbivores. Deer and elk specifically love to eat those tiny little baby aspen that sprout up from the ground from, well, I was about to say from pando. They eat them so fast it never almost has a chance to become part of pando. Right. Pando, they are doing studies now. Pando is old. They're old trees. It's a bunch of senior citizens hanging out, holding hands. There's not a youngster among them. Right. And that's not good. Whether it's a human civilization or population or a population of aspen clones, you want all stages of life. You want mature trees, middle aged trees, young trees, saplings, you want all of that. And if you have nothing but old trees, those old trees, remember, they only live about 75 years. So as they start to die, that means pandas dying. As long as an aspen clone is replacing itself, it's fine, it's healthy. But if it's not, then it's in big, big trouble. And apparently pando is in big, big trouble and has been for some years now because of overgrazing and over browsing. Not just with cattle, like grazing cattle, which apparently happens on panda land, but also the mule deer and elk populations are supposedly booming in Utah in the area where panda lives. Yeah. They're able to prove this now in a couple of ways. In 1992, the US. Forestry Service clear cut 15 full acres of pando right in the middle of it and fenced off about a third of this, left the other two thirds just to do what it would do. And the fenced part came back really healthy, which is a very clear indicator that because there wasn't anything there to eat. These little seedlings that pop up, that that's the big dip. So that was in 2013. They fenced off an area from I love the word ungulates, any kind of hoofed animal, whether natural or just someone's cattle. Because like you said, how many weeks a year do they allow cattle? Two weeks. But I think each rancher gets two weeks there. Right. I don't think it's like, hey, everybody, bring your cattle to panda land for like a two week period. Although I could be wrong Pando land, pandas. Please don't, not again. Yeah. In 2013, they fenced off this area and are going to leave it that way. And this is all part of a study a nonprofit group of conservationists got together with the US. Forest Service to kind of check out what happens. And then this year that's why it's current. Like you said at the beginning, these results are coming in and it's pretty obvious what's going on. It is. So number one, it's the over browsing, especially among elkin, mule deer, but also number two, the fact that the fences aren't necessarily working as well. So, like, the fences are doing the best that they can and the unfenced area is in even bigger trouble. But even the fences they're using, the mule deer are able to hop over and eat these shoots. And so you think, okay, well, that's the mule deer's fault. We'll just kill a bunch of mule deer. Well, the problem is, I should say we've reached like a point of contention here because the guys led by the researchers, led by a guy at the university or Utah State University, Paul Rogers, he is an ecologist and he's among a group who are saying the Utah Fish and Wildlife, they are overpopulating the area with elk and mule deer because they make money from hunting licenses. And the more elk and mules area there are, the more hunting of those things that can go on, the more the state wildlife commission can take in hunting licenses. Right. Hunting license fees. Yeah, revenue. And so the state is like, no, that's not actually elk and mule deer are lower than ever. Whether that's the case or not, whether they're being managed incorrectly or not, it does seem pretty clearly that at the very least, over browsing by mule deer and elk is a major factor, if not the dominant factor in what's killing pando off. Yes. And this goes back. Even further. Because, like you were saying, touch one thing here, and it affects something over there. This can even be separated by, like, 100 years. Go back to the early 1900s when people in this country, in north america as a whole, hunted wolves, hunted mountain lions, hunted grizzly bears. What are they? They are animals that eat mule deer and elk. So it's caused an effect here 100 plus years later, where there aren't a lot of apex predators out there helping to keep these deer population in check. So there's been talk here and there. I mean, they're not going to do it. No, they said unequivocally, they're not like, should we reintroduce wolves to the ecosystem? Because that's a very natural predator prey cycle that goes on. That is not happening right now. No, that is to say, shoot mule deer and elk and stuff like that. So the population, it's not like it's getting out of hand. And if it ever did, they would just have, like, open season on these things, right? And if it ever did, they would just sell More hunting licenses. I don't think that's the issue. What paul rogers and some of his fellow ecologists are saying is that if the presence of wolves and bears and mountain lions is known in an area, the elk and the mule deer, they're not just going to stay in one place for very long. They're going to constantly be on the move. And so even if they are going through with a big population eating a bunch of shoots off of something like pando, they're not going to be doing it in the same place. So the pando will be able to recover over time because that browsing Will be distributed. Whereas now it's like, I don't feel like going 10 miles down the mountain. I'm going to stay right here and just keep eating pando until pando dies. Yeah. There's no wolves, right? There's no bears, or at least not enough to scare me and my gang here. Yeah, they call it an ecology of fear. I'd never heard of that. I haven't either. Yeah. It's really interesting, though, that I guess it takes 100 plus years to create this kind of almost call it a culture. It kind of is sort of a culture among these herds of hooked animals to where they're just like you said, they're like, no, there's nothing around here to hunt me. So I'm just going to look at all this tasty aspen babies. I'm going to eat them all. Yeah. What am I, jump? I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, it's really interesting. It is. And then it's not like I'm a wildlife ecologist or a biologist or have any formal training in it whatsoever, but I tend to think that it's not just over browsing. I think that the fact that there are people that live in pando. Means that the forest service says, well, we have to control wildfire. You don't let wildfire go any longer. And so then you've got conifer forest coming in, moving in on Pando too. I think that's probably part of the issue as well. So the key is Chuck, is to put up better fences and let the fires go. Yeah. Burn, baby, burn. Burn. Just don't burn the fences down. Yes. I don't know what they were doing with those little three foot fences anyway. No. Because a mule deer just hops right over them just so easy. Yes, it's all very sad. Panda is such an amazing I don't know, such amazing things in this country and it's going bye bye. It is sad. Yeah. And I mean, part of it is like well, yes, it's an aspen stand, but it's possibly the oldest and definitely the most massive organism on earth, which seems like it should get like a little extra attention just for that. But then you asked, like, well, is that just dumbly sentimental? Why not save everything? Why just focus all of your attention on this one thing? And then the other part of me says, well, if you focus attention on this one thing, you come to realize that all this other stuff is in danger as well and you start to care. So maybe Panda is like just a poster child for getting people into ecology a little more. Kind of like the Great Barrier Reef. Yes. Superstar of the ocean. That is kind of quickly going away. Yeah, it's all sad. I'm depressed now. Yeah, me too. I was kind of hoping to end this on a high note. Well, despite what happens to Panda, it's not like this is the death of the aspen in North America. This is Pando. Yeah, there are plenty of them. And I encourage you to go sit among the trees when the breeze is blowing in the fall and tell us your experience. It's amazing. Yeah, it's a light and sound show. Nice. I got a couple more things. You want to talk about some of the other biggest or oldest stuff on Earth. Sure. So I mentioned that giant mushroom in Oregon. Isn't that how they say Oregon? Oregon. Oregon. It is an armor Stoye specimen and it covers 2200 acres. Pano covers 106. This covers 2200 acres of Mallory national forests in Oregon. But they only think that it's just a couple of thousand years old. And that's just area that's not mass. Yeah, I think I learned about Pando a few years ago when I was trying to find out the oldest tree there's like a sequoia that's pretty old, right? Or is that the biggest? I can't remember where I ended up as far as that result goes, but I know that's where I found out about Pando. Got you. And I was like, what? And there are some old trees there's like some bristle comb pines in California that are about 5000 years old. Yeah, that's pretty old for a tree. There's a crisis of bush that's at least 11,700 years old. That's crazy. And then have you heard of glass sponges? No. There are glass sponges. They live in the water off of Antarctica. They live to about 15,000 years old. A sponge. Who'd have thought, you know? Amazing. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay, well, then we'll just put out a call for everybody to save Pando. Okay? Yeah. If you've actually been to Pando or Pando onpando on Pando? Yeah, in Pando. That's gross. I want to hear about this experience, okay? Yes, please do. And in the meantime, how about a listener mail? Yeah, I'm going to call this. We get a couple on Robin Hood. I'll read these couple in the next two episodes. Okay. Hey, guys. Every episode you release, it's done to such a high standard, it's clear that the true effort and love of the job is poured into every session in the studio. You might give us a little too much credit, Joey. The episode on Robin Hood. Especially Piqued. My interest, though, is I am from Nottingham sure. Myself. And I live only about 10 miles away from Rainworth, the area of Sherwood Forest where Robin Hood and his men are fabled to have resided or at least spent a lot of their time. Nice. And this area is the major oak of Sherwood Forest, which is said to be the location they chose for shelter. It is between 800 to 1000 years old and it's now held up by a series of poles due to his age and bad health. Interesting. Maybe they should do that with Pando. I think I saw that tree, actually. I saw something on it. Oh, yeah? When doing Panda research. No when doing Robin Hood research. Got you. But have been like, gosh, this tree is everywhere. The episode was so well done. You taught me new information, even though I've been to the woods and visitor center a few times. Well, that's high praise. I've taken my children as well, and they also love the legend myth of Robin Hood. My father in law happens to be called Robin and resides in the Sherwood district. So I sometimes drop little hints to my young children that he could possibly be the Robin of Sherwood. I've lost all credibility with them. They love it, even though I think they're on to the ruse. Really looking forward to your legendary Halloween episode. I'm a huge fan of Horror and I am actually in a horror punk rock band called Headstone Horrors, based in Nottingham, UK. So this is an amazing, busy and exciting time of the year for us. I bet they booked a lot of gigs in October, don't you think? I would guess so. Headstone Horrors. I would guess. January is not a huge month for them, though. No. Or Christmas season. Right, everybody? A headstone. Horrors Christmas album. It's an amazing, busy, exciting time of year for us. I would love to send you a CD, some t shirts if you like. Just let me know your sizes. You want nice and I'll pack them up and send them on their way. That is from Joey, gathercole of Sherwood, son of Robin, perhaps father of incredulous children, for sure. Well, thanks a lot, buddy. That was fantastic. I appreciate the offer for the shirt. I think we will be taking you up on that. And in the meantime, if you out there want to get in touch with us to let us know your interesting, amazing story of how you fit to your children, we'd love to hear that. You can go to stuffieshadow.com and find all of our social links. I'm also at the Joshclarkway.com and you can send me Chuck and Jerry Allen email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
87f5436e-1d47-4914-8527-ae980120fee6 | Selects: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-the-disappearance-of-the-yuba-county-five | In 1978, five friends set out for home from a basketball game. The next day, their car was discovered in a lonely mountain road. The next spring, their bodies began to turn up. What happened that night remains a mystery to this day. Explore what we know with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | In 1978, five friends set out for home from a basketball game. The next day, their car was discovered in a lonely mountain road. The next spring, their bodies began to turn up. What happened that night remains a mystery to this day. Explore what we know with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 21 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=141, tm_isdst=0) | 47899784 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week's select, I chose our 2018 episode on the mystery of the Yuba County Five. I was actually inspired to choose this one because I was recently a guest on another podcast called Yuba County Five hosted by Shannon McGarvey, and it's actually a really fascinating deep dive into this long standing mystery, and it expands on and actually does a lot of updating on what we talk about in this episode. So if this one strikes your fancy, go check out the Yuba County Five podcast from MoPac Audio. And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy our episode on it. 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 there's Jerry over there. So this is stuff you should know. Yes. How are you doing, Chuck? Do I look tired? Do you seem a little logy tired, man. What's going on with you? I've just been waking up, like, too early for no reason. Going to bed too late, though, because if you go to bed early and wake up early, you're fine. Well, going to bed late sometimes not getting enough sleep and trying to go to bed super early to make up for it. But I don't know about this. Making up for a sleep deficit. I don't buy all that. I feel like we talked about it before. That doesn't actually work. Yeah, I'm just tired, that's all I can say. Sorry, man. I'll live. All right. I'm glad we killed some time before we got into this very mysterious, sad story. It's a good one, though, isn't it? It is extraordinarily sad. Probably the saddest true I don't know. It's up there as far as true life, true crime, disappearances go, and it's the one about Gary Matthias. That's what they call it. They call it the Gary Matthias disappearance. But that really doesn't do it much justice. So it doesn't serve it well, because it was a lot more than Gary Matthias involved. Yeah, I've seen it more so called the Yuba County Five, but I guess it just depends on where you're looking. I had not run across that. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. That makes me wonder what all stuff I missed. Well, you know, there were five guys. What? So no, there actually were five guys. There are five friends. Gary Matthias was one of them, and there were four others. There was Ted Weir, who was the oldest. He was 32. Correct. There was Jackie Hewitt. He was the youngest. He was 24. There was Jack Madruga. I'm not sure what age he was, but he was definitely between 24 and 32, I'll tell you that. He narrows it down. Bill Sterling. And then again, Gary Matthias and those five guys were a set of friends, and they met at the Yuba City Vocational Rehabilitation Center for what you would call today the cognitively impaired or cognitively challenged. Yeah. Because three of these guys of course this one article you have from 1978 doesn't use appropriate terms anymore, but three of these guys were intellectually disabled or developmentally disabled. Not an exact like it's kind of hard to get an exact diagnosis from these 1978 terms. But Madruga was undiagnosed. But according to his mom, he was generally thought of, as she said, as quote, slow in quote and then Matthias was the only one not diagnosed with a developmental disability, but he was under drug treatment for schizophrenia. Right. So all five of these guys had some sort of challenge going on in their life. Right, exactly. So there's a lot of details you can kind of glean because you're absolutely right. Like reading the really great Washington Post article, which is basically the comprehensive document on the case from you can kind of glean an idea, a picture of these guys. So they're just five friends, thickest thieves. Even within this tight little group of friends, there's subgroups of even tighter friends like Ted Weir and Jackie Hewitt were particularly close and Bill Sterling and Jack Madruga were particularly close. They were just these five guys known as the boys. Right. They all lived at home with their parents. They were always going to live at home with their parents. It was just what the plan was. Right. I think Ted Weir had a job as a janitor and then later on as a snack bar clerk. Yeah. Basketball. Yeah, that was another one. And they actually all played together on the basketball team for the vocational rehab center. Basically like their hangout, the place where they hung out. Right. They played basketball on that team. But Jack Madruga is worth saying, had a driver's license, whereas three of the other ones didn't, although Gary Matthias did as well. So these guys, they were friends, they had a tight kinship together. They had very normal, reliable lives that were basically home centric. And when they were out doing stuff, you could expect them home for dinner kind of thing. It was just a given. Yeah. I think that's super worth pointing out here early on is they sell in more than one place. They said they referred to their lives as very predictable and scheduled. Right. Which is why this interesting events that occurred on February 24, 1978 were very unusual. Right. So on February 24, 1978, the boys, that's what their families all call them because apparently all their families were at least in touch, if not friendly with one another. Yeah, I think they kind of supported one another, it sounds like as much as anyone did in 1978. Sure. So on this night, February 24, there was a Friday night, the boys left their homes around Maryville in Yuba City in California and they traveled, I think about 50 miles north to Cal State Chico, which is now called Chico State University. And they went to go see their team the Cal State La. Team beat up on Cal State. Chico And Cal State La. Actually won 86 to 84, which would have pleased the boys tremendously. Sure. So they went to the game. That much is known. And then they left the game. That much is known, too, because around 10:00 when they left the game, they went to a convenience store called Bear's Market and they bought some stuff. Yeah. Apparently they were trying to kind of close up and so the clerk was a little bit annoyed that they showed up. And these are the kind of details that aren't so important, but it just shows that they really did their investigating pretty thoroughly, including well, we'll get to sort of the lead investigator in a minute, but yeah, they bought just a few things. They bought a Hostess Cherry Pie, a Langendorf lemon pie, Snickers Bar, a Marathon Bar, couple of Pepsi's and a quart and a half of milk. Which is to say, it's not like they were stocking up on food. They just got some snacks right, exactly. For the drive back home. 50 miles, about an hour. Yeah. The thing is, they would have been fully expected back home. Not just because it wasn't like any of them to spend the night away. Right. Except Matthias. He had friends and he would stay out with friends sometimes. But the other four, they slipped in their bed at home every night. That's just what they did. So their families fully expected them to come back. And another reason why they expected them to come back was because the next day, Saturday, they had a basketball game for their vocational rehab team, the Gateway Gators. And they apparently were all extraordinarily excited about this game. Yeah. Which again, is just another point being made that these guys had every intention on coming home. Super excited about the game. I think Matthias even was kind of driving his mom a little baddie, saying, don't let me over sleep. Got this big game. Apparently the guys had their clothes laid out and they were all super excited about this basketball game. And then they don't come home and these parents and grandparents start waking up at various points in the middle of the night or in the morning and start getting in touch with one another, all verifying like, your kid's not there, your kid's not there. And they start to freak out. And by 08:00 that evening, I believe the mother of Madruga actually finally called the cops. Yeah. And the cops were kind of I don't have the impression that they were like, well, I'm sure this is fine. I think they got involved pretty early on. But things really picked up when I think on a Tuesday it was Saturday night that they finally called the cops. And on Tuesday, Jack Madrigas car was discovered. And it was discovered in a very unusual place. Right? Yeah. What was this thing? An old Mercury Montago. 69 Montago, a land yacht is what it was. Exactly. And they found it. And this was, by the way, this is Jack Madruga's prized possession. Like, no one else drove the thing. He took pristine care of it. It was like his baby. His car was right. So to find it abandoned with the window, one of the windows rolled down up a mountain road, which was, I think, 70 miles away from the basketball game in a different direction, away from their house. Right. So the basketball game was north of their homes. This was southeast of the basketball game, and up a mountain road. It was extremely bizarre. And also, I'm sure, quite worrying when the families were already worried. I think finding this car like this probably really set them into panic mode. Well, yeah. And here's where in this article is very clear to say, from that point on, nothing made any kind of sense. So here's a few things about the car that definitely don't add up. You might think, all right, there's a snowstorm. So they drove up here and they got stuck. Apparently. That is not true. The car stopped at about the snow line, and they said they did confirm that the wheels had spun some, but the car wasn't stuck. And these five dudes could have pushed it free pretty easily, apparently. Right. That's thing number one. Thing number two is that it had a quarter tank of gas still, so they didn't run out of gas. Right. Then when the cops hot wired the car, the keys were gone. And when the cops hot wired the car, it started up immediately. There wasn't any engine trouble or anything like that. Yeah. The last thing they found were all these maps of California. It's not like they had no way of knowing where they were. And then they found all the wrappers from the food items. The only thing, ironically, that wasn't fully eaten was the Marathon Bar. Living up to its reputation, I guess. The toughest candy bar to get through. Yeah, that's how they build it. Some weird cartoon cowboy. Yeah. So that's the deal. The underside of the car wasn't damaged, which they say was pretty interesting, because on this road, apparently, there were a lot of deep, deep ruts. This thing kind of hangs low anyway. It has a low hanging muffler, has these five dudes inside, these grown men, and there was no damage under the underside of this car, which means a couple of things if you kind of are surmising, which is that either the driver kind of knew where they were going and drove through the darkness with a lot of precision, or they just maybe drove really slow. Yeah, I think it was the latter, because I think Madruga would have been very unhappy that his car was on this road now. So just took it slow and took it super slow. I saw somewhere that there wasn't even a large mud spot on it. They had taken it that easy. Yeah. And apparently Madruga didn't like the cold. He didn't like camping, so he wouldn't have known that road. It's not like there's a lot else to do up there, but that right. And evidently, none of the boys were big into outdoorsy type stuff. Yeah, that's a really good point, Chuck. None of them had any connection to that area, and certainly not to that mountain. One of them, I think, Bill Sterling, had gone camping with his family there eight years before. Yeah. And he didn't even like I think they went back again, and he was like, no, I don't want to go. Right. So he didn't like the outdoors, he didn't like the cold. And then I think Ted Weir had gone deer hunting or something once with friends way west of the area. But still, I mean, enough that it was a lead that the cops would have chased down. But then, too, he didn't enjoy himself, and he didn't like the woods, either, so there was no let's go hang out in the woods kind of thing going on here. Just everything about the fact that they found this car and where they found it in the state they found it in was really bizarre and really worrying. Should we take a break? I think we should. Man all right. You and I are going to go hang out in the woods, and we'll be back right up to this. So I've never swept the woods before. That was really interesting. All right, speaking span out here, they find the car. And when they find the car, chuck I think it was the next night after they had gone missing, a storm blew into the area, and it dumped, like, almost a foot of snow on the mountain. This is February in the mountains in California, I would guess. The Sierras is what it sounds like. Right. So, yeah, chico is in the Sierra Nevada. I think it's north of Sacramento. So it would be very cold and the snow would be pretty tough to get through. But they still tried. They got guys on horseback, they got helicopters out. They looked for them, but they found nothing. They found one bit. Not a single trace of these guys after just the car. And that was it. Yeah. The snow certainly didn't help anything. Right. Because it would not be until June. On June 4, after this thing, the mountain thaws out somewhat when these Sunday motorcycle bikers, they'll go ride around the mountains. They went into an old Forest Service trailer camp at the end of a road and said, do you smell something that smells like perhaps a dead body? And sadly, it was Ted Weir. And this is where things get even stranger. Yeah. So I think the trailer caught their attention. But what caught their attention even further was that a window had been broken to get into the trailer. And then, like you said, what really caught their attention was the smell and the sight of Ted weird's decomposing body. But what made it very weird is one he's wrapped in sheets tucked under his head in a way that he couldn't have possibly tucked himself. So somebody had tucked him in like that. And Ted weird been a portly fellow. Cynthia Gorney, who wrote the Washington Post article on this case in 1978, calls them beer belly handsome, which I've never heard those words put together in my entire life. Well, I think that's what I am. Sure I call you beer belly foxy. Okay. Okay. But he was beer belly handsome. He was a thick guy. He was, like \u00a35200. He had a few of extra pounds on him. Right. When they found him, though, he weighed about 100 to \u00a3120. Which means that between the time that they went missing and the time that he died, he lost anywhere between 81 hundred lbs. Yeah. A couple of more interesting tidbits. His leather shoes were gone and missing completely on the little night stand by his bed was his own ring because it had his name engraved on it. Ted. Yeah, ted. His gold necklace, his wallet with money, and then, weirdly, a watch that was not his. It was a gold Waltham watch that had a missing crystal. And all of the families said that none of our kids had this watch. Right. So that's one interesting tidbit. And the other is that he had a big full beard that indicated that he lived in that cabin for anywhere from eight to 13 weeks. Right. And what's really unnerving about the 13 week, 113 week number is that if he survived 13 weeks, that means that he would have died just days before his body was found. Is that right? Yes. Did you do the math? I did the math. Because, think about it. So they disappeared on February 24 and he was found June 4. So you've got March, April I really hope, I call on the saints that that not to have been the case. Like, that he perhaps died a couple of days before. Yeah. That he would have expired weeks before. That there was just no chance for him if he was destined and doomed to die. I really hope it wasn't a couple of days before they found his body. After starving for 13 weeks. Yeah. And to cap it off, I don't think we mentioned yet this cabin was almost 20 miles from their car. Oh, yeah. So in the middle of the night, and at this point, this is all we know is about Ted in our story. He walked or ran almost 20 miles in four to six foot snowdrifts to go to this trailer where he spent the next two to three months slowly dying. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty weird in and of itself. And they found that his feet were terribly frostbitten. Right. Which is why his shoes were off, but again, his shoes were missing. What gets even weirder. And this is just where the case truly turns bizarre. Is one of the Yuba County Sheriff's deputies. Or under sheriff called it bizarre as hell is like the quote of the story. The trailer. The cabin was actually like a Forest Service trailer. And it was an emergency trailer from what I understand. And it was fully stocked with a year's worth of food that would have kept all five of those boys alive for a year. It was built to keep you alive. Yes, exactly. And they found it, but they didn't put it to use. Now let's not say that they didn't find the food. There were twelve rations, like sea rations, like army meals opened and eaten, but that was it. The other stuff wasn't touched. There was a whole locker of other dehydrated food and like fruit cups and stuff that hadn't been touched at all. Okay. And bear in mind, this is all right here. While Ted Weir is starving to death. Yeah. So all this food is there. They found out. The investigators determined that there had not been a fire built, even though there were paperback novels, there was wood furniture, there were matches, like everything was there to build a fire. And not only that, but there was a propane tank. That all they had to do. It was in another shed outside. All they had to do was open this thing on and they would have actually had gas. Heat. Yes, heat. Right. They also didn't even cover up the broken window that they used to get into the trailer. It's just weird. Just bizarre decision after bizarre decision, right? Yeah. So there's one other thing in the trailer that is pretty interesting. They find Gary Matthias tennis shoes. So Gary Matthias tennis shoes are there and Ted Weir's leather shoes are missing. And what they think possibly is that Gary Matthias was in the trailer with Ted. Ted had terrible frostbite. Ted would have had bigger feet than Gary. Gary probably had frostbite, too. So he used Ted's shoes to put them on and go back out into the wilderness. Yeah. I mean, they pretty much determine that probably all five of those guys were in here at one point. Okay. So I have to say I don't think that's true. Oh, really? Because that's what I saw. So what I saw was that they so okay, we should probably tell everybody that we should continue on Chuck. But I think a day after they found Ted Weir, they started looking around the area and they started finding the other boys remains. Yes. And this is thanks to what I said would be sort of the lead investigator, yuba County Lieutenant Lance Ayers, who actually had gone to high school with Weir, didn't know him that well, but he was really consumed by this case and seemed sort of obsessed with trying to solve it. To the point where he was chasing down leads from psychics at one point. Yeah. Apparently he met with a psychic who told him that the boys were in Oroville or had been murdered in a red house, either brick or stained in Oroville, with the house number either 4723 or 4753. And Lance Aires was so consumed with this that he actually drove every street of Oroville over a two day period trying to find that house based on the tip of a psychic. That's how obsessed he became with this case. Yeah. So we've put a pin were they all in the cabin debate? We're coming back to that. Right? Right. All right, so now we pick up a story of a man named Joseph Jones. And this is where things get even more odd. So this guy was 55 years old. He got in touch with the cops because some strange things that had happened that night, the disappearance, he was going to go camping with his family up that road. And so he decided to take his little Volkswagen Beetle around 530 that evening just to check out the snow line, see if it was possible and if it was going to be safe to take his family camping that weekend. He found out it was not. Yeah. He got his car stuck right above the snow line, and this was to be about 50 yards further than where that Mercury would eventually be found. Right. So he gets out to push his Beetle right. And has a heart attack. He's 55, and this is 1978, which means he lived on nothing but Scotch and stake. So you can imagine that that was the outcome. Right. When you have to push your Volkswagen Beetle and he's like in a bad spot right there. He's alone in the wilderness at the snow line of a mountain 8 miles away from help. The place that he had stopped to actually get a drink, probably of Scotch on the way up the mountain to check out the snow line had been 8 miles back in the other direction. So he very wisely leaves his car running with the heater on and just lays there and tries to collect himself and gather himself. Yeah. That's a mild heart attack, we should point out, but enough that if you just have shown, you are probably freaking out. Oh, yeah. I'm not trying to diminish, like, his danger level, but it wasn't like he was laying there near death. Like he would eventually hike 8 miles out after this heart attack. Yes. But while he was laying there trying to gather his strength again sure. So this happened about 530. And he said a couple of hours after that. A car. At least one. But probably two cars. And one of them would have been a pickup truck. Came up and had their lights on. And he saw the silhouettes of some men and a woman with a baby. And he said. He called out to them and they ignored it and turned off the lights. And he got back in his car and he said he laid there for another few hours before he heard some whistling sounds and some flashlight beams a little further down the mountain, probably about 50 yards. And that would have been a couple of hours, probably about five or 6 hours after his heart attack. And they think that the second group at least, was the five boys with Gary Matthias. Yeah, well, I think at this point, they were right outside his car window. Yeah. So again, he gets out, calls for help, and the whistling sounds stopped and the flashlights get turned off. And so he goes back in his car and lays back down, and he's like, two groups of people have come up this mountain. I'm having a heart attack here, and somehow calling for help, us chase both of them off. Both groups off. Yeah. So that Volkswagen Beetle, I can tell you from experience, had like, an eight gallon gas tank, so it eventually runs out of gas. It also, now that I think about it, doesn't have a very efficient heating system. Like, my first Beetle didn't even have a fan. We just call it the ankle burner. Like, when you turned on the heat, it literally just opened vents on the floorboard that came straight off the engine. Wow, that's sharp design. So you had to be moving for there to be actually hot air running through it, man. But I do know that I had another Beetle that did have a little fan. So let's just presume that Sean's had the fan. I'm not going to I'm going to presume the opposite. I'm going to presume that this was a hellish experience for him in every way. All right, so eventually the car runs out of gas. It's still dark, and he manages, after this heart attack, like I said earlier, to walk 8 miles to a lodge called the Mountain House. Is that where he had gotten the drink? Yeah. All right, so he comes back and they're like, Shones. And he's like, don't Shones me. He has no idea what I've been through. It turns out it's pretty serious. And on the way out, he passes this Montego sitting empty in the middle of the road about 50 yards further down the mountain behind his car, where he stopped at the snow line. That's right. So Sean doesn't think much of this. He just is like, okay, well, there's a car in the middle of the road. The snow line is here. I'm not the only one who got stuck last night. Those guys are jerks for not coming to my aid when I shouted for help. And he doesn't think much of it until all of a sudden on the news, he starts seeing these reports of these five guys who went missing the same night that he had a heart attack on the same road in the same mountain, and he came forward and the cops figured out that Joseph Jones was probably the last person to see those five guys alive. Well, yeah, they're silhouettes, at least. Yeah. Should we take a break? I think so. Man all right. We're going to take a break and get to some more sad discoveries right after this. Okay. We're back, Chuck. We are. You promise? More sad discoveries. Lay it on them. All right, so the next day, after Weir's body had been found, the search is really on at this point. They found a few things. They found the remains of Sterling and Madruga. They are on different sides of the road. That same road that led to the trailer, but about eleven and a half miles from the car. Right. So presumably another about 9 miles from the trailer. Yes. Which is why, I think, that they never made it to the trailer. Put a pen in that. Okay. All right. Madruga had very gruesomely been partially eaten by animals, of course, up there in the mountains, probably after he died, though. Yeah. I think it sounds like all of this was they succumb to nature, and then the animals kind of took it from there. Right. So they dragged his body to a stream. He's laying their face up, they said, with his hand curled around his watch. And then Sterling was in the woods, and very gruesomely. They said that his remains, or his bones, I guess, were scattered over about 50ft. Yes. And then I think a day or so after that, there was another search party that was launched, and Jackie Hewitt's father insisted on being a part of it. And Jackie Hewitt was still missing. And very sadly, his dad was the one who discovered his remains. He found his son's, I think, spine is what he came upon. Yeah. The same road a lot closer to the trailer, though, right? Like just a quarter mile or something. Right? Yeah, I think that's about right. Something very close to it. And they also found his clothes. They knew it was him because his Levi's and his shirt were also found nearby. And so he was wearing very stylish platform shoes called Get Theirs, which I had to look up, and they were actually pretty fresh. Yeah. Not the kind of shoes that you want to be hiking around the snowy woods in. No, definitely not. I mean, again, platform shoes, they're like you know that rubbery sold things that you find in Clarks, like Clark wallabies, the thick rubbery sold. I think it's called crepe sold. They were like those, but platform shoes and like a Rippley bottom. Look at these things. Yeah. They're probably the worst hiking shoes you could ever imagine. What these would be good for, actually catching ladies, probably. All right, I guess. I mean, they're pretty cool. That wavy sole that looks so strange. Well, I look that up. It's to. Keep your center of balance when you're way up there. Okay, well, that makes more sense then. Yeah. There was a lot of thought put into those shoes. And then finally the next day, there was a skull discovered about 100 yards downhill. And that was the final remains from Jackie Hewitt. Yeah. So they found everybody, that is except for Gary Matthias. He was still missing. Yeah. And he still is, actually. If you go on the Yuba County Sheriff's website, on the missing person's page, he's still listed there. Yeah. His shoes were inside again in that trailer. They can't say anything for sure, though, but it suggests that he was in there at one point. And they surmised that he may have, like you said, taken them off to wear the leather shoes, I guess, presumably because they were warmer or his feet were frostbitten and had swollen. So he needed the bigger shoes to strike out back outside. He was like, I can't go out there barefoot and I can't get my tennis shoes on any longer. Yeah. And so to deal with Matthias, like we said, he was under treatment for schizophrenia. He was in the army in Germany and apparently had occasions post war where he had become violent. He was charged with assault a couple of times, but all accounts say that for at least the last two years, he had really been on his meds. He had been working in his stepdad's business. They called him one of our sterling success cases. His doctor did? Yeah. And he was really coming around and hadn't had any what is his dad he said he called them Haywire episodes. Hadn't had one of those in a couple of years. And the stepfather said that he had been taking his meds the week he disappeared. Right. And his stepfather would know because his stepfather owned a gardening business, and Gary Matthias had been working with him side by side for a couple of years by that time. He also didn't seem like one to really mince words or BS. Right. So I take him for his word that his son was fully medicated and his schizophrenia was under control, it sounds like. Yeah. So the problem is he hadn't taken his pills with him. So if he did survive, he's had gone without him. He left him at home. And the reason why he left him at home is because he fully expected to be back home a couple of hours after he left for the basketball game. Now that more evidence that it's just really bizarre that they went anywhere but home. And that raised a lot of questions for the families back in the day. I think Madruga's mom, Mabel, was very vocal about her belief that somebody had either tricked or threatened her son and the other boys into going up that mountain or somebody else was responsible for this series of decisions. Yeah. So they learned a few things afterward that are sort of clues, but never ended up solving anything. One is that a snowcat forest Service snowcat had been up that road, I think just the day before. Yeah, I think so. And packed in a path of snow. So it was walkable. So it led up to that trailer. And they surmised that the boys this might have been the only walkable path forward. Right. So they might have followed that path to the trailer. They hired a water witcher at one point, and he was in Paradise, California, and he said that he fixed his little is it divining or divining? Divining. Divining rod to pick up human minerals and traces of humans. That led them to another cabin where they found a disposable lighter. And this was about three quarters of a mile from the trailer where they found the body. And all the parents said, no, they didn't have a lighter like this. The guys didn't carry a lighter. Right. So there were a lot of dead ends like that. And for example, that watch that had been found with Ted Weir that it was missing its crystal. All the Family said that was in any of our boys watch. Right. I mean, it could be totally meaningless. It could have been a forest ranger who had left the watch behind because it had broken or something like that. But most of the evidence in this case are just those just little dead ends. Yeah. That Gary Matthias apparently knew some people, and they're really just sort of reaching at this point, new people in Forbestown, which is about halfway between Chico and Yuba City. And apparently the turn is easy to miss. And there was some speculation, like maybe he was taking his buddies to go see these people he knew got lost, but apparently those friends were like, we hadn't seen him in years, and it would be really unlikely that he just would have randomly come to visit. Yeah. I could also see the other boys not wanting to go along with that, too, because they had that basketball game in the morning that they all wanted to be fresh as a daisy for, too. Yeah. Gary Matthias had been badgering his mom, I think, like you said, to make sure he didn't oversleep the next morning because he was excited about that basketball game, too. Yeah. So the thing is, though, Chuck, is even if let's say that is the case, let's say that they all got a wild hair and they decided to go see Gary Matthias friend and they started up this mountain because they got lost. They missed the turn off and ended up on a mountain road at the snow line, thought the car was stuck. Why would all of them, all of them collectively and individually say, well, let's go up rather than back down, let's go up into the snow? Supposedly the snow drifts were six to 8ft. Even if it was packed down with the snow cat. It doesn't make sense to go forward. No. Unless they thought, well, the last side of civilization behind us was too far. Maybe there's something up here. Which is the thing. It's an economic theory called sunk cost, where you're so invested in something you're so far along that you don't want to just stop and turn back or quit. So it's possible that aided in their decision making, but again, okay, so then let's say that they're like, okay, the snow cat track is going to lead us to safety or something when they get to the trailer, like, why not eat the food? Why not make a fire? I can even see missing the propane tank, just not being just with. It enough from the harrowing experience that you can just totally miss the propane tank and not even think that your trailer is going to have that kind of thing. But the food that you've already started to eat, that you already show you have a can opener and know how to use it, how do you just starve to death after that? Well, I mean, the other food was in a locker they never opened, apparently. But if you're there, especially for two to three months, you're turning over everything. You're lighting a fire with whatever you can get your hands on. There's plenty of stuff to make a fire. Yeah. What's up with the supposed woman and the baby? That could be chalked up, maybe pretty easily to what was his name? Snopes shoots snopes. That would be snoop dogg. That could be chalked up to him in the state of a heart attack in the middle of the night, just sort of seeing things. Could have been or it could have just been an entirely different party of people who had nothing to do with it or anything to do with it. But they could have been there, too. I mean, it was a mountain. Some people lived on it. Some people apparently like camp there, which is what Sean was scouting for. How did Matthias never get found at all? I don't know. I think at the end of the Walpo article, cynthia Gordon, the journalist, says that probably he laid there on the snow somewhere that they just didn't find or overlooked or he got buried in the snow and then when the thaw came, he sunk down to the ground and was covered over by some mountain vines. I guess so. But it seems like after all these years, a bone or one of those leather shoes or something would have been found. Yeah. You'd think both of those would still be intact. Yeah. I mean, what I did not see was any sort of speculation that he had had any nefarious actions. No, but we did put a pin in something. I don't remember what it was. I saw a couple of theories that they speculate that all of these guys went to the cabin at one point, and maybe we wasn't doing so well. So they all set out independently to go look for help, and each died, or maybe in pairs, maybe, since the two guys were kind of found together. But I don't know. It's all just speculation. You saw that they don't think they were all there. Yeah, what I saw was that Jackie Hewitt and Bill Sterling and Jack Madruga had never made it to the trailer. They would have split up on the way up. No. That they had or died during that 20 miles hike. Yes. Interesting. And then Ted and Gary had continued on up and made it to the trailer. And then what I think happened after that was Gary nurse, Ted. Gary had been in the army, and the can opener that was there was actually a very simple thing called the P 38. But you kind of had to have been in the army to know how to use it, and Ted wouldn't have been, and Gary would have been. So I think Gary may have stayed, probably fed both of them. And then, as you said, seeing Ted was not doing so well. Set out again with Ted shoes and died going off to get help somehow. That's what I think happened. Yeah, I would have think they get split up on the way up, though? I just don't even know. Like, these guys would have died that quickly on the way. On this 20 miles hike. I mean, six to eight foot snowdrifts. That's cold. Yeah, but they're also on the snow packed trail, supposedly. Sure. But they also have, like they're dressed for mild weather. Like, they didn't have jackets, sweaters. Their shoes were like Converse kind of things. Aside from the platform shoes, it's entirely possible that a 20 miles hike up a mountain, they succumb to the weather. Yeah. And you also like it was hard to determine what level of intellectual impairment these boys had, so I don't know how much that plays into it, if at all. Like, when they get to this cabin because he didn't have his meds after that, did he start kind of breaking down with some episodes of schizophrenia and leave? Yeah. Did the other guy not fully understand? I mean, at that point, he's exhausted and may be hurt and scared. Was he not even able to figure out maybe to light a fire? Light a fire or how to use that can opener? Or maybe he felt he couldn't get out of bed because of his feet. Yes. And he was just stuck there after Gary struck out to go get help, that there was nothing he could do, and the poor guy starved to death. What were they doing up there to begin with? That's the basic root of this whole thing. Yeah, but that's why they call this the American Diet love Pass. We got to do an episode on that one, too. But because there's, like, a mystery within a mystery within a mystery. There's so many other mysteries that just kind of crescendo from the first mystery, which is what were they doing there? Like you said, some of the parents firmly believe that they witnessed something at this basketball game and were then chased up this mountain. I don't even know what that means. They witnessed a crime, they came after him or something. That's what Ted Weir's sister in law always believed. And speaking of Ted Weir, you got anything else on this? No, except to only say if that was the case, then why was the car seemingly driven very slowly and carefully at this road if they were being chased? Okay, so you make a good point, and I think I saw that elsewhere, too. That virtually proves that they weren't chased. Yeah. If anything, it shows that something happened to them and somebody ditched their car. Who knew the area? I think more likely Jack Madrugo just would have driven extraordinarily slowly because this is his baby car. Yeah. Sounds very sad. I think it's just one of those it's probably like Occam's razor. It's probably the most simple explanation is maybe they just went on a little joyride, got a little lost, got turned around in the woods and succumbed to nature. Yeah. So I find this I said at the beginning that this is just a very sad story to me. Yeah. And one of the things that got me was in that Washington Post article. It's called Five Boys Who Never Come Back by Cynthia Gorney from 1978. You can find it online, but she describes Ted Weir as, Are you ready for this? That Ted got a good chuckle out of phoning Bill Sterling and reading from newspaper items or oddball names from the telephone book. That's what he was into. That's what made him happy. And I'm sure Bill Sterling thought it was hilarious, too, but they were just this group of friends. And can't you just imagine? We are, like, going through the phone book, looking for silly names and going and picking up the phone and calling his friend Bill Sterling and saying, bill, get a load of this one. And Bill is just laughing on the other end of the line. And they just had such a pure life, almost like an enviable life in a lot of ways. And that they died so horribly is just bitterly sad to me. Yeah. I mean, they weren't troublemakers. And even the one who had gotten convicted of assault a couple of times gary. Yeah. Gary. It seems like all signs point to his mental illness is playing a big factor in that which he had gotten in check. Right, exactly. All very sad. It is very sad. Well, if you have any theories on the what do you call them? The Yuba city. Six five. Yuba county or Yuba City? Five. Yuba City Five. Yeah. We want to hear them. You can find all of our social media connections on our website. STUFFYou shouldn't have come. And if you like, you can also send us an email. Just shoot it off to Stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. Wait, we haven't done this in the mail, have we? No. You're just going to let me keep going, weren't you? All right, well, hold on, everybody. Hold on. Stop yet. Since I said some stuff I'm not supposed to say, it's time for listener mail. Yes, and speaking of which, this listener mail is rated R. Okay? That's all I'll say. Doesn't use the S word, no, but it doesn't use curse words. It just talks very frankly about sex. And it's good PSA, though. I know this kind of stuff. Yes, for sure. And this is from Emily, not my wife. Hey, guys, listen to the select episode on condoms the other day. Thanks for all the great info. Appreciate you covering topics maybe slightly controversial or divisive and do so with such great I wanted to throw a little extra PSA in there, though, for your listeners. Most people are aware that you can and should use condoms to prevent pregnancy and or STIs when apnis is involved. But there's far less awareness about protection when you've only got vaginas in the mix. Although you certainly can't get pregnant. It is possible to spread or contract an STI from sex between two women or other vagina having people. But you can greatly reduce your risk of this by using a dental dam. It's a sheet of latex placed over the bulba or anus for oral sex, and that's all there really is to it. If you don't have one on hand, you can safely DIY one by unrolling a regular condom, cutting off the clothes end, and bam. It's a dental dam. In the case of digital sex, not as in computers as in fingers, latex gloves are perfect for the job. Of course, these can also be used by absolutely anyone. There's a lot more awareness of protection for heterosexual and male homosexual couples, and not a lot for queer women. Well, that's my stuff you should know, and now you know it. Thanks for consistently great work and outstanding effort and educating and entertaining us every week. And happy Pride Month. And she wrote back, I just realized I gave an incomplete DIY instruction. You would cut off the close end of the condom and the ring on the open end, then cut down the middle, and now it's a flat sheet. Bam. So that is from Emily. Thanks a lot, Emily. Happy Pride Month indeed. Good info. Yeah, it was good info. And if you out there want to send us good info, I already said it. I said it once and I'll say it again. You can find all our social stuff on Stuffyshirenow.com, and you can send us an email to Stuffpodcast at houses. Stuffworks.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/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-02-17-sysk-underground-railroad.mp3 | SYSK Selects: How the Underground Railroad Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-underground-railroad-worked | As early as 1786, groups assembled to help slaves escape lives of bondage. And, as the 19th century progressed, the emergent Underground Railroad grew more sophisticated in aiding escaped slaves. But how did it work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more. | As early as 1786, groups assembled to help slaves escape lives of bondage. And, as the 19th century progressed, the emergent Underground Railroad grew more sophisticated in aiding escaped slaves. But how did it work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more. | Sat, 17 Feb 2018 11:00:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=11, tm_min=0, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=48, tm_isdst=0) | 34772215 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects me. And Chuck agreed that we should rerelease our episode on the Underground Railroad. First came out in June of 2011, and it was a pretty good one, but it's since we just released our Harriet Tubman episode, we thought this might tie in quite well. So sit back, relax, and enjoy hearing about the thrilling stories from the Underground Railroad and happy Black History Month. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and with me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, which makes this stuff. You should know the podcast because Chuck and I are the host of that. Hostesses? No host. Chuck. Yes. How are you? I'm great, man. How are you? I'm fine. It's you and I and Matt, our guest producer. Yeah. Mattie alone in this entire building. Yeah. It's the Friday before Memorial Day. Friday afternoon even. And it's pretty empty in here. Yes, it is. There's lots of echoes that we're going to have to adjust for and post. Right. Do we do post anymore? Is this like, basically just live to tape? This? Live to tape. At least we're not getting hateful stares as we walk through the office. Yeah, it's refreshing. So, Chuck, as you know, I grew up in Ohio. I was hoping you would mentioned this. Well, I grew up in Ohio. Your hopes are fulfilled. Another reason why well, it turns out I recently learned from this article on how the Underground Railroad worked. We talked about how this is going to be problematic, that an estimated half of all Underground Railroad workers were from Ohio or lived in Ohio or part of Ohio. I had no idea about that. But reading that, it makes sense because that was such a part of my upbringing as a child. Everybody's house that was built in, like, the 19th or 18th century had, like, oh, this is where they kept the freed slaves in the Underground Railroad. Everybody's house had like, a little spot that supposedly was part of the Underground Railroad just to have the heritage or some real some were more believable than others. Right. But normally it was like a public building or like a national historic register building that they gave tours to that was part of the Underground Railroad. But everybody's house had a little spot in the basement where yes. Conceivably human beings could stand here and hide out. I see. I grew up in Georgia, so that we didn't have those talks. No. And apparently in this article, the author points out, and I don't know where she got this, but that there's still blemishes on families who are known to have helped slaves on the Underground Railroad in the south still today. I totally don't know what she's talking about. I thought that was completely out of left field. It was. I grew up in this state and I've never heard anybody be like the guy that lives down the street. Their family used to hide slaves 200 years. It's not true. But you were familiar with the Underground Railroad before this article. I was, but it's a good time to point out that not nearly enough, because black history is so glossed over in American schools, except in February, and it's still even in February that I went through all my schooling with just knowing, like, there was an Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman ran it. That's it. Period. Yeah. Never learned about Malcolm X. I think dred. Scott may have been mentioned briefly, but yeah, it's very sad. And hopefully that's changed some since then. Well, for the listeners who had similar experiences, we're about to remedy that, because we're going to tell you not only how it worked, we're going to tell you in so much detail that you could conceivably go start your own right now. Right. And there are some still around today. Yeah. Human trafficking. Yes. Human trafficking is the new word for slavery, basically, where it usually is forced into sex work. Right. And there are groups who are dedicated to, like, freeing sex workers from forced labor. They're called Polaris, which is renaming of the North Star. Yeah. We should do a podcast on human trafficking. I think we have a good article on that. Okay. That Molly wrote, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. You ready? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So, Chuck, basically, the origins of the Underground Railroad, which was the network by which escaped slaves ran along to freedom, almost always to Canada if they were going north, as it turns out, probably started before the 1820s. But it couldn't have possibly been called the Underground Railroad until after the 1820s, because the actual railroad system wasn't invented until then. Either that or they were, like, way ahead of their time. Right. But it may have had some sort of name. And we know that there were groups of people who were formed for the common purpose of aiding escaped slaves to go secure freedom to get out of the south or get out of a slave state into protection in a non slave state, because George Washington complained about it in a letter in 1786 that he suspected some Quakers that helped some of his slaves escape. He was probably right on the money, too. Yeah. Because Quakers were one of the earliest members of the Underground Railroad, and they were the most trusted because they were so recognizable and everybody knew, hey, Quakers will help you out. Definitely the most trusted white people, for sure. Right. But we should probably point out the reason everybody went to Canada was because there was a federal law in the US. Right? That's right. What was it called? It was called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. And it was around since 1793, but it really got its teeth in 1850 when it strengthened the fines and basically made helping a slave escape a federal crime and then in non slave states as well. And pretty much meant if you were caught as a slave, you were going to be put to death and likely tortured in a public place. And maybe even your slave family or friends that you were with on the plantation were also punished even though they didn't try to escape. So anyone involved in this, and even not being involved, but being involved by a relationship or something like that, really had a lot to lose from this one person making it to freedom, which really is just very heartening when you look back on what these people did. They risked a lot in the 1850 stiffening of the Slave Act. Right. If you armed a slave, which is routinely done because this is dangerous, then you were subject to execution no matter who you were, white, black, whatever, that was punishable by being executed. So people who are helping escape slaves were putting a lot on the line, right? Yeah. And one of the myths there's a few myths that even this article kind of perpetuates a bit. Not rarely, but more often than not, they were other black people or former slaves or current slaves helping the other slaves on the Underground Railroad. It was not a big happy group of white northern abolitionists risking their life to help out the slaves. They did that some, but it was usually Quakers or, like I said before, slaves or former slaves. Okay, so that's one myth, there's a few others. Well, let's go through this. What did an escape look like right along the Underground Railroad during its height in the mid 19th century? What would happen was free black people would send a field agent, what they called the field agents, a lot of times a minister or doctor posing as, like, a census taker to anybody who could move through the community undetected. Yeah. So they would make contact with a current slave who supposedly wanted to escape, and they had to gain their trust because this whole thing was about trust. You really had to trust because people would sell out their own kind to gain favor with the master sometimes. So sometimes you couldn't even trust your fellow slave. So you really had to gain their trust as the field agent. And then they would eventually, once that trust was gained, arrange for the escape from the plantation to travel to the first safe house, to a conductor actually, I'm sorry, they pass along to the conductor who would take you to your first station. Yes. And that was the beginning of the journey. Right. And the station was basically somebody's house, usually. Yeah. And the head of the household was the station master, and it was somebody who was putting his life and the life of his families on the line to feed and house and hide this person for a little while, possibly set them up with the disguise, which they got fairly elaborate. Yes. There's a story of one, and apparently with a seminal work on the Underground Railroad, appropriately titled The Underground Railroad written by Wilbur Seabird. And he talks about how a black woman was basically made up to look like a wealthy white woman and to complete this disguise, was given a white baby for her journey. That's crazy. Yeah. So people were fanatic about this. I read another one, a couple from Savannah. The woman was the daughter of her slave owner, and her mother was a house servant, so she was light skinned, so they had her pose as a frail, aging white man. Really? And her husband posed as, like, a loyal servant slave on their journey all the way from Savannah up to, I think, Philadelphia or Boston. But yeah, that was kind of harrowing. Apparently, they were almost found out a bunch of times. Really? Yeah. So I can imagine just trying to escape through the woods is scary enough. Trying to escape disguised in plain sight has to just be nerve wracking. Yeah. Especially the lady with a white baby, because I imagine that whoever might have found her out would not have been too happy about that. No. At the time, at least along the way, if you did maybe encounter a train conductor who found you out but was willing to keep his mouth shut for money, you needed money. Most slaves didn't have money because they were not paid. Right. And I guess at the station, the station master might also hook you up with some money that came from what are called stockholders. Right. And stockholders were probably wealthy abolitionists who didn't really want to get their hands dirty, but were happy to support the cause financially. True. Right. Yeah. And I didn't get where they just people who supported the cause basically financially. Yeah. But obviously in their hearts as well. Sure. Now I know what you mean, though. They didn't risk walking people through the woods. No. And abolitionists, despite their desire to end slavery, were frequently accused, and rightfully so, in a lot of cases of saying, well, we think slavery is abominable, but you're freed, and that's great, but go live over there. We still want to just have our very lily white parties and lives and all that. Right. And there were a lot of abolitions like that. So I would imagine that just giving money to people to use for bribes or for travel or to support the station houses probably really hit home. It's the same thing today. Yeah. Like, people don't go help, say, the homeless, you're resolving your guilt. They give money to organizations that actually deal with the homeless. Right. I think that this is very similar to that. I think you're probably right. Runaways usually didn't travel alone, although, again, I read somewhere else on one of the websites that a lot of times they were alone, but when they weren't, they would have a conductor or guide them to the next station, usually about a day away. They didn't want to make it like a three day journey because you probably don't have tons of food and water and it's just more dangerous the further you're going. Right. Not between station houses. The journey itself, the freedom, lasts days, weeks, months. Yeah. Each station was about a day away, ideally. Right. They would follow the North Star. Yeah. That's why that one modern Polaris. Yeah, that's why it's called that full circle. Yeah. When the clouds were out there's. The old trick of looking where the moss grows, because on tree trunks, moss usually grows on the north side and you want to be headed north. There were instances where because they made it a very zigzag route, usually they didn't want to make it a straight line, so it made it easier to track, but it also made it easier to get lost as a slave. It did. And actually, there's a sidebar toward the end of this talking about quilt patterns. Right. And there were codes embedded within that may be a myth. I found a substantial amount of it. Really? I found stuff saying that was like mythical, that in the songs, check out Osblackhistory.com. They have this list, this key of what all these different quilt patterns are and what they meant to slaves who came upon a quilt. And one of them was this kind of zigzagged X. It's called the drunken path. And basically it's saying like, go in a zigzag pattern because there's slave hunters around. And if you start walking south, they would be less likely to suspect that you were an escape slave if you looked like you were purposefully walking south. Because what, slave would walk south? That's where the south is, right? Yeah, that's a good point. But I mean, if it is made up, the schedule a good job of perpetuating it, because it's very interesting. Well, even in here it says it's one of the well known legends. Or not. They just don't know because a lot of this stuff and it's good that you bring that up. A lot we don't know about because the Underground Railroad was secret, so we don't know about a lot of the places. We don't know a lot of the routes or the people who work there or who actually started it. Josh also, I mentioned the moss on the trees. Clear nights were better to see the stars. But traveling in the rain was pretty good, too, because fat white plantation owner probably wanted to be inside by the fire when it was raining and not chasing after his slaves. So let's talk about the laws. We mentioned it kind of specifically earlier about some of the I guess the punishment that could befall anyone helping somebody. Right? Yeah. And in 1793, the Fugitive Slave Act basically created the first laws that said an escaped slave can be gone and gotten legally right. But there were slave states and there were non slave states, and the non slave states said, that's a great law, and you do whatever you want down in the south, but we're not really going to enforce it, and when we do, it's going to be very light. Right. Well, in 1850, this thing got a lot of teeth, like you were saying, and the fines were stepped up, the penalties were harsher, execution was a lot more doable, I guess. And then it also became legal for slave hunters to walk into a free state, a non slave state, and be like, hey, that black guy right there, I think he's an escape slave. He should come with me to anybody. He could legally claim it without having to justify, even if there were free men. Yes. And apparently there were rumors of slave traders like luring young black kids in free states on the boats and then taking them off to the deep south. And it's like, what are you going to do? How are you going to find these people? There's no documentation like this. So basically, the north came to really resent this change in the law in 1850, because people who are complacent living in non slave states, suddenly we're kind of having slavery imposed upon them a little more. Right. And then the dred Scott case, like you mentioned earlier, that really sealed the deal and really got abolitionists, I guess. Their roles expanded tremendously after that, and then as a result, also, the underground railroad became much more organized. Yeah. That is dred scott v. Sanford. And it was famous because dred scott, a slave, sued for his freedom, for himself and his wife and his two daughters, and on the grounds that they lived quite a bit of their lives in places like wisconsin and Minnesota and these outlying northwest territories or northern territories that had where it was illegal. Slavery was actually illegal. So he sued on those grounds. And in one of probably the worst supreme court decisions in the history of this country, they decided because the panel was full of southerners. The panel supreme court justices were a lot of southerners, and they ruled that black people were not or people of African descent, were not citizens of the United States. Free or not, they are not citizens, therefore they cannot sue for their freedom. Right. They don't have any rights. So they can be basically captured and taken to a life of slavery again. But if it hadn't been for the dred Scott case, we may never have well, we may have, but it really sped up the process of the 13th amendment, the emancipation proclamation, and hence the civil war, and hence the civil war. And some of his descendants still live in st. Louis today. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, shout out to the Scott to the st. Louis if they're listening. Yes. And Chuck, we said that this precipitated the Civil War, the Underground Railroad helped move it along. The dread Scott case, basically, these things, Northerners actively subverting federal law, and the South's economic clout really ticked the south off the south, imposing its views on slavery on the north through this 1850 strengthening. And the dred Scott case, it really ticked off the north. So this division is very much part of what led up to the Civil War. Yeah. Pennsylvania even thought about nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act because they didn't like it so much. But then they decided, you know what a better way to do this is probably to be subversive and to support things like the Underground Railroad on the down low rather than cause some big political stink. Write a check. Exactly. Right. So we say that because the Civil War, whenever you ask a kid, why did this war happen? Slavery. I mean, that's a big part of it. But that's why it's not just slavery. It wasn't like the north was like, slavery is wrong, and we're going to go to war with you over it. Or the south was like, we love slavery. We're not part of you any longer. Right. Although the latter, I've heard recently, was much closer to the point that the south was perfectly happy with Seceding creating its own country and basically creating an economic empire based on free labor that took over the entire Caribbean in the southern US. Yeah. I wish I was more of a Civil War buff. I'm glad you're not Chuck. Really? Yes. They're obnoxious. I wouldn't say obnoxious, but, man, do they know a lot about Civil War. Yeah. And they like, correcting people, too. And we're going to hear from them. Yes. So, Chuck, when you did finally make it out along this route up to the extreme Northern states, the northern part of the extreme Northern states, and to Canada, it could take days, weeks, months. It could take 24 hours if you happen to have the money and the gall to ride a train. Or if you live in a border state. Yeah. Which apparently is why a lot of slaves never escape from the Deep South. Longer to go. It was longer to go. And they wouldn't have taken the Underground Railroad, which went exclusively North, I believe. Right. They would have gone to Florida or to Mexico. Never knew that. So Mexico in 1829 outlawed slavery and became active in protecting slaves who escaped to Mexico. Yeah. Native American Indians, go figure, were very empathetic. They were probably like, Join the club, my man. Come on in. Almost literally. Chuck so in Florida, in 1693, Spain said, we're issuing a decree here that says any slave or Native American who leaves an English colony and makes it to Florida is a free member of the Spanish Crown. All we want from you is that you convert to Catholicism and become a member of the military for a prescribed amount of time. Right. And in return. You're a citizen here. Right. So that's why Florida attracted a bunch of people. And the reason they did it was specifically to attract people from the English territories like Georgia, South Carolina, because they wanted to jumpstart the economic engine, but they weren't going to do it on slavery. Right. I wonder what impact that has today. I wonder if there are more African American Catholics in Florida proportionately because of that. Well, one of the impacts that it had that still around a day are the Seminoles. The Seminoles were a recent tribe that started in about the 18th century based on displaced Creek Indians who made it to Florida to take Spain up on their offer and escape slaves. Really? And now there's a division in the Seminole tribe between black Seminoles and red Seminoles. They don't always get along, but during this time, the Seminole Indians came up because in a lot of cases, black slaves, freed slaves, or escaped slaves would come up to an Indian sentiment, live near it, or be absorbed into it. And that's where the Seminoles came from. That's pretty cool, isn't it? There's really one jerk in this whole thing, and that's white Europeans. Yeah, our ancestors check they were white Northerners, too. It's not all in the south. White Northerners, sure, probably. Yeah. Anyway, I'm just always stick up for the south. Well, think about it. There were an estimated 20 00, 30 00 underground railroad workers. There are a lot more people in the US. In the north and the south. And that at the time, buddy. Yeah, that's a good point. It is interesting, though, to me that you said Canada, because that was where many of them ended up, and I never knew that. And it made sense because why go to Pennsylvania even though they're sympathetic to a certain degree when the Fugitive Slave Act still is hanging over my head and somebody could turn me in for some dough if they wanted to? Yeah, let's just go to Canada where they don't care, and they don't have those laws. Plus, I mean, it's not like you're going to just stop in Detroit. You're going to be like, oh, no, I'm going to keep moving to Canada. Exactly. So we were saying that there was some involvement by some people. There was separate involvement, disconnected involvement, whatever. But some of the people, some of these abolitionists and freed slaves and escaped slaves who made lives for themselves formed in these Northern non slave states and enclaves where an escape slave can feel very free. Like Boston, philadelphia, I think. New York. They formed these things called vigilance committees, right? Yeah, it's very nice. They provided some protection for them, try to get them work, trying to get them a place to live. And it's just sort of like, hey, now you're safe now, and we're going to help you set up life as an American and get something that everyone in this country should be born with, which is freedom. Right. And here's a credit card to enslave you in a different way. That came later and that touched all raises. It did, yes. So, Chuck, there's one person who kind of rose above all others as far as the Underground Railroad went, and her name was Harriet Tubman. She is still referred to as the Moses of her people. Yeah. It is not a cliche to bring up Harriet Tubman. Of course you're going to bring up Harriet Tubman. Of course we are. Because she was the Moses of her people. Yeah. And she was an escaped slave from Maryland. And very sadly, I went back to get her family and help them escape. Found her husband, had a new wife and he was like, yeah, stay here. Yeah. And she wasn't too happy with that, clearly. So she reportedly books a kind of hardened her a little bit, which in the end helped her because you sort of needed a bit of a hard heart to lead people on the Underground Railroad. You didn't need whiners and criers and people that would draw attention and make noise. Yes. Apparently she would threaten to kill people if they didn't. Shut up. Yeah. Like, quiet down, I'm trying to get you to freedom. Just shut up about it, was her motto. Officially, I think. And she was individually probably the most successful conductor on the Underground Railroad, right? Yeah. I think at least 70 slaves that she led to freedom, to New York and Canada personally, 13 journeys, and these are long trips. Well, think about it. Also, she's an escaped slave. She goes back into slave states 13 times to guide people out. She's a big bad mama. She went on to serve as a spy, as a scout and a nurse for the Union Army and received no military wartime pension for that, even though she was Harriet Tubman and went on to sell fruits and vegetables door to door. You're joking. And wrote a book and lived off profits from her book. She actually made money off of it, which is good. The US. So, Chuck, you want to talk about how many people were let out? We mentioned Harriet Tubman let at least 70 out personally. And estimates vary wildly as to how many people escaped. As we said, the heyday of the Underground Railroad was 18. Some people maintain about 100,000 people escaped, which is huge. Yeah. On the other end, the journal Black Studies estimates that between 1830 and 60, only about 2000 people escaped via Underground Railroad. The National Park Service settles somewhere in the middle and says, let's say 1000 per year. Yeah, it's a lot, but again, it's very secretive. People have no idea who is who, whether a house really was a stop. There are some places that are most decidedly parts of the Underground Railroad that are still around today, like the Dobbin Horse Tavern in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as Movable bookcase that people used to hide in. It was a house at the time, but because of the secrecy and because of the success of it, we have no idea who was a part of it, who wasn't. And that's pretty neat, I think. But the National Park Service has really spent a lot of time and effort and money so far figuring out where the Underground Railroad ran and who was a part of it and what buildings were and to preserve the buildings. And there's actually a bike trail that you can ride, I think, 2200 miles or something like that, along established, identified underground Railroad routes. Yeah, pretty cool. I just wanted to point out, when you said, America's, checkered history, I still feel England's stink on this. Oh, yeah. It was early enough to wear. It wasn't, like, rednecks from the south. These are still, like, English fops doing this stuff. So I blame England. All right? You blame England? I'm trying to figure out when my line is drawn and when I'm saying this was America, because even after the revolutionary, world still just people from England living here. Okay, so England is your fault. Take that, England. And is Canada's a big hero to you in this? Yeah, of course, man. You know, that's still a territory of the English crown. Oh, really? Yeah. You on that one, pal. I don't know what to think. So wait, before we go, we have to mention John Brown. We talked about how a lot of people were like, here's some money. I'll be a stockholder in the Underground Railroad and impress my friends. John Brown walked the walk. He lived in free black colonies. If he didn't do it himself, he oversaw the murder of five unarmed pro slavery settlers in Kansas, which is up for grabs between slavery and a non slavery state. Right. And he basically turned into a gorilla and staged raids on prosperity settlements and killed lots of people. And then he staged the rate on Harper's Ferry and was eventually caught and hanged for it. But he was, as far as the abolitionists go, I guess you could say equal to Harriet Tubman as far as in the abolitionist camp where she was in the freed slaves camp. He was hands on and did it. Did you hear the box car guy who packed himself up in a box and had himself shipped to Philadelphia? No. Did it work? Yeah. Awesome. He had some biscuits and a little bit of water and some air holes, and I think his nickname is Box Car. I can't remember his full name, but they opened up the crate in Philadelphia and he climbed out, and they were like, congratulations, you're a free man. Holy cow. So the bravery not just the slaves themselves, people who helped the bravery of these people at the time cannot be understated. Agreed. Because you were getting tortured and killed if you were caught, and all for your freedom. That's all. You're looking for pretty heavy stuff. Yes. So, Chuck, if they want to learn more about the Underground Railroad, they should type in Underground Railroad in the search BARHOW stuffworks.com, right? And that, of course, brings up listener mail. And, you know, I bet the ladies from Stuff you missed in history class have probably done one on this already. I believe so. And so I would seek that out for another angle because sometimes we double up and it's always good to hear different angles on these things. Yeah, and they're a great show, too. And you can compare it word for word eventually by comparing the transcripts on the blogs. Right. They're like they were a lot more factual than Chuck and Josh. All right, Josh. I'm going to call this a critical email from Katie. We don't read a lot of criticism as much, but this was very specific, so I thought we would hi, Chuck and Josh. I'm a new listener but have recently listened to about 60 of your shows. I am 31 years old and work as a film producer. You guys have really grown on me slowly. The concept of the show is the best part. I think there are a few things that are keeping you guys from really going big and would like to share my thoughts. First, I think the podcasts are a bit slow and have a few too many personal jokes every time Chuck has a personal story to go along with the topic, this is the least entertaining and interesting. Your personal relationships to the topic are mundane. Sorry, this should be cut. The banter is good. You are clearly smart and witty and that is enough to keep the listener engaged. Josh, your intros are so boring. Why not mix it up and or cut the small talk? I fast forward past it every time and I think your listener mail is the worst part of the podcast. I think you lose at least half, if not more of your listeners at this part. Save that stuff for the blog. The podcasts themselves need to be solid and tight. The production value fails in comparison to this American life for Planet money. For these reasons, I would highly suggest getting a new producer. Taking potshots at Jerry. This is so wrong. You need a makeover big time. You need new music in your intros and throughout the show, perhaps sound effects and more out of studio commentary. Some of my favorite podcasts are saunas, Hangovers, Cremation, sherpas, Reincarnation, Mummies and altitude. Basically go be radio lab. I listened to your Guatemala pieces while I was traveling Guatemala last week. Pretty cool. In hopes of supplementing my education about the country while traveling there. But you failed miserably. Actually, she says it failed miserable. I get the point, though. They were my least favorite podcasts you guys have done, and I think you genuinely wasted your listeners time with your personal pointless stories about your free vacation I was shocked to learn how small your perspective of the world is, considering how often you both write and research about the world. Your impressions of Guatemala sounded like you've never left the south. They were naive and not worthy of 2 hours of my time. On the other hand, it was fantastic to listen how volcanoes work while climbing volcanoes in Antiqua. This is what you guys are best at, and you need to stick to this, but it needs to be better. Seriously, you have mastered the podcast medium, but there is so much potential yet to be tapped. She says taped, but I guess she means tapped. I hope you guys continue to make great podcasts and that you really up the production value. Thank you, Katie MPs. I happen to own a house in Turkey, and I spent much time in Turkish baths. You define them incorrectly in your sono podcast. Who is that? Katie? Yes, katie m. Thank you, Katie, for the tips. We appreciate the insight, and thanks for listening. We don't know why, but thank you for listening. Right? Well, we've mastered the medium okay. Except for the 50 points. Well, if you have any pointers for us or tips, we want to hear them. We're always open to that kind of thing, so shoot us an email at stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House Deport staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow." | |
8a5db7ec-4a58-11e8-a49f-1ba020231da8 | SYSK Selects: How Patents Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-patents-work | What was originally designed to encourage innovation by rewarding the people who create technological advances, the U.S. patent system has become a big mess. | What was originally designed to encourage innovation by rewarding the people who create technological advances, the U.S. patent system has become a big mess. | Sat, 01 Sep 2018 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=244, tm_isdst=0) | 59238690 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its your old pal me, Josh, and I am here to bring you today's SYSK selects episode called How Patents Work. It sounds like it will make your eyes bleed out of boredom, but do not, not get it wrong. It's actually one of our most interesting episodes ever. And it is seriously, sincerely, honestly, everything you could ever possibly want to know about patents. And I would guess that we've never said the word patent more than we do in this episode. So enjoy it. It's from November of, 2014. Take a little time to learn about patents. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. There's jerry, too, by the way. Hey, Jerry. Who's ready for January? Me. Yeah. 2015? You're ready for a new year? I'm ready for this year to be done, yeah. I think it's been kind of a cool year. No, it's been fun. I'm just tired. I feel I'd be much more rested in 2015. It's October. You know, we got a little ways to go. I know. And this is my favorite month, too. Just kind of a drag. I'm so tired. You hippie. You're going to start saying far out next, aren't you? It is far out. So, Chuck yes? I'm very curious. Do you have any patents to your name? No, man, I don't have an inventive mind. I don't either. My brother does, and he's had some good ideas that have later been made into inventions. Why didn't he patent them? I don't know, man. Every time I see a new one, I sent it to him and say, hey, I remember when he had this idea. Twelve years ago. Scott. Yeah. What are you doing? I know. Well, he's got a bunch of pinball tables, so he's doing all right. Yeah. He doesn't own the patent on them, though. No, but he could. You know why? Because it's America. That's right. So it turns out, Chuck, and doing a little bit of research, that there's mention of patents and patent protection in the Constitution. Yeah, dude, not even the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech isn't even mentioned in the Constitution. It's in the Bill of Rights. But patent protection is in the Constitution. Article one, section eight, clause eight, which is known as the intellectual property clause. And it says, quote, congress shall have the power ellipse to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. And since this is the late 18th century, a lot of that stuff is just like randomly capitalized. Like a 6th grader wrote it or something. Right. My apologies to all of you 6th grade listeners out there who know your capitalization. We love proper. Now it's in the Constitution. Like, if you invent something that's new and novel and cool. We think you should have some sort of government sanctioned monopoly over that, at least for a limited amount of time. You know why? Why? Because very early on, the United States said, we want to encourage inventiveness and forward thinking and entrepreneurship and great ideas. Yeah, they were on board pretty early, even though it's sort of a mess these days. Which we'll talk about, I guess, in the end. Oh, yeah, we will. But, yeah, the whole purpose of a patent system, and apparently it's one of the hallmarks of the modern society, I guess. They have a patent office. It says, we value innovation, we value technological progress, artistic progress. Sure. And we're going to show a commitment to that by basically saying, again, I guess the best way to put it is a monopoly on your invention for a limited amount of time. And it harkens back. Apparently, the first patent was issued in 1449 in jolly old England by King Henry VI, who gave it to a guy who didn't even have a last name. Well, yeah, sure of Utenom is not a last name. That's where you're from. Yeah, but that served it sound like I'm Josh of Toledo. I'm just saying this medieval it's not the 16th century. No, it's not. No. So John of Uttenham got a patent from King Henry VI for stained glass manufacturing. Yeah. Back then, patents in England, it was a little bit different. It was more like, hey, we want to protect the Crown and our country and our good friends and our good friends of the Crown and make sure that if they have an idea that we can go after anyone else in any other country, even if it's something like stained glass, that's already clearly being done in places like Italy. Right. It was basically like, you now officially are the only person who can make stained glass. It was a bit of a sham. Yeah. They would give out patents not just on an item or an idea or an invention, but like a whole industry. So, like, somebody held the patent on the publishing industry for a while. Apparently it got out of hand because it was just royal prerogative left and right. Yeah, it didn't last that long, though. By the 1624, they started to pass statutes and laws to try and curb that abuse of power any way they could and make it a little more like the patent system that we know and support today. Yeah. They were like, the Crown can't give out patents unless it's for a new invention. So yeah, that is very similar to what we have today. So right off the bat, America is like new country, we're setting up a patent office and the first person to get a patent in the United States was one Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins is the last name. Not Samuel of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Samuel Hopkins, Pittsburgh, Vermont. That is yeah. He got a patent for an improvement in the making of potash. Is it potash or potash? I don't know. I said it eight different ways in my head earlier. Well, one of those is right. Yes. And so he held the first patent, actually, and the person that reviewed his patent was a man named Thomas Jefferson. Yeah. He was big on innovation, as was Lincoln. And Lincoln is the only president to actually hold a patent. He got a boat stuck one time in a river and said, hey, that'd be neat if we could find a way to not get boats stuck. Right. So he devised the system to unstick boats when they were stuck on a sandbar if the river was too shallow or something. Yeah. By inflating some buoys, they would just basically let you float over and they were like, President Lincoln, that's a great idea. Here's your patent. Well, he was a congressman at the time, but yeah, he's the only president to hold a patent. And then Jefferson handled the application process for a while before passing it off to other Cabinet members. And then eventually they're like, this is all out of hand. We need to establish our own patent office, and so on. Yeah, I think they grossly underestimated the number of patent applications they were going to receive. People got their invention on. Yeah. The first patent that Samuel Hopkins received. Jefferson examined. He signed it. He gave it to the Secretary of Ore, who signed it, who then passed it on to the Attorney General, who signed it, and then President George Washington signed it. So that wasn't a sustainable process. And then, Chuck, there's, like, tons of millions of patents, I think. Like 5.7 million patents. Tons of millions. Yeah. 5.7 is a ton. Yeah, it is. Anyway, there was this notable one that I think is kind of hilarious. Mark Twain. A beloved American humorist, I'm sure. Who doesn't like Mark Twain? Man, there's a lot of Twain haters. Well, he invented the elastic broth strap. Oh, really? Yeah. I wonder why. He invented an improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments which he suggested could be used for pantaloons or vests or other garments. Sure. But basically, if you look at it, you're like, that's a bra strap. Yeah. I bet the old sockgarter benefited from that idea. I would guess so. And then other things. I wonder. Yeah. He also held two other patents. One for witty banter. He invented a game to help players remember important historical dates. Okay. I don't think he ever saw a dime on that one. I'm sure. Yeah. And then a self paced scrapbook, which wouldn't become huge until the 90s. Yeah. Self pacing means I don't know, it's already sticky. Yeah, like the photo albums. You peel back the plastic and that sheet underneath is sticky. Uses static electricity. No, it's actually sticky, too, isn't it? I think it's static. Really? Sticky. I think it's sticky. I haven't looked at a photo op in a while. Well, I'll have to go to, I don't know, a Hallmark store and check one out soon. Let's do it. Well, we were going anyway. I know the new Christmas ornaments are out. So, Chuck, let's talk patents, man yeah. I had this idea because I'm a big fan of Shark Tank, the TV show, and there's a lot of patent talk, and I was watching it the other day, and they said, well, we have the utility patent, but not the design patent. And I was like, I got to look this stuff up, see what all that means. Well, we'll get to that in a second, but let's start out and we'll probably do shows on maybe copyright and trademark at some point. Maybe they're worth mentioning here, though. Yeah. Copyright. Those are all forms of intellectual protecting your intellectual property. And copyright is the easiest and most broad and wide reaching and longest lasting form, because you can just write something and it's yours automatically in the United States, at least for your lifetime, plus 70 years. Not bad. No. And literally, Chuck, if you write a short little story right. When you finish, you can write C, put a circle around it, Chuck Bryant 2014. And you have your official copyright. That's right. That's it. Legally, you're done just because you created a work of authorship. Yup. And that's pretty great. If you're a company and you have a copyright as a company, it lasts up to 120 years, depending on whether they publish it or not, right? Yes. But eventually it does run out, and then it can be shared, and other people can make money off of it. Like, for example, old HP lovecraft stories. Like, you or I could take a bunch of lovecraft stories, say we wrote them, type them, put them together and publish them, and sell those books. Really? Yes. Like a collection that you don't have to get any kind of permission for that. No, it's in the public domain at that point. Belong to the world. That's right. Well, we read every Halloween. We have to read something from the public domain. I know. Because it's really expensive to do otherwise. It is. Trademarks are a little bit different. They're a lot more narrow in what they protect, and they protect designs and phrases that businesses use. Or maybe trade secrets, like a formula for a soda. Those are different. That's its own thing. Yeah, but that's still a trademark. Is it? Yeah. I thought it was separate from a trademark. I don't think so. With a trade says it's a trademark trade secret. Well, with a trade secret, it can be beneficial to keep something under wraps as a trade secret, because if you have something that you patent, you're protected for 20 years in the United States, your patent is but part of the patent process, as we'll talk about, is to publish it. You make every detail of it public so that after 20 years, when your patent runs out, anybody can go and look at your patent and recreate it and not give you a cent for it. If it's a trade secret, as long as no one discovers the secret formula for Coke by accident or by being this American Life and rooting it out. Right? Yes. So coke could sue this American Life for damages, but once it's out in the public, it's no longer a trade secret and other people can use it legally. The other way you can do it is to take Coke and reverse engineer it and come up with the formula successfully. That way that's not protected by trade secrets. Right. Bank defused that. Well, though, they were kind of like, great good luck. Yeah. Supposedly they keep it in a bank vault here in Atlanta. Oh, really? Yes. Isn't that cute? Sure. And then the last one is a service mark, which is like a trademark for a company that provides services rather than products. So, like, if you're a plumber, you might have SM next to your logo. Right. Those are the different types of intellectual property protections afforded in the United States. Chuck. But the final one and the one we're discussing at Link is the patent, and that is a copyright for an invention. And the US. Patent law defines that as, quote, any new and useful process, machine, manufacturer, or composition of matter, or any new idea and useful improvement thereof. And well, we'll get into all that, but the wording there is sufficiently vague and specific, because when you're talking about inventions, it's got to be a little bit vague. Yeah. Because you don't have it all worked out, maybe. No, because with the copyright, for example, what you wrote down is protected. Right. The sentence structure, the paragraphs you use, the wording you used, that's protected the thoughts that it's getting across about the little puppy who got lost and came back home and everything ended really well. The idea of a puppy getting lost can't be copyrighted with a patent. It's the reverse, the actual invention. Like the platform shoe with the goldfish tank and the heel that you invented. Right. Yeah. You can't defend that actual tangible shoe. Yeah. But the idea, the design of that shoe, that's what a patent protects. Yeah. And you can't steal it gets a little tricky with things like writing or, like movie ideas. You can't steal someone's idea. Like, there could be two movies about lost puppies, but if you could somehow prove that you met someone in a meeting and pitched them this idea for the lost puppy, and then six months later they came out with a script for lost puppy, you might have a case that they I don't know, man. This happens all the time. Okay, but think about Deep Impact in Armageddon. Let's go back to that. Well, no, I know. That's what I'm saying. You can have two movies. There are lawsuits every day filed in Hollywood over stolen intellectual ideas. But whether or not it's successful is whether or not you can make your case. It depends upon each one. That's a good point. So the first thing, if you want to patent an invention, is that you have to or it has to be sufficiently novel, is what they say. It can be similar to other things, but it has to be different enough to something that's already patented or been published in a publication to grant the patent. Yeah, because that's a really key point. Even if you invented something, right, and let's say you wrote about your platform shoe with the goldfish tank and the heel, right. If you wrote about it and don't file a patent application if it was published yes. Within a year. You can't file a patent after that. And that's why the first thing you need to do is file the patent. Right. Like no one invents something and writes all about it in the Washington Post for a year and it says, maybe I should patent that. Exactly. So that's your first step. Right. That's what makes a novel. It's new. It's a different idea. And like you said, you can be taking different things that already exist, but putting them together in a new way that people hadn't thought of or that wasn't what's called obvious. So the invention also has to be non obvious. Yeah. And that's what most inventions these days are, improvements on things that already exist. Like there are new inventions, but a lot of it like the great example they use in 1977, when Jerome Lemilson's invented or Got patented, the idea of the Camcorder. It was so absurd at the time. People were like, you can't record video and sound at the same time. That's denied. That's just silly. Get out of here. And he said, Actually, no, that's kind of a good idea, and it's super easy to do because all I have to do is tape the tape recorder to this camera, which is probably what he did. And he was able to get the Camcorder patented, of course. And now if you go to the patent office and do some research, there are probably thousands of patents that have to do with the Camcorder. Got you each individual little piece that someone innovates they can patent. Right. Like night vision on it or a light attached to it. Right, exactly. But you couldn't say, I'm going to patent a Camcorder. This other guy's Camcorder ID, but it'll be green. Right. Because it's an obvious change. Or this article gives the example of, like, a toaster. Like you couldn't patent a toaster that has an extra two slots for bread, because anybody could think of that. Exactly. That's obvious. That would be no obvious, it's just a bigger toaster. And then there's also useful. Useful is kind of the last of the triumvirate for what makes a patentable item or invention. And it has to be something that works. So, like, the example given in this article is, like, you couldn't patent a random configuration of gears, right? Because it doesn't do anything. It doesn't work. It's not useful. But if those gears transported as a new way of transporting something from one place to another. More efficiently maybe. Than you could patentable and then in the same vein. Something that apparently the patent office interprets. Something that can be used strictly for immoral purposes. That they consider that non useful. Because at the end of the day. The patent office is supposed to be doing this for the benefit of society. So I guess they feel that they also can morally interpret things as well. Yeah. What is that? Like, you can't patent, like, a whiskey still in your bedroom? No. I don't know. I think it'd be more harmful than that. Like, maybe a doomsday laser that only works on children who haven't done anything to anybody. But the Tim say laser for bad kids is great. You see my point? Patentable. That was a great example, if you ask me. And then, similarly, your device has to be able to be not just work. Like yes. You could say, well, this random configuration of gears will work. Why can't I patent it? Because it's not useful. In the same vein, you can't patent, like, a time machine. Again, the example they give this article is lousy with great examples. Yeah. We tried, actually, to get our way back. Machine patented. The basic guys, it's really cute. They're like this basically just sound design. Yeah. Thanks for wasting your time. We could probably trademark it, though. Although I'm sure the good people who made Rocky and Bowl Winkle would sue her. Yeah. Sue ourselves. The patent in the United States, and I apologize that this is not patents all around the world, but we don't have, like, 80 hours. No, because we research each country again. Any modern developed country typically has a patent system. Yeah. And good advice. If you have something that you think could be used internationally, you need to get patents and all the countries you fear might rip it off. Right. Because your patent that you've received in the United States protects you in the United States. That's it. Not Canada, not Japan, not Mexico, not China, not anywhere for 20 years. Right. These days. That's how long your patent will last. That's right, Chuck. It used to be 17, and I can't remember when they changed it, but it wasn't too terribly long ago. Within the last couple of decades, I think. Yeah. And actually well, we'll go over the types of the patent real quick, too, because one of those, the design patent is only for 14 years. Unless that's changed. Okay. Design pattern. You'll hear that on Shark Tank all the time. That is something like if you designed a new chair, like an Ikea chair, that would be design patented. You can't go and rip off that chair. Oh. But the idea of a chair itself isn't patentable, it's just this configuration of the chair concept. Right. Or Steve Madden will design a shoe, and Steve Madden can put a design patent on that shoe even though it's a shoe. You can even patent the sole of a shoe if it's some innovative new tread or for, like, a tire that channels water away or something like that. Exactly. I don't think those are design patents, though. I think that would be a utility patent. But design patents are enforced for 14 years. Utility patent. There are five categories there. It can be a process, a machine, a manufacturer, a composition of matter, or an improvement on an existing idea. And it might fall into a certain category, like more than one, but it'll only be patented for one of those categories. But it's covered. Okay. And that lasts for 20 years. So basically, the coffee maker that also makes an egg and toast at the same time, that would have gotten a utility patent, right? Yeah. Does that exist? Yeah. Nice. Emily said the best egg she ever had was at a cafe in Utah, where they cooked them using what you used to heat the milk that sprays out the steam. They were steam cooked? Weird. Yeah. Like, to make an espresso, they would put the raw egg, like as if you would make an espresso and cook the eggs with that steam. I've never heard of that. I never heard that either. And then there's the super weird plant patent. And that is granted for any asexually or sexually reproducible plant or flower that is novel and non obvious. Yeah, that's kind of a big one, because there was and in Australia, this is the way it is. But in the US, it was up in the air for a little bit that people were worried that naturally occurring genetic sequences could be patented to where basically some company could be like, hey, we now own your genes, and you can't do anything with them, even to save your own life unless you pay us. In Australia, one of the federal courts said, yeah, we're totally down with that, which is crazy. In the United States, I think in 2014, the Supreme Court said, no, we're not doing that. If you can figure out how to manipulate genes to make them do something that doesn't naturally occur, knock yourself out. Totally. Patent that. Like, for example, Monsanto seeds that prevent themselves from receding or creating more seeds. Yeah. Or some new strain of tree that's hearty against some kind of insect. Sure, you can patent that. Right. But you can't just go out and patent an oak tree. No. Or a human gene. No. You can in Australia, which you should not be allowed to do. But in the US. You can't do that. And that was a big load off of, I think, a lot of people's minds including mine. Well, that's good. I'm glad you can sleep, then. I'm feeling great. Plant patents are good for 20 years as well, so I don't know why design patents are only 14, but maybe they just want to encourage more design. No, nobody values design like they should. That's the problem. As far as we mention Jerome Lemmelson, and as far as inventors go, he ranks second to Thomas Edison in number of patents in US. History. Not necessarily number of inventions, though, a lot of people would point out. Yeah, he's a pretty controversial guy. Some people see him as a philanthropic genius. Oh, I'm talking about Edison. Oh, no, I was talking about Lemons. Yeah, he's controversial himself, too. Yeah, because he has accused a lot of people of creating what's called submarine patents, which are basically a patent that you sit on and knowing that there's something just like that being developed, and you don't let anyone know, and you just hope it doesn't get their attention. And then later on, when it's huge, you come out and say, hey, you owe me a ton of money because I have this 17 year old patent. Yeah. Now, this Lemmelson, basically, what you're talking about is a form of patent trolling. That's right. And he does definitely stand accused of that. Or we should say his foundation stands accused of that. But Samuel Lemon was incontrovertibly a genius inventor who definitely did come up with a lot of really great ideas that we all use. Right. Things like the camcorder, things like barcode scanning. Basically, the modern world. A lot of it came out of Lemmelson's head. Jerry Lemelson's head. Right. But you are right. His foundation has racked up, like, a billion dollars in licensing fees and court awards from these kind of lawsuits and litigations until they ran up against one where it was like, I think, a bar code scanning case. A couple of them got put together, and then they were added onto, like, seven others. And the judge in the case found that basically, even though there isn't necessarily a statute of limitations, a reasonable statute of limitations had run out right. On the time between when barcode scanners came out and the time they filed the lawsuit. Right. And they used the term submarine patents in this article and said, times basically run out. These things belong to the world now. Right. And sorry, Ion Foundation, you're not going to get this money. Interesting. Yeah. There was something passed in 1995 called Trips Agreement. Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. And that was supposed to kind of curb submarine patents, but they'll still pop up every now and then. I think TiVo reared their head. I think I saw something about that. I don't know the details, though, with the submarine patent saying, hey, everyone, with the comcast DVR, we actually invented that whole technology. Oh, yeah. I'm not sure how that all panned out, though. I didn't get to look into it any further, but it's interesting. Well, let's keep at it, but we'll start again right after these messages. Okay. So, Chuck yeah. You want to talk about Edison? Yeah. I said Jerome Lemaltzon was number two with 557 patents held in the US. But Edison eclipses that with 1093 patents, and he had a set up in Menlo Park, New Jersey, that was just like the idea factory, basically, which, ironically, is unrelated to the Menlo Park US. Patent and Trade Office out in California. Oh, really? Yeah, it's just coincidentally named, from what I understand. Interesting. I never drew that connection. When he set up the Menlo Park, he hired a bunch of really bright people and said, let's come up with one small invention every ten days, one major invention every six months, and I'll put my name on all of them. Exactly. And if your hackles are raised right now, go back and listen to our Nikola Tesla episode, which is a good one. Edison was a smart guy in many ways. He was quite a good promoter. Like the light bulb he's frequently credited with inventing the light bulb. A lot of purists will point out, like, no, he didn't really invent the light bulb. He took a lot of other innovations that were incandescent light related, and he figured out how to put them together into what we understand now is the light bulb. Well, yeah, but that's an invention. He went and got the patent, and now everybody says Edison invented light bulb. And I like that, too, because that's kind of the whole point of patents is this stuff is available to the public to look up. And that was one of the original reasons they made it public, is so people could look up other people's ideas and build upon that. Right. That's one mark in the favor of patent offices in the patent system in general, is that it's a way to disseminate scientific information yeah. And encourage growth and inventiveness. Right. And the way it does that is by offering an incentive for inventors to invent, because that can be a very long, arduous, heartbreaking experience inventing. And if you're going to do that and go to all the work of research and development, and then right when you come up with it, somebody can just come along and mass produce it, then you're not going to have any incentive to invent anything. You're just going to go off and work on a road crew or something instead, because it's probably a lot more satisfying at the end of the day. Yeah. And you can't just go to the government and say, hey, you need to look into this guy. They stole my idea that I have patented. The government will be like, I don't care. Well, they may care. That's a little callous, but they say, that's not our job. You can go and take someone to court if you want to challenge this. But there is no government agency that patrols the patent infringement. No, it's up to the patent holder to monitor and police their own patents, which they are big on. So let's talk about the courts a little bit like 20 years ago, if you held a patent and you took someone to court for infringement, the courts typically sided with the infringer. There was, I guess, kind of either a thought that you are stifling innovation if you're just kind of suing people over patent infringement, or else they just didn't view patents like they do today. Nowadays, it's going to the other extreme where the courts rule in favor of the patent holders so frequently that a cottage industry of what are known as patent trolls sprang up where you have groups of people or companies or individuals who just go around either applying for patents that are really abstract and really shouldn't have been approved. Yeah, very vaguely written. Right. And they're typically software related too, because I think there's a sentiment that the US Patent Office doesn't fully grasp software and the internet and it and that kind of stuff. So you either go and file for and get a patent on something really overly broad and vague, or you buy a bunch of other people's patents and you just start for the whole purpose of going to people and saying, you're infringing on these patents that I now own. Give me some money, I'm going to take you to court. It's a business unto itself. It is. The problem is because the courts move so far in favor of patent holders that people would settle out of court to avoid litigation. And so as a result, this whole cottage industry came up. And then recently there's been some steps taken to kind of reform that a little bit. There was something called the Innovation Act. The Innovation Act passed. The House was sent to the Senate. It was in the Senate Judiciary Committee. And then Senator Patrick Lehe killed it. And the tech community, who's really big into patent reform accused him of being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies. That would never happen in this country who are really big into preserving the status quo. Right. And if you really look at what's going on with patent reform today in this argument, Chuck, you've got the pharmaceutical companies versus the tech industry. Yeah, tech industry is like things are moving so fast and there's so many ideas coming out that we can't focus on patent infringement. It shouldn't be as big of a deal because it's stifling innovation. There are people here that are scaring people from licensing computer software because this guy says that he has a patent that says you could put software onto a CD Rom and sell it. Right. That's the kind of patent troll thing. On the other side, the pharmaceutical companies say, hey man, we make tons of money licensing our patents. And so if people are afraid of infringing on patents because they can get sued, then our investments, our portfolio of patents are going to be protected. So there's this huge behemoth lobbies, like, hammering it out right now in the halls of Congress. And it seems like the Supreme Court and the federal government are siding on the tech side. Yeah. You sent that great article from Forbes about just the problems with the modern patent system. And that was one of the great points. I can't remember who wrote the article? The guy who found a priceline jaywalker. Oh, really? Yeah, he said that people are so scared companies are these days of infringing on patents, because if you can prove that you knew about this patent, then you could be in big trouble. Right. So they're not even looking, which is the original idea of making these things published is, like I said earlier, so people would go and look up how someone did something. Maybe I can improve upon that. Right. So people aren't even looking now because they're afraid that it will be traced back and be like, no, we know that you saw this patent pulled three years ago. Yeah. Because the penalties for accidental infringement and willful infringement are vastly different. Yeah. It's a big problem. Well, the jaywalker suggests that you kind of cut the courts out and maybe make it easier to license things. Yeah. So just create some big national exchange where somebody can go and easily give somebody some money or temporarily license whatever they need. And he cites some, I think, a forest research study that suggests 95% of the 5.7 million patents that the US. Has granted 2.1 active patents okay. Yeah. 95% go unused and unlicensed. And of those, approximately half a million are considered to be, like, high quality patents. Yeah. A lot of them are from university research. And they just sit there. Yeah. And so protected. It's the same study found that $1 trillion of revenue is not generated each year in the United States because of this unused innovation that's just sitting there in this big pot. Yeah. A big guarded vault with a pot in it of unused ideas. Yeah. Which definitely goes against the spirit of the original idea. For sure. Yeah. Which means the system is broken. It is broken. The other way that it's broken, too, is the enormous backlog that's going on at the Patent and Trade Office. Oh. Just getting it reviewed. Yeah. So if you file a patent and we're going to talk about this in a minute, but if you file a patent, Chuck, and they reject it, that is not the end of the story. No. You can keep coming back and back and back and back. In fact, you usually will get rejected on the first try for one reason or another. Right. But every time you come back, you add to the PTO is already big backlog. Right. Of course. And so apparently there was another study that Ours Technica wrote about or carried out that found that there was a huge decrease in the backlog under the Obama administration. But they suspect that it was because the PTO lowered their standards and issued patents for a lot of shoddy patents. Right. Just to get people to go away to clear the backlog. Because that's the best way to get rid of somebody who keeps refiling their patent, is to just grant them the patent and get them out of your hair. Well, they're saying, yeah, that decreased the backlog, but it led to a lot of shoddy patents, which in turn led to the patent troll industry. Yeah. And a lot more burden on the courts to suss all this stuff out later. Exactly. The problem is the Patent Office has an incentive to keep letting people file and file again because they make money every time they generate revenue from that. Yeah. The actual patent itself will cost you five, $700 or so that you have to upkeep every year and pay a little bit more in maintenance fees. Yes. Well, it depends. Have you seen the fee schedule? Yeah, there's like 30 or 40 different things you could pay fees for. Well, yeah, it all depends on how detailed your patent is and what you're trying to get through. All right, well, let's talk about what you can and can patent. We've talked a little bit about it. You cannot patent something that exists in the natural world like a discovery. Like, they gave another great example, einstein's Law of Relativity. He can't copyright that or patent it. Right. I mean, it's a thing he might have named it and figured it out, but it occurred long before Einstein was around, just in the solar system. It belongs to the universe. It belongs to the universe, yeah. It's a good way of saying it. You can patent, like, an industrial process, like we said, computer programs. You can. But it gets a little dicey. And if you have something that you think might be patentable or not, the first step you probably should is, like, hire either an agent or an attorney. An agent or patent attorney. Yeah. And a lot of people do. And this is if you're serious about this stuff, like you really think you're onto something, this is something you do not just say you got this idea for a thing. You're not going to want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars unless you really think you're onto something. Right. So the first step you want to talk about the steps of patenting something? Yeah, I guess so. The first step you can do is to do a search yourself. I think Google even has a search function to search patents in the United States easily. But if not, you can definitely go to the US. Patent Office site and search you some keywords to kind of generally describe what your invention is, to just see off the bat if there's already something out there that's patented and there probably is, yeah. It's very rare to have a truly, truly unique idea these days. But if you have something and you're like the guy who made the thermonuclear fusion reactor in his garage, the 16 year old, right. If he wanted to patent that, there's probably a pretty good likelihood that he could get that patent and then it's going to be worth a ton of money. So we're going to take that kid and run him through the patent process because it's going to pay off for him in the end despite the enormous amount of money that he's going to have to spend upfront just to get the patent protection in the United States. Right. So he searched the database. Let's say he went to the office in person because that's what kind of kid he is. And he looked through the files and he found you know what? I think I'm on to something. I don't see anything else in here that's super like it, I feel like it's novel and it's innovative and it's not obvious, but there's a lot of money on the line here. So I'm going to hire a patent lawyer who patent agents aren't attorneys. They function similarly. But an attorney obviously has a little more power under their belts. Well, they have a technical degree typically and a law degree agent just knows about the patents. They don't have the law degree, they have the technical expertise because you have to be able to look at the actual invention and understand how it works or if somebody's just trying to pass off something dumb like you're not a divorce attorney and a patent attorney. Right. You might be, but probably not sure. There's probably one out there. So a patent lawyer will review everything and say, yeah, I think you are on to something here with your garage nuclear fusion reactor kid. You're a heck of an inventor and I think we can take this right through the roof. So who's this guy? The kid stays in the picture, dude. He's Lionel Hutz. Who's that guy? The producer. The legendary producer. Yeah, robert Evans. That's who this attorney is. Yeah. Okay. We're getting this nailed, man. We're really filling it out with great detail. Although Lionel Hutz, or I'm sorry, Robert Evans may say there is a patent here, don't waste your time. Yeah. It's up to you. But it's really similar in these ways. Or maybe, hey, this thing is super similar but this actual process within your patent that you're applying for is super unique. So maybe you should just focus on that. Right. And then you can license it to the person who's already got the patent. Exactly. Yeah. And then that's the point where the kid says, all right, I want to move forward on this smaller part or the original patent and I want to fill out my application like anything else that's the first step is you have to fill out that application and send it in. Yes. With some money. With some money. Depending on who I have to pay that upfront. Right. It's for the application fee. Yeah. And then after, at that moment once you file your application fee your patent starts. So that 20 year protection. That doesn't kick in when your patent is granted. Like it kicks in from the date you filed your application. So you can go out and put patent pending on your thermonuclear fusion reactor and start selling it to people. That's right. In your application. You kind of have to spell it all out for them. You can't just throw your idea in there and say you guys do the research and see if there's anything else out there. Right. You have to list any kind of potential roadblocks and prior art that may be similar for them to review. You have to briefly summarize your invention. You have to give a description of what they call the preferred embodiment which means how are you going to use this thing basically. Yeah or like what shape is it supposed to take? How do the components fit in together? Right and then your claims. This is the most important part and this is what you're actually going to be arguing about in court if you have to go that route is your claim and that is the actual legal description of your invention. Right. And if your claim is very well written if you spring for a great lawyer Robert Evans this claim is going to be very well written very concise, very descriptive but also sufficiently vague. Sure. Because when you do take somebody to court and you say this guy has totally ripped me off here's my patent here's the description of what my thing does. Now look at what this guy is doing. It's the exact same thing that my patent lawyer described years ago when I filed my patent application. So the claim is extremely important. I mean it's as important as getting the patent itself. Yeah totally. How much you're going to pay that attorney? All depends of course on how many hours they spend. But they put in this article between 5000 and $20,000. Yeah I saw more than that. I'm sure it can get up to as much as I'm sure corporations pay these people a lot of money. Yeah well the patent office actually has a sliding scale of fee schedules. So like if you are a micro entity I think which is like just probably one guy you're an inventor you're going to pay the least. If you're a corporation you're going to pay the most. And that's for the patent fees not the attorney's fees. Right. They don't care about those. No but if you're a corporation and you have a lot of like a large patent portfolio and you have an RND company you have a patent attorney a stable a patent attorney who are working on that anyway. Yes, they have their own office in your building. But I saw for in a 2005 article I saw, a study had found that for a small size business so probably the middle slot of the schedule fee, it would cost about $310,000 to get and maintain patents in ten industrialized countries. Wow. So if you've got a thermonuclear fusion reactor and it works, it's going to totally be worth that. You want to patent it everywhere. You can possibly do that because you're going to change the world with it. Yeah. And probably as many sub patents as you can create. Sure. If you are kind of shaky on your idea or you don't think it's going to end up paying off that much right. Then who knows? Maybe a highfalutin patent attorney isn't the way to go, but maybe you go the route of Inventors help group. Right. Like, there's actually one called Invent Help, and some of those things are scams. I looked up invent help. It appears to be totally legitimate. It's got an A minus rating on the Better Business Bureau. What do they do? Have you ever watched daytime television? They're like inventors. Do you want to help get your invention to market? Sure, they do every step of the way. Like, you submit your invention. I think they help you get it patented. Got you. Help you market it. They may set up a website to sell it on TV. Yes, they get a piece of the revenue down the street, down the line. Or they may also require fees along the way. Right. But some of them are kind of scammy. Apparently invent help is not. And then another good resource for you if you are an inventor of limited means, would probably be to go to the Lemmelson Foundation that was established by that inventor Jerome Lemmelson, who spent most of his career suing companies that were using his patented stuff. I think it's called lemmelsonfoundationorg. They have a bunch of programs to help inventors, especially young inventors. It's a good place to start, I would think. All right, we're going to finish up on how to finish up the patent process and a few more critiques right after this. All right. So this kid has turned his idea into the patent office. Like we said earlier, it has a pretty good chance of getting rejected on the first pass, and they will tell you exactly why. And then it's up to you whether or not you want to redo it or just bail on it altogether, or like I said, redo it and resubmit it and see how your luck runs. Right. And the reasons for rejection can be myriad. Like literally 300 different reasons. Yeah. So it can be something from the patent office saying, like, we think that this is way too close to another already patented invention. We don't think it's necessarily an improvement. It's not useful. These are the very high level reasons they can be rejected. If that happens, then you might want to go back to the drawing board right. More frequently. I think it's like we think the wording and your claim is a little too vague. We don't quite understand the description. Can you make these changes to this paragraph? Your drawing is missing a label. The patent is supposed to be flawless, well written. Like, if you hire a patent attorney, they're going to hire an artist to do the drawing that's submitted to the patent office. Yeah. So it's really supposed to be professional and well done. And so for any minute technical detail, they can reject it, but then they'll also explain why. And then you can just make the change and refill. Right. If it's something that's just kind of open to interpretation. If you have a patent attorney, your patent attorney can be like, let's negotiate this point, right. And hopefully get the whole thing passed through. I wonder if you have to go back to the back of the line or if you have a new phone number you can call. I don't know, man. That's the key, isn't it? You get that secret phone number to the person who actually picks up the first time and you can be like, please help me. Yeah. And I think one thing we did mention, it gets really dicey if you work for a company and you have an invention as an employee of that company. There have been countless hanky situations. I remember the one they made the movie about the guy who invented the delayed windshield wiper. Is that a documentary that's out on Netflix? There probably is, but I think what's his face oh, I know. You're talking to the guy from as Good As It Gets. Great canar yeah. I didn't see the movie though. But I think that was a case of someone who worked for a company or maybe he didn't work for a company. Maybe he just presented it to car companies and he thinks they ripped them off. But if you work for a company, you might get the patent, but the company might still own the product or the process that you invented. Yes. Because you did it as their employee under their purview. But you might still get a personal patent for it, but maybe you might not benefit like you would as a private person. No. And basically, if you're an inventor, good luck getting a contract with a corporation of the United States where you don't automatically sign over every bit of your invention to that company. Sure. Or if you create anything creative, you probably have a work for hire contract where all of your work that you write or draw or design or compose automatically belongs to the company. So the ironic thing is you are technically the creator of that work or that invention. But if you go and republish it, like on your own personal website, you're infringing on this copyright that your company owns, and your company can sue you to get you to stop or to do whatever. Yeah. And that's a big critique of the patent system, too, is that there's not a lot of the Patent and Trade Office can do about it, but just the way the system works right now, corporations have all of the power as far as patents go. Yeah. It's such a tough thing. You hear there are just countless stories from history of so and so invented this thing that we all use, but they never made a penny off of it because they did it for IBM or like the guy who invented Superman, they were paid like 150 or $300 by DC and basically told, thanks a lot. Yeah. And over the years, as DC made tens and tens and hundreds of millions of dollars off of Superman, these guys were like, this isn't right. Yeah. And finally, after there was enough outcry, they were granted, like, some back revenue. They got a cape. Do you remember our Christmas extravaganza from last year? The guy who composed Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer works for Montgomery Ward, and he hit on hard times, and the president of Montgomery Ward granted him the copyright to rude off the Red nose reindeer. That doesn't happen. Yeah. And that's a copyright, not a patent or an invention. I see both sides a little bit. I always think that corporations are the ones taking advantage. But if you work for IBM and they have given you the resources and paid you money to do this, then that's quit your job and go invent something on your own, then sure. Yeah. So I kind of see both sides. Yeah. But generally, I think corporations probably sticking it to the man. So speaking of corporations sticking it to the man, or humanity in general, is the pharmaceutical industry again, so I said that they're very happy with the status quo. And one of the great criticisms of the patent system now, as it is, is you can get a patent. You can buy a patent and just sit on it. You can buy a patent, say, from a competitor or from somebody who may be a competitor down the road right. And prevent them from making it. Even if this thing benefits humanity, even if it literally saves people's lives, you can sit on a patent. And apparently drug companies have been known to do that. There is one famous case with a company called Amgen, and they developed an anemia drug that treated anemia and iron deficiency, and it worked really well. The problem is the body absorbed it really quick, so you had to take large doses for your whole life. Right. Apparently, this researcher, this chemist, found a way to make the drug longer lasting, which in Amgen's mind meant while we can't make as much money off of it, you're selling fewer drugs. So this lady was like, can I just see your patents and I can figure out a way to latch this onto your drug and save lives. And Anthem is like, no, we're not going to let you see our materials, our research. We don't want to make that better. And that's not as overt as buying a patent. It's sitting on it to keep people from doing it. But that does happen. It's a competitive way to navigate the business climate. Well put, Josh. Yeah. You've worked your way around that one very nicely. I got something here. It might take like a year to five years to get this patent from pending to approved. And let's say you put in an idea very similar to someone else around the same time. That happens all the time. If that happens, they declare what they call an interference. A dance off. Exactly. And they have to actually have a little trial. A little trial? Like they serve tea and everything's in miniature. Everything is small. They have a trial where they basically figure out who got there first. Yeah. There's a very famous case of Alexander Grand Bell and Elijah Gray basically putting in a patent for the telephone at the same time. Yeah. And I guess for a long time it was whoever could prove they invented it first in the United States was the one who got the patent. Right. And then just to simplify things, in March of 2013, the US changed its patent law. So now the first inventor to file is the one who receives the patent. Right. So even if it's by a minute, whoever got it there first is the one who gets the patent. That's why filing that patent right away is your best defense. Like, go now, stop, press pause and go do it right now. Seriously, if you have an invention, I just got one more thing on the infamous poor man's patent or poor man's copyright. I'm sure everyone's heard, like, all you got to do is write it out and mail it to yourself. I think I've suggested that on this show before. Do you remember? I don't remember that, but that is just an old wives tale that's not going to hold up in court. It's basically worthless. But I don't understand why, right? When you create the work, it automatically is copyrighted. Why would that like dating it not make it not just substantiated even more? Well, I'm not talking about writing a book. I'm talking about, hey, I did this invention and here's a schematic and I'm going to mail it. Okay. Yeah. So it could work for something copyrighted, but not a patent. Well, no, I mean, if it's just an original work of art you've created, like a book, then like I said, it's already copyrighted. Okay, so that doesn't even apply. Okay, but if you invented something and designed it and just mail this to yourself, it's worthless. Right. I got you. Basically, you can't prove like envelopes can be steamed open and manipulated. Like, that's not going to hold up in court. You can do it if you want. Sure. Take it to court and show them. I have an extra stamp that I don't know what to do with. That's right. Let's see. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to learn more about patents, it's actually surprisingly interesting stuff. Agreed. You can type that word in the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this thanks for the panic attack episode. Oh, I'm glad they said episode. We got a lot of great feedback. I think this touched a lot of people because they're way more common than you think. Hey, guys. Love the episode on panic attacks. I had them in college. Brought on by normal college stress, plus the loss of a beloved uncle. I would often wake up in the night standing in the hall of my dorm, feeling like I could not breathe. Sometimes I would be awake enough to think I'm dying. I just need to get the hallway so someone will find me or my body. Sometimes I would just wake up screaming. What helped? And the reason I'm writing was some wonderful therapy offered through my university's health services. Along with some antidepressants and the support of my family and friends. I learned coping mechanisms to get me through my anxiety, how to express my stress so I wasn't bottling it all up inside, and the importance of taking time to rest my mind and body. With all the help, I was able to leave therapy. After a few semesters, I was able to recognize that I needed it again later in graduate school, after the birth, in my second year of my much loved but very implant child. I urge all college students, graduate and undergrad, to really take advantage of their mental health services that are offered to them. For me as a student, my university, each session was only $10. Man, remember that college? All that stuff was so cheap. Like the doctor. You can go see a shrink for like $5. I remember I got Acupuncture for like $3 a section. Really? They had that at UTA. No, I did that in La. Through a university, though. My roommate there's just some dude. Exactly. He was good with a needle. And it could also be charged to my Bursar account, which I don't even know what that is. Bursar? Yeah. I didn't have one of those. Yeah, I remember that from college, but I don't remember what it was. I think the word looks familiar. Yes. The health building was on campus, so sessions fit right into my schedule, and I can't stress enough how beneficial it was for me. Without therapy, I would no doubt have not made it through college and graduate school. There's no shame in therapy or medication to help you through tough times. Turns. Out. Pretty much everyone goes through it to some extent, and no one is weak for getting help. Admitting you need help is what makes you a stronger person, in my opinion. And Rosalie Malthbee, researcher at University of Oklahoma Department of Biology. I couldn't agree more. Well, thanks a lot. Is it Rosalie or Rosalie? Rosalie. Thanks a lot, Rosalie. We appreciate you writing and spreading that message, because it's a good one. Very pretty name as well. If you have a patent, we want to hear from you. Tell us what your patent is so we'll steal it. We can't. It's patented, man. But if you've got a great idea that you haven't yet patented, send that to us. Whatever you want to do, you can tweet to us at siskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffysheanow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyouhw.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com summer school's out? The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
86f5337e-3b0e-11eb-9699-77e4bcc369e3 | The Tale of the Church of the SubGenius | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-tale-of-the-church-of-the-subgenius | The Church of the SubGenius is a religion, but really a parody of religion. Learn all about this group of weirdo outsiders in today's episode.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | The Church of the SubGenius is a religion, but really a parody of religion. Learn all about this group of weirdo outsiders in today's episode.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 07 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=280, tm_isdst=0) | 50034820 | 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. 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 iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's over there, wandering around in circles. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast about the church of the SubGenius. At long last. When did you become acquainted with the Church of the SubGenius? I had a group of friends that walked on the otter side of life, darker side of life, less serious side of life. I'm not sure in the there was one guy who was big time into the Church of the SubGenius. That happens, right? Yeah. That was my first introduction. Then I actually came across the hour of slack on Georgia Tech student radio once, like, in the early 2000s radio. I never got into it, though. Are you actually, like, a secret subgeni? No, same as you. I had a friend in college, a very influential friend, actually, who turned me on to a lot of different things as I was just getting into college and exploring different ways of life and thought patterns, and sherm sticks. My buddy Jason, he turned me on to a lot of things in life, and I've been able to tell him so, which is always a nice thing. And Bob Dobbs in the Church of SubGenius was one of them. Yeah. And you might not be utterly familiar with the Church of the SubGenius, but I'll bet there's a pretty good chance. That a lot of stuff you should know. Listeners are at least familiar with it without even being fully aware of what it is. But there's a very, very famous picture of a clean cut, mid century middle aged dude with a pipe clenched in his teeth and almost like a Patrick Bateman psychotic look on his face. Patrick Bateman meets the word cleaver. Exactly. Yes, Chuck. I don't think anyone has ever put it better than that. And that is Jr. Bob Dobbs, who is the high profit of the Church of the SubGenius. And he has popped up everywhere from the background at Pewees Playhouse. There was a sublime record that had him on there. Like he shows up all over the place. It's almost like code. So you probably have seen it even if you're not familiar with the Church of the Sub genius that's called the Dobbs Head. Right. Gathered from clipart, which we will see. It's kind of one of the fun in jokes about a pseudo religion, a satire and parody of religion. And it was formed by two guys. We'll get into the history, but I have a sort of a favorite definition and I know you do and maybe we'll just read both of them. Okay. Mine comes from Steve Davis of the Austin Chronicle and he said this in the late seventy s. The Church of the SubGenius was intended as a dogmatic antidote to a re emergent mediocrity embracing an aesthetic in confluence with evolving new wave sensibilities and tropes in music, film and pop culture. It was an injoke with a half serious punchline. Very nice. That was great. Yours was from Ed the grabster himself. He kind of put it nicely. Yeah. Also from the Austin Chronicle. Yeah. So Ed said that the best way to explain the church is it is a joke. But to get the joke you have to see that it isn't really a joke at all but is actually getting at harrowing truths about the world. Not bad, Ed. Not bad. So the whole thing is scared at a little bit. I think so too. It's hilarious and cute, but the whole thing is that it is a parody of a religion, a parody of a cult, a UFO sex cult, if you want to get technical. It's an absurdist injoke. And the whole thing is one big in joke made up of millions of tiny little injokes that anybody in the church can kind of generate and create. But it's all kind of hung on the skeleton of this doctrine of the prophet Bob Dobbs, who is the world's greatest salesman, who is basically carrying out the will of an alien God who may or may not love us, or the Subgeniere, as they're called in plural. And either it sucks you in immediately and you're like, I want to know more about this because this is hilarious, or repulses you because it is making fun of everything that you hold dear. There's not a lot of middle ground, although I would count myself as somebody in the middle ground, to tell you the truth. That was so awesome, Chuck. Nicely done. Yeah. What I just did there and you'll see this a lot if you watch the documentary, if you see any YouTube footage of people from the genius church hanging out at one of their de vivals, they don't call them revivals, they call them de vivals. They will do this thing where they kind of juggle their throat with their hand as they sort of get this weird chant. Yeah. And I didn't find much information on that specifically, but I did see them doing it all over the place. Well, it is a huge rabbit hole and as we'll see some people accidentally take it seriously and that's not the right thing to do at all. That is a mentally unsound thing to do. That's not what the intention is or anything like that. The intention is to basically point out how just warped our consumer culture is. And it made a lot more sense in the 80s before our culture ended up becoming the parody that the Tristas SubGenius was carrying out. Yes, it had a very Mad Magazine vibe. Something I know that you and I both grew up loving and cherishing. And I could see like if that's something as mainstream as you want to liken it to help people understand, it's almost as if Mad Magazine started a religion and Alfred Newman was the God and it was all just one big joke about consumer culture. And then if people end up taking it seriously you can really see why that would be a very strange thing. Of course, Alfred D. Newman is not God, and of course, Bob Dobbs is not God or the prophet. But these two guys founded this kind of funny joke religion in the late 1970s because they were like minded dudes. And what started as a joke grew into, I guess, a mini phenomenon. I don't know, man. I think it's a major phenomenon. I would say major as far as cult classic or cult phenomenon go. I think we should preface all this, if it's not too late, to all of the Church of the Subgenious members out there, past and present and future. This is one of those things where if you explain what makes something funny that's the least funny thing you can do. So if we trapeze into that just by virtue of explaining things, we're sorry. I know because it is a fun kind of cool thing that was created for people that felt like they were on the outside of things. Precisely, yes. For outcasts and weirdos who didn't fit in necessarily. They found common ground before the Internet by writing letters back and forth to each other. They kind of had the Internet through pen and paper in these de vivals. And we have Douglas St. Clair Smith and Steve Wilcox to thank for this. Yeah, the original outsider weirdos. That's right. You may not know him by that name. If you're familiar with the Church of the SubGenius you know them as Ivan Stang and Philos Drummond. And these were two guys, like I said, they were in Texas. I think Philo grew up in a religious family and had a really good childhood. It wasn't some like stifling situation but he was always sort of didn't quite fit in and felt like the outsider at school and was seeking outsider culture. Whereas Stan was I think he described himself in the documentary as secular humanist, scientist in his upbringing, super liberal family. Whereas keep on calling Wilcox, whereas philosophy more conservative, to be sure. But they found common ground when a friend introduced them. They said, you both love comic books, you both love Frank Zappa and Captain Beef Heart get together, and you might have a new friend. And they were immediate friends. Yeah, they definitely hit it off in part also, because they both kind of just felt like they didn't really fit into Dallas, Texas at the time. That helps. One of the other things they really had in common was a love of earnest bonafide extremist pamphlets. Right. They're fun. Yeah. Whether it's extremist religious groups, extremist white supremacist groups, which I'm sure Dallas, Texas, in the 70s had quite a bit of like anybody who is just kind of off the rails and was trying to recruit other people to be off the rails with them and made a pamphlet about that these guys would collect it and relish it. And that also included member of the Jack Shake tracks in the Satanic Panic episode. They were huge in that they had a huge influence on them, as well as comic strips about how somebody had sex before marriage and now they were burning in hell kind of stuff. They took all these things together, and they kind of use them as the basis for this outlook on the world, which is humans are totally nuts in a lot of ways, and then even more than that, they can be dangerously nuts when they try to foist or impose their own crazy thoughts onto you and make you behave a certain way because of their crazy thoughts. That that's the danger that comes out of modern life. And I think that's one of the things that really stuck out to them and the thing that drove them to kind of try to fight that however they could. Yeah. I have to say, I see the appeal of what they did, because if you remember a few years ago this is quite a few years ago now our buddy Joe Randazzo and I wrote a TV pilot together about a Scientology esque religion, and it never went anywhere. We even had a few pitch meetings, and nothing happened with it. But in writing that script, we had to create our own religion for that pilot. And you can't just say, well, let's just call it this, and it's whatever. You have to really kind of explore the tenants of it and make it a real thing. And we did that, and I made a pamphlet. Joe and I made it together, and I kind of put it together, and we brought the pamphlet to the Pitch meetings, and I'll send you one sometime. It's really funny. Our religion was called Binarism, and it was like this number based kind of Scientology thing, but it was so much fun. And all I could think about when these two guys got together in 1979 and hatched this idea was, yeah, it's a lot of fun to create a phony religion, even for a screenplay. Yeah. And they were definitely inspired by elron hubbard and his success at basically founding scientology based on some science fiction ideas that he had and then becoming rich. There's a famous quote attributed to elon hubbard that you can't get rich writing science fiction, but you can get rich by writing by founding your own religion. We should be really careful here. They weren't inspired by elron hubbard in the sense that they wanted to take advantage of people. I think they were more fascinated by the fact that there are plenty of people out there who will buy into this. Right. And I think they kind of wanted to explore that. Not in any kind of like it's weird. The whole thing is kind of a cynical it comes from a cynical place where you just have to be cynical to be critical enough of society to see it for what it is. But it's also like a very humanist group as well, where they're not trying to hurt you, they're not trying to explore you. They definitely come off as superior a lot of times, especially if you're not in on the joke, because that makes you, by definition, part of the butt of the joke. Right. To enormous, yes. But for the most part, they're not like a group of people who hate or despise other people. I think they're fascinated by the fact that that kind of stuff exists, and they're also fascinated by just how conformist the average person is without even thinking about it. They were fascinated, I guess is the way to put it, by elron hubbard and his success with scientology. And there was another quote that was attributed to sting. I don't know if it was in the documentary that came out recently or not, but he basically said, we figured that if jim jones can get 900 people to kill themselves, we could get 900 people to send us a dollar. And they kind of wanted to toy around with that and see if that was the case. Not to exploit people, but just to kind of see, I think, if there was anybody else out there, they were kind of shouting into the wilderness, and the way that you told them that you were out there was to mail in $1 and say, send me your pamphlet. Yeah, and here's the deal. It looks like, by all accounts, has generally made his living doing this over the years. Yes, it worked. He's not gotten rich. It's not a scientology thing where it's like, and send me 100 more dollars, and we'll give you another thing. No, it's really just sort of mail us some money, and we'll send you our comedy goods in the mail. And he still steps envelopes, and he still sends pamphlets and CDs and literature today. It's like paying for a mad magazine or something, but it's just done from this guy's house. Yeah. I also get the impression that the far and away, the vast majority of the people who understand the church of SubGenius for what it is when they say money and they're sending it out of gratitude for what Sang and Philo have built together, that's what it is. They're not being duped in any way. They're in on the joke. They're just showing their support by shoveling money toward those guys. All right, I think that is a great preamble. You're either turning off your hi fi system now, or you're intrigued by what's to come. And we'll talk about the night it all hatched right after this. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpai jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes. And you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It. Systems that rule up their own sleeves. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com it automation. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building. Or you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a MILKSTAKE flaming flamer's chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquillum house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis? As an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling hoosa? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only murders in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway Hulu. Check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription required. Terms apply. Visit Hulucom for plan details. 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 these guys are hanging out. I think Philo was the one who always had a pretty decent job. He kind of had an okay career, and he always wanted to there were times where he kind of dropped in and out of his involvement because he did have a decent career, but he always supported it, whereas staying was all in from the beginning and didn't have a ton of prospects for work. But they were hanging out, and they were, like, kind of wondering why they didn't have more and why they weren't as successful as they thought they should be. And Stan said we aren't geniuses. We must be SubGeniuses. And he says in the documentary, he's like, that's the moment. It was literally like a lightning bolt out of the sky that hatched this idea. So they kind of took all their interests and all these weird pamphlets and weird UFO cults and pseudo religions and New Age beliefs, and they made the original pamphlet. Spent $60 on this original pamphlet, and we're just leaving them at dry cleaners and stuff like that until Stan's wife got mad. And she was like, that's a lot of money for us. At least send this to some publishers and see if you can do something with this. So they sent it to every publisher under the sun and got rejected by every publisher under the sun. But it's pretty funny that later they did end up having a fairly successful book. But early on, book publishers didn't know what to do with these guys. Yeah, and you can understand why if you've ever seen what's called pamphlet number one. Now, which is part of the church doctrine, this is like the sacred writings. The idea is that Ivan Sting is the sacred scribe who took down the words of Bob Dobbs. And by the way, Bob Dobbs, the Bob is always in quotes. Not just when you say Jr. Bob Dobbs like, even if you say Bob Dobbs or even just Bob, it's always in quotes. That's how you write his name. And that Bob was getting his divine inspiration from Jehovah, one that alien overlord that runs Earth. And this is kind of like the conceit of the pamphlet. And the front of the pamphlet said things like, the world ends tomorrow and you may die in all caps. It asked, do people think you're strange? I know. I love that one. There was another one that said eternal salvation or Triple your money back. So these are the things on and in the pamphlet. And they're going around to publishers being like, hey, you want to give us some money for this? So, of course, everybody said no. The most astounding thing is that eventually somebody actually said yes. I think McGraw Hill. Yeah. And this was much later when they finally did get their book published, after they had quite a following and the sort of writing was on the wall with these fairly successful gatherings and live shows. But yeah, the book came later. Early on they got together and started just as buddies, getting on the CB radio and doing and again, this was like you would get on the internet today back then it was the CB and they would do these sort of parody voices. It basically hatched what was the beginnings of what would end up being the hour of Slack radio show, which is 90 minutes long, part of the joke. And people started hollering back at them. He said they were trolls before they were trolls. You were kind of trolling people on the CB all and then other people would troll back and call them Pinks. And that's where the notion of Pinks or Pink Boys came up. And Pink Boys, they kind of flipped it in the church of the SubGenius. Pink boys are the others. They're the squares. They're the ones who just follow along and go to their nine to five job and spend their consumer money on catalog items. And anyone else outside is a Pink or a Pink Boy. Yes, but there's a distinction between say, people like you and I and actual died in the Wool. Pink Boys, like middle manager types who are not only fully bought into the con, the great con that's going on, they actually almost violently defended in its existence and its rightness. Those are pinks. They're irreparable. There's nothing that's ever going to help them. And they're genuine humans. Now, there are plenty of subgeni out there who don't know their subgeni. They haven't been exposed to the church, they've never seen a DOB's head, maybe, whatever reason, they're not aware that they're a subgenious yet. And if you're a true SubGenius, then you have Yeti blood coursing through your veins. Yes. Now, if you're an actual SubGenius, that means that you are of Yeti heritage, who has basically become aware of the teachings of Bob and are now actively working against the conspiracy and exploiting Pink Boys anytime you get a chance. Because again, they're hopeless. They're never going to be converted because they don't have any Yeti blood in them. Right. And to reiterate, I don't know if I kind of just tossed it off earlier, but he tossed it up. Bob Dobbs is a piece of clipart, literally. That face that you see was a piece of clipart from clipart catalog. And they loved clip art because it was free. And a lot of their early stuff was just collage from clipart that they had found. And this was from a clipart catalog. And now it's arguably one of the most famous pieces of clipart there is. Yeah. And I don't know if it was a joke. It's so hard to tell what's a joke and what's not because they play everything so straight. Yeah, they're in character, basically. Yeah, but I saw on one of their websites that they said, reminder, this is a trademarked piece of art now as part of the copyright SubGenius. So I don't know if they actually did copyright. I could totally see them doing that in real life or if they were just joking about it. Either way, yeah, it's kind of great. So I think we probably can't go any further without explaining this concept of slack I mentioned. The radio show is called the hour of slack and kind of the major, I guess, philosophy and tenets of their religion is this concept of slack. Are you having trouble describing it? No. They even say in the documentary it is not even to be described, that they can't even describe it. So whatever we do is going to be our own attempt. Okay. Slack is different for every person, but the definite idea is what you think, which is being slack, but not just being lazy, having everything you need in life and being content while giving up as little as possible. Exertion wise. Yeah, exertion wise, exactly. Like having done as little as possible to actually attain it. That's one definition of slack, for sure. The point is, I think it's one of those things where what is not slack is easier to recognize than what is slack. And I'll give you an example of something that happened today. Okay. Because I've been thinking about this. I'm like, how are we going to define slack? Yeah. So I knocked over the toilet brush behind the toilet in my bathroom. Right. Okay. And you know like the little drippings that end up in like the toilet brush holder? Yes. They spill out on the floor. Yeah, those are the worst drippings. The worst drippings. I would have rather spilled like raw pork juice onto my floor than those dripping. They're bad drippings. Right. Bad dripping. So I spent the next ten minutes not only like cleaning up those drippings and I mean like, cleaning it up like there's some floor missing now. I scrubbed it so hard and then also cleaning the holder for the scrub brush before I put everything back. And this is a totally unintentional, totally avoidable thing for me to be doing that took up ten minutes of my life. I did not want to be doing it. It was gross, it was yuck. And I realized this is the perfect example of what is not slack. It's the conspiracy. It was the conspiracy that probably had something to do with it. But the point was I was doing something I didn't want to do and I was getting no reward from it whatsoever. I was a little stressed out about it. It was not slack. So slack is the opposite of that. It's where things are going your way. It's where you are content and happy. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have everything in life. Like all the trappings of life. It very frequently doesn't mean that. Instead it's just whatever it is that makes you content. And because it's undefinable, that means that it's up to every subgeni to define what is slack for them. Yeah. And the conspiracy are the things that prevent you from achieving slack. Originally, I think the conspiracy was literally like the man, that kind of thing. But it evolved over the years to the point where one of the guys in the documentary said it evolved to it was like when it rained really hard on a day you were going to do something like that's. The conspiracy. I got you. It's things I think conspiring against you. That toilet brush knocking over, that's definitely the conspiracy, right? Because it prevented you from, I guess, taking your mid morning nap. Right. Under the teachings of Bob, the conspiracy is actually an acronym for clicks of normal secretly planning insidious rituals aimed at controlling you. That's a good one. Agreed. And then under the doctrine, like, this is an actual group who they don't know what slack is, but they know it exists and they're bent on stealing as much of it as possible and they start stealing it from everybody pinks and yeti from the moment you're born. And so it's up to you to steal it back to get as much slack as you possibly can. But the problem with the conspiracy is they're the ones running the show here on earth. They are the ones who are behind consumer culture and they've created this illusion that what normals and pinks and non subgenial yeti, who haven't figured themselves out yet buy into as life is all just this vast consumer conspiracy and that they actually offer what appears to be slack. But it's like false slack is what they call it. Yeah, it's manufactured slack. So it's like the subgenious wiki is awesome. And they give examples of pre planned recreation, like days off from work that you earn or are given. This is all false slack. Like it's somebody else deciding what your slack is and you're buying into it. And that is not slack. Slack is you have to decide what slack is. Right? And there is original slack. We are all born with original slack according to the church. And the conspiracy chips away at that slack or sells you false slack over the years to degrade your natural slack that you're born with. And then there's also involuntary slack, which is my favorite slack. And this is like if you lose your job or something, if you get fired, this is just involuntary slack that Bob is sending your way to force you to take a little time off. Yeah, I saw a video from I guess, 2009 or ten and it called the Great Recession, the Great Slack Session. And it basically said the financial markets have melted down. And I had this real dramatic music of millions of people are out of. Work. No one has a clue about what to do about it. Victory is at hand. There's one other thing I want to say about slack, too. There are basically two groups, two approaches or philosophies as far as slack is concerned. And I think it's pretty interesting that the whole concept has gotten this far. It's evolved into something. And I think this is a really good example of what happens with the church's teachings. Like, these guys just wrote some crazy stuff, like back in the even into the then other people who kind of vibed on it came along and expanded it. Like, I read an essay on the Scissors of site and apparently that's mentioned off handedly in pamphlet number one. And somebody wrote a whole essay about how they're still trying to figure out what those are and they think it's from a crystal in Atlantis. And it was just like, that's just what they do. It's almost like they're putting stuff out there as like thought starters for other people's creativity to kind of sprout from. But anyway, the two paths for slack is kind of split between these two groups, the rewardians and the emergent tiles. Right? Yeah. And the emergent tiles are getting their slack because they're getting the things done that they kind of feel like they want and need to get done, but it's under a deadline from someone else. But then they have their slack and then the rewardians. Don't think this is more like Tao of Steve stuff. Did you ever see that movie? No, I need to though. I'm well aware of it. That was sort of that guy's deal. He was just like he had this life philosophy and he would have really fit in with these folks with the rewarding. And they're basically like slack off all the time. Don't do any work until you absolutely have to. Right? I think there's quite a bit of pot involved every day kind of thing. Sure. That wouldn't surprise me. And that's what I think most people would think of when they think of, like, slacking. Like, yeah, that's what you do when you slack. You don't work, you sit around, you smoke pot, you're never put on pants or anything like that. And you're just having the time of your life as long as that's what you want to do. Emergent times, you're like, no, there's another way to do this. I feel really good about accomplishing something, about setting a goal and meeting it, but that's my goal. I want to learn how to climb a mountain, so I'm going to go learn how to climb a mountain and climb that mountain. And during that whole process, I'm slacking. Like, that's my slack. So those are kind of like the two ways of doing it. And apparently the two groups kind of pity each other and think they have it completely backwards. But the point is, neither group is right or wrong because it's all up to the individual, what your slack is. I mean, what these guys really? It's such a time and place thing. They were born out of this sort of spirit of the Mary pranksters, 60s counterculture King Kesey kind of thing. Yeah, but they came along at a time where that had been bulldozed over and the 80s were being born, which was about as anti 60s counterculture vibe as you can imagine. But these guys still had that sort of fun, playful idea, and this was their invention. I always think it's just so fun and so cool. Every time I see Bible or a live show, I absolutely do not want to be there. No, but I think it's awesome. I liken it to when I saw Spinal Tap in concert, they actually toured when I was in college and I was such a fan of the movie. And when they played the Fox Theater and we all went and it was not fun at all because it was funny as a movie. But you're at this rock and roll show that is supposed to kind of be funny. But there were also people that were really getting into the rock and roll, and I didn't know I was stuck in between worlds. I didn't know how to feel. And when I was watching these subgenious live shows, I was kind of like, oh, that's like Spinal Tap live. I don't want to be there. But I'm glad people are enjoying it. Yeah, it's kind of like and dude, they are enjoying it. The people who go to those are genuinely having the time of their lives. That's their time to just be themselves as much as they ever have in their life. I love it. It's almost like I would compare it to a meeting of the Juggle o's a Comic Con and Guarantee all mixed together. That's what the Bibles these days kind of seem like, just based on what I've seen on the Internet. Yeah, that's good. I like it. And if you think this is all really dumb, then you probably would not like their motto. They have a lot of sayings and mottos, but they're cheap. One that they kind of yell out at these devivals is FM. If you can't take a joke or if they can't take a joke right there. It's amazing to me that some people take this too seriously because the motto is literally this is a joke, right? Yeah. And it is really kind of like disconcerting, because if you do take it seriously, you really have to go to great lengths to get past all the wings, the nods, the absurdity of everything. It suggests that you're worse off than the average Colt member because you're actually taking a joke. Cult as a cult, it's like when Fight Club got too serious. Yeah. They started blowing up buildings and stuff. Yeah, I think so. Except there was no violence involved in the Church of the SubGenius no, they're peaceful. That's right. Because they're all stoned. Yeah. I think a lot of them are. I think a lot of them are like the Frank Zapotypes where they're just weird and they have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol or anything. They were born with original stone. Yeah, that's exactly right. Requires no drugs. Apparently Frank Zappa was a real jerk to people who did drugs. Like he had that cafe or restaurant or club or whatever, and he kicked you out if he thought you were on pot. That's conspiracy. Yeah. He was a little pink, from what I can tell. Interesting. Yeah. And you said also if this kind of stuff seems weird to you or whatever, or you don't like it, that's a pretty fairly normal reaction. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you now, but one of the reasons that it might make you feel a little wobbly or a little shaky or like you're missing something, or like you're being made fun of, that kind of weird feeling in your stomach is because you probably are being made fun of. Like, if you're not in on the joke, like I said earlier, by definition, you're part of the butt of the joke. You're a member of that group. And if you actually are actively getting offended at what they're saying and doing because one of the threads of humor that they very frequently use is bad taste, shock value, basically the opposite of PC. They really don't care for PC very much. And if you're deeply offended by this stuff and you actually respond to it, you're actually kind of proving their point that you are maybe a little too wrapped up in this culture, that they're basically saying, like, this is a fraud. This is all a fraud. And you're proving that there are problems with it by getting mad at something, at a joke. Basically, yeah. Before you start feeling too sorry for these people because they're being made fun of, is like squares who aren't hip to the joke and don't get the joke. The original reason this was started was because these very people were outcast and being bullied by those very people to begin with. Right. So let's take a break, man, and we'll talk about some of the lower points in the Church of the SubGenius that have happened across the years. Let's do it. 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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 if you went to a devival, one of the things you would find, Chuck, is especially in early one, is a lot of like put on preaching, like evangelical mock preaching. But what the guy is doing is doing a fire and brimstone preacher bit. Yeah, but what he's saying is espousing bob stuff about FM, if they can't take a joke or whatever. And that doesn't sit very well usually with people, but also it never really sits very well with me because it's obnoxious even in its real form and it's super obnoxious when it's like mocked because that's why I wouldn't want to be there. Yeah. And the anti music is another reason that was the next thing I was going to get to, is like if you are not super into this and probably on a pretty decent amount of acid back in like 1985 for four, the anti music would probably turn you off too. I know, I don't like it at all either. Yeah, it's basically the idea is that they would get a bunch of instruments and you could just do whatever you want with them. And the idea is that you can't play these things. These are not skilled musicians or not even musicians at all, and they would just make noise with them. And watching the documentary, you get the idea from some of them that it's sort of like the drum circle, that finally everyone gets in synchronicity for a minute. You're like, oh, okay, something just happened. That would happen occasionally, apparently, with the anti music, is that it would coalesce at a certain point, or maybe that was a drug stalking, but basically it's a bunch of people making a lot of awful noise and screaming. Yes. There was actually a time at devival, I think during the 90s maybe, where a schism in the church developed was very much planned. Right? So the idea was one of the big parts of one of the tenets of the church. Is the world's going to end eventually on X Day? And X Day was originally slotted for July 5, 1998. And that came and went, and there were no UFOs driven by sex goddesses to come whisk off the subgeniae to Planet X to live out the rest of their eternity partying. But the fact that this was coming along, the church decided, like, we don't know what's going to happen to the pinks after that, so we need to decide. And the schism was formed between people who said, well, there will probably be some subgeni who want to stay and rule the world, and we can just let them rule the Pinks from there on out. And then the other group said, no, all the Pinks are going to be slaughtered on next day. There won't be any Pinks left. And apparently this differing opinion on basic church doctrine, like, was a thread that was carried on for a very long time. It was, and I think we just need to be really clear. A schism was written into the script of the church, of the SubGenius, okay? Nothing formed. They wrote a heel, basically, into their wrestling show with Papa Joe Mama, who was the leader of the Holocaust, who believed and again, all ingest, but he believed, like, go out and shoot the rich, basically kill these people. And I think it was Stange was the leader of the evangelicals, which was let's just enslave them, basically, and keep them alive. Right? And two things here. First of all, they eventually had a big show in the 80s kind of jumping back in San Francisco, they had had these sort of small tent de vivals with 100 people. And then in San Francisco, they booked this theater for two nights, 900 seat theater for two nights. And we're like, we don't really know if we can do this. And they had set builders and set designers, and it became a real, actual thing. The news covered it, and they did. They covered it, and they had a fake assassination of Bob. Bob finally came out. He walked out on stage and then Bang was shot. But apparently they started doing this a lot. Bob had many, many lives and could be killed over and over again, assassinated. So there was that. And then after X Day, judging from the documentary, is when it seemed to kind of go bad and not go bad in that everybody really started believing and it became this really scary thing, but it sort of lost its judge a little bit. And there were some people, and I think one person specifically even went up to staying I don't know if it was the next day. I think it was San Francisco show in 1984. Okay. And obviously someone who needed some real help because he thought this was all real was livid, that it wasn't being taken seriously and that people were laughing. And that's when Sting was like, man, kind of this was bound to happen. But it also made him sad because I never wanted anything like this. Right. And that was the reason why the documentary that was made by Sandy K. Boone, who was involved in a few other pretty great documentaries recently, including Tower I don't think it's The Tower, just Tower, the one about the Charles Whitman, the shooting at the University of Texas back in the it's amazing. So remember Waking Life, that whole thing Link Letter did with the animation? Yeah, they did that for this documentary and it really had a great impact. The Rotoscoping. Cool. Yes. So she was involved in that as well. But she made this documentary, apparently her late husband was like a great adherent in the truth of the SubGenius. And she made it also kind of as an ode to him as well. But in it stage and philo break character, and they hadn't broken character for 30 something years. Right? Like, they've done interviews, they've print TV, radio, they've done the radio show, they've written tons of books. They just don't break character. That's just part of their jam. And for this documentary, they did, and they said the reason why at least Stan said the reason why he did was because they're kind of getting on in years. And he wants to make sure that it's perfectly clear before he dies that this is a joke and that everybody knows it was a joke. And it's always been a joke. And you need to take it as a joke so that it doesn't accidentally turn into something like Scientology down the line. Yeah. You watched it, right? Yeah, I didn't watch it right before this. I saw it several months ago. Yeah. He said and this kind of sums it up in the way that it makes sense, but it doesn't. And this is in relation to that guy who really came up to him and other people that really thought it was real. He said, we always wanted to trick people, but we didn't really want to trick people, right? Yes, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. They were fascinated by the fact that people could be tricked and they wanted to explore that and make fun of it, and they invited other people to explore it and make fun of it, but it wasn't to hurt anybody. They weren't actually trying to exploit anybody. Like the idea of having you become a part, become a member, sending your dollar, become ordained, buy into all that sales stuff, was to point out that that's what was going on in the real world. Yeah. And this sort of came to a head in the 90s when it was just after Columbine. They had a live show planned in Boston, and Papa Joe Mama, who was, again their sort of scripted heel agent Provocateur, got on, I think, a radio show and somehow referenced Columbine. It was a little unclear. I think he blamed Columbine on the Church of the SubGenius. Was that what it was? I believe so. Okay. Because I couldn't quite tell what the reference was, but it was clear that that was over the line for both Philo and Sting. And the show was originally canceled by the theater. And then a real church, I think, like an Episcopal church, stepped up weirdly and said, you can have it at our church. And then they got bomb threats and they said, well, now I guess we can't do that. And then I think they ended up having it in a public park or something. But that was sort of like where the 90s weren't too kind to not just like the numbers, but once the Internet was born. And that was like, really when the consumer culture and the Internet boom happened for real. It was just so antithetical to the Church of the SubGenius, it seemed to kind of fade away until later on when the Internet kind of helped revive it again. So my take is that what really kind of let it downhill, not to say that it went downhill on its own. Like, the world changed and the world became the parody. It wasn't like, straight any longer. It was just a joke. But that was real life now. So you can't satirize something. That is the satire that you're coming up with. There's just no way to do it. No, that's absolutely right. And America changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. You just can't you can't satirize something when it becomes this weird version of itself that you were using before. It encroached on your turf kind of thing. Yeah. And then the last ten minutes of the documentary sort of focus on the Trump administration and these fringe groups that started online there saying this crazy made up stuff. And that really puts a hurting, like you said, on something like the Church of the SubGenius as far as being and their numbers were never huge, but I get the idea from watching it that staying still has people that write in that still send him some money. He told one funny joke about getting a payment upon receipt envelope that he had to pay $2 to even open this thing. And he was all perturbed about that and there was $1,000 in cash. Oh, really? And he took half of it and immediately took it to a sick friend. That's the kind of guy he is. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, he struck me as that as well. But he's still paying his mortgage. Stuff in envelopes. Well, yeah, because I think if you go back and you read the original books and even still I was reading, like, The Wikia that explained all of the different stuff is hilarious and totally worthwhile and still applies today in a certain way. It's timeless, even though it screams Reagan era. Yes, but it still makes sense because we still have a consumer driven culture that has a lot to do with gender norms and conformity and exploiting people for their labor. All that stuff is still going on. So the original stuff still stands and still holds. Yeah. And Mark Motherspaw of Devo and I can't remember the other guy's name. And Devo, they were way into it. Penn Jillette nick Offerman richard Linklaterter paul Rubens pee Wee Herman's Playhouse head of Bob Dobbs on his big Wall collage These were all people that were attracted to it. It was a lot of dudes, of course, but they do interview a few of the women in the original group that said we were outcast and we wanted to meet these weirdo guys. And this is where we did it. We went there because it was mostly guys and we could meet these dudes, but it was very male oriented and I don't know. Like I said, I always had fun reading about it and hearing about it, but never wanted to get too involved just because I'm too much of a pink, I guess. Yeah, it is a lot of fun to read about, for sure. Like, there's a lot of stuff out there on the Internet to read. This is like 10% of it, I encourage. Yeah, it's huge. It's an enormous, huge rambling. Like, what do you call a group of beliefs in scripture and doctrine? Mythos, I guess. Maybe canon. Yes, canon. That's what I was looking for. There's a huge, extensive canon. And it's a lot of fun. Especially the older stuff. Some of the newer stuff is not that funny because and I don't mean new, I mean, like mid. Two thousand s the mid ought kind of stuff started to really lose its sense of humor. Some people lost their sense of humor and got real serious about it. The eighties and 90s stuff is hilarious. I strongly recommend going to read an explanation of the male to female discrepancy in the Church of the SubGenius by Reverend Nancy Regalia or by the brilliant book. Yeah, well, I don't think that was in the book. That was just supplemental stuff. It was an essay explaining it. But it also is more like a kind of a call to arms for those girls who never felt like were always recognized that they were kind of being forced into certain gender roles and didn't ever feel good about it. She had a quote. It's not enough to simply burn your bras. Why stop there? Burn a few bridal boutiques in City Hall while you're at it. It's a good essay for sure. It's totally worth reading. Good stuff. Yeah. There's a lot more to say about the Church of the SubGenius, but we'll just leave it to you. I feel like we should just part with it's a joke. It is a joke. Ultimately, it's a joke. And take it as that. Okay. You got that down? You got some yeti in you? Pink boy? Maybe. And since I called Chuck a pink boy, it's time for listener mail. Keeping it short and sweet, here with a quick correction from a new listener. Okay. Hi, guys. I'm a very new listener, and I love what I've heard so far. However, just three episodes in about the Magna Carta, one of you off handedly suggested that William Mcconker was a beloved English king because he annexed Normandy after the Battle of Hastings. Knows me. That's pretty much backwards, guys. He was a Norman king who conquered England at that battle. William's story would make a great episode. That is from Scott Scattergood and Suwanne, Korea. Well, Scott, since you're new, you obviously don't know that most of the viewpoint that we give on Stuff You should Know is from the Viking viewpoint. So we had it, right? Okay, good. Scott Scattergood. What a great name, right? Yeah. What happens if you scramble Scott around? Scattered. Good. If you want to get in touch with us, like Scott did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, 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." | |
02b076aa-3b0e-11eb-947e-97a3edaec67a | How Monster Trucks Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-monster-trucks-work | If you’ve never seen a huge truck with gigantic tires do backflips or roll backward perched only on its two front tires, you haven’t lived yet. Chuck and Josh are here to ignite your interest.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | If you’ve never seen a huge truck with gigantic tires do backflips or roll backward perched only on its two front tires, you haven’t lived yet. Chuck and Josh are here to ignite your interest.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 13 May 2021 12:15:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=12, tm_min=15, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=133, tm_isdst=0) | 45117514 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were an apparel company facing an avalanche of demand? So you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure and now your ecommerce platform can handle spikes in orders. Let's create It systems that roll up their own fleet. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hello. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to square space. 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. Comssysk 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 a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there Jerry's, hanging out in the ether again. And this is stuff you should know on a Sunday. Sunday. Sunday. But it's not. This will be out on a Thursday. That's true. He's that guy. I don't know, but he is an American icon. For those of you who live outside of the United States and use the metric system, there's an announcer that is no one knows his name. He may be living or dead, I'm not sure. I bet a lot of people know his name, but we don't know his name. Well, yeah, I'm just generalizing from my own experience. Got you. But he's like a monster truck ad announcer guy who is always getting you hyped up to want to go to see the monster truck rally. Yeah, I think he is second. I mean, there have been some great announcers in the history of this country. I would put him up there with Michael Buffer. So let's get ready to rumble, guy. Yeah. I put triple Sunday Man way ahead of him. And Don Pardo to me is my all time favorite. Yes. The Sarah live announcer. Yeah. Featuring Josh Clark. I've been waiting so long in musical guests. Boy, that'd be a double. Bill, who would be your favorite musical guest if you were the host? Oh, boy. Dolly Parton. That's a good one. Sure. I was going to say Gandhi or Jesus Christ or something like that, but I got my fantasies confused. You know, our buddy Scott Ocreman does a great Don pardo. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, he's good at that stuff. He is a brilliant comedian. He is. It's great. I've been listening to his new Ish show with Lauren Lapkis and Paula Tompkins, our other friend called Freedom and it's hysterical and great. Yeah. Good. Nice plug, Chuck. Yeah, everything Aquaman does turns to gold. Can I give you my brief rundown with offroading as we get into the monster truck episode. Yeah. I predict a dad story coming. Yeah. And I think we talked about this a little bit when we talked at some point about CB radios. But when we were kids, you and I in the CBS were a big deal. The whole culture around it. It's hard to explain, but it's interesting. And my dad got a CB, and he and one of his better friends, they both had Jeeps. My dad had a brown Jeep Renegade, and Charlie had a green one. And we would go offroading when I was a kid, so we would go up into the mountains and literally cut roads where there were no roads. And my dad was the mudslinger. Oh, really? That was a scandal. Yeah. Nice. I don't remember what Charlie's was, but we did quite a bit of it, including a fully four wheels off the ground jump at one point on the dirt road where they had been I think they were going to pave the road. So they had bulldozed, basically, a ramp out of dirt and rocks and left it there to come back the next day to probably remove it. And my dad and Charlie heard about it. They're like, let's go. Jump the jeeps. And my dad jumped a Jeep with my brother and I in it. No seat belts, of course. Oh, my God. Of course not. I don't think Jeeps had back seat belts back then. Oh, my God. And I remember hitting the ground and then bumping up and smashing my head on the roll bar. I did. I can imagine. You still have that divot. Yes, but it was a 70, so I don't even think he said, Is everyone okay? I think we just kept on tracking. He's like, Take a salt tablet. Yeah, exactly. That's a great story, man. I had no idea that you'd done any offroading. I've done exactly zero offroading in my life. I do have a deeper appreciation for it after researching all this stuff, but I have never been into monster trucks and never gone to one of those. Although I haven't either. I will say, the thought of you and Emily and me and Yummy going to one of these had a lot of appeal for some reason. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, out of the four people you just listed, as far as I know, yummy is the only one who's been to. I totally believe it. Yeah. She was into Power Motorsports for a little while there. That's great. And what's the one she said? It's really loud and it's pretty great, except she said breathing all of the gas fumes, the exhaust fumes, is not super fun. You need to go to one of those stadium ones outdoors. Yeah. I saw footage of one in Anaheim where the Angels play. I'm like, oh, yeah, it's an outdoor baseball stadium. That's the place to go see a monster truck rally, for sure. Not like an enclosed sports arena hockey rink. No. And I've heard the noise is really I've been to one drag race, and the noise was really bad there. So I can't imagine what it's like for a monster truck gym. Yes. But there's something about it, like even just watching clips on YouTube, like I've done the last few days. Me too. I saw a couple of things that I'm going to admit gave me goosebumps a little bit. I was that impressed with it, but part of it was the noise from the engine, but also the noise of, like, 25 year old guys screaming like little boys because somebody did a wheelie like a giant monster truck. Yeah, it definitely adds to the sound as well. And little boys and girls screaming like grown men. Right, exactly. It's a weird scene. It's a big crisscross. So, yes, I think it's good that we fessed up out of the gate, that we have not been to a monster truck rally, and we're not huge as far as our understanding of, say, like, motorized engines go, that kind of thing. Yeah, not our bank. I feel like we could still do one on this pretty well because there's just so much to it. There's a lot of really interesting stuff to it. You don't actually have to have gone to see a monster truck rally to appreciate it, especially if you watch some clips on YouTube. Yeah. And the reason I mentioned the offroading is because that is where monster truck rallies is. That what they're still called? Monster Truck Jams? They're called Monster Jam, but that's like a specific brand of show that you go to. Well, the Monster Jam. Correct. Right. I'm calling them rallies. I'm going to call the monster truck prom. Okay. The catalion started with offroading with people like my dad in the getting off road, and before that, even offroading in these pickup trucks that eventually were like, hey, let's get some bigger tires. Let's lift it up a little bit. Let's get some more ground clearance. And before you know it, trucks are just a little bit bigger and taller than they were before. And a man named Bob Chandler from St. Louis said, I've got a great idea. Too bad he didn't have some sort of IP around this. But he did come up with a great idea, which was the very first Bigfoot. Yeah. He's very widely credited as basically the inventor of monster truck. It was basically born out of necessity. Like, he drove his car really hard. The reason the first monster truck was named Bigfoot was because that was his nickname. He was well known as a very aggressive offroading driver. But because of that, he would break axles, he would get stuck in the mud. He would find himself in his truck, more importantly, in places that your average truck driver would not find themselves. So to kind of get out of those sticky situations or never get into him in the first place. He started to try to upgrade his truck well beyond anything you would buy from a dealership. And he was a tinkerer. So much so, and he got so into it, he actually opened his own four by four parts store. In part, I get the very strong impression to probably get a discount on the parts that he was needing to use on his own truck that he was braking with regularity. Yeah, yeah. It was called the Midwest four wheel drive center. And the initial truck was a 250, a Ford F 250. And he dressed it all up, and he got those bigger axles and bigger tires. And he actually did invent a technology which was I'm not sure if he completely invented this, but he at least installed four wheel steering on his truck, which is when the back wheels turn and the front wheels turn so you can turn tighter. I don't know about a rage, but this was a thing for a while because my good buddy and your pal John Pindell from New Jersey, he had one of those four wheel steering Honda Preludes that he just it was like his baby. He loved his car more than anything. I remember that they were always like, he can get in and out of a parking spot at the grocery store like you would not believe. Yeah, you should have seen him park at the grocery store. I forgot about that effortless. And especially in a big monster truck when you're going to need that turning radius and the tires got bigger and bigger. I think he landed at 44 inches, which was like a tractor tire initially. And that was in 1979. And that was sort of the very first monster truck. Yeah. Nowadays, if you're riding around on 44 inch tires, other monster truck enthusiasts would be like, what's wrong with your tires? Why are they so dinky? But at the time, people would ask you to pull over so they could talk to you about your car when you were driving down the road with tires like that. Sure. And he actually used it to great effect. He advertised his business parts, four by four parts business on the car when he was driving around town. And he ended up adding the word bigfoot, the name Bigfoot onto it. And again, at first, I believe he was basically saying, like, a long haul trucker will put their name or nickname or CB handle on their rigor. That's what he was doing. But in very short order, that became the name of the car or the truck. And the successive trucks that came after that. There's, I think, 25 iterations of Bigfoot or some offshoot of Bigfoot now. Yeah, he made one very famous initial video sort of as a promotion, like a local TV commercial, basically, for his business of bigfoot riding over some other cars. And that was it, man. After that, people went berserk. Yeah, there is one sort of I don't know if it's apocryphal, but at least we can't find the original source. But that he did get pulled over once in Bigfoot because he would drive this thing on the road. It was just crazy. And he was ticketed because the only violation that they found was the headlights were too high off the ground. Yeah. Which, I mean, I was looking at what makes monster trucks not street legal, and that's definitely one of them. But some other ones are, like usually they don't have windshield wipers or horns or things like that. It's not stuff you would think of. Another one, though, is like, the tires can't be too wide beyond the body, and if they do, you have to have mud flaps to cover it up. There's a lot of different laws state by state, but for the most part, yeah, you're not allowed to drive those things on the road for a number of reasons. But yes, the height of the headlights is definitely one of them. So he takes off around the country and starts doing some promotional events. He would go to exhibitions. He would drive over a car or pull a weighted sled that looks like a giant six pack of Budweiser. Did you see some of the early Bigfoot videos? I watched the very first one, and a lot of them after that. Yeah, they were like slow motion. They weren't hyped up. It was just basically like, okay, for my next trick, I'm going to start in about 90 or 120 seconds. I'm going to roll over this one car very slowly. Yeah, that's what it was like. Yeah. It wasn't like no one had seen anything like it, though, you know what I mean? So at the time, what seemed boring to us now was, like, just mind blowing to the people of 1981. Oh, yeah. So he was doing pretty well, especially as far as business promotion goes, and realized that he needed a second Bigfoot because people wanted him in movies and they wanted to get their county fair. And so an 82 Bigfoot two debuted at the Pontiac Silver Dome, this time with 66 inch tires, which kind of ended up being the industry norm. Yes. Apparently they started out with agricultural tires, the kind of tires that you put on tractors or huge combines, like just giant tires. And then to save some of the weight, because these tires can be 800 plus pounds each, fully inflated, like mounted to wheels. They'll actually shave off a lot of the tread, the real deep tread, the lugs, I think they're called, they'll shave off a substantial portion, so they still have lots of traction, because at these monster truck catalions, they're driving over, like mud and dirt and everything. I don't think those are lugs, are they? I saw somewhere somebody referred to him as lugs, a huge tread. I thought the lug was the thing that came out that you put the lug nut on when you change a tire. This is a very confusing world we live in, so it's possible that they're both called lug. There's a lot of people laughing at us right now, which is fine. I know they're going to pat us on our heads when they'll probably be nicer than soccer and chess enthusiasts. I certainly hope so, because I've seen these people get up and yell, and I don't want to be yelled at by a monster truck enthusiast. Should we take a break? Sure. And look up what a lug is and come back? Sure. 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Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. So, Chuck, where we left off, bigfoot had really kind of established this whole thing in the very early 80s. It appeared to take this job and shove it in 1981. Yes. Johnny Page. Did you ever see that movie? I'm sure your dad probably made you watch it, like all the time. That was an HBO special for sure. Okay. I never saw it, and I was very surprised to learn that Robert Hayes, the guy from Airplane, was in it. Like the main guy. I would not have cast him. I'm surprised no one has reinvigorated his career, like Tarantino style. Sure. He seems for a comeback. He really does. So it was in that it was in Police Academy two and six. It was part of the pop culture zeitgeist, for sure. But at the same time, it's success and its popularity spawned imitators is not the right word. Catalan mates. Yeah, fellow Catalano or something like that. Other people are like, yes, this is what we should be doing with our lives. And they actually were able to make a livelihood by appearing at some of those early hot rod shows or like car exhibitions or drag races, things like that. They would just be there to entertain the crowds. And then all of a sudden, they're like, well, maybe we should match these things against one another. And so from that monster truck rally started to grow on their own. Yes. I get the feeling it was kind of like the rodeo clown for a little while. Like you said there would be drag races. And they said, and now Bigfoot will make it a special appearance. And it's interesting in that it sort of started it kind of followed NASCAR's footprint a little bit, or stock car racing in general, because the name is right there, stock cars. Like, initially those cars were just juiced up cars that they would race. And initially these trucks were Ford, F, Chevrolet, and they were just trucks that people built bigger and heavier and more rugged and just made them huge. They got to a point, though, where they were using military axles and stuff like that on their Big equipment because everything was breaking, but they found that those were even breaking. And as they got bigger and bigger, they said, you know what? We need to start over, everybody. This is a real thing, and we can't just modify these pickup trucks. We got to build these things from the ground up, like NASCAR eventually ended up doing. Yeah, and that's exactly what they did. And apparently Bob Chandler led the way on that as well, really tinkered around with CAD designs, computer assisted designs. And one of the things he came up with and it wasn't him specific or it wasn't just him, there were a group of people working on this by this time. This is the I believe the late 80s monster trucks were a thing by now, but they revolutionized it by basically saying, how about instead of these, like, super heavy, brittle things where the truck itself weighs a total of like \u00a315,000. Yeah, that's ridiculous. And we break axles because they're really strong, but they're really brittle too. Let's start using tubes instead. And they created a revolution by creating and welding these cages, these frames, out of very strong but very lightweight tubes. And you're never going to guess one of the components that they use that they make these tubes out of aluminum molybdenum. No way. Way. It's funny, we heard from people about how to pronounce that, and someone said, I don't know if you saw this. And they said, in the industry, we just call it Molly. Molly. Yes, I saw that, too. Yeah, they use a chromium molybdenum alloy, and they call it Cromole. Wow. Yeah. That's what your average monster truck is made out of. And you don't need the same amount of stuff that, like, a passenger vehicle needs. You need just the bare minimum amount of stuff that's going to make this thing run, keep it together, and then, most importantly, protect the driver inside. Because when you strip everything away from the monster truck of today that Bob Chandler and his friends revolutionized in the late eighty S. You basically have a roll cage, is what you're dealing with. A giant tubular roll cage. That's what a monster truck is at its core. Yeah. And one of the other big improvements and advancements they made was moving the engine behind the driver. So it's a mid engine layout. No more what's in front of you under the hood. The bodies of these things now and since the late 80s, early 90s, are fiberglass. And they're just I mean, if you watch any videos of this stuff online of, like, current monster truck rally or catalans excuse me. These fiberglass bodies, they're just showpieces they're made to just tear apart and break away. Like, very few of them end up in one piece at the end of these. Yes, but they still cost, like, $10,000 a piece. But they're super modular, super interchangeable, so that you might see the same truck a couple of times during a rally. But what you don't realize is they just oh, sorry. Forgot what I just said for another 20 minutes. No, I mean spoil it for the people that think they're watching different trucks. Got you. So, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are more bodies than there are actual trucks at any given monster truck. Catalan, they're just swapping out the actual shells, the fiberglass body. There's a crew there. I was reading about them. They're the unsung heroes of any catalion, where in between appearances, in between shows, like, a lot of times, those monster truck jams will be a couple of shows a day on a Sunday in a certain city. They're working feverishly to fix everything that's gone wrong from the abuse that that poor truck took for the last couple of hours during the show. But one of the things they do is switch out the bodies real quick so that you have to transport far fewer trucks. It's a lot easier to transport a lighter fiberglass body than a big, heavy truck. Yeah, I thought it was funny. And the Gravestor helped us put this together. And at one point, when he was talking about switching out the shelves. He said this kind of started because multiple bigfoot would show up at an event and you can't have a bigfoot racing a bigfoot, I bet you no one would care. They'd probably just think it was some twelve year old boy would be like, that ain't right. I can't put my finger on it. That ain't right. Paul, something's been violated here. I don't know, who knows? But they did start switching them out with regularity. And like I said, they just tear apart. If you watch any video, these drugs are pretty insane. I mean, they're doing like double back flips now. I know it's crazy. So you have to make a distinction whether you're talking about the double back flip where the truck just follows everybody. A giant monster truck hits a ramp and does a back flip, and then before it touches the ground, it does another backflip. In mid air, it looks hard to do. I didn't see a lot of successful ones. You could also be talking about a consecutive backflip where the truck does a backflip, lands and does another, immediately goes into another backflip. Both are equally impressive, but the single double backflip is the harder of the two to do. And it's fun to watch people try and fail at, but it's also pretty great to see somebody land. Yeah. And speaking of trying and failing, we should talk a little bit about the Anderson family, another first family of monster trucks. So the father, the elder statesman of the Anderson family was in it way early alongside Chandler and his family truck was the Grave Digger. Eventually he passed down to his son, and then another son, and then eventually his daughter. Kristen is now the driver of the Grave Digger, and she set the Guinness record for altitude for the highest jump, I think just last year. Right? Yeah. In June 2020, in beautiful Bradenton, Florida, she landed a 33 foot nine inch jump off of a truck ramp. And it's pretty impressive. I think it was her dad. The reason I mentioned the trying and failing thing was her dad was the first person who said, you know what, these races are fine racing, these things are good. But he was the one that said, hey, after the race, why don't the drivers just come out and do some tricks and stuff? He realized people like that more than the races. And although they still do race now, freestyle competition was born out of that notion. And that's sort of where the crowdpleasing entertainment comes from, are the drivers that are doing these jumps and driving on two wheels and jumping over things and through things, and it's all right there on that big dirt pit. Yeah, Dennis Anderson definitely was the one to be credited with creating that. And it went from just the existence of monster trucks to monster trucks slowly driving over a couple of cars to them racing apparently in the 90s, they raced them. They got them as light as, like \u00a39000, which is about twice as heavy as, say, like a normal midsize truck today, which is really light for a monster truck, considering that all four tires and wheels combined maybe make up 2000, 2500 of those pounds, that's really light. And they wanted them light so they could raise them and get them really fast. And then they said, you know what? People want to see what Dennis Anderson was saying is all the tricks, but you still need to be able to go fast. So now they're about \u00a312,000 is what they clock in at. They're durable, but they're also light enough to be fast and to hit 33 foot high jumps when they hit a ramp. Yeah, and they can do this thanks to a massive supercharged methanol powered engine. 540 cubic inch motors, and you've only got two speeds, though it's got a very low geared transmission system. And I think first gear is sort of like on an 18 wheeler that just sort of gets your wheels rolling, and then you immediately pop into that second gear, and that's all there is, because all you need is torque and acceleration. So you can go super fast in a very short span, so you can hit those ramps and do whatever trick that you have up your sleeve. Yeah. And I was like, what's the point of using methanol? These engines are called blown alcohol engines. In the industry, they call them alky. Alky. And it turns out that methanol actually is less energy dense than gasoline, but you can cram more of it into a gaseous state than you can gas. So if you have a supercharger and air compressor that's compressing a whole bunch of blown alcohol vapors into your engine, you can actually get more power, more energy out of it. So that's the reason that they all run on, like, pure methanol. No gasoline. Not a drop of gasoline goes anywhere near these things. And the engines are extremely big, and they're also extraordinarily inefficient, fuel wise. There's one very famous monster truck called the Raminator, and it clocked in as the fastest it was the fastest monster truck on the planet. It did zero to 60 in 3 seconds, which is faster than a Ferrari Enzo at the time, or at least back in 2014. No kidding. But it got 264ft to the gallon. Isn't that awesome? I was trying to figure out before you said to the Gala, I was like, where's this going? Right? Wow, that's really funny. Yeah. They're not worried about fuel consumption. They're worried about making that big engine go boom because people love that sound. It's hysterical. And put in here that they have attempted electric powered monster trucks, but they were not popular with the fans. They want to hear that engine going. It's part of the allure, I think. I think more than anything, they don't want to hear. Themselves. Oh, I doubt that. If you talk about shocks when you see these things today, it's crazy how they will do something where and I encourage you to go check out videos if you've never seen this stuff, at least photos. But yeah, definitely video. Watch a video because they can contort themselves and go back upright way more often than you would think. Like about 80% of the time. I'm like, well, that thing is on its back, or it's done for the day, and it manages to just flop back over. And those wheels look like they're all independent of one another. They have four nitrogen charged shocks on every single wheel on all four wheels, and it's pretty cool looking. And those shocks are not like normal shocks either. Your average shock has what's called a range of travel, which is the amount of basically give that it has of about four to six inches. These usually have about 24 inch range of travel. And like you said, there's four on each wheel. So on the one hand, that keeps the driver's spine from compressing every time they land after a huge jump. And on the other hand, it also pushes the truck off of objects and obstacles. And I don't know if we said those huge giant tires, in a normal car, you've probably got about \u00a333 per square inch inflation in them. These have maybe eight to ten. Yeah, there's a lot of bounce in the tire. There's a huge amount of range of travel in the shocks. When you put it all together. They can pop up on their back wheels, they can pop up on their front wheels, they can just do tumbles and somersaults and all sorts of crazy stuff because of those shocks and virtually deflated tires that are basically like giant balloons. Yeah, they need more cushion for the pushing. They bounce around quite a bit. I think safety is an important thing. And like NASCAR again, they sort of followed that model of in the early days. I would be surprised if Bob Chandler even used a seatbelt. He seems kind of like a wild card to me. But like I said, along with NASCAR, they started improving the safety over the years. There are still things like back injuries. Fire is another thing that obviously because when you flip these things over and you're bouncing around those fuel, it's not just like a regular gas tank or oil reservoir. They're like super modified. And there are backup systems and redundancies to make sure they're not throwing flaming gas all over people. There are automatic fire extinguishers, like in NASCAR, they're wearing those fire suits and gloves. I'm not sure if it's the exact Hans device, but the device that I think after I might be wrong, I'm just going from memory, but I think after Dale Earnhardt died is when they brought in that device, basically, that straps a NASCAR driver's head completely stationary. Yes, absolutely true. And I think that's what they're using in monster trucks as well. Yes. So I was reading a guy who went to Monster Truck University in Illinois, or Monster Jam University and got to test out driving a monster truck, and he said, your field of vision is basically relegated to how much you can move your eyeballs in their sockets. Yes. Your head is not moving at all. Not only is your head mobilized, your body is basically two, except for your arms, and you're strapped in with a five point seatbelt that's actually ratcheted in. It's not some buckle like they use ratchets to screw them in. So you are in that thing. And then also, if you're an actual professional monster truck driver, the seat that you're sitting in has actually been molded to your body. To your body. You probably can't fluctuate and wait too much if you're on the monster truck circuit, or else you're not going to fit into your own seat, you know? Yeah. You got to watch your weight, I imagine. And, you know, the whole debate about whether race car drivers or athletes is of course they're athletes. And I would imagine a monster truck driver. It takes a lot of toll in the body, and they have to be in pretty decent shape as well. Sure. Also, whoever you are listening, you couldn't do this. No, totally. It's not something like driving one of these things is not intuitive. Not only do you have to learn it, I get the impression that you have to be basically naturally talented to start with to even get good at it at all. Too. Yeah. I mean, should we talk a little bit about driving? I think one thing we did mention, which is pretty cool, is that the driver sits in the middle. It's not mounted on the left side like we drive here in the United States, it's in the center because for a very good reason, so your arm doesn't fly out the window and get crunched. That's a big one. And I actually have seen a picture of Bob Chandler driving bigfoot. Yes. He's leaning out the window, looking at the ground, like checking his clearance, but he's like, he might as well be going 10 miles an hour down a country road for the way that he's sitting in this car. Especially now, knowing that they're, like, strapped in and in the center of the car. It's just hilarious to see. I can't believe the guy is still alive. Yeah, I mean, is he still alive today? Is he still around? Yeah, yeah. Like we said, they're only those two gears. And there's also still that rear wheel steering that Chandler came up with. And I don't think we mentioned he called it a four x four x four because four x four, obviously for four wheel drive and then that four wheel steering. But you now can turn those on and off. The four wheel steering feature with a toggle switch. That's how you drive it. Yeah. So, like slipping that switch on and off and steering and hitting the gas where you're and I don't think we got to that part yet, but it's actually attached via a tow loop to the accelerator throttle because they would have problems with sticking accelerators. That is not good in a monster truck that can go that fast. So now you can pull back on the accelerator. But all of this stuff takes a lot of practice. And that's why you would go to the monster truck University. Yes. And have to be naturally talented, too. And then there's also safety issues, Chuck, that they've come up with because there's been a lot of tragedies. Apparently no monster truck drivers ever died driving a monster truck, but plenty of spectators have been killed because of things like when you crush a car, debris can fly everywhere. Sure. Parts of the monster truck itself can come off and they're usually moving pretty fast and are pretty heavy when they're flying through the air. And then sometimes monster trucks can just like, drive into crowds. So if you go to a monster truck rally or Catalan, whatever your preference is, you will see that the lower seats are just totally you can't go down there because these things are so unpredictable and can so easily spin out of control that it's just not safe to be anywhere near ground level when one of them is driving around. Yeah. And I think after they implemented that, there were incidences where the trucks did go up into those empty seats. Everyone involved looked around and just sort of nodded like, yeah, we did it. Yeah. Just save some lives. And then also there's another thing, too, where if you go to one of these shows, you'll find think that there's four people standing around at each corner of the hockey rink or the baseball diamond or whatever that have little remote controls, and each one of them is capable of completely shutting off the engine and the fuel immediately with the press of a button. And they do that in case the driver is knocked unconscious but the throttle is still down in the car or the truck is still running around. Yes. You don't want a ghost driven monster truck inside of a stadium full of people. I mean, do you know, doesn't that just shout how dangerous this is that there's people standing by with remote controls to turn the thing off if you're knocked unconscious while you're doing your job? Yeah, maybe we won't go over all these, but there have been fatalities multiple times through the years at monster truck rallies, including small children getting killed in the audience. This was mainly in the 90s, but there was one in Mexico in 2013. There was something else in 2014 in the Netherlands. Yeah. Which is? I don't know. Why is that surprising to me that the Netherlands has monster truck rallies. But I mean, these people, they were just standing around like they were watching, I don't know, a couple of dogs do it or something like that, just in a circle. And then all of a sudden, the monster truck loses control and just plows into the crowd. I think it killed like three or four people. Yeah, like they're watching Disney on Ice, basically. Can we take a break? Yeah, with that one, for sure. All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and reveal why I mentioned Disney on Ice right after this. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. 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Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listening is host Baratoon de Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, Doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Shady Rays is an independent sunglasses company that gives you the features of $200 sunglasses for a fraction of the price. That means polarized lenses, well constructed, durable frames, and premium high end finishes. Also something you won't find anywhere else is the Shady Rays Protection Program. Shady Rays includes lost and broken protection on every pair. They'll send you a brand new pair if you lose them. No matter what happened, give Shady Raise a try and if you don't love them, you'll pay nothing. It's as simple as that. Exclusively for our listeners, head to shadyrace.com and use code stuff for 50% off two or more pairs of polarized sunglasses. Once again, head to shadyrays.com and use code stuff for 50% off two or more pairs of polarized sunglasses. That's code stuffed for 50% off two or more pairs only@shadyrays.com. All right, so you mentioned there were at least 25 different Bigfoot over the years. Bigfoot is, you know, it's part of popular culture now in the nomenclature. Like, Emily, if she sees a big truck in our neighborhood, will be like, look at that Bigfoot. Get out of the way. Or some Bigfoot. Let me just rephrase restate what I said. It was in Police Academy two and six. Yeah, two different times. Yes, I'm sure when they got to six, they're like, who should we bring back? They're like, Definitely the guy that makes the noises. Robert Hayes. No, not Robert Hayes. Yes. Let's get Bigfoot back in here. He came that close to having his career advised by Police Academy Six, but they skipped him over for Bigfoot. So Bigfoot 14 jumped to 727 and 99, and then Bigfoot Five. If you look this thing up, it's pretty ridiculous. It's the biggest one of all. They built Bigfoot Five with tires that are 10ft tall that were used on the VC 22 snow freighter land train, which was this train. It's really a vehicle connected to other vehicles. It's more like a big shipping bus, but it's a trackless freight train, basically, that they shuttled supplies between Cold War early warning outposts between Alaska and Canada in the if you look up Bigfoot, which one was it? 14. Just take a look at those ridiculous tires. It doesn't look as fun or as nimble because they're just super tall and not as wide. Yeah, but yeah, it was a stunt. It's ostentatious even for a monster truck. I think so. And it just doesn't look as nimble and as fun. For those of you who were raised in the 90s rather than the 80s, grave Digger is probably even more familiar than Bigfoot. And like we said, Dennis Anderson, the original creator of Grave Digger and his family keeps driving for him, was the guy who basically came up with freestyle monster trucking. Yeah, that's off to him. I think his daughter Kristen is the only first and only full time monster truck driver who's a woman. Oh, yeah. Hats off to her as well. And also the uninsured world record holder, too, which is nothing to sneeze at. That's right. Since we were talking about fiberglass bodies are super removable. Since you're no longer having to kind of work with anything that was originally a car or a truck, you can kind of do whatever you want. And some people model like the Grave Digger is modeled after a 50s Chevy panel van. There's one that's called the Big Kahuna that looks like a Woody from the 60s that you go surfing in. Sure. And then there's some that don't look like cars at all, or they look like cars that are hybridized with animals. Like El Toro Loco is a bull with horns. My personal favorite is Megalodon Giant Shark. There's Higher Ed is a yellow school bus. There's one called the Zombie Truck that tettered rags coming off of it like a zombie. And then one of the best ever, the Mohawk Warrior with a giant mohawk sponsored by Great Clips. Is it really? Yes, which really kind of reveals, like, the state of monster truck Catalans today. It is super commercialized. And the main reason why it's super commercialized is because Monster Jam, which started out from the hot rod racing community, was bought by Feld Entertainment, which has a lot of different live touring acts, and one of them is Monster Jam. Yeah. And that was not without some controversy prior to the big corporate takeover. It was people like Bob Chandler. It was these people that would get together, maybe get a sponsorship and raise some money because they're very expensive to build, obviously. It's not like they were all just like rich guys doing this stuff. So you get a sponsor, you'd build out a monster truck team, and your truck you'd be paid money to show up at an event. And if your truck gets a notoriety, you get more money. And I think in 85 is when the United States Hot Rod Association started having these races where there were actually rules and a point system. And then these other point series started up, and eventually that culminated in 88 when a bunch of the drivers got together and formed the MTRA, the Monster Truck Racing Association, right. Where you finally have some real safety rules. And everything was just sort of codified. But then that's when this sort of corporate takeover thing started coming in, and there was a lot of controversy with Feld Entertainment coming in there. And they're like, it's sort of lost a bit of its soul in the monster truck world. And half the trucks that you see at any given rally will be filled trucks, and they're rigging it. So the failed trucks are winning, which is some people might get worked up about that, and others might say it's just about the entertainment. Who really cares about the competition? Right? And it's very much the same as, like, getting worked up about pro wrestling being rigged, where it's like, yes, it's for entertainment purposes. This isn't a sport, but it's still very athletic. What you're seeing is really hard to do. It's really impressive. It takes a lot of work to make that happen. So, yeah, it's for entertainment, but it's still legitimate in all these other ways and just stop being upset and kick back and enjoy it. Yeah, or don't. And don't go and just shut up about it. Well, that's what Bob Chandler did with Bigfoot. Bigfoot is conspicuously absent from all of the Monster Jam series because he didn't like feld entertainment. And apparently he since said, I would have liked to have maybe not done that because I think my life would be a lot easier. I'd probably be 50 times richer. But it is what it is. And so Bigfoot is still its own thing on its own just being Bigfoot. Bigfoot is going to bigfoot. You got anything else? I got nothing else. This is interesting. I got to say, I enjoyed watching those YouTube bids. Same here. I'm still not interested in going to one unless the four of us go together. All right, well, we'll make it happen. Once this pandemic passes, we're going. But it can't be the first live event I go to that could not okay, fair enough. But we will go. We'll go to the KFC Yum Center in Lexington, Kentucky, to see it. That sounds like fun. And in the meantime, everybody, if you were at all entertained by this episode, go check out some monster truck clips and specifically look up moon walking. It's one of the most amazing things you will ever see in your life. Since I said, it's one of the most amazing things you'll ever see in your life. Obviously, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a correction email. We like to read corrections when we get stuff wrong. Sure. It's been a hallmark of the show, and I'm going to read one right now from Mike. Hey, guys. I was listening to the uranium mining podcast today, which was great and super interesting. However, I just want to let you know, and I expect I'm not the only person who emailed, but you are, Mike. That uranium is categorically. Not from the Big Bang. During Big Bang nucleosynthesis, hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium were produced, including various isotopes and basically nothing else. Uranium is produced from supernovae exploding stars. During the final seconds of a life star, something called the r process occurs where dozens of neutrons can rapidly be added to the existing atomic nuclei. Some of these neutrons will subsequently decay into protons and electrons until a stable or at least quasi stable isotope is reached, such as uranium. Cheers. Thanks for all the great podcasts. That's from Mike. Cheers. Any kind of abruptly there, but man, thanks for the schooling, Mike. Who knew? Mike did. I definitely did not know, and I like to think that I know basically everything there is to know about the Big Bang. There you have it. No uranium. Thanks, Mike. If you want a schools like Mike did, we are always willing to sit in awe of someone else's giant brain. So you can email us. That's the best way to get in touch these days. Wrap it up and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You 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. 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 fruit every time you host. Learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Air Cover for Hosts." | |
SYSK Live: How Bars Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-live-how-bars-work | Join Josh and Chuck live from Vancouver as they dive in to the ins and outs of one of the oldest businesses in the world - the bar! Learn about the history of bars, cocktails and the good people who put them together in new and amazing ways. | Join Josh and Chuck live from Vancouver as they dive in to the ins and outs of one of the oldest businesses in the world - the bar! Learn about the history of bars, cocktails and the good people who put them together in new and amazing ways. | Thu, 01 Jan 2015 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=0) | 48913079 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. What if you are a gigantic snack food maker who needs to satisfy cravings? From Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to manage your supply chain with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. That is the good stuff. Can foie gras for everyone. Wow. Good man. Yeah. I have to say, alcohol makes a difference in the energy level. Huge difference. Popcorn and Diet Coke just does not cut it now. So we're here today, hanging out, just doing our thing. Yeah. And I have a question for you. All right, Chuck. Have you ever been to a bar? Yes. I know you have that was this set up? Yeah. Did you realize, though, that while you're at this far, you were in one of the oldest businesses known to humankind? The oldest profession? No, not the oldest profession. This is the oldest business known to humankind. One of I did. Bars have been around a very long time. They have, but not as long, it turns out, as alcohol. As anybody who's listening to our How Beer Works episode, it's entirely possible that bread was invented as a starter for beer, which is pretty awesome. I mean, that makes humanity as a whole like, a pretty awesome species. The thing was, booze was around for a very long time before bars. So there wasn't a place where you just went to go drink? You just drank everywhere you went? Pretty much, yeah. You literally like you could drink at work, you could drink at school. There would be meetings and civic meetings. You would drink there. But there wasn't an establishment with four walls set up just for drinking at this point. Right. You would drink. It like the Saturday night ritual sacrifice or something like that. Yeah. As you do. So the first bars then that really kind of pop up are around the turn of not just past millennia, but the one before. And you can find them in Italy in a place called Pompeii. And these aren't necessarily the oldest bars in the world, but they are one of the earliest established bars. And they were basically hot snack bars. They're called. Sounds gross. It does. Hot snacks. Hot snacks. Well, it's like chicken wings. Sure. Poutine. Poutine is a hot snack. That's a hot snack. That's the hottest snack, yeah, because they took a hot snack and then poured hot gravy. Right. And what is it? Cheese curse. Cheese curse, yeah. That's hot. Right? That's hot. This is more like, I imagine, hot olives, hot I don't know. Hot tomatoes. The point is, there was wine at these places, right? Yeah, they serve boots. And actually, if you've ever been to Pompeii, as I have, you can see these places. They're like bars or countertops with holes cut out and they put, like, jugs of olives poutine and wine and stuff. And you would go down to this area and hang out and drink and hang out with your neighbors. Sure. Like, look at Mount Vesuvius over there. Isn't it lovely? Think it's ever going to do anything? No, we're good. Don't be ridiculous. You were drunk. Give me some more wine. So, again, these aren't the earliest bars, but they're among the earliest. And the Romans were really kind of big with bars. In Rome itself, there are lots of bars. Like there were in Vesuvius, but the Romans also did something else that led to the spread of bars, and they built roads. Well, first of all, they conquered the world and then they built roads. Sure. And along these roads, there were inns for travelers, and in the ends there were bars. Yeah, because if you were a tradesman on a Roman road, it was scary at night, you might get mugged and killed. So they would do their trading and traveling during the day, and then they would stay in these ends at night. And just like modern American business travelers, what else do you do when you're on the road like that? You go to the hotel bar and you drink your face off. Right. And that's what the tradesman did in ancient Rome. You celebrate not getting murdered. That day on the Roman road, I traded some spices, I didn't get killed. So bring on the grapple. Exactly. So out of this came the taverns, the ends, the pubs. They basically said, that's great, you've gotten in, but we've got a little town and we could use a couple more, but we don't need inn, so let's just stick to the bar part. That's how those evolved out of there. But the oldest bar in the world, probably. It's definitely the oldest bar in Ireland, but it could possibly be guinness is investigating as we speak. If it's the oldest bar in the world. Yeah, right now, yeah. It's called Sean's. Has anyone ever heard of Sean's in Athloan, Ireland? Yeah, you've been there? It sounds pretty neat. He's heard of it, though. He's heard of it. That's enough to cheer. Not bad. Sure. It was founded in 900 Ce, and actual real life, no joke, vikings used to get wasted there and this place is still around. Like, you can go get wasted where the Vikings got wasted, which is pretty amazing. I guess they would eat mushrooms and then kill people all day. They would go, berserk, kill, beserger. Right. Remember that? So the coolest thing about Sean, actually, is it predates the town that it's in now. It used to be for 250 years, just Sean's bar in this old Roman road. And apparently people got tired of having to drive home after getting wasted at Sean. They just built their houses around it. And that's where the town of Athlon, Ireland came from. That's true. And interesting fact. It's not true. Interesting fact about Sean's bar in it was owned by Boy George. Yeah, the Boy George. Not the one you were thinking of, b Boy George. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. He thought it was a safe investment. It had been there for that many years. It's not going in. But he got out of it. He's like, no, I think he went broke. Someone in the first show said he went broke. Well, that's mean. Yeah, but it could be true. Yeah, I think it is true. So we did a little research on your town, and we were very pleasantly surprised to find that your town was founded on a bar. Right. Y'all know that. Gassy Jack. Gassy Jack. That's right. Gassy Jack. Within 24 hours of landing and found in Gas town, gassy Jack built a bar. That's the first thing he did. He's like, I'm going to have a town. He woke up the next day and went, I'm going to build a bar. Yeah. And he built the Globe, which is not there. It was at the corner of Walter and Carroll streets, I think in Gas town, a Water live corrections the Water and Carroll. Hey, I said Carol, right? Come on, give me some points here. Well, the way I look at it is we just save these people from having to email us. We save it's not Walter. This is actually kind of efficient. Yeah, this is cool. We should just do every show live. So there's a statue of Gassy Jack, and we think very highly of them because of the fact that he built a bar. But he did things back towards Gassy Jack. Well, and Gassy. And we found out it's not Gassy. Like, you think that it was Gassy because it was talkative. Did you guys know that? Boring. Yeah, I was all pumped up. I was like, this guy farted a lot and owned it. He was clearly proud of it because he lets me go for, like, ten minutes. He let them erect a statue that says Gassy Jack. That's just because he talked a lot. And they do have a statue there, right? Yeah. At Water and Carroll streets. So Vancouver itself would have older bars than it does if, like, Atlanta, where we're from, it hadn't burned down in what was that 1886. Quickly rebuilt, of course, because you're a strong city. But in Victoria, we have the Six Mile Pub, not too shabby, not too shabby. And Garrick's Head pub. Also in Victoria, 1867. So that is not bad as far as old is drinking establishments go, no. But Gassy Jack kind of thwarted convention by building the bar first and then the hotel, because the whole tradition of having a bar in a hotel survived long past the Roman roads. Yes, there were pubs and taverns and everything, but that didn't mean that there weren't bars and hotels any longer. And that made its way over to the New World, which is here. That's all of us. And along the way, one of the reasons why this whole custom and tradition made its way over was because you could make a lot of money being a bartender, because you probably own the bar, you probably owned the inn that the bar was in, and you're probably making the booze that you were selling, so you are just making bank. So the bartenders actually were among the wealthiest of the socioeconomic states. Yeah. They were the upper tier of society. Exactly. In America, we have the same thing. Like, just that we had ends that had the bars. But then in 1832, the US Congress said, you know what? Let's pass a law. Let's call it the Pioneer Inn in Tavern law. And let's just say you don't have to stay in the hotel to get drunk there. You can just come in, get south and get on your horse and crash it on the way home. I guess somebody just clapped for the Pioneer Inn in Tavern La. Yes, we won't stay here. All right. But it was a cool on. It changed everything, because all of a sudden, you could just have a bar and a place where you could just go drink. And the industrial age changed everything, too, because a place like, say, New York City became this beacon for immigrants to come to and be skilled laborers and work in factories. And they brought with them their love of bars, and they said, what the hell is going on with this town? Like, where are all your bars? We want a bar here, bar there, bar there, bar there. We want a bar there. Where are all your bars? We know how to make whiskey, too. Exactly. Yeah. Just leave it to us. We'll open the bars. And very quickly, bars sprouted in neighborhoods and became customary, like, pretty much overnight in the United States. Yeah. And they were sort of like they are now in the best towns. They're the center of civic life, where people congregated. It was the center of politics. In fact, back in the day, it was untoward to actually have legitimate advertisements and political campaigns. That was no good. What you could do is get everyone loaded on election Day, and they even had a name for it, which was swelling the planters with bumbo. Yes. And bumbo was a rum, and the planters were the voters. The voters. And basically whoever got the most people drunk on election Day. One. Like, almost literally. That's the case. Yeah. Pretty solid. George Lamb, George Washington, who's the father of our country, he made his first bid for the Virginia legislature and lost because he didn't cotton to that kind of thing. He didn't swallow the planners with bumble. No, he did not. And he learned his lesson because the next time he ran for the legislature, he spent something like 80% of his entire campaign fund on booze on election day. And he won big time. He figured it out. That's right. And to this day, well, it became rife with corruption. Of course, anytime you're getting people drunk to vote for you, eventually they're going to evolve as a nation and say, maybe it's not such a good idea. So let's outlaw drinking on election day altogether. And for many years that was the case. And in a couple of states, South Carolina and Kentucky, in America, they still won't let you drink on election day. Yeah, the bars are closed, which is weird and archaic. And it's on a Tuesday, which is strange. Yes. But they have, like, really efficient, quick elections. They just over and die. Everybody's like, let's get this over with. The bars are closed. This is awful. Yes, you're elected. They do. They're drinking at home. I think on election day, probably. We'll be back to stuff you should know live in Vancouver. Right, Josh? Right. Hold your horses, everybody. You know, buddy, I was just hanging out with my very cool nephew over the holidays, and he is a budding photographer, and he showed me his website and I said, that looks like a Squarespace website. And he says, Uncle Chuck, it is awesome. And it looked great, man. It's drag and drop. It's intuitive. You don't need to learn how to code. He has a great time with it. He's showing off his pictures and getting business. Yeah, well, plus, if your cool nephew gets into any troubles, he can contact Square Space's. Excellent customer support. They have email support and live chat 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah. And if you need a logo for your company, don't spend a ton of money. They have an easy logo creator, and you can get a really quality logo for your website at squarespace. Comlogo. Plus, all plants have commerce options. So from hosting an entire store to accepting donations for your personal blog, it's right there for you. Yeah. And it's going to look good on every device from your laptop to your tablet to your mobile phone. And folks, we got a deal for you. You can try the product risk free just by going to www. Dot. Squarespace. comStuff. You're going to get a 14 day trial with no credit card necessary. And if you like it, it's only $8 a month after that, including a free domain name if you sign up for a year and without offer code stuff. Josh, you can also get 10% off your first purchase. So take our word for it. Get a free 14 day trial with no credit card necessary. Just head on over to squarespace. comStuff. So we're in New York City. Let's get in the way back machine. Okay? We bought a full size wayback machine so we can all get to go back to New York City. It's 1820, and the first celebrity bartender is well, he's not born because he's old by that point, right. But his name was Erasmus Willard, and he worked at the City Hotel in New York, and he was famous. He had two really neat traits that turns out to be a celebrity bartender. He was ambidextrous, and he had a photographic memory. So he could make drinks with both hands and recognize your face as you're coming in the door, be making your drink with one hand and recognize his face, and then we say his, because only men were allowed in bars at this point, by the way. That's true. Right, ladies? It gets better. It gets better. It gets better. You guys hang in there with us. Eventually, women could go to bars. I don't know if you knew that. So Rasmus Willard was the first dude, and he sort of paved the way. He was known as the best known man in the city, and he paid the way for Josh's hero. My hero, Jerry Thomas. Yeah, come on, give it up for Jerry Thomas. So, Jerry Thomas, are we supposed to know that guy? Yeah, everybody's like, tell us more about him. Why is he your hero? I'll clap later. Explain. They're always asking us to explain. Jerry Thomas was this dude who was flamboyant. Yes. I like to say he had a little liberatch in him. Definitely. He would tend flashy guy, very flashy. He would tend bar with, like, diamond rings on both hands, diamond stick pin in his tie, literally a rat on each shoulder while he's tending bar. And this guy breasts. And this guy, his signature drink was called the Blue Blazer, which was Scotch. And I think a little bit of sugar and some water. But you would pour it from wineglass to wineglass on fire with rats on your shoulders and diamonds sparkling in the flames. And, like, this is Jerry Thomas, which is pretty awesome. That in and of itself warrants mentioned 150 years later. But he also had the brains and the creativity to back it up. And basically, in Jerry Thomas, you have everything that we know about cocktails and drinking and going to a bar in this one dude's person. Yeah, he barred in New York for a while, had his own place, and then the Civil War started, and he was like, I don't like all this killing of each other's thing. So I'm going to go out west and do my thing out there for a while, and you tell me when that Civil war is over and I'll come back to New York, which he did. He spent some time out west in saloons, I guess, applying a trade. And that is a place you just got pandered to, my friend. The west coast is the thing. That's right. West coast. Good job. That works. I think that's east side. Or maybe this I got the gang early on. I was so bad at it. This is West Coast, clearly. Right. So he goes back to New York and he says, you know what? I'm going to write a book. I'm going to spread the joy of my craft. He's going to take, like, everything that he's learned through his travels, all the inventions he made, and puts it into a book. Yeah. All the way back in 1862. It's really the first bartenders guide ever. You should do the honors here because it's the greatest book title. Well, there are three titles. It's called the Bartenders Guide or how to Mix Drinks. Or The Bomb vivant's Companion. I like the Bomb vant companion. That's the best, for sure. Especially when you're like wearing diamonds on both hands and rats on your shoulders. It's the bomb of a companion. So he had a lot of flash, like we said, and not necessarily the other bartenders that followed in his footsteps didn't really necessarily go that far. But what he did do was he provided craftsmanship and artisanship to bartending for the first time. And he was the first guy to really say, you should take pride in what you're doing here and making a good drink. Yes. And dress up. Would it kill you to dress up a little bit? Will it kill you to put a rat on your shoulder for once? They don't bite much. And we'll talk a little more about Jerry Thomas and what he did. But while he's working, this is like the boon, the heyday, the initial boon of drinking. Basically, before then, everybody drank, and they drank all the time. But this is like going and getting a drink was a cool thing. But if you listen closely, while Jerry Thomas is mixing his blue blazer, there's a drum beat in the background. And if you listen, it sounds really, like, stupid and wrong minded. And if you really focus in on it, you realize it's the drumbeat of the Temperance Movement, which managed to get Prohibition passed not just in our country, but in your country. Yes. It's all boots of temperance. What a bad idea. And the Canadians knew it was a bad idea way before we did because you had Prohibition for a very short time. And this sucks. It's stupid. You had it for a couple of years during war time, from, I think, 1918 to 1920. Right. It was provincial otherwise, but you had a very nice Canadian loophole if you have an ailment, you could get booze even during Prohibition. You could go to the doctor and say, Doc, I got the shapes. I need some booze back. I got the sits, I got the cold, I got the jimmy legs. I'm awake, Doc. I'm awake. Just give me some booze. And the doc would be like, yes, sure. All you had to say was, I need some booze in Ontario in one year and 1923, anyone have a guess on how many prescriptions for booze just in Ontario? Everyone? 41. What do you say? $400,000? No, double it's. 810,000. People were so sick that they needed boost in one year just in Ontario, in one province. Yeah. So we were really impressed by that number. So, as is our usual want, we went and looked at the 1921 Canadian census, and we found that you can do that. 810,000. The number of prescriptions in that one year in Ontario alone was one 10th the entire population of Canada. And we were like, wow, the numbers really add up. Canada's pretty cool. That's when it really broke on us. All right. You are very sickly people. We needed your bill better. It is funny to see it play out all these years later with the marijuana clinics. Yeah, it's like the same thing. I got the sits, I'm awake, I got the shakes. Oh, you need some marijuana. I don't eat enough. You have the neuropass here, right? But you can just walk in and talk to a dude, a neuropath, and they'll say, oh, well, you clearly need some marijuana. So this is a very dark time, not only for bartending as a craft, because it was just sorting to become, like a legitimate thing and respectable thing, but for booze, period. Prohibition was bad because there were a lot of bars, but they just weren't legal. I think there were twice the number of Prohibition bars that there were legal bars. Yes. There were 40 Prohibitions in 1927 in the US. There were 300 species, which was twice the number of legally licensed bars before. Prohibition is clearly working. So clearly Prohibition was just a great idea all around because the mob was like, yes, come here. We can take care of you. Just look for the green door and you'll find us. Speak easy. Yeah. And it was bad for bartending, though, because whoever the bartender was, the guy who could get the booze and who could get the booze, didn't necessarily know anything about booze, for one, or making good drinks. And it wasn't necessarily good booze. It would literally kill you or strike you blind. You heard the saying, this will make you go blind? It's really made people go blind to a lot of people, yes, that's where the phrase comes from. There was a batch of industrial alcohol that I guess the US. Government thought was going to fall into the hands of bootleggers, which it did. So they decided to poison it, and a lot of people died. And the American government was like and walked away. It's not very much talked about. We found out about it, so we're like telling everybody because that is messed up. But I think in what is it, Chuck? 1928 alone, 50,000 people died from bad liquor, and that's not including people who are paralyzed or stripped. Yeah, what that means actually just occurred to me. That means 250 people died and 25,000 more people were still like, I'm going to give it a shot. All right, what are the chances? Anything to take care of the Jimmy legs? Yeah, I got the shakes. So the other cool thing about Prohibition is since all the rules are out the door, basically, women said, I'm going to a bar and you're not going to stop me. I've come a long way, baby. So women were now congregating in bars, and men all of a sudden went, this is great. I don't know why we never allowed women in here, because we've just been getting drunk by ourselves and sort of looking at each other and going home at the end of the night. And that's sort of weird, which, as we'll get to, eventually became a tradition at bars. That's right. Only home alone. But at least there are women now, and they were getting south right along with the guys. Right? Great. But it was because there weren't any rules. It was like a speakeasy was operating illegally. So a woman would come to the door and be like, what, are you going to not let me in? Like, you're not even supposed to be serving booze anyway. Yeah, and there's another unbelievable fact here that Josh dug up that I still take issue with. Apparently up until the 1980s in Alberta. Where is that? Is that east? That way? Apparently in Alberta, they had laws on the books up until the 1980s that still were gender specific with bars. Hey, man, what telling you guys about it? We didn't create the laws. Well, I think it might have been I don't know if it was enforced. Surely not because they had the too, right? No. So Prohibition happens, right. And everybody's like, that was a really bad idea. Let's never do that again. Let's repeal it and let's go to war. So World War II happened, and that actually had a pretty significant effect on bars, too. Apparently up here, they send all of your guys over to Europe to fight, and you guys came back and said, there are these pubs in Europe that are awesome, so let's build them everywhere. And then after that, like, yeah, we got the pubs. How about some sports bars, too? Let's mix those in a little bit. And that's pretty much how things went for a while in Canada, in the US. Our guys apparently all went to the South Pacific and came back and were like, tiki culture. And tiki was huge in the United States. Not a fan here. I don't understand this at all. How do you not like tiki? There's like, fun shirts, right? All the drinks are good, very tasty stuff. The restaurants that you go to to drink are fun. It's just nice. Yes, I'm a pub guy. I don't see why you have to differentiate. That's true. Anyway, so that's how things were in the US and Canada until there was a very dark time that settled over the land. Not as dark as Prohibition, but pretty close. And this was the age of the fern bar. Does anyone know what a fern bar is? Have you ever heard of that? You know how you go to Red Robin and there's, like, Tiffany lamps and terrible drinks and all that stuff? Well, you can thank the invention of the fern bar for that. Have you ever seen Threes Company? Remember the regal baggage? That was a fern bar. And in the 70s, they were all the rage. Yeah. There was a guy in San Francisco, and he went by the name of Henry Africa because that's a super fun name. His real name was Norman Hobby, and he opened his bar Henry Africa's because Norman Hobday is a really bad name for a bar as well. Plus, also, he apparently all the time wore safari gear and, like, a helmet. Yeah. And so he went by henry Africa and Jerry Thomas were sort of similar. I think they were both flamboyant. One ruined things, one did great things. So he opened up Henry africa. There was another one in San Francisco, too, in the early 1970s called Perry's, and they were like, you know what? Let's get rid of these classy oak dark bars that everyone loves because they're awesome. And let's put in ferns and Tiffany lamps and fat chairs, and let's bring the lights up, and let's serve nasty drinks, mixing machines. Nasty. From bags of mixed chemical flavored things. Yeah. And I have an idea. This is going to make us a million bucks. I'm going to make a gun that shoots soda water and orange juice out of the same thing. And everyone apparently said, yeah, it's the 70s. Who cares about anything? Let's go this way for the firm bars. And they did. True. And it was the sexual revolution. So the ladies that were already going to bars now felt like, hey, I'm in a bar and I can be more aggressive. All of a sudden. It's the hip happening times. I'm Diane Keaton. This is what they said to themselves. I can look for Mr. Goodbar and have a drink and go meet a man who's my lady from the 70s impression. I have to see Mr. Goodbar. Searching for Mr. Gurbar. Looking for Mr. Gubbar. No one knows but you. No. Has nobody ever seen that movie? No. Oh, my God. That was a pity clap. They don't have Diane Keaton in Canada. Have you seen it? I think. My Three Company reference is way more well received, way better. But the point is, you could get bad drinks in these bars. It's sort of a dark time for the craft of bartending. Like the Bahama Mama, the kamikaze, the mudslides. Yeah. The Harvey Wallbanger, which apparently was so popular it had its own mascot. It was like, basically a drunken version of Ziggy just wandering around. And I guess you would get a sticker or something if you ordered a Harvey Wallbanger. This is the level of thought people were putting into drinks. Yeah, if you sell the drink, you give a sticker out. That's not a place you want to be in. Especially Ziggy with, like, X's for I was that what it was? Pretty much changed my mind. I think he had one of those inclined coming off of them. Kind of nice. I'll get you one for Christmas. They have them on ebay. So this is the way things were going for a while until this very fateful meeting between this guy named Dale DeGraff and a dude who owned a restaurant, and he wanted Darw to set up a bar for him. And he said, you know what? I don't want this usual firm bar crud. This is awful. This is New York City. Like, we got to do this right. Yeah. Let's get back to basics. And he tossed Dale DeGraff a book, a very important book. What book? The Bomb Boss Companion. Yes. From 1862. Everything came full circle. Yes. And Dale DeGroff was like, this is amazing. We can bring craftsmanship back into bartending. And let's use real ingredients. Let's get rid of these stupid swirly mixing machines and these bags of chemical fruit flavored things. And let's use real fruit because there is such a thing as real fruit, and we should put it in drinks again like they used to in the 19th century. Right. And that's what they did. And the bar was saved. So when you go to the Cascade Room or the Diamond, I don't know if you guys have been to Boulevard. I know it's, like, pretty new, but if you finally do go and you enjoy a cocktail there we did our research, and I hope that was dead on, because I really put us out there just then. But if you go to a place where there's a decent cocktail and somebody's really putting thought into it, you can thank this Dale Degrad guy for bringing it all back. But really, you should thank Jerry Thomas, to tell you the truth. Now do you understand why he's my hero? See they love Jerry Thomas. Let's talk a little more about them. Right? So at the bars, as they're evolving and bartenders are evolving, they're going from diamond studded to just normal. Cocktails are evolving too. Early on, basically, everybody made their own booze and they had it in a jug with three XS on it, and they just turned it up. And that was like, their cocktail. It's how they drank days. Yeah, like chuck. Yeah. Turn the three X chug up. And then when Jerry Thomas came on the scenes, like, we can do better than this. There are some cool ingredients that I want to kind of mess with and create new stuff. So originally there were punches, which is a huge bowl of hot booze that everybody drank from the bumbo that the planner swilled, right? Then there was a toddy, which apparently, from what I can gather, is just like a single serving hot punch, right? And then there were slings. And slings were the ones that had the most promise. Those became what we understand now is cocktails. They are basically booze. A little bit of water, a little bit of sugar, and then maybe some fruit juice. And Jerry Thomas looks at the sling and he goes, I can do something with this. And he creates what's called the Baroque age of cocktails, where there's just like this great experimentation going on. Nobody knows what the hell anybody else is doing, but everybody's trying new stuff. And all of these the foundation for what we know now is cocktails came out of this area. Yeah. And the first cocktail was mentioned in print. The word in 18 three in Amherst, New Hampshire, with the slogan it's excellent for the head because it was a morning drink drink. You were supposed to drink a cocktail. That's where it comes from. The rooster cocktail is where the word comes from. And if you drank too much of the night before, you would get up in the morning and make your little fizzy cocktail drink with bitters. And it's like the hair of the dog that some of us know and love. Right? You drink your cocktail, get punched in the face by your wife, pick up your action, go back out there and work another day. That's what they used to do. Jerry Thomas said, you know what? I love a morning cocktail as much as anybody else, but why can't we keep drinking throughout the day? Let me see if I can mess with this. Why save alcoholism for the morning, right? So through this baroque era of drink making, it was very nuanced. Like, you would have like, a sour, and a sour was just booze, citrus and a little bit of sweetener. Usually maybe cura sour or something like that. And then you would change that dramatically by adding soda. And then all of a sudden, you had a fizz or if you wanted to use booze, a little bit of grenadine, I think, or was it curacao sweetener and brandy or something, you would have a daisy. And then in Mexico, they added tequila to the daisy. And in Spanish, daisy is margarita. That's where the margarita came from around this time. Yeah, you got some margarita fans out there. So Jerry Thomas was very influential. But if you ever pick up a copy of the Bali Bell Companion and try and read this thing. It doesn't translate that great to today's proportions. Like, what is a glove? Like, literally, like, three Glugs of this and a pinch of that and well, I guess pinch is easy enough. Well, no, I still don't understand pinch. I mean, yeah, it makes sense, but what if you're like a meeting? That's a lot more than that. Good point. So it took, like, cocktail historians to kind of read this thing and bring it into the modern era, because back then, sugar came in a big loaf and sugar wasn't refined like it is today. And ice was a big deal. Yeah, sure. Outside of the winter, chip it away exactly how you wanted to. It took cocktail historians to really kind of translate all this stuff. Right? And they did. And along the way, Jerry Thomas dies, but he creates this great body of work that's added to over time, and then eventually we come to like, the streamlined, classic cocktails that we have today, like the Martini or the Manhattan. And all of this is from the work of these wonderful, genius people who are, like, fighting on the front lines against the temperance movement and making life better for everybody. Heroes, real heroes, shirking out of, like, the Civil War and all that stuff, just doing God's work, basically. The Martini. We're going to talk about some of these classic cocktails, the Martini. If anyone here drinks martinis, it's always any martini fans. I love martinis. There's a guy with PBR in his hand, I'm just going to put these back in my helmet and drink them from my straw. So the martini, if you've ever had a martini, it's very dependent on the individual and how exactly you like it. Everyone says that they, like, make the perfect martini, but the ratio for move to gin no, I make the perfect marketing. See, everyone thinks they make how do you make it? Okay, I use two to 3oz. Okay. I use 3oz. Three, like Scotch over 3oz of gin and half an ounce of vermouth. Okay. Stir it with some crushed ice because it gets colder faster. It's way better. Strain it sometimes if you want to get a little crazy and you want to go original, the martini is actually supposed to have orange bitters in it. A couple of dashes of orange bitters? Yeah. You say what and it seems weird, but you don't taste the orange. It just does something different to it. And then a couple of olives. Olive juice. I drink my dirty. Do you really drink your sturdy? Oh, yeah, I like it. It's salty. No. Is that wrong? No, that's the thing. Chuck that's the key. You enjoy it. There's no wrong. Absolutely. Yeah. But the origins of the martini are equally contentious because everyone thinks they invented it. There was a drink in Martinez. No, no, no, I invented the Martinez. There was a place in california called Martinez. In Martinez, they made a drink called the Martinez and they claimed that the martini came out of the Martinez, that they are the inventors, but they're just one of several. Right. There's another one that said it's just named after Martini and Rossi, the vermouth makers. Does anyone else make vermouth? Oh, yeah. There's tons of other vermouth. Why is that the only one I ever see anywhere? I guess marketing. Okay. It's the worst kind of vermouth, too. Oh, is it really? Yeah. Like every other vermouth on the planet is better than Martini and Rossi. And that's the one that everybody knows. Martini and Rossi. I feel like a heel. No, you're fine. Okay? You're fine. If you enjoy Martini and Ross patronize me, I'm getting you back for that one, dude. West coast. Yes, we're on the West Coast. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes. And you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own slaves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. A summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between. Host Selena Ercart 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 drinking. What about the daiquiri? Yeah, the daiquiri was invented in Cuba by an American who was there working in mines and was bored and went to a bar and said, you know what, why don't you take some rum and some lime and some sugar and mix that all up and let's make a drink and let's call it a daiquiri. And that's how the daiquiri was born? Yeah. And then the firm bar you take out of the freezer and put into a blender and put like a fifth of Rome in and get wasted. That's the firm bar version. And your wife punches you and you get your axe and you go to work. You can't work on a blender full of daiquiri. Believe me, the Tom Collins has an interesting history. Kind of dorky now. But in New York, in the 18 hundreds, it was a big fun joke to tell everyone that this guy Tom Collins has been talking about you. Yeah. Because apparently just going to a bar to drink wasn't amusing enough. Like, they had to jazz it up with hoaxes. They didn't have Ziggy stickers at the time, so there was no Tom Collins, of course. It was just a big hoax. But apparently it was a big laugh back then to tell people that. So bartenders got the idea, like, hey, these people come around asking, where's his Tom Collins? I got to have a word with him. So let's make a drink called the Tom Collins. So when they come in and ask for it, we have to serve it to them and they have to give us money. Right. Easy sale, easy peasy, every time. What about the Mojito? Anybody here like a mojito? I like the mojito, too. Like a Mojito. It turns out the Mojito might be the oldest cocktail in the entire world. Yeah. It's what, mint? Little sweetener. Right. That's a different drink, actually. It's a mint soda water, some sweetener and rum. But originally, the reason they put all this stuff in, because these are pirates drinking this in the 16th century, and the reason they put all this stuff in was because the stuff they were drinking, which is kind of like a proto Rome called Tatia or Agua Gadiente. Hey. Nice. It tasted so bad that you had to put all this other stuff into it. And so eventually they introduced copper stills to Cuba and started making really good rum there. But they were like, no, I still like the mint and this sugar. This is a really delicious drink. So that's the moji, though. Old drink. Here in Canada, you have a drink called the Caesar, another popular morning drink. Man, they love the Caesar drink. I know. We had eight this morning. I have been making those for years, unknowingly calling them Bloody Mary the whole time. I did. My friend taught me a recipe. He taught me a recipe that had clamato in it and it was delicious. And so I was like, well, this is my Bloody Mary. It's with climato. I did not know it had a different name. Right. So I'm going to call it a Caesar from Allen because it is delicious. Yeah. And really, it's way better with the komodo, to me, than just regular tomato juice. It's good despite its origins. Apparently the guy, I think his name is Walter Chell yeah. From the Calgary Inn. He went to Venice and tried a spaghetti dish. It was like, I want a drink that tastes like that. And he came up with the Caesar, which you guys love. You love spaghetti and the glass, the clam dish, basically, yeah. What would be really good in this drink? Great idea. It is a good drink. We just and then, of course, we figure you guys would probably beat us to death with your shoes if we didn't conclude this podcast with a lengthy discussion on Canadian whiskey, which you call Ride, which we're big fans of, actually. And in Toronto, for the first show that we did, we said, we're going to talk about Canadian whiskey. And everybody went, Right. And we thought, everybody's going, Why? And we just looked at each other like, oh, we just lost the crowd. This is not good. I thought they would love this. Yeah, it turns out we finally everybody calm down. One person basically raised their hand and addressed you guys for us and said, everyone is saying rye. We call it rye here. And we're like, okay, so just disregard the last 45 seconds of panic that you saw us go through. So we understand how you guys call it Ride, but we call it Canadian whiskey. The first distillery here in Canada was open in Quebec City, you may have heard of in 1769. That was number one. And then by the 1840s, there were over 200 distilleries, which is not too bad. You guys love making your whiskey because you had people from Europe and Scotland, Ireland coming over and saying, we know how to make this stuff. We know how to spell it without the E, like the rest of those dummies. And that's why you spell whiskey without the E was because of those immigrants. And a man named John Molson is credited, is starting the first distillery in Canada, western Distillery. And your rye is very similar to our bourbon, except the process is different. Like, both of them have corn, a lot of corn in them, a lot of Malta barley and then a little bit of rye. The difference is, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, where they have the soberest elections in the country, they take the corn and the rye and the barley, and they ferment and distill it and age it together. You guys take your barley and your corn and your rye, and you make liquor out of them, and then you bring them together at the end. Which is why rye is a blended whiskey. Like Scotch, actually. Yeah. And apparently the rye part of it is the smallest amount of grain that they use, but it provides the most flavor. So I guess that's why you call it rye. And so during the Civil War, our Civil War, when our country was torn asunder, you guys were totally fine. We were busy fighting. We weren't. Our forefathers were. The Clarks were killing the Bryants. Yeah. I feel really bad. It's okay, man. It's all good. So during the Civil War, our distillery shut down. We have other things to focus on, but we still need boost. So Canada said, we got plenty of it. Here you guys go. And after the Civil War, when our distilleries went back online, there was an enormous amount of competition still because everybody loved your rye. We were like, I just got my leg amputated. Give me some more of that stuff. And you guys were more than happy to oblige, so much so that the American distillers were like, congress, we need you to step in and do something about this. And Congress, it no, it's true. They said, any booze that's manufactured outside of the United States has to have his country of origin on the label. So in 1890, a very popular whiskey from Canada called Club Whiskey became Canadian Club and still around today because of a law, because of us, because of our Congress. Thank you. That's right. And Canadian Club remained super popular still to this day. And in the 1960s, one of the reasons one of their cool little advertising tricks was they had this cool campaign called Hide A Case 1967. They said, you know what we'll do? Let's appeal to the rich drunks of the world, and let's hide a case of whiskey in some remote area and leap clues in magazines. And the rich drunk said, this is fantastic. Yeah, exactly what I've been looking for, something to do with my time. I've been wanting a free case of Canadian Club for a long time. I want to spend $50,000 finding that free case. So they hit them in places like mount kilimanjaro and africa. The great barrier reef. Angel falls, venezuela. And they hit, I think the last one in 1980, they hit in Washington, DC. Yeah. From 1965 to 1980, they hit 25 cases, and it didn't go quite according to plan. I think the first case that they hit at Kilimanjaro was found by accident, like, ten years later. Like, a guy just tripped over it. Yeah. He's like, oh, in case of Canadian Club is here for some reason, I guess it's mine. I'm taking it. Good fortune. And then the last one, by 1980, they kind of given up on the whole thing. It was in Washington, DC. And I think they let the people who found it, watched them just set it down and back away, and they just walked up, and they're like, Hide a case, catch the fever. But the cool thing is, there's a bunch of them out there that have never been found, still hidden. So if there are any rich drunks out there with a passport and some spare time, there's some whiskey that you could buy at the store, or you could just spend a lot of money and go out and try and find it. Right. That's all we found out about Canadian Whiskey. You got anything else? Man, I'm just glad that people can see your jazz hands live, because they're doing a lot. He does that in the studio for me, and I'm just like I wasn't even thinking about that. Did you bring a listener mail? No, sir. No? Okay. We'll have to dub one in later. Sorry. Someone prepared one of the paper airplane. People throw stuff up here. Okay, so I guess we'll wrap it up this part of the show. There's more. Sorry, everybody. It treats us in store. If you want to know more about bars, you can type that word into the search bar how Stuff works, but I don't think it's going to bring anything up. You can try it anyway. And if you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, you can tweet to us at syspodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushhno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our luxurious home on the web stuffyouchnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit househopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this 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 amazonandhalopeets.com." | ||
4134884e-53a3-11e8-bdec-27311d960cf9 | The Insidious Abuse of Stalking | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-insidious-abuse-of-stalking | Stalking has only recently been recognized for what it is – a profound form of psychological abuse where the victim’s life is “infected” by the stalker, as one survivor put it. Stalking can go on for years, and in some cases may be the prelude to murder. | Stalking has only recently been recognized for what it is – a profound form of psychological abuse where the victim’s life is “infected” by the stalker, as one survivor put it. Stalking can go on for years, and in some cases may be the prelude to murder. | Tue, 05 Feb 2019 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=36, tm_isdst=0) | 54301340 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. Creepily in the background. Right. She just has stopped working and staring at us right now. That's right. Which is not at all funny. No, it's not. It's like, we can get around about this stuff, but nothing about it is funny. No, it's really like but we just try to make light of things that are uncomfortable. That's what we do. Yeah. We did one on Comas once, remember? That's right. That one was hysterical, quite frankly. It was like Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley coming out from Platoon and Naked Gun. You remember? Yeah. Just laughing. Watched Naked Gun two and a half the other day. Oh, yeah. Hold up, holds up. And then some. Yes. Especially once you've met the director personally. Oh, right. That's right, man. We met him a thousand years ago. Maybe 5000 years ago. It was a while. So, Chuck, we have a good 150 pages on stalking here. It's a lot. And you say, like, no, it's not funny. Absolutely, it's not funny. And it's really tough to put yourself in the situation of a person who's being stalked. Yes. But there's a lot of quotes from people who compare it to what's a form of abuse. It might not be physical, although it frequently can turn into something physical or violent. Yeah, there's a lot of blurred lines here. But even if it never gets physical at all, it's a form of psychological abuse, protracted torment, wherein you, the victim, feel like your life has been infected. It affects every part of your life. And you feel like you're constantly being watched, as one victim put it. Like, not in any sort of flattering way. Yeah, I had the most minimal form of stalking happened to me in college. And I cannot imagine what, like, a serious stalking situation might feel like, considering how that made me feel. Really? Yeah. Wow. And not very minimal, trust me. I'm not saying, like, I know how it feels, man, but, like, a girl that I was dating in college and didn't date anymore couldn't get enough. Chuck I mean, a few times, like, banging on my bedroom window in the middle of the night kind of thing, I come out here and talk to me. Right. That kind of thing. Well, I mean, that is sucking. Especially if it happens repeatedly. Especially if she had, like, escalated over time. Yeah. This didn't really escalate. And it was only a couple of times. I think then that would probably qualify as what's called harassment. Yeah, harassment. But I will say this. I moved to New Jersey just a few months after that because that was the end of college and that's what I did. And I didn't go because of that. But it was definitely like well, there's also the benefit of moving to New Jersey. And one week into being in New Jersey, we lived out in the woods. I had a dream that a bear came out of the woods and pounded on my windows and pounded on my door until it fell down and the bear came in. It was one of those where I woke up and was like, well, I know what that means. Come out and talk to me. Yes, the bear her name is not Blair, by the way. That wasn't a Freudian flair. The bear definitely resembled her in some way. Her name wasn't Blair, but she looked exactly like Blair from Facts of Life. Oh, I wish. Yeah, I wouldn't have broken up with her. She was alive. Now, to be fair. Also, I was young and immature and probably wasn't the best breaker upper. Not to say I deserved it, but well, I really think that's a good point. You've made like 17 good points in there. Okay. Yeah. So number one, men get stalked, too. Sure. It happens. And depending on where you live, it can happen pretty close to an equal frequency as women being stalked. Although I don't think anywhere it's equal. I think almost across the board, if not totally across the board. Women are stalked more frequently than men are. Right. But men can be stalked pretty much evenly by women and other men. Correct. Not just in the realm of ex lovers, whether you're hetero or straight. But also, you might be stalked. And if you're a woman, you might be stalked by another woman to someone who's jealous, sure. Angry or resentful of you or your arrival or something. Single white female. Right, exactly. Somebody who's just become obsessed with you. So that was one thing. Men can be stalked, and that's very important. But also, you said that you weren't the best breaker upper. And there's a lot of perceptions, like misconceptions and misperceptions about what stalking is, what the victims of stalking do or don't deserve what they did or didn't do wrong. And from everything that's kind of emerging over study of this for the last few decades, if you're a stalking victim, you basically did nothing wrong, but everybody assumes you did something wrong, like you didn't break up with them properly. Are you still sending out mixed signals? Or maybe you flirted or you're too nice or whatever. Or maybe you're making a big deal out of all this when really it's not. The guy just likes you or something. Yeah, maybe you're just seeking attention. Yeah, maybe you got it in your head from watching Sally Jesse Raphael or something like that. We're not saying these things are true, by the way. No, this is like a lot of the misconceptions that people who are victims of stalking run into, even from law enforcement. Luckily, it's changed dramatically, and the laws and law enforcement are taking it far more seriously than they did before. But it's definitely still not automatically like, oh, you're being stuck. Great. Here's how they help you. Well, and especially, I think of a certain age group. Like your grandparents may think it's romantic. There's this great Hampton Yacht joke. Yeah. Remember him? He was better. Okay. So Hampton Yacht was saying he was like our grandparents generation were nuts. It was like my granddad said, you know, for 380 days in a row, I went to your grandmother's work and I asked her to marry me. And finally on day three, she said yes. It's funny, like yeah, I mean, stocking is and we'll go ahead and tell you straight up, it's a new term that's only been around for a few decades. But it's an old behavior. It's an old behavior. Of course. Yes. It's just we're finally waking up to the impact that it has people. Right. Thanks, granddad. So let's talk about kind of the history of the understanding of stalking. It was actually not until the late eighty s that the world really started to kind of wake up to this whole thing after a couple of high profile killings. Yes. Celebrity, obviously, if you want to get something sadly in the news, if you want to get something in the news, it's having a celebrity undergo that or be a victim to that is the best way. Right, exactly. And that did happen a few times. Well, first of all, there's been a lot of movies over the years. Like a lot. And Robert De Niro is in a lot of them. Yeah. Kate fear Victim and Taxi Driver no, wait. And the fan, he was also so he was the stalker in there? I think it was Wesley Snipes, baseball player. He was a fan. I was thinking, was he the baseball player? But that was bang the drum slowly. Oh, yeah, he's a baseball player in that. Yeah, he played catcher, thermon Munson of the Yankees who died young. But yeah. Taxi Driver stalker. Cape Fear stalker. Right. What was the other one? With the van? Not a very good movie. No, but I remember the other two were good. I remember reading he hung out with knife salesman to understand his character better. Fatal Attraction. Of course. Of course. The Crush. Single white female, 1 hour photo. Do you see that? Robin Williams. Yeah, but I forgot all about it. What was it that was sort of family obsessed. Like they have the perfect family. I want to be that husband. So what do you do? Well, I'm not going to ruin it. Was he like scary Robin Williams in it? Yeah, he was a photo processor. Like a photo booth guy. Right. And so he would look at these pictures of the family. Super unnerving in that. Yeah, it's always portrayed the same way. The king of comedy classic. These are just few of my favorites. Wasn't DeNiro and that he was was he the stalker? The stalker. I think he likes these roles. Boy, I never thought about that. And then there was one I want to shout out from a few years ago called The Gift. That was really good. Jason Bateman. I didn't see that one. It's good. I saw that interview as well. I thought you were talking about the one that Billy Bob Thornton directed with Kate Blanchett is a psychic. Oh, no, that was good, too, though. I don't think he directed that, though, did he? I thought that was Sam Raimi. No, I thought I was positive. Did he write it, then? No. I don't know. He did something for it. Well, it's interesting, though, to look at these movies. I like so many of them, and there are a lot of them, considering that stalking hasn't been around that long. But I also thought there's also comedies, too. There's something about Mary stalking through and through. Say Anything standing outside with the boom box. That's romantic, right? That's what I'm saying. All right, Grandpa. Okay. I just wonder what this is interesting, though, the obsession with entertainment about stalking. Like, people are into these movies, right? And dozens and dozens of them. We know it's creepy and weird to stalk before we even called it stalking, though. I mean, based on this body of movies. Yeah. And I think, actually a lot of these are post. Like, not all of them, but not all of them. You're right. The Grabster wrote this, though. And he points out Peter Lawford from the Rat Pack. He talked about it in his book. There wasn't a name for it, though. That shows just how new it is, because this was in 1990, and he said, they are crazies who become so obsessed with celebrity that their fantasies are lived as though they're a reality. They can walk your streets, follow you everywhere, telephone you, send you letters, generally harass you. They can threaten you, discuss, observes they're planning to perform on your body, can do almost anything they wish, but as long as they do not physically hurt you, the police have limited power and elaborate rules to follow. Yeah, because that's a confounding factor. For years. You've got, like, first Amendment protection. You can say weird things, and you can be in public places. I know. Actually, the first taste of stalking in real life that America at least had was with an actress named Teresa Seldona, who was enraging bull with De Niro. Yeah. Played Pesci's wife. And she was very publicly stabbed in front of her apartment, like, I think ten times, very violently. Like, the knife bent, even. It was really horrific. Fortunately, she survived, and she actually became a victims advocate for stalkers for the rest of her life. But that was, like, kind of a big whoa, whoa. What was that like? The guy who was a drifter had become obsessed with her. Yeah. He was mentally ill, and we'll talk a lot about mental illness throughout the show, but he eventually was extradited to the UK on another murder charge, and they found him not guilty. I guess whatever they call reasons of insanity, it has a different wording over there. But he was committed and died in a hospital in 2004. But she went on to I think she made a TV movie about it. It was scary stuff. Yeah, it was. But Rebecca Schaefer was the one, seven years later, that really hit the news. My sister Sam, right? These are all equally horrifying and sad, but she was stalked for three years by this man. Again, an obsessed fan. Yeah. Who did the same thing. Two other famous women. She wasn't the only one, but she's the one who killed. And Marcia Clarke actually tried that case. Little known fact. Oh, really? Yeah, I guess, right? Yeah, he's still in prison, actually, and he was shanked in prison like ten years ago. Really? Eleven times. Wow. He survived. Yeah. So he's still in jail. Actually. The guy who stalked Rebecca Schaefer took a lot of his cues from the playbook of the guy who Theresa Seldon actually used things like something called pretexting, which is a really pretty common way that stalkers will get information about their victims pretending they're somebody they're not, and then get info from unsuspecting, like family members or whatever. Hiring a private detective to get info used to be a lot easier to do that. Way easier. Like, you could go to the DMV and be like, hey, where does this person live? Right. They might tell you up until 1994, your information wasn't federally protected at the DMV. And then there was actually a website, one of the early websites in, I think, the 90s helped you stalk people easily. I cannot remember the name of the site, but they would basically socially engineer a chance meeting with whoever you wanted and they would give you all this information on them and teach you how to strike up a conversation and talk about all the stuff that you knew they already knew they liked. And it was a website that was dedicated to helping stalking. It almost sounds like a dating app. Social media. I know, right? And then Letterman also really shined a light on this with his stalker, who was a woman who used to break into his house pretty frequently. Yeah, that was a very sad case. And we'll get into where she fits in the modern definitions, but she was afflicted with schizophrenia and he often didn't press charges and he was pretty cool about it. He joked about it here and there on the show, I think. Yeah. She made his top ten list a lot. Yeah. Just to try and make light of it, I guess. But she went on to stock in astronaut as well. Yeah. Story muskrat. Yeah. And they both expressed just sort of a general condolence and sadness when she took her own life. Yeah. Like, I think Letterman knew and they would wake up with her on her property. She stole a car one time. Like, serious stuff. But as we'll learn later, she falls into a category that generally is not physically dangerous to her victim, but still, it's just unnerving. So all these celebrities being stalked kind of shine a light on stocking in general, although not necessarily the most the correct light initially, but they definitely brought it to everyone's attention, and that kind of brought it under the jurisdiction of the law. The law got much more involved after that. And let's take a break and then we'll get into that. You want to? Yeah. Okay. We'll be right back. All right, chuck so America said, Wait a minute, letterman is being stalked. Rebecca Schaefer's killed, teresa Saldana went through this. Let's do something about this finally. Yeah. And it's tough to get good statistics because it depends on what state you're in, what the definition of stalking is, whether or not and this is one of the big problems is the actual crimes committed. Like, now stalking is a crime, but before that, it's not necessarily crime, like you said, to be waiting for someone in a parking lot. Right. It's creepy. But a law isn't broken. Or if laws are broken, they're little misdemeanors, usually like trespassing. Yeah. So it was always a sort of legal gray area until, like you said, the high profile incidents happened. Right. And that's when the DOJ the do double g. That's when Snoop Dogg the DOJ got serious, and they created a legal definition of engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety or the safety of others, or suffer substantial emotional distress. And that definition is really important because it says, cause a reasonable person to fear. And while that's open to interpretation, it doesn't say, like, there has to be a literal vocalized threat to count. They don't have to say, I'm going to get you in, wear you for a raincoat. Right. You can just feel that threat if you're a reasonable person. And that counts, thank God, because that really opens it up, you know? Right. And it doesn't even have to be the threat doesn't even have to be a physical threat, either. It could be like, I'm going to make up lies about you on the Internet, or I'm going to go tell your parents all the stuff we did together, like, we did drugs. There's all sorts of different ways you can threaten somebody. You can trample your flower bed. Exactly. There's a lot of, like, ways you can threaten and intimidate somebody. And all of these things, each of these acts is considered harassment. I was looking up to try to figure out what is the distinction between harassment and stalking? And it's really tough to find an obvious distinction, but from what I could get, harassment are the individual acts that people do when they're stalking. And stalking is a pattern of harassment collective frequently escalates over time. Yeah. And it also obviously blurs lines with domestic violence like it is. Yeah. And I think you can even say it as a form of domestic violence. Yeah. Definitely. Depending on unless you don't know the person at all. Right. And then it doesn't count. Yeah. There's a lot of categories of stalking. We'll get into them in a second. But domestic violence is definitely one of the cradles that stalking is born from. Yeah. And one of the really sad things about it is a lot of times there's no possible good result. Like oftentimes a stalker might stop but then start back up. Too often the end result is like someone's death or a physical attack. It can be. Or there's just no closure resolution. Right. Like, even if the stalker stops, that doesn't mean that the victim is like, oh good, I can have my life back. Don't have to worry about that guy anymore. Like the trust, the security, all of those things that most of us just take for granted on a daily basis have been lost. And they're not just immediately regained because it's like you said with stalkers, the behavior can be discontinued and then it can start back up again out of the blue. And so you never know when they're going to pop back by. Or it probably freaks you out even more when they stop communicating because what are they doing? Right? What are they up to? Yeah. And even if your stalker gets thrown in prison or gets hit by a bus, there can be irreparable psychological damage done to you. You may never be able to trust another man or woman again and have a hard time finding a love relationship that you can trust. Right. And this happens so much more to women, I think, these statistics, you can kind of just flush down the john because so much of it goes unreported. Yeah. It's a big problem. And so much of it is stuff that women have just dealt with since the beginning of time. Like the guy who's a little too handsy or a little too creepy or a little too forward or doesn't ask me out for a date. Like grandpa showed up every day. It's just sad. I think things are starting to change, but as far as stats go, it's hard to even take those seriously sometimes. Yeah. And before these incidences in the early ninety s, it was hard to even get cops sometimes to investigate, or like either they didn't have power, they didn't take it seriously. In 1000 1994, the Violence Against Women Act really broadened, like training, advocacy, counseling, but really like law enforcement giving them broader powers to investigate an arrest was a big deal. And Joe Biden was actually one of the champions and big supporters of drafting that the Violence Against Women Act. Yeah. So part of our national shame from the shutdown is that that law was allowed to expire in the Stalking Awareness Month, which is January. Yeah. Everything about that sucked. Yeah. But it was been signed immediately after that was one of the first things that happened was they re upped that act as soon as the government went back to work. It is a big deal. It's a larger umbrella act, but it does include all sorts of funding for stalking, support and resources. And as we'll see, if you're being stocked, there's a lot of places for you to turn. But those places need to get federal funding because they're usually pretty small nonprofits that can't float themselves. Yeah. 2018, you want to talk about another feel good act, the Pause Act, which had, you know, it wasn't just about this, but under that umbrella act, it included threats to your pets, because that's a big one, people. A lot of times part of the pattern of stalking is you come home and you find your animal dead. Fatal attraction. Right. That bunny got boiled. And not only protecting the pets, but grants and funding for shelters to allow you to bring your pet, because some people rightfully won't leave their pets behind. Yeah. You're not even threatened. Yeah. I mean, that's a decision you shouldn't have to make. But you're like, I can't go to that home that can protect me because they won't take my dog. Right. And it's not just with people who are being stalked. Homeless shelters have the same problems, too. There's very few homeless shelters that have accommodations for pets as well, for sure. So one of the other big laws came in 1996 that Clinton signed in, which basically made stocking a federal crime. It extended protection, like restraining orders. Basically, they enjoyed nationwide protection. Like, no matter where you were, if you had a restraining order, it was good across the United States. If you went to stock somebody across state lines, it was now a federal crime. And the FBI was on you. If you use the mail to stalk somebody, to sending letters, sure, it was now a federal crime. So it became a big deal. And we're talking seriously. Rebecca Schaefer that's kind of when it really started. By 94, California had the first law. 96, the feds had a law. And I believe within a couple of years after that, every state in the union had a law. So no, I'm sorry. California had a law that same year in 1990, and by 1994, every state in America had anti stalking law. It happened like that fast. Yeah. And in 1990, the LAPD actually started the Threat Management Unit, which was a big deal, because now you have an actual unit of dedicated officers that will study behavior and try and determine risk and things like that. Whereas before it was just like, yeah, we'll get to it. Yeah. We'll send a couple of our heavy hitter cops over to tell them to leave you alone. Send over Russell Crowe. La. Confidential. Yeah, that's a great character. And then I advocate for vendettas and extrajudicial, I think, like beating down. But you said it's a great character. It was pretty great in that movie when he would stick up for the abused women and go beat down those jerks. Yeah, that's a good character. I agree. So, Chuck, we kind of defined stocking here or there, but let's talk about what some of the behaviors that stalkers have. There are some set things that just about any stalker will engage in. It's basically a pattern of stalking behavior, which is really surprising because when we talk about stalker psychology in a little bit, you'll see there's a lot of different people and a lot of different personality types that engage in stalking, but they all kind of tend to do the same stuff. And one of the first things that they'll do is just show up where you are. Yeah. Showing up now, obviously, calling and text, like texting is a big one. And social media harassment and stuff like that. Right. But I mean, that falls, I guess, under cybertalking. It does. So cyberstalking kind of deserves its own episode. Yeah. So it's its own thing where you might just be targeted by someone you've never met before and just found you on the Internet, and they're using the Internet exclusively to stalk you and harass you and maybe even extort you. That's cyber stalking. But also using email or location tracking or spyware to stalk under the traditional definition. That's also technically cyber stalking. It's like two things. Yeah. It's scary, though, with all those personal things that people have online now. It's certainly not like the old days. People can see so much about your life, even if you think you've protected yourself in that way. Yeah. We'll do a whole episode on cyber stalking. Okay. So they're showing up. There's non consensual communication. You kind of hit on emails, text letters. It can be. And apparently a lot of stalkers will communicate in ways that they think is totally obvious to their victim, but their victim has no idea what they're saying. Like, some examples I saw in real life were, like, fingernail clippings a stack of Texas Monthly magazines. A dead rat wrapped in cellophane. What did that stack of magazines? I had no idea what that meant. It was like a message. No one knows what it meant except for the stalker is the only person that made sense to. But the stalker felt like they were communicating a stack of magazines. Yeah. Or left them outside of their house. Got you. Obviously, you don't even have to like, if there could be a co worker that you see every day in the office and they can stalk you at work even though they're also supposed to be in the same office as you. Right. The line is very fine. Someone can stop by your desk too much and pay you too many compliments. Again, that overlaps with harassment too. But if you go to your bosses and you're like, hey, I want to be in a different part of the building because this guy's really giving me the creeps. Right. Then he starts showing up over there every day. Like that's stalking, right? Absolutely. There's also threatening family members, friends, anybody that the person cares about, pets, making threats, whether explicit or otherwise. And all of these combined, they can be separate, they can be repeating the same one over and over again. They can be a random assortment. There's also very frequently, like trespassing, breaking into your house, breaking into your car, just basically getting into your stuff and then sometimes making it so like you can't tell how they got in there, but you just know they were there. I read one account of a woman who was being stalked and she went and unlocked her car and there was a rose on the seat, like the passenger seat. And she's like, how did this even get in here? She had no idea how the guy got in there, but he got in there. So just knowing that this person is watching you could show up wherever you are and can get to you is all of these things that combine that makes stalking so insidious. Yeah. And like, the effect goes beyond just psychological harm, of which that's obviously the worst part of it, but financially, you can have missed work and lost wages and you might have to move. People have picked up and moved house at great loss, change jobs, changed jobs at salary loss. It has a real financial impact as well. Yeah. And you were saying, like, how technology enables people to stalk so much more easily. Now that's a big one. Especially if you had a relationship with your stalker previously, right. And they had access to your computer or your phone. Most stalking advocate groups say if you can afford it, get a new computer, get a new phone, because those are compromised and that's too expensive for a lot of people. So there's some tricks and stuff you can deal with or work with if you can't replace it, which will get to you. It's hard to research this without feeling a sense of unease, for sure, and just the injustice of it. Consider you just were nothing but passingly friendly to a stranger and all of a sudden they're doing all of this to you and disrupting your life like this and robbing you of your security and you have no idea what they're going to do next. That's about as unfair as it gets. Yeah. And I think we'll probably take a break now and come back and talk about the different types. But one of the types specifically is like the photo map guy or the casual acquaintance, the bank teller, or you're the bank customer and the bank teller is the. Victim. Right. These short little communications that someone who has mental illness maybe, and is prone to this. You get too nice to have a great day and a smile. I know. All of a sudden. Yeah. And that sends them down the road. Scary, man. Because you don't want to stop being friendly to people. No. Or should we all I think we should. It's the only way to protect ourselves. All right, we're going to take a break and we're going to talk more specifically about the different types of stalkers right after this. So, Chuck, remember we said that California was like the first state to really take this seriously? Yeah. Well, La. Was the first city to take it seriously because at first people thought, oh my God, celebrities are in trouble. And now that we've done more research, we know, like, actually, celebrities are the least stocked group, and they're actually probably the safest of all the stalked groups. But initially, La. Really went whole hog on studying stocking, and that's where we got some of our earliest data and understanding of the stalking mentality. They created the Threat Management unit with some forensic psychiatrists and some security guys, and they came up with basically some early stalker profiles. And one of the first things they figured out is you can roughly categorize stalkers into three different pigeonholes, basically. All right. Is the first one aradomania? Yes. Right. If you just found that word out, you probably have a pretty good idea what that means. And that is someone who feels like are those the ones who feel like they're in love with the person? Those are the ones who feel like they're in love, but also that the other person loves them. Right. Like Letterman's stalker was an erotomaniac, a person with eradomania. Right. But she also was someone with schizophrenia. Right. So all these are comorbid. I guess there's a lot of overlap with mental illness, but from what I've seen, depending on the type of stalking you're engaged in, when an actual diagnosable mental illness comes into play, the stalking kind of takes a backseat to that diagnosable mental illness. It's like it's a byproduct of it or a symptom of the mental illness, rather than the stalking being the main part. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, if she didn't have schizophrenia, she probably wouldn't have been stalking Letterman. Exactly. But it's characterized by a deep, profound delusion that the stalker and the celebrity victim who has no idea the stalker exists, at least at first, are basically bound souls that they have. Their soulmates rarely sexual. Very rarely sexual. Sometimes it's not even necessarily romantic, but it's so hyper romantic. It transcends romance. It's just complete and utter delusional obsession. That's eradomania. Yeah. And this is the one that I mentioned early on, which I think very interestingly has an inverse proportion of danger. So the more distant or unattainable the relationship, like this woman and David Letterman or really any of the celebrity cases, the less likely they are to actually injure the victim and the less likely they are to ever even meet them face to face. Right. It's usually like in Letterman's case, I don't think he ever met her face to face in an incident. No, but I'm sure she would have liked to have met him face to face. But in her case is very much an outlier. Although because of the medium, because it's celebrities, we think that's very common. That is extremely rare. First of all, in a Rotomania stalking situation with a celebrity, but one where the person actually tries to physically get in touch with the victim, that's pretty rare. Yeah. So a rotomanius one. And that's also the smallest group, from what I understand. Right. But the most probably press grabby. Yeah. And movie makey. Yeah. Movie mickey, like De Niro has got it cornered. Love obsessional. Yeah, that's another one. And that is the one that I was talking about with, like could be a fleeting acquaintance. It could be a coworker. Yeah. Those are like two types. Yeah. It's either someone like you work with every day or it could be the bank teller. Right. Or again, you could be the bank. I saw that the healthcare worker is very frequently the victim of love obsessional stalking, because the experience of being in the hospital or whatever and having somebody, some stranger take care of you. Yeah. It's intimate. It is. They're healing you. So they're very frequently a target of that. But it can be something like a grocery store clerk or a bank teller or something like that. Anybody just the most fleeting, casual acquaintanceship can turn into a full blown stock. And in that case, the person who is doing the stalking is aware that the other person isn't in love with them yet. Right. But it's seen basically too many rom coms and believes that if they diligently pursue this person and show up at their work and send them all these unwanted gifts, that the person will eventually their heart will melt as they see how wonderful they are and they will be together forever. The problem is, first of all, it's obnoxious and annoying. Well, it's also a real narcissistic personality disorder. Totally. But it can also, once you reach people, have a breaking point. And if you become obsessed with somebody and it finally becomes clear to you that they're not going to reciprocate, you already feel like you're entitled to their attention, to their love, and now they're withholding it from you. So that might turn into rage, which is extremely dangerous in a stalking situation. And that's almost every movie, the way it goes down. Yeah. Wasn't there one with, like, Marky Mark or Donnie? Yeah. Fear. Fear with Reese Witherspoon. Marky. Mark or donny mark. You know the marks. Did you know? Reece witherspoon listens to stuff you should know. Did I know that? I don't know I read it somewhere. Yeah. Hi, Reese. I can't remember she listens in the car. She said in some magazine article, oh, wow. Well, we think you're great. Yes. Come on, movie crush, and come on into the world. You could work her in there somehow. I think her son also, she said her son makes music or whatever. He should make, like, jingles for stuff you should know. Oh, yeah, totally. Play this. For sure. The other interesting thing I thought about the love Obsessional is that it says oftentimes they are affluent and well educated, and they are high strung professionals who have no personal life except for this obsession. Right. Basically Patrick Bateman types who are interested in a relationship, who are just like yeah, this article that was kind of old, but they were basically saying, like, they could tell when it said they're usually like the next door type, like Olivia Newton John, not like Joan Collins. Right. And I was like, what year? This is really old. I read a victim's handbook that was written clearly by a victim who wrote a book on what to do if you're being stalked. Oh, wow. And it was from, I think, and she had advice on what to do if they were blowing up your pager. I was like, this is dated information. She's not a Joan Collins type. But they made a really good point, and it's still going on today that the distinction between work and social life is so blurred because everybody works so much. That it's. Right? Yeah. I mean, the people you spend all your time with are the people at work. So if you are already, as they put it, high strung, neurotic, narcissist types, you may feel entitled to this person's affection or attention. So that becomes the coworkers stalking situation of love obsessional. Yeah. In the movie version that's, well, let's just work late and order some Chinese in the office. And then they have this kind of funny exchange candles and that's in act one. And then act two is all the hey, this is getting out of hand. And then act three, she rejects them, and then it gets violent and angry. I would think she'd reject them in act two. And then act three is all the oh, God. And then the resolution. Yeah. I think the first plot point at the end of act one is probably the rejection. You're right. Okay. And then that would set up the act two action, the building of the tension. And then act three is the yeah, but something always kicks off act three. Like, I guess in Cape Fear I think the kick off deck three might have been them getting out of town and going to Cape Fear. Got you. That would be my guess. It's so funny, movies, you can almost you check your watch next time you're watching a movie and everything happens in 30 minutes. Increments. Almost. It's funny. Then the last one, I think of the three that we were talking about is this one simple obsessional, and this is the worst. I mean, they're all bad, but most typically violent. Yeah. This is like someone who you generally had an intimate relationship at some point and you don't want to be with them anymore, and they harass you and stalk you and seems like almost always it ends in violence. Well, no, that's not necessarily true, but it's at the highest risk of all of the types. Like, if there's some dude who comes into your bank every day and has a crush on you, he's far less likely to become violent then. But that's not a former intimate, is it? No, that's what I'm saying. That's a different category. The former intimate is more likely to perpetrate violence, but that doesn't mean that every time it's going to result in violence. That granted, though, one of the first tips I've seen for stalking, like, advocacy groups, like their lists of stuff you should be doing. One of the first ones is take yourself seriously. Trust your gut and your instincts. Very frequently, family and friends will just kind of blow off all these signs. If you feel insecure and nervous about it, go with that. You should take this seriously because it can turn into something dangerous for you and you should treat it that way and take it seriously. Yeah, because I'll say this, if let's say you me, not you. Let's say one quote, unquote, overreacts. Fine. That's okay. Sure. Overreact. Do it. Because if this person is not a stalker, it would be just like, I'm really sorry, things obviously got out of hand and you'll never hear from me again. The only person that would really get super ragey about that is probably a stalker. Yeah, no, it's true. It's a good rule of thumb. So err on the side of caution, because a restraining order is one thing I wrote in here, they are worthless. They're not worthless. They're worthless. And it doesn't stop anyone from doing anything. But I think the main juice of a restraining order is so you officially have legal precedent that this person has done something. Yeah, you're documenting it. Although I did see, I read a Guardian article about a woman who was stalked by, like, an ex boyfriend from high school or college or something, and he stalked her for nine years, and I think he broke 56 restraining orders over that time. Right. So it's like yeah. And then he finally got two years in prison at the end of this. Nine years, 56 restraining I'm not sure exactly what he finally did that landed him in prison. Right, but the idea that you can break 56 restraining orders and still not go to prison or jail yeah. It's got to be extremely discouraging for the victims of stalking. Yeah. Here's the saddest stat of this whole podcast to me is that 76% of women who are murdered by an intimate partner. We're also stalked by that partner, and half of them have been reported as stalkers. Half of the murdered women were reported that they were being stalked before they were murdered. Yup. Yeah. So, yes, you should take it seriously. And that's with cops taking it seriously, supposedly. Right. Still 50%. Yeah. So we were saying, like, what's it called? The significant, not significant other stalker. That simple obsessional. Yeah, the simple obsessional, one where, like, you've had a relationship with this person and they didn't basically take the breakup very well. You belong to them very frequently. If you are a victim of domestic abuse, that will turn into that, but that doesn't necessarily jive with that. It can also kind of just come out of what you would call a bad breakup. Right. But it's still like the same, roughly the same. But I think if the abuser was already a domestic abuser, the chances of violence are much greater. At the greatest risk of violence are domestic abusers turn stalkers. Yeah. It says 30% of women who are murdered were murdered by boyfriends and husbands. Right. That's why they always look at the husband and the boyfriend first. I'm surprised. 30%. That seems low, even. Yeah, I mean, that's a stat, so it's super old, but I bet it's somewhere in that wheelhouse now that was too different. And just real quick, this is not just an American issue. There are countries around the world that have stocking laws, anti stalking laws, I should say. It's much easier to list ones that don't have it than the ones that do, because just in the last couple of decades, countries have really started to take this seriously, which is heartening because it says, oh, okay, good. We value women, the women in our society. Yeah. And we want to them to feel protected. There's some that just absolutely don't like cyprus, Greece, Namibia, Spain. They don't have anti stalking laws. Interesting. But for the most part, most countries do, and very frequently they follow like, a high profile murder at the hands of a stalker. Japan started to take it very seriously since, I think, like 2000 or 2001. Great Britain, like, really well aware of its stalking problem and they have a really high incidence of men being stalked too. Oh, really? And then I read an article that France, Sweden and Luxembourg have the highest rates of stalking and I was like, that seems a little weird. And then the article pointed out, well, these are also probably countries where women feel empowered to report stocking, whereas some of these other countries that have very artificially low rates of stalking in the EU are probably countries that are a little more macho and where women feel like the cops are going to just tell them to feel flattered for the attention. Right. Which happens, actually. Sadly, like you said originally, the data and the stats on stalking are really hard to come by, but it's basically a universal thing. Well, and it's hard to come by too because not everyone can agree on what behaviors even qualify stalking. There's this one interesting thing that had put in here about incompetence. Did you see that? Yeah. Not incompetence with a ce, but NTS. Yeah. Ents. This is a category of stalker and this is someone who is so awkward and unaware of social cues and norms that their clumsy attempts at initiating relationships feel like stalking. Right. They might have some sort of cognitive disability or something like that. Sure. Or just may not pick up on social cues and not realize that you don't stop by and compliment the ladies dress every day. Don't do it. Right. And the guy's like, what? I'm just being nice. Sure. Or he may be a legit stalker. Sure. But I think in that case he wouldn't be an incompetent. He would be a stalker. Well, right, but that's what I'm saying. The guy who's an incompetent is just like oh, and then he never speaks to her again. That seems to be another whole other class of stalker. There's the incompetent, there's the Erotomaniac, there's a love obsessional and then there's even like subtypes to those larger types. Like there's the scorned lover, there's the guy who is experiencing rage because he's not getting his affection reciprocated. There's all these different little subtypes and all of them to one degree or another have some sort of mental illness associated with them but it's not necessarily like diagnosable mental illness. And that's what makes stalking so weird is that a lot of stalkers are otherwise utterly sane or narcissism or something like that, but you can diagnose that. And yes, maybe we'll study them enough in the future that will be like, oh well, when you put this degree of narcissism with this degree of sociopathy together and mix in a little bit of an overly critical mother, you've got a stalker situation, right? Yeah. But socially speaking, especially coworker love obsessional and the simple obsessional ones, those very frequently seem to be people who've become obsessed with somebody and have become so obsessed with that person they've lost their marbles, basically. In that respect, in every other respect, they can kind of keep their life together until the obsession leads them down the path to where they're full time stalking and they like will lose their job or whatever. Or something. Yeah. So we should probably give a few tips before we go. In case you are being stalked, first and foremost that I've seen is number one, take it seriously. Yeah. But number two, if you believe you're being stalked or you feel like you're being stalked, go find a local stocking advocacy group. They have them all over the place and they are experts at what you need to do things like if you are being stalked by a former intimate, you should assume that your computer and your phone are being spying on you. You want to change the passwords to your accounts. Don't use your computer. Don't use your phone. Go use a computer at a church or a library and then change your passcodes. And then don't log in on your phone or computer until you can get a new one. Yeah. From the get go, you should log all activity just so when you go to the cops, they're not like, oh, well, this guy just came by your house once. Like, let's just see where this heads. Right? You can hand over a piece of paper that says these 17 things happened in the past four days. Right. So you just have a good log of activity. You also want to engage in what's called like safety planning, where you don't just think about what the stocker just did. You have to think about what your stocker is going to do. And that really kind of gets to the heart of how, again, unfair this is. Well, yeah, because then all of a sudden you're obsessed with trying to figure out something that's going to happen in the future or may not happen in the future. Yeah. That's like how they brew in your life. Right, exactly. You're constantly thinking about them and where they're going to show up or whatever. But you want to tell people at your school, at work, at home, here's a picture of this person. If they show up, call the police. Do not give out personal information to anybody because again, they might be pretexting. There's all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't normally think of to where if you're being stuck, go find a group that helps people like this. They would probably say, get off social media now. Yeah, I think that's another one. But also I think it has an effect where not only do you get off social media, you stop going out because you're afraid they're going to show up. So you lose contact with friends, you lose your life. So a group that I found that I thought was pretty great, it's called Spark. S-P-A-R-C. Stalking Prevention, awareness and Resource Center. They have a lot of good starter tips, but they'll tell you, just like I did, go find a local group to help you come up with a safety plan to be safe. Yeah. Because the one thing that won't happen there is they won't disregard your fears and not take you seriously. And sometimes, especially in those early moments, that's exactly what you need is some support and someone to say, like, you're not crazy. This might actually be happening to you. And then to end on kind of a hopeful note. As distasteful as it sounds. There is a growing awareness that stalkers need. That they're. In a weird way. Victims. Too. And that they need to be treated. That they need to be pulled out of this life that they've built for themselves and basically over the course of some very intense therapy. Rehabilitation be brought back to reality and to have pointed out to them what they're doing and just how off their views of this other person are. Because very frequently stalkers are found to be giving their victims tons of power that the victim doesn't even know they have when they're reminded like, no, this person isn't doing this to you, or no, they're not getting what you're saying, or anything like that. It's starting to look like stocking can be treated and that that's part and parcel with saving a victim is treating the stalker, too. Yeah, sure. Then the victim can have resolution at some point without the stalker having to die or spend the rest of their life in prison. Right? Yeah. So that's kind of a growing thing is treating stalkers as well. Yeah. I could see it being something that could be rehabilitated. You would hope. And then hopefully you just don't bump into one another two years later. Yeah. They'd be like, it's awkward for us. I swear. I'm feeling better. Usually don't shop here. I'm going to just go right. In which case the victim would what? I don't know. Back slowly out of the grocery store. Sure. Yes. And never stop there again. So that's it for stalking. If you're being stalked, hanging there and get in touch with us, let us know how it's going to be said that it's time for Listener ma'am. Hey, guys. Love the show. Just started listening and to my surprise, one of the first episodes I listened to was about the biggest misconception in my industry. Thread count. The softness of betting. This is from a short stuff. The softness of bedding comes down to the quality of the material that's being used, not necessarily how many threads which I think we said. That right. This person is just restating everything we said. Long staple cotton only makes up 3% of the global cotton production, yet it's best kept as the best option for bedding. The longer threads provide a smooth surface for sleepers to enjoy. It's also more durable short staple cotton threads. This is what he said, isn't it? The more popular and cheaper option are rougher and scratchier because the shorter threads are tied together throughout the weave of the bedding. In order to get the softest, best performing sheet, a long staple cotton, preferably one that is responsibly sourced as necessary. Anyway, I just wanted to say what you guys already said. Thanks for being what you are. Congratulations on the billion downloads, guys. Oh, nice. There you go. Here's to another billion. That's how you get your email ready. And that's from Ed. Thanks, Ed. We're glad you joined us. Welcome to the family. That was a baptism by fire. That's right. If you want to be like Ed and get baptized by Reverend Josh and Reverend Chuck and Cardinal Jerry, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit houseupworks.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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-03-17-sysk-trickle-down.mp3 | SYSK Selects: How Trickle-Down Economics Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-trickle-down-economics-works | The concept of trickle-down economics is tied to Ronald Reagan, but the idea's been around and in use since the 20s. It's simple: Give more money to the wealthy and they can use it to rev up an economy. But is the whole thing just a scam? | The concept of trickle-down economics is tied to Ronald Reagan, but the idea's been around and in use since the 20s. It's simple: Give more money to the wealthy and they can use it to rev up an economy. But is the whole thing just a scam? | Sat, 17 Mar 2018 12:00:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=76, tm_isdst=0) | 41110145 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, your old pal Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how trickle down economics works. It sounds boring, but it'll actually knock your socks off. It's so interesting. And maybe Ronald Reagan will make an appearance. Who knows? You'll have to listen and find out. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. And there's snickering and Tittering. And that makes us know. Yeah, we got sidetracked before, talking about things that trickle names. Names that trickle. Yeah, like the famous race car driver, Dick Trickle. Dude, I swear to God. Look him up. I will. Don't image search, just look them up. Okay. We should specify race car. Yeah, okay. That's a good idea. You're a Google master with your Google foo. Yes. And we, the three of us, are apparently all eight years old again. Yes. Speaking of trickle chuck. Hey. Happy birthday. Oh, be quiet, Jerry. You have a big mouth. You're always talking. Oh, I usually remember, but I didn't today, so happy birthday. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. And this will be out several weeks later, but right. I'll get to relive my birthday all over again. Exactly. Thanks, man. Have you, chuckers ever seen the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Yeah, I knew we'd go there at some point in this one. Yeah. Because of Ben Stein. Yeah. Okay, good. So you know the answer, then. Something. D-O-O. Economics. Anyone who do economics. Yeah, when they're in econ class. The guy who says, Bueller, bueller. That's Ben Stein. Remember he had that show When Ben Stein's Money, which was really his money. Yeah, it was, wasn't it? I think so. Legit. Yeah, I think maybe, like, they gave it to him if it wasn't one or came out of a salary, who knows? Probably. But before that show came on, he was in Ferris Bueller's Day Off as an econ professor. And I believe he does have a degree in economics. He's also just a great actor and viseine pitch man. But what he was talking about in there no, he was clear eyes. Clear eyes, yeah. Thank you. Clear eyes is awesome. Yeah, that's right. That sounded like not Ben Stein. Well, that was as Steiny as I get. Anyway, he was talking about voodoo economics, and voodoo economics was another name for trickle down economics, aka. Reaganomics. And the person who coined the term voodoo economics, do you know John Hughes? No. Yeah, it was George Bush senior. Yeah. H-W-I remember that. Yeah. He was running in the primaries against Reagan for the 1980 election before he came on as his vice president. And he was deriving Reagan's economic policies, specifically his belief in trickle down economics as voodoo economics. Because there is apparently some sort of magic to the whole thing that makes it work rather than sound economic principle. Yeah, it occurred to me today when I was studying this stuff, that John Hughes picked this very topic to represent the most boring thing you could talk about. I guess so. Yeah. And it took me a few times to figure it out because my brain doesn't skew toward understanding economics. It's tough to do. But I finally did, and I was like, you know what? It's not the most boring thing ever. It's pretty interesting. If I came around, that means anyone can. Now it's just our burden to make it interesting to everybody else. That's right. Which we've already failed. That spectacularly. That's right. So let's talk about this idea. First of all, trickle down economics. We'll explain the whole thing in detail, starting in just a moment. But we should probably say it's a disclaimer. If you want to drive a fiscal conservative or a conservative economist, or just a conservative in general. Crazy. Mention trickle down economics. Like, call what they call supply side economics trickle down economics. It drives them bonkers. There's no such thing as trickle down economics. It's a derisive term. It doesn't capture the spirit or the thought behind supply side economics, which is what they've come around to call it. Yeah, but back in the day, it was definitely called trickle down economics. And the whole point, the reason why it was called trickle down economics is that the idea behind it is if you place wealth with the wealthiest people, this idea goes, they will take that money and invest it into the economy, which will get things running again. And as a result, that economic engine revving up will create more wealth at the top. That trickles down to the lower working and middle classes. Yeah, like, who better to stimulate the economy than the super rich? And they will maybe open a business to put people to work, and then those workers will benefit directly from that investment that that person made. Right. So this is the whole theory behind it. We should also disclaim even further that economics as a field is so far from science, it's preposterous. Most economic theory that you ever will run into from John Maynard Keynes or Adam Smith or Jean Baptiste. Yeah. These guys are talking about pure economies, the United States, and I don't think there's any economy in the world that is a pure economy, free market economy. The United States has things like tariffs, and we have things like government intervention, tax policy, monetary policy. There's intervention in the market. So you can't ever say we can't say, really what causes recessions and what brings us out of them, or whether trickle down economics is effective or if it's not, or if it is effective, is it effective in the long run, in the short run? And what about the opposite way? Is that effective in the long run or the short run? We don't know. People think they do, though. That is the thing. That's why this kind of stuff can get people's blood boiling. The point of this one is to just talk about trickle down economics and the theory behind it and why it may or may not work. And on the caveat that we don't know and neither do economists yeah. I think I left this a little frustrated after my research because I thought I would come away with an answer. But if you look up Reaganomics, which is another name for Reagan's version of the supply side economics, you will find 100 article well, more than that, but 100 articles on what a great success it was and then the abject failure of economics, and no one is going to agree. I looked at some of these theories and said, well, that makes sense in an ideal world. And I look at the opposite and think, well, that makes sense in an ideal world. Right. And like you said, I don't know if there is an answer, even though everyone thinks that they're right. Both people can't be right. Both sides. No, it's true, because these are very opposite, in most cases, ideas. Yeah. But what I did find was a bunch of articles after digging further, that said the Failures and Successes of Reaganomics. And I think to me, that's probably a little more accurate because it isn't a black and white situation. Well, part of the problem is, if you point to Reagan's tax policies right. And Reagan is tied to trickle down economics yeah. We'll get into the history, we'll clear all this up, but he's not really the first one to implement this. No, but he's tied to it. But if you look at Reaganomics, the problem is this, Chuck. If you say, well, the 90s were very prosperous. We had the.com boom and the sweet surplus, nasdaq hit like, a record 10,000 points in the $90. All of that was from Reagan's policies. Well, you can't say that that was from Reagan's policies. We don't know. We just simply don't know. Was it something short term that the Clinton administration was doing, or was it the long term effects of Reagan's tax cuts? We don't know. And we're going to get scores of email from people saying what we do know. Right, but we don't know. So just send your email. That's fine, but you're wrong. Well, I guess we should go ahead and say, too, that just the name trickled down was coined by Will Rogers famous humorous in the 1920s. It is not a 1980s thing. It had been around for a while, right. And he said, quote, the money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. And that's where it started to get a derogatory feel around that name, for sure. Since the over time, especially since the 80, the people who champion trickle down economics, or this particular version of trickle down tax policy, have tried to distance themselves from the term trickle down, right. Because it does seem elitist, and it seems like a big wealth transfer, which, in fact, it is. Let's talk about this. Trickle down policy isn't necessarily associated with Reagan's tax cuts. Right. The whole idea behind trickle down, as I said already, is you take wealth and you give it to the wealthiest people. That's what's done. It's a wealth transfer, and it's usually done at a time when you're in an economic slump. So you're hoping to revitalize things. Yeah, it's the government trying to smooth out the rough spots in the national economy, like aka recession. Yeah. So you're transferring wealth. You're transferring wealth, though, on the premise that that money is going to be reinvested. Reinvigorated used to reinvigorate the economy. Right. So it is wealth transfer. But with the one we're talking about today, specifically, we're talking about Reagan's version. So it's wealth transferred through tax cuts. Yeah. Right. Yes. So when Reagan came into office, he took over a tax policy where the highest tax rate was like the highest earners were paying 70% on their highest income. Yeah. And he got that down to about 50. Yes. Which is still seems incredibly high today in an age where we're paying like, 35%, the highest earners are. So the point is, Reagan did it through tax cuts, but that doesn't mean, like, trickle down economics doesn't equal tax cuts necessarily. Right. It's trickled down ways. That's one way of putting more money into the hands of the wealthiest people. Right, exactly. It's really a question of supply and demand, and I guess we can go back through time a little bit to John Baptiste, who you mention, 19th century French economist, and his philosophy has been misinterpreted a lot as supply creates its own demand. Yes. It's not exactly right. What he was really saying is products are paid for with products, and money just had, like, a temporary function. Yeah. Like if you are somebody who produces something, when you produce that something, that item, when you go make that shoe and you're going to sell your shoe, which is with the whole reason you made the shoe in the first place. Sure. And then with that money, you can go use it to buy other goods and services. Right. So the production of that shoe created a wage for you, which in turn stimulated consumption demand from you for something else. Yeah. Product is paid for the product. The misinterpretation that supply creates its own demand is just a bastardized version. And that basically means that there would never be a failed product. Like you can just produce and produce and produce. Right. Which isn't sound. No. That's insane. And I think Safe would have saved that. That is not true as well. Well, he did, during his lifetime, even say, like well, no, I mean, it's possible that there is such a thing as overproduction. Sure. I mean, if you think about it, like, during the housing market crash, starting a few years ago, there was a glut of homes on the market. And it's not like the people who are building homes just merely went on building homes and building homes and building homes. Once the demand ceased, they stopped producing. And we still had a glut on the market, and the ones who were still just sinking money into building just stopped, basically. And it was because there was an oversupply, because demand had ceased. So the idea that if you produce it, demand will come on a short term basis, it's kind of a fallacy. Yeah. But in the earlier days of this country, a lot of big thinkers agreed with them, like Jefferson. But the tide turned later on in our country with the introduction of Mr. Keens. Keynesian economics talked about in our audiobook. Yeah, we did stuff you should know. Super stuff. Guide to the Economy. Yes. Which is probably super outdated. I wonder, but I think there's some evergreen content in there. Yeah. I mean, it was like an economics one on one course. That's true with us. So the basis of CSL is that if you stimulate production, then you'll get the economy going again. And it was implemented for a while, like some of the early 20th century presidents, like Hoover, among others, like Harding and Coolidge. Yeah, JFK. Well, JFK later. But early on in the 20th century, harding and Coolidge both implemented this kind of what's called supply side policy. Tax policy's law. Right. Where if you stimulate production through lowering taxes at the top, and we'll tell you in a second how those two are correlated, you can get the economy going in. Well, Hoover also followed the same policy, and under Hoover's watch, the Great Depression happened. Yeah. Which would cause any just regular thinking person, even if they don't understand economics, to think, hey, we're doing it wrong. Right. So Roosevelt came along. That's right. Roosevelt held the opposite view, and he was very much a Keynesian, and he was operating at the same time that Keynes was writing and working himself. And John Maynard Keynes said no, you guys have it backwards. Yeah. You don't stimulate the supply, you stimulate the demand. Then all of a sudden, if you have a housing glut and you suddenly have people who have more money to spend, they'll take care of your housing glut, and then things can get back to normal. We reach equilibrium again. Yeah. He was about short term ideas, short term fixes, maybe lower interest rates. May be taxes, fiscal policy, taxes and spending, basically what you hear a lot about these days. Keynesian economics kind of lasted a long time until probably Kennedy and then Reagan. Right. There's only been a handful of US. Presidents really endorse the trickle down theory, like, wholeheartedly since the 20th century. Yeah, the Keynesian policies ruled, and it was very much about, like, cutting taxes for the lower and middle and working classes, increasing taxes for the rich, because if you're a government, you still need revenue, right? Sure. So you can't just cut taxes for everybody. If you cut taxes for one group, you kind of need to increase it for another because you still need your money coming in. Of course, you could also take the radical step of figuring out how to eliminate waste and bloat in government. That would help a lot. But we're not talking about that in this one. No, we're talking about trickle down economics. That's right. So then along comes Kennedy, who says, hey, my dad was pretty rich, so I'm kind of thinking that this trickle down thing might work. Right. So he got into supply side economics, and then when Reagan came along, he really championed this whole idea, and it was out of a result of some guys in the 70s saying, there's this whole other thing that we've been ignoring, which is this trickle down tax policy that we should implement. And they got Reagan into it and he implemented it. Yeah. And after this message break coming up here in a second, we are going to talk a little bit about if it doesn't sound like it makes sense to you, there's a certain curve that will explain that might clear it up for you. All right, so we're going to talk about the Laffer Curve, which was also in Ferris Bueller. Oh, was it? Yes. He says Laugher curve. But in high school, I had no idea. No. I was like, what are those words? Together. I don't understand. Laffer was a person la, F-E-R. And the Laffer curve helps explain a little bit why trickle down economics could possibly work. Is that a good neutral way to say that? I would say so. The idea of the laughs and Curve is that the relationship between taxes and revenues is a curve instead of a direct relationship. Yeah. So at a certain point, let's say you own a company, you make and choose, and you gross $10 million through the first two financial quarters, and you're taxed at, let's say, 50%. And, you know, if you make any more money, then you're going to jump up into that 90% tax category. You might slow down production, you might halt the production altogether and say, you know what? I'm going to take off the rest of the year. Right. Maybe even put these people out of work for four to six months for low furlough, because I don't want to be taxed anymore. So if you look at that on a graph, if you tax people 100%, they're not going to work. If you tax people 0%, you're not getting any money. So in the middle of there is the curve. Right. Basically, Laffers curve suggests that the correlation between tax rates and tax revenue is not totally positive. At some point, it starts to go back down. Yeah. That's called the prohibitive range. At a certain point, people don't want to be taxed in that range. Yeah. And it's not even necessarily that they are not working any longer because they resent being taxed. What Laffer was pointing out is that there is this prohibitive range, and within the prohibitive range, you remove the incentive to work theoretically. Right. And James McGrath, who wrote this, gave a pretty good example where it's like, if you make that money and you are taxed 50%, that's tolerable you're still going to make you still get to keep 50% for yourself. Right. But when you text in that 90th percentile, let's say you're going to make another million dollars, you have to give 900,000 of it to the government. You just get to keep 100,000. Well, you might decide to just go and spend the rest of the year at your beach house with the money that you did make, not because you resent being taxed, because it's just not worth it to exert that effort to make that next million dollars when you just get to keep $100,000 of it. So at that point in that prohibitive range, the tax policy is effectively keeping people from working, inducing them to not work any longer, which is bad for an economy. And that's if your income is directly related to your work. Right. You could conceivably if you owned a factory or something and you didn't have to really exert any problem, and you could still make payroll and all that stuff, it might be worth it to just leave it to these other people to make that extra $100,000 for you rather than go off to the beach house. But if your effort directly is taxed, then yes, it would become a disincentive toward work conceivably. We should point out Chuck and Jane didn't do a very good job of doing that in this article. Laughers Curve is a thought experiment. It's not based on data. It's not a hard and fast rule or law. It's basically an intuitive idea of tax rates and their effect on tax revenue. Yeah, but if you don't even have to be a business owner, let's say you're just a regular employee that makes a salary, you have a salary sweet spot as well. It's great to get promotions and to get raises, but if you're really climbing the ladder at a certain point, you might think, man, I got a big raise and I'm making barely any more money than I made before this big promotion because I've been kicked into a higher tax bracket. So that's the prohibitive range and it can apply to you. You don't stop working. No, but you may say, I don't actually want that promotion because it's going to be more responsibility and really not much more money. So I'm going to hang out right here rather than keep going yeah. In my little 20% range or whatever it is. Right. So that's Laugher's Curve. Yes. And it's kind of the basis of trickle down tax policy. It's the idea that, okay, there is a point where you can text too much and now you're actually slowing down the economy. So based on Laffer Curve, when you're looking at it through trickle down policy, there's a point then, like you said, there's a sweet spot as far as tax revenue goes. Yeah. And it creates this seeming paradox where if you cut tax rates, at a certain point, you'll actually increase tax revenue. Yeah. Because people will be incentivized to work more throughout the year. And the other basis of trickle down theory is that you are going to put more money or keep more money with the people at the wealthiest people who under this idea are more likely to invest it right back into the economy. Right. And when they do that, supposedly, allegedly, the economy booms. Yeah. What you can't account for is just the single person. This is looked at in the broadest terms because somebody could make all their money and just sit on it in the bank, which isn't reinvesting it. That is a really big point. You'll remember back at the beginning of this recession, the Fed was doing everything it could to cheapen lending, and still has been, and it didn't do anything. Like, you have to take into account things like insecurity fear. Being human. Yes, being human. We're not necessarily rationally maximizing actors. Humans are like, there is such a thing as fear. And the idea that maybe hoarding money is best. So what's possible then, if you follow this trickle down tax policy, is you're taking money from everybody else and giving it to the rich. Or if your head just spun because you're a fiscal conservative, what you're doing is allowing the rich to keep more of their income, but they're not doing anything with it. Right. At least as a short term fixed, that's not a good idea because you can probably bet that eventually the rich are going to take that money and invest it back in the economy. But it's more money. Yes. But when is that going to happen? You can't really say. And part of the other problem with it is that you are then also basically handing money out at a fire sale. You're saying, hey, here's a bunch of money invested back in the economy. And have we mentioned the bargain basement rates you can get on all these businesses over here because the economy is in a recession. Yeah. Infomercial. Yeah, very much. And it's like it is literally a wealth transfer. And under some circumstances, like the recession that we're still coming out of now, it is a wealth transfer and an asset transfer in that the people who have the most money, the wealthy, also have the most buying power and they have the best bargains. Yeah. Thomas Sowell is an economist, and he won't call it trickle down economics because he thinks it literally benefits the workers immediately in first, because in the idealized version, they're going to reinvest and the very first thing that's going to happen is they're going to put people to work and people are going to have jobs. So yeah, he's not going to call it trickle down theory because he thinks it works literally the opposite way. No, I read a column in the National Review by him and he's like, you'll never find a legitimate economist, a history of economic theories and policies and analysis. You'll never find trickle down economics anywhere. Like it drives them crazy that people call it that because it has such a negative association, an elitist wealthy association. Sure. Yeah. And if you're doing election time or if you see these big tax cuts for the wealthy, if it makes your blood boil because you think these people are obviously in the hip pocket of the politician, that may be true, but you can still remove yourself from that and look at the theory itself and does it work or does it not? And we will do that after this message. So Chuck, let's do just that passionless rundown of how a trickle down supply side tax policy works. Yeah, I mean, it's got to be passionless with me because I have no idea. I can't argue hard for any side because I read so many articles disputing one another completely that I have no idea. So, okay, so we're in a recession and there's a discussion is it supply or demand that you want to stimulate? Well, with supply side economics, trickle down is what you call it in the vernacular. Sure. You want to stimulate the supply because under this belief if you stimulate the supply, the people who are producing stuff will have stuff for sale and people will buy it and more money will enter the economy and things will get back to normal. Because the basis of this is that people still work during recessions and since they're working, they have money to buy things. Not everybody is working, but you can handle the idea that not everybody's working by getting production going again because that creates jobs and that in turn generates even more income. Okay. It's passionless. So how do you do that? Well done. According to trickle down supply side tax policy, you cut the tax rates of the wealthiest people. You incentivize them to keep working harder and harder because they get to keep more and more of it themselves on the hope that rather than keeping it themselves hoarding. They will inject it into the economy through things like investing. Expanding their businesses. Hiring more people. Opening new businesses and taking that investment and making more money themselves. But in the meantime spreading the wealth around through things like wages and tax revenues. Through minimum wages. So that is supply side tax policy and whether it works or not, the jury is still out. I did find something from Faireconomy.org, which I have to say, I don't know whether they're nonpartisan or liberal, they definitely didn't strike me as conservative, but take it however you want. But they took the top tax rate, and it changes from 2002 and they took the changes to that top tax rate, the highest tier, which is the one you're supposed to cut under this type of tax policy and juxtaposes against four different economic indicators growth in the gross domestic product, which is kind of like the indicator of the overall health of the economy. Income growth rate, which is how the average American's wealth grows, I think, changes to unemployment and the growth of the hourly wage. And they found that the correlation was basically statistically nonexistent, that when you lower tax rates or raise tax rates, but specifically, in this case, when you lower the highest tax rate, it does nothing to improve the GDP, to improve hourly wages, to improve median wealth. Just statistically speaking, over the course of the 1954 to 2002, lowering the tax rates did nothing for those things. Yeah. So speaking from that end, you can say, well, it doesn't really do anything. Yeah. Well, with Reaganomics, I think well, again, I say most people agree, but no one agrees. It did help inflation if it was because of his policies, but tax revenues didn't see much change at all under those policies. We're not even getting into the part of Reaganomics where he kind of shut down trade with a lot of countries, keep it in house. And the effect that had and I've gotten varying answers on how long after presidency can you even look back with a good judgment of, like, the policies really take effect ten years later is when you're going to see or no, it's more like 20 years, or now. You can see it immediately with short term fixes. So the whole thing is very frustrating because no one agrees. Everyone thinks they're right. Yeah, that's the frustrating part, is everybody thinks they're right. Like Obama's policies are almost virtually the exact opposite of Reagan's. Well, that's funny you say that, because that's not necessarily true. In a lot of ways, they are. Well, in that he kept the Bush era tax cuts going. He's actually well, that's true kept lower tax rates than Reagan did. And Reagan's always pegged with the trickle down economic theory. Right. Yeah. Obama's got this other one going. It's called quantitative easing. So with Reagan, it was trickled down tax policy. Under Obama, it's trickled down monetary policy. And by pumping money into the markets through the Fed, it's actually helping because of this income inequality, it's helping the wealthiest Americans right. By far, without anything trickling down, really, to the lower working and middle class Americans. So trickle down policy doesn't necessarily just mean tax policy. It can also mean monetary policy. And we've got a very specific trickle down policy being carried out under Obama's entire two terms so far through quantitative easing. Either way, there's a vast transfer of wealth going on right now, just as there. Was in the 80s. Yeah. I'd suggest people read up on their own if they want to jump in this argument. This one kind of also, once you really start looking into it, especially if you go beyond what helps and really step back and look at what's being done and the effects of it, forget my idea is the best way to cure recession. Theoretically, if you just get out of that mindset and you look at economic policies and you look at them through the lens of income inequality, then suddenly conservative and liberal and Democrat and Republican all just kind of fade away. And basically everybody has reason to feel like they're being talked out of something very valuable. Yeah. I came up with an idea. I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with it, Josh, andomics I wonder if you did cut down on the tax rates for the wealthy to about where they are now. This is like bargain basement tax rates, frankly, 35%. It used to be at 90% in the was the highest. Now it's 35% under Reagan. Yes. Much of the world pays a lot more taxes than we do. Oh, yeah. So 35%, I think, is fair for everybody, to say the least, if not unfair, because it's so low. Right. But let's say that it's fair. You keep the tax rates low on the wealthiest earners, and you let them build up as much money as they want in their lifetime. But when they die, you tax their estate like there is no tomorrow. Yeah. And I wonder, first of all, you increase revenue. Sure. But you also prevent dynasties. You want to prevent dynasties. Sure. I read an article about how those who inherit wealth tend to invest it less. They tend to hoard it more because they didn't have any means of accumulating wealth other than a windfall. I think if you just look at it, statistically speaking, and you look at rather than, again, on an individual basis, if you look overall when wealth is inherited rather than earned, the inherited wealth is less often invested in ways that create new jobs than the wealth that's earned. And it's the same thing. Like, if you win the lottery or something like that, you should be terrified of losing that money because you didn't do anything to earn it. So there's no guarantee whatsoever that you will ever earn that money or have that money again once you spend it. If you amass a fortune in industry and lose it, you did it once, there's a likelihood that you could go do it again. Yeah. But you're more likely to take more risks with that wealth. But people work to take care of their families for generations to come, and that's what their goal is. Right. So let's say you have $100 million state. Okay. Okay. And you have one kid and your estate is taxed at 90%. When you die, your kid still gets $10 million. If your kid inherited $10 million, you're a wealthy person and your kid inherits $10 million, I think you can get your eternal rest easy knowing that your kid is going to be okay with the $10 million for the rest of his or her life. I think that's fair. Yeah. That's enough to set them up in business, for sure. That's enough of a leg up that most people don't have. That's fine. You have to agree with me. Yeah. I think it's like when I hear about Bill Gates is only going to leave his kids so much money, or whoever. Was it Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or someone they pledged, like, a significant amount of their estates right. To not just leave that to their children. I think that's great, but I think that's, like, it should be a person's choice, and the government shouldn't make that decision for them. Government making decisions like that, that makes my blood boil. But that's tax policy, man. Like, they can make that decision while you're alive or when you die, your income being taxed, either way, it's like, are they taxing your inheritance before your death? Well, but it isn't tax policy because Josh Anomics, is it? No, but the very fact that there are taxes and that progressive, means that the wealthiest people pay more. The more you earn, the more tax you pay. So why does it matter whether it's now or when you die? That's kind of a glib interpretation. Because I realize what I'm saying is normal taxes now and then, a heavy tax when you die to prevent dynasties and to increase revenue. I just don't think it will disincentivize work, because I think while you're alive, you still want to make money. The people who are dedicated to amassing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, that's not going to prevent them from making money while they're alive. They're still alive, and their kids still get a slice of the pie. Right, but what about their kids kids and their kids kids? Well, then it's up to their kid to go out and through his own effort or her own effort, amass their own fortune just like everybody else's. Everybody gets to start at zero. Although those rich kids still get that leg up of 10% of the estate. It's just my idea. I got you, Josh Anomics. Josh Anomics, man, we're going to get some letters for that one. You got anything else? And, hey, let me say, I think people should be able to live much more meagerly than they do. I'm not a proponent of people leading these lavish, wasteful lifestyles, but I think if you've made your money in a legitimate way, then it's your right to do so, I guess. Yeah. I wouldn't want some government putting their hand in my pocket and saying, hey, you worked really hard for all that. Give me 90% of it. Well, I mean, who does? Nobody wants that especially when you look at government wastefulness or if you don't want to fund war or something like that. Then it makes it even harder to bite. Yes. The whole thing makes me want to drop out and move to an island or someplace in the woods, very quiet, to where I don't have to even think about any of this stuff. I got my little garden. I got my chickens and my goats. You need to go make some money so you can do that. Yeah, I want just a little nine bedroom house on, like, 120 acres with the staff. Yeah. All right. Are we done with this? We are done with trickle down economics. If you want to learn more about it, you can read this article on HowStuffWorks.com just type Trickle down Economics in the search bar. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this one. The waiting is the hardest part. Hey, guys. Just found your podcast a few months ago and I love it. The reason I'm thanking you is because I have a bit of a worrying problem. I just sent out my application to dental school and now I'm playing the waiting game. Through my waiting, I always find myself worrying and wondering what could happen, even though I know it's not the best thing for me. Through my long days at work this summer, listening to you guys really helps me not only take my mind off the process, but helps take the bite off my worrying mind and even makes me laugh out loud while people look at me like I'm on crack. Which, by the way, I know all about through your crack podcast. That was a good one. So thanks for what you do. You're informative, and your humorous podcast makes my day easier and helps me through the waiting game and teaches me so much about what I do not know. By the way, I know it's a long shot, but if by any chance you read this on listener mail, please give a shout out to my fiance, Elizabeth. We have less than a year before a big day, and that is from Caleb Davis Indicator in Indiana. Yeah, I was just making sure there wasn't some new state I didn't know about. India Ho. Yes. So Caleb and Elizabeth from Indaho. Congratulations. And, Caleb, I hope you get into a dental school, my friend. Follow up with us is Caleb Rita frequently. Is that the Caleb I'm thinking of. No, that is not okay. You're thinking that Caleb that won our contest and had lunch with us, is that the same Caleb that writes us sometimes follows us on Twitter? Yeah, I think so. Hey, what's his well, we won't say his last name. I don't remember. Well, at any rate, thanks to all the Caleb's out there who listen. We appreciate you, all right? If your name is Caleb, or even if you're not and you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on our Facebook page at facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com and join us at our home on the web the Beautifulstuffyshow.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. 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401839a4-121b-11eb-ba6a-db90dbd5c173 | Short Stuff: Jack O'Lanterns and Sleepy Hollow | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-jack-olanterns-and-sleepy-hollow | We launch our spooky October episodes with a little bit on Jack O' Lanterns and Sleepy Hollow. | We launch our spooky October episodes with a little bit on Jack O' Lanterns and Sleepy Hollow. | Wed, 13 Oct 2021 15:44:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=15, tm_min=44, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=286, tm_isdst=0) | 12222860 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. Yes, Dave is here in spirit. I don't think I even need to say it. Maybe next time I'll say it is when Dave is actually here. How about that? He's a disembodied spirit. That's right, Chuck. Nicely done. Because this is a Halloween e short stuff episode. Yeah. In October, we try and throw you a couple of bones from the skeleton dangling from behind you. That's right. Nicely done. So dumb. I know. I think we explained Jack Leonard's at some point. I know we did. We did a Halloween episode that we could either redo or rerelease. This is a good one, but we definitely talked about Jack Lanes in that one. I think we're going to do it again. Okay. Yeah. Because I don't really recall the story, but the whole idea of Jack O Lanterns is that they're based on an Irish legend of a man named Stingy Jack, who's fascinating, but you probably wouldn't have wanted to be friends with him. No, not Stingy Jack. Which is how I read it in my head four times until just now when I said Stingy. No, I finally figured it out because it's pretty obvious where he gets that name. But I was still very thick headed and saying Stingy Jack in my head. But why was he stingy? Well, he was Stingy because his legend has it stingy Jack was hanging around, said, the Devil comes walking by and he says, hey, Devil, let's go have a cool one. You could use that. And the Devil said, sure, let's do it. So Stingy Jack, at the end of this little drinking session, says, I'm a little light double. I forgot my wallet. If you could help me out here, turn yourself into a coin so we can pay and get out of here. So the Devil's like, all right, no harm, no foul. I'll turn myself into a coin. And then Jack says, AHA. I've got you. I'm going to put you in my pocket and I'm going to put you next to that silver cross and you are just going to stay there as a little coin. Sorry, Devil. Yeah, no word on how he got away without paying the drinks in the first place, but he got his drinks and he got to keep the Devil coin. And then finally the Devil's like, come on, dude, I have things to do. Please let me out of your pocket. And Stingy Jack said, okay, I'll let you out, but you have to promise not to bug me for a full year. And the devil said, Fine, whatever. I don't care. And the Devil said, you invited me for a drink, right? He said, Well, I didn't realize you're going to bother me. So the Devil, being a fine, upstanding devil, said, I will honor that agreement, and left Jack alone. Sometime around the next year, Jack got in touch with his old friend Devil, who by this time had forgotten that Jack had kept him trapped as a coin in his pocket, said, hey, you want to hang again? Devil said, sure. And I guess somehow Stingy Jack got it in the devil's head that the devil should climb a tree and pick up a piece of fruit. And that didn't go according to plan as far as the devil is concerned, though, did it? No, it didn't, because the devil climbs up the tree and checks like, I got you again, Devil. Look, I've carved the sign of the cross into the tree bark so you can come down. And how about this? Don't bother me for ten years. And not only that, if I die, you can't take my soul. And the devil is like, good Lord, this guy really drives a hard bargain. But okay, fine, I'll agree to all these terms. And not only will I agree to him being the devil, fine, upstanding devil that I am, I will honor these terms. I will not go back on my word. And he didn't. He didn't because Cinji Jack died and the devil didn't try to take a soul. As a matter of fact, we didn't let him in hell, and God wouldn't let him in heaven. So Cinchy Jack was left to roam the earth. That's right. And if you're wondering what all this rigamarole has to do with Jack o lanterns, he was sent off in the dark, like you said, couldn't go to heaven, couldn't go to hell, stuck in between and had a burning coal to light his way, and he put that coal into a carved out turnip, and he was known by the orrish as Jack of the Lantern. Yes, but the Irish never said the word of in their entire lives, the entire history of the Irish. So that's where we get Jack O'Lantern. That's right. And that turn up depending on where you were in the world. And this legend moved around, that turnip might become a potato, it might become a beat. If you're in England or if you're in the United States, one thing we have a lot of is pumpkins. Yes. So when you're carving a Jack o lantern, you're paying homage to a double dealing, Satan advantage taking Irish guy named Stingy Jack. I love it. So there's part one. We're going to take a break, we're going to mix it up just a little bit and go tangentially. That's absolutely right. Jack o lantern related right after this. Okay, Chuck, we're back, and we're talking about now. Nothing that has to do with Chuck. Well, I guess a little bit. Like you said, tangentially. Well, not better. One of the first ghost stories in American history. There, of course, been a lot of great ghost stories since, but the legend of Sleepy Hollow is great. It is great. But if you've read other Washington Irving short stories, he's actually written much scarier stuff than that. That's a little more tongue in cheek than some of the other scarier stuff he's written. Alright, fair enough. It's fine though. So the legends of Sleepy Hollow concerns the Headless Horsemann, and I think if you're a kid, even if all you ever saw was that Disney cartoon, the idea of the Headless Horsemen is utterly terrifying. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. One of the more terrifying figures in American history. American lore. Agreed. And it takes place in the real Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County, New York, and it is about a new man in town, the sort of lanky, goofy schoolmaster Ichabod Crane who is in love with in courts, katrina, well, thinks he's in love with Katrina Von Tassel. And when he is rebuffed at a party by Katrina, that Headless Horseman appears seemingly out of nowhere and chases him down and he vanishes. Yeah. Kebab Crane is never found or heard from. That's right there's, that jackal inert because he throws that flaming jack o lantern in the cartoon. Right. Well, in the story, the Headless Horseman throws his head and connects with Echobad Cranes head and knocks them off of his horse. And all that's found near the spot the next day is a smashed pumpkin. So it's not entirely clear whether it was a Headless Horseman or somebody playing a prank or whatever, but if it was all in Icabod Cream's imagination but the upshot is that he was never heard from again, which is pretty mysterious. The thing that's so cool about the legend of Sleepy Hollow, though, and what makes it so interesting is that Washington Irving like kind of interwove fact and fiction to come up with this tale. Quite brilliantly, actually. I think that's one of the reasons why it is so creepy is because you hear like, wait, there's a real town called Sleepy Hollow in New York, stuff like that. I wonder if you go to Sleepy Hollow, if there's any sort of touristy things you can do. I would guess so. I wonder what they do. I don't know. But I guarantee headless. Horsemen. Yeah, and I'm not sure if it's a thriving tourist industry, but I'll bet it's a pretty respectable tourist industry they got going on there, especially this time of year. Yeah, but you're right, he wove a lot of real things in there, real locations. The old Dutch church. The churchyard. Major Andre's tree. There may have been a real icobad Crane. I mean, there was we just don't know if there was any connection. I think the New York Times said there was a Colonel Ikabad B. Crane who was alive at the same time as Irving, who was a Marine, enlisted in served for 45 years in the Marines. But they really don't know if they met each other or if that name was just sort of a weird coincidence. I don't think it was a coincidence. Apparently Washington Irving was a bit of a collector of weird Yankee names in one of his stories, he mentioned an actual New Yorker named Preserved Fish, but I think they would have pronounced it Preserved Fish, but it's Preserved fish when you see it written down. And so the other kind of bit of info that connects them is that they were both stationed at Fort Pike, I believe, around the same time. So they may not have ever met. But Washington Irving probably did find the names. Like I am using that at some point. Yeah. And there have been stories of headless horsemen through the years. I think the Grim Brothers, which we did a pretty great episode on two parts three years ago. Yeah. Was that a two parter? Well, one was on the Grim Brothers, the other was on Folktales in general, I think. Yeah. They wrote about headless horsemen. Other writers in other countries, I think in Holland and I think in Ireland, there were other legends of headless horsemen. So it's definitely something that he had, his influences. He was also a friend of Sir Walter Scott, and in 1796, Sir Walter Scott wrote The Chase, which was really just sort of an adaptation of a German poem, the Wild Huntsman by Gottfriedd Burger. And I think there was a headless horseman in that too, right? Yes, there was. He was chased around by the hounds of Hell for all eternity, basically. So it wasn't like an entirely new thing. But one of the other things that makes it so creepy is that Washington Irving took a piece of actual history of local upstate New York history and use that as the basis for his headless horseman. He said it was a Hessian mercenary, and there were hesian mercenaries fighting in the Revolutionary War alongside the English. Wasn't it the English they were fighting with? I think it was, yeah. Well, actually, they're probably fighting on either side because they were mercenaries and they didn't really care. But in this case, there was a Hessian mercenary who, at the Battle of White Plains around Halloween in 1776, got his head taken off by a cannonball. And it was such a remarkable, unlikely event that people wrote down in their journals about this. I can imagine the entire battle stopped and everybody went over and looked, because that was such a nutshell thing that happened. But that was an actual event. And Washington Irving used that as the basis for his headless horsemen. That's right. And all of this to say is that maybe one reason why it was so popular to begin with, because he was weaving in these stories of folklore that other people had known all these real places from the region that people knew were real places. And that probably made it just a bit more interesting than your average ghost story for the time. Definitely. And it is a great ghost story, everybody. So go read it. Okay. Okay. Are you asking me? Yeah. Okay. I'm looking for some support here. Yeah, everybody go read it. Do what Josh says. Alright, so since Joe says that everybody short stuff is ow. 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." | |
2a7ed040-3b0f-11eb-a672-c79dbab4b1c4 | How Tacos Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-tacos-work | It’s Taco Tuesday! If you like eating tacos, you’re going to love learning all about them in this delectable episode. You’ll realize how much you’ve taken tacos for granted and just what a debt we owe our friends in Mexico for inventing them.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | It’s Taco Tuesday! If you like eating tacos, you’re going to love learning all about them in this delectable episode. You’ll realize how much you’ve taken tacos for granted and just what a debt we owe our friends in Mexico for inventing them.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 01 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=32, tm_isdst=0) | 54040516 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here. And this is Stuff You Should Know, one of the best episode topics I think we've ever come up with. I agree. Ironically, we're recording on a Thursday. No way. It's taco Thursday. But I ate tacos for lunch. Dude, I want a taco so bad, but I'm holding out until I see the next good taco truck. Yeah. So what I did, and I'm going to shout out my favorite taco places at the end. But tacos, as most people know, aren't the best delivery food, because you should eat right after assembly, basically, is your best taco. Totally. That's why when you go to a taco truck or a taqueria, they're putting those things together right in front of your face. But there's a place in Atlanta called Bar Taco in Inman Park, which they're kind of fancy schmancy tacos, but they have a couple of really good ones, and they deliver a little taco kit, like a little bento box almost. You got your meat separate from your tortillas, separate from your phoixins, and then you put it all together there at home. And I got the pork belly that's flavored with a pineapple sauce. It was sort of an El Paso flavor. Sounds like it. And then like, a shredded beef. And boy, did it hit the spot. After researching this for the past day and a half, I can imagine I had an open face deli turkey sandwich. This was weeping while I was eating it. I could not have tacos. I tried to think of something else, but I got my tacos. I think that was the right thing to do. I'll tell you what else is the right thing to do, chuck asking Dave ruse to help us out with this one. Right? Because it turns out that Dave Rouge is apparently born to write this episode. So just a little bit of backstory. Dave and his wife moved to Mexico looking for adventure years and years ago. And while he was down there. He's being the journalist he was and meeting up with really good. Authentic tacos for possibly the first time in his life. He decided he wanted to write a story. An article about how we got from authentic. Real good Mexican tacos. Like the ones you just described to the kind of tacos we had in America as kids outside of Texas and California. Which is like the crispy. Hard shell. Little ground beef lil. Taco seasoning. Iceberg. Lettuce. Tomatoes. And just shut up and eat it and don't ask for anything else. Which, by the way, I do love those. I think it'd be delicious. There's a place for them, but it's the same place that grilled cheese occupies. Yeah, exactly. Or your square pizza. Yeah. Well fed. So the thing about Dave, though, is when he started researching this, he found out like, I guess he reached out to a guy named Jeffrey Pilcher as a source. Jeffrey Pilcher is a Latin American or he's an historian of Latin America. I don't think he's Latin American. And Jeffrey Pilcher realized that he didn't know actually, the answer to that question, how we got from authentic Mexican tacos to kind of blandish American tacos, right? Yeah. And it seems like Dave may have possibly been an inspiration for what ended up being the Jeffrey Pilcher book, planet Taco Colon the Global History of Mexican Food. Because he's even listed in the acknowledgements, right? Yeah, he thanks Dave directly for helping come up with this idea, and I can't remember exactly how he put it. Okay, so then now we fast forward to 2021. We asked Dave to help us with the tacos article, and Dave goes back to Jeffrey Pilcher's book that he helped inspire as a source for this episode. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty great. And Dave loved Mexico so much, he ended up living there several different times for a total of about nine years. The country he found so nice, he lived there twice. It's Thrice, I think. Oh, yeah, that's right. Country so nice. He lived there. Thy. It still works. Yeah. I've done very little travel in Mexico. I've done some of the border town stuff in Tijuana and Algae donuts, but I really want to go south, south, south into central and south central Mexico. I just got to do it. It's wonderful. I worked in Mexico Grand College and ate Mexican food literally every day for three years, and it's just one of my favorite cuisines and favorite cultures in the world. It's pretty good. One of the things that really is kind of shocking about all this, though, Chuck, is the taco, the thing that pretty much everybody in the world associates with Mexican cuisine is possibly the latest comer of all of Mexican, what we would identify as Mexican cuisine. It's actually a fairly recent invention. And that's pretty much what this episode is going to be about, how the taco got invented and then how we got from an actual authentic Mexican taco to the Americanized kind of Taco Bell version of it. Yeah. And Dave makes a great point that growing up in the like we did, we had our what's the brand again? Old El Paso. Yes, the old El Paso like taco kit style tacos. And like I said, I still love them. You love them. There's a place for that. If you put that pop that taco shell in the oven and get it crispy, it's really a beautiful thing. As long as it doesn't break in half, that can get a little messy. But while there's a place for those, dave makes the point, and I agree that we are truly in the golden age of tacos here in the United States, because it used to be, like you said, Texas and California. You could always get pretty good tacos once they came on the scene in the 1950s or so. But now every major city has world class tacos. Yeah, and I mean, that's just, like, taco trucks that somebody pulled up, and thank God for those as well. But I mean, like, multiple taco restaurants. Taqueria's, like, authentic ones all over the place in just about any town in the country. I don't know exactly how it happened, but it happened. And it's great that it did because it's not like people from south of the border started showing up in 2005, and that was it. They brought tacos with them in that kind of cuisine. There have been plenty of Mexican and Central American immigrants that have moved up into the United States for a very long time, and they did bring tacos with them, but for some reason, those authentic tacos just took a while to catch on. I think, Chuck, it was America that finally came around and caught up to what the Mexican cuisine actually was, rather than being like, no, we don't want that. We want this Taco Bell version. Yeah, I think I agree. And when I said every major American city, I'm talking if you want 50 taco places to choose from. Right. But Atlanta probably has that many. I looked on the map today out of curiosity. I counted, like, 17 taco places within literally 3 miles of my house. And those are just places that have taco in the name, right? Yeah, these were places that I mean, they weren't I kind of threw some generic or not generic, just some overall Mexican restaurants in there that have really great tacos. Okay, got you. But most of those were sort of taqueria style or taco trucks. But forget major American cities. Like small towns. Like, you can find really good tacos everywhere in this country now. Yes. The best taco I ever had actually was in some little countryside, rural area outside of Boston. I don't remember. We had a show in Boston, and then we had another show somewhere else that was within driving distance, and I was driving there and no. Okay. It was driving from Seattle to Portland. OK. Best taco I ever had. Driving from Seattle to Portland in the middle of nowhere, and there was a taco truck, and they had a beef tongue taco, and it was hands down, the best taco I've ever had. Yes. I'm not in love with the tongue. When I worked at Mexicali in college in Athens, the guys in the kitchen, they would make our food, but then on special days, they would make their own food for themselves. And Mexico didn't have stuff like tongue. It was a bunch of frat boys and stuff that were eating it. So they weren't in the trip and tongue, but they would make that stuff, and I would always try it. Don't love the texture of tongue. I definitely don't love the texture of tripe. But I gave it a whirl. I did not like tripe. I would eat cabeza, which is cheek and jowl meat. I like those better than the tongue and tripe. I've never had beef cheeks, but I've had no, actually, I guess I have had beef cheeks, but it wasn't in a taco. It was, like, prepared, like braised beef cheeks, and they were delish. Yeah, but give me some carne ASADA or shredded beef or carnitas or El Paso. I'm down with Churchill, but that's probably lower on my list just because I like the others more. I'll eat a fish taco. I'll eat a shrimp taco. I love those seafood tacos. I like it all. Definitely. Yeah. A good fish taco with some red cabbage slaw on there is pretty tough to beat. Really? Yeah. Let's just do this. We'll talk about the tacos that we like for the rest of this episode. I like the fried fish and the stewed fish. Yes, it is all good. And so it's worth restating again. I think we're living in a golden age of tacos here in the United States, clearly, because you can find all these tacos, and if you're not out there finding all these tacos and this sounds good make a concerted effort to go find an authentic taco place and see what's what. And I'll bet you never really go back. That's right. One last taco that I love is the Korean taco. Yeah, the little Asian tacos that are out now that are so delicious. Do you know the first time I ever even knew that existed was Chad Crowley, who produced one of the producers on that show, had that catered. Some king barbecue taco place somewhere over on the West Side had it catered. You were talking about Land Cook taqueria, my friend. Is that what it was? Okay. Yeah. And it was like, I don't ever want to leave this craft services table. I just want to stand here and eat these tacos for that. Let's just call off the shoot and do this. Yeah, I still go there. There's a lot of houseware places over there, so whenever Emily and I go over there to look at those, I always pop into hand cook for some sesame fries and beef bulgogi tacos. Yeah. And the guy there, dude, still recognizes me from Stuff You Should Know, the TV show. That's awesome. It's really cool. He's like, It was no good, but I recognize you every time I go and you say, man, how are you doing? Are you still doing the TV show? I'm like, for the 50th time, no, no. He said, Get out. Very nice guy, though, and delicious tacos. We got a shout out, though. Roy Choi apparently was the guy who came up with Korean barbecue tacos, so he's worth mentioning for sure, at least for that. So I guess we should really talk about tacos instead of just salivating and talking about our favorite tacos. Agreed. Because like I said, tacos are fairly recent creations as far as Mexican cuisine goes. But one of the things that is essential to a taco, the tortilla, is actually very old. Yes, it is. And technically, if you put something in a tortilla and eat it, you could describe it as a taco. But basically, since the domestication in southern Mexico of corn about 8700 years ago, they have been granny and that stuff up, flattening it out and cooking it near a fire. Usually back then, like on a hot rock or we saw in Guatemala, they were still doing this by hand every morning. Some of the best tortillas you're ever going to have. Yeah, but that was it. Then you have a tortilla after that, and they've been doing this for thousands of years. I think it was kicked off by the Maya, who figured this out. And then there was another really important innovation that the Olmec people came up with, and that was to take that corn and soak it in hot water with wood ash, which made an alkaline solution, basically. And that actually broke down, I think, the paracar the whole of the corn and changed the corn nutritionally. Like, it made a lot of the stuff inside more bioavailable. So it took something that was already like, okay, this is fine. We can stay alive on this, and actually turned it into like a really nutrient rich food. So the tortillas you're eating, as long as they've undergone a process called mixed tamales, is actually pretty healthy for you. It sounds like you said the word tamale in there, is that right? I did, yes. Would you like to spill the beans on being coy? So in the Nahuatl language, the language of the Aztecs, next, T. Lee means ashes. And then tamale with an, I mean, unformed mazdo, which will sound familiar if you've ever had a tamale with an E on the end. Let me ask you this. Do you and Yummy ever do tacos yourself at home? Yeah, we do more like just variations on taco salad, typically. But yes, we'll get like some blue corn tacos once in a while and fill them up, or else we'll get some of those. Usually we do flour, though, like the ones you have to refrigerate will get those. The Lucy Goosey ones. Sure. Make some fish tacos, slaw, that kind of stuff. Yeah, we do sometimes. All right. If you ever want to just kind of take it to the next level, I highly recommend making your own tortillas. Get a tortilla press, some maize or some masa, and just give it a whirl. They're a little tricky, but once you get the hang of it, it really just takes things to a stratosphere that I previously did not know. I can imagine. I'd never really even considered doing that, but I'm going to now. Yeah, maybe I'll buy you a tortilla press. Did you accept that you have to now you just offer it on the podcast. I will hold you to that. Good. I'll send you mine and I'll get a new one. I'll be like, there's, like, old crusty dough on this one. Actually, I've worn in. I don't know if there's anything to that, but if it's like cast iron, that maybe something to that. Yeah. Like season. Sure. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, man. Sure. So we've got Nick's Tamalization, which makes the stuff in the corn that was already there, like iron and vitamin B. Three. Way more bioavailable, right? Yes. It actually sucks calcium into the corn, so it adds a lot of calcium. It fortifies it with calcium. Just this process of soaking the corn in wood ash and water before you turn it into masa. And then it also kills off mycotoxins, which can mess you up pretty good. Fungal toxins that can be present on corn. And when you put all this together, especially if you add it together with some beans, you have what's called the complete protein. That's right. And that means you can indulge in those tacos and feel good about it. A complete protein is when you have the nine essential amino acids and basically equal amounts. And here's the little trick to tacos, though, that make it special. You can have beans and you're not a complete protein. You can have corn and you're not a complete protein. But if you put those things together, you do have a complete protein because beans have all those essential amino acids. But one, it's called methionine, and corn does have that. So it's almost like it was meant to be. Yeah. Corn is like I'll help you out with some metallic nine. No problem. Refried beans. I know there's something about food that when you know that they form some sort of natural pattern just makes them even more satisfying and wholesome. Yes. Or when things come together to make a greater whole. Yeah, exactly. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. And we'll get to contact between the Spanish and the Mesoamericans. Want to learn about a terrace or a Colorado toy? How to take a breakbooty? We've got the invention of the tortilla, but that doesn't mean the tacos were invented yet. One of the reasons why tacos you can't say tacos were invented yet is because Mesoamericans use tortillas for just about everything. I think the Spanish said that Montezuma, the emperor of the Aztecs who was running the show when the Spaniard showed up in 1519, that he would basically use his tortillas as a spoon much the same way. Have you ever eaten Ethiopian food? Yeah. I mean, I do this with tortillas, but sure. Yeah. I can't remember the name of the bread, but they use that bread for everything. It's just generally a utensil as much as it is a food. And apparently that the Aztecs used to do that with tortillas. And I would guess Mesoamericans as a whole. So Dave points out. Quite rightly. That you can't really say what they were eating were tacos. Even though they might have even been putting stuff in these tortillas. In the way that you couldn't say that whatever you are eating was a sandwich because there was a loaf of bread on the table or a basket of rolls on the table in the exact same way that that makes sense. Yeah. I remember when I lived in Yuma 25 years ago, and I went to Alga Donuts right over the border for the first time, and I saw the local Mexican population with these big plates of, like, stewed meat, and they had the tortillas, and I was like, oh, they're going to assemble that to a taco. But no, they ripped it up and they would just use it to grab the meat and put it in their mouth. And I thought that's when the lights kind of went off. And I still love the traditional taco, too, but I also love to just put the stuff on my plate and use it as a spoon or a grabber. Sure, I can't remember what it's called, but there's a kind of sushi. It's almost like deconstructed sushi, where they don't bother to turn it into a roll. It's just a bed of rice. And then they put all the stuff you would put in the sushi just on top of the rice. So it's technically not sushi, even though all of the elements are there. Yeah, and I do the same thing with Indian food. With the garlic naan. Yes. Which, again, is another one of my favorite cuisines, too, like Indian food. Oh, my God, I just make me so hungry. I love all food. Yummy is always saying she's like, it doesn't really matter whenever you talk about how great a food is because you think all food is good. And it's true. I love just about all food. There's really not a food that I'm like I don't like that wholesale. Yeah, I know. One of my favorite hobbies is eating foods. It seems good. So the taco, though, back then, like you said, they were using these tortillas, spoons and such like that. And it was about the late 1800s that sort of the Mexican taco that we are familiar with finally kind of comes on the scene. So the word taco is kind of up for debate, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, taco was a word in Spain hundreds of years ago, but it didn't mean the food. It meant a lot of different things. But one of the things that meant that's going to come into play with the food was it was like a plug or attack stuffed into the barrel of a musket to keep that ball settled. It also was like a shot of wine or a hammer or a billiard cue you could call a taco. But at the time, none of those words had anything to do with the food. No. So the word taco predates the food. Taco. That seems to be the clear aspect of this, the clear upshot, as I would say. Yes. There's also a rival to the Spanish word taco. Taco. And that's a notwattle word, taco with an L in there, basically Tlahco, and it apparently means middle or half. And from everything I've seen, that is an incorrect etymology for the word taco as we understand it today. That it's just total coincidence. Right. But you might see some people claiming that correct. Yes. But they are wrong, from what I can tell. That's right. So to get from the musket plug to the food in Pilgrim Books, he makes a guess that surmised that other people have also made. That sounds pretty good to me with the story in Hidalgo, it was a silver mining town, rial del Monte, specifically. And what the guys in the mine would do is they would work, and sometimes daughters and wives would bring them their lunch, which was something a lot like a taco, like beans or that stewed meat or maybe some avocado. And wrapped in a tortilla, they would put it in a towel line basket where they get all nice and steamy and bring it down there for lunch. So while they're working in the mine, they're blasting holes in the rock, which they do by carving out a hole and then stuffing in an explosive, which they call the taco. So it might seem like a tenuous connection, but in Mexico City in the early 20th century, there was a taco called taco ste manero, a minor taco, and some other variations. A taco stenasta tacos from a basket or tacos sudatos, sweaty or steam tacos. And that kind of draws the line, I think, pretty clearly. Yeah. And all three of those were basically different names for the same preparation, where when you fried them and then you stack them all together, you would cover them with a little, like, napkin or something like that in the basket to allow them to steam themselves to finish. Right. And to me, that's where the word taco comes from. Not from the food wrapped in the tortilla, but from that kind of food wrapped up in that cloth napkin in the same way that they were wrapping explosive in cloth and stuffing it in there. That, to me, is the correlation rather than the food. The fact that it was in a basket wrapped up in fabric. Yeah. And food wrapped up in a tortilla. Sure. I mean, I get it. They're both possible. I'm just putting my own hypothesis out there now. Okay, everybody. You're like, it's not the tortilla, it's the napkin. Honestly, it makes sense to me when we're talking about explosive plugs wrapped in fabric. You know what I mean? How about an explosive, delicious food? Well, that's the thing, and I totally understand that. They could have been like, there's a bomb in one hand and a food bomb in the other hand. So I get it. Taco and print. Talking about a taco as food, I believe for the first time, was in a novel called Los Banditos de Rio Frio the Bandits of Cold River. And there's a line in that book where they're talking about a celebration in Mexico City, and they say, cheeto, which is fried goat with tortillas, and the children skipping with tacos of tortillas and avocado in their hand. Sounds great. What an idyllic little bucolic scene that is. I wish I was there. Yeah, anywhere there's fried goat being served. I wish I was there. I'm not done with the goat, but sure, I'm with you. It seems to be okay. We've got taco as a food. It's appearing in print by 1891 at the latest. Which means that if you write something down, this is basically true across history, we've seen an episode after episode. If you write something down and you don't explain it, that means to people coming 100 or so years later, looking back at this, that means that this has been around and everybody already knows what this is. I'm just referring to something that everybody is familiar with. It's not a new invention. So somewhere between the time that people were creating these taco plugs in the silver mines in the middle of the 19th century, maybe the late 19th century, in 1891, tacos became a thing. They were invented somewhere in there. Yeah. And I mean, it was in an actual Mexican dictionary in 1895, defined as taco as the food and Mexico City as its birthplace. Yeah, it seems like Mexico City was ground zero for this place and that they believe that by the turn of the 20th century, mexico City was starting to become a bustling metropolis again. Do tell. So apparently, by 1910, mexico City had become like a huge town of a population about half a million people, which is pretty significant, right? Sure. This is 1910. When this happens, if you went back to about 1500, say about 400 years earlier, right before contact with the Europeans, the same city, ten octet lawn, which Mexico City was built on, but the Aztec City that was there before had about 400,000 people, just under half a million. Isn't that nuts? Yeah, I mean, you would think that by 1910, they would have over a million. Right? But they wouldn't. And one reason why is because the population took a nosedive both between conquest of the Spanish and the violence that broke out from that, but also even worse, from the smallpox that the Spanish brought with them, which wiped out 40% of the population of tenochtitlan in one year. The year after contact, 40% of the city died from smallpox. Jeez. It took that long to rebound all the way up to finally surpassed its pre contact population. So things are cooking literally in Mexico City, and a lot of people from more rural Mexico had moved there to get work, to work in the factories. And they were living in small tenements, basically. And they didn't have these big full kitchens usually to work with. So this is where the street taco, or the taquerias really started to pop up, where you would go outside for dinner and you would go down to the street and find these delicious mouthwatering taquerias. And they were bringing in influences from every corner of Mexico because Mexico is a huge country, just like the United States, and every country has regional food specialties. Same is true in Mexico. And all of these different flavors were coming into central Mexico City and exploding onto the food scene there. Yes. In various cuisines that are brought by different peoples is not the least reason why multiculturalism is a great thing. Agreed. And Mexico City is a melting pot at the beginning of the 20th century. I mean, all these people were bringing it, and not just from Mexico or every part of Mexico, but there were some influences outside of Mexico, too, like Tacos al Pastor. Right. The one you mentioned earlier that you got kind of a deconstructed version of today. Yeah, with that pineapple flavor. And that one, I think has a pretty interesting story, which I never knew. It originated in Lebanon, specifically in the Mexican state of Pueblo. I say we feel like I'm living in Mexico right now after those tacos you have. I can imagine why have these Lebanese immigrants settling there in the early 20th century. And they started selling their euros and they had those lambs on the vertical spit like they still have the day. And they were cutting off strips of it, putting it on a pita, sometimes a flour tortilla. And in Pueblo there were and still are known as tacos Arabis, which is like Arab tacos. And the Mexicans there said, hey, they're really onto something here with this vertical spit, but let's throw Adobo pork bud up there instead. And then throw a little grilled pineapple on there as well. And you have what we recognize as Tacos el Pastor, which means shepherd's tacos, which is a reference to the Bedouin roots of the Lebanese immigrants who came over. Great story. It is a great story. And actually, Chuck, that reminds me of another story I was talking about. I was boasting about I love all food there's. Actually, one of the few things I've ever sent back in my life oh, no. Was at a Lebanese restaurant in Toledo called the Beirut, which may still be there, a little on the nose, but sure. And my family was feeling pretty adventurous and ordered a bunch of stuff off the menu. And one of the things we ordered, it didn't really sink in what we were ordering, but they brought out a bunt cake, a full size bunt cakes, bunt pans worth of raw ground meat covered in raw egg. Oh, my gosh. And. It was just on this big plate, and it was like, Dig in. And we were just like, we can't, we can't. And I still to the state feel bad about wasting that meat. Do you know what it was like? What? The dishes? I don't remember what it's called. Someone to let us know. Sure. I don't think it was like an invention of that restaurant's owners or the cook chef, I should say, but I haven't seen it very frequently since then. But we're like, no, I'm not going to do that. Well, I mean, hats off to your family. In the 1980s in Toledo for going to a Lebanese restaurant, we had Chinese food, and that was about as crazy as we got. Oh, we got fancy. Not only did we go to the Beirut once in a while, we also sometimes went to in Japanese steakhouse, which is a hibachi steakhouse. So we got real ethnic sometimes. Yeah, that stuff was we couldn't afford that. I'm not like, you are rich or anything, but we ate a lot at home, so we didn't even go out that much. So when we did, it was pretty conservative. But it wasn't until my 20s, till I left home and got into college that I really started exploring foods of the world. Yeah, well, good for you for doing that. Some people never do, especially if they were raised without being exposed to it. So it's good that you did. What's so great about multiculturalism food? Beautiful babies. Yeah, beautiful babies, for sure. Plenty of stuff, different points of view. All sorts of great stuff, really. Food. Sure. So you want to take another break and then get back to tacos? Continuing on, because we finally reached the point where we're like, okay, tacos now exist, but they're pretty much being slung out of food carts in Mexico City right now at the beginning of the 20th century. Yes. We're going to take a trip to Los Angeles. Los Angeles right after this. Word up, Jerry. All right. Smoggy kind of already overcrowded. Gross. Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s was a very segregated place. There were plenty of Mexican residents. There were plenty of black Americans. There were plenty of Asian residents. There were plenty of people. It was a melting pot, but there was a white flight that happened, and they tended to live apart. By the 1940s, sort of the suburbs in the Valley, orange county maybe, is where a lot of white people fled to. Not entirely, but if you wanted to live inside Los Angeles, like maybe East Los Angeles, you may have been from Mexico originally. Yeah, like Chichmarin. Yeah. Born in East La. Yeah, that's right. Man, what a great song. That was Jeffrey Pilcher senior. Pilcher, he thought to look around at the I think he got his hands on some phone books from Los Angeles in the started looking up taco joints because remember, at the behest of one dave Ruse, who would become a stuff you should know. Legendary writer Jeffrey Poultry is on this quest now to figure out how we got to the Americanized version of tacos. So he's tracing it from Mexico City up to California, as one would do, and he did that by looking at the phone book. And what he found is that outside of East La, you could find plenty of restaurants that were taco joints. But in East La, they were only two restaurants in the phone book that had the name Taco in them, which would suggest, Chuck, that they didn't eat tacos in authentic Mexican American neighborhoods. But that's not necessarily the case. Yeah. I think what has been surmised, and I fully agree, is that there were plenty of places in East La serving tacos. They just didn't feel the need to advertise it as a taco place to make it sort of if you were a white American or a black American in the 1940s and 50s in La. Mexican food might have seemed exotic and maybe a little dangerous to try. Like dangerous for your stomach. That is right. So tacos was a safe cell, essentially, is what has been speculated. Like, to put taco on a sign. People are like, oh, well, I've heard of tacos. I can try this place out. Right. Pelter came up with some pretty great names that he found in the predominantly white, predominantly black neighborhoods in La that had taco in the name. Apparently the first one in Los Angeles that catered to non Mexican customers was called Taco House. And that opened up in the early 40s. It's a pretty legit name, especially if you're saying, hey, American people, particularly white people and black people. Taco House. That seems approachable. Right. You're not afraid of that. Come eat here. That makes sense. They didn't even say Taco casa? No, that would be oh, no, that would have blown the minds back in the early forties. I like any restaurant with town at the end. So Ernie's Taco town kind of speaks to me. Yeah. How about Alice and Burt's places? Burt's taco Junction. Yeah, that's good. I wonder if it was an old train caboose. Yeah. Alice's taco Terrace, which is fine. Frank Taco Inn. That's a good one. I've never gotten why you would call a restaurant an inn. Because typically you sleep at an inn. Yeah, I've never gotten that because we had Village in Pizza and I never got it. I tried to sleep there and it never worked. No. I'm so full. And then in Watts, which is a predominantly or historically at least, black neighborhood, you had taco kids and Taco the town. That's a great one, for sure. I looked Taco the town is not around anymore. That's sad. But apparently there is a Taco. The town in Maine, I believe. Oh, man. Maine Tacos. I bet you even Maine has some good tacos here and there, for sure. That would be the least likely state. I would say, like Maine and Alaska. Right. So we've gotten to the point where now there's tacos in Los Angeles, right. They've crept up. People are starting to create them and cater to non Mexican and non Central American palates. And a lot of people say, okay, well, it was actually Glenn Bell, the guy who founded Taco Bell, which did you know that there was a person with the last name of Bell that founded Taco Bell? No. I didn't either. It's insane. My whole world views changed. Like Jimmy Hut's pizza chain. Right? I've got one for you, Chuck. Did you know that the very first Pizza Hut was in Wichita, Kansas? Really? Yeah. And the very first KFC, guess what city that was in. Oh, please tell me it's Kentucky somewhere. No, where? Salt Lake City, Utah. What? Yeah, it's true. The Colonel really was from Kentucky. Okay. But the first Kentucky Fried chicken restaurant was open in Salt Lake. Salt Lake City. I think it's one of those things where it's like if you open a thing based on a regional cuisine, the one place that's not going to do well is in the actual region that that cuisine comes from. Well, they don't have Taco Bells in Mexico. No, we'll talk about that later. We'll talk about that later. All right. So again, Senior Pilcher, I got to read this book. It sounds fantastic. He talks about the fact that if you were a Mexican immigrant and you were building a restaurant scene in the United States and you wanted to appeal to the Americans there, then you might want to source ingredients that you're probably not throwing tripe their way right out of the barrel. You might want to look at the ingredients that are readily available that people like, and ground beef is one of them. So that ground beef as a central ingredient to those American tacos was really early on. Dude, I can't tell you how late it was in life before I even had a chicken taco, for Pete's sake. Yeah, I know. I'm with you. It was all ground beef. That's all there was. Even if you went to a Mexican restaurant that was not really a Mexican restaurant. Like we used to go to Chichi. Yeah, ground beef. Ground beef and everything. It was just ground beef. And actually, that reminds me, Chuck, I turned up there's this 1998 Onion article that I remember from 1998. It made that much of an impression on me. Yeah. What's the headline? Taco Bell's. Five ingredients used in completely new way. The article talks about how you've never had anything like this. This one, the beef is on top of the beans, which is on top of the cheese. It is funny how they do that. Still just make these crazy combinations of the same thing. Right. But the upshot of all this is that a lot of people lay or credit Glenn Bell with inventing the American eyes taco. And that's not necessarily the case. It was some of these Mexican American immigrants who were creating these tacos to cater to American tastes, but then also based, like you were saying, on stuff that was easily obtained cheap, because everybody knows restaurant margins are so thin, it's incomprehensible why anyone opens a restaurant if you're just trying to make money. Right. And when you put all that together, people were making what you and I, at age ten, would have recognized as a taco before Glen Bell came along and started making tacos himself. Yeah. And a lot of people say, well, Glen Bell, at the very least, invented the technology where you could fry up these tortilla, these corn tortillas, into these perfectly little shaped taco shells. And he kind of did. It seems like it was one of the cases where a few different people all sort of had the same idea within a few years of one another without even stealing from each other. Yeah. Because there was a man in 1949 in Arizona named Joseph Pampa who filed an application for a deep fryer basket that made these perfect little taco shells. But a couple of years before them, there was another restaurant to our name, juvincio Maldonado. Great name. And he actually won the patent out of New York City in but Glenville also created his own version, it seems like, independently. Yeah. And the reason why everybody was having this kind of same idea at the same time is because part of the zeitgeist at the time, as far as food went, was the idea that fast food was awesome and creating food quickly and efficiently was thrilling. Because prior to this, if you made tacos, you made the tacos as order to order, and you took these uncooked flour tortillas, and then you fry them up and made tacos that way. And this was like no, just imagine if you had the shells already ready. It would save so much time. And knock these bobby soccer socks off. Right. And if you happen to break the shells, it's a nacho. Exactly. That's what my T shirt says. So in 1948, Glen Bell has opened a hot dog and hamburger stand in San Bernardino in San Berdu, California, across from the original McDonald's, if you remember that episode, which was pretty fun, which started out as a barbecue restaurant, and he was doing okay. He wasn't doing that great. But he noticed across the street there was a Mexican restaurant called I guess it's the Meatla Cafe Mitla that had been open since 1937 by the Rodriguez family. And it was not a taco stand. It was like a full sit down, full service restaurant, open breakfast, lunch, and dinner that was killing it. And he was like, I got to get me some of that. Yes. And we've reached the point where I want to point out that Dave Ruse is a born food writer, because the reason both of us wanted tacos so bad is in large part because of Dave's really great descriptive writing. But he talked about how, like, the meal of Cafe, it wasn't a taco joint, but they had killer tacos and they had something called Tacos Dorados, which is a golden fried taco. And he said that at night, young people would show up at the meatla cafe craving a quick bite. And the bestseller was a freshly fried bag of Tacos Dorados. Golden fried tacos. That is good food riding. It makes me hungry. Imagine that. And these are essentially taquitos, right? Yeah. They would take a corn tortilla, put ground beef in it, roll it up, put a toothpick in it to hold it together, and then fry that. And then they would put the cheese and the lettuce and the tomatoes on the outside. And I shouldn't say would because meat like cafe is still there. And they still serve Tacos Dorados. Yes, it's taquitos. I love it. Sometimes I'll get taquitos. Sure, yeah. Stop by the racetrack or something. No. Or the quick track. Have you ever seen those? Like, they look like a Takito and a hot dog. Like made love or something. I'm not even sure what it is. That sounds hot. No, I like to quit it in a place where Flautist is another name. I'm a big fan of the chimichanga, which is different than the deep fried burrito, but that's an American invention. Yeah. Put anything in a fryer basket and I'm all over it. Dude, I'm with you. But also, that sauce that's peculiar to the chimichanga is so good. It is. Oh, man. And plus, it's just fun to say when you order it. Yeah. I haven't found a great one here in Atlanta near me because all the places near me are a little more authentic and they don't have them. Yeah, I was going to say, like, you three places near me, but I just don't go there. Right. But, yeah, if it's authentic, they're probably not going to have a chimichanga that's an American Mexican food. Or it's a Mexican place that's catering to Americans. Right, exactly. So the reason that we're bringing up the meat like Cafe is because this is where Glenn Bell learned to fry up tacos to make tacos. And it's not entirely fair to say that he stole the idea from the Rodriguez family who were running the Meatlock Cafe and came up with the Tacos Dorados because he, Glenn Bell became a regular customer there. But he was there not just to enjoy the food, but to kind of like, spy on them and watch the process and figure out how to do it. And there is a guy named Gustavo Ariano. He wrote taco, USA Colon how Mexican Food Conquered America. And he's the guy who seems to be the one who really turned up the story about how the Meatlock cafe was the basis of Taco Bell. Originally when the Rodriguez family figured out that Glenn Bell wanted to learn how to make Tacos Dorados and was kind of surreptitiously learning by spying. They invited him into the kitchen to teach them how to do it. They just showed him how to do it. What a great culture. Exactly. So Glenn Bell went off and basically he went from making hamburgers and hot dogs to making tacos based on the Tacos Dorados'thing. But he was also combining it with inspiration from the McDonald's brothers across the street, who had gotten into really efficient fast food. So he was trying to figure out how to make Tacos Dorados as fast as possible. Yeah, I mean, this is where he comes up with his frying contraption. And we should point out when it was a very sort of Americanized version of the taquito, he actually topped his with chili dog sauce from his hot dog days. I'm not going to hate on that. I bet it's delicious. Sure. That's all I'm going to say. Yes. But he was looking to open up his first taco restaurant in 51, and he did so, and a consultant was helping out with the naming. They said. What about Latapatia? Sure, which is a nickname for a woman from Guadalajara. And he said, yeah, Latapatia is great, but how about just Taco Tia? They said that make sense. Taco Ant. That makes no sense. That's fine. Sure. It's an aunt who loves tacos. It makes sense to me. Yeah. An aunt rather not an insect ant. Right. To be clear. So he had taco tia. And then he went on, he's like, I really like this taco thing. I'm going to start another chain with a couple of Rams football players. They created El Taco, and that went well for four years, and he sold out his portion of that. And then he finally created the first Taco Bell in 1962 in Downey, California. Right. Diarrhea is born for Taco Bell. I love Taco Bell. We've talked about it before. I never, ever have it, but I had it once about four or five months ago for the first time in a couple of years, and it was so good. And I had diarrhea. Yeah, well, that's why you'd associate that with that. It was worth it, though. So the first one, they call it Taco Bell. Numero uno. The one in downtown California that he opened in, it is one of the most adorable buildings you'll ever see in your life. The sign is awesome. The overhang is awesome. It's in a Mission revival style. And actually, Glenn Bell envisioned it as kind of like a community center. So he had fire pits. There was, like, mariachi music and dancing. It was way more than it should have been. It's just a taco joint, a fast food taco joint. And it took off really quickly. Within five years, he had 100 stores open. Yeah. And they still even in the use the similar signage when I saw Taco Bell. Nomura, uno. And that's what they call it, by the way. We're not just trying to be cute. No, never. I recognize that sign immediately. I was like, oh, yeah. I remember that from when I was a kid. And they still sort of had that mission, that sort of stucco look to the restaurant until the ran across an Architectural Digest blog. It said, we legit want our apartments to look like 90s Taco Bells because there's a lot of weird Memphis style mixed in. But I remember when it transitioned from the old now. No, not really. It's way more slick. Okay. I haven't really noticed there was a big transition. There's actually been a couple since that one where they went from the ones where we were kids to the 90s version, and it was a sad day. I remember being like, Something's been lost here. I don't like this new stuff. Yeah, it looks like Zach Morris took over and redesigned the whole thing. Well, that's just because of the big mural of Screech on the side. All right. Screeching a sombrero. Yeah. He died, didn't he? He did. Very sad. Lung cancer, even though he didn't smoke. Jeez, that's terrible. I remember Del Taco too. That was the other big one growing up, and that went out of business eventually. But Del Taco and Taco Bell were the two biggies Del Taco still around? Is it? Yeah, they'll shut down now. I had another Del Taco by my house, not very far away from it, and I had not had it until ever. Until maybe 2019, 2020. I think they slim, though. I don't see those much anymore. It seemed to be like a legit rival, the Taco Bell, but Taco Bell squashed them with the tortilla press. Yeah, because in a big way, just in the US alone, there are 7000 Taco Bell locations. That is a lot. And they're all over the world except Mexico. Yeah, they tried in 1092 and 2007 to open up Taco Bells in Mexico City, and they did, and they did not go very far. But I think in 2015, there was a campaign to save Taco Bell numero uno, because they were going to demolish it. There was actually a KFC Taco Bell across the street from it. And that lot where Taco Bell newer Una was, was being redeveloped, and there was a campaign to save it, and they moved it in 2015. They moved it, I think, 45 miles from downey to Irvine, where Taco Bell's headquarters is. Yeah. There's a lot of stories on this online, but I would recommend you go to Pewee Herman's website. Pewee.com. Yeah. I found the best article was there because it has all kinds of pictures of the restaurant now wrapped up in the parking lot of the headquarters. And then there's a video. There's pictures of it going down the freeway on a truck with the extra wide load with a police escort, and there were 20 or 30 cars of people that took the two hour journey, honking their horns and stuff. So it's really kind of a fun story. They sadly haven't found a place where it's still because I saw follow up last year. They're still looking for a permanent home for it, though. Yes, apparently it's still, just like you said, wrapped up in the parking lot in a tarp on the trailer, still just kind of off in a corner of the parking lot, which is hopefully not the end of the place, I guess. A big shout out to the conservation group we Are the Next, because there who headed up that whole plan to save a building that a lot of people would say is not historically significant. Sure. You should have sent me the PB Herman link. I would have liked to have seen that. I love that guy. Oh, you didn't see it? No. I mean, it had all the same stuff. It just had a couple of cool pictures. Got you. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Well, if you want to know more about tacos, go eat some tacos, find some authentic ones and see what you think. And since I said, see what you think, it's time for listener mail. Well, before listener mail, I did promise to shout out my favorite taco places. So can we do that? Yeah, let's me and you feel free as well. In San Francisco. Taco bar right there in sort of lower hate. I'm sorry. Not lower hate. Lower Pacific Heights. Los Angeles. Yucca's. In Los Fields was one of my favorites. Senior fish in Eagle Rock. And then there was one called Seven Mares in Silver Lake that I think closed down but has now opened up as Playita. It was very seafood focused. Mares like mares of a town or mares like horses like horses. I got you. I think it was El Ciete Madis was how you would really say it. It's very pretty. Seven years. You wouldn't know that if it weren't for multiculturalism. They had really good ceviche, really good seafood. And then here in Atlanta. Altosaurus and Kirkwood, mescalitos and Oakhurst. Any place on Beaufort Highway? Sure. You're going to get good, authentic Mexican food and tacos. So those are my shout outs. Yes. Do you have any? No, I don't. I need to get out to more taco places, apparently. Shout out to the food truck whose name I did not get in between Seattle and Portland that one time. Yes. Slater Kinney tacos is what it's called. Listener mail. Listener mail. I'm just going to call this nice email from a nice human. Okay. Hey, guys. I wanted to share with how your show is helpful and enjoyable to me and how I used my experience to help a friend. My friend started new medication and messaged me expressing insomnia troubles that came on as a result. I empathize and explain how actually, you stuff You Should Know to help me fall asleep when my mind is running 100 miles an hour, I put on an older episode with a sleep timer and let my brain focus on the topic of discussion. Also find your voices really calming, probably because I'm so familiar with hearing them almost every day for the past few years. Of course, I suggested speaking to her doctor, too, but I encouraged her to look into your podcast, even just for the general curiosity and enjoyment since my husband and I moved overseas for his military obligations. I find your show even more important in my life because I feel connected to the routines and the life I was used to living before we moved. Thanks for all the hard work you put into each episode. Your content and enthusiasm truly brings joy and brightness to this world. I'm extremely grateful. Hope you have a wonderful new year of 2022. I look forward to continuing listening for as long as you're willing to make episodes. That is from Katie Frettonale. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Katie. I remember I probably said this before a million times. I used to take not offense, but I used to be like, what exactly does that mean when people said that they use it to fall asleep? And then I was like, no. It is a high honor that you can put people to sleep. Yeah. You're in bed with somebody and you're soothing them. Yeah. Especially if they have trouble sleeping to a clinical degree and you can help them. I'm going to have that put on my tombstone. Should you put people to sleep? And now he's sleeping. The big sleep. It's a little birdie workshop. It all right. Well, if you want to be like Katie oh, sorry, Katie. If you want to be like Katie and send us a great email like Katie did, you can send it to us at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
46208762-cf93-11eb-b6e0-1f9949e8d48c | Selects: Are good samaritan laws effective? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-are-good-samaritan-laws-effective | Good samaritan laws have been around for many years, helping to provide legal protections for people who try to help other people. But do they work? Listen to this classic episode and decide for yourself today! | Good samaritan laws have been around for many years, helping to provide legal protections for people who try to help other people. But do they work? Listen to this classic episode and decide for yourself today! | Sat, 03 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=184, tm_isdst=0) | 44394959 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Selects, I've chosen how Good Samaritan laws work. We dive into the weird, wacky, wild, extremely patchwork world of Good Samaritan laws. Laws. Laws that are meant to protect people who lend aid or help to other people in need. Sometimes those people in need are not too happy with the help that they get and it creates all sorts of problems. So check out this really interesting episode in this week's select. Enjoy. 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. And this is stuff you should know. Just a trio of helpful types who like to go around the world and escort people through Crosswalks and get sued for it. Escorting someone to a busy intersection against the light. Right. And then you get to the other side and hold out your hand, say, Lay some bread on me, sucker. All these are bad ideas. They really are. But, I mean, we're full of those, aren't we, Chuck? Yeah, I mean, just brimming with them. That's our log line ten plus years of bad ideas. Oh, God. You've been listening to us this whole time? Are you crazy? Oh, boy. So you're feeling pretty good about this one? Because I got to tell you, I am. Yeah. If folks listen to our, I think, dare I say, it was a good episode on the very sad case of Kitty Genovese in New York. That was a good episode. You can go back and listen to that. And that's a pretty good setup because just to recap very quickly, in the mid sixty s a young woman was raped and killed in a very busy area of New York City. And it was very famous because many people supposedly heard the attack, watched the attack, perhaps didn't do anything, made the news and created something that they studied still today in psychology classes called the bystander effect. Yeah, this idea of responsibility diffusion where if you have a bunch of people standing around, everybody just assumes somebody else will help and they don't help. Yeah. Joshua Clark has some help. Sure, leave it up to him. And I'm sitting there like, well, obviously Chuck is going to help. He's a better person than me. And then we both just stand there and do nothing. Yeah. In the meantime, Jerry's just laying there with, like a Jolly Rancher in her throat. Right. But everybody knows she can't talk anyway, so she can't call for help. It's very hard to tell sometimes, is Jerry's in need of assistance? Or if she's just being Jerry. Right. Or if she even exists. However, our article says that the bystander effect, in this case in particular led to the first Good Samaritan laws in our country. That is not true, because two years before that, right here in Georgia, our first laws went into effect. Yeah, the one I found that was the earliest was in 1059, five years before Kitty Genevieve was murdered, and that was in California. And that protected doctors who were administering aid in emergency situations. Hippie liberal elitist out there. Right. The Left Coast. But it's a weird thing to tie together the bystander effect and Good Samaritan laws because they don't actually go together. You want them to fit together, but when you lay them side by side, you're like, oh, these are two different types of sea monkeys. I thought they were husband and wife, but they're not. Oh, I see the correlation. I want to my brain just won't quite make the connection. Like, if someone had raced down to help Kitty Genovese and render her aid and not been a bystander, then that falls under the Good Samaritan laws. It does, but really it falls more under the Duty to act laws. You'll get in trouble if you are just a bystander if you don't do something. Whereas a Good Samaritan law basically says if you do do something and you help Kitty Genovese or somebody who's in trouble and you make their situation worse, you can't be sued for rendering aid because you were acting in good faith. So it's kind of there, but it doesn't click. I got you. You know what I'm saying? I hear you. All right. Okay. I just really wanted to get that off of my chest. Well, so, yeah, you just kind of set it. Those laws are in place now as protections generally for American. They happen all over the world, and we'll talk about a few of the laws here and there. But all 50 states and Washington, DC. The District of Columbia, have some sort of laws on the books that you can basically be protected potentially and not held responsible for your actions, even if they cause harm. But because it's state law, if you're not American, I'm not sure how it works in all countries. But the laws from state to state on the same thing can vary wildly. And certainly in this case, it's what they call a patchwork of state laws in need of a federal law. For sure. Yeah, for sure. So because there's so many different laws in so many different states, the actions that you perform in one state might get your mug on the front page of the paper being celebrated, and in another state, your mugs on the front page of the paper because you just got sued. So we'll dive into that a little more. But first, let's talk about where the name for the laws come from. Chuck? Yeah, I remember this story from my church going days as a kid that really stood out to me back then because well, it's in Luke. And the story is that a Jewish man was assaulted and robbed on the road and left for dead, basically. And some people passed by without rendering aid. A jewish priest and the Levite, which is an assistant priest, basically, or assistant to the priest. Do you have the impression that the priest and the Levite were together or that the priest passed and then at some point later on, the Levite passed? You know what? This is going back a lot of years, dude, but my memory is telling me that they were two separate things. Awesome. Okay, I knew that question would pay off. I might be wrong, but I still have some old church memories rattling around in this dusty noggin. I saw like, smoke coming out of my ears. I thought that was flour. Oh, sure. Well, I'm gluten free, though. Oh, are you? No. Emily is by default. I sometimes am. Right, sure. No, I know what you mean. You know how that goes. But finally, as the story goes, the Samaritan, that is, the person from Samaria who were bitter enemies of the Jews came by. And what did he do? He said, hey buddy, you look like you're having a pretty rotten day, let me help you out. That's right. And he did. He not only said, here, let me pick you up and get you out of this dusty road, I'm going to take you to an inn, and not only am I going to do that, I'm going to pay for your room at the end and I'm going to say, bid you good day and good health. Audio enemy he did imagine this, Chuck, this Good Samaritan story. It's entirely possible that this actually took place, that this is a real story that happened, right? It's not just a parable. Sure, it may have. Imagine if you were that guy, that Samaritan who did this thing, this act of goodwill, and 2000 years later, people around the world are still talking about it. How great would that be? Yeah, like 20 minutes after our show ends, no one's going to talk about it, right? It would be just like all of the talk shows we've been on the kiss of death. That we have. But yeah, for sure. Even if you are like the most atheistic, agnostic human on earth, you've heard of the story of the Good Samaritan. It's just one of those things that is transcended religion into pop culture. Yeah, and I had never known that at the time. Like you said, the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other. And apparently I looked it up, they really did not like each other. Just like over religious stuff. It was over political stuff too, and how those things intertwined. So they really did not get along. So not only did this guy help somebody in need, he helped an enemy in need. So I think he does deserve to be commemorated for eons over that. Sure, but that's where the name of the law comes from. Good Samaritan laws are when you stop and help somebody, whether it's your enemy or your friend, in an emergency situation. Typically, you should not be penalized if your good intentions cause further harm. Right. Which seems very much like a no brainer, but it is complicated. The more you read into this stuff, the more you're like, man, there's a lot of nuance to the variations of these laws. Yeah. The more you read into it, the more you're like, I am going to end up second guessing myself the next time I'm faced with an emergency situation. I hadn't thought about it before, but it's like, yeah, you could totally get sued for helping somebody out depending on where you are. Yeah. I've never come across this, not even close. What an emergency situation? Yes, I have. Yeah. I was one of many at an accident. I witnessed the accident. It was like one of those things where you see it happening, you just see it in slow motion and you're just like trying to will it to stop with your body and it doesn't work. It was a man who got T boned by another car that he didn't see coming. And I was one of the people on the scene kind of helping out. But it didn't even occur to me that that man could be like, these people hurt me in helping. I didn't touch the guy or anything like that. But other people were and we called for help and all that. So I think we did it about as good as you can. But nothing about a situation was like, well, I need to watch out for my legal exposure here or Google something real quick. What state am I in? Let me just check out what's going on as this person is bleeding in the street. Right? Exactly. But it is nuanced. And after reading some of these examples, I get both sides of the coin for sure. For example, there are a couple of things that all of this patchwork of Good Samaritan laws will have in common. Basically two, as this article states. One is that you can't be compensated for helping out. And that's a pretty literal reading of the law. I think it's meant to exempt emergency workers, paramedics doctors, like they've got their whole own set of laws governing their actions or inactions. Right. So to keep them from giving preferential treatment. I think it's mostly to say this is meant to this is my interpretation of it, but from what I've seen with Good Samaritan laws, it's totally in the eye of the beholder. But that's meant to say, like, this covers non medical professionals, is who we're talking about. And to define that, they're saying this covers somebody who isn't compensated for their assistance. And that's been transmuted into you can't be compensated for your assistance or else that leaves you exposed to legal action later. So when you were sort of kidding around at the beginning though, but if you saved, let's say you performed a heimlich at a restaurant and the person's like, man, you just saved my life. Here's a finski. Right. Don't take that $5 bill and also throw it back in their face and say, this is what your life is worth. Right, exactly. They say, yeah, I don't really love myself. Well, then you introduce them to a good analyst and go about your day. Sure. Analyst. What is that? What do you mind? A New Yorker in the 70s. You sound like Kerry Green. Nobody says analyst anymore. It was weird. I think that's what Bob Newhart was. Was he? I think yeah, he did consider himself as an analyst. That seems like an antiquated term, though. Yes. Now it's therapist, right. Or shrink. Yeah, shrink. Head shrinker, I think, is the preferred term. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't been in a while. Oh, yeah. Years. It's good to go talk to people, you know what I mean? Yeah. But I got it all figured out now. Oh, well, that's good. You're cured is what they call that. Yes, they cured me. I hope they gave your shrinking award. Yeah. Do you know what the cure is? Not really thinking about things too much. Yeah, that's a good advice. No, I'm just kidding. Because people have real problems. But I never had the real problems. Yeah, but I think even if you don't have real problems, if you don't have some sort of chemical imbalance or diagnosable condition, just about anybody can benefit from time to time to go. Absolutely. Just talk. It's not even necessarily the counselor helping you. It's just being in a situation where you're talking out loud and talking through your problems to find out what you actually think is very helpful. Yeah. I mean, I do that at my doctor and my dentist, and they're like, dude, we don't want to hear this. You see an analyst, you're like, no, I'm knocking out two birds at once a time. All right, let's go over just a couple of these. I mean, like I said, they're different everywhere. But hold on. There was one other thing, Chuck. Okay. So I said that there were two things in common, and one of them is you can't be confident. The other one, almost across the board with any law you're going to find is that you can't act recklessly or negligently. Wow, that's tough to get out. You would not hold up in court. No, I'd be like, Give me my $5 as your lawyer. Or maybe that's your defense. You're like. Your Honor, I can't even say yeah, those are two important factors for these laws. For sure. Yeah. That's what they all have in common generally, right? That's right. But from there, like, if you go to Oklahoma, let's say, you are only given protection if you are untrained, like, you're just a regular person. Right. You're not a medic, let's say, or a doctor, and only if you're giving CPR or trying to stop blood loss. Right. That's weirdly. Specific. I've seen that you could say that that was the third thing that they all have in common. Like, if you're administering CPR or something really basic that any person would want to do or try to do, you're probably protected by a Good Samaritan law. Yeah. And defibrillators are covered in a lot of these laws since those have really gotten, I guess, just more common. And I looked into buying one of those. They're expensive, though. Yeah, you looked into buying one? Yeah. Just carry around with you? No, not to carry around, but to have sure. Like, not in my car. I got you. You could help somebody stranded on the side of the road with a jumper cable or get their ticker going again. The key I've heard is that when you're setting them up to be defibrillated, you have to shout hot stuff right before you engage it. I thought it would be like, three or $400. How much are they? I mean, thousands of dollars. Oh, really? I can't remember how many thousands, but it was enough to where I just kind of closed the browser and went and looked at cool news or something. Well, you know, God bless those malls in America for having them every 10ft and keeping us all safe. Sure. I'm sure their insurance helps pay for that. I guess you're scenic. Here's another one. In Vermont, you can be fined, actually, if you are a bystander and don't do anything. I kind of love this one. Yeah. This is what I think the law should be. Get a penalty unless you're jumping in there. Yeah. And, I mean, obviously not putting your own life in jeopardy. This is not like if you see somebody getting mugged, you have to go wrestle the gun away from the guy. Or jumping into the frozen Potomac River. Sure. But that if you see someone in need and you just keep walking by, you should suffer some sort of consequence for that. You should act. This is a very slippery slope right here, because compelling people to act, that's a big infringement on personal liberty. But at the same time, it's kind of like, come on, if you have to invigorate somebody's humanity with a little bit of law here, there I'm kind of in favor of that. One of my favorite stories that I can ever see on any news program is when you see a group of people coming together and saving people is great too, but, like, to pull a goat out of a river or something, and there's, like, the guy with the truck, and another guy is like, I got rope. And this lady comes up, and I'm a goat whisperer. And they all like, you see six or eight strangers come together to rescue, like an animal. Yeah, but they tied the best. They tied the not too tight and accidentally pulled a goat and two and then the goat suits. Yeah, that's how it goes. And then michigan, just forget about it. It is so convoluted and weird. In Michigan, they protect people who declined to offer assistance, but then they also protect, like what is it? Ski patrol. Yeah, what else? There's like three very weirdly specific. If you're a block parent, which means your house is designated as a safe place, you know, the safe place signs that you see on 711 and stuff I never noticed that if you're a little kid and some stranger danger guy in a trench coat is following you, you can run into a thing that has a safe place I've never noticed. And they will protect you and all the cops and call your parents in Michigan, I guess you can volunteer as a person whose house is a safe place. Oh, cool. And you're exempted through Good Samaritan laws. Right. But you show up and they're like, you're an Ohio State fan, right? You can't come in. So potential Assistance medical personnel, block parent volunteers and national ski patrol in Michigan. Or if you're giving CPR or using an emergency defibrillator again, I think that's pretty well, that's like covered almost across the board. That's like the one area that they just want to make sure that everyone would jump in on. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's one of the reasons why they make them so prominent in public. I mean, it's not like you have to break glass and there's like a fire hose that you have to know how to get off and turn the thing on. Like it's meant for the public to go grab and use, not just for emergency personnel. Because using a defibrillator in a timely manner has such an impact on the survival rate from a heart attack that you want people walking around knowing how to use one and ready to use one in an emergency situation. Argentina, this is tricky. Yeah. You could face jail time for either putting a person in jeopardy or abandoning a person to their fate. That's a real fine line. It is, for sure. It is a tricky one. I went back and rewrite it too, and I'm like, no, it's a tricky one for sure, but I like the idea of abandoning their fate if they need help, like somebody on a mountain or something like that and just being like, sorry, chump and walking along. I like that idea that you have to do something for them. Okay, I thought you're saying you like the idea of just saying, well, it's kind of in God's hands. No, that's Michigan. Michigan protects that, right? Sure. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, let's take a break. And we're going to talk about a very interesting case from California about 15 years ago right after this. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, and you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, dude, we're back. And we are in California. And during the app break, we got in the way back machine. And it's 2004. Yes. Oh, wait, I was still living there. Oh, yeah. We're going to run into you. I've arranged it. I just didn't know you. I'm like, who's that guy? I got in touch with Patrick and I said, you're going to want to meet somebody special. You're like, just wait for that beard you're going to have one day. I'm like, what, you can't grow a beard? Yeah. And he'll be like, well, at least I got all my teeth. That checks out. Oh, the salad days. Yeah. All right. So this case is really interesting. Lisa Torte and Alexandra Van Horn were makeup artists that work together, friendly acquaintances as co workers. But I didn't get the picture that they were, like, best buddies or anything. Yeah, I would guess the lawsuit implies that they weren't. So they went out as a group of not just those two, but a bunch of people from work went out for some drinks in the La. Area. One of them, Alexandra van Horn, was headed back and crashed her car. Pretty bad crash. I think it was like, 45 miles an hour into a telephone pole. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Jeez. Like, all the airbags deployed. Lisa Tortillas saw this, got out of her car, saw smoke, saw liquid, and was like, I think this car might explode. I need to do something quick. And pulled Alexandra Van Horn from the car, which seems like it had a hand in paralyzing her. Yeah, I mean, that's one thing you want to really be careful doing, is moving somebody, and you probably don't want to move them at all. But again, Lisa Toherty thought that Alexandra Van Horn's car was about to blow up, so she decided that she was better off trying to get her out of the car. And in court, van Horn said that torture yanked her from the car like a rag doll. Torti said the smoke. Looking back on it, probably it was Annie freeze on a hot motor. But even still, she acted in good faith. Right. So California's good Samaritan laws. She said, you can't sue me. I was trying to help you in an emergency situation. Sorry. The Good Samaritan laws cover this? And by the way, I'm no longer speaking to you. Yeah, probably. So it went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they ruled that she could sue her friend and coworker, because protection at that time, at least for the Good Samaritan law, was only for those administering medical care, not rescue care. Well, so the law says that it was emergency care, and the court interpreted that to mean medical care. I got you. Which was like, what? And the legislature even said, no, that's not at all how we meant it. Interesting. Yeah. In fact, they amended the law the next year to say specifically medical or non medical emergency care. But that vagueness. Got Lisa toward sued. Yeah. And it's hard to find out sometimes. Final results of legal cases. We've had that problem, I feel like, a lot over the years. Yeah. The media, they have a short attention span. Well, it's that, and I think sometimes these things are just still dragging out. Oh, really? You think it's still going on? I think so, because I found an article from, like, three years ago, because I was just trying to find out what happened with the lawsuit. And apparently the woman who pulled the woman being sued tortilla had two different insurance companies, one of which said, I'm not getting involved in this, the other of which said, you know what? We're going to agree to defend you against a lawsuit. It was settled for $4 million. Wow. And then the one insurance company that agreed to help Defender sued. The other insurance company said, you got to pony up half of this. And the last thing I saw was the district court judge ruled for the defendant insurance company. In other words, the one that said, I don't want any part of this. Okay, you don't have to pay. But then it said, an appellate panel reversed that decision on Wednesday, and that's literally the last thing I could find. Wow. That is still dragging on. Holy cow. Chuck. Nice research. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, there may be something newer out there, but there are probably tricks that legal scholars know that I don't know about researching this stuff. I mean, what does that say, Chuck? That like an insurance company can just be like, we're your insurance company, but not, we're touching this one. Well, it was complicated, though, because it was insurance. It wasn't, like, just insurance for me walking around if I want to help someone, it was car insurance. So it all came down to whether or not it was considered a use of a car by her opening that door and unbuckling her seatbelt and pulling her out, whether that was using the car I got you. That makes a little more sense, though. It's just you know how convoluted that stuff gets, though. It does, for sure. Legally, the whole legality of this whole thing, that made that whole Lisa Tority and Alexandra Van Horn case. I mean, I heard about that. When that was going on, everybody heard about that case because it was like, well, wait a minute. She was trying to help, and now she's getting sued. Yeah. Why are friends fighting? That whole kind of thing. That was 2004, and then two years later, china started to rise as a great power of anti Good Samaritanism big time, in a lot of different cases. And all of it started in 2006 in the case of Pengu, who was a man who got off of a bus in China and saw that an older woman had fallen and broken her hip, and so she had been trying to get on the bus. Paying you was coming off of the bus, and he went to go help the lady. Well, the lady later said that he was the one who caused her to fall and sued him, and he was like, I'm just an innocent bystander. He was being a Good Samaritan, helping this lady. Well, the court said, no pain you. We've decided that you probably did cause the fall. Otherwise, why else would you have helped the lady? That's crazy. And there's more nuance to it. There are a couple of things. Paint, you said he was the first one off of the bus, and the court said, well, then you are probably the person to bump into the lady and knock her down. And also, why did you give her 20 you on, which is about $30 if you didn't feel responsible? And then, thirdly, if you were acting heroically, why didn't you go apprehend the person who knocked her down? Why would you go help? So there's a little more to it than just like, nobody would possibly help someone out of the goodness of their heart, so you're guilty. But that's kind of how it got played up in the popular media, both in China and in the rest of the world. And so Paying You became this cautionary tale, like, if you see somebody hurt in the street, don't help them because they will sue you. And people started to do that. And so people in China, a few really big cases, sensational cases, did just that. They stopped helping people who clearly needed help, and people were dying as a result. Yeah, there was just one case I can't even talk about. I know, but it was just awful. People not helping people clearly in need became sort of an epidemic in China until they finally changed some law just last year, I think a national Good Samaritan law in 2017 that does offer protections. But you said that one article that was. Like it's out of hand in China now and the other way. Right. Because this one, Donald Clarke, a law professor who actually specializes in Chinese law at GW, said that in China you can see someone choking in a restaurant and attempted tracheotomy with a butter knife with no training and be covered, and you can't be sued. Which is I think everyone would agree that's a little too far. Yeah. No matter what you do, you cannot be held liable for acting as a Good Samaritan, even if it's the most reckless, negligent thing you can imagine trying something you're not familiar with at all. You can't be sued. And so some people said, well, not only does this Article 184, this new law, cover, it goes too far in covering protecting people. It doesn't address the problem, which is this culture of distrust that's been kind of fostered by these judges who are ruling in favor of people who are accusing the Good Samaritans that have helped them of actually causing their injury and creating this chilling effect in helping people. I mean, people literally, elderly people getting hit by cars and being left in the street as people walk around them and then being hit by another car and killed later on, like a half hour later, this was happening. This is going on. And people wouldn't go anywhere near these people because they were afraid that they were going to get sued. And it was mostly because judges in the court system were saying they were siding with people with zero evidence whatsoever, just basically on a suspicion of someone's good intentions. Yeah. I mean, that original case when they said what was the man's name again? Ping Yu. Ping Yu. They had no evidence whatsoever. It's not like it was on closed caption television or anything like that. It was just like you said, the judge going seems to me like it's pretty weird that you would have helped had you not been the one that actually knocked off to begin with. Exactly. So, I mean, it's good that China has this Good Samaritan law, and it's a very broad law, and it probably needs to be walked back a little bit. But they also need to go after the judges or the I guess kind of the sentiment or thought process of judges that kind of says, why would you help somebody out if you weren't the one that caused the accident? Until they do that, and until they go after this group, Peng Xi, which are basically crooks, people who lay down in front of cars and pretend they got hit and then sue the people and are frequently found, they're ruled in favor of their case. Until that is rooted out, that people are still going to be distrustful of helping people who are in need. Yeah. And even the Band Horn case, I know she's trying to help, but you're not supposed to move people. Everyone kind of knows that. And this woman ended up paralyzed. And if it was a direct result of that, then I don't know. That's a tough one. But they say that the road to hell is paved with good intention. I know that's kind of like where that lies. Yeah. I mean, I feel bad for both parties, for sure, because the tortilla was legitimately trying to help. She wasn't like, well, let me do something that might really hurt my coworker further. She thought the car was going to blow up, so let's get her out of there. Right, exactly. It wasn't like she'd always harbored some deep resentment of her, so this is her chance to paralyze her. Yeah. Not funny at all for the way that you said it. So there's another big push in Good Samaritan laws in the United States. It's interesting how they're kind of, like, refined as things go on, but there's this thread, the sentiment that runs through them that's like, okay, we need to make sure that people don't hesitate in helping their fellow human in need. Yeah. A lot of these it's labeled as special interest Good Samaritan laws. But these are great. It makes a lot of sense, especially well, they all do. But this one about the food donation. In the mid 1990s, there was a realization that a lot of food was going to waste \u00a314 billion specifically of food going to landfills when people in America needed that food. And you've heard stories about grocery stores can't be held liable, so they just have to throw that stuff away. Right. So they passed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which is to provide some protections in case you donate food and someone gets sick from eating that food. Right, exactly. So I remember back when grocery stores did have to throw that away before that law, and it was just so wasteful and so just morally wrong. So they passed that 196 good year for passing laws, I guess. And then there's even newer kind of push of Good Samaritan laws that are protecting college kids who drink too much even though they're underage. They might be worried, oh, man, I'm going to get expelled or kicked out of college if I call for help. And so apparently that some of them weren't calling for help. And so some universities, I think it's up to 240 universities in 35 states now have something called 911 Lifeline or 911 Good Samaritan law where if you call for help for yourself or for somebody else who's had too much to drink and it's like a medical emergency, you won't get in trouble for having been drinking underage. But it's laid the groundwork for a larger law about opioid abuse that we really kind of need. That's a Good Samaritan law that protects people who are calling for somebody who is overdosing on heroin where under normal circumstances, they might hesitate because they're on heroin themselves and they don't want to get busted for it. Yeah, it's called nalixone. And this is basically it comes with, like, an EpiPen now, and it's something that cops have in their emergency kits. And just like, an EpiPen is something that a civilian can use. You don't have to have medical training if someone is overdosing on heroin or some other kind of opioid, you just inject this thing and that can save their life. And so junkies don't want to call the ambulance or the cops or whatever. Just the same as an underage college kid doesn't want to call the cops. So they're often described as medical amnesty laws. Great. And it's making a difference. There was one study in 2002 at Cornell about the alcohol one, and they said there was a rise from 22% to 52% of counseling sessions attended by students in 2004 because students weren't afraid. I'm 19 years old or whatever, and I need help. So it's shown that it's working. And I think the same is going on with this naloxone drug. Right? Yeah. So, like, the naloxone kind of has its own protection where whether you're somebody who's on heroin or not, if you administer that, you could be a medical professional. It's like such a new thing that they realize they need a specific Good Samaritan law for that to cover anybody who's administering nalaxone, like, if they do some damage or whatever, they were still trying to help. But then also, if you're on heroin yourself just calling 911, you can have immunity in some states from getting busted for heroin for being on it yourself. Right. So, like, hey, we're going to save you and you're under arrest. Right. Which I guess is still in some states, it's still a possibility. You don't want people worrying about whether they're going to get popped themselves and then saying, well, I can't really call for shorty juju over here, which is, I guess, a heroin user's name. So the heroin user who's overdosing who would otherwise live dies because the person they shot up with is too worried about getting busted themselves because the last thing a heroin addict or drug addict might do in the throes of that drug is think, let me call a cop, or an annual right. You know what? I need a police officer. They might help. Right. They'd say as far as advice goes for Good Samaritans, this article counsels people to think sensibly. Most states do have laws to protect people that if you're doing something reasonable to try and help, which all goes back to the split second, is kind of tough. But that all goes back to what you're saying, like reasonable maneuvers to help somebody. Yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily like, don't try the tracheotomy. Right. So that kind of ties into a second point. Don't try things you're not trained to do. And it just kind of ties into reasonable. Like, is trying to administer CPR a reasonable thing? If you come upon somebody who's not breathing? Yes, totally reasonable. Is it unreasonable to try to get their heart going by pumping their arms up and down and accidentally dislocating their shoulder? It's probably not going to be protected by a Good Samaritan law. Yeah, but how much can you get sued for for a broken collar bone? Probably a lot. Especially if the person is like, a ping pong player or a professional illustrator. Yeah. You ruined my ping pong crew here. Right, exactly. You like ping pong? Love it. We need to do an episode on ping pong. I love Ping Pong too. I'm surprised we never squared off. I am as well. Chuck well, we've never been in the same room as a ping pong table. That's what I was thinking. I was going to make a camp joke, but you beat me to the truth. You got anything else? Oh, yes, I do. There's one thing that came up, if you don't mind talking about it. The Seinfeld thing. I didn't talk about it. Do you remember how that yeah, the final episode. Right? Right. Yeah. Which is, like, the least funny episode of Seinfeld ever. But it has, like, a weird message when the gang gets put in jail for watching a guy I think it was Jonathan Panette get carjacked by somebody with a gun and just sitting there making fun of them while they're videotaping it. Right. Yeah. And that kind of raised the site. It kind of ties into Good Samaritan laws. A lot of people are like, is there any place in the country where you can get in trouble for that kind of thing? And it turns out, no, that kind of falls into that duty to act law where you are in some places like Vermont or I think in California, under some circumstances, you are required to report a crime, but you're not required to actually intervene. That is like, kind of that big point I made earlier at the beginning of the episode. That's a big distinction, right? Yeah. And not only are you not required to intervene, you're not even required to report the crime during the commission of the crime. For most duty to act laws, you just can't walk away and pretend you never saw anything. That's the key. That's where you will get prosecuted. So the Seinfeld gang probably would not have gone to jail. And this article that I read quotes a guy who's an attorney in San Diego named somebody List. Oh, man, I wish I could remember the guy's name. Franz List? No, not Franz List, who's a great composer, but a liss. Yes. His name is Peter Liz. He's a criminal lawyer from San Diego who ended up in this article. He basically says, not only should they not have gone to jail, they provided very valuable evidence by recording the entire crime. So let them off the hook. Has there ever been a tougher show to end in Seinfeld? No, yes, probably not, but they really chose a very specific, unsatisfying way to do it. What about Sopranos? Everybody hated how that ended. Yeah, I loved The Sopranos, but then moved to La. During its run and didn't have TV, so I quit watching it. But I do remember all the hooplaw. But Seinfeld is just one of those. I mean, the last episode stunk, but it's just a hard show to end because it was the most uncertain show probably in TV history. Sure. And most shows have a finale that is highly sentimental, and you couldn't do that on Seinfeld. It would not have been true to the show. So I don't know what I would have done. It's a tough one. It is a tough one. Maybe it was the perfect ending and it just wasn't a great episode. You could make that case for sure. You know, I'd like to hear maybe if someone had a better idea. Okay. Rewrite the Seinfeld finale. Yeah. In 160 characters or less suited to us. Or 240 now. What is that? It's weird. Anyway, I think that's the end of this episode. We kind of let this peter out too. Yes. Okay. If you want to learn more about Good Samaritan laws, that's actually a tip. Go learn your state and our country's Good Samaritan laws so you know what to do and you're ever faced with an emergency situation? And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This one is great. I'm just going to call it great email. Good guys, in the spirit of Thanksgiving and this glass of wine I'm drinking, I wanted to reach out and tell you how thankful I am for you. Been listening to the show for a few years and your comforting voices, light dad, humor, and interesting topics have become increasingly important to me. My brother passed away almost two years ago at the age of 24. He was an incredible soul and would have loved your show. I had trouble falling asleep for a while and began playing your podcast when my mind was racing and I needed the distraction. I fell asleep to many interesting topics for months and I greatly appreciate your help through the sad times. Last year I sailed from Seattle to San Diego with my uncle and father. This was the scariest and most exhilarating trip I've ever taken. Ever. We kept a watch system 2 hours on and 4 hours off. During my first two hour night watch alone, I was scared pupils with no land in sight and my life has secured to the boat. I plugged in my headphones and listened to the stuff you should know selects fecal transplants episode. Midway through my watch, a pot of porphoises started following and playing with a boat. I could only spot their phosphorescence, but I was so darn happy sitting there in the cold and dark listening to you both talk about poop while watching the porpoises create tubes of glitter in the Pacific. Wow. Can you imagine that? Dude? Yeah. That's amazing. And our voices didn't ruin it. I know. This brought me so much comfort in a time of such great discomfort. Now, you've heard it before, and at the risk of sounding sappy, your podcast brings comfort and joy to your listeners, and we appreciate you. My brother's birthday is tomorrow, and I have been catching up on your latest episodes, thinking about the time you helped me get through, and I wanted to say thank you. Thanks for being there for me in a weird way, and thank you for your friendship and your jokes and your comfort. And that is Jane from Seattle. Awesome. Jane, thank you so much for letting us know that story that's like the deer on the track story that Will Wheaton hadn't stand by me. That's right. That's a pretty cool story. Yeah, it's a good one. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jane did, to let us know one of your coolest stories, you can tweet to us. You can join us on Instagram, you can hang out with us on Facebook, you can find links to that on our site, stuffieshando.com. And you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuffyshnnow is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-06-08-sysk-whale-strandings-final.mp3 | Why Are Whale Strandings Still a Mystery? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-are-whale-strandings-still-a-mystery | For millennia, mass strandings of whales have confounded us. Why should dozens or more whales come onto shore only to die a terrible and lengthy death? | For millennia, mass strandings of whales have confounded us. Why should dozens or more whales come onto shore only to die a terrible and lengthy death? | Thu, 08 Jun 2017 17:46:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=17, tm_min=46, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=159, tm_isdst=0) | 42125363 | 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 this July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, season three zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody. I know we've been sheepish about tour announcements lately, but we can finally announce our well, let's just call it 2017, our tour. Some cities we've been to, some are new, some it's been a while. Yeah. We are coming to cities all over the continental US. And parts of Canada. If you live in either of those two places, there's a really good chance we're going to be somewhere near you at some point this year. Chuck, I'm psyched. We're kicking off in Toronto on August 8 at the Danforth Music Hall. It's going to be great. And then the next day, we're going to be in beautiful Chicago on August 9 at the Harris Theater. And then the next day, August 9 at Danforth Musical in lovely Toronto, Canada. North America, planet Earth. Yes. And then where to next? So, I don't know. How about Vancouver on September 26? And then the next day, we're going to be in Minneapolis on September 27. Those are going to be awesome. That is correct. Then we are going to take a nap, and then we are going to wake up on October 10 in Austin, Texas, wonder how the heck we got there. And then remember that we have to be at the Paramount Theater for our show. Yeah, that's called the Austin. Wake up. And then, Chuck, the next day, we're going to be for the first time ever in beautiful Lawrence, Kansas, at the Liberty Hall on October 11. It's going to be huge. And then equally huge is what's next. We have a special three night second home stand. We call it our second home. That's because it's the bellhouse in beautiful Brooklyn, New York, october 22, 23rd and 24th. We're going to be there three nights in a row. And finally, we're going to wrap it up in true stuff you should know fashion here in Atlanta at the Buckhead Theater on November 4. And this is going to be a very special show. Stay tuned for more details, but it is going to be a charity benefit show. Yeah. And not only are we donating 100% of our dough. We got our booking agent and venues and promoters, and everyone is chipping in to donate large portions of their dough as well. So we're pretty excited about that. Yes. So it's going to be a great tour. Chuck. We need to go get our rest. Yes. And you can go to Sysklive.com to get all your details because that is our touring home on the web, and tickets are going on sale this Friday, June 9. So visit Sysklive.com for ticket links. And if the ticket link doesn't happen to be there, do not fret. Just go to the theater homepage and you can find out all about it there. We'll see you on the road. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Mr. Charles W, chuck Bryant and roundly liked fella and another roundly like person gary Jerome roland Me. People can take or Leave me. What a weird start. Yes, weird. But this is a weird episode, man. Do you think? Sure. It's mysterious. At least. Mystery is weird. Yeah, mystery is weird. Yeah, it's a T shirt. Proved my point. It's been a long time since we came up with a T shirt. Well, yes, since we pointed one out. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, mystery is weird. Yeah. Josh Clark. Right. Or some people say S-U-S-K. I've never gotten that. Well, you is it the text version? I don't know. I guess. I think it's just a mistake. I think so, too. It looks weird. To each his own. That's another good T shirt. Yeah. Well, that's our motto here. Stuff you should know. To each their Own. That's right. So, Chuck, back in February of this year, not too terribly long ago, down in New Zealand, at a beach called Farewell Spit in Golden Bay, it's on the top of the South Island of New Zealand. Okay. They had a huge mass stranding of whales, pilot whales, to be specific. About 600 died. Imagine that. It's the saddest thing you can see. Well, yeah, there's one of them. I was reading an article, I think it was from The Guardian that was basically on location interviewing people down there. They were like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. I've never experienced anything worse than this. There are dead pilot whales everywhere. Dying pilot whales everywhere. And apparently the local authorities put out a call to people living in the area saying, like, Cancel school, call in sick to work. Like, we need your help down here. And there's this group called Project Jonah that's a New Zealand basically a whale rescue group. And it's pretty appropriate that they're from New Zealand because from what I understand, new Zealand has the highest incidence of whale strandings or I think even cetacean strandings, any kind of cetacean ending up on the beach in the world. But as the International Whaling Commission puts it, any country with the coastline is going to have a problem with mass strandings of whales happen in Germany. It did happen in Germany, which is not landlocked, it turns out. Yes. It's just heartbreaking. These beautiful, humongous creatures just laying there dying at awful death. Yeah. Like I said, mystery to the whole thing. We're not entirely certain why whales end up stranded, especially on mass. There's a lot of pretty good hypotheses, some of which are probably true. There's probably multiple explanations, but there is definitely some weirdness to it still. And then there's a lot of debate about what exactly you should do during a whale stranding. Should you help them? Should you kill them? How should you kill them? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then there's a lot of debate also about what exactly you should do with a dead whale stranded on the beach. Because those things, you don't just flush them down the toilet. No, they're pretty big. Yeah. And when I said dying and awful death, well, there's a lot of things that happen. Their skin burns. Yeah. They have very soft, sensitive skin. Yeah. So just to be out there in the sun like that, they equated it to like a third degree burn on a human. Right. Just laying there in the sun. Seagulls come in and don't even wait for them to die and apparently have a thing for going for the eyeballs. Yeah. So a dying live whale having its skin burned and eyeballs picked out. Yes. That's a big problem. And then you also I didn't think about this. So whale is a marine mammal. Right. They come up to breathe, but they're equipped to be in the water where gravity is less. Yeah. They're huge. And so they need that water to well, when they go on land, big problems happen. Yeah. They encounter the pressure of gravity pressing down on them. They actually start to suffocate under their own weight. The big problem is, while they're laying there on the beach, it takes them a very long time to suffocate. They have a tremendous, obviously, tremendous reserve of blubber so they don't starve to death first. So they very infrequently do. So over the course of days, possibly even weeks, they're laying there suffocating under the weight of gravity, being crushed by their own blubber. Yeah. And their own organs being crushed under their own weight. So it's a bad jam. It's a pretty bad scene. Yeah. It's just really sad. And to fully understand how to help Wales and other citations from becoming stranded in the first place, we have to understand why they become stranded. And there's a lot of investigation into this, but apparently it's nothing new. From what I've seen. As long as humans have been keeping records, there have been reports of mass whale strandings all over the world. Yeah. And you cobbled together quite a few articles for this. One of the really good ones was what causes whale mass strandings? From the conversation by robin Grace. And she points out that, like you said, this has been going on forever, since people have been writing it down, and lots all different kind of species of whales this can happen to, and dolphins and other cetaceans. But she said shortfin pilot whales are the most frequent. Or he. I guess it could be like that guy from Cheers. It is. R-O-B-Y-N. That's always a she, right? No, robin Hitchcock spells his name with a Y, doesn't he? What a confusing world. I talked to him in an elevator at the sketchfest last year. Really? Yeah. Was it the Egyptians with him? No. Wait, wasn't he in the band? What band? The band. No, what was he in originally? I don't know. He was in, like, a major band like that first. I wonder. He's definitely not in the band. He's English. Okay. Sorry. Where were we? Oh, yeah. So pilot whales, short fin pilot whales are the most frequent strandees, I guess. False killer whales, melon headed whales, poor melon headed whales. I know that name. The cuvier beeked whale and sperm whales. These are all very much deep sea dwellers, right. Very social fish. And this is one of the problems. They hang out together in the hundreds. And like you said, there are a lot of different hypotheses. But one of the thoughts when they see these mass strandings is, whatever, and we'll talk about what might get that first whale there, whether it was just sick or confused or out of its depth, trying to go for some prey, like out of its comfort zone, literally out of its depth. Yeah. But maybe the other hundreds are just tagging along. Right. So there's this big drive, especially among Environmental Protection groups, to say this is human caused in large part. And there is a whole branch of strandings that probably are that actually almost certainly can be accounted or chalked up to human activity. But there's also a big, wide portion of animal strandings, cetacean strandings that appear to be natural in nature. Right. Yeah. And so some of those hypotheses are that initially, like, one whale or something was sick or maybe injured and came in toward shallower water so it could come up to surface for air more easily. Sure. And went in a little too shallow and got trapped there. It's possible that a pod of whales were chasing some very valuable prey into areas that they weren't familiar with, that were too shallow, and they got stranded there as well. And there's a couple of parts to this that the whole thing makes sense a little more. One is that echolocation. That is part of it's. Basically, the number one sense that marine mammals use, it doesn't work very well in shallow waters. Right? Yeah. So just their navigational aid, they get into these shallower waters, like you said, maybe they were chasing something to eat. All of a sudden, they find themselves out of place, they don't know which way to go, so they inadvertently swim towards the shore right. And accidentally beach. And maybe they've got hanging out with 20 or 30 pals because they're social. Right. Which makes it all so sad. That's a big clue that these are deep sea marine mammals that strand on gently sloping, sandy areas. Yeah. And they found some, I guess, anecdotal evidence. Some whales in the North Sea that were beached or stranded had recently digested oceanic squid. So they thought, well, maybe they had gone in chasing the squid, had just eaten it and didn't know which way to go to get out of there. Yeah, they got confused. And that's another thing that people who have been on the scene of mass whale strandings report is that the whales often seem to be disoriented or disorientated, depending on where you're from. Oh, that's right. Wasn't that a thing on the show? I think it's UKish. Disorientated UKish, yeah. Should we take a break now? Sure. All right, we'll take a break and talk a little bit more about the natural causes and also about potential manmade causes. 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, 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.com S. So, Chuck, one thing that you hit upon is that the whales are very social. Yeah. And so there's this idea that if one becomes stranded, especially if this is a leader that's leading a pod, if they become lost or disoriented, as long as they're stranded, the other members of the pod of this extremely social, tight knit group are going to hang around and stick with that one. There's also an idea that ones that are sick or injured, if they go off and become stranded, that even if the ones that follow them aren't lost, they're there because of the social bonds. They're there to provide support or because they care. It's called the social caring hypothesis. This idea that whales allow themselves to become stranded because a member of their pod has become stranded and they're worried about them, basically. Yeah. Obviously there are a lot of people around the world that care a lot about this and are trying to work to just learn more about how to handle this. And last year there was a workshop held to discuss how to practically handle these strandings. And so it concluded that they had an international strandings network. They were going to establish this. And I guess they're in the process of doing that now, basically stranding experts from all these different countries where it happens, partnering up with something called the Entanglement Network to basically share information on best practices and just get a little more organized with how they can best help this situation. Right. So it's good that they're doing something about it. One of the other things that very recently, I think within the last year or two has been finally handled was this long standing issue of whether or not sonar that's used by Navies around the world, it leads to strandings of whales. Yeah. 1996, this was the first time this connection was made. There was a NATO military exercise off the coast of Greece which coincided with the stranding of twelve cuvier's beaked whales. Another one, in May 2000 in the Bahamas, loud mid frequency sonar stranded a number of whales. And for those, they did some examinations and found hemorrhaging in the inner ear that indicated acoustic trauma, which is just devastating. Right. And there were either NATO or US navy sonar exercises that had been conducted right there. Right. And then in 2002, a group of beaked whales landed in the Canary Islands and they were examined. And this has raised a really big mystery as well. Some of them showed signs of what we would call the bends submersion sickness. Yeah. Which you would not think that a marine mammal would ever have a problem with. No, because they've developed well, they've adapted to be able to dive very quickly and rise very quickly, but they think that probably something about acute sonar, which is basically just getting hit by a blast of high frequency, short duration sound waves, causes them to either swim away. This is the current hypothesis. There is a New York Times article called The Search for Clues to What Causes Whale Strandings, and it talks about the study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2017. And the study, who is carried out by Terry Williams, basically says that sonar goes off nearby. Some whales or Cetaceans, they try to get away as fast as they can. As they do, they expend about double the amount of energy they normally would swimming, and they lose oxygen to their brain. In the meantime, carbon dioxide starts to build, which allows bubbles to form in their tissues, including their brain, which is bends, decompression sickness. So it's not like sonar causes the bends, but indirectly, they think leads to the bends by disrupting the whale or Cetaceans ability to dive or rise very quickly without decompression sickness. Yeah. And that study was pretty important because I think for a long time, people just thought, well, they're fish. They can swim endlessly, and it's not a problem because they're marine mammals or fish, and that's what they do. But it's sort of a no brainer that they can get tired just like anything else. And they confirmed that in studies. So if they sprint, basically, they are essentially getting tired. Right. And if they're sprinting to avoid sonar, then that's a problem. Yes. And so, as a result, the Navy entered into an agreement to not conduct these trials or sonar exercises or underwater explosions around Hawaii or Southern California, which are extremely important reproducing and feeding grounds for whales of all types. And there's some resident populations there, but they finally said, okay, all right, fine. We're not going to do that anymore around there. Yes. Which was a big deal. Yeah. Sea quakes are another underwater sound, like really intense thing that can affect them beyond sonar. Yeah. So it's not always just manmade sounds. No. But there is another type of manmade sound that's a big problem called chronic underwater noise that is created by things like shipping or industry, that kind of thing, where it's not necessarily this high intensity, but it's pretty much constant. And it can drive citations nuts, because, again, like, we use our eyes, they use their ears. And if you have a huge loud sound or constant loud sound, it makes it difficult for you to do things like hit on a lady whale when it's time to reproduce. Well, yeah, we've mostly been talking about whales, but there was this one anecdotal story of these dolphins, short beaked, common dolphin that this one researcher found. And this kind of lends itself to the fact that they will travel together if one of them is hurt. And this is at the TFE Estuary, West Wales. And he found these two dolphins on the beach, and one of them was sick. Post mortem reveal had a heavy lung parasite infection that affected its breathing, but the other one apparently was not sick, but remained close to its little buddy in distress, like, whistling frequently. So, man, that's just, like, heartbreaking. It was like, Ted, stay with me. Who's Ted? Ted is the dying dolphin. Okay. I thought that was a reference to something. Just Ted the dolphin. Yeah. Got you. Did you ever hear about the researcher? Surely we've talked about that. The dolphin researcher who took acid with dolphins, like, gave acid to dolphins and dropped it himself. I don't think so. Built a house, and I think the Bahamas that could be flooded so the dolphins could come live in the house with them, I believe trying to or successfully. His research assistant did it with a dolphin. Had sex with a dolphin. That's another way to put it. Wow, this is real. I've definitely never heard this story. Yeah, I think that one might deserve its own episode. It happened. The man who did acid and did sex with dolphins, I think his research assistant, a female, did it with dolphins, or at least came close. There was like a you said this wasn't a fever dream. It sounds like it must have seemed like it's out in the Bahamas at the time. Wow. Yeah. We'll do an episode on it. Okay. So it feels like science is hot on the trail of cetacean strandings, of figuring out what causes it. There's a lot of different causes. Yeah, it's probably all that stuff, I think. Yeah, probably. But there's a big issue still to be discussed, and that is that if you have a dolphin stranding or a whale stranding and you've got some that have died naturally, but you still have some that are alive, what do you do? Well, there's a group in New Zealand called Project Jonah. They have guidelines for the average person of how to keep a citation that's been stranded or beached, how to keep it comfortable, how to keep it alive. Yeah. Dolphin, obviously, is more saveable. Sure. And more saveable. Not only because they're smaller, but frankly, it's unsafe to go too close to a beach whale. Right. That's why I was really surprised that this group was putting out guidelines telling you how to care for a beach whale. It's an extremely dangerous thing to get near a beach whale, especially by the tail. Yeah. I mean, an accident can easily happen, and they're so strong. Sure. And they're agitated. They're scared out of their mind. It's a dangerous thing. So there's a lot of discussion about what do you do? Well, some people say, well, you refloat them. You get them out there as fast as possible, but apparently it is hard to do. And also, to an untrained person, you can't really spot a gravely internally injured citation just by looking at it. So you may be pushing it back out to sea and being like, go live, when really they're going to have a long, prolonged death at sea because they're dying of internal injuries. Right. The prevailing idea, it seems like, at least among scientists, is that you should probably euthanize, especially a whale. Dolphins. Yes. You can probably refloat them. A whale, once it becomes beached, it's probably a goner. So say most scientists that I've come across. And so you would euthanize them. But then this raises the whole issue. How do you humanely kill a whale? Where do you get a guillotine that big? Yeah. And you know what? We'll talk about what they've come up with right after this. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes. LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated USbased restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thieves have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock.com stuff. That's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. 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. Comcysk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comssk. Squarespace. All right, so where we left off was, sadly, oftentimes the most humane thing to do would be to put one of these whales out of their misery immediately or as quickly as possible. Sure. And so how do you do this safely? They've tried a variety of drugs over the years, some to greater success than others. One drug they tried was good old phenobarbital. The problem with phenotyl is that it doesn't just leave the whale immediately. It can stay in the whale system and then go into other places. Like a dog. Yeah. It doesn't break down in the environment. And there was a case of a dog being fed whale meat and falling into a coma because of the barbiturates. Yeah. It takes a truckload of barbiturates to euthanize a whale. Right? Sure. So this dog eating this meat and falling into a coma. It was to be expected. Luckily, the dog was covered after having his stomach pumped twice. But what a cluster of a day that was all around. Catch euthanized a whale and then your dog falls into a coma when you feed at the whale and you're just trying to complete the circle of life. Well, yeah. Don't you need special permission to use female Barbara anyway? Yes. It's not like the kind of thing you can just order up. No, these are like significant drugs. And actually, there's a protocol that was recently developed and published in the journal of a sequence of drug administrations that will kill a whale, but it will do it very humanely and actually quite safely, too. These very clever scientists figured out how to use drugs to kill a whale. And it's very much like the drug cocktail that they give to prisoners in the United States for the death penalty. Yeah. I mean, it's taken them a while to find the correct mix of drugs that are safe to use that won't agitate the whale further that will kill them quickly. So a lot of experimentation has gone on. What they finally came up with was ford drugs midasa lam. I think that's like Addavan. Okay. Thumbs up on that. As a pramazine, I think that's like bear exalazine. That's ecstasy and potassium chloride. That is Special K, the cereal. And that needs to be administered sequentially, I believe, in that order. Correct. Yeah. Because one of them was the one with the execilizine. Okay. So that one is Xilizine. Yeah, maybe. Or is it celebsine? Anytime something starts with reconstituting, I just get thrown. It's a tough one. Yeah. But if you just give that to a whale it's a sedative, I believe, or no, it's a painkiller. I'm sorry, but it can cause thrashing. That is extremely dangerous. A whale's tail is already dangerous enough when it's stranded. If you give it a drug that makes it involuntarily thrash, you're in big trouble. But they found that if they administer that stuff after the other two, it won't cause thrashing, but will have the painkilling effect. Yeah. So the Medaza lamb and the aceppromazine they use already in veterinary services for horses and dogs to calm them down. And you know, when you have a dog put down, they don't give just one shot. That's a couple of shots. Yes. Ideally. Yeah. They don't even give humans a couple of shots these days. Yeah. So they do this with dogs. They give one to kind of calm the dog down and then one to stop the heartbeat. Right. And the potassium chloride, the final thing, is the one that stops the whales heart, I believe. Yes. The xazaline is the pain relief and anesthesia. And then the final potassium chloride is what does it. So the guys who came up with this protocol also developed needles, like industrial sized needles that can be used they're attached to garden sprayers. Yeah. That's not right. So you put all the drugs in these garden sprayers, and then you attach a needle to it. And the great thing about the needles is that you can insert the needles into the veins that are around the fins. You don't need to go near the arteries, which the main artery connects the tails of the body. So it's much safer to administer these drugs because you're working by the Finn, which is much less dangerous than, say, working by the tail. And apparently, I don't think that they've actually used this protocol in any citation yet. So it's kind of brand new. It is brand new. But they are feeling pretty good about it. As good as you can feel about coming up with a cocktail of drugs to kill a whale. Yeah. But that's just one way of euthanizing whales. There's other ones, people shoot them with shotguns. Yeah. They're certainly more primitive attempts that are primitive. Yes, it is. And there's actually a protocol for shooting a whale, and you want to use very high caliber bullets, projectiles, and if you don't, you're just going to hurt that whale because they have a really strong skull that's really tough to penetrate. So there's this thing that's been developed called the Swed, the Sperm Whale Euthanasia device. Sperm whales have very thick skull. They're huge whales. And this thing is a modified World War II 14.5 millimeter Russian anti tank gun that's been developed just to euthanize sperm whales by shooting them in the head with this thing. Yeah. I'm going to go with the drug cocktail. There's also exaggeration, and which is if you don't have a drug cocktail and you've got a whale, you don't have an anti tank gun, you don't have a drug cocktail. The preferred method is to extinguish, aid the whale by cutting that major artery that connects the tail to its body and basically just letting it bleed out, which is sad, but it's better than dying while your skin is burning off. Yeah. And seagulls are eating your eyeballs. Right. And so we'll finish with kind of the problem of what to do with that dead whale. Something that happened in November 1917, november 12, specifically in Oregon. A lot of people think that it was a made up story that they blew up a whale, but it really happened. Right. And there's actually grainy footage of it on YouTube. Yeah. 1970 news footage from W? No K because it's west. Right. So it's K. Oh, is that what that is? Yeah. W is the east? K is the west. I never knew that. Yeah. So you've got an eight ton, 40 foot long sperm whale. This is from Snopes. Correct? Yes. And apparently Snaps did the real research because there was this long published article that everyone kind of referenced over and over, as people do on the Internet. And they realize you're like, no one ever really called the people that actually did this, so let's do that. And they did. They talked to a guy named Ed because it kept coming up on the Internet, and people thought it was number one, and it just happened. And then number two, that it was a hoax and an urban legend and an actual urban legend developed out of the real thing. Correct. The real story is that on November 12, 1970, an eight ton, 45 foot long sperm whale which was dead, washed up in Florence, Oregon, and a dead whale eventually will smell a lot. That's a big problem. And not only that, it poses a big problem in that if you have a whale that's still partially in the surf, those sharks come a call in to feed on it, and they'll attack anything around there. So it's a huge public health problem if you have a big dead whale on your beach. Absolutely. They think like, all right, we need to get rid of this thing. What do we do? Who do we call? The Oregon beaches? Public right of way. So, oddly enough, they went to the State Highway Division to clean this up. So they consulted the Department of the Navy, and the Navy said, blow it up. Yeah. This guy named George Thornton was the guy whose shoulders that fell on. He was with the Highway Division, and he was like, all right, well, blow it up. It made sense at the time. They blew up huge boulders that weighed about the same, and that's what they use to calculate how much dynamite to blow this whale up. Yeah. In the weirdest way, it did make sense. It totally did. They calculated that they would need a half a ton of dynamite, 20 crates worth. And they thought, well, if we stuff this stuff on the landward side of the whale, it'll blow it out to sea. Out to sea. Basically. No must, no fuss. Going to blow it to smithereens, and we'll just leave it for the seagulls and the crabs. And I think the quote was, the crabs and the seagulls and what not to eat, the tiny particles of blubber. Like you said, no fuss, no must. So on November 1270, there were a group of a couple of dozen onlookers who came to see this work got out around Florence, Oregon, that they were going to blow a whale up. I'm sure that was a pretty fun thing to do in Florence, Oregon that day. Right. So people came out to see Channel Two kat used, Paul Linman reported on the scene, and he did the whole thing very tongue in cheek. This is right out of the gate. They're going to blow a whale up with half a ton of dynamite. This guy got the hilariousness inherent in the idea. It's like right out of Anchorman. Pretty much. Yeah. And so he called it and everybody went and hid behind the dunes about a quarter of a mile away. Not far enough. No, they blew the thing. And you got to see this footage. Just look up exploding whale on YouTube. Yeah. It was a huge explosion. Oh, yeah. And everybody's watching and they're like, yeah. Somebody goes, Wait. And then all of a sudden they're like, I think a woman says, oh, God as well. Parts start raining down on everybody. Yeah. It's like that scene in Trimmers when they finally blew up one of the trimmers and they just start getting of course in Trimmers, it was that kind of orange, blood orange pulp. One of the Grab OIDs is that they were called. That's what the store owner, the little store owner guy called them. They were trying to think of what to call me. He's like, what about grab oi? Great movie. Yeah. So it basically rained down whale blubber, some in larger pieces than others. And it's remarkable nobody got hurt. Yes. Because a three ft. By five foot piece landed on a Buick owned by Walter Oomanhoffer. And they showed the car. It crushed his car. Had he been sitting in that, he would have been dead as a doornnes. Yeah. It's really lucky no one got killed. Yeah. That could have squashed somebody easy. Sure. And so everybody is sitting there wiping whale blubber and guts and gristle off of their faces, and they look over and most of the whale is still there. It definitely vaporized part of the whale, but most of it was still there. So they just buried it on the beach, which is one thing you can do with the whale. You can bury it on the beach and take it to a lionfill. You can drag it out to sea. That's the preferred thing to hook it up to a boat and pull it out and then let it sink, which is the natural thing. There's something called a whale fall, which creates like a temporary ecosystem on the sea floor that attracts a bunch of different organisms that eat the whale. Right. But it's illegal in the US. To tow a whale that's been put down with barbiturates out to sea, because remember, those don't break down, so you've got secondary toxicity. So if you put a whale down with the cocktail in the US. You have to render it, burn it or bury it in a landfill. You can't take it out to sea, but if you just shoot it in the head. You can drag it out to see and let it interesting. There's a lot of math to be done with dragging it out to sea. Sure. Because ostensibly you would tie a rope around its tail, pull it out where it would drag along the sea floor. Well, hopefully it would float. Would it? Sure it would. And the reason why is another reason why a dead whale is super dangerous, because as they decompose, gas builds up just like they do in a decomposing human, and then they explode on their own sometimes, too, that you don't want to be standing near either. All right. So I guess it has to float because otherwise eventually it would start pulling that boat down with it. Sure. At which point you would definitely want to cut bait. Yes. Literally. You got anything else? No. It's a very sad thing, and I'm glad that there are people who dedicate their lives to this kind of thing. Yeah. If you're into that, if you hear that as a call and go check out Project Jonas website. They will be right up your alley. You'll probably end up moving to New Zealand, which I can attest is a great place to visit. I want to go. It's great. And I hear it's friendly and safe. Yes, and I've heard it compared to the United States in the 1950s as far as, like, friendliness and safety. Yeah. Just sort of a bit of a throwback in the best ways. That's what friends of mine have said. Okay. Or maybe they just mean everyone's drunk all day long, maybe, and doing drugs and having a good time. That's all that happened in the 50s. There's a town in there that was built, like, completely art Deco in the 1930s. Talking about that. Did they use Art Deco to describe it? No, this is just New Zealand as a whole. Okay, well, check it out. We'll have to go there on tour someday. Absolutely. Okay. Well, since I said we'll go there on tour someday, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this general email of interest. Okay. That's a good one. Hello, Josh, Chuck and Jerry. Hello. I cannot remember the name of the podcast where there's a crazy doctor. Oh, I remember what this was. Not uncle Slomo, who got run out of multiple towns, starts up multiple practices, and possibly loses his license multiple times. I know if I could remember exactly what he was doing to get run out of these towns. I remember the podcast, but the ripe age of 20, it is lost. Do you remember it? No. I was hoping that you would know and that we could delight this listener. I think this guy is confusing us with stuff to blow your mind. Well, it's a lady, I think. You think? I don't know. It happens from time to time. I'm going to finish the email anyway. Okay. I know that it's on my list of favorites among Satanic Panic of the 80s. Great one. Great one. Operation Mincemeat. Another good one. How Bars Work. Okay. Public Relations. Yeah, man. And Kitty Genovese Boy. Those are all some of my favorites, too. They are. And of course, the time you guys partied with Billy Boy Gates. That was a great party. You guys always brightened my day and lead me to become a person whose slogan is so I heard on this podcast there's a T shirt. I'm an architecture student from Auburn University. War, eagle, even if you don't want to. Or tigers. Yeah, see, that's just weird. Yeah, none that's dumb, too. Make up your mind. Auburn. And I've listened to you all to keep me going through countless late hours, early mornings, and days when I don't ever leave my studio desk. Also, I have forced many of my classmates to listen to you shout out to fellow listener and classmate Corey pronounced Suebasic subsac. Yeah, man, I threw all kinds of letters in there. Sure, Cory, Suebasic, if you read this on the listener mail, shout out Corey. And I always suggest The Satanic Panic as the first episode. That's a good starter. Yeah, I agree. Anyway, guys, please help me remember my favorite episode and have just a remarkable day. Best of luck to you all and your prospective children and spouses. I don't think she means prospective children, does she? I think she's been in architecture too long. I think prospective children mean children that have yet to be born. Sure. I don't think that's happening anytime soon. Lil angel that is from Libya. Barrett she said, sign out Birmingham, Alabama, would love to have you. You performed in Birmingham. It was a great show. Maybe we'll come back to a great workplace theater there. It's a very warm reception. I can't remember. So what I'm hoping is someone writes in I do too, about the crazy doctor who got run out of multiple towns, start multiple practices, and possibly was licensed multiple times. No idea. Not a clue. If anyone can remember that and write it and tell us, we will answer Libya back again on the air and then read your email. Oh, well, there you go. That's a heck of a deal. Yeah. Well, if you have livia's answer, you can tweet to us at S YSK podcast. You can also hang out with me. I'm at Josh Clark on Twitter with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W, Chuck Bryant or Stuff you should know, you can send us an email to stuff podcastworks.com and, as always, turns to their home on the web, stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.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 Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients plus probiotic for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandalopets.com." | |
Rumors, Myths and Truths Behind Obama's Health Care Plan | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/rumors-myths-and-truths-behind-obamas-health-care | In this third episode of Stuff You Should Know's health care reform series, Josh and Chuck -- and special guest Molly Edmonds -- sort through the myths, rumors and truths behind President Obama's proposed health care plan. | In this third episode of Stuff You Should Know's health care reform series, Josh and Chuck -- and special guest Molly Edmonds -- sort through the myths, rumors and truths behind President Obama's proposed health care plan. | Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:48:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=18, tm_min=48, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=272, tm_isdst=0) | 33480044 | 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. 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. 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. Bryant. And with Charles W. Bryant and I is our colleague and healthcare reform guru, Molly Edmunds. I think it would be. And me. I thought she was going to say that. Yeah, saw that coming. Yeah, well, she's not the first person to do that. Molly, you can send an email to stuffpodcast@health.com. Yeah, send an email. Molly, thank you. I'm here to keep you on track on all things grammatical and healthcare reform related for anything else. That's good. That's it for now. That's enough. Right? Perfect. So, for those of you just joining us, you should probably go back and listen to the first two podcasts that we released in this special Stuff You Should Know healthcare Reform suite. And this is number three of four. Yes. We talked about what's wrong with healthcare in the US. In the first one, right? A lot. We talked about Obama's proposal. Just straight up facts. And then this one, we're going to talk about myths. Yes. Both from the left and the right. So those of you who are Bill O'Reilly fans, you can sit down and have a mug of beer with people who are fans of NPR say, right. If you're Libertarian, sorry, you're out. Just go do whatever it is you guys do. Nice, Chuck. So let's get started, kids. Yoana. Yes. Sure. I think one of the things that people keep maybe weekly throwing out is that the US. Can't really afford to tackle healthcare reform right now. Right? That's a myth. Are we doing that? So we have some sort of ding. These are all my dings, actually, Molly says a myth, and I agree with her. Well, you know, the thing about it is you may not be able to afford, like, a new TV, right? Right. But if you had an old TV and it was a tremendously bad value if you were just paying way more for that TV than what it's worth. I had to get it repaired a lot and that kind of thing. Yes. Then you've got to do something about it because you're not getting a good deal on your TV. Sometimes it's smart to buy the new TV. Yeah. And that is the position we are in right now with healthcare reform, is we pay way too much money and get way too little care for what we have. So just if you like a good deal, I think you should be behind healthcare for them. So let's recap real quick. The US. Is spending about $2.4 trillion a year on healthcare. That makes up a 6th of the gross domestic product, and that's more than we spend on defense. Right. At the same time, we're not getting as much value out of it, so they say. Right. But we are entrenched in two wars and the economies in the toilet. You're saying still we should do something about it. Now, how are we going to pay for it? That's another common criticism we keep hearing, is how are we going to pay for this? Well, I think the specifics still need to be worked out, but I think that it's important to remember that the President has pledged that it will be deficit neutral. It's not going to add a penny to the deficit in the first ten years that it is in action, nor after that. So it's something that we could possibly say is a myth just because we don't know exactly how to pay for it. Taking with a grain of salt. Yes. I liked your point you made in here that the people are afraid that the uninsured are going to be paying for the uninsured. That already happens. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's an estimate that families are paying about 1000 more in their premiums just because people who are uninsured still show up and go to the hospital. Yeah. And they get treated, and an individual pays about 400 more. And so doctors and hospitals likely shift those costs to us because they got to get paid for it somehow. Sure. And they know insurance companies will pay. So let's flesh that out a little more. Say an uninsured worker, a day labor gets hurt on the job. The boss comes and drops them off at the Er. The Er, by federal mandate, has to treat that man, stabilize them, fixes wound, whatever, right. He walks away. He doesn't pay. He doesn't have any insurance, and possibly he's here illegally. Say, so what you're saying is the hospitals will end up charging more for patients that have insurance. They'll charge the insurance companies more, and then the insurance companies turn around and charge more for people who have insurance, they charge more in premiums. Right. And then that's the way that there's an invisible tax for the uninsured that covers the uninsured. That's in place right now. Right. That's the thinking by the came up with these numbers that we are already paying for people who show up without insurance. And so if these people then had insurance, if this plan works and we can get everyone insured, then that would kind of cease that. We're hoping that it would control the cost a little bit. Yeah, that would be great. So this is a $1 trillion proposal over ten years, right. So clearly just making sure everyone has insurance in and of itself is going to be very expensive. Right. Is it a myth then that there won't be higher taxes for people who, say, make a quarter of a million dollars or more a year? I think that it's impossible to say what we'll actually have in place, but that is the President's current preference, is that we tax people who make more than $250,000 a year. Okay. And then I noticed a point that the President and people like Nancy Pelosi have made is that those people had been getting a lot of breaks over the previous eight years. What? And so they think that this is going to sort of balance that out without getting too political about it. That's what Chuck can't help himself. Libertarians. Nancy Pelosi said, not me. So, guys, it's light in the mood a little bit. Talk about death panels. Let's bring a little comedy into this one. This is probably the most pervasive myth, I would say, about healthcare reform, and arguably the most asinine, wouldn't you say? I don't know. I think if you are told that you might be put to death, you're going to take it pretty seriously. Yeah, you will take it seriously. But I'm saying, I guess the thought process behind that interpretation of the House bill about end of life counseling, that's what it's about, right? Yeah. So basically in the House bill, it says Medicaid or Medicare can be reimbursed for voluntary end of life counseling. Right. It doesn't say anything about the patient signing a resuscitation order or Do Not resuscitate order or anything like that. It has nothing to do with actually terminating a patient's life. Right. It's the way they made it sound, though. Like they would stick the pin in Grandma's hand and put it on the line, and if she just falls asleep and it scratches across, then all of a sudden there's a Do Not resuscitate orders come in there and one less old person we have to worry about getting an organ transplant for because she voluntarily said, I don't want it. It is a myth. And not only is it a myth, it is a career ruiner too, if you speak out too much. You guys heard about Betsy McCoy? Yeah. John Stewart. Is that the lady? He killed her. Yes. Have you seen that? Molly? Yes. It's pretty she's the one that came up with the term death panel, right? Yeah. Am I wrong there? I believe she's just the one. If she didn't coin it, she gets credit for coining. She was so vociferous about it. Right. You know what? Here's the thing. Without pointing fingers at who came up with it, right. No one wants to die. Right. I would say most people most people don't want to die and they also probably don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about how they're going to die. Right. And so the fact that we're even bringing this conversation up just makes it uncomfortable for some people. Right. The fact of the matter is that we probably all have in our head that we'd like to die maybe peacefully at home. And the fact of the matter is now most people die in a hospital or a nursing facility. You said 80%, whereas 86% would prefer not to die there, yet 80% are dying there. So what we're trying to do is to respect well, not I shouldn't say we like it's not me trying to do this, but what these girls are trying to do is to make sure that if you do have a wish about how you die or who makes the decisions at that time when you maybe can't speak for yourself, that those wishes are respected. The AARP has come out in support of this because the fact of the matter is that even if we don't like to talk about it, it's going to happen. Let's have the conversation. And if you have the conversation, have it paid for by Medicaid and Medicare. Right. But you don't have to have the conversation if you don't want it. Yeah. It's completely voluntary. And even if you have it, you're not going to leave that meeting with a living will necessarily or a DNR order. You're going to leave just knowing what your options are. Right. I thought I wasn't going to put my opinion in, but that sounds like a really good idea to me. Sure it is. And also, Stuart pointed out in that interview that you can just as easily come out of it with a resuscitated any cost order. Right. So it's not just specifically about DNR, why they call it death panel. They should have called it life no matter what because the death panel scares the tara. Exactly. Right. I think that was one of the most odious things that come out of this healthcare reform debate, was the death panel. It was specifically geared to scare the elderly, but they already have enough things to worry about. I think that some of the elderly spheres about this bill are founded. When you hear there's going to be cuts to Medicare and that there might be incidences of euthanasia, which this is not true, the death penalty is not true, but there will be cuts to Medicare. You can't get around that. Sure. Let's talk about that because that's something that you raised in this article, that it won't affect Medicare. A myth. Right. It's a promise that the president has made in terms of benefits, that if you are a medicare recipient that you will still have the same benefits that you've always had. Right. The fact of the matter is a large part of the funding for these proposals will likely come from medicare, because the way that medicare operates now is probably unsustainable. So by making these cuts and incentivizing doctors to be more efficient in the way they treat patients, we're talking about bundling services. Bundling service. So actually, we spoke chuck and I spoke to Dr. Michael Rosen, who's the chief wellness officer at the Cleveland clinic inappropriately I in Cleveland, Ohio, and he's also the co author of the you the owner's manual book series. And he talked about bundling services, and it's based around what's called accountable organizations. It's like a group that's in charge of the health of an individual patient. Right. Here's what he had to say about that. So I like accountable organizations, meaning that someone pays, if you will, whether it's myself or the Cleveland clinic where I work, pays for my health care, and I don't have to worry about it. And they get a set amount of money, whether I need 16 tooth extractions and four, if you will, revisions, or four total hips, two total hips, two total knees, or whether I need none. And the goal of those organizations would be then to keep me healthy so that I don't need any major technology procedures, teach me how to brush my teeth and floss. So I need no teeth extractions. Right. So that's what I mean by paying for accountable outcomes. So if you couldn't tell, dr. Rosen is very hip on prevention rather than preventative care. Preventative care, right. And he's also on board with accountable organizations, and he's also evidently on board with tooth extraction. He is. It's a good example. 16th. I mean, anybody can approach a tooth extraction, right? But the point is there has to be a group that is in charge of the health care of the individual. Right. And then that way you can hold that group accountable. You're paying that group and you say, keep this person well. And if they do need treatment, this is your pool of money that you have to extract from it, right, like so many teeth. Now, here's the problem. This is where I think a lot of the fear comes about, is what happens when that money runs out? Can doctors be trusted to say, we're going to still keep treating you, or are they going to try to skinch on that? Is that a real fear? I think it's valid. We would like to think that doctors become much more efficient. There's evidence that there is a lot of waste in the medicare system. And ideally, how this will work is doctors will say, yes, we will become more efficient with this pool of money we have. But you just never know what case is going to come up that you can't treat a person with that pool of money with. So, Molly, you just brought up another point. Is rationing healthcare, right. That's another huge fear among not just the elderly, but anybody. Like, if this bundling of payments goes beyond just Medicare and it becomes a standard, I guess one of the ways it would become a standard would be to have some sort of panel that approves medical procedures, right? Right. And there are some panels in these bills, but they do not approve medical procedures. Let's talk about those. Cost effectiveness panels are just meant to come in and decide which treatments are effective. There's no evidence that they would come in and say, you can only do this because it's cheap. It might be helpful to compare really quickly how Britain ration healthcare. Let's do it. Okay. So they've got this committee called, ironically enough, Nice. That stands for National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence. And then they're under the NHS, which is their big public system. Right. So let's say that there's a drug that costs $15,000 and it's going to improve your standard of life from a .5 to a .7. They look at everyone's standard of life from a zero to a one, and it's worth saying that everyone's quality of life is considered important, whether you're a 77 year old woman or a twelve year old boy. So it's going to improve your standard of life from zero five to 7.2, and it's going to help you live 15 years longer. Okay. That's been proven in a study. So zero two times 15 is three. So they get a multiplier and then that's what they call three qualities quality adjusted life year. So they're saying your quality of life has been adjusted for these three years. Wow. It's like a multiplier. So then they're going to divide the total cost of the drug by the multiplier and get a cost per year amount. In this case, if the drug is $15,000 and your quality is three, the drug costs $5,000 a year. And that's the number on which the nice would approve or not approve the drug. And nice basically approves anything, basically anything that's about $45,000 a year or below. Are we going to base our system on that? No, that's not in the bill. When people talk about rationing health care, britain says, yes, we have rationed healthcare, and that's how they do it. And there's nothing like that in any of these proposals. Got you. Let's talk some more about actually, before we do that, I want to bring up another point that worries me, and that is that these panels that approve medical procedures could lead to a stifling of innovation, right. Is that a possibility? I don't think so, because if you look I mean, even if you talk about Britain, it's not like Britain's way behind us on medical innovation. In some countries, they've been able to do a lot more with a lot less. Right. So isn't that sort of the true definition of innovation? I think so. I think you basically have to prove that it works. I mean, we may not allow people to say, this pill will take you to Mars if it won't. What if they said, this pill is dynamite? Would they have to prove it? Do they mean dynamite, like, explosive, or just dynamite, like, awesome? Awesome. Okay. I mean, they definitely want to prove something that was explosive, in my opinion. Sure. That's more into, but I'm no doctor, right. In the FDA. Yeah. So I think it's just making people prove the quality. One of the problems so far is that we have a lot of care that we don't necessarily know if it works, but it's really expensive. Right. And this is just ensuring that people have to prove that it works. And instead of spending all this money on marketing their drugs, drug companies might have to spend more money on research and development, which I think we can argue would benefit a patient more than marketing. Sure. Boy, last time I was in the doctor, the pharmaceutical people came through there. Have you ever been to the doctor when they asked, did they walk in and go, we got some dynamite pills? No. Well, who knows what happened behind the doors? But there were literally, like, seven of them. They were spaced out, like, every five or ten minutes, and they came walking in with their suitcase that, you know, it's just full of drugs. And they went in the back, and then they came out, and then the next dude would go in. Sure. And then the doctor finally comes out after the last one leaves, and his little reflector is all skewed. He's like, next doctor feelgood. Yeah. So is that how it goes down, Molly? Is that a myth or truth? I don't want to comment on Dr. Philgood's personal life. Yeah. And we can't get into pharma too much. That's a whole different thing. But I think almost entirely, isn't it? Big pharma hasn't been made a part of this almost at all. It's not a part of healthcare for me. Well, this might be a way to make them more accountable. It's these panels that will evaluate cost effectiveness of treatments. But let's re emphasize again that these panels are not designed to say to you, you can't have this drug. Right. It's just saying, we think this drug is the most cost effective. Why don't you try that before trying one that is more experimental? May not work as well, so on and so forth. It's not designed to get between a doctor and a patient. Okay, good. And I guess the last point that I keep hearing about rationing health care, it's very delicate, but there's a lot of people who say, we kind of need to ration healthcare. You pointed out that healthcare is already rationed by the health insurance companies, right, by annual limits or lifetime maximums for care and by denying coverage to people exactly. With pre existing conditions. But I think this whole idea that we may need ration care is kind of based on an idea that the average patient abuses this healthcare infrastructure, right. That there's so much available and we have so little conception of value to actually what we're taking advantage of that will say, no, I want the MRI, and that kind of thing. I think we touched on that in the first one, didn't we? I think that's fair for both sides to say. The patient probably wants more care and more care because we have a lot of people who know what's out there for them to take advantage of. And then I'm sure you also touched on that. Doctors are paid for every service they provide to a patient. And so there's incentives on both sides for jobs, keep sending the patient in for the same thing, even if it's not working, because it makes you feel better. So Medicare, with this bundling, is going to be sort of the testing ground for trying to do this within our system as a whole. That's the ideal. I don't know how it will shake out in the end. Right. So can you say definitively whether rationing healthcare is, number one, a myth or truth, that it's going to happen? Well, if we take Britain's definition of what rationed healthcare is in terms of a panel making a choice whether you can or cannot have this drug, then, no, there's nothing in these bills that would do that. Whether eventually there will be fewer services and fewer of these people going in and getting every single service they asked for. And it's possible that might decrease. But that could be a good thing. It could. It could be. And ultimately, you can make the point that this is very similar to government prohibitions on drug use or something, or you have to be a certain age to buy tobacco or to buy alcohol. That's pretty much arbitrary. And this is actually a little more focused, saying, no, we have this huge infrastructure. You guys are costing us $2.4 trillion a year, a lot of it unnecessary. So you could argue the point that maybe somebody does need to step in and say, you can't do this because it's stupid. That's true. But then, on the other hand, you've got someone who takes nine tests, and the 10th one would have been the one that worked. And if they feel in any way that they didn't get that 10th test because they already got nine, then that's where people start to get worried. Is there any mechanism to sue the pants off of the person who denies you that 10th test? Well, that would currently we've got the whole medical malpractice thing right. But if it wasn't a physician, if it was a government panel or something like that, could you see the government? Yeah, it could get very hinky. Some of the decisions that the Nice panel makes are controversial. I mean, they deny a lot of really expensive cancer treatments, and as a result, Britain has worse cancer survival rates in the US. Does whether someone has tried to sue? I don't think so. But you can pay in England, right? Our colleague Lee Dempsey pointed out yesterday that you can actually pay for better care. That was awful. What was that? Everyone, I just want to apologize to leave for Chuck's terrible impression of his British accent. He's actually not from England. He's from a small island that's not been yet named. Manoa, they have a very odd accent there. So, guys, I don't know a good way to put this. Let's talk about abortion. Is it a myth? It's a great icebreaker, by the way, for your next dinner party. Josh, I'm having deja vu. You should keep that in your crawl. That's how a lot of episodes of stuff mom never told you start out. If anyone's interested or Kristin. I just go, let's talk about abortion. Really? So we highly recommend you go listen to the podcast. But women's issues, it's a big thing. Obviously, people who want women to have the right to an abortion would like to see abortion be a necessary benefit included by the government. What these bills provide is the government to come in and say, these are things that insurance plans have to cover to be considered valid. Insurance plans? Right. The minimum coverage. Right. So there's a big debate about a lot of things to be covered, like mental health. How much will that be covered? Abortion is the big one. That is dicey because no anti abortion person wants to pay for someone else's abortion. Right. So how the House is compromised on this is that health providers can choose whether to provide it. It doesn't necessarily have to be one of these essential benefits, but it can be. And if you do get an abortion, the thinking is that you would pay not with these public subsidies that are available to people, but you'd have to pay out of pocket for that. Unless it was one of the abortions that's defined as in the Gray zone, the rape sort of abortion. Right. Senate Finance Committee bill, as it stands now, prohibits funding except in cases of rape, incest or endangerment to the woman's life. Right. That's the plan that a lot of Congress people, for example, have. The government currently pays for abortions under those qualifications. And also the Finance Committee bill, which was just released yesterday. But you said it's not the final version. Right. It's his mark, so it'll still go through the Senate Finance Committee. Okay. It's the chairman's mark on abortion. They continue to say that the bill would prevent abortion coverage from being included in a minimum benefits package and in the health insurance exchanges where you shop for the coverage, but the plans in exchange could include they could offer abortion coverage as long as no government subsidies pay for it, and instead the coverage will be funded through member payments, which are segregated from the federal money. Right, so that's what the Finance Committee said. Yeah. So that's consistent with how the House had it as well. Is it? And basically the thinking is that any given area, you should be able to choose one plan that has abortion covered in one plan that doesn't. But they would be I saw this in your article, too. They would be the same plan, except one covers abortion and one doesn't. Right, okay. But everything else is the same. Okay. And they'd be the same price, I imagine, right? I would think so, yeah. What for the total plan, the total bill, if you're in the marketplace, those insurance marketplaces we were talking about, you should have a choice of a plan that has abortion, and a choice of a plan got you. You'd have, like, a premium abortion pro plus, and then premium no abortion plus plan right next to each other. And they should be the same cost just to give people a choice. I thought you were talking about the total bill. The Senate Finance Bill is about $150000000000 cheaper. Do you remember how when we went into the marketplace and we were looking at all those insurance there? Yeah, I get it now. Okay, so you can be pro choice choice. You can have the choice to have the plan that has the choice. It just blew my mind out. Wow. My mind is melting all over the table. All right, guys, can we talk about something that President Obama loves to say? It's usually the first thing he kicks off with, if you like your insurance plan, you can keep that plan. Yes. Molly Edmonds says that is not necessarily true if you start looking down the road and read between the lines. Right. The thing is, when Obama went out the summer and did his town halls, I think that if he had a nickel for every time he told people that, if you like your plan, you can keep it, he would have enough to fund healthcare reform. Right. But I think if you were paying attention to the speech he made, the famous speech to Congress, you will notice that phrase did not appear in the speech, because I think he's realized that he can't promise people that their plan will stay exactly the same under these reforms. We think you can keep it, though. Not necessarily. That would be the exact same plan that you're keeping. Well, but that was how we were sort of pitching it. You like your doctor, you can have your doctor. And the fact of the matter is that your plan is going to change already to build in these consumer protections. So that's a great change. You won't be able to be dropped by insurance. Company they can't discriminate for preexisting conditions. Right. And then your plan will have about five years, probably to come up to speed with all these other plans. It'll be grandfathered into that minimum set of benefits we were talking about. But in that marketplace, when they start competing for all these uninsured customers, we don't know what current plans will have to do to stay financially viable. Right. They may have to slash services. They may have to slash services. That kind of stuff happens. Anyway, though, your insurance plan probably isn't the same today as it was five years ago without all this government competition. That's true. And the thing is, if you don't know how your plans change over the five years, you may not notice how your plan changes when this happens, too. Right. Yeah. I don't know. First of all, I didn't have insurance five years ago, but I couldn't tell you what it looked like last year. Right. You're living in the mountains, I was living in my car. Okay. I mean, the only way you're going to know is if you go to the doctor and all of a sudden they don't accept your insurance, or if something that used to be covered isn't covered anymore. But that's just so speculative right now that it's impossible to say one way or the other whether things will be the same or not. I think a lot of this, from what I'm reading, is like, the outlines in place, but who knows how this is going to shake out? Sometimes you have to wonder if we have to believe the best about people or the worst about people. Well, I think what it comes down to I keep running across you mentioned that this whole thing is a rosette test or the public option is a rosette test. And really what it comes down to is, can you trust doctors to not skinch on health care when they're being paid and bundled? Right. Is that a word? Skinch. Skinch. Yeah. Okay. If it's not, it is now, pal. He said it twice. I love it. Yeah. Can you trust that the government panels won't stifle innovation it does undercut the insurance company so much where they can't stay in business? Sure. Can you trust Obama that this isn't really a plan to ultimately create a single payer system? Right. And can you trust individuals to take it upon themselves to, like dr. Rosen is a big advocate of to take on preventative care? Yeah. The burden for health is on the patient as much as the doctor. And I don't think that mindset is clear to a bunch of Americans. No. And I think that that's what they're using as an excuse. I mean, someone who would be against a big public option or really subsidized healthcare would say, this person got themselves into this mess because they smoked or they're overweight or so on. And so looking at just what the mistakes a one person made is like not seeing the forest for the trees. So all these pieces are working together in a way that we can't isolate blame at anyone. But that's what this discussion has turned into saying that the worst is going to happen about these people. Agreed. And actually, when we spoke to Rosen, if I can bring him back again, he said that apparently, basically, us not caring at all about our health is costing this country more than any other sector of the healthcare spending. He put it like this. 75% of all health care costs are caused by chronic disease. That is caused by four factors tobacco, food choices and portion size, physical inactivity and stress. So we can reinvigorate primary care by paying physicians to teach these things, because what gets paid for gets done, and what gets done gets taught well. So, in fact, we have a tremendous opportunity of paying physicians to do this and saving a huge amount of money. In fact, if all we do is a program and I'll go to the exact bill, it's called S 1640, take back your Health, that does this for five diseases coronary disease, type two diabetes, metabolic syndrome, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. We save after paying for it, we save 1.9 trillion over ten years. So clearly, as Rosen pointed out, Molly, you are right in very large part comes down to us changing our perception about our own health and taking responsibility for it. Right. Let's do one last one. Do you guys mind, since we're not doing listener mail? Okay, let's do it. Josh, are we moving towards a socialized country, this one? No. Well, do you know the definition of a socialized country, chuck Go? I do not. Josh Go state owned and operated industry. So not only is the government paying your bills, they're hiring your doctors and running your hospitals. Right. So that's what Britain does. And then there's also fear of a single payer system, which Obama has a few choice quotes that people like to pull up saying that he would like a single payer system. Right? That's what Canada has, where all the bills just go straight to the government, no questions asked. Taiwan. Right. Doesn't Taiwan actually let's say that because we're going to talk about healthcare systems from around the world in the next one. Most countries have some form of single payer, but whether we've been promised a uniquely American system because we are a uniquely American country, probably too late at this point, don't you think? Even if we wanted to switch to socialized medicine, we couldn't do it now? I think you could over the course of six decades, 100 years maybe, but we're certainly not there with these proposals. There's no need to fear these specific bills as any sort of move towards single payer or socialized medicine. I think one of the concerns, though, is that this public option will eventually run the other insurance companies out of business, and then we'll have a de facto single payer system, because the only man left standing will be the public option. Right. Is that one of the fears, the concerns? That is a concern. The public option is so in the air right now that it would be hard for us to make any sort of conclusion, whether that's a myth or not. The thing that just came out this week, the Senate Finance Committee, one that's going to get all marked up, that went for co ops. So how will a co op work in this system versus what would a public plan be? So that right now is such a shadowy thing that I think we should avoid speculating on it. Okay, agreed. No, we don't want to stir up any more fiercely. The whole point of this podcast is to lay them pretty much right or at least say, no, you're right. You should be scared out of your mind. Here's my guess. I don't think they could do anything to put every insurance company out of business. No, that's what I think. I think the one out of all these call me in ten years. If there are no more private insurance companies in America, then I'll buy you a beer. Really? Yeah. Anyone out there? Yes, of course. I'll be dead in ten years. Yeah, you will be, because they'll have rationed your health care. Exactly. You face the death panel. No, I want to live. You signed. Sorry, guys. It's about it, right? You got any more myths you want to cover? Oh, I know one. Illegal immigrants. Yeah. Oh, you thought you were getting away without talking about this? No, this is a big one, as I saw actually in the House bill, actually, it does say if you're born in the United States and you're not covered, you're automatically covered. Does that amount to covering illegal immigrants? Now, not necessarily. The people who are that same day labor who went into the Er, we're not talking about him necessarily, but the children of illegal immigrants would be covered under that language. Right, right. So, I mean, that is technically correct, that illegal immigrants will be covered. Well, no, their children will be covered. Right. But they themselves, the children would be considered illegal. No, they would no. If you're born on American soil, you're an American. Excellent point. There's no law that says that. But it's generally thought that if you're born on American soil, you're an American citizen. Okay, so technically, it wouldn't cover illegal immigrants. Does it in any other way? Well, the way it was explained to me is that illegal immigrants would not be able to receive any sort of subsidies because there'd be too much need for proof about where they were born and where they all their paperwork would have to be in order to get these subsidies. Right. But it's possible they would be able to enter the exchange and buy insurance because they would be subject. I mean, there's nothing that would keep them out of the marketplace. If they want to pay, then welcome to the game. But some people aren't ready to say welcome to the game. Right? Molly, I am looking forward to your second career as a diplomat. Seriously, thank you again for coming in and we'll see you next time when we cover another one of your articles, which is healthcare systems around the world and how they compare to the US. Dr. Woods and is going to be back. Yeah. So we'll Chuck Schottie. We'll talk about different countries. People are already emailing saying, what about us in Canada and England and Norway? Chuck has been responding with pipe down, we're going to get to you. Right. Keep your pants on. If you're looking for a place to move, I think that podcast will be really helpful. Okay? In the meantime, you can basically take advantage of Molly Edmond's giant sponge like brain and learn everything you need to know about healthcare reform by typing healthcare reform in the handyarch search barr@housestuffworks.com. And by the way, if you want to send us an email praising us, condemning us, telling us that we're in favor of illegal immigration, whatever, just send it to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. 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c5d59ba2-5460-11e8-b38c-77190522728f | Selects: What Is Collective Hysteria? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-what-is-collective-hysteria | Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think? Find out in this classic episode. | Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think? Find out in this classic episode. | Sat, 04 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=338, tm_isdst=0) | 40948386 | audio/mpeg | "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 small, 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. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comcysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey, everyone, it's Josh and I've chosen for this week's SYSK Select, our 2014 episode on the inappropriately named Collective Hysteria. It turns out that people can have a real effect on how other people feel and behave, so take this as a sign to be nice and maybe even soothing to others. And while you're working on that, enjoy this super cool episode on some super weird psychology. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's. Over there to the left. And that makes this stuff you should know. Got the 18 in the hissy I call Face. What? Oh, I'm faced. Oh, of course you're face. Looking at you, I would be a combination of Murdoch and Mr. T, I think. Yeah. Your hair is kind of spiky in the middle today. Yeah, Jerry, I don't know what she'd be. I guess she'd be the leader. She'd be Hannibal. Yeah, she's smoking a cigar right now. Wearing a black glove. When did you start smoking cigars, Jerry? That's weird. Very timely. I said a team. I don't want to slag off guest producer Noel he's not exactly B Team. No, we'll just call ourselves the OGS. Okay, now that we have that established, we are the OGS. That's right. We need bowling shirts that say as much on the back. You're feeling good? I'm feeling nauseous and dizzy. Oh, well, Chuck, did you happen to see somebody else who is nauseous and dizzy? Well, Jerry was last week, and then a few more people in the office, so I just figured we all had the same thing. All right, I'm going to diagnose this, okay. It's called Collective Hysteria. Also known, I think, more appropriately, is mass psychogenic disorder. I think when you add the word hysteria to this, it takes on certain dimensions that a lot of people could find very objectionable. Sure. Hysteria. Dogs and cats living together. Yeah. But I think it has a definite gender specific connotation to it from over the years. Like, women were supposedly very hysterical. The idea of diagnosing somebody as hysterical under any circumstances is kind of tad amount to patting them on the head. Yeah. You're a nice lady, you're just a little hysterical. You just go calm down and bake something. Right? Yeah. Stop being crazy. Yeah. No. Mass psychogenic disorder instead is just kind of like, whoa, your brain just did something pretty neat. And that is the case for mass psychogenic disorder, if you ask me. In this article, Chuck, written by Jacob Silverman, Jeopardy champion. Yeah. He won on Jeopardy. That makes him a champion, right? Yeah, I think so. He wasn't like the ultimate champion, but he won a couple of episodes. Right. Which is why they should have a word for I guess the champion is like, the one who won it all. Ken Jennings. Yeah. Or Watson. Who's at the IBM computer? Yeah, sure. So Jeopardy winner Jacob Silverman wrote this article years back, and he did a pretty great job of citing a contemporary outbreak of mass psychogenic disorder that had been going on around that time down in Mexico. Down Mexico way in Chalko, Mexico, at a boarding school. There apparently was a girls boarding school, and the girls that went to school, they were ages twelve to 17, and all of a sudden they started well, there was an outbreak. Yeah. A weird outbreak. There was vomiting, I believe, trouble walking. There was fever. Yeah. That's weird. Nausea. And so the people running this boarding score like, what's going on? This is not good. Yeah. And they had no idea. The girls went on Christmas break for ten days, came back, and the thing just took off again like wildfire. Yes. 600 of the 3600 girls showed these symptoms, and nobody could figure it out. They did a lot of tests. They brought in people to check out the facilities, because, as you'll see, there's a trend there here in the west. They start to blame it usually on environmental poisoning of some kind. Right. There's some sort of toxin present that is poisoned everybody. They didn't find anything there. And eventually they said, this is what do you call it? Psychosomatic. Mass psychogenic disorder. Okay. Mass psychogenic disorder. But no, that is one of the names of mass psychogenic disorder. Collective hysteria. Mass hysteria or mass psychosomatic reaction. Yeah. They're all saying the same thing. They are? Well, you're not really sick, but that is not exactly true, because that's one thing that differentiates this from something that's just in your head as you actually do manifest physical symptoms. Right. Yeah. There's this article written by an MD named Timothy F. Jones from the Tennessee Department of Health, way back in the heady days of the year 2000. The future. Wow. And he writes that if you are experiencing mass psychogenic disorder, it is not just in your head that the symptoms that you have are actually very real, even though there's no toxic cause, they couldn't find some sort of environmental poisoning or anything like that. The symptoms are extremely real. It's just psychosomatic. It's just basically the brain has been tricked into causing this response. Yeah. And this has happened. They've documented about 80 cases throughout history, and apparently the National Institutes of Health gets about two cases per week reported. I mean, that's way more common than you would think. Yeah, I would think there would be more than 80, because these have happened. If you go back and look at I mean, there's all sorts of crazy lists on the Internet about these cases that date back to the 14th century. Medieval dancing mania was one of them. Yeah. The dancing plague. Yeah, that's in there. The Salem Witchcraft trial. Sure. Or the Salem witchcraft. I guess what led to the trials was supposedly attributed to this kind of thing. Yeah. One weird thing about this condition is, more times than not, it affects females. Yeah. And young females. Even more specifically, teenagers, or even younger, which is, as far as it goes right now, inexplicable and it's kind of a prickly issue. Again, you kind of come back to the idea of calling it hysteria. The fact that it does tend to afflict women or girls more than boys is apparently one means of diagnosing psychogenic disorder. Mass psychogenic. Yeah. That's one of the first things they'll say is, like, all the sickness is happening in this place, the school, wherever, and the doctor will say, Is it a bunch of girls? Yeah. And then that will clue them in. That, hey, this might be what we're dealing with here, but the problem is no one has any idea why. And there have been explanations of things like, I guess, girls this is girls culturally acceptable outlet for raging against the patriarchy. Sure. Even if they don't necessarily feel that that's what they're doing. This is the symptoms of that. That's one, yeah. I thought this was a pretty interesting part. What article was that from? Slate? Yeah. One called Masses. Areas in upstate New York by Ruth Graham was on slate. That was a good one. It was a really good one. And we'll get to that case in a SEC. But I thought it was pretty interesting. In one part, it says, and this is a quote from someone writing about something and said, inform, if not in conscious intent, it is to protest the sexual repressiveness, rigid double standard of female teen culture. But they were writing about Beatlemania, which is interesting because it sort of has a similar vibe of young ladies being repressed, not having an outlet. And so they see the Beatles and they go berserk and faint and cry and scream collectively, whereas boys, they're more prone to just act out if they're not feeling good. Girls are trained to keep things inward and they also point out that ladies and young ladies are more prone to seek a doctor's help for something. They say that may account for the bias right there. Right. Like guys just won't go to the doctor. Exactly. You have to be careful though, and just diagnosing mass psychogenic disorder. Physicians out there who are listening that encounter a case like this just by basing it on the fact that it is affecting more girls than boys. Because there's at least one case in Great Britain where I think girls were afflicted by more than half, more than double the number of girls were afflicted by this. And it turned out that they were tainted cucumbers being served in the lunchroom. Yeah. And everyone knows boys hate cucumbers. They didn't need anything. Right. But this is one of the issues with dealing with mass psychogenic disorder in that it looks and acts a lot like some sort of weird epidemic that basically it looks like either something like bioterrorism, a rapidly spreading affection infection, or affection it's beetle mania and then acute toxic exposure. That's what it looks like. It's like one person gets sick. This is your index case and all of a sudden everyone around them suddenly has the same symptoms. Yeah. And like you said, it's super dangerous to just dismiss that as, oh, it's all in your head, silly little ladies. You can't do that because what if it is something for real? But it's also a double edged sword, as that doctor pointed out. You start ordering batteries of tests and it can go both ways. What the old saying is if you order enough tests, you're going to find something. Right. So it can fuel that fire, but you also can't not run any tests and just dismiss it. So it's a very fine line that physicians walk when dealing with stuff like this, for sure. Indeed. Apparently a study of mass psychogenic disorder has found that it's more prevalent in isolated communities and in situations where there are highly rigid, formalized structured rules. Like a Catholic school in Mexico. Exactly. Or again Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century. And apparently between 1973 and 1993, half of all the outbreaks of psychogenic illness took place in schools. Oh, yeah. That's possibly in part by due to kids being susceptible to it more. Right. But also because of that rigid formalized structure. Yeah. And there's also usually a top down effect, like it'll start with a teacher or an older student and then the younger students follow suit, which if you're talking influence, would make sense for sure. There was one very famous case. Apparently there's not very many actual academic studies on this, but there's one that came out of the New England Journal of Medicine that described a case in Tennessee where a teacher noticed some weird gas odor. A gaseous odor, like the chemical kind? Yeah. Not like the guy on the front row tooted. Right, exactly. And she apparently started suffering symptoms, and all of a sudden, like, 180 students and teachers had to go to the emergency room. The school was shut down for two weeks. They did all this environmental testing, couldn't find anything, and finally traced it back to a mass psychogenic disorder, if that's what did it. And then in most of these cases, we should point out, everyone starts feeling better. Yes. Like in Mexico and then the school in Tennessee. It's not like they went on to die or anything. Yeah, so in the school in Mexico, these girls at a boarding school, they were only allowed to see their parents, I think, like three times a year. Yeah, they couldn't even call. It sounds more like a prison. Right. No phone call. They were allowed letters. When they went home. Immediately their symptoms cleared up. Yeah, the problem is that doesn't automatically say, oh, well, it's obviously mass psychogenic disorder. It could be an environmental toxin that they are being exposed to. Still at the school and we're removed from. But I think the definite prognosis is mass psychogenic disorder in this case. That's right. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in is host Baratoon de Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on squarespace. Yeah. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comssysk. So the nosebo effect, we talked about that in what the Placebo Effect? Well, that makes sense. Yeah. I was trying to be more clever. Thought we were more clever than that nosebo. I think we said in that other podcast, it was Latin for I shall harm. And that's basically whereas you take a placebo thinking it's going to help you out, and it does help you out, because the mind is powerful. The nocebo effect is thinking something bad will result. Like my teachers getting sick. I think I feel a little sick, too. And then, oh, wait, my neighbor's feeling a little sick. I think I'm feeling a little sick, too. Or this drug trial that I'm on, I was told that I could possibly get some sort of gastrointestinal distress. And even though I've been given a sugar pill right, I'm now going, yeah, because in my mind, because of the nocebo effect. There was a famous experiment or case from 1886 where there was a woman who had a rose allergy, and they showed her an artificial rose, and she began to I guess it was convincing, and she began to have her allergic reaction. And they said, AHA, it's fake, and you're faking. And she said, oh, well, I think I'm feeling better now. And supposedly that curator of her real allergy to real roses. Right. I couldn't find a lot to back that up. But it is a story. Yeah, well, no, it was in I can't remember the journal, but really? Well, yeah, it was a real deal thing, and I didn't get to the bottom of why they presented this woman with a fake rose or whatever, but they definitely did, and this definitely happened. And even the author of the study was saying, like, this woman, she wasn't faking. Right. It was like she had real symptoms. Sure. Hives are hives. Exactly. You can see those. I think they call it like a rose cold or something like that. You can get stuffy, your eyes are watering, your nose is running, that kind of thing. And what's interesting is some researchers have studied the nosebo effect, and they basically have isolated this chemical that gets released when the nosebo effects going on. And again, we should say it's not just making your nose running or releasing histamines or anything like that. It's pain too. You can experience pain even though nothing is there to give you pain just because of the nosebo effect. What they found was, I guess a hormone, I believe. Are you ready? I'm going to try this one. Cola cystokinnon. That sounds great. Thanks, man. I haven't looked at the word, but it sounds right. Cola cystokinnon. Yeah. Do you see it now? Oh yeah, that's totally right. I totally did. So it's a hormone right. And it gets released and it actually helps you experience pain. So it's a nasty little hormone. But they found in testing with the nocebo effect that if you block this, you can also block the nosebo effect. So that proves two things. Does that block pain though, like your pain receptors? Yes. So does that mean if you slam your hand in the door, you won't feel it? If you can block this. Wow. Yes. So if you can block cola cystokinnon right? Yes. It will keep you from hypersensitivity to pain, I believe. Yeah. And this guy named Fabrizio Benedetti, who I think was also in the Strokes back in 1997, there was a fabric, right? Yeah. He was testing out the nosebo effect and found that if he told people that he was giving them an injection, which is a pretty cruel test, but effective, these post office people who had just come out of surgery were given an injection and told, this injection is going to increase your pain in 30 minutes. I'm sorry, we have to give it to you. It's part of the procedure. He gave some people an injection of saline and they reported an increase in pain. And they all went behind the two way mirror and laughed. Right. They're like, what a chump. Why look at them. And then they gave somebody like the other group, the control group, a chemical and injection that blocks that pain. But they were told that it was going to increase their pain. Right. But they were given a chemical that blocks cola cystocinin and the noticebo effect didn't take place. They didn't report an increase in pain even though they were told they would. Yes. Wow. So this guy is saying like the nostibo effect is real when they say it's not just in your head. Sure. You are experiencing the same thing as if you are experiencing somebody stabbing you. Well, what it is real when you have to start asking yourself those deep philosophical questions. Right. Interesting. There's another case that's have you ever seen the movie Safe? The Todd Haynes movie with Julianne Moore. No. It's from the mid ninety s. And she played a lady that started to have environmental sickness just in the air and she's got sort of like increasingly crazy as the movie went on as far as scrubbing things and locking herself in her house and making her house a clean environment. Sounds great. It was good. There's a true story, though, of a lady in London named debbie Bird. She's a health spa manager that says that she's allergic to EMF electromagnetic fields, and it's an actual thing. Now, there's more than her claiming. It's called Es electromagnetic sensitivity, where she has basically transformed her house. She painted it black. She said she's allergic to computers, cell phones, microwaves. She had her house rewired to make it basically EMF free. She and her husband sleep under a silver plated mosquito net to keep out radio waves and covered all her windows with protective films. And she said she's feeling a lot better now. So I saw that, yes, electromagnetic sensitivity, that if you expose somebody to an electromagnetic field and then just tell them that you are and don't, they have the same reaction, which would suggest that it's no SIBO. Well, it's super fascinating because you see cases like this, from that to gluten, sensitivity becoming a big thing now. And some people contend that, well, it's maybe a collective hysteria going on. And if you think you're going to be sensitive to gluten, then you're going to be sensitive to things that contain gluten. And I'm not saying that people because that's a very hot topic. Sure it is. But some people have claimed that, well, we'll talk a little bit more about things that exacerbate the mass psychogenic disorder and the placebo effect right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create Learn More@ibm.com consulting what if we could Change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in is host Baratunde Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. 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. 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. Comssysk. Squarespace. So, Chuck, back in 2007 in New Zealand, a drug called Ltoxin, it was a pretty widespread drug in New Zealand. It's a hormone replacement drug and it was the only one that the government would pay for. So most people who were on this hormone replacement therapy were using Ltoxin and it had been that way for decades. Yeah, it was just an established drug. GlaxoSmithKline. What was it for, though? Hormone replacement. Okay. GlaxoSmith. Kline. I think just those there's no welcome involved. Changed just the outer, the inner qualities of it, like the shape of the pill, the color, and I think that's about it. But the active ingredient was exactly the same in 2007. And when they released it, all of a sudden some reports of bad side effects were starting to trickle in and the government was like, wait, what's going on here? It got a little bit of media attention and more reports started trickling in. Yeah, and then the media attention grew and the reports grew and grew. And apparently the reporting of adverse effects of Ltroxin increased 2000 fold in a year and a half. Because of the look of the bill. Because of the look of the bill, yes. They went back and studied this and they found that in areas where there was more reporting about these adverse effects being reported for all trax and the more adverse effects were being reported in that area. And that kind of reveals one of the risk factors for mass psychogenic disorder, is the media. It's actually spread through the media most easily. Yeah, they have a point, though. I know in this article, too, it points out that pills that are blue and green are usually associated with Drowsiness. Pills that are orange or yellow are not. And I don't know if that's why they market it that way or if it's the opposite, as we just see it that way because of products like NyQuil and Daquil. Right. But the one that makes you sleepy is green and blue, and the one that keeps you awake or keep you awake but doesn't make you drowsy is orange. I thought about it. I mean, what do you associate with, like, daytime sunrise yellow, orange. It definitely makes sense. What do you associate with nighttime? Like something tranquil, like blue? Yeah. Scotch. Amber. Yeah. I think the pills came after the association rather than the other way around. Yeah. I think when I get a prescription for something, when I see the pill, I make a judgment on it before I've even had it, just by saying, look at that thing. Yeah. That's a horse pill. Or that's a capsule with powdery stuff inside that's different than the chalky one. I think you just make an association. I don't think I have any preconceived notions on what a larger pill will do to me. Right. Or a capsule will do to me other than a tablet. But I think it's interesting, though, how you make these judgment calls, but without even thinking about it. Yeah, totally. You probably don't sit there and look at a pill in your hand. You just take it and just make some sort of almost unconscious judgments about it. Yeah. It may remind you another pill that helps you that you're not even remembering. Exactly. So that would be placebo. Yeah. That's great. No placebo effect. Not great. No. And it poses a lot of problems. For instance, there was a study, I think, in the found that women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were four times likelier to die of heart disease than women who didn't believe they were prone to it, even though they had all the exact same risk factors. Basically the same risk factors. There was nothing differentiating, these women, aside from a belief that they were going to die from heart disease or a belief that they weren't, and that led to a fourfold increase in deaths from that just basically from a belief is what it suggests. Yeah. Well, it's sort of like I know it's kind of cheesy, but the PMA, the positive mental attitude, I think we've all known someone who walks around so and so sick, oh, I know I'm going to get it. I just know I'm going to get sick, or I just know I'm going to get cancer because it runs in my family. I think that has an effect on things. I have to agree. I know some of our more skeptical listeners are pulling their hair out right now, but I totally agree with you. When we did our show in Toronto on the way back Yuumi. And I flew out to Buffalo, and I was feeling a little down, but at the point where I feel like you can talk yourself into staying healthy. Positive mental attitude, I guess, is what you call it. BMA. But we were leaving right at about dusk, and the sun was just beaming through the windows and illuminating every single visible microbe in the air. I could see them going into my nose, in my mouth, and I'm like, oh, no. I couldn't stop. I was like, I'm not going to get sick. I'm not going to get sick. And man, did I ever get sick. But I noticed that right when we took off and no, you know what it was? Somebody shut one of their window covers. Yeah, the shade. Shade exactly is the word that I was looking for. Somebody shut their shade and I couldn't see it anymore. And I immediately started to feel less symptomatic. Wow. Immediately it was like turning off a light. Yeah. And I still got sick, but I was just drowning. And basically what my brain was interpreting is like being assaulted by foreign invaders, which I am all the time, but I normally can't see them. Yeah, I do that all the time. When I open my curtains in the bedroom and I'll see you in the morning, I'll see that stuff in the air and I just think, oh, man, that's what I'm walking around, right, breathing in and breathing dog hair and cat hair and Emily hair. So your lungs are just chock full of it. So one of the problems this poses, Chuck, for physicians is that we expect doctors or we want doctors to be transparent, to not lie to us. Yeah, we've talked a lot about this lately, I feel like. Yeah, we've talked a lot about diseases. Some of our hypochondriac listeners have been like, please, first stop talking about diseases because now I've got morglon. I'm going to have some sort of toxic exposure toxoplasmosis yeah. And then very soon, leprosy spoiler. So the problem is. If you tell somebody that's going into surgery. Hey. By the way. You might have trouble walking. You might feel nauseous for the next six months. All this stuff that could be associated with. Which we demand from our doctors. It's been shown that if you are fearful or in despair going into surgery. That's associated with longer healing times and a higher risk of postoperative infection. Right. So if you have the nosebo effect where doctors are saying, okay, if I tell somebody, and it's been proven time after time that in drug trials, people who are still are given placebo will drop out of drug trials because they're experiencing these negative side effects even though they're given the sugar pill. So if you're a doctor and you know that you're telling somebody something that ultimately may end up harming them, and you've sworn an oath to do no harm, you've got a conundrum going on right now. Yeah. And that's what the nosebo effect poses. It's the problem the nosebo effect poses for modern physicians. Like, how much should they tell you if you're going to tell somebody that they're going to feel nauseous for six months, even though they probably won't, should you tell them and give them a chance to basically have the psychosomatic symptom or tell them they're going to feel great? Well, that's another one. Somebody says the solution to this is just frame it differently. Right. Like, don't say there's a chance you're going to have nausea for six months. Say half of a percent of patients who go through the same procedure that you're about to go through have nausea for six months. 99.5% don't. Right. You're giving them the same information. It's just framework positively. Yeah. And that one doctor who wrote the article on collective history said what he recommends is not naming the illness, said that can help out because as soon as you give something a name, then instantly you have something you can call it and everyone's calling it that or the media picks up on it. Right. And it's a thing. Yeah. And that's actually, again, one of the risk factors in the spread of mass psychogenic illness is the larger the response, the emergency medical response to it, and then hence, the larger the media response to it, the larger the outbreak tends to be. It's called line of sight exposure. Just knowing somebody is sick or seeing somebody sick can give you the same symptoms. I'm sure if you see a news story that all the other news agencies are running that says there's been some weird chemical leak in the air in Atlanta, people are going to start walking around and coughing and saying, I'm not feeling so good. I have a bitter taste in my mouth. There's microbes everywhere. Well, here's a case from the article you sent that I think is super fascinating, the one in upstate New York. Because it is not a rash or a cough or nausea. It is Tourette Syndrome. 16 year old young lady named Lori Bronwell. What year was this? A couple of years ago? Yeah. Not too long ago, I think. 2012 in Corinth, New York. Was at her school's homecoming dance and lost consciousness. This is after she had banged at a concert. Sorry, man, I thought you were going to leave out like, the best part. Yeah, she was headbanging at a concert. I wish I knew a concert that was me, too. I didn't find it anywhere. Apparently passed out there and had passing outfits, involuntary twitching and clapping, started twisting her hair, fluttering her fingers. Hey, starting stuff like that. And the doctor said, you know what? You've got Tourette syndrome. So Tourette's syndrome is we've had a podcast on it. It's a real trade on it, not psychosomatic. But since that time, 14 other students, along with her 13 girls and one boy, started exhibiting at Leroy Junior High School. Sorry. Junior senior high school started coming down with tourettes. Right. Which is not contagious. It is not contagious at all. Aaron Brokovich got on the case, famous environmental activist, and she said, no, I think this has got to do with this train derailment from 1970 that dumped cyanide all over this town. Right. And I didn't see where they found any legitimate effects. Right. Again, that's the confounding thing about mass psychogenic disorder is that it is still possible that there is some weird toxin in the environment that is causing this. Like, maybe there was exposure to cyanide that got in these people's brains and all gave them Tourette. And if you stand back and look at it, you're like, Tourette Syndrome isn't contagious. That doesn't mean that you can't all come down with Tourette Syndrome from exposure to a toxin. It's just still this X factor that's out there that you can't just necessarily rule out. Yeah, and I believe in that case too. Those 14 students didn't end up with Tourette Syndrome. That was a good episode. Man. Love Tourette Syndrome one. Yeah, it's an oldie, oldie, but a goodie. And it all came from headbanging. That's how it started. Bitmass at a nickelback show. Yeah, because current is near Canada. Canada doesn't let nickel back out any longer. Oh, really? Are they caged in there? Yeah. Nice. There's another case of the toxic lady. Did you hear this one in Riverside, California? A woman named Gloria Ramirez. Yeah. She was dubbed the Toxic Lady in 1094. She had cervical cancer and was being treated. And all the medical staff started to get sick that was treating her. This sounds gross, but they said her body exuded a garlicky fruity smell and her blood had flex of what looked like paper, which sounds kind of like Morgan, actually. Nice. You like that? Yeah. And they said that most of the people that got sick while treating her were women. More women than men. And they all took a blood test and came back normal. And the health department said, Mass hysteria. So that's funny because I remembered that story and I was like, I wonder if that was masteria. And I looked it up and I found that no, it was an environmental toxic. Oh, it was. That's what I found. So they called it maserati at the time and then later found out, I think, like a year or two later, she was using some sort of sav or something on her skin. And they think that it interacted with her biochemistry and really did produce a toxic gas. She said it may be this fruit garlic sav. Right, exactly. That's interacting badly with my pancreas. Oh, well, this list needs to be updated. That is a fascinating case. It is. People got really sick from that. I think I remember hearing about that too. Well, I'm glad they found a real cause in that case, from what I understand. But that's the point. You can say, well, obviously women were more affected than men. Right. Well, is that because there's more women in the nursing profession and there were more nurses in the room? Maybe. There's a lot of different things you have to take into account before you just write it off. Sometimes it is real. Like sick building syndrome. That's a tough one, because after the OPEC oil embargo, apparently people started designing buildings to be more airtight. So your ventilation system was really important. And these buildings haven't aged necessarily very well. So the ventilation system is not doing what it's supposed to any longer. And so they think possibly that's leading to what we know is sick building syndrome, which is malaise. It's when you don't feel good when you go to work. Exactly. Which is everybody else. But some studies have found, like, that is the better predictor of sick building syndrome is job stress or job dissatisfaction. If you have a building full of people who don't like their jobs, you're going to have a building full of people with sick building syndrome. But if you go on to say, like a local government's website or whatever, and you look at sick building syndrome, it's treated as a real thing. Yeah. Well, it definitely affects your gastrointestinal like stress does. Also, apparently, it can set off bouts of asthma, which is another reason why they think it might have something to do with, like, volatile organic compounds in the ventilation system or new carpeting, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Off gassing, man. You smell that stuff when you open up a new product, right? Yeah. There's also the dancing plague, which we mentioned briefly. Tell me about it. Frau Trophy, July 14, 1518. Went out on the streets of Strasbourg, France, and started dancing, even though there was no music and dancing like a maniac for three straight days. And all these people started dancing with her, saying, this is a good time. Said within a month, 100 people were dancing with her and couldn't stop. And hyperventilating, hallucinating, some drop dead of heart attack and stroke and exhaustion. And the authorities said, let's just hire a band and let them dance it out because they've got the hot blood, is what they called it. All right? And so they did. And a lot of people died as a result. It said 400 people in the end were struck. I don't think they died, but were dancers. Right. And then it just stopped. And that's the one they blame a lot of people blame on ergot poisoning, which we've mentioned before. I always go with ergot poisoning. Yeah. Those people are clearly tripping on something. They got the hot blood. What it sounds like you just described is basically how Tom Hanks invented jogging in the 70s. Yogin. Yeah. He just started running and people started following him. I wish that part had been cut out of that movie. Oh, really? Yes. I thought that it was a weird thing that should have been on the editing room floor. They really kind of derailed things for a while for me. Yeah. I don't think that movies age well, though. Other people say, though, that it was sitting hams chore disorder linked to strep throat and rheumatic fever that causes dance like twitches. And then, of course, modern medical historians say it was mass psychosis. I would go with that one. Yeah. Back then it made more sense, though, when during the Salem witch trials and before they knew anything about medicine. And you could just say you got the hot blood or you're having the fits the devils possessed to you. Yeah, exactly. These modern cases are the ones that really freaked me out because so much is explainable. Now, here's the thing, though, Chuck. We've always explained it was something that comes easily to mind. So back in the day before science and medicine, it was the devil possessing you. And don't think that people weren't freaked out when they thought that the devil was there in town possessing people in the same way that you're freaked out by the idea that it's cyanide in the soil from a train derailment from beetle mania. Exactly, which is the deadliest of all the maniac. But it's just as real to the experience there. And it all comes down to people just basically being sick of the establishment and letting loose for a while. Don't want to go to work? Nice. So I'll dance. You got anything else? No, sir. If you want to know more about collective hysteria, which is the name of this article, type those words in the search bar housetofworks.com and it will bring it up. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this episode on grief. We got a lot of great feedback and that continue to roll in. Yeah. Hey, guys. Just stumbled upon your podcast to my tune in radio app. I guess that's a mini plug. We're available there. Now I've devoured almost all of the 600 plus shows. I may be a new listener, but I'm already a lifelong fan. So while I'm writing in guys is I lost my twin sister back in 2010. It was a rough time because as a fraternal twin, me being the boy, I looked at her not only as a sister, but as a mother and friend, too. Long story short, I wanted to comment on the grief show some time ago. I've dealt with my grief through my artwork. I'm a small town artist from Johnson City, Tennessee, and I rarely can get noticed or any attention with my art. I wanted to share my new piece I just finished after listening to how comic books work. I'm a huge fan of Marvel comics, and I hope you both enjoy this. And he sent this really cool. I think it was like every member of the Marvel universe had to be in this picture that he did. I didn't see that one. It's really neat. Just jam packed full of Marvel comic heroes and villains. So, Josh and Chuck, thanks for the inspiration. Last in getting through every day at the office. PS. My twin Jessica passed away from epilepsy, actually a condition called suedep. Sudden unexplained death of epilepsy. My mother is trying to raise awareness because November is epilepsy awareness month. So if you guys wouldn't mind mentioning this on the show, she would be so happy for that. Also, an Epilepsy show would be cool, too. Not a lot as discussed about it. And that is Jason Flack. And Jason. I wrote you back. That is heartbreaking about your twin sister. Yeah, it is. Very sorry to hear that. And we will definitely do a show on Epilepsy. And since this is November, though, people should go out and find out what they can during National Epilepsy Month. Yeah, we'll follow up with the show. I don't know if it'll be in November, but we'll get to that one for sure. Yeah, and thanks for that piece of art. And if anyone's interested in a great comic book artist from Johnson City, Tennessee, do a lot worse than Jason Flack. Jason, thank you very much for sharing that with everybody. That means a lot to us. If you want to share with us and all of our listeners out there, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebookcom stuffyhenknow. You can send us an email with attached artwork to Stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web. Stuffyshow.com Stuffyshop Knows is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet 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." | |
0759434c-5468-11e8-bef9-534c668a0c84 | How the Amityville Horror Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-amityville-horror-worked | In early 1975, the world was introduced to George and Kathy Lutz, a couple who had fled their home in Amityville, NY to escape a powerful, evil supernatural presence living there. And this being the 70s, the world went nuts for their story. | In early 1975, the world was introduced to George and Kathy Lutz, a couple who had fled their home in Amityville, NY to escape a powerful, evil supernatural presence living there. And this being the 70s, the world went nuts for their story. | Thu, 25 Oct 2018 13:32:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=13, tm_min=32, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=298, tm_isdst=0) | 50555172 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W. Nononsense. Let's get down to business. Bryant. There's Jerry. What's going on? On with this thing? Rolling. And again. It's me, Josh. Put the three of us together, you get Stuff You Should Know, the late 2018 edition, which is tense. It's Josh doctor Nonsense clark, you have a degree in nonsense. That's true. And I have a minor in tomfoolery. Oh, man. How are you doing? I'm well, how are you? Good. Sorry to clear my throat. I had a little garlic chicken and it really kind of attacked my mucus membrane. It's fall, Chuck. Yeah. Halloween is almost here and it's finally, like, cooling off a little bit. Yeah, I know. It's been a hot one. Although the sun is still blazing hot. Yes, in the sun. If it's in shade, maybe after sundown and the wind's blowing. Big death. You're in there. It's full time. For real. I'm wearing my boots. Oh, nice. Got a flannel shirt on. I might as well be on a hay ride wearing my pumas. My favorite Murder shirt. Nice. Yeah, that's a great shirt. The toxic masculinity ruins the party again. What a great shirt. Yeah, they actually follow through with great show quotes and put them on T shirts. Smart. And sell a ton of them. That's smart. Yeah, that's the way to do it. We try. The key is selling a ton of them. That's right. And having the good quotes. I feel like we ran out of good quotes seven years ago. That is not true. Chuck. Watch this. You ready? It's showtime. What do you think? That's good. How about this? There's no business like show business. Oh, that's a good one, too. You could write a song out of something like that. It's not show friends, it's show business. Well, look, before we start, I want to address the ten people who are still listening. At this point, I would like to announce the birth of my new website. Yeah, it's called the joshclarkwaycom. How much did it weigh? It weighed nothing because it's a website. But there was a lot of blood, sweat and tears put into its gestation and delivery. And our friend Brandon Reid, who's such a great guy and a listener on the podcast, put it together through his business innovate with an e built this awesome website. It's super 80s, super poppy. I'm very proud of it. And I'm starting a newsletter just to celebrate the whole thing. And it's called the Josh Clark Way. Did you look it up just now? I'm trying, but it's not loading. Oh, what else? We're cutting all this part out anyway. Oh, wait, here we go. Isn't it beautiful? Well, it's still loading. It's because of my old phone. It's not because of your I appreciate that. My phone just can't handle your website. There's so much to my website. It's like, oh, there you are. Yeah, the Joshclarkway.com and I also want to say you may help me with the site, too. So big ups. And thank you to Yuumi and Brandon for helping me put this thing together. So, anyway, I just wanted to say welcome, website. Oh, I got a new fun thing to do to hang out on my website. Sure. Sign up for the newsletter, too, while you're there. Oh, this is great. Okay, are you ready? I'm glad I have this in my life now. Are you ready to get started? Maybe I'll get a website one day. You should get a website. It's like the new thing. Everybody's getting one. Yeah. So, Chuck, we're talking fall here, which means there's only one word that comes to mind every fall. Pumpkins. No, the other word. Candy corn. No. Diarrhea. No. Amityville. And specifically two words, the Amityville horror, which is, for my money, one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Yeah, one of the great ones. And being a kid in the 1970s, when this stuff was going on and famous even as a little youngster, I remember being terrified at that paperback in the drugstore when I would go by the paperbacks, and the look of that house just terrified me. If the house looked any different, the story would have had 15% less spread. Or did the house end up looking creepy because of the lore? No, it's just a colonial. No, the house looked creepy. Well, yes. If somebody didn't say, this house is haunted, by the way look at it, right. You'd probably be like, oh, it's an interesting looking house. But yeah, you put just even the hint of a haunting to it, and that house was built for it. Well, it looked like it had eyes, right. Which was one of the key things. It's a colonial, but it's one of those colonials that are situated sideways on the lot. So from the street, you saw the side of the house, the chimney running down the side of the house, and those two eye like windows on the top floor on either side of the chimney. Just amazing. Yeah, it was a Dutch colonial, to be specific. Yeah. And if you Google Maps that thing now, first of all, it is not any longer 112 Ocean Avenue. No, it is now 108 Ocean Avenue. That's right, because the owners at some point, whoever owned it, I think about two or three years ago, successfully lobbied to have the address officially changed. It took them that long. I don't know how long they had to battle, but they changed it by four digits. They'll never find a city. Exactly. So I went and looked on the Google Images, and of course, now it looks bright and sunny and has a lovely yard, and it's in the middle of a lovely neighborhood, and there's a Chevy in the driveway and an SUV, and it just looks like any other house, but it's still, if you monkey around with Google, you can see that image. And there are big signs all over, like, no trespassing. Sure. And they need them, believe me. Yeah. People just I feel sorry for homeowners since the let's. I don't feel sorry for them, though. No, I don't either, because they made up a bunch of malarkey. Yeah, that's one way to put it, but we'll get to that part later. All right? Sure. Let's set the scene here. Yeah. True. Horrific thing did occur there. Yeah. And I think that kind of gets swept under the rug a little bit overlooked. I agree. On November 13, 1974. Ronnie Butch DeFeo Jr. Killed the other six members of his family, his own family, his mother, his father, his two sisters, Alison and dawn, and his two younger brothers, Mark and John. He's the older brother killed his whole family? Yeah. 912 13 and 18 ages. This is one of those crimes that rightfully has gone down in American history as one of the worst. Yeah, like you said, rightfully. This guy was a bad dude from the outset. He denied doing anything when he ran into a bar called Henry's Bar in a little town of Amityville. I bet that place is great, and I'll bet, too. And he said, Somebody just killed my family. And all the bar patrons were like, I got to see this. And they ran to 112 Ocean Avenue with Ronnie Defayo, and they found all six members laying face down on their beds, dead, I think their heads their faces resting in their hands. And Rodney defeat said it was the Mafia. Yes. Which I think his family had some tie somehow to the Mafia. He had an uncle named Carmine. And that's all you need right there. Yeah, but there was one, like, a legit crime family that had some tie to his family, so maybe he just thought that was a good alibi or whatever. Yeah, it wasn't so good. No. And he killed him with a 35 caliber Marlin rifle, which did you look this thing up? No, it's like the Old West, like lever action. Oh, really? Riding on a horse, cowboys and Indians kind of gun. I expected the side bolt action carbon. Like a Lee Harvey Oswald. Yes. That's what I would say. No, this is like a boom boom. That explains a lot, because one of the big mysteries that still remains is why didn't the other family members wake up? Well, that's a big read a little bit into the case, and that's definitely one of these sticking points, because it's not like they were all three years old and fast asleep or something, right. I mean, one of them was 18, and so there are a lot of variations of the story because of that. One of the sisters helped kill the father, and then the mother freaked out, so Ronald killed her, and everyone was waking up, and I don't know, it sounds like he just did it all himself. I also saw that he had said a year after, while he was being questioned, that he had drugged them all with barbiturates, but I only saw that once. That would make a little more sense at least, right? Because you can't silence this kind of I mean, maybe you could have wrapped a pillow around it, but it's not like a handgun, right? So he said it was the mob first, and then he said that he did it. But there was a really big caveat to that. He said that he had been hearing voices that were urging him to kill his family, and even during the murder, something was telling him to continue and just keep killing, kill them all. And he said he looked around and there was no one there, so I just assumed it was God telling me to kill. So I did, and he killed again, his whole family. And I read this article in Vice magazine from 2014 from some guy who said he spent, like, five years in prison with Ronnie DeFeo and said finally, after befriending him over a couple of years, he finally got to the truth. And the truth was he felt like his parents treated his brothers and sisters better than him. His parents didn't like the fact that he liked PCP and LSD and heroin. Imagine that. So they got what was coming to him, basically, and he'd do it again. I don't know. This is an armchair diagnosis, but clearly if his reason is he liked my brothers and sisters more, like he has some sort of serious mental issues going on for sure, but he did not want apparently his attorney talked him into talking about God and voices because he was like, we can get you a plea of insanity. And he was like, I don't want to do that. He's like, but you really should. And he goes, no, I don't want to do that. He goes, well, there may be a book deal in your future if you claim this. He goes, I like books. And he went, what are books again? And he went, they're things that make you money. And he goes, he's like, you know how you carve out the middle of those things and you keep your heroin and PCP in there? That's a book. So a real crime happened there in this house. Let's just say it was a fateful decision for him to say publicly that a voice had urged him to kill his whole family. Okay? That would come into play pretty soon after that, after Ronnie defeat, I believe, two weeks after he was sentenced, a year after the murders, and he got sentenced to six consecutive life sentences. Yeah. He's still in jail? Oh, yeah. He will be forever, I would guess. Yeah, he's alive. That was my point. Right? You're right. About a year after that. Just like a year and a month after the murders, a couple named George and Kathy Lutz bought this place and they bought it for a song. It was 80 grand at a time when 80 grand was a pretty good deal for a six bedroom Dutch colonial in Amityville, New York. Yeah. And so there were a couple while they were a couple with a couple of kids well, three, I think nine year old Daniel, seven year old Christopher at the time, five year old Missy. We'll get to their financial situation a little bit in more detail later. But the thought was that George could run his even though it was kind of a lot of money for them. It was a good deal on the house. And George could run his business out of the house. So save on office space. He had a couple of boats. This house came with a dock. He's like, I don't have to pay marina storage fees. They almost had to buy the house, it sounded like, financially speaking right. It was just too good of a deal to pass on. Yeah, sure. So they bought the house. Did you say they were looking in the 30 to 50 range originally? I don't think so. It was a stretch for them. But again, that's how good the deal was. So they buy the house and they move in, and apparently almost immediately, things started to get weird. Right. So Kathy was a Catholic, and what do you do when you're a Catholic and you buy a new house? You invite your priest over to come bless the house. Do you really? I guess in the 70s in New York you did well, I didn't know if that had anything to do with the I mean, did they know that the murders had occurred there and just sort of didn't care? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yes, and I don't know that they didn't care. Supposedly, George Lutz later said that after they said, we're interested in this, when the realtor was like, well, let me just tell you one little detail. Just six big horrific murders, right? Yeah. Just a year ago. Yeah. Sorry, we haven't cleaned up the blood yet. Seriously? So they apparently took a second to think about it and talk amongst themselves, like, is that really bothers? This is such a good deal. And they said, no, the deal wins out over any superstitions we have. So, yes, they knew. And I don't know if they hired the priest in because of that or just to bless the house, but they brought the priest in to bless the house. You can burn a little sage or you can call in a priest. I think they had to ramp it up. They called in Father Ralph Pecarero and he came in and this is how the story goes, and we'll just sort of tell it as it happens. Supposedly. I think it's a great idea before we start pooping all over. So he comes in, blesses the house. Supposedly he feels, in one room in particular, a very cold chill. He said, even though it was winter, it shouldn't have been this kind of cold. And he hears a strong voice, a masculine voice, shout, Get out. And then his car started acting weird. Apparently the hood flew open and smashed. The windshield doors are unlocking and opening. His horn went, Aruba. And he didn't even have one of those kinds of horns. The car installed. And this is just the very beginning of and if you've seen the movie, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about is portrayed in the film. Right. And it's Rod STiger getting shouted at. He's great. Like flies where there shouldn't be flies. Crucifixes, spinning. Well, smell of rotten eggs. And this hidden room that wasn't on any blueprint. The red room, the pigs. So there was a phantom like pig beast with glowing red eyes that would look in on the family from the outside and leave cloven hoof prints in the snow. And little five year old Missy would be like, oh, that's just my friend Jody. Which makes it ten times scarier. Way scarier. Like, I would rather have my kid say, I don't know what that is, I'm scared. Rather than that's. Just Jody. Right. Jody's been suggesting things. What else? I think the dad claimed to see Butch Defeat face on a wall. He would wake up every night, or a lot of nights at 315 in the morning. Supposedly when these murders took place, the kids started acting funny. Classic movie haunting stuff. Yeah, it was a very weird situation for him. Things were tense. They were all had, like, hair trigger tempers. They were all yelling at each other. Apparently very uncharacteristically. And supposedly George Lutz, I've seen him described as an ex Marine who is an expert in karate, which, again, this is a 70s, so everybody was in the karate back then. Sure. Elvis had a black belt. Sure. And he was like a no nonsense kind of guy. No nonsense. Right. Yeah. Like me. So he's like, what's going on? And he goes to the local Amityville Historical Society and says, I want to know everything you have on Twelve Ocean Avenue. And it got quiet in the room, and the guy was like, Come with me. So George finds out that their house is probably built on Shinnkok Indian land. That was a big one. Yeah. Not only that, but supposedly where this Native American tribe uses a sick bay for the mentally insane, is how they put it. Right. And this is where they would just keep all of those people where they were just sort of left to die there, so haunted by them. It was the kind of place where they just get dropped off and the people kind of back slowly away, like, okay, take care. See you later. And they would die. And no one wants to be treated like that. So, of course, anyone who has left to die right there on that land, like, that would obviously haunt the land. There were some other legends about what was behind it, too. There was, like, an abandoned cemetery pretty straight up on the nose. Yeah. There was a Salem witch guy that supposedly sacrificed animals. John Ketchum. Yeah. And there actually was a John Ketchum who lived somewhat in the area around that time, but Ocean Avenue. Right. He'd never been accused of being a witch. And then I saw an interview with a guy named Hans Holzer, who's a bona fide parapsychologist, and Dr. Holzer says that it all started in the original house. There was a house that was built in the 1720s that was moved when that house was moved in 19 five, it disturbed an Indian chiefs grave, native American chiefs grave, and somebody played with his skull like it was a soccer ball, and he's been mad about it ever since. And that is what drove Ronnie to FAYO to kill, and that is what terrorized the Lutz's. And that's the whole problem. Everybody just calmed down. That's it. So there's a little bit of peace falling into the puzzle. They're figuring it out, but it's not making anything better. In fact, everything's getting worse. Like, the stuff is getting worse and worse and worse. And finally, everything culminates on this one stormy night when their door blows open, blows off of the hinges outward into the street, I believe, or no, into the house. I can't remember which way, but blown off of the hinges. It's like a 250 pound door, and the windows, the iconic eyeball or eye windows blow out. Some of the glass somehow blows in. It's just an enormous explosion of energy, and the family leaves. They just left the house after 28 days? Supposedly, yeah. Well, no, they definitely left the house. Yeah. But neighbors say they left in ten days. Okay. Yeah, one of the two. Point is, there are discrepancies all over the place. We'll get to those. Yeah, we'll get to those. But they left and this is true. They left all of their possessions in this house and just fled. And that part is true. Never went back. Yes. Unless they had a sneaky little moving team with a U Haul on the dead of night. From what they go back and get our stuff? From what I understand, this stuff got auctioned off. Yeah, it did. I mean, they left it. They did. They had to grab some clothes, and they took off into the night, which will go on later to be one of the key selling points that this really happened. Because people that were on their side were like, why would they do that on just the gambit of this being a hoax that would eventually make the money? Would they really leave all their stuff behind? Could anybody be that foolish if they could break and we'll find out right after this. All right. So they get the heck out of Dodge, they leave, they contact an author named Jay Anson. Oh, even before that. Well, I was going to get to the attorney. Is that right? Go ahead. So Princess Hall, as the publisher released the Amityville Horror was a huge best seller. 42 weeks on the bestseller list by sold six and a half million copies. They were all over the country plugging this book. Right. And the letters were household names. They're like, on every talk show you could imagine. I want to underscore that in there was a family from New York who claimed to have been driven from their home by a supernatural evil force, and they were international celebrities for it. Yeah. Reason number 5,000,080, why the 70s were just awesome. Yeah. That's what you could be famous for. Was saying, like, ghosts chased us out of our house, and everybody'd be like, that's a great story. Should we jump ahead and talk about that attorney? Yes. Great. So what was the guy's name? Bill Webber. Yeah. This is where things get really hinky, is that Bill Weber is an attorney and he's the one that sort of gets everything. I think he's the one that saw dollar signs initially and gets a team together for this book and starts saying to everybody, including DeFeo, hey, we can all make some money if we do a book here. DeFeo has got to get a cut, though. The lutz is like, what? You're going to pay the murderer? And he was like, yeah, it's my client. And they said, we're not down with that plan. Yes, but this came after they had formed basically a business relationship, but not even an attorney client relationship. Straight up business relationship with William Weber. Yeah. Like, how can we make money off of this? The way that the world heard about these things going on at one point, Twelve Ocean Avenue for the first time ever was at a press conference that the Lutz is held at William Weber's office. That was when the world was introduced to the idea of this Amityville Horror, even before the book ever came out for anyone, at least not locally. Right. So Bill Webber and the Lutz, they had kind of like a tentative tenuous relationship. And when Prince Hall came along and Jay Anson came along, I don't know if Jay Hanson poached them or Prentice Hall poached them, but whoever was involved with The Amityville Horror book got the Lutz's away from William Webber and his book idea and proposal, and he got cut out of the deal. Just put that in your bonnet and smoke it and save it for later. Okay. Yeah. And supposedly left because, again, they didn't want to give defeat a cut or they just wanted a bigger cut themselves. At this point, it's all about money. Right. But jumping back or forward can't remember where we are in time. But they're all over the country, all over the news. This would have been about 19 77, 78. Yeah. They're on Merv Griffin. They had a ghost team of ghost hunters come by from Channel Five in New York yeah. WPI X and had people posted in the house overnight taking all these photographs. There's one now, very famous photograph, and it's creepy looking, but you take a picture of anyone in black and white in the dark poking their head around a corner, and it'll look creepy. So I want to comment on that picture. Have you seen it? Sure. Creepy. It is creepy. It's chalked up to some of the paranormal investigators. One of, like one of the men who was at that WPIX seance fest at the house, getting in front of the camera. Yeah. They're saying that one of Paul Bartz okay. That it was just one of the ghost hunters. So that was a grown man. Whoever's in the picture is a kid, just plain as date. There's no confusing that for a grown man. I think so. Unless he had a boyish face. I think it's a very bizarre picture. No, I think it's bizarre. And supposedly it was taken with infrared film in the dark. And again, it doesn't look like a man, which is that's why the eyes are glowing. Right. Like that explains that. It's the fact that it's clearly the face of a boy. Are you going under the Joshclarkway.com again? I'm trying to find that picture. Again, it's clearly the face of a boy. That's not a man's face. That's the thing that sticks out to me. Yeah. I mean, it certainly looks like a boy. Man, it is creepy. It's got to be a boy. That's what it looks like to me. And it got to be. This picture was debuted in the 1977 78 by George Lutz on The Murv Griffin Show. But they could have set that up. Could have been. They could have stayed or whatever. Have you seen the con drink? I think I've seen parts of it, but that's the real life couple. Yeah. Ed and Lorraine Warren. Yeah. Who hooked up with these. I mean, this is where they got their start, kind of. Right. Kind of. They basically had, like, an occult museum. They were like a psychic and psychic investigators in Connecticut, like you do. And the guy, Marvin Scott, who was the anchor, who investigated the Amityville horror for the WPIX local Channel Five station, he invited them to come out to the seance, and it was like a series of sciences that they filmed. And you can actually see this. Look up. WP IX news Eleven marvin Scott part One And it's like a 1998 retrospective of this case, and it has some of the footage from the seance, but it also has an interview with George and Lorraine Warren. And they're basically like, this is real. This is obviously real. And during these sciences, supposedly the psychics started to feel sick. Lorraine Warren said she felt an evil presence from the bowels of the earth in the house. And then that picture, that famous photograph was taken. I think the Warrens are the ones, too, that said, why would they leave all of their stuff behind? Sure. And they also said, well, we would not be involved if this was some sort of a hoax. Right. Exactly. Don't you know who we are? Proof positive. Right? Yeah. But yeah. The real life warrants were they did investigate the Sanityville house in the early 70s or mid 70s, early on, after the story broke. You also know it was the 70s because they were featured on Leonard Des Moines great show, In Search of Love, which we both used to love. And of course, they covered that. 1979 supposedly got the priest on there even though he wanted to be kept anonymous. And he or whoever it was kind of reinforced this cold room get out screen. Yeah. Just doubled down on it. His face was hidden in the book, I think. The Janssen book. There were three source materials that came out about this story all within a couple of years of each other. There was a Good Housekeeping article, which is hilarious. There was the Janssen book, and then there was a coloring book, and then there was a movie. Yes. And those three are like the source material for what everybody knows about the Amityville legend. But what Leonard Nemoy pointed out is that this movie is huge. Everybody loves it. But what a lot of people don't know is that it's a true story. He says it's a true story. The book said it was a true story. But Leonard I expected more from Leonard Nemo than that. He says unequivocally, it's a true story. That's because that's what the script, the teleprompter said. Well, anyway, that was a great episode of In Search of anyway. Yeah. So in 1979, the very famous film adaptation of this book comes out starring James Brolin and Margot Kitter as the Lutz's. And it was a big hit. $80 million in domestic release, which was I didn't do the conversion, but a very good haul for 1979. One of the smash hits of that year, for sure. I think it was close to 300 million, probably. Oh, yeah. Good money. Yeah. I mean, this is back in the time when movies didn't routinely make a billion dollars in an opening weekend. That was a ton of cash. Yeah. There were a lot of really bad sequels that no doubt just kind of threw out the whole legend of the house and just did whatever they want with that name. Have you seen any of them? I haven't. I haven't seen any of the sequels. Nor did I see the remake recently with Ryan Reynolds. Yeah. Did you see that? No, I don't remember the original movie that much. And to be honest, I don't know if you ever. Saw it all the way through. I mean, I was way too young to see anything like this. So it would have been it's still around Burning Copyright. I know that's. The whole point, though, is I would have had to have seen this years and years later. I don't know that I ever did. It's worth seeing. It's a great horror film. Like, I've seen a lot of the parts. James Bowen's great in it. Margaret Kitter is wonderful in it. Little Missy for Jody's friend, is a little creep show. And who played Jody? I don't know who played her, but, yeah, the kids did good. Rod Stigger was the priest. He was great. I remember seeing that scene, so definitely seen parts of it. Joel Brenner was the get out voice. Was he really sorry. That was unbelievable. They actually didn't shoot at that Ocean Avenue house, though. Of course, with a movie like this, the lure is kind of usually not true. And the lure was that the crew was too scared to shoot there. It's not true. They couldn't get a permit. So they shot at 18 Brooks Road, Tom's River, New Jersey and built a superstructure around the house to make it look like the other house which was just like, a couple of hours from there. Right? The town of Amityville said, no, we don't want anything like this. No publicity like this, please. This is a tragedy. We like our quiet, sleepy town the way it is. No, we're not giving you a permit to shoot here. Yes, but Tom's River was like, bring it. Yeah. Nobody knows about us. Who's Tom anyway? We don't know. Monte Ever River, the movie, like you said, it was a huge smash hit. And it just like the Lutzes were already kind of household names that changed everything. The Amityville horror became part of American popular culture. It was cemented into it. And it was also cemented in that this is based on a true story. Maybe the movie blew it a little outer portion, as movies will do. But the Lutz's were driven from their house by an evil spirit and a lot of this stuff was true. Isn't that nuts? Yeah. And it was that period in the late 70s where, like we talked about it with the Bermuda Triangle was a big deal. Waterbeds were huge, water beds were big. But I feel like there wasn't as much stuff, there wasn't as much content. Just a bigger deal. Like Amy Devil, like you said, it wasn't just all that horror movie. Like, it was spoofed on Johnny Carson and it was all over the place. It was, like, part of the fabric of America. But I wonder if people bought into and thought about this stuff like you were saying because nothing was grabbing their attention every 30 seconds. Over here. Look over here, over here. And you could really kind of ruminate on something and let it stew. Yes. Like now a show can win best show Emmy award. I've never even heard of that. Yes, too much stuff. A lot of stuff out there. But is that better or worse? I feel like it is true that things can just change and they're not necessarily worse or better. But I also believe that it is possible for things to get objectively worse. Now, whether they are or not right now, who knows? I don't think anybody has ever lived long enough to be like, I'm 1000 years old, and it is way worse these days than it was 500 years ago. Now, are you talking about entertainment content or just general culture? Everything being alive? See, I think entertainment wise, it's better because back then, it was just like everyone got obsessed with Emmy devil because it was the only thing around obsessed with and it wasn't even great, you know? But it was you just take this schlocky thing and obsess over it. But you're saying it wasn't great compared to today's standards. But back then, it was great. It was something that you could maybe you could basically put on, like a cloak and wear around for a year and really be into the ammo d rather than the cameraman missed that shot by, like, an 8th of an inch. That's the critical detail that people have today. And I think it keeps us from enjoying stuff like they used to be able to in the seventies. That's what I think. That's my point. Plus, we're all doped up. Yeah, there's a lot of grass, but really terrible grass. That's one thing that's gotten better is the grass, from what I understand. All right, so maybe we can take a break now, and then we can start poking holes in this thing. Start does that sound good? Yeah, stop. You should know. All right, so I insist we have not booked any hold yet. There's some dents in there that we've kind of put our fingers in. I've just been snidely laughing at everything we say. Yeah, right. But here's some of the holes, and there are quite a few I kind of mentioned before. Neighbors say that they left, like, a week and a half enter their stay in this house, let's just say 28 days. So right out of the gate, you got a discrepancy. Yeah, kind of. What the thinking was, and still is to some people, is that they couldn't afford this house. It didn't take them long to realize it, and so they cooked up the story. Yeah, but imagine figuring that out in ten days. That's a little weird. Well, and I also don't know how that would get them out of their mortgage. Just defaulting on it because it's haunted. Yeah. Just walking away, like can't get blood from a stone. Go take the house if you want it back. Yeah, but could they claim that it wasn't disclosed? If it was disclosed, how could they literally get out of the mortgage. I don't know, man. I think if you stop making payments, if you don't care about your credit and I'm not sure what it was like in the 70s, but if you're like, I'll take this hit for seven years on my credit. Right? Just walk away and just walk away. Like, then you don't have to make payments anymore. That's what I think happened. But I don't think that they were able to do that because they started making money from their story and everyone knew that they were making money from their story. So people wanted their money from them. Right. That's incredible. The great show from 80s. Did you used to watch that? Yeah, I watched the episode that this was on, but did you watch it as a kid? Great show. And on the show sorry, it was really positive. Do you remember? It seemed pretty upbeat. Well, it was called that's incredible. Not like that's crappy. The cameraman missed that shot. And I think it even had an exclamation point, didn't it? Yeah. At the end of the title. Yeah. So that's incredible. Barbara Camardi owned the house at the time of this episode, walks them through and shows like close ups of the hinges of that front door and these windows that are still sealed. It's like these things didn't blow. No, she went out of her way to make sure that everyone knew that this stuff hadn't happened. And ironically, she exaggerated the facts that the skeptics pointed to. So everybody was exaggerating their case on either side of this. But let's also said, though, that no, there were pictures in the newspaper of that front door blown out. Have you seen the picture? Well, no, I didn't think anyone could find it. It's a screen door that's kind of like hanging open. I'm not kidding. That's the picture from what I understand. All right, so it's all falling apart then, right? Oh, yeah, it's all falling apart for the letters. It is falling apart big time. Apparently George Lutz died in 2006 and his dying day said that all of this is true. He said, yeah, man, the book got a bunch of stuff wrong. The movie got a ton of stuff wrong. Because I think the Ryan Reynolds remake of the movie was supposedly built as this is way more true to the book. Oh, really? The original movie kind of created its own stuff, which is why it's viewed as an additional source rather than just part and parcel with the book. So, George, let's say all these people got all these details wrong, but the stuff we said happened really happened. Part of the problem is some of the stuff that they said happened was like levitating off the bed and looking at each other going, can you believe we're levitating? Yeah, I saw an interview where he said that in public on camera. He really, like, kudos to him for sticking to it. Yeah, I would say deathbed is the perfect time to be like, guess what, everybody? Because then everyone would be like, yeah. No. If you guys knew. No. S. I love it. This is a family show. Yeah. So George Lutz went to his grave saying, no, this is for real. William Weber. Bill Weber, the attorney did quite the opposite of that. Well, he said and of course, Lutz will paint, probably painted this as sour grapes. Sure. Because Webber was cut out of the money deal, but as soon as they left and made their own book deal, he started barking that this is all BS. This is a hoax that we made up. He totally did that. He said that over about three bottles of wine, he and George and Kathy Lutz concocted the story out of whole cloth and then had a smoking night of love making between the three of them on their water bed. Geez. Took a sexy turn all of a sudden. Sure. Bill Webber. He said that? He said, hey, I was just looking to get another trial for my client, who I think was innocent and insane. What the losses were doing was going after money. But you can also look at it like Ronnie DeFeo was the greatest thing that ever happened to Bill Webber's career. Sure. He even said at the time, like, I'm giving Ronnie DeFeo a cut rate because the publicity from this case is worth more than anything Ronnie DeFeo could ever give me. So the idea of reviving interest in the case would probably help his case load as well. Who knows? The point is, William Weber hired a guy named Paul Hoffman, I think his name was, and he wrote the Good Housekeeping article. Yeah. And when that Good Housekeeping article came out, the Lutz's were like, you're going to scoop us? We're going to sue you for invasion of privacy because you stole our story. Which is pretty rich, because they were using the courts. Like, if you have a life story and some lawyer comes along and hire somebody to write that story yeah. That's invasion of privacy. If you make that story up with said lawyer and then screw that lawyer over that's, and he goes off his own way, using the courts for that is pretty I don't want to say ballsy. Gutsy. Yeah. And speaking of lawsuits, I mean, we won't go through the myriad lawsuits, but it felt like more than a dozen lawsuits over the years. Yeah. They sued Weber, weber sued them. People were suing everyone. People are suing cops. Cops were suing the family. The Crow, Marty's, were suing the Lutz's for even making the thing up in the first place. And to me, this is what is sort of proof positive that the whole thing is rotten to begin with. Sure. When the lawsuits start flying yeah. Everyone had their hand out. This father petroro in court documents said that, you know what, I never went there. And blessed the house, right. And heard this voice. I actually kind of just had a phone call with them, and maybe one of their daughters yelled, Get out. In the background. She was talking to a doll, I think the dog Harry, but it creeped me out nonetheless. I always wanted to be played by Rod Stigger, so I went for it. But yeah, I mean, it all sort of fell apart. So in cases like this, people are like, well, the Catholic Church is shutting that guy up. They don't want to talk about the truth if there are some demons here. But the priest really confounds things. Not because it's like, was the Catholic Church really trying to keep this quiet? More like, why did this priest lie so overtly In Search Of? Well, he may have had some skin in the game. Maybe so. Maybe you're right. I don't know. But the Warren said in addition to him experiencing that in the house, it followed him throughout his life, and that he was once in a hotel room with a rabbi in Florida and a lizard demon from the house appeared to him there. That's the quality of quotes you can expect when you have the Warrens on your interview show. I love it. I love that we're treating it In Search Of as if it was this no, I highly regarded. I mean, it was great, but it was lucky. TV for ten and twelve year old boys in the 80s. Sure. Like, I'm sure I mean, that probably wasn't even the priest. He probably just hired a guy. No, it was the guy who in court documents, that was the guy on In Search Of, but they blocked his face out. Right, but I mean, that's the guy. That's the guy. He was revealed later on the guy on In Search Of was revealed later on to be Father Pecorero, and he was on In Search Of back before anyone ever knew the name Pecarero. He was called in the book Father Mancuso. All right, but as far as I know, that is the same guy, and that he was just on TV lying to his teeth. That's what I saw. Or he could have been just handed a script by Nimalay's team. It's possible it was the America Will Believe Anything You Say a couple of years ago, actually, just last year in 2017, it was sold for about 600 grand, the house. Yeah. Which is a couple of hundred less than they were asking for it. They're asking around eight. Is that crazy? And apparently the only thing it had to do with the price of ring was because of the pain and the rump to live there and have people constantly coming by. It wasn't like, forget that there were six people murdered here. Forget that this house has green ooze and flies and devil pigs coming out of looking through the window. Right. It's. The real problem is Google Earth. Right. And now people can just say, oh, let's go by there and take some photos. There it is. It's at one point they must have moved it. That still cracks me up. Yeah, but yeah, that's the thing. That's why the house is still selling for less than it ever was before. And the Lutz has claimed that they didn't make much money on this and that we never got rich and what little money we made kind of went out the door with court fees and legal fees. I don't know if that may be utterly true. Who knows? It says that he did admit to getting about 100 grand from the book and another 100 from the film. But that's not that much money. No, but this is 1000 nineties money. That was some money. Yeah, but it's not like kickback and retire money. Sure. Probably the most telling thing about the Lutz's story being a hoax, the whole thing being just one big hoax, is that no other person owner, anybody who was associated with that house after the Lutz family left, ever reported anything even remotely supernatural like this. Nothing. And of course, Lorraine Warren had a pretty good explanation for that, which is what she said. Well, then obviously one of the exorcism was successful because that's the only way to explain why the hauntings went away. Yeah, that's the only way to explain it. The Lutz is also never called the cops. That was a big one, which was a big old people poke into it. Like if all this stuff was going on, at some point you're going to go to the police. Right. And even if it's ten days and not the 28th, you're not just going to just quietly be haunted by the demons of hell. Right. And not sweat it with a cop. Sure. At least call them once and be like, you guys do anything about demons? No. Okay. Even if it's a thanks anyway prank call. Sure. What do you think? This is getting a little philosophical, I guess, but what do you think about bad juju in a home where six people were murdered? I'm a totally agnostic non believer in any thing like that, but part of me also thinks that, like, if you brutally murder six people, there's got to be some change in the energy in the air, which sounds hokey than anything I've made fun of. What's the Josh Clark Waycom? What's the word? Placebo. I think it's a placebo effect. Okay, so you know that something happened here. If you didn't know anything, you would never notice anything. Probably not. Yeah. I don't think that there is a change to the energy or the air or anything like that. I think there are cues that we can find where even if you didn't know, you could be like, oh, there's a shadow over there, something like that. And you can freak yourself out even in a house like that that you didn't know was haunted or said to be haunted. But I think if, you know, a house is said to be haunted, your brain's working overtime and you're going to produce those things that you think you see. Well, I agree with that, but my imagination is just dead and gone. So who knows? If you do believe stuff like that, then that's fine with me. Sure. You're not hurting anybody with that. If you're taking money from people to exercise stuff like that, then I have a problem with you. But I don't think a lot of people are out there doing it. I think most people just believe one way or another. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I don't know if that boy is in the picture. It's Jody, the pig demon. If you want to know more about the Amityville horror, you can type those words into the Internet. Actually, you can type it into how stuff works, and it will bring up an article by our own former own Matt Hunt. I remember that guy. He wrote the Amityville article on the website. What's he up to now? Any idea? I don't know. He's continuing his investigation into the Amityville Horror. He was never heard from again. Right. Since I said that it's time for a listener mail, I'm going to call this follow up on the homelessness episode. We re ran that one for selects. Got a better response this time? Yeah, I was really looking out for somebody, but I guess they learned their lesson or else stop listening to us by now. Yeah, well, and I set it up too, because it was my pick with like, hey, this is what happened last time, right? I dare you to write in this time. That's exactly right. So this is from a woman who said that a homeless man saved her dog. It's a pretty great story. My sister and I were taking our three dogs for a walk down Main Street in our city one day, and we stopped dressed on a bench for heading for home. Without realizing it, I had accidentally let one of the leashes slip out of my hand. Unfortunately, Safari noticed her leash was free at about the same time I did. Decided to up and chase after something. My sister and I jumped to grab her, but the speed of two clumsy humans is no match for a spry young dog. She ran down the sidewalk. This is like a nightmare for me. She ran down the sidewalk. A few pedestrians reached down to try and grab her, which frightened her enough that she ran from the sidewalk into the busy street. Four lanes of traffic going in both directions. Sprinting to try and catch up. I watched in horror as she ran out into the street. Sure, I was about to see my dog get killed by an oncoming car. It was right about then that a homeless man that we had previously seen around town rode up on his bicycle right in the middle of the road, keeping himself between my dog and the cars flying by. If weren't for him doing that, she would surely have been run over. Finally caught up. Was able to catch her attention caller. Thankfully she ran right into my arms and I looked up to thank the hero who would save my dog and he was nowhere to be seen. What was it? A dream? That's me talking. He had put himself in harm's way to save my dog's life and then just quietly ridden away when he saw that she was safe. Don't know his name, never saw him again to thank him. Safari is now ten years old. It's because of that nameless man that she has lived to see that old age. And that is Ally from New Hampshire. That is a great story. Love it. Thanks a lot, Ally. Thanks for sharing that one. See everybody, we told you. If you want to send us an email like Ally did or get in touch with this, you can go to our websitestepychano.com. I also have a website called the Joshclarkway.com if you want to check it out. And you can send an email to Chuck, Jerry and me. Plus Frank, the chair, guest producer, everybody. Send that email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-30-sysk-toy-testing-final.mp3 | How Toy Testing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-toy-testing-works | It's every kid's dream - a job playing with toys that pays in toys. It's a real thing and has been around for a long time. Then there's the other side of the testing process, companies who ensure that toys are safe. It takes both of these testing techniqu | It's every kid's dream - a job playing with toys that pays in toys. It's a real thing and has been around for a long time. Then there's the other side of the testing process, companies who ensure that toys are safe. It takes both of these testing techniqu | Tue, 28 Nov 2017 15:58:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=15, tm_min=58, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=332, tm_isdst=0) | 44956180 | 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. This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry Rowland in there. And this is stuff you should know. For all the kitties out there. For the cats, the kitties. There was a D. Oh. Got you. Two DS and an Ie. Not kitties. No, not kitties. Not the meow meow. Nice callback, man. Yeah, that was a good one. Basalt. Probably shouldn't mention that on the one for the kitties. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever tested a toy? No. Did you ever want to? Yeah. I've done some product testing before because I have a friend or had a friend that worked in market research, and she would occasionally hit me up for a burger taste or a beer drink. Nice. Or a tool test, but never toys. Wow. I'll bet the beer drink was fun. That's great. Drink a little beer and you get paid, like, $100. But she's like, no, no, you can't swallow. You have to switch it around in your mouth and spit it out. Actually, most of the beer ones, the only one I did, I think there was only one that was taste. A lot of times it's just like, what do you think of this logo? Type of thing. Oh, really? Yeah. So, like, the beer wasn't even in the room with you? No. What a tease. Yes. They just throw things up and I just go, boring. Yeah, you probably could have explained this better when you asked me to test the beer. Well, you get that little envelope with $100, though, so who cares? Oh, nice. Is that how much that pays? Sometimes more. Wow. Sometimes. I did a frozen yogurt one for $50.01 time, but it ranged between 50 and a couple of hundred. Very cool. Yeah. Cash money. Yeah, why not? You can go buy a lot of beer with that. Totally. Well, I remember hearing about the idea of toy testing as a kid and just being like, how do I do this? My parents were like, oh, no, we both work. We're busy. Go be a latchkey kid. Yeah. Especially after the movie big. Oh, yeah. There was, like, a lot of toy testing in that, right? Yeah, that was his job. I forgot about that. Totally forgot about that. I just remember the piano scene and then the scene at the end. Well, don't spoil it. Okay? I didn't. I said the scene at the end. Hopefully it didn't spoil it for anybody. That big ends eventually. Yeah, don't spoil it. But it has something to do with a dirty bomb. Right. That's the next episode. It's a big surprise ending. So, anyway, I remember wanting to be a toy tester, and it never panned out for me. And now that I have grown up a little bit and I've read this article, especially doing a little research, toy testing still sounds awesome if you're a kid. Oh, yeah. But if you're a parent, it does not sound all that great. What do you mean? Like, if your kid does that? Yes. It sounds like a lot of work, man, getting the toy and having your kid play with it. Yeah. I mean, it's not like that's the end of it. There's a lot of extra stuff you have to do. You have to pay attention to your kid while they're playing with it. You've got to write reports and stuff. There's work to it if you're the parent, for sure. So, in other words, you have to take them out of their small, plain brick room and actually let them play. Yeah. Take off their Hannibal Lecter face mask and their straight jacket. I never thought about it that way. We get to work and then put them back in after they're done with their toy. That's right. Again, if you're the kid, great job. If you're a parent, it seems tough. Plus, also, one of the things that's tough about it is that this is not something that is easily come by, I think. Although it's a lot easier today to get a job for your kid as a toy tester than it was, say, like, in 1990. Yeah. I think back then you had to literally depend on someone getting in touch with you. Right. Or you had to go show up at headquarters and be like, hey, what do you think, you kid. Right. All right, well, let's go a little further back, Chuck, because there's a lot of different testing that goes on with toys. There's the kind I was just talking about research, market research. Right. Like you and your beer logos. Yeah. Like, play with this toy kid. What do you think? Does it stink? There's also the kind that has to do with actually making sure it's safe, which is another kind of toy testing. And we're going to cover both. But the idea of testing toys to make sure that they didn't disembowel the kid that was playing with them with some weird sharp edge or missile that was actually would stick in your gut and catch fire or something like that, that's actually a relatively new concept. Like surprisingly new, actually. Yeah. Toys have been around for thousands of years. They found toys that are potentially 4000 years old. I saw a rattle that was from Turkey that maybe like 4000 years old. And by all accounts, this Italian find was sort of like an early Easy Bake Oven kit. Yeah, it was like a toy kitchen, basically. Kitchen set. Yeah. So, like, little kids have always wanted to play with stuff. It's just part of being a child. Whether it's took junior or all the way up to modern times. Right. And in the 18th century, it became a thing to where the Enlightenment philosopher said, you know what, learning through play is a really valuable thing. So legit toys started being developed for the first time. Yes. I think this is about the time maybe a little before, but this is probably the seeds of where childhood came from. And we need to do an episode just on childhood, I think. Man. Like when it was allowed. Yes, like troll it may be natural, but observing it is not a longstanding thing among humans. Well, sure. It was like, well, you're five years old, time for you to get to work. Exactly. Like here you get a little more cold dust on your face, you look jobless. So the idea of kids playing, especially to kind of learn and grow into adults, that finds its roots in the Enlightenment. So you've got that one branch or that one sapling coming up and it starts to integrate and merge with another one that comes up later on in the 19th century industrialization. Yeah. So now you have the idea that kids should play with toys because prior to industrialization, families may have made them themselves. The kid may have been just playing with a kitchen utensil, forced to use its imagination. Yeah. And I just realized they keep referring to the kid as it. Yeah, his or her imagination. Like a broom becomes a horse. Pretty easy. Yeah. I mean, look at stick ball. Sure. Is there anything simpler than cutting a broom into a broomstick and playing baseball? Right. Or a nice ladle can become an electric guitar. Sure. That was always my thing. I always played air guitar whenever I could. I would give entire god, man, now that I am older, how torturous must just have been. I would give entire concerts of like Bon Jovi slippery when wet. Oh, boy. But it would be in either air guitar or a drum set made of country croc lids for symbols. And then the tubs for the drum themselves, or like a quick roast box or something like that. But I have a whole Tommy Lee drum kit made up. All right, I got some questions here. Okay. I wasn't done. I was on oh, is there more? Yeah. We give this whole concert, and everybody would come into my room and sit there and listen to the first song and be like, okay, one more, and I try to go through at least one whole side of the tape. Okay. I don't think I ever made it through a whole side, but my aim was to do the whole album. All right, well, that answered all my questions, actually. Okay, I want to know how long were these performances? Who you subjected them to? My family, and they were long, and they must have been excruciatingly long. Okay, yeah, that pretty much sums it up. All right, so I'm not even sure how I got on. That what my point was. Well, because of your imagination of turning household items into fantastical toys that's right. So thanks to industrialisation and mass production, toys can be made and sold and distributed, and all of a sudden, now you have something like the beginning of a consumer culture, especially in America. Yeah. And we're talking 1950s. It became a real thing. Except back then, the toys were highly likely to injure or kill your child. Right. Not highly likely, but a lot of them were pretty dangerous, to be honest. I found this one stat from 1968, and I've seen it like, question no one was keeping track. Apparently no one really started keeping track to toy injuries and deaths until, like, the 21st century, until the great londard incident, the 4 July. Isn't that jaw dropping, man? 21st century is when they started releasing reports with injury and death statistics from toys. Yeah. So I saw this one. It was a guesstimate, but I saw 700,000 injuries from toys in 1009, and that's not including jungle gyms and swing sets, bikes, trampolines, probably scooters, nothing like that. These are just straight up toys. By 2012, I saw that there were eleven children who died in the US. Five of them were from tricycles, two of them were from scooters, two were from balloons. So really, technically, only two children died from what you would consider like, just a straight up toy, like a dollar stuffed toy or something, like a crane or plato. I think both of them were asphyxiation. The idea that there was this huge change from very, very dangerous toys into actually a pretty safe industry that has to do largely with toy testers. Yeah. And it was 1969 that they finally passed what's known as, well, the first federal safety standards for toys into law. And then the national commission on product safety that same year said, all right, we've got eight recommendations for banning toys. And I look these up in picture because they're kind of fun to look at. Sure. The empire little lady stove, which is basically an Easy Bake oven mixed with a pottery kiln. 600 degrees Fahrenheit. This thing would get it's 316 degrees Celsius. Your home oven doesn't get up to 600 degrees, probably. No, it genuinely does not. I think mine goes to 550. Maybe in cleaning, self cleaning mode, that high. But this is not something a little toddler needs to play with. Right. In selfcleaning mode, it locks itself shut so you can't open the door even. Right. What else? The Bird of paradise slingshot, which looked innocuous enough, but the deal with that one was it had these sharp missiles that could make you bleed. Yeah. I think slingshot, it just begins and ends at that as far as the safety is concerned. I looked up slingshots today because I had remember the wrist rockets? Yeah, I do. Those things were so dangerous. Did you have one? No, I was never allowed to have one. So I had a wrist rocket. And I looked up today after this article, I was like, I wonder what's going on in the world of slingshots. And dude, you should see some of the slingshots on the market today. Are they even more dangerous than the wrist rocket? Oh, yeah. Wow. And, like, there are YouTube videos with people with these things that they look like little musket balls that you can fire. Sure. And this guy was shooting these balls with a slingshot through, like, half inch plywood. It's like a gun. That is a dangerous toy. Wow. Yeah. It's really just look up extreme slingshot at some point and go get one. Yes. That would be my advice if you're 18 or older and don't have, like, some grudge against anybody. This last one, the Zulu blow gun, was that period in America where you could have a kid's toy that was highly racist and very dangerous, all in one convenient box. Yeah. I can't imagine what the packaging looked like on that one. It looks like what you think it looks like. So the kids were choking on the darts, I'm sure, like putting the dart and then taking a deep breath. Exactly. They were like, I should have thought this through first, pretty much. I regret nothing. And that was that. Right. So that was the first time they started taking toy safety seriously. And prior to that, the last time they had looked out for little kids was, I think, in the 50s, because in the 40s there was a lot of flash fire deaths among children wearing, like, pajamas, because pajamas were made of ray on this new material at the time, and I guess no one had ever tested it around a flame. And it turns out that it could burn up real quick. And not only could it burn the kid badly, possibly to death, it could also kill them from smoke inhalation from their pajamas. Right, yeah. And even if they survived, they were again, very badly burned. So Congress passed the Flammable Fabric Act, I think is what it's called, not flammable. Can I go off here for a second? Sure. Can we all come together and just agree to drop the word inflammable altogether? Oh, that again. There's no reason for it. It's just a dangerous word. Yeah, it's weird. I'm still beating the drum on that one. Wasn't that a Simpsons thing, too? Yeah, Dr. Nick, he's like, right? Flammable means flammable. Yeah. Okay, so Congress passed this act to basically say, all kids wear needs to be flame retardant. Now, the problem is, the chemicals they use to make the closed flame retardant were flammable. They were not. They were the opposite of flammable in their credit, but they supposedly were linked to kids, an increase in hyperactivity and a decrease in IQ. Oh, wow. And still today, it's very tough to get kids pajamas that aren't flame retardant with those same chemicals in them. But apparently, in the mid 90s, congress allowed a loophole to keep going where if the pajamas were of a snug fit, they could be not flame resistant. Right. They didn't have to have the flame retardant chemicals, because to burn, fire needs oxygen. And if there's no oxygen, really, between the kids skin and the pajamas because they're snug fitting pajamas, then the fire is probably not going to happen. So they don't have to have flame retardant chemicals. That's the one loophole. Isn't that fascinating? Well, yeah. And now we can get back to the long standing tradition of leaving a lit candle in your baby's cribb for the first month. Well, there was one other thing. I saw Chuck, too. There is a longstanding rumor that it was actually the tobacco industry that got the Flammable Fabrics Act pushed through because they were trying to deflect the blame for death by fire. Accidental fire from cigarettes to the actual fabric manufacturers. Got you. Even though a lot of people died in their beds from their mattress going up because they fell asleep with a cigarette in their mouth, smoking a bed. It seems like such a thing that nobody would do anymore. But I know people still do it. Yes, but it's still shocking when you see it in a movie or TV show, which you see that all the time in movies, but now when you see it, you think people really smoke in bed? I don't know. Yes. I don't know either. I don't I don't smoke. All right, well, let's take a break, and we will come back and talk a little bit more about different kinds of toy testing right after this. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. All right, so there are mechanisms in place and regulatory bodies in place now that are in charge of making sure toys are safe. And these are constantly it's not like they wrote the book on it and said, all right, we're good. As toys expand and are developed, the safety standards need to be changing all the time. And they do, which is great. So one thing I saw, ironically enough, is that somebody actually did write the book on this. Well, yeah, but it's not a finalized version. Right, I see what you mean. Like, they updated as new science comes in. Yeah, agreed. But even that just the idea of creating standards, again, is pretty new, because I think until, like, the 90s, they didn't really update the toy safety requirements for a while. It started to finally pick up, I think, in the in the 2000s. There is a group, an organization called ASTM, could not for the life of me find what that stands for, but they created the standard consumer safety specification for toy safety, which apparently is the universal guidelines for toy safety, american standards for toy manufacturers. Oh, my. Maybe that's not bad. Chucky. All right. That was my first stab at it. That's pretty good. You also have companies, like in our article here at How Stuff Works called InterTech. Not in a tech. What's in a tech? I think that was office space, wasn't it? Was it? I think so. Inner tech, which basically they're professional toy testers. They have laboratories where they have technicians that say, here, let me see if I can bite the eyes off of this doll into my mouth and let me see if it's so small that I can swallow that eye. Let me rip it apart, let me light it on fire. In England, they have, I think, actually not even just England and all of Britain. They have a rule that a toy burn rate can be no more than one inch per second with the idea that if a toy does catch on fire, at least your kid has enough time to throw it away, throw it toward the gas can and run. Right. And then the EU has their own set of standards, too. So with that burn thing, I should say at least yeah. If a toy burns faster than 30, which is a little over an inch, then it can't be sold in the EU. Right. And then if it burns between 10, it still has to have a warning that says, warning. Keep away from fire. Can get burning. Right. And yeah, the whole idea is like, if that kid sees the thing on fire, they're going to throw it and run, and the house will catch on fire. But the kid is not going to burn up. Right. Unless the kid goes and tells the grown up. I think that should be in the warning, too. Throw dull, run, tell grown up. Right. Don't go make like a ham sandwich. I saw this really great video from Inner Tech, and it's called Teddy Bear Testing. Oh, yeah? Did you see it? I did. It is great. They clearly are aware of what they're doing is bizarre and morbid if you just are standing there watching it as an observer. But, you know, the point to the whole thing is actually quite noble and heroic. But one of the things that they did was there's this, like, three pronged. It was almost like those things that a jeweler uses to pick up diamonds with tweezers, kind of. But they have one that's like a three prong thing where you push down on the end and the prongs extend and open a little bit and you pick something up and then release the end and it draws it up and tightens it and holds it snunk tries. That's going to be in the OED one day, I think. But with this, it was a little bigger and much sturdier. And they hooked the dolls, the teddy bear's eye, up to this thing and then pulled the teddy bear back to see how many pounds of pressure it could be seen before it came off. And that's the other thing, too. They're not just like pulling this and having fun. They're making measurements and they're using standardized force that they're applying to this. Right. Like the seams, the sewing has to be able to withstand like 1 weight for 10 seconds without opening up. Just things like that. Right. And it's thanks to these groups like the EU or the ASTM and who have gone through and said, if your toy makes a sound, it should be no louder than this. Or if you are manufacturing a toy gun, it should be marked like this. So it's obviously a toy and not a real gun. Like just comprehensive standards that everyone could adhere to to keep little kitties to deeds safe. Yes. I just think it's great that there are people out there doing that because it's kind of a new thing. Well, sure. And they ostensibly have done the research on, like they really cover all their bases. What could we imagine a child doing with this thing? I suspect that even as much time as they spend doing that sure. Kids still come up with some wack stuff to do with toys. Yeah. I mean, I told the story during the evil and evil thing. We used to make coat hanger hoops and dip them in gasoline to jump evil through. I wish I would have known you back then so I could stand there and watch that. Oh, man. Well, you would have been putting on your we would have been running the Pyrotechnic for your Bonjovi concert. Oh, wow. Good thinking. God. And I would have been all over that. You know, it's not too late. That's true. All right, so that's toy making sure toys are safe. Once the toy is safe, then there's this whole second thing that we were kind of talking about from the movie Big, like the great scene when Tom Hanks, his first and grown up Josh Baskin, is in the office. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Did you look up his name, or do you just walk around knowing it? No, I know the movie Big inside and out. Wow. Is that one of your favorites? Oh, sure. You've been running around asking people on movie crush what their favorite movie is. What's yours? It's Big. It no, but it's up there. I love the movie big. I've seen it a dozen times or more. Got you easily. Josh Baskin. Yeah. So a little Josh Baskin is all grown up in the office. And what's his name? Is it John heard that he recently passed away. He's the evil corporate executive that has his idea. Yeah, I remember his famous line, stop having fun. Yeah. And he makes his Big presentation. I think it was like a building that turns into a robot. And Tom Hanks very sweetly just raised his hand, said, I don't get it. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, I don't get it. And that's basically what they want to ask kids. Like, do you want to play with this? Is it fun? Like, adults design these things, and they might I would assume that if you're a toy designer, you have a mind of a child to a certain degree, but you're still not a kid. Yeah. It's got to pass that test. Right? Exactly. That's the whole point of having toy testers. It's kids. They're not adult toy testers. Maybe their parents are there or something like that. But the whole point of actual market development toy testing is by just giving kids some toys and seeing what they do with it. That's right. And there's a lot of places that do this. Right. Apparently Mattel has something called the Mattel Imagination Center in El Segundo. And if you live around El Segundo are willing to travel to El Sagundo and you have a child at zero to 13, there's a pretty high likelihood that you'll be able to get into the door and your kids will be able to play with some toys and be watched by scientists behind two way mirrors. But I think that's pretty close to reality. I think the places where you go to actually test on site with toys are a little more fun than a room with a two way mirror, but it's still the same principle generally, you're being observed while you're playing with toys as a kid. Yeah. And to get these gigs, the dream job for a kid, or I guess you think the job from hell for a parent, pay attention. Like, sometimes they might get in touch with you. Sometimes you might can follow the social media page of, like, the Mattel Imagination Center if you just Google toy testing jobs. There are pages and pages on places where you can submit your name, and from there, it's probably a bit of a lottery like experience, depending on what exactly they're looking for. Like, your kid might fit a demographic, but there's still a lot of kids in that demo that they have to sift through. So it's not like you can say, don't promise your kid you can get them a job as a toy tester. Right? Oh, yeah. You may want to not don't even tell them that that's a job until you've secured it. Don't even say the word toy around your kids. Yeah, exactly. So there's the old school way is, like, going directly to the company, like to go to Mattel or Fisher Price, maintain something called its Play Lab, and you can email these companies directly and basically send your kid's resume, maybe a video of your kid playing with the toy, what they would be looking for. Like you said, they might be looking for a certain demographic, but more often than not, if they're just looking for, like, a go to toy tester, to where your kid actually has the job of being a toy tester, where some company or companies are mailing your kid toys to test, you basically need to audition for that. And you would want to include a video and that your kid in the video would want to be using coherent words that express how he or she's feeling about that toy at that moment, and you may get picked up. That's the old school way of doing it. Although if you want to do super old school, use a video camera and send in, like, a VHS tape of your kid playing with the toy. That's the old school way of doing it. Now you can go on to social media like you were saying, Chuck, and it's a lot easier for companies to reach out in a targeted way to basically tap kids to become toy testers. Yes. If you are a mom, Mommy blogs are huge. They are huge on the Internet. And they get sent everything from baby products that they can use to mommy products to toys. So tell your mom, start a blog, become a top blogger, and she'll thank you because then she'll be rich. Yeah. Say, mom, start a viral blog today. Who is it? Ellen DeGeneres has a show feature where she has these kids that come out and test toys on TV. You're not going to get that job because these two kids already have it. Well, one of the kids I'm not sure what Tray Hart's background was, but noah Ritter, he was the apparently kid on Allen. Remember him? No. He came off ride and was asked by a local news person, like, what he thought of the ride. And he's like, well, apparently I thought it was great. It had me scared half to death. You've ever seen the video of that kid? No. Oh, it's beyond adorable. He's one of the two toy testers now. So that's how he got that gig. Yes. Good for him. What else? You can start a YouTube channel. There are actual kids out there with their own YouTube channels where they test toys. And beyond that, I want to recommend have you ever seen our buddy Joe Randazzo's lego Dude Reviews? Yeah, I have. I don't know if you have to be a friend of Joe or not, but go out there and look at Lego Dude Reviews lego City Logging Truck. And our friend Joe, formally of The Onion and formerly of At Midnight fame, our comedian writer friend. It's just the funniest thing I've ever seen. And it doesn't translate to everyone because there are comments like, is this guy for real? Right? Yeah, because he's doing it straight. But it's like all those reviews, like they start off with the box that it comes in and said joe starts off with the box and how well taped up it is. It's just really funny. Yeah, he's a nice spoof. Lego Dude Reviews. Lego Dude Reviews. And there are all kinds of those, but specifically Lego City Logging Truck. And you'll just see that sweet face of Joe's and you'll notice him. But there is a boy called well, I don't know what his full name is. Evan Tube HD is a YouTube channel. Yeah. He and his sister do reviews. Yeah. And he has four and a half million subscribers. Is that as of today? Yeah, 4.6%. I noticed they did like a pizza challenge where they just put weird stuff on pizza and it has like 65 million views. Unbelievable. It is unbelievable. It's crazy. Chuck, if you ask somebody back in 1980 to conceive of what TV's like in the future, and they said it's people just opening up toys on TV and that's it. You'd be like, that's a pretty good description. I would buy that. Well, the features now well, there's the other one, the Disney collector, BR right? This is who I'm talking about. Nine and a half million subscribers. And like you said, there's literally nothing but the hands of some woman, some anonymous robot AI creature right now. It's a real person's hands opening up toys and playing with them and talking a little bit in a very creepy voice. If you ask me. I think it's great. You think your voice is great? Dude? Yeah. Peppa Pig. It creeped me out. Oh, I liked it. Okay, so her name probably is Vera Credidio. Vera Moneybags. Yeah. Get this. She's even more wealthy than you realize. She's a woman in Winter Park, Florida. If that's her, then that's supposedly her and her husband, Messius Critidio. Okay. He has something called Blue Toys Club Surprise, which is the boys version, basically, of Disney collector BR. And together, they seriously are probably clearing 20 plus million dollars a year making a video every day and uploading it. And she will say Peppa Pig, or something like that, and say what it is, the product that she's holding or opening or playing with or whatever. And that's it, man. It's like you were saying, all you see are her hands. She's opening the packaging. She's actually really good at opening packaging. She never gets frustrated. I didn't see them have to cut, and there was no jump cut or anything like that. She's really good at opening packaging. And then she kind of says what it is out loud and then just, like, sets it down to the side. And I was watching it like, this is ridiculous. This is the first 10 seconds. This is ridiculous. People actually watch this. I can't believe this. And then the next thing I knew, the next four minutes were me sitting there with my mouth kind of open a little bit, just zoned out, watching this. I think that's the whole point. Kids love it. Toddlers love watching that stuff. I can see why. Yeah. Her husband, though, or I should say Blue Toys Club Surprise, he doesn't talk at all. And that I find a little creepy. He just breathes heavily. He just, like, plays with them. He plays with them more than she does. She just opens them. He opens them and plays with them, but he doesn't talk. But again, you just see the hands. Yeah. $20 million a year. Yeah. What a world. It is quite a world. It's the future. All right, so we take another break. Yes. All right, let's do that. And we're going to come back and finish up with a little fun with some of the most dangerous toys of all time right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to sex by cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. Okay, we're back, man. Are you ready? I'm ready. So this list could go on for years? Yes. There are lots of lists like this out there. It's not meant to be comprehensive. It's just a selection of some of our favorites du jour, huh? Sure. So one that I saw was the Snack Time Kid cabbage Patch Doll. Yes. Which you could feed real stuff to it in the ad. They feed, like, the Cabbage Patch Kid, a French fry or two, or maybe I think it came with food. That's what it was. It came with food. And you could feed it, and it would just keep chewing and swallow, and then, bam, the plastic French fry was gone. Your Cabbage Patch Kid just ate a French fry. Can you believe it? And that was the whole thing, right? Yeah. But they would chew no matter what was placed in their mouth. Yeah, like fingers or hair. Right. And they wouldn't stop either. So your little kid could end up with, like, a crushed finger or lose a big tuft of hair, and the Cabbage Patch Kid would just be all fits and elbows, saying, More. Give me more. Yeah, that's something for your nightmares. Cabbage Patch Kid just chewing their way toward you. Exactly. Connected by your hair. To you. So that was recalled by Mattel in So they did the right thing there. Yeah, they did. Probably the most famous one of all time is lawn darts. Yeah. Lond darts. I played it when I was a kid. If you haven't seen londarts of a newer generation, just Google it and you would have two big kind of hula hoop rings, kind of like a horseshoe game. And you would launch these large plastic sharpish darts. Plastic on one end? Yeah. The fins were plastic. The stick part or the what would you call that? The dead end. The piercer. Sure, yeah. Was metal. And it was sharpish. It wasn't like a razor or anything, but it was sharp enough to where, if you launched this thing from across the yard and you look up and go, I can't see it. It's in the sun. And all of a sudden it's in your eyeball and you're blind. Yeah, that happened to some people. Like, people were getting injured by these things. Apparently there were 7000 reported injuries from lawn darts. What did you call them? Jarts? No, I never said that. I thought you call them Jarts earlier. No. Okay. That is the thing, though. I've heard of Jarts. What are those? I thought that was the same thing. Maybe that was the brand name. Maybe. I'm not sure. But they were banned, actually. They didn't even have a chance to be recalled. They were banned in 1988. So it is illegal to manufacture, sell, possess, and certainly play with lawn darts in the US. By punishment of death, by law and arts. Yes. I just looked it up quickly. By the way, Jarts was the brand name for at least one of them. I'm sure there was more than one kind. There definitely was. Because the one I saw was Franklin yards. Franklin. They made the shuttlecocks that my family used to play badminton with. Did you know I was like a world class badminton player? I'm learning so much today. Now that I think about it. World class is probably misleading. Neighborhood class. Neighborhood class, for sure. Yeah. All right. I could destroy the neighborhood at least. Yeah. I will still play a game of badminton. My brother set one up a couple of years ago. Of course. How did you do? I was okay. Good enough? Yes. Have you ever watched, like, Olympic baby? Oh, it's awesome. It is. It's amazing. It is amazing. I can't even follow it. They could be out there faking like, there is no shuttlecock and I will never know. Yeah. The only way it could get better is if Disney collector BR commented on it, but didn't even talk about what was going on. She just said, Pippipy, extra squishy. All right, so this next one is actually these next two are legit. Scary. The Atomic Energy Laboratory. One AC. Gilbert, invented the Erector set, and he released this energy lab, like sort of like a little chemistry lab set thing, but it actually had uranium. It had real radioactive materials, so you could see, like you could create mist trails and things. Yeah, it was like a chemistry set for kids, but with radioactivity. That was the point of it. This is at a time when the government was like, no, it's all fine. Radioactivity is fine. Yeah, good for you. It gives you a healthy glow. Yeah. And the next one, the CSI fingerprint examination kit this was on IO nine list, was the number two most dangerous toy of all time. Yes, I think also, thanks for saying that the last three were from the Band Toy Museum online. Yeah. And like we said, all these and I looked at a bunch of these lists, and it's mostly the same stuff. Sure. Which is good to know that it's not like there's really a hundred things and we're just picking our favorite. Right? Exactly. So the CSI fingerprint examination kit, you could play CSI, you could dust for fingerprints with trimley, which is one of the deadliest kinds of asbestos. The powder that you used to dust had about 7% trim alight. And this was really scary. And it's amazing that it got through because this was not the 1950s. Yeah. No, it was like the early two thousand s, I believe, because it was a CSI brand fingerprinting kit and I guess so. I saw that. What is it? Tremolite? Yeah, I think they used actual fingerprint dust. And that's like part of something that fingerprint technicians have to work with is asbestos. But they packaged it up and sold it for kids and the company went bankrupt pretty quickly. Yes, I would imagine so. What about bucky balls? It's kind of a legendary one. Do you remember those? Yeah. I didn't know that these had a bad ending because I remember my nephew and niece got bucky balls for Christmas whenever, I mean, not too long ago. And they were awesome and cool, and I played with them like crazy at their house. Yeah, they're fun. They're great. They're like ball bearings that are super strong magnet. Right? Yeah, it's really neat. So far, so good. You can build stuff out of them. You can hold stuff to a refrigerator with them, whatever you want to do. It's just a great round magnet. But the problem is that if you swallowed more than one, you could be in big trouble because these things were very strong magnets. And if you had one in your intestine and another one in a different part of your intestine, they would come together and your intestine would be pinched off right there. Yeah. And this actually happened to the extent where about 1000 or so kids required surgery to get these out. And they were a big hit. It was kind of just one of those Christmas toys that really captured yeah. Must have. Christmas toy. And I guess the inventor did not want to acknowledge this, so he basically said, I'm not recalling these. These are a hot item. The federal government sued him. He dissolved his company instead of funding a recall. And so they went after him personally to try and get $57 million out of him. Yeah. Supposedly settled for about 1% of that. Yeah, 1%, I know. 57 million. Down to what, 570,000, right? Yeah, that was my calculation, too. But I was like, that's so small. I'm not very confident about saying it out loud. Thank you for swooping in. Well, I think that's right. I didn't calculate it. And I'm terrible at math. We'll find out. I am too, buddy. And look how far we've gotten in life. Yeah, it's $570,000. So thank you for using the calculator. Sure. And then lastly, Chuck, we've mentioned it before. We mentioned the prototype for it that was banned. The Easy Bake Oven itself, the famous one that was in the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2006, was itself banned. Yeah, this one did not. So was that the deal with the other one that was a prototype? No, it was like a predecessor, I guess, is what I mean. Yeah, because the Easy Bake Oven never got up to 600 degrees. No, but it got up to 200 degrees Celsius, 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You don't bake anything like that much. Like, that is hot. Yeah. Like you could cook a pizza in that thing. Yes. Not well, but you could. Yes. If you had time. Sure. But they had some problems with them over the years. I mean, this is, like you said, a hall of Fame toy that's been around forever and beloved by boys and girls for generations. And 250 incidents reported 16 cases of second or third degree burns over the years. Yeah. And there was specifically a design flaw that got little kids fingers trapped in the oven when it was hot, and one little girl apparently had to undergo a partial finger amputation, says IO nine. Very sad. It is sad. But we wouldn't know about this stuff if it weren't for consumer protection. And I guess that's the moral of the story. That's becoming the moral of the story lately. Our Restaurant Inspectors episode. Oh, yeah. Now, toy testing. Yeah, there you go. Good point. If you want to know more about toy testing, you can type those two words into the search bar@householdforce.com, and it'll bring up an article. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this something we missed in Napoleon episode. Hey, guys. A long time listener, first time writer. Just listen to the Freedom of Information Act episode. He acknowledges he's a little behind. I wanted to bring something to your attention. Many states have laws modeled after the foyer. And there's a disturbing trend in the last few years, there are many special interest groups and activists out there that have begun using FOIA requests to stall legitimate research. This sounds familiar. Yeah, exactly. With facilities having hundreds of terabytes of data to potentially sift through. Complying with a request for, say, every inter departmental email from 2000 to 2017, they can completely shut down an operation with only a handful of researchers. Another tactic is to cherry pick from tons upon tons of data to attempt to piece together an argument to discredit unfavorable study results. The groups making the request know this, so it's a win win for them. They get tons of private emails to look through, to spend into something nefarious. And even if and when they find nothing, they still throw a wrench into legitimate research and endeavors. How about that man? He said he was a little disappointed we didn't mention it, but first of all, Brandon, I didn't know about this. Yeah, same here. Brandon, lay off. That's why? But he said, I realized you focused more on the federal version, so that's not much of an issue there. He let us off the hook. Yeah. He says you guys are awesome. Keep up the great work. Sincerely guy you should know. Brandon Ben Zak. Thanks a lot, Brandon. That was pretty smart. Thanks for letting us know so we could, in turn, let everybody else know terrible stuff. Yes. I got to look into that. Now, if you want to alert us to something that we walked right past, please do. We always want to know that kind of thing. You can tweet to us at S y skodcast or Joshua and Clark. You can hang out on Facebook at Charlesw chuck Bryant or Stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena 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, act during play time, give epic belly rubs and feed them Halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. 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e5c39398-da6c-43d0-8745-ae7c014a51d4 | Short Stuff: Salute the Grilled Cheese | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-salute-the-grilled-cheese | Today we pay tribute to the comfiest of comfort food, the grilled cheese sandwich.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Today we pay tribute to the comfiest of comfort food, the grilled cheese sandwich.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Wed, 20 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=110, tm_isdst=0) | 15276977 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry standing in for Dave, like usual, but that's cool. And this is short stuff. That's right. And this comes from our old friends and Kyle Lakes@houseoffworks.com about the grilled cheese. And I double and triple checked and corroborated I hate that word. Do you? Because you can't say it. I can never say it right, corroborated you have to say it like that. But I went to all sorts of food websites about grilled cheese and they kind of all said the same thing. So it's either one of those internet things where everyone's lying in unison or how stuff works. Got it right. Well, yeah, I like to presume that house stuff works. Got it right. But before we start, I just want to throw out to everybody a little tip. If this makes you want a grilled cheese, which is a pretty good likelihood it would, it did for me. You could do a lot worse than buying yourself a nice little wedge of fontina cheese. Oh, that's not where I thought you were headed. Where did you think I was headed? I thought you were going to go with mayo instead of butter. No, I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah, that's a legitimate grilled cheese technique, is to use mayonnaise as your fat instead of butter and it provides it's crispier than butter in the end. Okay. It doesn't quite have the unctuousness of a butter, but I also heard Jay Kenji Lopez Alt, food scientist and extraordinary chef and book writer, say that if you're going to do that, then at least don't use CuPy mayonnaise, because he said that creates a bit of a funk because of some ingredient in the Cuba. Yeah, I could see that. Yes. Try it with mayo. It's interesting. It makes sense that it would be a little crispier because there's egg whites in there, so I could see them cooking up crispier than just butter. Yeah, it's good. I like it. I mean, I'm still going to go with butter overall and I'm a mayonnaise freak, but I still will take the butter. So with fontina, it melts really well. It's got a neat taste. I would recommend maybe mixing it with another cheese. Yeah, whatever you normally use. Just also add fontina and you're going to be like, oh, wow, now I know what a gooey grilled cheese is. And hat tip to our friends at Blue Apron, who introduced me to using fontina and grilled cheese and one of their recipes. Okay. It works really well. Yeah. One of the most comforting of comfort foods is the grilled cheese. And we're going to talk a little bit about some kind of weird facts and things. But the history of the grill cheese is interesting in that it's been around for a long time. It's been mentioned in ancient Roman texts, but certainly beginning in about 1910, the French were making and it's one of my favorite breakfast sandwiches, the croquemalcio, which is I love them. It's like a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in, I think, pancake batter and then grilled, something like that. Heat is applied to it to cook the outside, basically. I don't think you have to have a pancake batter, though, do you? That's what I've always seen. It sounds like you're talking about a Monte Cristo. Are they not virtually the same thing? Well, Monte Cristo, I think, has jam in it, but it is definitely dipped and griddled. But I didn't know what croquette was. And then you can also add the egg, and I believe is that a croak, madam? I don't know, Chuck. You really put me on the spot here. Can we talk about Earth science instead? No, we're talking about the grilled cheese. And this is all off the dome as me ordering at a restaurant. Maybe we should just stick to the facts. Okay. All right. So fact number one the grilled cheese really started to take off thanks to something that you wouldn't think would be related until you stopped and thought about it, and that would be sliced bread. The next time you hear somebody say, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, you should mutter, thank you, auto Frederick Row weather and see what they do, what their response is. If they step away, they're not that cool. If they say, I know exactly what you mean, or they say, what do you mean? Then they're a friend. Yeah. I think maybe that deserves the short stuff on its own, sliced bread. So we should get into that. He's the father of it. He engaged in cottage with bread, and a baby loaf of bread that was sliced came out, and he's the father of sliced bread in the world. It's just the facts he said we're sticking to. Oh, goodness me. All right, so you've got your bread, and this is in the grilled cheese, because of the sliced bread, became sort of a staple menu item during the Great Depression when it was fairly inexpensive, fairly filling. But this was of the open faced variety with a grated cheese, correct? Yeah. Okay, what's next? Okay, continue. Then James Lcraft comes along, the entrepreneur who revolutionized pasteurization of cheese and processed cheese. And in the Jlcraft. And brothers company, they opened their first plant in Illinois and started selling what the English would call rat cheese or rat trap cheese, because the English are very snooty about their cheeses. Yeah. And James craft is like, I'm not trying to be fancy to stop. I know it's crud cheese, but it's really shelf stable. You can transport it very long distances, and the guys in the Navy love it. Yeah. I mean, it was in a Navy cookbook, there was something called American cheese filling sandwiches on the Navy chef menu and government cookbooks. And what's better than American cheese filling sandwich? Yeah. And so my impression chuck is that initially craft processed cheese came in huge blocks, akin to probably, like, velveeta today, but I'm guessing even bigger. And it wasn't until the believe that maybe even 1950, that craft is like, we're going to slice that for you. Like auto Fredrick Rowwetters invention, but with cheese instead of bread. But they said, we're just going to slice the cheese, that's all. We're not going to get into any of the other row, wetter weirdness. That's right. So now you've got sliced bread, you've got pre sliced packaged cheese. And even though grilled cheeses have been around and I did see things that suggested that people were adding a second slice of bread during the Great Depression for the men who went to work that needed a little extra. But it really started to come on the scene in the 1950s and 60s in America once you had all the bread and all the cheese that you could ever dream of. Right. And so from that point on, it was like, okay, now we've got grilled cheese sandwiches. They're going to take off like a rocket. But like you said, there's a lot of recipes around that kind of predate the grilled cheese as we know it, which apparently just dates to the lot of them, are open face. Most of them are open face, if not all of them. And one of the one thing they have in common is that they have all sorts of different ways to, I guess, apply heat to this, because if you just put a slice of cheese on a piece of bread, you have a cheese sandwich cheese. Oh, you mean without cooking it? Yes, you have to apply heat for it to be a grilled cheese, which is indicative of the name, but they have all different names and all different ways of applying heat from starting about, I think, is as far back as it went. Yeah. And so why don't we take a break, we'll talk about some of these recipes and some other grilled cheesy facts right after this. All right. You mentioned you're talking about the recipe for a melted cheese and Sarah Tyson Rohr's book, mrs. Rohr's new cookbook. Yeah, she said, Cook it in a hot oven, why don't you? That's the cheese toast, though I beg to differ. Same thing with Florence. A coles. She had a cookbook called 700 Sandwiches. I'd like to do that. That's amazing title. And she said that you broil the ingredients. Still, what you do is take a piece of bread and put some cheese on it and cook it open face again. Cheese toast is what you're talking about. Or as you may call it, cheese pond. She used to make that when she was a kid. Okay. Finally, in the late thirties, people come to their senses and they start to just kind of nip at the outlines of what is a real grilled cheese. That's right. That is the toasted sandwich recipe in the Boston Cooking School cookbook, they talked about boiling, which is still cheese toast. But then someone finally says, why don't you put some butter on it and throw it in a pan? Yeah. And then Irma Rombauer, who wrote The Joy of Cooking all the way back in 1953, said, I got one even better. You're going to need a second slice of bread for this, but we've already established that's abundant, and you can do that. But get yourself a nice waffle iron and just put it in there, and you've got yourself a grilled cheese. How about prepanini? Yeah, that's the beginning of panini. And she wasn't even Italian. Okay, I love it. And then from about that point on, people are just like, I'm just going to put some butter or mayo on the bread and put it in a pan and heat it on the stove and call it a grilled cheese. Yeah, I guess we can talk personal stuff. You talked about your fontina. Fontina. I'm a big fan of mixing up just a couple of kinds of cheeses, maybe a slice or two, and then something grated that's different on top. Maybe a Colby jack or something. But what you don't want to do, or at least what I don't think you want to do, is put too much cheese. Like, you want it a little thick. You want it more than like, a slice, but you can't go too far overboard. It's a lot of cheese. You know what I'm saying? Yes, it is a lot of cheese. And if you're speaking about your arteries, then no, you don't want to go too far overboard. If you're talking about overwhelming the bread, then that just comes down to a ratio of bread to cheese. So if you have a thicker bread. If you have a loaf of bread like Row Weather's wife was unsliciced. You can slice it yourself to whatever thickness you want. And you can pile in as much cheese as you like. But bread cannot be overwhelmed by the cheese in the same way that you can't just do one slice of cheese and expect it not to be overwhelmed by the bread. Yeah. And it also depends on what you're going for. If you're going for a real, like, gourmet type of thing, you're going to have different kinds of cheeses. You may want it a little thicker, but you're probably not going to be dipping it into tomato soup like you want that sandwich to hold up in the tomato soup. Oh, yeah. No, you definitely do, for sure. I was going to say I don't think there's a grilled cheese that couldn't be put into tomato soup. And if so, you've exceeded a grilled cheese to some disappointing degree. Yeah, I guess so. Because even if some of the bread chunks off in the soup, that's a pretty good bite for sure in the spoon. You know what else it's good for dipping is french onion. Oh, never dipped in a French onion. Oh, it's good. It's almost like a meatless oju sandwich. Well, I mean, there's already bread and cheese in there. What are you dipping? That's true. More bread and cheese. I like to double up. Okay. Oh, man. I love a good crock of French onion soup. So good. I made some from scratch. As a matter of fact, it was so good that I actually went back and made my own beef stock. So I made French onion soup from scratch. All of it from scratch. I would love to stuff that I made using store bought chicken stock was way better than the second time when I tried to make my own beef stock. Oh, really? So, yeah, it sounds really weird. You think? Well, it's got to be beef. No, use chicken stock instead. And it's really good, and it's not very hard to make. It just takes a little time to get the onions to caramelize. Yeah. I've been making ramen at home, and I use this, my starter momofuku, Maefuko. Yeah. Of course, they sell their noodles online, but they also sell their stock that you can get delivered frozen and why that stuff is good. You can get stock also from White Oak Pastures. We talked about them in the Future of Farming episode. They're like the ones who their farming techniques actually sequester carbon rather than releasing it. Right. It's pretty neat. But they sell stock online, too. Good. I'm so hungry. I guess we should mention a few of these cheese facts here before we go, right? Okay. Fast, Chuck, fast. This one seemed remarkable to me, but apparently in 2007, craft foods thought people aren't eating enough grilled cheese. And I double check this. They spent $1.4 billion marketing dollars to get people to eat more grilled cheese, which is and have it on restaurant menus, which a lot of hipster comfort food restaurants. You can get, like, a $14 grilled cheese in a lot of these places. Now, I don't know if it was due to that marketing campaign, but that is a lot of marketing cheese to be throwing at cheese. Yes. And in a deeply 2007 move, they held an online contest on MySpace to get people to make videos that are like Odes to grilled cheese. And a guy named Chris Gianloni, I believe, who went on to become a game designer, he designed the Reincarnation game series. He made a video about a grilled cheese going into a tanning bed, and that's how it gets grilled. And he won 50,000 Simoleons from that. Wow. That's what I said, too. I'll bet that's what Chris G and Alone said when they call them. None of the rest of these are that interesting, I don't think. No, I think it's great to end on Christian Maloney. I hope he's a good guy. Yeah. Everyone has their own take on a grilled cheese sometimes, because I love that everything bagel spice. Sometimes I'll butter it up and then sprinkle some of that and griddle that into the bread. That's really good. That is good. Oh, wait. One more thing, Chuck, because it's an opportunity to plug our book all the way back. In 2004, online casino Golden palace.com paid $28,000 for a grilled cheese sandwich that had been made a decade before. That's right. I remember that because it has the likeness of the Virgin Mary in it. Yeah, and we mentioned that in the chapter on back masking in our book, stuff You Should Know. Incomplete. Compendium. That's right. And this actually kind of did look like the Virgin Mary. Yeah, it did. Well, way to fact check how stuff works. Sure. If you want to know. Oh, yeah. I don't do that in this series, do we? Nope. You just say short stuff out. Short stuff 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." | |
How Miranda Rights Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-miranda-rights-work | Back in 1966, the Supreme Court decided that suspects in criminal cases had the right to be reminded that they didn't have to talk to the fuzz if they didn't want to, as stated in the 5th amendment. Since that ruling, scores of other cases have shaped and | Back in 1966, the Supreme Court decided that suspects in criminal cases had the right to be reminded that they didn't have to talk to the fuzz if they didn't want to, as stated in the 5th amendment. Since that ruling, scores of other cases have shaped and | Thu, 04 Jul 2013 14:04:33 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=14, tm_min=4, tm_sec=33, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=185, tm_isdst=0) | 27882132 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global energy company with customers in different places on different systems? So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now data is available anywhere, securely. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited. Excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseupworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this stuff you should know. Gary just told us right before she pressed record, don't forget to be clever. Yeah. What is that about? I don't know, man. I'm a little thrown off right now. Well, I think maybe because you said Miranda rights were named after Sex and in the City character. Is that what you're talking about? That was like 45 minutes ago. It's a callback. So I guess that was clever in Jerry's book. That's the thing. I didn't even consider that clever. Right. Juvenile, maybe. So Miranda from Sex and the City. So what was your response to that one? I don't remember what I said. I thought it was fairly clever. Well, we'll just skip over that. You said you have the right to remain fabulous. Oh, yeah, that's right. So that's the recap of a conversation we had a little while ago, everybody. Well, people always say they want to know what happens behind the scenes. It's just tomfoolery. There you go. Chuck. Yes. I know that you and I have both been arrested many times, and we've done some time in the stir and all that, so we know what Miranda rights are. Yeah, not true. But the average person also knows what Miranda rights are, because they're so ubiquitous on every cop show, every lawyer show, every show. I think they show up on Er. It's still on, right? I have no idea. Like, season 27. I have no idea. I don't think it is. I had a pretty good long run, sure, but Miranda rights are just this thing that become totally ingrained in our culture. We can all say it. Let's say it together. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. But hey, buddy, don't fret. You have the right to an attorney, and if you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you. Right. And then over time, apparently, some agencies have added, and if you waive these rates, you can invoke them at any time. Yeah. I hadn't heard that one. They hadn't made it to TV yet. Really? Right. Yeah. He goes, like, short and sweet. I'm not even going to tell you that. Yes. Castle he's all business. Yeah. Is he a cop, though? I think he's a private investigator. I got you. Although I'm not sure. So he wouldn't have to mirandize anybody. No, but he's castle so he does. I've never seen it. I love Nathan feeling, though. Oh, who doesn't? Yes. He's a nice guy. But this idea that Miranda rights are everywhere and everybody knows them and knows that they exist. Sure. But first of all, the case behind them, I think, is probably unknown. And then, secondly, what they're designed to do, really, the real nuts and bolts of it, it hadn't really occurred to me, even though it's pretty self evident when you think about it. Yeah. And it seems really straightforward. But it can get a little tricky, which we'll discuss how that happens. Well, so the idea of the Miranda rights is fairly recent. It goes back to a case called Miranda versus Arizona v. Arizona. Yes. Which is like the legal profession can't even be bothered to include the S when they abbreviate versus and we should also point out that it wasn't just this one case. Miranda v. Arizona gets all the press because the name Miranda, but it was actually four cases that they consolidated. But we want to give Vignera v. New York West over the United States and California v. Stewart. They're due as being part of this thing. And basically all the cases were similar in that there were confessions after interrogations, and those confessions were used against these various people. Right, but we're going to stick with Miranda, though. The lawyers of these well, not just us. I mean, everybody does it's. The Miranda case. The Miranda Laws. They're Miranda rights. Your Miranda's. Yeah, but the whole point behind these and all of the cases that the complaints had was that the people who committed these crimes and made these confessions and were later convicted for them were not aware that they didn't have to talk to the police. Right. And this is actually the Miranda case goes back to the American right, guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Yeah. Fifth Amendment to refrain from self incrimination. That goes back to 1791, like you said. The Fifth Amendment basically says that you don't have to tell on yourself. The cops can't make you talk. Right, is what that is. Yeah. But until 1966, I guess you just needed to be up on your Constitutional knowledge. And then in 1966, they eventually will get to the case. They said, Maybe we should start telling people this when we arrest them. Right. So let's go back in time to in Phoenix, Arizona. The cops picked up Ernesto Miranda for questioning in a kidnapping and rape case. His car was spotted near the scene of the crime. He was called in. When he got there, he was like, I didn't do this, man. He was completely cooperative. He's like, I didn't do any of this. 2 hours later, an interrogation. He was not identified in a lineup, but the cop said the girl identified you in the lineup. And he went, oh, I think his direct quote was, well, I guess I ought to tell you about it. Then the cops lied to him. And this is a clear case of not doing things the right way. Well, no, the Supreme Court has upheld the use of deception by police in interrogation. They can lie their tails off to you. Right. But not if you're not Miranda's. Right. That was the point is, he didn't know that he could just be quiet and not say anything. So he just volunteered the information, signed a written confession. And that's the whole point. And that's what the justices in the Supreme Court who heard the Miranda case and all the other cases that combined to make it we're getting at was that when you are being interrogated by the police, you're in their custody. They are allowed to use deception, they are allowed to use all sorts of tactics to coerce you to talk. But if you're not aware that you don't have to talk, then what you're saying amounts to an involuntary confession and hence shouldn't be able to be used against you because you have a constitutional right against self incrimination. If you're informed that you have that right, then you are making the decision to go ahead and confess against yourself. And you're waiving that, right? Yes. And that can be used in court. Exactly. So they give you the option, essentially. So this is what the whole case was about in 1966, like we said, the Supreme Court heard this case and ruled yeah. He was convicted, we should say. Right. Based on that confession in sentence to 30 years, I believe. 20 to 30. Yeah. And the Supreme Court case was part of an appeal. That's right. From that commitment, three years later, they heard this case. Yeah. And apparently the other three people probably represent even more than just those four cases total. Sure. Usually when the Supreme Court hears something, there's a lot of it going on in the courts. Yeah. And they said in a five to four decision, you know what, the suspect has to be read his rights, which one they'll call his Miranda rights. Yeah. And they specifically said prosecution may not use statements stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self incrimination. But the key there is custodial interrogation right. And established a couple of things. One, you can't self incriminate from the moment you are in custody, so it's not like you're on trial or something. And then any confession is involuntary, basically. And again, the reason that they're differentiating between in custody and not in custody is because once you're in custody, the cops can do things like lie to you or something like that. That's right. And in custody is the three keywords. Taken into custody is where all the gray area has been since then. Right. And still is today. Yeah. Because they were pretty clear in their ruling, like, yeah, this person has to be read their rights. Let's even print some cards for police officers to carry around with them so they can read off of the card if they have to. Yeah. And we should point out that Miranda actually they retried him without his confession and his girlfriend said, he confessed to me, so that was used in court. So he was found guilty again since the 20 to 30 years, again parole after five years, and then sold those little Miranda cards with his autograph on them for a while for like a buck 50. And then he was stabbed to death in a bar fight in 76. Yes. And the suspect who stabbed him was read his Miranda rights and so he never talked and he walked. Really? Yeah. Oh, my God. The irony. It's definitely irony. Wow. Yeah. In like the truest form of the word. That's right, man. So custodial interrogation is one of the keys here. In custody is where it gets a little hanky. Like, if you're in the back of a police car and you got your handcuffs on, then you're in custody. Right. That's pretty straightforward. Or even if you don't have handcuffs on, if the cops lock you in the car and it's understood by you that you're not allowed to get out, you're in police custody. Right. The official definition of custody and the Miranda decision is, quote unquote, denial of complete freedom of action. Right. But that's open to interpretation. It is. Because if you're handcuffed and you're put in the back of a locked police car, you're obviously denied freedom of action. You obviously have to be Mirandized. Right. You can bang your head on the little clear glass in front of you. Right. What were you saying? In police chases, like, you can defecate or urinate or whatever, do whatever you want back the cake, but that is not freedom of action. Right. It's been brought up, though, that because of the legal authority that cops represent, with their uniforms and their outwardly worn guns and tasers, all that stuff, they're mirrored sunglasses that they have some sort of they project just talking to a cop, a person might feel detained. Yeah. I think it's like an implied detention. If a cop came to my front door and said he had some questions for me regarding a crime, I don't think I would feel even though it's within my right, I don't think I would feel like I was able to say, no, actually, I'm going to go to the grocery store right now. Right, exactly. And just walk past them and get in my car or even, I'm going to have to ask you guys to leave. Yeah. Which, again, you said it is your right to do. They haven't placed you into custody, but you don't have to be Miranda's in the situation because you can tell the cops to leave. If you are in an interrogation room and you tell the cops to leave, they're not going to listen to you. If they're on your front doorstep and you tell them to leave, they are supposed to listen to you. And because of that, you have freedom of movement. You can go back in your house, you can go to the grocery store, you can tell the cops to leave. So even though the perception might be that you are being detained by the cops just by their very presence, and you don't feel like you can tell them to leave, this law isn't designed to let you be slippery. Right. 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 joint. 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 comdealsfordetails. Today's episode of Stephanie Shannon is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family. So they offer advanced, whole home security that puts you, your home, and your family. Safety first. With 24/7 professional monitoring, Simply Safefs 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@simplisafe.com. Stuff go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off. With interactive monitoring, just go to SimpliSafe.com. Stuff like a traffic stop, for instance, is not weird. But if you get stopped by a cop and you'd say, I've got \u00a35 of weed in my trunk. By the way, Mr. Officer, you caught me. That can be used in court because that is a noncustodial situation, right? Which is weird, though. I didn't realize that a traffic stop is considered noncustodial. Does that mean you can just drive off gray? Then that's a custodial situation. So does that mean that you can drive off legally, or does that mean that it is a gray area that the courts have no fleeing? That means you're evading. Evading what? Arrest a traffic stop. Okay, well, then that means you can't leave. You don't have freedom of movement, therefore, that's a custodial situation, and you should have to be Mirandized when you're pulled over. Well, hey, talk to the Supreme Court, my friend. I've been trying, but I do have a question. If there are any constitutional lawyers or any kind of lawyer really? Yeah. Who knows what they're talking about? Defense attorney. I'm very curious about that. Are you allowed legally to just drive off once a cop pulls you over? Since it's a noncustodial situation, my answer is no. I would imagine no, too, because every time you do well because you have committed a crime and the cop has pulled you over, maybe that's where the language gets tricky. You're not in custody, right? Maybe you're temporary detained. I bet you there's some specific language that allows for this. And I would never, like, argue this with a cop who pulled me over. That's not what I'm getting at. But I'm genuinely curious. If you can't drive off, then how is it a noncustodial situation? That's my question. Yeah, that's a good question, but that shows the slippery slope in the gray area, right? And like you said, I mean, if you say, hey, I've got \u00a35 of weed in my trunk, and the cop never Miranda it's you, and then after they says, well, you're under arrest, and then he Miranda's you, and you shut up. From that point on, they can still use that initial exact confession because it was noncustodial. Yeah, and here's the other thing. A lot of people well, not a lot of people. Some folks may be confused by if you're not read your Miranda rights, then you get released or whatever. Right? Not true at all. That just means that they can't use what you have said in court, and any ancillary incriminating evidence that came from that confession could not be used either. Right. Like, if they arrest you and you say they tell you you're placed under arrest, and then they're like, so we're going to get some tacos rather than, here's what we have to tell you about your Miranda rights. And then you say, I've got a bunch of weed on me. They can't use that confession about the weed against you because you hadn't been Mirandized. You've been told that the cops wanted tacos. Yeah. I wonder what keeps someone from voluntarily talking about evidence so it won't be able to be used. Man. We are criminal minds right here. I'm sure there's workarounds for all this. We're like Mandy Patinkin and the rest of the cast right here at this table in Yentl. No. Isn't he in Criminal Minds? No, I don't know. He's in Homeland. I watch that. He's also in the Princess bright. He's in Nego Montoya Monday. Patenkin. He was also the alien cop in Alien Nation. A lot of people don't know that. With Jimmy Khan. You never saw Alien Nation? Now, is that good? That was a great movie. It always looked silly to me. I'll tell you what, when you're 13, it is a great movie. A long time. It was Crow. Do you see that one? Yeah. It was nothing like crawl. I had, like, a good plot. It was like to live and die in La. With aliens. Right. Or enemy mine on Earth. Yeah. I never saw that one. It was just kind of the same deal. It's like it's Luke gossip, Jr. In an alien suit. And Dennis Quad. Right. Randy Quad. Dennis Quid. It definitely wasn't Randy. I'm pretty sure. All right, so Miranda rights here is the requisite meandering tangent. So there's an important thing we haven't covered yet in regards to Miranda rights, and it was recently got a lot of press with the bombings in Boston. Right. And that is the public safety exception in the case of the Boston bombing. What was his name? Jocar Sarnav. Okay. Joe Carr. There's a lot of ways to say it that are wrong. And then there's one right one which I may have had in there. So he is in the hospital. Everyone knows what happened. The bombings went off. The one brother was killed. They caught the other one, and he was wounded. And so he was in a hospital. And they had what they called an urgent public safety interview in the hospital without reading him his rights. He's asking for an attorney. They're like, you're not getting an attorney. Why don't you tell us what's going on? And he did. Yeah, he did. He confessed to the bombing. He told them about possible other bombs. I think that's how they found out that the apartment was possibly rigged with explosives. Or at the very least, there were explosives in his apartment, his brother's apartment. And they found all this out by denying him his right to keep quiet. And a lot of people were saying, well, you guys just blew the case. Why didn't you mirandize them? And it was because of this public safety exemption that came about that the Supreme Court ruled on in 1984. Yeah. New York v. Quarrels. Benjamin Quarrels was in custody at a grocery store in 1980, and a rape victim had identified him. And the cop tristram and said, hey, you've got an empty gun holster here? Is there a gun nearby? And he was like, yeah, it's right over there. Cop went and got the gun unloaded, it obviously secured the scene and that became a court case because the gun evidence was thrown out. An appellate court agreed and then later on the Supreme Court said no. You know what that's called? Securing the scene. That's a public safety exception. Right. You can't have a gun loaded gun in there. You can't have bombs waiting to go off potentially somewhere else. Right. So forget the Mirandasing. You need to secure everything. Right. And once that threat to public safety is secured, then you have to Miranda them. Yeah. In which the Boston case he just shut up after that. Right. So it's too late. Yeah, exactly. The Feds had gotten all they wanted out of them and we're like, sure, whatever. And apparently a judge ordered the Feds to Mirandize the guy after two days of this questioning. I bet that was a pretty satisfying reading of the rights at that point, I'm sure, because they knew they were covered. But I mean, this is such a Gestapo tactic too. We'll just question you about everything we want for two days until the judge ordered us the Miranda's. That means that some attorneys are going to have to go through all two days of that confession to pick out at what point the public safety exemption was basically exhausted. Right. And I mean, you can argue that any question that has to do with possible future terrorist attacks right, is protecting public safety, but it's just like I don't know, it definitely skirts the spirit of the law, I would think. Yeah. And I found an article written by the guy who originally, I think wrote the quarrels verdict and he was like, you know what? In the case with the Boston Bomber, they shouldn't even done that anyway because there was so much evidence. They didn't even need these confessions. Right. And it was in the true spirit of trying to secure public safety to find out if there was other explosives. Right. But from that point on, they were like it was completely unnecessary because the guy was convicted just from the evidence was so strong that they didn't even need that confession. Exactly. So after they found out about the bombs or whatever, whether there weren't bombs, then it seems to me like the public safety exemption would have been exhausted and they would have had to have Miranda's them. It's a slippery slope. But I mean, it's not like the CIA has to have admissible evidence in court to go after all the people that Joe Carr named, if he named anybody. Right. Or whatever he gave up. Sure. I don't know, I'm coming to trust like, Obama's security policies, like less and less. Really? Yeah, that's my opinion. Now I get it. It's a very fine line between like, hey, this guy's a terrorist and get that information, or people still have their human rights. Right, exactly. And it's such a difficult thing to swallow to the concept that some little punk who him and his brother blew people up in Boston and took people's lives and legs, that they did this, that the concept that they have any rights whatsoever is pretty unpalatable. But we as a society have decided that, yeah, you do have rights. If you're an American citizen, you have certain rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and court interpretation of those rights, and that's the law of the land. And I guess to just routinely skirt around those whenever it's determined to be called for by whoever is in charge of power, that's equally unpalatable to me. Yeah. Because also the court judged a criminal suspect. When you invoke the public safety exemption, it's not that that person doesn't have any rights, it's that the safety of the public trumps that person's constitutional rights. Right then. Right. But just for that narrow window of time right. And then after that, it's exhausted. That's right. And this is not the first time. It was just three years ago that the Feds did the same thing. They invoked the public safety exemption for the Time Square Bomber. Yeah. And he sang like a canary. If they just did it to Joe Carson, I don't think I would have a problem. But just the fact that it popped up three years ago, too, that's starting to indicate a pattern to me. Yeah. Terrorism, I think, is the key agent there. Sure. Got anything else? I'm done. We're going to get so much mail for that one. Hey, buddy. You have the right to remain fabulous. Thank you. That's my takeaway. Thank you. If you want to learn more about being fabulous, you can type that word into the search barhousoffworks.com. You can also type Miranda rights. M-I-R-A-N-D-A. Rites. And since I said search bar, somewhere in there, it's time for message break. 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.com fiveg for you, visit www. Dot att. Comcallprotect for details. Today's episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family, so they offer advanced, whole home security that puts you your home and your family safety first. With 24/7, professional monitoring simply saves agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah. And SimpliSafe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch. And SimpliSafe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards. From flooding to fires. You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes@simplisafe.com. Stuff go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe. comStuff and now it's time for Listening to Mail. Yeah. Before listening to Mail, we have a quick shout out. And we don't usually do this because we get inundated with requests for shout outs. Yeah. So every once in a while they caught you at the right time. Exactly. This is an anniversary shout out from Josh Underwood. He and his wife are teachers in Robertson County, Kentucky, and they've listened to our show incorporated in their classrooms, and they are celebrating their ten year anniversary. And he said if we could say Happy anniversary to Amanda. Can't think of anything that would make her smile more. So on June 14, he said, if it's late, don't worry about it. So this is probably going to be late, but I hope you guys had a great anniversary on June 14. Happy 10th, josh and Amanda Underwood. Yeah. Happy anniversary, you guys. Or I don't know if a man that took your name yeah, whatever her name might be. Yeah. So the real listener mail. Speaking of taking names is a good one. I'm going to call it Royal Tan and Bombs Theory. Oh, I like this already. Yeah, it's one of my favorite movies as the losing finger in a wood chopping accent. Hi, guys. My wife Molly and I have been listening for about three years. We both love it. I've always wanted to email you, but I didn't have a reason. And I didn't want to sound like a twelve year old girl talking to NSYNC or something. It gets pretty out of touch. Yeah, I guess it's wanted to say something interesting. So here are two interesting things. One. My name is Josh Bryant. Pretty interesting. It's like the two of us together. That's right. I appreciate you taking my name. And number two, he actually had three things, but one wasn't so interesting. Number two is I watched Wes Anderson's, Royal Tannin. Bombs was amazed at how different and unique all the characters were and how well they all work together as a family. After reading other theories about the movie, I think the one I love most is that every character represents a different stage of grief. So denial. I collect fan theories. Oh, I love it. That is a great one. Have you seen room 237 yet? No. Have you? No. I'm dying to them. Yeah. They didn't release it in Atlanta. I know. All right, so denial is Margot Tanninbaum, her unknown smoking habit, numerous marriages, secret crush on Ritchie. Totally. Denial. Yeah. Anger. Chaz. Tannin bomb. You guys say more. Pretty much throughout the whole movie, he's angry and full of resentment. Bargaining royal. Tannenbaum himself. He lies to get out of bad gambles and gambles to cover up bad lies. This is, like, pretty good. And he didn't make this up. He got off the Internet. But Joshua Bryant, you get no credit. It's like that kid who stole that haiku from a T shirt. Depression. Richie Tanner. Bong. Again, very obvious. See, when he tries to commit suicide. Great scene. And acceptance is ethylene. Tanninbaum. Her role is more subtle. Her acceptance is seen when she accepts Mr. Sherman's marriage proposal. It's a little thin there. It's also seen when she finally moves on from her old marriage and accepts her new life with her new husband. So that's sort of the most tenuous. Yeah, but he asked what we think, and I think that's pretty good. I love fan theories. Like, you five stages of grief. I doubt if that's the case. Well, that's what makes fan theory so great. If you just unlocked the director's secret sure. Then it's done. It's fine. You figured it out. One of the great things about fan theory is if it rivals what the director was trying to do or the writer was trying to do yeah, it was like English class. Remember back in English class? It was always and I had a problem with it back then, but now I love it. I would always be like, well, this teacher is just interpreting this. Like, who knows what the author meant? Oh, yeah. But that's kind of the point now. In my old age, I realized yeah, I remember feeling my brain unfurl and start to get like yeah, there are specific interpretations of things that kind of fit within a framework, but still, it's pretty wide. Agreed. It's nice. Pretty cool fan theory. I'm writing a blog post on them right now. I'm collecting them. Oh, yeah? So that's from Joshua Bryant. Joshua, I guess, is the result of some weird stuff you should know in breeding. Yeah, he's an experiment. That's right. Formed on a country dish. Let us know where you are right now. If you escape from our lab, we want to hear about it. Especially if you have some cool fan theory, man. Send us fan theories. Like, good ones. Yeah, I mean, like, good ones, not like stupid ones. Yes. I've been on feral children lately. What? That's been my obsession lately, reading about feral children. I might try and write a thing for fan theory. Feral children? What does that have to do with fan theory? Nothing. That's my obsession. Yours has been fan theory. Oh, I got you. I've just been obsessed with feral children. Yeah, because there have been actual ones in the Emerald Forest. Many cases. Okay, if you have a good fan theory and or a good feral children's story, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on stuff you should know, which is prior to that. facebookcom. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@discovery.com, and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyoushodenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetuffworks.com. Jackdards has quickly become the online shopping destination for guys. Here's why everything on the site is up to 80% off. As a listener of Stuff You Should Know, you can skip the membership wait list and get instant access@jackthreds.com. Konwstuff. That's jackthreds. Comnostuff. 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 Kilgarriff and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | ||
8a7b38bc-4a58-11e8-a49f-3bd06b083f87 | SYSK Selects: What's with the Winchester Mystery House? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-whats-with-the-winchester-mystery-hou | After her daughter and husband died, heiress Sarah Winchester became obsessed with the idea that spirits haunted her and to appease them she had to have a house continuously built for them. So she did - 24 hours a day for 38 years. | After her daughter and husband died, heiress Sarah Winchester became obsessed with the idea that spirits haunted her and to appease them she had to have a house continuously built for them. So she did - 24 hours a day for 38 years. | Sat, 27 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=300, tm_isdst=0) | 29598722 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. It's me, your old pal Josh. And for this week's SYSK Spooky select, I've chosen how the Winchester Mystery House worked. It debuted on Halloween of 2013, and on the surface, it's about some kooky rich woman who believed in ghosts haunting her, and so she made this crazy house that's super interesting. But if you peel back beneath the surface of the story a little more, you find, like, a clear picture of the person that she was, and she was as interesting as her house was. So hopefully you'll enjoy this one. It probably won't scare the pants off of you, but it's at the very least, interesting. So check it out and enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and happy Halloween, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Go do what you're about to do. Chuckles, boo. And Jerry. Jerry sings. You put the three together. Me josh Clark. There Chuck Bryant and there Gerry. Yeah. And you got stuff. The Halloween edition. Yes. We got a big old tub of candy corn here. Have you tried starburst candy corn? My goodness. I don't like candy corn, and I like starburst candy corn. Is it starburst or is it candy corn? It's candy corn with starburst flavors, but not starburst texture. No candy corn texture. Okay. Some mad scientists threw it all together. Interesting. Yeah. I'll try it. You got one? I have a warm one in my pocket. It's been in there for a few days. Perfect. Here you go. Soften it up there. That's delicious. Make it chewy. Yeah, it's strawberry and lint. Yeah, it's exactly right, Chuck. Yeah. So we've got candy corn. It's a Halloween edition, and we hope you enjoyed our Halloween episode. Our story that came out yesterday. Probably my favorite thing of the year, that and Christmas episode. We got to get cracking on the Christmas extravaganza. Yes. We're running out of stories. I got one up my sleeve. I got an idea. Yeah. Otherwise, we can just make stuff up, and then everything worked out okay because it was Christmas. The end. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever heard of the Winchester Mystery House? I have indeed. I have two. Thank God, because that would be a surprise if I was completely unprepared. It would be. I would be surprised, I can tell you that. Yeah, I've heard of it. I've never been there. But I would like to go for sure and check it out. I might do that next time I'm in the Bay Area. I might venture towards San Jose to check this thing out. Yes. Well, I've already cleared it with Yuumi that we're going next time we're in the San Francisco area. Great. How far away is San Jose from San Francisco? I don't know. I'm close. Right. Do you know the way to San Jose? I do not know the way to San Jose, apparently. But if I could find my way there, we would find the winchester Mystery House because apparently it sticks out like a sore thumb. I bet it was originally in some pretty rural area. And over time, the acreage, I think 162 acres is what the Winchester House grounds eventually covered has been whittled away. And now it's just like the suburbs with this enormous Victorian mansion situated in the middle of it. Yeah. And when we say enormous, we mean enormous. Supposedly about 160 rooms. And I think this is part of building up the lore. Some say they cannot be counted because you will get lost in the house and never get an accurate count and never escape. I say that's hokey hokum. Because, hey, if you can put a man on the moon, you can count the rooms in a house. Yeah. And what do you suggest? Using a Post it note. Just put a Post It note up and you've already been in. You don't even need to write that. Just the very presence of a postit note indicates you've been there before. And count up all the Post it notes. Right. You could write the numbers on them. Even better. You wouldn't even have to count them. You just write one and then keep in mind the last number you wrote down. The write the next number that comes after that on the next post. No. Right. And you know what we should do? It would be funny if we did a little video series where you and I, big smart guys, tried to do this and we kept getting confused. I would watch that. I would watch that over and over. And then we find the lost wine cellar and everything's kind of peters out from there. All right, so what we're talking about, those of you who don't know what we're talking about, in we're talking about the Winchester Mystery House, which was, as Chuck said, an enormous mansion of an indeterminate number of rooms. I think they estimate 160. But even the state of California on their tourism website says it is an odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms. A tourism website said that? Yes. Because of the tourist attraction. Exactly. They're trying to draw people in with the mystery of the mystery house. Yeah. The whole thing was the brainchild and the result of a four foot, ten inch little firecracker nicknamed the Bell of New Haven in her day named Sarah Pardi, who became Sarah pardon? Winchester. Yeah. New Haven, Connecticut. She was born in 1839. Yeah. Not New Haven, New Jersey. No. And she was very smart. Spoke four languages, could play the piano like a champ. Yeah. With her elbows. Yeah. She's beloved. She married in 1862. William winchester of the Winchester repeating arms company. Yeah. Remember, because it's a big part of the story. It is. They developed what was known as the repeater, the repeating rifle, which is the coolest rifle ever. The Lone Ranger had one. Did he? According to the Lone Ranger place that I have. He did. I believe that he mainly used the old revolver, though. Yeah. And the cudgel. Yeah, the rifle is famous for the rifleman used the repeater, for sure. The loan ranger did, too. Okay. But basically it was a revolutionary gun that you could fire really quickly. Yeah, you could fire once every 3 seconds, which is pretty fast, amazingly fast for a rifle, especially. It was the gun that won the west, and it was the gun that helped the Northern troops defeat the Southern troops in the Civil War. And when the west depends on your vantage point. But yes, it was the westward expansion took place at the barrel of the Winchester repeating rifle. So she marries William Winchester, heir to that fortune. They started a family in 1866 and very tragically lost their loan daughter Annie in infancy. And it was something that Sarah never recovered from, basically. No, it was a pretty sad thing to see. Apparently, the child was alive for either 28 days or 42 days, I guess, depending on who you ask. So she made it to term, she was born, and then she died of a wasting disease called mirasmus, which is a disease of malnutrition. So no matter what they fed her, she just wasn't taking in the nutrients and she died of malnutrition. And at the time, herasmus was still mysterious. So it seemed like, what the heck just happened to my kid? I'm feeding the kid also. Here I go, right along the edge of completely losing my sanity forever, and I'll never be quite the same again, but I'm going to come back a little bit, and then when I do, a few years later, my husband is going to die an early death at age 43. Yeah, 15 years later, to be exact. Which, by the way, chuck, can I take a second here? Sure. Somebody wrote in, and I can't find the email, but they wrote in. For our dying podcast, you mentioned life expectancy, and we said that we made the assumption that people used to only live to, like, age 30 or something like that because of the average life expectancy was so low. And this person pointed out that that's not the case, that people typically live to old age like they live now. But the infant mortality rate was so high that if you took all of the infant deaths and all the people who survived it and put it together, you had an average life expectancy of 30. Right. So it's not like everyone's dying in their 40s. Right. They were dying in their ones and twos. Exactly. So if you made it out of your ones and twos, you would probably live a pretty long life. Okay, so that was the discrepancy that I never understood until the person wrote in. So whoever wrote in, thanks for writing that in. You didn't catch a name or anything? I don't know. So where are we? She's lost her daughter, she's lost her husband. She's very distraught, goes and sees a medium, which was a big deal at the time. Yeah. In Boston, a man named Adam Coons, which was strange that it was a male medium. It is, because which is why they're all called Lady So and So. Yeah. Are they? Yeah. Oh, Madam. Yeah. Or madam or Lady Charlotte or whatever. Yeah. Lady Charlotte, who I go to. That's why I buzz marketed her. No, you don't. Do you really? No. I got to see Lady Adam. Anyway, she goes and sees Lady Adam and he says, you're going to be haunted by ghosts for the rest of your life because you married into a fortune of killing and murdering with that Winchester rifle. Yes. They're haunting you. Remember I said it was important that she married Mr. Winchester? Right here. William the Winchester family supposedly had a curse, according to Lady Adam, that all of the people who had died at the other end of the Winchester rifle now haunted the family. Sure. And they had a list of demands that Sarah was going to have to put up with or else she would be gotten by the spirits, too. And that's where the house was born? Basically, yeah. The guy said, these spirits need a house, so you're going to have to build a house for them. More and more people are dying from the rifle that your husband's family created every day, so you're going to have to make it a big house. And you can never cease construction. If you see construction, you'll die. And there's two different interpretations here, and they're not quite sure how Sarah Winchester interpreted it, but whether if she stopped construction, she would die, or if she kept construction going, she would live forever, eternal life. Because the people who are into spiritualism were into that whole thing a lot, too. Yeah. But either way, she had her walking papers, her instructions, and she decided to take them out west and follow her husband, who she believed was leading her, who supposedly told her all this through the medium and headed toward California. Yeah. She visited, had a Nissan minLow Park, and eventually found a property 3 miles west of San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley there. And she said, you know what? I'm going to buy this land. I'm going to take this house, and I'm going to build on it until forever. And Lady Adam had his cousin was a contractor. It's not true. That would have been great, though. Yeah. He's like, so you have to build forever and nonstop here's. My cousin John Hanson, right. He owes me a big one. John Hanson was, in fact, her foreman, even though Mrs. Winchester was her own architect. So hold on. Mrs. Winchester, who's just really slightly off her rocker, now at the loss of her child and her husband, has instructions that she is to move west, start building forever. A huge house to house the ghosts of all the people who have died at the hands of her husband's company's rifles. That's where we're at right now. Yes. Before we go any further, let's do a message break. Okay. Before we left, I sort of hinted that she was her own architect and she was. Not only did you hint it, you said it. Not only was she her own architect, but she supposedly got instructions on building through seances. Right. And she had an architect at first, but she fired him later on, apparently. Oh, really? I think because he wouldn't listen to her. And she was like, look, I'm getting instructions from the other side, pal. Are you getting instructions from the other side? No. Well, then we go my way. So she had a seance room, and here's how she would conduct her sales. She would try and trick the ghosts into not following her and disrupting the seance. So she would set out for the seance room. She would traverse, basically elaborate, the rooms and hallways. Like, she would push a button and a panel would fly up. She would step quickly into there, shut the door. She would open a window to that place, climb out onto, like, a flight of outdoor steps that took her down a story, come back inside, like through a window. And she was basically trying to lose these spirits that she felt like were tailing her until she could finally get into her comforting seance room, where she would receive instruction on what to build next. And then when she got into a sauna's room, which was the blue room, it was at the center of the house, and I think the second floor, she would get instructions, I think from her husband, supposedly, and then also a spirit caretaker named Clyde, and she would get the instructions at twelve. There would be a bell ring. That's when the spirits arrive. At two, another bell would ring, signaling their exit. And she would do this every night. And then in the morning, she would go meet Forman Hanson yeah. John Hanson. And say, here's what you guys do today. And he would go, all right. But we should say that all through the night, including at midnight, at two and the time when she was sleeping after the seance and before she met Hanson, there was construction going on. Yeah. Like it was 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, including Sundays, including holidays. There was always somebody doing construction on that house. Yeah. Apparently, as long as she could hear those hammers, nailing, nails, then she felt at ease. She would design rooms that would be built on top of other rooms. She would build rooms, apparently, to get to those 160 rooms. They estimate they may have built five or 600 over the span of those years. Right. Because if there was something that got in the way, she would either build around it, have it torn down. Sometimes it was even less explicitable why a room would get torn down, but she would just order it torn down, even though, say, they've been working on it a month up to that point. Yeah. And the whole trick to all this is to pay well. If you weren't paying well, then you probably would have had dudes walking off the job being like, you're crazy lady, I'm out of here. Right. She paid double the day, right? Yeah. Which is $3. The day rate was $150. She paid three. Yeah. And so the construction dudes were happy to keep working on this, what they thought was this crazy old lady's plans. And they might be frustrating, but they were getting rich or not rich, but they were doubling their money. Right. And I think over time, too, chuck, I get the impression that the people who worked for both the construction workers, once they came, they didn't leave unless they were fired because the money was so good. So when you work for some crazy old lady for 12, 15, 20 years or whatever, you're going to start to develop a sense of loyalty. Sure. And she was very much protected from the outside world by these people because her neighbors thought she was a total wacko, maybe a little evil. Who knows what's going on? She lived in seclusion. She always wore black. She always wore a veil. Yeah. One of the first things she did was had a private planted around the entire house. But she was also very kind to children, especially orphans. Would have them over for ice cream. So it's not like she was some awful, mean old person. No, she was just mysterious and liked her privacy, mainly. Yeah. And apparently, once she moved into town, a lot of the local charities started getting anonymous donations that they never got before. Of course, she didn't need all the glory, but she was still very charitable woman. Yes. She had a bunch of money. The reason she was able to pay double was a big inheritance, obviously about $20 million and a lot of stock in the Winchester company. And it afforded her, they guessed, about $1,000 a day to spend on construction, which is like 20 grand now. 27 and change a day. And this is good money, mostly prior to the era of the income tax. So that was all hers. She ended up spending, I think, 5.5 million on the house in 1920. $2. That's a lot of dough. It really is. But she didn't have anything else to do with it except give it away to orphans. That's true. So all of this construction led to some very strange design decisions. And we should say this is probably a pretty good point to say. Mrs. Winchester didn't leave any diaries, any journals. She was never interviewed. All we can say for sure is that she went to a medium in Boston, received these instructions that she had to build the house to appease the spirits, and that's what she did. Everything else is kind of conjecture, like her motivations. Beyond that, the details of her motivations and what she thought and believed, it's conjectures, we should probably say that. And there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. Like the staircases that she built had lots of steps, and they were, like, two inches high. Well, the reason that she did that is because she had very bad arthritis, and those are the only types of stairs that she could climb. But they would also double back all of a sudden or go around in crazy circles. A lot of people say that she thought that you could kind of screw with the spirits and throw them off your trail, I guess, on your way to the science room by having stairs constructed like that. At any rate, there's a lot of weird design elements in this huge mansion. Yeah, the switchback stairs were seven flights that rose only 9ft. It's 44 steps total. She had stairs that would go down, leading to stairs that went upstairs, that would go into a ceiling, chimneys that would stop short of the ceiling, hidden doorways, covered up stairwells. It was just sort of a big, beautiful mess of design. There are doors that led from the inside out to the outside, but it would just be a sheer drop if you stepped out the door like that. Last step as a doozy. Right. There was an inside door in the sandroom, a closet door that opened up onto the kitchen sink. Another story below, there was a corridor behind a cabinet that went along the backside of 30 rooms. There's just all sorts of neat stuff. There's a very famous stairs that lead to nowhere. Yes, there were cabinets that are only, like, two inches deep. There was a grand ballroom, and it wasn't all just wacky stuff. It was like really gorgeous design and places. The grand ballroom was built without nails, which was a feat of engineering in itself, and was gorgeous, but never used because of an earthquake that was pretty significant in her life. In 19 six, there was an earthquake that she was known for sleeping in different rooms every night so she wouldn't be found out by the ghosts. And she was actually trapped in the Daisy Room and not found for a little while by her employees because they didn't know where she was. After this earthquake happened, not only did the ghost not know where she was sleeping, her servants didn't either. So she was in there for a few hours, and it reeked her out, I'm sure, because despite the fact that it totally killed a lot of people and ravaged San Francisco and burned it down, she took it as a sign that the ghosts were mad at her, right. That they were afraid that construction was nearing an end. And so to appease them, she boarded up a lot of the damaged interior so that it could never be repaired, and then therefore, the house could never be finished. We should also say that by this time, the house had reached seven stories, and the earthquake was so bad it knocked off the top three, I believe. Yeah. She ended up sealing the front 30 rooms of the home, including the front entrance to the home. These grand front doors that they had just put in, apparently only three people, the two guys that put in the door and her, were the only people to walk through them before she sealed them off forever. Well, she had a beautiful Tiffany stained glass window installed and then built a wall behind it so no light can shine through it. Yeah, you can only see it from the outside, and I'm sure it looks kind of dull. And then after the earthquake, six earthquake, which I said freaked her out, supposedly she went and lived on a house boat in San Francisco Bay for six years. I bet that was nice. And then when she came back, it was different. There wasn't necessarily much of a plan, and so if she ran into trouble architecturally, she just tear the thing down or build around the problem. This was like a different kind of frenetic pace, and it was just like, build whatever, wherever, right after the earthquake, it really got to her just like crazy person building. Yeah. All right, Chuckle, before we go any further, how about another message break? Okay, so back to it. Here's some numbers for you. Okay. 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, two basements, six kitchens, 10,000 window panes, and 467 doorways. And only two mirrors in the whole house because, of course, ghosts are afraid of their own reflection. And apparently the staff would sneak hand mirrors so they can occasionally see what they look like after getting out of the shower. But she didn't want to have anything to do with the mirrors, though. Yeah, she also supposedly would fire staff who saw her without her veil on. Apparently her butler and her niece were the only people who could see her without avail. And if you saw her without avail, no hard feelings, but you're cut. So we talked a lot about the fact that she worked as her own designer and made all these weird, terrible choices that made no sense. Right. But we also mentioned early on, she's a very smart lady, so she actually learned over the years more about design and architecture and got better at it and developed a skill. And she actually had some innovations in her home that were brand new at the time. For instance, they say she was the first person to use wool for insulation. Yeah, it's pretty cool. They had carbide gas lights in the house that had their own gas manufacturing plant for the estate right. Which is brand new. And she had electric push buttons installed to turn the lights on and off. She had an inside crank to open and close outside window shutters. First person to do that. That eventually became the norm. Oh, yeah. That's huge. What else? I guess it was sort of green at the time. She had drip pans under the windows and a zinc subfloor in the north conservatory. So when you watered plants, the runoff from those plants would be captured by drain pipes for the garden below it. It's pretty cool. And she had something called the annunciator, which is a servant call system. Allowed her to summon servants from anywhere in the house, and it would drop a little card to show the servant which room she was in at the time. That's pretty awesome. So it wasn't just crazy, weird steps that lead to nowhere. There were actually some innovations at the time. And it's a gorgeous Victorian, like, when you look at it, really beautiful house. Yeah. And apparently the construction, by the time she died, took up six acres. Six acres of the house, not just the ground, because the grounds are like 160 acres. And when she dies, finally, it's and apparently the legend has it that she died at a time when construction stopped the workman, took a break or something to play cards oh, really? And never started back up again because they discovered that she died in her bed sleeping in 1922. And right afterward, she left everything to basically her nieces and nephews. And one of her nieces, I think the only one who was allowed to see her without a veil, came in and was like, let's just auction this stuff off. And it took six weeks, supposedly, to get everything out of the house because there was that much stuff. And it was that difficult to find your way out when you really got into the interior. Yes, and some really valuable things, too, that were locked away in storage that were never even used, like furniture and furnishings just sitting in wait, basically. Didn't you say that there's a wine seller that's lost? Yeah, I think they can't find the wine cellar to this day, which also sounds a little like lore to me. It does. Why can't you find the wine seller? I don't know. It's lost. It is a popular tourist attraction today and still being renovated and maintained. Apparently. It's continually being painted. The exterior is all year long. They finish painting it, and they start once again because it takes 365 days to complete the job. I would imagine so. And it's been a tourist attraction almost since she died. The house was sold to a group of investors who wanted to start it as a tourist attraction for $135,000. That is crazy. Even though she dropped 5.5 million into it. And again, if you're interested in this, you can go check out the Winchester mystery house in San Jose. They have a website. I just imagine you type in Winchester mystery house but also look up something called Mrs. Winchester's House. It's a documentary from KPIs, I think it's San Francisco television station. It's narrated by Lillian Gish It's just a half hour long, but it's really spooky and black and white and just interesting. It's a neat one. Very cool. Yeah. Check that out. All right, so we're going okay, let's go before that, though, Chuck, if everybody wants to read this article, you can type in Winchester Mystery House in the search bar@howstoughfworks.com, and it will bring this up. And I said, search bar. That means it's time for listener mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this asexuality. Call back. I just listened to your Asexual podcast guy. I found it very interesting. One thing really caught my attention. You said Asexuals were classified as a separate group outside the range of homosexual to heterosexual. I think it could be different. So Paul is proposing an idea here. Instead of the range being a number line with a subgroup that doesn't fit, it should be more like a coordinate plane. Not all people are equally sexual. I'm sure. You know, people who don't really think about sex often and then people who it dominates a large portion of their lives. That made me think that it could be a coordinate plane with homo and hetero on the left and right. And asexual to extremely sexual, I want to say nymphomaniacal, even, but I feel like nymphomania is more complicated than born sexuality. Or at least we don't know enough about it to say whether it is. Yeah. So what he's describing is like a plus sign the sexual orientation on left and right and then the intensity of your sexuality going up and down. Exactly. So you could have, like, high homosexuality, low heterosexuality, right and so on. Exactly. It's a good idea. I've actually seen that elsewhere, too. Coordinate plan. It just makes sense, he says. That way all the people could be accurately plotted to some degree, at least. Not saying it would count for everything perfectly, but I think it would clarify it a bit more. Anyways, I'd love to know your thoughts on that idea. You just got them. Yeah. Has it been done before or have you read about that? I have not. I do not know. I saw in a paper somewhere somebody proposing that similar thing that who was it? The sex studyer? Henry Johnson? No, it's kinsey. They really kind of missed a really obvious aspect of intensity rather than just orientation, just stuffed orientation. It's a good idea. I agree. So Paul of Uniontown, PA, we think it's a swell idea. Get to work on it. Yeah. Go, Paul. If you can call it the Paul's sexual plane. Paul's a one sexual plane. And Edgarol yeah. That was cute. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for that. And if you like, Paul has some great thoughts or ideas on things that we've talked about, more expansive ideas. We want to hear them because we like that. Kind of stuff, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushhno. And hey, guys, come hang out with us at our website, stuffyhow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstopworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia 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. Bye." | |
How Vampires Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-vampires-work | Out of obligation, Chuck and Josh mention Twilight, but it is the longstanding vampire lore that gets the most attention in this examination of how the bloodsucking undead evolved from baby-stealing demonesses to suave counts in our collective psyche. | Out of obligation, Chuck and Josh mention Twilight, but it is the longstanding vampire lore that gets the most attention in this examination of how the bloodsucking undead evolved from baby-stealing demonesses to suave counts in our collective psyche. | Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:57:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=20, tm_min=57, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=339, tm_isdst=0) | 46980353 | 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 sitting across from me, back in the saddle. And this is stuff you should know back in the satellite. Yeah. Do you want to explain that or should we just leave it in mystery saddle? Well, with the metaphorical saddle is in this case. Yeah. Well, we have been kind of a way, even though it seems like we've been here every week through the magic of digital recording. That's right. Pre recording. We batch recorded our episodes and covered ourselves. We built up what we call a kitty, and we've been releasing them steadily and faithfully while we've been off recording a TV show. Recording a TV show? That's right. Our own TV show. Where and Yummy pointed this out to me. How cool. It says we play ourselves. Yeah. I think that's the only thing I'm qualified to do. Oh, yes. We would have failed miserably if we'd done anything else, like Sherlock Holmes Update or something like that. There's so many of those going on already. I know. So why not us? Yeah, why not? Elementary, my dear Clark. Yes, but yeah, we have a TV show coming out. I guess we can talk about it freely. We're done. Yeah. We'll really ramp up the pluggage come December, but look for it in January on Science Channel. Yes. And if you don't have Science Channel, go out and purchase Science Channel. Yeah. And we do not know, because I know people are already asking about online stuff, if they're going to be available through various media outlets. Online. Yeah. We don't know yet. We're working on that. We'd love for it to, but it's not up to us. Yeah. So, I mean, you have to hedge your bets and get Science Channel. Yes. Add it to your cable subscription. And if your cable provider doesn't offer Science Channel, you burn down their offices. That's right. Until they do. That's right. Okay. So, Chuck yes. Have you ever heard of a little movie called Twilight? Yeah, I've seen all those. You've seen them? Emily read the books and she's way into it. So I have been I got you sucked into it. I was very supportive of you. I don't think they're very good. But I must admit, I do want to see the final one. Just because it's like when you watch four of something or however many it's been, three or something, it just becomes weird to stop there. Got you. So I will see the last one. When did that come out? I think probably sometime around this published date. Oh, really? Yeah, I think it's Thanksgiving or Christmas release. Got you. Okay, well, I bring that up to propose that that's the only time we talk about that franchise throughout this whole podcast. Sure, agreed. Because vampires, which is what we're talking about yeah. They go back a very long way. They've evolved, they've changed, they've shifted their shape. But they seem to all have certain characteristics in common. Right? Yeah. For example, they can't see their own reflection. Well, not necessarily. Okay. If we go back to the ancient myths, okay. They are wary of crucifixes. Crucify? Crucifixes. Yeah. They only come out at night. Yeah. They're the undead. Yeah. Suck blood from a victim's neck. They have to be invited into your home. Yeah. Garlic as well. Holy water. Yeah. Superhuman strength. All tenants of the modern vampire lore. Yes. And modern is a good way to put it, because all of this is a fairly recent image of the vampire, thanks to Bram Stoker, and then shortly after that, Bella Legosi. We now have this conception of the vampire. But like I said, it goes back way further than the 19th century or even the 18th century. Yeah. It goes back as much as 4000 years, as far as we know, and probably further back. Right. Yeah. And I will say one thing, not to bring up the T word again, but Rob Stoker and other authors and filmmakers, the cool thing I like about the vampire in pop culture is you can pull from all these different things to create your own creature of the night. Yeah. Like, some of them in, like, True Blood, for instance. They can retract their fangs. They're super sexy. Lilith is in that version of Lilith that we'll talk about. Okay. So I just think that's kind of one of the cool things about vampires. Brahm Stoker did the same thing. He pulled from different areas of mythology and said, this is a fictional character I'm going to create using all these old folk legends. Right. But there are some things that are very basic. The commonalities among all vampires is that generally they suck blood and they are dead in some way, shape or form. Undead. They are. They're undead. You just coined an excellent term. Yeah, I just made that up. So you have undead people, former people, in most cases, feeding on the living. That's the vampire. It's the basis of almost all vampires. Yes. But even that has exceptions because the earliest vampires that we know of that arose out of the first civilization, mesopotamia were actually demon goddesses. Right? Yeah. La Mastu was a demon goddess and she was the daughter of ANU, the sky god. Yeah. And she would creep in and kill your babies. Yes. She was not a happy, nice person. She had talons wings. And they believe that the Assyrians and Babylonians were basically going, like, what is going on? When they would encounter sudden Infant death syndrome or miscarriages. And they said, well, of course it is Lamasu. Thank you. Yeah. I think it's so funny how so many of these things were sort of used to explain, and not vampires, but all kinds of folk legends to explain. Like what medicine now says is SIDS. Right? Yeah. But I mean, this basis of the vampire legend. Using it to explain stuff people didn't understand. Usually some sort of sudden death or wasting away, as we'll see later. It spans thousands of years. People have been going back to that well for thousands and thousands of years. Sure. That's pretty interesting. When you look at this one group in the 19th century with the Assyrians 4000 years ago and they're all thinking the same thing. I find that very interesting. That's an archetype, if you ask you. Yeah. And it just goes to show you we're all humans all over the world for as long as we've been around. We're all stupid. We're all stupid. All right. Lamasdo is also associated with Lilith, who I mentioned, who this past season was on True Blood, like a version of Lilith. But she is in prominent and Jewish texts and is a lot like Lamasu. She was the first woman, supposedly not Eve, but Adam and Lilith. Yeah. That's like that question about who was the first president. Well, apparently there were other presidents for Washington. It was like eight or nine before Washington. But you just have to say, well, were they the president of the United States? Right. No, they weren't. Right. So Lilith was a modern woman and she was like, you know, Adam, I ain't putting up with this because I am just the same as you. I was created from God, just like you are. Yeah. Stop acting like you're not made of dust. Exactly. So she left Eden, said, I'm out of here. I'm going to have my own kids. God sends angels to bring her back. She's like, no, I'm not going. And the angel said, all right, you think angels are nice? We're going to kill 100 of your children every day until you get back up to Eden or heaven. Yeah. And rather than say, okay, well, let's go back to Eden, then Lilla said, do it. And they did it. And so she started killing human children in return. That's right. Again with sharp talons, winged demonstration infants and fetuses. And I find that extremely interesting that the vampire legend is kind of born out of this folklore of how you're supposed to be subservient to men. Right. That's very interesting to me because there's this element of seduction that kind of was reinvented with vampires here or there. But it may have gone away in some areas, but it always came back. This idea that there was a woman or a person who didn't follow sexual morays. True. Whether that sexual meaning like intercourse or gender. Yeah. They didn't follow the rules. And that's kind of like another thing that's always kept the vampire legend going or that's always been part of it. I guess that's a good point. Because Lilith has set up the notion of the seductress we see over and over in further legends. Right. And then so Lilith is associated with ancient Jewish texts. Lamasu is from Mesopotamia and they aren't certain if Lilith was a variation of La Mascu or if they both evolved from a third character. Right. But those are the two most ancient ideas of vampires that we have. Shortly after that, we can head on over to Greece. And they feared a lot of vampirelike creatures. Yeah. Lamia was another demons. Head and torso of a woman, lower body of a snake. Yeah. And evidently this was one of Zeus mortal lovers. His wife did not take kindly to this Hera, and she was like, no, I'm going to make you go insane, lady, and eat all your children. Yeah. You're so crazy you're going to eat your kids and then come too, afterward. That's right. And when she did, she went so berserk. Not in the Viking way. Not berserker, no, just straight up berserk that she became a monster again, killing children. Yeah. Because she was jealous of other women who had children. Who else? They also had the Mpuse, the daughters of Hakata, who is the guys of witchcraft. Yeah. And they were shapeshifters for the first time. Right, right. So you have all these different cultures contributing to the vampire that we understand today, here and there. And it wasn't just the Greeks, it wasn't just the Mesopotamians. You also had India getting into the mix with the ratsa. Right. Which was basically like a ghoul, the shapeshifting ghoul who once again killed children. Right. And same with the Vitala, but they were more like a zombie, if you ask me. Yeah. A demon who took possession of recently dead bodies to wreak havoc on a living. It sounds like zombies. And then the Chinese also had their own thing, the Kuwait. Sure. Okay. You have to say, like, that stuff. Yeah. Like the guy on NPR who always reports from China speaks normally, and all of a sudden he's doing it accurately. But it's a little bit like Daniel Day Lewis doing Lincoln. It's like, yeah, that's accurate. But do you know what? You sound like? I want to get rid of slavery. That was sort of like a jacked up Kennedy. That's weird. So how did Kwai come about? They are corpses who would rise from the grave, kill again. And that happened when a person's lower spirit did not pass to the afterlife because of bad things they did. So the poe was angered by the lower spirit. Yeah. And that would reanimate, basically, and say, you know what? I'm going to attack the living at night once again, because what else do I have to do? Nothing. Well, it's a good way to exact revenge. Just have to hang around here with the wheelbarrow. So all of these stories were floating around the world and eventually through trade, and things wound up in Europe. Yes. The first globalization. The Silk Roads started bringing all these things together and yeah. They moved over to Europe and that's where they really sort of took off. Yeah. I guess you could say. And the place that became the epicenter was Central Europe or Eastern Europe. Yeah. Russia early on with the upir. And again, Greek was oh, boy. Rikoakis icolocas. Yes. Ricolacus. One of those is good. One of those you can't start the word with four consonants. Right. One of them has got to be silent. Yeah. And this kind of like, was an offshoot of the Chinese conception of how a vampire became a vampire. The upper, which I think is the word that led to vampir or vampire, was basically a person who, during their life was a sinner, unbaptized baby, which is really sad. A vampire baby. That's kind of funny. And anyone who wasn't a Christian yeah. Practitioners of witchcraft, especially, of course, for obvious reasons, because you already sold your soul of the devil. Yeah. So you were doomed. You're, like, halfway there. Right. So all of these factors combine to basically make you a loser in the afterlife and you're going to come back. And families were, I guess, aware of this kind of thing. They knew that there was the possibility that Uncle Viggo, who had a big gambling problem, which the village looked down upon right. Yeah. When he was alive, when he died, well, he was probably going to become a new peer. And so if all of a sudden, Uncle Vigo's, like nephews, start dying in a weird way, say, of maybe a dread disease, the family would probably go dig up Uncle Viggo and do crazy stuff to his body. Yeah. And one thing to point out here, this is, I think, the first time with the up here that we get the notion that they would go back to the grave to rest. Oh, yeah. It's a big one. On a regular basis. And that sets things up moving forward, kind of. Right. So like you said, they would sometimes dig these bodies up, sometimes burn them, drive a stake through the heart. They would really take care of this corpse. They would bury them face down sometimes. Yeah. So, like, if they tried to crawl out, they would be headed in the wrong direction. That's pretty awesome. Got you. Stakes facing down. So if they tried to crawl up, they would stake themselves. Yeah. And this is about 10 years ago in Central Europe, this stuff, or Central or Eastern Europe, these beliefs started to come about that you could solve your vampire troubles by butchering the corpse of the suspected vampire. And it started then, and it carried on. Anytime there's a vampire panic, which, interestingly, almost always attended an outbreak of some sort of disease. Yeah, I could see that. Because once again, they're just trying to explain away exactly medical conditions. Right. People would dig up corpses and do crazy things to them. Like in Venice, they found a 16th century corpse that had a brick in its mouth. Oh, really? That was no accident. No, it didn't fall in there. And then in the 1850s, there's this really cool article Chuck called The Great New England Vampire Panic. It was on the Smithsonian website recently. It is awesome. And in the 1850s in Connecticut, there was a tuberculosis outbreak and people panicked and started digging up graves and just completely rearranging the people's bones or cutting out their hearts and burning them and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And this is the 1850s, this wasn't the Dark Ages. Like, people were starting to have an understanding of disease. Most like the Salem witch trial. Same deal. Right. But 200 years later, 150 years later. So there was this big panic still as recently as the 1850s in the US. Among folk who dug up their family members and burn their hearts. Those people are funny. Yeah. They call them undecided voters. But those are the people that I'm talking about, though. They're doing the same thing or thinking the same things that the Assyrians did 4000 years before. I just think that's so interesting. It is. And backward. Yeah. So in wallacia Moldavia in Transylvania, which is Romania, they had something called they were a little bit different because they would go through different stages after rising from the grave. Like, at first they were just poltergeists and they were invisible spirits that would torment their family in the afterlife or in their regular life. The Strigois afterlife. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. But then as time passed, they would become visible looking like they did in life. And they would still return and steal cattle and bring disease and all that stuff to their family. Big for food. Yeah. Why would they do this to their family? That's what I never got. I think I saw later, metaphorically, it's basically a vampire lore is a life lesson. Don't be a drain on your family, support your family, take care of your parents in their old age. Like you don't want to be a Strigoi. Okay. You know what I mean? Sure, I guess that makes sense. And struggle. Or struggle, which I guess is the singular of the Strigoi. They would have to go back to the grave a lot, just like the up here did. And they followed the same pattern. If they thought someone was a Strigo, they would exhume the body and take care of it the old fashioned way. Right. But here's a little loophole. If you manage to survive for seven years as a stringo, then you're good to go. They're like, all right, you've got staying power. You just go do your struggle thing. Right. You are like the living dead. You no longer have to return to your grave to rest. You're basically reborn. Well done. And apparently the struggle. The struggle. I couldn't make their way in their town after that 7th year because they weren't allowed to vote. There was all sorts of mutilations. Right. So they would move to other towns and they would have secret meetings with other strigoi. And that's where the idea of vampires fraternizing came from. Yeah. Hanging out. Yeah. Talking shop. Yeah. Basically a secret culture of vampires existing outside of our awareness. Yeah. Remember, like on Jerry Springer when that was on? Or it might still be on, I have no idea. I think it is. Is it really? Yeah. Wow. Is it still the same crap? Yeah. Yeah. He didn't take the high road at some point. No. I just remember back in the day, they would have, like, those real vampires, the people that live the vampire lifestyle. There's a video of it in this article. Oh, boy. Yeah, those people. Yeah. The guy looks like a cross between Marilyn Manson and Brandon Lee. Oh, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Kind of odd looking. He's got the contact lenses and everything going yeah. They'll shave down their fangs, like, for real. Right. They'll file them down. Yeah. So there's two types of strigoi, right. You've got the strigoy mort. Not morty, no. Mort as in dead. Yes. So this is basically who we were just describing. And then the struggle, I view, which is the living. The person who's going to become a streago when they die. Yeah. People that I feel very sorry for because they were probably just born with a bump. What are those called when you're born with a really just racking my head with the vestige. Like a partial tail. Yeah. Vestigial tail. Yeah, that's what it is now. There's a word for it. I can't remember. I'm so tired of doing this. Well, let's go. How many hours have we wasted combined saying, oh, I wish I could remember it? Well, we just invented this off the top of our heads. Yes, exactly. Right. At Avisions Citizens is some sort of drug. Yeah, it is, actually. So your poor baby born with a vestigial tail, a little bump on the top of your tailbone, or some sort of fetal membrane still attached to the head, which is called a call. Yeah. They would just call you a strigoi view or vu. Right. And you're sort of like, sorry, I was born with this bump, I'm not a vampire living walking on the Earth. They said no. You are. Right. And if you have kids and they're going to be strigoi in the afterlife and we'll have to destroy your body when you die. And they did. And they did. So. But I guess it's kind of nice that they didn't just kill the person while they were living, they just shunned them, I'm sure. Yeah, exactly. The idea of a call, like, having some sort of special significance, it goes beyond the vampire thing, too. You're gifted with a second site or there's all sorts of supernatural, paranormal folklore surrounding people born with a call. Once again, people have proven to be stupid over the years. But this is where vampir came in, right? Yeah. The street the street oi started to come to be called the vampire, which is again from up here in the Russian. And all of a sudden the stage is set for the vampire legend to really take hold as it's taking shape. Yeah. This is where pop culture came into play. Hysteria had set in. And so painters and artists and authors had this material that's pretty rich for the time. Right. All the hysteria is going on. So let's write a scary book about it. And that's what Brahm Stoker did. Yeah. Are you going with Rom? I go with Bram. You go Bram? Yes. Have you ever read it? No. I saw the movie, though. I heard the movie was a pretty faithful adaptation with the coppola one. Yeah, it was pretty good. The book is great, though. I took a Literature of Horror class at Georgia. Oh, neat. And it was one of the cooler classes I took. I'm sure. He did Dracula and Frankenstein and the House of Usher and then a bunch of short stories. Yeah, very cool. So Bram Stoker. Also Abraham Stoker, which I didn't know until I read this. That was his first name. Yeah, just because of the class. He was a theater manager and a novelist and also a really great researcher. Because all this stuff from this vampire hysteria yes. Panic. All this took place like hundreds of years before him. And I guess I don't know what inspired him exactly, or where he saw it or where this all took place, but he didn't just go, oh, that's a pretty good idea, and wrote his book. He went and did some serious research. Yes. Supposedly he was inspired by he was a personal assistant to this actor who ran the theater that he worked at. And supposedly Henry Irving was the guy's name, was the inspiration to write the book. And I don't know if that meant he was some jerk. He was like, I'm just going to personify you as a blood sucker or what. Or maybe he just inspired him creatively. Who knows? Right. I bet someone knows more about this than I do. I'm sure. So right in and tell me. Graham Stoker goes and he starts to do some research and pokes around. And he finds a great place to set this vampire tale is in Transylvania, which is the heart of the street, oi vampire. This is where everything that we just talked about came together. Wallacia, Transylvania, romania is what we call it today. Yeah. And he thought, well, this is just perfect. I'm going to set it there, and let's see if I can find somebody of that area who I can base this vampire character on. And he came up with a guy named Vladislav Basarab. Yeah, that's a creepy name, period, but it would be even creepier. He was the Prince ruled Willakia in the mid 14 hundreds. Creepier is that his father was Vlad Dracula, the dragon or the devil. And Vlad Jr. Was referred to as Vlad dracula, which is Son of Dracula or Vlad teppas or Vlad the Impaler, because even though it's not verified, supposedly he was a very fierce warrior. He would impale his victims. Okay. I really feel like we should do the real Count Dracula episode sometime. Yeah. I wrote this awesome article on it and it's verified. Was there a real countercula? It's about Vlad Tepper. The Vladimir Impaler. Yeah, because he just borrowed the name in the title. Right. He wasn't really based on this guy who count Dracula. Brahm Stokers. Yes. Version. Right. VI Tepper was probably far worse than anything Bram Stoker wrote about Count Dracula. Way worse. It is verified. Yes. He had all sorts of guys who were against him and who published extensively all these books and pamphlets and all this stuff to smear his name. But they got a lot of stuff, right? Yeah, he was into some horrible stuff. He killed a lot of people. He had a lot of people killed. His armies killed a lot of people. He probably liked most rulers of the day. He was worse. He was most likely worse than anybody else. So he borrows this name in this title and social standing as an Aristocrat. Great movie. Aristocrat. He has a naked woman in that one. In the Aristocrats? Yeah, the Disney cartoon. Yeah. I'm thinking of the rescuers. Oh, I remember that. There's a naked woman in the rescuers. Yeah. When they're flying through the city, if you watch it frame by frame, they pass by a window and there is a photograph of, like, a woman standing in the window naked. And you have to watch it frame by frame. It's the only possible way to see it. But it's in there. Yeah, they were dirty. There's also the Little mermaid thing. The phalluses. Yeah. Hidden. Not so hidden. Phallus. Yeah. I'll bet the guy was like, no one's ever going to see this. Then he lost his job forever. So Stoker borrows the name. Like I said, the social standing says this would be a great setting. Let's throw it in Transylvania. Let's change a few things. Let's borrow from a bunch of different folklore and let's say maybe you can't go out in the sunlight. And let's bring up the crucifixes now, and let's make them really smart and charming. Well, that was largely Bella Lagosi that did that. Well. No. Robb Stokers was totally like that. I thought his was that he was like a withered ugly old man. Yeah. But he still had the stuck to power. Oh, suave and all that. Yeah, he changed ages, if I remember correctly. Well, he does in the movie. And I've heard the movie is a pretty faithful adaptation. It was also, I think, the first time where all of a sudden they didn't have any reflection because most of the previous legends, they loved their reflection. Yeah. Apparently, not only were they in love with their own reflection and they could be lost for hours staring into a mirror. They were also supposedly obsessive compulsive, as some Eastern foreclosure goes. And one way to ward off vampires was to spread seeds outside of your house, because the vampire would be bound to count every single seat. And if you put a little nail or tack or something in there, when the vampire went pick that one up, it would prick itself and drop all the seeds, forget where it was, and start counting all over. You got to start counting again, and then you'd just be sitting inside laughing, drinking your ale. Stupid vampires. Yeah, but that was another difference. I'm sorry. We've been calling them stupid vampires, and up until the 19th century, you could make that case. They were kind of dead zombiesque a little bit. It was Stoker that introduced, like you say, not just all this other stuff, but the acute intelligence. That's right. This very smart, like, power persuasion, almost hypnotic Bengali type. And in True Blood, they have this thing they do called glamouring, which is kind of a silly name, but it's almost like a charm, like a spell that they can put over you if you, like, block eyes with one. And when you glamor them, they're basically in a hypnotic state. They're highly suggestible I get into a sexual way. Oh, really? Well, in all kinds of ways, but, yeah, there's plenty of they usually just like, take off your pants. Does he say like that? They point and say in a creepy tone, yeah, see? Don't tell me you can't act. You could play the role as a vampire. Take off your pants. Yeah, you got the job. So let's do some voging. So you mentioned Bella Legosi film Dracula, which was where we get the cape and the vantage. Drink your blood. And the sort of familiar modern vampire that pop, culturally speaking, that we're familiar with today. Yeah. And one of the best songs ever, Bauhaus, is Bella Lagosus dad. Yeah. Excellent. 1922 silent film. NASA Ratu with Max Shrek. A little more true to the original creepy looking guy. What was the movie starring William Default and oh, about John thinking of nonstopathy. Yeah, that was good. What is the name of that movie? Do you remember? I can't remember. Dude, that is such a good movie. I want to see that movie again. I do, too, actually. It's a great one. The ending is just off. Yeah. What is it? Shadow the Vampire. That live direction. Anne Rice then came along. Yeah. Nothing happened in between, but Anne Rice definitely brought things more into the forefront as far as this range of emotions and these really complex characters. Yeah, I didn't think the books were very good, but it's just not my bag. Oh, yeah. No, I read the first one, and it's just not my thing. Okay. Yeah, I'm not saying it was not good. It's just not my thing. I'm with you. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of course. Classic. Not so great movie. Great TV series. Are you out of your mind? You didn't like the movie? I didn't think it was very good now. Oh, you're crazy. You saw the movie. I love that movie. Well, that's good. That's a good movie. Yeah, I thought it really became itself when the cast changed. I love that movie. Yeah. Well, that's great. Have you seen that South Park where all the kids start becoming like vampires? All the good kids? It's very trendy and hip to be like a vampire and give yourself a new name and everything. And they drink Clamato. I love Kamato. Yes. You're in the minority, buddy. That's the secret to my famous bloody Mary. I know, you've told me. Yeah. It's a good south park, Chuck. I'll check it out. Where are we now? So we talk about psychic vampires a little bit, I guess. All right. These are people in modern times that claim that they crave and feed on others energy, their psychic energy, and they claim to be vampire richesque and that they will not if they do not do this, then they will not have feel like they have fed on sustenance. Like that is their sustenance. It's other people's psychic energy. Got you. And it also goes back modern people claim this, but it goes back thousands of years. This phenomenon does. It's nothing new. Well, I actually think that it may have given rise to vampire lore as we understand it now. Yeah. And it's also a metaphor. If someone can call someone a psychic vampire, if they're just a drain as a person. You know those people. Oh, I do. Energy vampires. That's right. Not to be confused with the other kind of energy vampire, which is like your coffee maker. Yeah. These things that are left on all night. So we kind of touched on it earlier, the idea of where we would have gotten vampire legends. People use it to explain phenomenon that we didn't understand before. There was such a thing as, like, germ theory. Right, right. So you have, like, Lamasu being blamed for SIDS and miscarriages, that kind of thing. Right, yeah. And then you have a couple of other diseases that we've come to understand that they're like. You know what? We never really definitively linked this to vampire lore, but I'll bet you this gave rise to it. It probably didn't help, period. All right, we'll go with that. Have you seen the others, Nicole? Is that what those kids had? Yeah. Okay. All right. That makes sense. It's a rare disease. Irregularities in the production of him with hemi, which is in hemoglobin. Hem. Hem. Yeah. I like hemi. Got a hymn. That's an engine. Yeah. And basically you're going to be sensitive to sunlight. You're going to have bad stomach pains. You may be delirious. Back in the day, one prescription may have been to drink blood. So I would say that's probably a dead giveaway right there. Yeah. And have you seen pictures of people stricken with this creepy looking their teeth can be like red or black and their gums can be red and black, which is, I think, probably another reason why they linked that to that. And it's a hereditary so there were places where there was more of this happening than other places, which would also lend itself to the whole vampire thing and feeding on your family. Yes. Same with tuberculosis when people were kind of spread out, except your family. And there were 19 of you and you all lived in one house. If one of you had TB, probably the rest of you were going to catch TB and a lot of you are going to die from it. And whoever was the first one to die of this was probably the original vampire who's feeding on the other. And you're probably the one who's going to be dug up and have your heart cut out and burned. Yeah, but at that point, who cares? Then there's another disease called cattleepsy, which is associated with epilepsy. Yeah, this one is freaky. Do you ever see that Twilight Zone where I can't remember what actor it was? It may have been the professor from Gilligan's Island where he's in a car and he's paralyzed and the whole thing is just him talking to himself in his head like he's walking to these people to not bury him. Wow. Because he's not dead and it's a great episode. So is he catalptic? No, he was, like you said, locked in his Twilight Zone. Catalepsy is a specific neurological disorder, like I said, associated with epilepsy, where your muscles just freeze up and an episode like this can last for days and your heart rate slows and your respiration slows and you're alive and God knows what your brain is doing, but you're alive during this time. But prior to, say, embalming, you may have just been taken for dead and putting in the ground and you had to figure it out and go back home. Yeah. And it's also associated with schizophrenia. So you're sitting around the dinner table and uncle what? Vigo. Uncle Vigo. I remember. I like to gamble. He comes in three days after you buried him, brushing dirt off his overhauls, having a schizophrenic episode, and you're going to put a stake through his heart. Yeah, if you're smart, which is just not fair because after an experience like that, it's like, why would you wait? Why not let fate kill this man before he goes through this horrific catalptic experience? And then it all end with a stick through the heart, just let him get hit by a truck with a hemi or something ahead of time and then I'm not so sure about this suggestion, but it might carry a little weight. What happens after a regular human body dies might have fed into this a little bit, I would say so fingernails and hair continue growing. So this is like if they dig you back up, they're like, look, the fingernails are long, the hair's grown, they're bloated because you're full of gases expanding. So let's cut them open and all this fluid drains out and say, see, they've been growing their hair and fingernails and feeding on other bodily fluids. They're alive or undead. Right. But I can see that they're going back and resting and they obviously have gorged themselves. Look at their stomach. It's all distended. So, I mean, I think it was probably like the nail in the coffin on their beliefs. Sure. This is all absolutely correct. Yeah, I could see that now. Yes. And then the notion of the vampire bat came along later on where the vampire could shape shift into bats and sometimes wolves. Right. Although in Twilight, wolves and vampires are on opposite sides. Yeah. So I would mention it again. Yeah, there I went. But the whole thing of the vampire bat was just like a creepy real vampire. Bats are docile creatures and they might drink like, the blood of a cow, but they're not attacking people. No, that was all for there's. Harmless as vampire babies. Yeah. What are some of your favorite movies, Josh? Oh, vampire movies. No, just because comedies like DC Cab. Yeah. Doctor Detroit. I would say probably the best of all time, in my opinion, is Lost Boys. It definitely has a Kitch value. Now, that is a great movie. It doesn't hold up super well, though. Have you seen it lately? No, I haven't seen it in a while. In the ways that other 80s movies don't. Really? Because that was like a cool movie. Echoing the Bunny Men. Cover the doors in it. Come on. Yeah, that's a weird one. It's a strange song. Near Dark. Did you ever see that one? I don't think Soxton and that one guy, Lance Heinricson, they're like these modern vampires traveling in an RV through the desert and killing people. Really good. I have not seen that. Near Dark is excellent. What about first bite with George? George Hamilton. Yes. First Bite, yeah. It was like a disco. Dracula vampires kiss was funny. Nick Cage. I never saw that one. That was good. I thought the original Fright Night, granted, it was the 80s again, but for me it was pretty good back in the day. I haven't seen that. Kronos, have you seen that? No. Guillermo del Toroo. I don't get one. I think I've seen it. And then, of course, let the right one in. That's a great one. Both versions to me, very good. I really I heard the American version was compared to the original. I thought they were both pretty great. I'll check it out. Then. They definitely didn't ruin it by Americanizing it. And then there, of course, the bad ones, like Van Helsing, West, Cravens, dracula 2000. Yeah. Blood Rain. R-A-Y-N-E-I mean, there's lots and lots of bad vampire movies. Sure. Dracula dead and loving it. That's good, though. Do you know how many emails we're going to get from people that say, like, you forgot about this one. Yeah, let's just say there are hundreds of vampire movies. There's TV shows now, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, which I mentioned, which is sort of good again after falling off the rails, in my opinion. Okay. And Twilight breaking Dawn Part Two What is your problem? It's twice in theaters near you. Oh, actually, the 79 Dracula with Franklin Jello. That was good. Did he play Dracula? Yes, he was good. Oh, yeah, okay. I could see him. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking of the right person. And then if you're into old movies, you can't go wrong with Bella logosi or Nasferatu. Yeah. Take some time watching old movie. That's what I say. Yeah. That's pretty much your life coaching. I think so. Okay. Take some time to watch an old movie, says Chuck. Yeah, watch something in black and white for a change. Hey, also, while we're on this kind of scary esque topic, you want to plug somebody real quick? Yeah, I think we have another horror action as we stop. Right, right. As we said we would plug people who sent in their stuff for horror fiction contest and who went on to publish stuff. And one of the guys, Christopher Kelly, who wrote a very cool short story, Variable, took us up on that. And he says that he has a creepy novella about two boys whose father tries to kill them called Abraham Road, not Bram Road. He says that it's what would have happened if HP. Lovecraft rewrote of Mice and Men, which is pretty awesome. It's available on Kindle. You can go find that on Amazoncom. Abraham Road ebook. And then he also has a collection called I Held My Breath as Long As I Could. 23 Stories of the Strange, the Sinister and the Literary. And you can get that on Amazon as well, so check those out. Christopher Kelly, thanks for sending in your work. We liked it a lot. And remember, anybody else who has published and entered our horror fiction contest, we want to say thanks by letting everybody know about your stuff. Great. If you want to know more about vampires and it's been a while, you can type that word into the search bar athouseforce.com it will bring up a bunch of cool stuff, including who is the real Count Dracula? This vampire article written by Tracy Wilson, which is a great one. Oh, Tracy wrote that? Yeah. Couldn't you tell? That's pretty thorough. Yeah. And then also another one I liked a lot was a Hungarian countess, the world's most prolific serial killer. She was like the female Dracula. Elizabeth, bathroom. Yeah. Awesome stuff. I typed in the search bar and it will bring all this great stuff up. As I said, search bar. It's time for listener mail. All right, Josh, we're going to call this trivia plug. We went to New York for Comic Con and we had one of our trivia nights there. And one of the things that we were required to do and want to do is read the names of the trivia winners. I got emails from them and the runner up team because they were cool, and I'm going to read them all. This is from the winner, kyle, Janish or Yanis? Not sure. Thanks, guys, for hosting the event. As an avid S-Y-S-K listener, our team, Steve Holt had a great time. Team name was Steve Holt. Yeah, I remember. We were made up of mainly former Midwesterners, which gave us a good advantage in the Great Lakes questions. We had three girls in fashion caitlin Grummel, Monica Lang and Amy Guidel. We also have three teachers dan Farrell, Michael Rokovsky and myself, kyle, Janice, and my twin who does social work, mike, Janice, and my friend who seems to always be working for a pyramid scheme, Michael Sterling. So those were the winners there. And he says the fashion expertise did not come in handy this time, but we were prepared for anything except for the Kevin Smith movies category, which I wasn't a fan of. It was rough. They were far behind coming in the last question, but wagered at all in one. It's crazy. That's how it goes. That at one of our trivia events. Yeah. So Kyle and his brother Mike remember meeting them. They were buddies with Joe Mendezo, and he says, thanks for hosting and thanks for the sweet T shirts. Yeah. And then the runner ups. Runners up. Runners ups. Sorry, the ghost of William Sapphire just ran through me. Thanks for hosting the super fun trivia night at the Cutting Room. And, boy, by the way, thank you, Cutting Room. That place is amazing and very generous in hosting us. And it is back up and running after redoing the inside. And it is really nice. So give them some love if you live in New York. I'm a longtime listener, four years of pure love, and I recently got my boyfriend David hooked as well, and it has been a nerdy bonding experience for us. Anyway, we decided to come up from Virginia. Came up from Virginia for this. That's a long drive. We met some awesome people online and formed Team Phil. Our lovely teammates were Paul Mcgowski, Lia Tallman, Jim Nelson, Charlie Tran, David Burri and two others who skipped out early and myself. Who is Natalie? David. And Natalie is the one who brought us the Mike's on pants off T shirt. Yes. Not only was that super nice, but they sat in the table next to us and I was able to talk a lot of smack with them. And so I said I would read about them on the show. This is how it goes at one of our trivia events. We bring people together chuck talk smack directly to you. It's a lot of fun. So Natalie David says, thanks a lot and cheers, and I hope you enjoy the shirts and all that good stuff. Yeah, we met the Convo Kings, who we've been in touch with. That's right. They have a podcast of their own called, appropriately, the Convo Team. Very nice, guys. And yeah, that's worth checking out, too. Yeah, great fun meeting everyone. And it's always fun. I enjoyed rubbing elbows like that. Nice people. Yeah. What else? All right. If you have had a good experience because of Stuff, you should know whether it's at one of our trivia events, standing in line for one of our trivia events, or nothing at all, you can tweet to us right at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffystnow. You can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit househofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylight is longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen 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 Freedom the Amazon Music App and listen today." | ||
What causes rigor mortis? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-causes-rigor-mortis | If you've ever watched a crime drama, you know that bodies get stiff after death. But why? Explore the biochemistry behind rigor mortis in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | If you've ever watched a crime drama, you know that bodies get stiff after death. But why? Explore the biochemistry behind rigor mortis in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 12 May 2009 16:38:33 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=16, tm_min=38, tm_sec=33, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=132, tm_isdst=0) | 19152296 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Join Josh and Chuck, the guys who bring you stuff you should know as they take a chance trip around the world to help you get smarter in a topsy turvy economy. Check out the all new Super Stuff guide to the economy from howstepworks.com available now exclusively on itunes. Hello, and welcome to our podcast. We call it Stuff You Should Know with your host, Josh Clark and Charles W. Bryant. I'm Josh Clark. We were told to call it stuff you should know. Yeah. What did you think about that opening? That was good. I still have to keep trying. Yeah. Okay, well, we'll try it next time. 100 plus episodes, and we're still working out the first 20 seconds. Still working out. We can't see it's. Just not just the first 20 seconds, Chuck. You're right. I mean, from beginning to end, it's hurky and jerky, the whole shebang. It's evolving, Josh. So, Chuck, I'll tell you who wasn't evolving for about 17 hours. Back in May of 2008. You want to hear about a woman named Val Thomas? Yes. And that was awesome, by the way, that set up. Thank you. Very good. Val was a 59 year old West Virginia woman, and in May of 2008, she died. Died. Okay. 17 hours. No brain activity. Her heart was stopped. They had her on a ventilator. Even during this time, she was dead. Okay. And worst of all, rigor mortis set in. Right, right. Which is a sure fire sign, I would think, that you're dead. Yeah. Because it's not even, like, part of the process of death. You've been dead for several hours now, and here's this new process that happens to a corpse. The weird thing is, this wouldn't necessarily be significant under any other circumstances, but this, because we all go through rigor mortis. Sure. But Val Thomas woke up. She came back. You're kidding. I'm not kidding. After rigor mortis set in and everything, she was dead for 17 hours. She woke up, started talking, and she popped a breath, man. And cracked her knuckles, I suppose. Yeah. And I was wondering, what would it feel like? What would your muscles feel like after rigor mortise said? And I can't imagine it feel very good. Yeah. You probably feel really sore, right? Yeah, I would imagine so, because, I mean, what is rigor mortise except for, like, a contraction of the muscles? Right. Well, is it? It is. Chuck, let's talk about rugged mortise today. You want to? And that's the rigor mortise setup you have it very nice. Chuck and I have had fun all afternoon sending each other gross pictures of corpses in river mortise of stiffs. Stiffs. Exactly. That's where the term comes from. Absolutely. Have you ever heard of that book Stiff by Mary Roach? I think so. Is that the pictures of dead people? No, it's a book about what happens to the body afterwards and basically what it's like to be a cadaver. All the uses for cadavers. I haven't read it. I was reading the introduction today, and I was also listening to the thrash metal band Rigor Mortis. I saw them too. Yes. Were you listening to him? I wasn't, but I was surprised they were able to get the domain name. It seems, I don't know, like some sort of mortuary. They've been around for a while. They released their debut album in 1988. Oh, really? Yeah. So, I mean, they were probably on top of it back in the 90s. But I was listening to them on Last FM and I was like, our mortise isn't as good as I remembered. So I went over to the Children of Bodom channel and they were all right. You ever heard of them? They're pretty serious. You should check them out. I will. But anyway, so, yeah, I was prepping for this podcast reading Stiff, and Ms. Brooch mentions that she was talking about all the ways could ever have been used to help further humanity. Right. And one of them was there was this French scientist back in the late 19th century who was trying to find out whether or not the Shroud of Turin was real or not. Okay. And he actually got his hands on cadavers. And he was the first one to establish that Christ could not have been crucified through his palms because this guy determined that that would only hold about a 90 pound man or body to a crucifix. You know how he found out? By nailing to the average to a crucifix. So it was through the wrist. Through the wrist, yeah. Apparently there's like some joint. I can't remember what it's called, but I think the place where you're what? Tibia and Fibula. Oh, I hope that's right. I don't want viewer listener mail. Is it? Tibby and Fibula. I doubt it humorous. Humorous? Well, anyway, we can't put in there well, anyway, I assume going to get some listener mail for that one, but the two bones where they come together at your wrist to connect to your metatarsal or metacarpal because it's carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyway, there is a hole there that you could drive a stake through and it will hold up a substantial adult sized male. Interesting. But this guy, this French physician figured it out by nailing could average to a cross. And I guess the other option was that Jesus was a 90 pound weakling, which doesn't seem likely to me. I don't know. I can't imagine they were all that. Well, nourished, back then. Yeah, but \u00a390? Come on. Yeah, that is kind of tiny. Slight. Sure. So cadavers? Yes. Rigor mortis. Yes, rigor mortis. Josh, what does it mean in Latin? Well, Josh, it's not so important what it stands for in Latin because we know Latin is a dead language. Latin is suffering from rick and mortise. What is important is how it works, because that's what we're here to educate folks on. Do you want to talk about that, or you want me to? Well, we'll both get into it. I thought one thing that was interesting is that 3 hours or so after a human or animal dies, it starts to happen, and then it happens from head to toe. Yes. Which I thought was pretty interesting. Whose law is that? That would be nice law. Yeah. Nyston. And he discovered the Frenchman way back in 1812. The reason why it starts from head to toe, basically, they think, is because you have smaller or delicate muscle tissue right around the face. So usually it's the eyes and the mouth that require very delicate, precise movements that trigger up first. Right. Which is why every movie in history, every death scene with a guy's eyes wide open, a friend will come by and gently shut them, maybe put a couple of half dollars over them. Yeah, if it was a Western, sure. Nice. Okay, so rigor mortis truck is nothing but the stiffening of the muscles, right? Yeah. Okay, let's talk physiology here for a second, buddy. Okay, so we have two different kinds of muscle fibers, right? We've got skeletal muscles, and we have smooth muscle tissue, right? Smooth muscle tissue is like your heart. It's what? Your heart is made out. This is microscopic. Sure it is. Then when you bundle them together, you have a muscle. What we see is a muscle, right? But, yeah, they're all made up of individual fibers, and all of these are connected or commanded by neurons, right? Yes. So you have motor neurons that command skeletal muscles, and you have fast twitch muscles, which are the ones that require precise movement. So your fast twitch neurons are the ones controlling, like, your eye movement, your tongue, that kind of thing, right. And then you have kind of the big o fish neurons of the physiology world. Those are slow twitch neurons. That was a good oath imitation, by the way. Thank you very much. Very lumbery. Ready to go video. Chuck, we will for you. Okay, so, anyway, when the brain says, hey, man, raise your left arm, it transmits an electrical impulse to the neuron, which says, okay, we got to get this going. What happens is, when this transmission takes place, there's a biochemical process that happens. You've got these calcium ions, right? Right. And they exist outside of the cell, but they like to go into the cell whenever they get a chance. So they'll go into the cells that make up our muscle tissue, and they kind of throw everything off balance. What they allow to happen is that these two proteins to connect, and we have two different kinds of skeletal muscle fibers. I know what they're called. Let's hear it. Myosin and Actin. Okay. And myosin makes up thick filament fibers, right? And then Actin makes up thin filament fibers. And when you connect the two, when myosin and Actin connect to one another, they're molecules, right? Yes. Then you have a contraction. So calcium ions allow myosin and Actin to connect, which makes your muscle contract. So to get a muscle to relax, you have to uncouple myosin and Actin. And through oxygen, through an aerobic process. When we breathe in oxygen, some of it goes to produce this stuff called adenosine triphosphate. ATP. ATP, sure. And that stuff actually decouples myosin and Actin, causing the muscles to relax. When we're dead, though, we have two problems. Well, yeah. Number one, we're not breathing anymore, so there's no oxygen, which means we're not producing ATP any longer. But secondly, apparently, those calcium ions, their natural state is trying to get into the cell. Right. So there's a buildup of calcium ions, which means your muscles all start to contract, hence, rigor mortis. There you have it. That's it, Dr. Clark. Thank you. That is not it, though, Josh. Oh, it's not? Okay. I stand corrected. Well, what's important about riga mortise is what we should talk about next. And we know how it happens. And you can become stiff. And it's funny to play with a stiff, dead body, put them in silly positions. Yeah, it's a good time. But it can actually be used at things like crime scenes. Oh, it can? Yes. Oh, yes. Do we need to talk about that? Well, yeah. Well, how about this? You said that it sets in after 3 hours. Yes. Well, not always. Okay, but how long does it last? Well, it lasts up to 18 hours. Twelve to 18 hours, okay. And then it fades away again. I've heard up to 36, 72. Just doing side research on this. It seems like nobody can say definitively how long it lasts. Well, it depends on a lot of things. Okay. Well, what do they depend on? Well, temperature is one obvious thing. Temperature, Josh, is one thing. Right. It's pretty obvious. If it's warmer, it'll speed up rigor mortis. And it will also go at a slower pace, or I'm sorry, faster pace. Right. So it sets in faster, but it lasts a shorter amount of time. Right? Right. Because basically, it creates a good environment for bacteria, for the decay process, which starts after rigamarole. Right. And ultimately, that's what gets rid of rigomortis. Right. This process called autolysis. And that is basically where the cells kill themselves. The enzyme cells basically break down the cellular structure. And this is the case for the cells that make up muscle tissue. Right? Right. So then, as these cells decompose, the muscles can no longer hold an erection and you're no longer in the state of virgin mortise. Very nice job. Thank you. I'm proud of you. When it's cold, on the other flip side of the coin, it'll slow the process down. So if you die outside in the freezing cold like Jack Nicholson in The Shining yeah. I love that he's a stiff. He probably wasn't just frozen in that scene. He probably had rigor mortise. Probably, yeah. And it was frozen at the same time and it would have lasted a long time. I've heard that it can last up to like 28 days under the right conditions. Yeah. If you're freezing out there, for sure. So physical exertion just prior to death, that's another thing that can affect yeah. Because your muscles are already contracted. Exactly. Or if you're drowning or something, you're already starved of oxygen, so you're not producing ATP anyway. So it can set it immediately. Right. Which is called a catavarek spasm. Right. I actually saw beaver undergo a category of spasm woods. Really? Yes. When I was in Tennessee, I saw a beaver get hit by a car and it went and just immediately died because like the next day I was driving down the same stretch of road and the beaver was in the same position, making the same face that it was the moment it died. Interesting. It was crazy. I saw something undergo a caterbaric spasm. Wow. Yeah. So police are investigating a crime scene and someone has still got their finch clenched on their purse or something. Then that means they might have died while in a struggle against an attacker. Sure. So that can help out the cops. And then fat distribution is another one. Fat is an insulator, as we both know, because we're very warm guys. So what would that mean? Would you and I undergo more quickly or less quickly? More slowly. Okay. More fat. And then age is another thing. If you have low muscle mass, like if you're a little kid, if you're really old, I guess I should say elderly. Sure. That will happen a lot faster too. So those are some things that can affect the speed of the onset and the pace. But because of that, all those different circumstances surrounding rigor mortis and prolonging it or shortening it, it's not quite that precise. Right. So there's a bunch of other stuff that forensic crime scene investigators use or prefer to use over rigor mortis to establish time of death. Correct. Yeah. And it's not just time of death too. You can also tell if a body has been moved post mortem, which is usually a big clue toward finding out kind of if there was foul play, probably. Or if there were teenagers around afterwards. Yes, I guess so. Playing with the body, were you talking about livermortis? Well, that's one thing. Yeah, that's a good one. I like that one. Yeah. Liver mortise is when all the blood cells, basically and all the blood go to the place where it's lowest. So if you're lying on your back, the blood is going to pull in your back. Or if you're on your side and your face is faced down on the concrete, your face is going to be flush with blood. Exactly. It's pretty gross. Also, known as lividity. Exactly. And there's another one, too, right? There is. You're talking about? Al Gore, Mortise. Mortise, yeah. That's a good one. It has to do with PowerPoint presentations, right? Actually, that's just the cooling off of the body until it matches the room temperature. Right. And that happens at a predictable rate, too. Right. It's like one and a half to two degree per hour. Yeah. So it's a pretty good way of calculating time of death, usually. Absolutely. Unless the person had a fever. True. Yeah. Because you're generally assuming that the person starting out at 98.6%, if they were sick and had a fever, that's going to set it off by a couple of hours. Right. I think the official body temperature changed, though, didn't it? Did it? I'm pretty sure I read that a few years ago. It changed by a .1 degree or something. Okay. And we will determine this and follow up on that. Sounds good. Chuck. Another thing the cops can do is look at the contents of your stomach, just like they did in Jaws. Yeah. When they cut the shark open. Or in seven. How do they do that in seven? The gluttony guy. Yeah. Right. Gnarly. And obviously, you can see how much your food is digested the last thing you ate, and that can gauge how long you've been dead. And then my favorite insect activity. Insects. Yeah. I think, as we all know, dead things tend to attract flies and other insects, and that is because they are feeding on your fluids. Yeah. They're not just there because of the smell. And boy, this is interesting. They're feeding on your fluids, Josh. Well, what's fascinating is somebody who's clever enough to figure out, hey, we know so much about in the US. The blue bottle fly in every stage of its development, and it develops so quickly. Right. And its lifespan happens over such a short period of time. We can walk up and say, oh, there's maggots, and they're blue Bottlefly maggots. So we know that this body is only X number of hours dead. Right. Or if they hit the pupa stage or the adult stage, we can use these stages of these flies and maggots burrowing around in somebody's dead corpse to determine how long ago they died. That fascinates me. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah. I think we should talk about Body Farm sometime soon. I think we do a podcast on Body Farm. We should. And then Forensic Pathology period. I know John Fuller wrote a good article on that. Let's do it. We'll do a whole suite of just court stuff. Sure. Sweet. Sounds good. All right. So, Chuck, I think with that promise, we've pretty much reached the end of rigor mortis, right? Well, let's hope not. Auto license is starting to stay in. We're starting to decompose. I can tell you that. I can agree with that. So does that mean that it's listener mail time? I believe so. Let's do listener mail, then. And I think all of you friends out there listening should make note. We plugged nothing today. Yeah, that's right. Our producer Jerry gave us the thumbs up, baby. In fact, we refuse to plug anything because we don't want you to read our blog or to buy our spoken word outlines. Reverse psychology. They refuse to plug. Very nice. The anti plug. So it's listener mail time. It is. So, Josh, this comes to us from David in Atlanta right here. Hey, I know Atlanta and David is commenting on our ponsi podcast. Wait, you can't just say it like that. I don't know what you're talking about. You know what I'm talking about. Okay, wait, chuck, we're not proceeding until you say it correctly. Just let me read. Okay. This is from David. I was listening to your podcast about the Ponzi scheme. Happy? Yes. And it reminded me of a company, quote, unquote, that I did some work for a few years back in Atlanta. He names a company, but I want to name it. They were running a real estate based ponte scheme, and they hired his company to come in and work on their computers like an It deal. And he said he knew something fishy was going on. He saw a few red flags in just a couple of days. It was there. There was a high level of security for a small company. The owner of the company had a personal bodyguard, and there were several security guards in the little tiny office. Second the pitch that the sales staff were giving promise, typical Ponzi scheme results, high return, that kind of thing. And this is to me the big red flag is he said that they would not let anyone from Georgia invest in their company. Really? They're based out of Atlanta, and they wouldn't let anyone in Georgia invest in their company. So he suspected this was a big cover up and a big scheme, and it turns out that it was. It only lasted about a month. And he heard that they had been operating before that, though, clearly, because they built people out of about 70 million. Holy cow. And his company did not even get paid. And that's his favorite story. Wow. Well, thanks a lot, David. First name again. Hope things come around again since then for your company. If you have any fascinating stories about Ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes or any kind of scheme whatsoever, or you just want to say what up? To Chuck. And I Chucking Me. You can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@howstepworth.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. And be sure to check out the Stuff you Should Know blog on the hashtagworks.com homepage to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
20d0b8fa-121b-11eb-85ed-2bbaf19241e5 | Short Stuff: How California Got Its Name | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-how-california-got-its-name | California is a pretty cool name. And the story about where it came from is even cooler. | California is a pretty cool name. And the story about where it came from is even cooler. | Wed, 10 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=41, tm_isdst=0) | 12303102 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry out there. And this is short stuff. California, here we come, right back where we started from. I love California. As you know, I lived in La. But I love Northern California. I think Emily and I have designs on maybe even retiring there one day. Oh, yeah. Maybe there are people I don't know. I mean, somewhere in wine country would be just lovely. Oh, man, that'd be so nice. Now, I saw the soap one time called Santa Barbara, and it looks really nice there. Santa Barbara is awesome. Yeah. I don't know. It depends on what happens with Ruby. We've kind of pledged to follow her around. Oh, yeah. So I'm going to tell her how great San Francisco is, take her there a lot. So maybe she'll want to end up in San Francisco, and then we can be nearby in Sonoma or something. Yeah, I'm sure she's going to love that. She's really going to grow up to look forward to being really close to her parents for her whole life. We'll see. She's going to end up a Republican in Michigan. Just you watch. Mark my words. Yes, she does have a Detroit edge to her. Nice. So obviously, Chuck, we're talking about California and where the whole thing got its name, and apparently no one fully knows. What we're going to talk about is an interpretation that's been around since the 19th century, but it's pretty widely considered as the correct answer. But no one wrote down, like, this is what California is named after. And some earlier attempts to explain it is that it was derived from the Arabic word caliph, as in caliphate. There's a Greek word called kalos that means beautiful. Okay. And then some people said, no, it's after caliente, which means hot and furnace, which means furnace. So California is a hot furnace. And everybody's just like, just go back to bed. Yeah, it was rather lovely, actually. Restart this day. Man so there's this guy in, I think, the 1840s or 1850s who he was like an amateur historian. He wrote a paper saying, this is where I think California comes from, and he said, this is pretty good. Man yeah, I think this makes a lot of sense. There was an author named Garci Rodriguez de Montello of Seville, spanish writer who wrote a novel called man I was doing so good. Omadis de Gala or Omadis of Gaul. And Omadis was, I guess, sort of an action hero of the time. And the book was really big, so much so that Montalvo wrote a sequel to the book featuring the son of Ahmadis La, Sergio de Esplandian, or the exploits of Esplandian. And this is just sort of a set up of these books and a very kind of neat little factoid that lies within. Yeah. Like these two books right here were like, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, all rolled together. Huge. I've heard it like that. They were huge. Is it crichton? I've always said crichton, but I have no issues until just a minute ago. But I've heard it as Christian. Let's say Michael crichton. How about this? Let's say Tom Clancy and Laura Ingalls Wilder mashed together. That is the level of popularity that these books had in the early 16th century, like 1510, I think. That's right. And so we mentioned the first one because the second one is where California possibly comes from, or the name California comes from, because in Las Vegas de espondian, a lot of the action is the sacking of the town of Constantinople held then by the Turks, by a bunch of different countries and nations and armies sacking the city together as allies. And one of them is a group of basically Amazonian women who bear a striking resemblance to the Amazons that produce Diana, aka wonder Woman. I thought the same thing. But in this case, these women warriors were led by a queen caliphia. Yeah, kalythia. Yeah. Looks familiar. They are very strong. They had pet griffins and they fed men to these griffins. Yeah, their male offspring got fed to the griffins. Pretty cool story. I think it was like the Scum manifesto. That's right. Which you can find in the book, the Stuff You Should Know book, that is. So he described their homeland. Apparently the homeland was called California. And if that's true, then that seems pretty straightforward to me, right? Yeah, it definitely does. But the interesting thing is that's not really the end of the story. There's a lot more to it. And this antiquarian basically said, here's basically proof. And I think we'll take a break and then talk about that in a minute. How about that? Sounds good. 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, Chuck, we were saying that in the book las sergio de Escandian that they mentioned that Queen caliphia is from California. That's the name of this mystical land where there are all these beautiful cliffs. The only metal to be found there is gold. And so all of the warriors under Queen Califia wore, like, golden armor while they were flying around on their griffins. It was just kind of like this mystical place, basically paradise on Earth. Right. And so when the Spanish showed up around the time that these books were at the peak of their popularity we can assume that some of them would be familiar with this wildly popular work and the land of California that was described in it. Yeah. And that they might have literally brought these books over. The Spanish believed there's an area south in Southern California kind of like as far south as you can get called Baja California. And I think that's actually Mexico. Right? Or is that part of California? Well, I think there's Baja California and there's Baja Mexico. And I think the border goes right through it, as far as I know. I've never been down there. I always wanted to, but Emily and I were so broke when we lived in La that we didn't do a ton of traveling throughout California. We did most of that since we've moved, ironically. But Baja California they thought was an island. Just like the island where Queen Califia or Califia lives in the novel. And so they called these European colonizers called it California. They later learned that it was not an island, actually, it's a peninsula. And Baja means Lower California. And then the upper part was named as Alta California. Not to be confused with what we think of as Northern and Southern California. It was literally like, sort of what we think of as Mexico and just California. Yeah. And so initially, when they came upon Baja they thought Baja was an island, not a peninsula. They didn't figure that out. So they didn't call Baja. Baja California? They just called it California. Because in the book, California was an island as well. Right, right. But it wasn't until that expedition where they're like oh, this thing just keeps on going that they came up with Baja California and Alta California. And then Alta California just became California. That's what everybody calls California now. Right. But it gets a little more interesting too because the word California goes back supposedly even further. They think this book was written in 1510 but apparently the author of the book based part of it on the Song of Roland which is a French poem written in the 11th century about Charlemagne in the 8th century. And in this poem, Charlemagne list a bunch of people that he expected to combat him and come after him and rebel against him including men of Africa. This is, in quotes, men of Africa and those of California or California. Either way. C-A-L-I-F-E-R-N-E. California is what the people in the Ozarks call California today. Have you been thinking of that joke for the past day, my friend? It literally rolled out of my brain, on my tongue. Kudos. Kudos. Thank you. You've got Charlemagne worried about California. And people say, well, what is California in the Song of Roland? And it turns out that at the time when the Song of Rowland was popular what did you say, the 11th century. 11th and 12th century, I guess. Yeah. 11th century is when it was written. Okay. So people were very familiar with the town that was basically called California. He was referring to the author of The Song of Roland was referring to a real place in what's today Algeria, but at the time was considered the Barbary Coast. And there were basically fortified settlements that were called generically Kala or Kalat. And they combined that word meaning today, you call it like fort. Josh if I found it in fortified town. This is virtually what we're talking about here. And one of these particular places, actually a very magnificent, seemingly wealthy place, was founded by a warrior named Beni Hamad. Benny Hamad. Not Benny like Benny Hill. B-E-N-I. Ahmad. And he was followed by a group called the Benny if French. And now we kind of start to get to the root of where California came from. That's right. But I think Calais was just sort of a prefix for a lot of different places right at the time. Yeah, the fortified town. It's like what we would say instead of fort, they said Kala. Yeah. So Kala Ifreen, which could be sort of loosely looked at as may be California. That actually crumbled in the 12th century after the Song of Roland, not too long after the Song of Roland was written. And I guess they think what I don't see is the connection. I mean, do you think he lifted that all those years later for his book? That seems a bit of a stretch. Yeah. No, I don't know. This North African city. Kalafrin was very famous in Europe. The Europeans knew all about this. It was almost like a city of gold. Almost. It was extremely wealthy. So it's entirely possible that it survived knowledge of this thing survived a few hundred years or kind of morphed into a generic term for a paradise on Earth. So this guy might have just grabbed this term possibly without knowing its origin. But then what's interesting is that got morphed into the state of California, and everybody forgot that origin, too. So it's basically a famous North African city, was cited in the Song of Roland, which ended up in the Las Sergas Day Esplandian, which ended up as the name for California, as far as we can tell. I love it. I buy it. I do, too. I'm buying it big time. I'll buy it twice on Sunday. And since I said that everybody short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is the production. iHeartRadio for more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1229539134383hsw-sysk-dead-body-uses.mp3 | What can be done with a dead body? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-can-be-done-with-a-dead-body | From transforming into a gem to being shot into space, modern technology has created a multitude of possible destinations for the bodies of the deceased. Go beyond the traditional funeral in this podcast from HowStuffWorks. | From transforming into a gem to being shot into space, modern technology has created a multitude of possible destinations for the bodies of the deceased. Go beyond the traditional funeral in this podcast from HowStuffWorks. | Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=353, tm_isdst=0) | 14653392 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from houseuffworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. This is stuff you should know. And I'm Joshing. There's Chuck. Nice, Chuck. Good one. Hi, Josh. All right. Hi, I'm here. I just got here. All right. Chuck one of my heroes, one of my idols of all time, a guy named Doctor Hunter at confidence. I knew that's. Where you're going? He actually stole one of my ideas. Years and I'm not kidding years before I don't know if you actually stole it, but years before Hunter Thompson had his ashes shot out of a cannon at Woody Creek, Colorado. Too much fanfare. Have you ever seen a video of it? No. I'm really dying to see that documentary. Awesome. It's really great. I want my body, not ashes, body shot out of a cannon. Like a urine circus. I figured I'm in Cannibal. Yeah, exactly. But a lifeless one. It just kind of goes over on, like, a prairie or a plane in Kansas. I figure all I need is a really good attorney and a really corrupt sheriff, and I can get it done right. Well, what's the idea, though? You get shot out and just land on the ground and then let the carrying crows take care of me. That's nice. Yes, it's a way to go. And you want to hear some other ways to go? Sure. Okay. Apparently, you can do a lot with humans cremated remains. Yes, you can. There's this one company called Life Jim, and I actually think they're Swiss. They will take certain measure of you think they're Swiss? Like, they're not like they claim to be German, but I actually I'm suspicious that they're not with maybe Jersey or something. They'll take a little portion of your loved ones cremains, and they compress it into a diamond, actually. Wow. Yeah. And it's actually fairly a real diamond. Yeah. You can do that. It's a synthetic compressed diamond. Real diamond takes eons to fold. That's what I thought. This is, like, diamondoid, I guess maybe cubics or cunning, something like that. As far as they say it's a diamond, though. Sure. For a point. 29 carat diamond. It's only $2,500. You just send them some of your loved ones remains. Yes. And it also actually is equally effective to keep an enemy in prison for eternity. If you want to do that, you just have to get your hands on some of their ashes. You can wear them around. Right. Like you own them. That's another thing. That's a power trip. Totally. Well, you know what's going to happen to you after you die? I know. You better not die before me. You can also have your ashes shot into space. Timothy Leary had it done, actually. Exactly. Again, one of my heroes. Yeah, I know. Slightly affordable. Somewhat affordable. Surprisingly affordable. How much for, I think, a gram of your ashes to be shot into space and then allowed to burn up in the atmosphere where you conceivably become part of the carbon cycle or the rain cycle or something. $2,500. It's not bad. I wonder if they shoot you up there. I'm sure they do with a bunch of other people. Oh, definitely. Yeah. And there's a couple of different flights. One, it just goes up, hits zero gravity, and comes back down. And then they return it to you, and you're like, thanks a bunch. That would be appropriate for me because you know how much I hate to fly because of being next to strangers. Yes, that would be my ultimate touching. Horrible way to go is to be shot up into space, crowded and surrounded by a bunch of other people's cremains. Right. No, thanks. Yeah. So we won't do that to you? No, I don't have to worry about it. You'll be trapped in a diamond and a ring on my finger. That's your fate. I think I'd like to be cremated. I definitely don't want the old Southern traditional burial view of the body type of thing. Well, you know, there's some other stuff you can do. You can actually put a dead body to good use. That's what I hear. Yes. Bodies can actually be made to generate power after they die. True. In theory. Right. This one fascinates me the most because it's actually a conceptual art project called the Afterlife Project. But basically these two artists, or an artist and a designer, I believe, came up with a way where you can put a microbial fuel cell beneath the remains of a dead body, right. Specifically underneath their stomach. And as the body decomposes, these gastric juices that are produced are eaten up by the bacteria in the anode of this microbial fuel cell. Right. And it's anaerobic, so there's no oxygen, so it can't just be turned into water. So these free floating electrons that are looking for something to bind are basically converted into electricity, and that is actually shot up to, like, say, a memorial statue of the grave marker. And the grave marker is actually a battery charger. So you have a battery, and it's got, like, your name and your date of birth and death on it. And your loved ones can power all sorts of weird stuff with it or normal stuff. Normal stuff. But I like the weird stuff better. Well, that's crazy. I wonder if that is actually going to come to fruition. I don't know. Looking into it, I didn't find a whole lot. Like, sometimes when conceptual arts done, it's done and whatever, but they proved that it can't happen. I actually do think that they created a model for it, and the science is there for sure. But they were saying that they did this to provide proof to people who are spiritually disconnected or require proof that there is a life after death, because really, they're taking energy that was there before and putting it out into small, handheld, battery powered devices. That's mind blowing, truly. It really is. It's a great idea. It is. That's the Afterlife project. So you can't put bodies to uses. It's a good thing. But that actually is kind of part of a growing trend of green burials. Yeah. That's a big thing now. Or, depending on where you come from, green burials? Burials, yeah. It depends on who you ask. I've got a stat for you. You know, I love your stats. I know. There was a study performed by the American Association of Retired Persons and 21% in 2007 of people over the age of 50 were interested in green burials. That makes sense because that's my dad's generation, and they are the ones who got, like, the recycling kaibosh put on their heads. My dad recycles religiously, and I think his age group really bought into that in the early 90s, so I'm not surprised. Not bad. I think the other 79% said, Get off my lawn. Probably got wicked kind of thing. Well, the thing is, it makes sense. It may seem a little wacky, a little eco conscious to the nth degree. I disagree. Well, traditional burials actually are really harmful environmentally. Yeah. They don't make a lot of sense, I think, to me, this is my opinion. I think it's a little bit of an outdated thing to load the body up with formaldehyde and put it in a very expensive casket and sink it into the ground. It doesn't make much sense to me. That's just Chuck talking. It's been done, clearly, because people need that kind of closure. You have to take a few days to really kind of get over it. Sure. In the 19th century, people used to sit up around their dead loved one, which is popped up on chairs in the living room for days. They eat meals around it, that kind of thing. Yeah. Nothing. And this was before embalming was used, I believe. Right. So I imagine it got pretty gamey, but so we come up with embalming and now a mortuary putty, and all of a sudden we can hang out with our loved one until we're ready to plant them in the ground. But even when we plant them in the ground, that embalming fluid. It may make cigarettes pop, but really it's not good for you at all. No, it's not. And it's not good for the environment. But if you're interested in the green burial, you don't think it has to be some of these more radical ones that we're about to mention. If you do want sort of a traditional casket type of deal, you can get biodegradable caskets these days made out of bamboo, sustainable bamboo. You can get an eco pod, which is basically a pod made from recycled newspaper. It's kind of like paper mache. Yeah. So it dissolves along with you into the earth. Sure. Forego the formaldehyde you can use. Apparently, they use dry ice and refrigeration instead. Which makes sense to me. Sure, it makes perfect sense. You're limited then, in where cemetery can be, right. You can't be near the watershed or the water table or else some nastiness could really get into the waters and pollute it. Although I guess if you're not using embalming fluid or any other kind of hazardous materials would a decomposing body be that much threat? And really, honestly, how much decomposing body do we drink every day just from tap water? I don't have that stat. Probably a significant amount. You think? Sure, I guess so. Okay. A lot of people buried out there. Sure. But I mean, dead fish, right. Dead squirrels. Right. Dead raccoons. Pretty much any woodland animal that's dead. It's a good point. We've probably drank before. Why not humans? Sure. And of course there's always good old cremation which is supposedly a green burial because also the caskets that are usually used used like a mahogany casket that's like an old growth forest wood. Sure. And it's being cut down so it can be planted in the ground with you. And it's probably laminated using some horrible kind of lacquer. It's just not good. So cremation, that's great. Even though there is a casket involved, it's not degrading, it's actually being burned up. Right. But the problem is there's all sorts of horrible byproducts from burning a human body. Right. It takes a lot of energy too. Yes, it does. But the energy can be harnessed, can't it? Well, yeah, that's one cool thing. And this is in Sweden. Our friends in Sweden are always ahead of the curve, it seems low, Sweden crematorium is there. They are harnessing that heat that it takes. I think it's over 1800 degrees Fahrenheit which is 1000 degrees Celsius for you in Sweden. Right. So they're harnessing that heat and actually turning into energy. And there's a town in Sweden that actually gets 10% of its home heating energy from crematoriums from the dead. Pretty cool. Provide heat for the home. Yeah, that is very cool. It's also a little creepy, but it's very cool. Right. But that is not the coolest one in my opinion. Are you talking about alkaline hydrolysis? Oh, yeah. Man, that is awesome. So you want to tell them? You want me to go ahead. Okay. So basically all these animals they're experimented on like we couldn't have come up with ebola without sacrificing a few animals. But you don't just toss those kind of things into the garbage. It's a biohazard. There's a process that was created where you dissolve a body in lie and heat it to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, 149 degrees Celsius. And you apply about \u00a360 of pressure per square inch to the body. So I imagine it's in some little kind of box or something with like a card cruncher kind of thing. Right. And after a certain amount of time the body dissolves and it turns into like this coffee colored goo services. It's the consistency of motor oil, and it's sterile. So what do you do with it? Down the drain. Pour it down the drain. I can't think of any less sentimental way to dispose of the human body than that. Right. Yeah. A lot of people don't like this, though. I mean, they do this on cadavers and like you said, research animals. They don't do this. It's not in practice yet. Well, they're trying to. Right. I'd be all for it. Personally, I can't remember where the town is, chuck it's in New York. And there was a funeral director who's trying to get this process legalized because apparently you can't do that with human remains. Right. It's illegal. And the Roman Catholic diocese came out against it and basically got it dubbed the Hannibal Lecter Bill. Yeah, I don't think any bill I don't get that. I think they're just trying to play off the creepiness and the complete disregard for the sanctity of humanity or anything. Yeah. Terrible example. It works. But it worked because everybody's heard of hamburger and the bill got sunk. And frankly, I don't know, I need slightly more common circumstance. I need more cannons and Kansas planes. Well, you can have a ceremony. I don't think it necessarily has to be your wife in a darkened room just pouring you down a drain. You have a big party and a big ceremony. You can still have all the fanfares. That's true. And technically, I guess it's not that much different from cremation. Right, sure. Yeah. Or you could put the syrupy goo into a balloon and drop it from the Empire State Building. They'd be kind of cool. That would be very cool. No cannon. Yeah. What is a syrupy goo? I'm covered with some poor guy with, like, a fanny pack and grab and then he's covered with Josh, ironically. He's from Kansas. Yeah. So there's a lot of things that are in the works. It looks like the funeral industry is going to be turned over eventually. Even Nate Fisher from 6ft under, he had a green burial wrapped in, like, a canvas sack and planted in the ground. But there's only so much land mass out there, and it can't agree with cemetery. What I think is cool about the green burial movement is they use these cemetery plots as land easements because they're protected in perpetuity, because there's a person there. And basically, rather than getting spending the money on a plot in the traditional cemetery, you basically buy a piece of land and it's protected forever. So it's protected land that can never be developed on that's. Another kind of subtle aim of the green burial movement is land conservation by death. Right. And there's also burial at sea. The new green way to be buried at sea is to have your cremains mixed with concrete and become part of an artificial coral reef and be tickled by fish for the rest of eternity. So, yeah, that's green burial. And actually, you can find more on this on the site. It's called can my body generate power after I die? And before we let you go, Chuck and I wanted to point out another article about death that we think you'll enjoy. It's called the 15 most common causes of death in the world. Fantastic read. Combined with can my body generate power after I die? It will have you rolling in stitches on weekends. You can find both of those by typing some words into the search bar@houseworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?" | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1236975420261hsw-sysk-microexpressions.mp3 | What are microexpressions? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-are-microexpressions | Microexpressions are brief facial cues that reveal a person's true intentions. Listen in as Chuck and Josh discuss the subtle art of reading faces in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Microexpressions are brief facial cues that reveal a person's true intentions. Listen in as Chuck and Josh discuss the subtle art of reading faces in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:07:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=18, tm_min=7, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=76, tm_isdst=0) | 16815829 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. Welcome, people. And this is stuff you should have. It is. And I'm about to tell Chuck. You guys should listen to this. Chuck, did you know there's a theory that there are two kinds of learning? Spill it. So there's one called cognitive learning, which is book learning, right. Where you read an article and you read it again and again and you try to make connections, and street smarts, actually, yeah. That kind of would fall into the other category, which is called intuitive learning. Okay. And apparently some people have more of one than the other. Ultimately, we would all, under this theory of learning, do both simultaneously. So you're reading a book and you're taking in knowledge, and that's cognitive learning. Intuitive learning is where, basically, we're picking up cues unconsciously from our environment around us, and we're learning from that. So what you would call instinct or gut feeling, it would be the result of basically, an unconsciously processed evaluation of some stimuli in the environment. So street smarts. Street smarts it is. Absolutely. Yeah. And part of that, Chuck, actually, is well, we're about to talk about micro expressions. I know you've heard of them, but that's part of these unconscious cues and information that we pick up without knowing about it, which would make it unconscious. As I said, I really like this article. Very good, too. It was written by Tom Sheath. Friend of yours, right? BFF. So, Josh, we're going to talk about micro expressions, which are in the face. We have to talk about the expressions you can make facial expressions. Yes. The broad, plain ones that we see. Right. So, yeah, Chuck, as I understand, there's seven universal facial expressions, right? Yes. Quickly. They are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and contempt. And what was the name of the guy who traveled the world studying these? Ekman. Yeah, Paulman. Paul Ekman. Yeah. He went around the world to a bunch of disparate cultures all over the place and studied facial movements and found that those seven are universal. Right. He was trying to basically get to the root of whether or not it's a learned thing or not. And I thought, I love this man. I thought it was so cool that he could go to the furthest reaches of a Borneo and they perhaps might make the same contempt face as I do. Yeah. Or disgust. I could see smiling, fear, that kind of thing is universal. But that's kind of strange, because that suggests that those are universal feelings, then, right? Yeah. Very cool. Okay, so basically, Ekman documented all of these seven universal facial expressions, but that wasn't enough, right? No. He and a guy named WV. Freezing actually mapped out the muscles that create facial expressions, and what they came up with is the Facial Action Coding System. So cool. Which sounds like it should be, like, on the front of a comic book. Right. It is. With a fist punching out. And what the FACS does is it measures the movement of facial muscles and expresses them in action units. Yeah. AU's. Yeah. So a raised eyebrow is au one. Right. Right. And it also denotes whether or not this movement was voluntary or involuntary. And it also measures intensity. So like a smile, the strength of a smile is measured in six degrees. Right. And so you pop all this stuff together and you apply it to our knowledge of the seven universal expressions. And you can say, just by analysis of these facial muscles, exactly what emotion is going on. Yeah. I think it's so cool. It is very cool and conceivably useful. There's a stuff called facial scan facial recognition Systems. Yeah. And right now, as it stands, they're kind of hit or miss. They tried one in Logan Airport in Boston and it was like, 61% accurate. Which isn't enough, because if you're going to be stopping people based on their facial expression right. It needs to be a lot higher than that. No. Were they setting micro expressions? Okay, yeah, but also there's software out there that can look for fugitives in a crowd based on the FA CS. Right. And what Ikemen and Friedman came up with. Right. But yes. No, the one at Logan Airport, not micro expressions. Got you. That's another one that I think FEMA no. Homeland Security. TSA. Yeah. TSA is using it's like a trailer and you walk through and I think they show you stuff that's supposed to create, like a facial or micro expression if you're uncomfortable. Right. And I don't think it's in use commercially yet. I think if they were smart, they would hire my wife. Oh, is she good at that? Oh, she is. Not only does she have a keen gut instinct on things, which is pretty accurate, I must say, but, yes, she can read body language and facial expressions like nobody's business. Well, if she can read micro expressions, that would make her part of just an estimated 10% of people who can pick up on microexpressions when they're shown them. Yeah, I would say that's her for sure. I cannot fool her ever. Okay, so, Chuck, we've got facial expressions down and we know that not everybody can consciously pick up on micro expressions. What are micro expressions? Well, basically, it's not one thing, but it's super fast. Sometimes as fast as 120 fifth of a second. That's fast. And it's just a really quick facial queue that, like you said, not many people even notice sometimes. Right. But we're still, again, we're picking it up on an unconscious level. So the information is in there. Right. Right. When you are talking to just kind of a slimy guy and you're getting a slimy impression from him, you're not quite sure why? Because he's smiling at you like I am now. Exactly. But see, right there? Right there, I just saw that look of contempt. So now I don't trust you. But I'm not quite sure why, which I think because facial expressions are generally considered a revelation of the real emotion that's going on, it lends itself to the idea that you should trust your instincts. If you get a bad feeling from somebody, run away or knife them or do something, they just listen to their plain expression. Right. That could be the micro expression if you've ever had that feeling. Like, I don't know what it is about that guy, but something about them that you may be picking up on very valid micro expressions. Right. And again, they're fast and 120 fifth of the second. And most people can't pick them up, but that doesn't mean that they are insignificant, I guess is my point. No, they're very significant. Not everybody is as attuned to faces as your wife Emily is, though. Do you know that? Sure. Well, there's actually a condition, a medical condition. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Yes, it's prosopagnosia aka. Recognition impairment, or for just the ultimately people us face blindness. Okay. And basically it's an actual medical condition. They're not entirely certain what causes it, but they've seen it. People have been born with it, and they've seen it as the result of stroke or brain damage from a car accident. Right. Chuck what they do know is that there is some sort of impairment in the physical form gyrus, which is located in the temporal lobe. Okay. And this is the area of the brain that's in charge of processing visual information of faces. Right. It's that specialized. It just has to do with faces. So people who have face blindness actually have been shown under MRI scans to this area doesn't activate. It's not working. So they can't tell if someone is pleased or displeased by looking at their face. Like, they don't understand what a frown or smile means? No, they'll get that. They'll get that. And apparently it was a terrible segue. They're looking at your face. They can see if you're smiling or frowning. What they don't do is make a memory of your face. Okay. So, Chuck, how many times have we seen each other since we first met? One too many, Chuck. Thousands of times. Let's say thousands. Sure. If one of us had face blindness, it would be like seeing the other one for the first time right now. Oh. And then they wouldn't reckon, like, I would say, I don't know who this person is. Yeah. Wow. I mean, like, I would say it's me, Josh. But you wouldn't know for certain because you can't recall a memory, a visual memory of my face. Even though I saw you yesterday or earlier in the hall. I'm a total stranger to you. So, of course, this makes life kind of hard for people with face blindness, like, for example, a television show or a movie, try keeping up with that. Like, every time you see the main character again, it's like, where's this guy coming from? Right? She'd be watching your Magnum Pi. And every episode you think, who is this handsome mustache guy in the Ferrari? I would but the thought of not being able to keep up with Magnum Pi. It's a hellish thought. I would never wish that on you. But that's just movies and TV. Let's talk about real life. There are tricks that people with face blindness have come up with, like every morning. Name tags. No name tags would work. Sure, okay. But at the same time, how do you know that people aren't playing practical jokes on you? Right? Like the movie Memento. I love that movie. Yeah, what a great movie. Actually, I'm going to go watch that after this. Now, one trick that people do at work when they have face blindness is go around and write down you can look at the name tag on the cubicle and then you write down what that person is wearing and then you can kind of maybe study it or access it when you need to when you're talking to somebody. I have a feeling that people who work with people with actual face blindness are probably fairly forgiving because other than that, there's no other disorder. Right, right. I don't know who you are. With family members, they'll often create like, a safe word, like a password. So if somebody says, hey, it's dad, I need to borrow $500, he'll also say like, geronimo or Apache or something, a trigger pickle, Eskimo, something like that. So you know that it's actually them. Right, that makes sense. It is. But do you know of any more interesting disorders than that? That's a pretty good one. That's right up there with alien hand syndrome. I agree. Or Jerusalem syndrome, which we'll get to eventually, I'm sure. Can we talk about Alex Rodriguez? I'm so proud of you right now, Chuck. I am. Timing, really, because you came up this year wonderful man. Look at me, little me making it happen. Dr. Ekman, who is the master, from what I can tell, at micro expressions, he, as everyone knows by now, probably in the sports world, yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez recently came out that he not came out, but he revealed that he used steroids for a couple of years and he famously had an interview with Katie Couric before that. He absolutely said he did not and that he never saw him in the clubhouse and he didn't know much about them. And so good. Doctor Egman recently, as last week, actually reviewed his videotape of this Courage interview and picked up on three micro expressions that indicated that he was lying. Wow. One was a gestural slip, which is when one of your shoulders raises slightly. So it's just a micro expression, obviously. So it's not something and this isn't on the face, but his shoulder raised slightly quite a few times in the interview when she was asking him blunt questions and he was giving firm denials. And he said that kind of expression does not line up with firm denials. People that are firmly denying something do not do. The guest real slip one was unilateral contempt. I like this one. He said that Rodriguez would raise the corner of his lip just slightly and that indicates arrogance or a feeling of superiority. And he said he did this a lot and he doesn't know if this might just be a trait that he has. Maybe he thinks he's better than everyone else. I don't know. Sure. But he says it definitely doesn't fit with what he was saying about being humbled with the steroid use. Got you. And interestingly, it's called unilateral because it's the only emotion with a corresponding facial expression that occurs just on one side of the face. Everything else anger, surprise, fear, sadness or bilateral. So both sides of your face would react. Yes. So I thought that was interesting. And the last one was micro fear. And she pointedly asked him if he had ever been tempted to use illegal drugs. He answered with a simple no. And along with that, no was a microphere expression, which was basically a horizontal stretching of the lips. And he said that basically he looked like he was lying because it's either fear or a fear of being caught when you make this expression, or surprise too. Aren't fear and surprise often confused? Yes, indeed. Which is actually one of the problems with searching for micro expressions. People with social anxiety have shown to launch into an anxiety attack when they're confronted with micro expressions of surprise or fear, because they mistake the surprise look for fear and it's a microexpression. They're already socially anxious as it is, so all of a sudden their gut is telling him something interesting. There you go. Well, he had one more little one, which I thought was the best, and at the end of the interview, he flatly denied taking drugs. And he said that he actually slightly nodded his head in the affirmative as he was saying that. Nice. Which there you have it. Yeah, you can't pull one by Paul Ekman. No, I would not want to be arrived and sit in front of him and try and tell the truth. No. So that's micro expressions. Yes, it is. And there's a lot more to it. I think anybody would be wise to go onto our site and read what are micro expressions? It's a pretty in depth explanation of facial expressions and the whole shebang interesting. You can look that up. And Chuck, is it listener mail time? Not quite. Oh, no. What? We need to give a little shout out to our new blog, which is on our website. It's called stuff you should know. You can find it@households.com and josh and I post once a day each little interesting news items, tidbits then you want to engage the stuff you should know nation, get people talking. Yeah. And you can get to it on the homepage houseworks.com on the right hand side. And without further ado, the chime says, listen to mail time. Are you ready, Josh? I was born already. This is a good one. This came to us from a writer named Lee, and that would be the female Lee. L-E-E. And Lee heard us talk about the one guy who wrote in talking about that he was possessed by the god Horace. And she thought we were very accepting of that notion that, sure, who knows? Anything could happen. So she wrote this about her daughter. She says she has an attractive daughter, very intelligent, lovely and outgoing. And in high school, her daughter was only attracted to gay men one after the other. A lot of times they were not out with their sexuality. Sometimes they didn't even know it yet. But she had a terrible, terrible time falling in love with and being mistreated by gay men because they clearly could not return to love. Okay? So she was very frustrated by this. She took her daughter to a card reader, and apparently this card reader said the reason that she cannot get over these falling in love with gay men is because she was possessed. Her spirit was possessed by a gay man named Jerome from the 1800. Well, and this is what the card reader said. She said Jerome is running the show. And the kid basically says, I don't like this. I'd like to get rid of this spiritual possession. Jerome is kind of baggage. Baggage. And so the card reader, she said, quote, without any fancy, fancy ceremony, said that Jerome was gone and she got rid of him. And the lady said after that, her daughter felt different, never fell in love with a gay man again, had healthy relationships. And I just thought this was real interesting. It is very interesting. And as we are always our motto is who knows? To each his own or her own. Who knows what's going on out there in the wacky universe? She could have been possessed by a gay man named Jerome from the 1800s. Well, thank you, Lee, and your daughter and Jerome as well. And if you have a really cool story to share with us or you just want to say hi no hiccups. Send an email to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. For more I'm and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?" | |
What's the Deal With Staring? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-staring | Gazing too long upon another person is almost universally viewed as anywhere from impolite to hostile, which is odd considering science isn't fully certain why we stare - and why we're so good at knowing when we're being stared at. | Gazing too long upon another person is almost universally viewed as anywhere from impolite to hostile, which is odd considering science isn't fully certain why we stare - and why we're so good at knowing when we're being stared at. | Tue, 17 Nov 2015 14:42:24 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=42, tm_sec=24, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=321, tm_isdst=0) | 34725877 | 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 and guest producer. Noel is actually staying in here. I believe he's staring at us for this one. He is. As we speak. It's making my cheek blush. Just the one, though. Yeah. This is weird. It's a tease is what that is. A little bit of a tease. If I'm anything, I'm a big tease. Spoiler alert. Okay. No, that was it. That your cheek is hot. It's a post. Spoiler alert. I don't know if those work, Count. I think you can set the Internet off into a frenzy if you do it the wrong way. Oh, yes. We've done that before. Oh, yeah, that's right. You say spoiler alert beforehand, apparently, yeah. I thought you just spoiled it. And it said spoiler alert, right? As a tag. Yeah. It's not how it works. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever been to the grocery store? Yeah, I was there yesterday. Were you? Did you go down the steep? Buy cereal? No. I don't really buy cereal much either. I appreciate cereal. I'm glad it's still around, but I just don't buy it myself every once in a while. Go down the cereal just almost to visit old friends. There's the Count Chocula. Yeah, exactly. There's Fred Flintstone. What the heck happened to Lucky the leprechaun? He doesn't look anything like he did when we were kids. Look at Tony Tiger. Yes. While I'm walking down the ceiling, I noticed they don't hold my gaze like they used to, actually. Because you're not seven. No, actually, there's a study that found in, I think, last couple of years at Cornell University, they have, like, a whole food psychology program. I love that stuff. And they did a study of, I think, 65 different cereals and found that the average gaze downward gaze is about a 9.6 degree right. Just your normal human walking. No, in the cereal. Eyes in the cereal. If you were looking at Tony the Tiger and you were me in our normal adult height, he wouldn't be locking eyes with us. But if we were little kids, he'd be looking right into our eyes. Tucan Sam. Tucan Sam. Lucky. Cap'n Crunch, which we talked about. Yeah. The Honeycombs Maniac. Yeah, the goleen fiber stick. Sure. All of those guys, they look into little kids eyes. And the whole reason why is because it builds brand trust and brand loyalty among cereal boxes where the character is looking right into your kid's eyes on the cereal aisle, there's, like, 28% brand loyalty compared to, like, 16% among boxes that don't have little characters looking into your kid's eyes. And it all just kind of goes to show you, like, the stare. Even being stared at by a lifeless cardboard cartoon character is that powerful that it can make you say, I want to eat what's inside of you? Yeah, sure. So the days it's powerful or like the old days when I was single and I would go into a bar and just, like, go right up beside a lady and just stare at her face until she looked at me. Make your eyes as wide as you possibly could. They love that stuff. Sure. Very powerful. It shows what a panther you are. A creep is what that would be. Sure. Yeah. And I mean, that's a really great point. Like, if it's a leprechaun on a cereal box, you're not threatened or intimidated by it, but there's still some sort of power to its gaze. Right? Yes. If you're another human being that is so powerful, it has to be wielded very delicately, because people don't like to be stared at. As this house, the Forks article points out, it's simply rude to stare. Yeah. Depending on what culture you live in, it can be everything from intimidation tactic to an affront to something that's very aggressive. Right? Yeah. It means a lot of things around the world, but I didn't find a lot of cultures where it was super nice. Now the closest thing I could find was Argentina being called out as it being socially acceptable for men to stare at women. That doesn't mean that it's article, right. It's not welcome necessarily, or wanted, but it's not like, what are you doing? Kind of thing. But I couldn't find any culture around the world where just outright staring is just normal and fine. Right. It seems to be like, universally it makes people uncomfortable, it seems like. Yeah. Well, this article we're going to draw from a few, but one from our own website, why is it rude to Stare? Which never really answers, actually. No, it doesn't. It sort of gives some reason danced around it. But I did think they made a good point. Whoever wrote this early on in the article that humans are constantly categorizing things when we look around at anything, right. From inanimate objects, that desk looks comfortable, or that chair looks nice. Let me lay down on the desk. That car is cool, or that person is white. That person is a woman, that person is attractive. That person isn't. Like we're always scanning and dropping things into different mental boxes. Right. So they make a pretty good point, I think. Whenever something is just slightly off, like that person has one leg, the brain has an instinct to stay on that gaze a little longer because it just disrupts the normal. Like, that's a thing. That's a thing. That's a thing, and that's different. So let me look at that for a minute. Right. And the whole idea behind us walking around constantly scanning our environment is this idea that we've evolved to at first, I guess, probably hunt for predators. Remember in the gun control episode, we talked about how humans can recognize a gun in the environment as readily as recognizing snakes or spiders. So we're trained to pluck stuff out of our environment that may or may not be a threat as we've kind of moved away from the possibility of a bear eating you. Typically it still happens infrequently but for the most part, we're not threatened by bears. Right. That same ability is kind of moved into this social realm where that whole in group, out group categorization that we've talked about, too, really kind of comes up. And so we're walking around saying, you're okay, you're all right. You may be a threat. So I'm going to move over here on the other side of the street. Right. I don't necessarily recognize you, but we can do all this pretty quickly, right? Sure. But it's like you were saying, if you see somebody with missing a face, for example, it's a good one. And I read this Wired article. It cited a woman who basically was like, her husband shot her in the face. Oh, man. She walked around before a face transplant, like missing a significant section of the middle of her face. Sure. And she just was stared at all the time. She said she had to get used to it. Sure. This article points out that all you're doing necessarily is taking in more information than you're used to. And we do that by staring. It's a result of saying, there's more info than I can just get through with a quick glance. I need to look at you a little while longer. Right. And then there was a study at USC, as in Southern California in 2012. This one makes a lot of sense to me because I think what you're doing is you're satisfying a curiosity. Like, I guess Oscar Pistorius is a weird example now that he's gone through that thing. But let's say pre that incident, you would see someone like Oscar Pistorius and say, wow, I want to see how this guy runs without legs. Right. So I'm going to look at him, put on those blades and run. And of course, it's a spectator sport anyway, but could it happen any day? Like someone who's handicapped? I wonder how they drive a car with no legs. Right. So it's very interesting. So I'm going to look at that and watch them get in the car and have a specially outfitted car with hand operations. Sure. So it's weird because in that case, I don't think it's rude, but you're walking a fine line, but it is still very rude. Another non murderous example, like the second one you gave is there was in this study at USC, they use women with novel biological effectors, meaning in this case that their arms hadn't fully developed, but they were performing functions that people would normally use their hands for with their residual limbs. Right. So someone might be like, wow, how is she painting, cooking her dinner. Exactly. But at the same time, you're right. You're walking that fine line, so you're staring, but maybe you look away, but then you look back and you kind of have to take it in in pieces because we are in this weird position where we want to take in, but we're also socialized to not stare as well. It's rude. Well, what they determined in the study though, which sort of backs up the idea that it is satisfying the curiosity is they looked at the brains of people, like staring at the lady without the formed limbs. And after they looked for a little while, the brain lit up at first like, oh my gosh, what am I seeing? This is super interesting. And then the brain normalized and was like, oh, okay, well, that's how she cooks her dinner. That's really neat. Exactly. And then they were able to interact normally after that point. So it's almost like as long as your brain hasn't gotten enough information to its satisfaction, you're not going to feel comfortable. There's going to be something weird and different around. And if you interact with somebody before you've satisfied, your brain's need to understand what the heck is going on there, then you might not interact with them as comfortably as you would if you were able to sit there and take it back. And they did this by having people watch other people through like a one way mirror, I think, and watch them for a few minutes, their brains, I guess became satisfied or figured out what the process was. And then after that, they interact with the people much more normally than they did before they were able to fully satisfy their brain's curiosity. Yeah, this might be a pretty lame example, but it's like if you have a huge zip on the end of your nose, right, and you walk into a group of friends for a meeting, you might say, just get over with. I got this huge zip on my nose. Like Fred Savage in Austin Powers the Mole. The mole, yes. Like acknowledging it, hey, I got this huge thing. Instead of being weird about it, just go ahead and take a good gander. Isn't it amazing? And now let's just stack normal. And then nine times out of ten people are like, yeah, great, I just put my hand in front of my face and pretend that nothing's different. Is the makeup not working right? But the thing is, people have zits themselves. They're fairly well understood and it's transient, you know what I mean? So there is definitely looking at somebody who is differently abled or just different in any way. It can be considered rude, especially if that person has to put up with it again and again. But I think there's just not that understanding of what is the basis of it. And of course kids are going to do that. And as parents, you are probably Johnny on the spot by saying, don't stare at that person, that lady without a face. It's not nice. Whereas the kids thinking like, I've never seen someone without a face. Right. And the parent was thinking the same thing, but they're just having to do the parental thing and steal a quick glance and then tell the kid not to stare because it's been socialized out of them. Yeah. It's super interesting to me. But it seems to be innate because kids do it, and then they have to be taught not to do it. Right. Yeah. So I wonder almost if it's then, in that circumstance, if it's like a vestigial trait, it's an innate thing that the kid is responding to the kids evolutionary history. Right. But it hasn't been socialized to not do that yet. So there's like, this social layer that's being put on top of an evolutionary trait. Yeah. So steering seems pretty straightforward so far, right. Actually, it gets way more complex, and we will dig into that right after this. So we're back and we're talking about being stared at, which, by the way, I didn't get a chance to listen to it, but Robert and Julie At Stuff to Blow Your Mind did a staring episode a few years back. They had a stare off. Yeah. Who won? I met Julie won, I would guess. Yeah. Again, I don't know. I'm sure they did, though, now that you mentioned. So, Chuck, we're talking about staring and how maybe the evolutionary adaptations to it, and there's a further idea that we've actually evolved our eyes have evolved to really understand when somebody's looking at us. Right. I think it's pretty neat. The gaze detection system. Yeah. They make the point in here. Which article is this from? This one was from Psychology Today. Basically, the main difference between humans and a lot of animals is with people, you can see a lot more whites of the eye than you can with most animals. Right. So the dark parts that is, the parts that look at you, you can really tell when those things are moving around. Right, exactly. You can tell when you're being looked at a lot more easily. Yeah. So, like, if the dark parts are in the center of the eye, roughly, you can assume that you're being looked at. Sure. If the dark parts are to the right, the person's looking to the right. If the dark parts at the left, vice versa. Right. Yes. I'm looking at null out of my I guess you would say peripheral vision. Exactly. So I can relax because you're not looking at me, you're looking at null. So I can go back to knitting or starting fires, whatever, but Noel needs to be on his best behavior, and that's actually one of the two suggestions for why we're so responsive to being looked at. Like, there's a couple of things. So with this gaze detection system, they've determined that if you are looking toward me, Chuck, but over my shoulder, and I can just kind of tell right. So your head is looking at me, your eyes are generally at me, but you're just like a degree or two off. Yeah, like right now. Isn't that weird? Yeah, right now it is kind of off putting, but right now you're setting off a different kind of neuron in my brain than you are now that you're looking directly at me. Now different neurons are firing, like specific neurons for when someone is looking right at you. Fire. Which is awesome. Exactly. Like, we have basically a region of the brain dedicated to that. Yes. And I have to say, you and I are, like, staring at each other way more than normal in this episode. You think? Oh, yeah, interesting. Or maybe we're just talking about it more than you. I'm not sure. The other cool thing is you tend in your peripheral vision to notice more when. Like. Instead of someone just looking at you straight on with their body and their face. If someone is looking from the side and turning their head completely to the right to look at you. That will stand out a lot more in your peripheral vision than someone just standing staring straight at you. Which is super weird. It really is. Today when I was driving in, there was this woman walking her baby in a stroller down the street, and I was just looking at her kid and I was driving parallel to her, but my head, I'm sure, was turned toward them. She wasn't looking anywhere near me. And all of a sudden, she turns her head and just completely meets my gaze. Right. She saw somehow, probably in her peripheral vision, that there was somebody in the car looking at her kid and she needed to check it out. So she threw the cover over the stroller real quick, turned around and went the other way. He's like a monster. Yeah. I don't know. I find all this stuff fascinating. Like whether or not you can feel when you're being stared at directly to your back, let's say. Well, that's something different. Up to this point, we've been talking about stuff that can be explained away using your peripheral vision, noticing other people's body language, looking at where the eyes are. Now we're getting into just some weirdness and something called the psychic staring effect or scope aesthesia or the feeling that you're being stared at from behind. Even though there's no way, using your normal senses, you should be able to tell that someone is looking at you. Yeah, there was a paper. This is from the article. The feeling of being stared at. And there's an old paper from 1898 from Science magazine called The Feeling of Being Stared At by Edward Kitchener. Yes. And this is sort of a weird feedback loop, but he said you go to the front of a room and you have your back to everyone, you're going to feel like you're being stared at, and then you're going to get nervous and start fidgeting around, which will cause people to stare at you. Yeah. So that doesn't do much for me. He also said, it's possible that when you think someone is staring at you, you start to turn around to see them, to catch somebody staring at you or to see who it is, and they'll then look at you. Right. They notice you moving, and they start looking at you. Before you've made it all the way around. You were looking at me. Exactly. And you say, no, jerk, I didn't look at you until you turn around and looked at me. Right. And then it just turns into a fist fight. Every time. Every time. Without fail. So Tishner basically was like, It's all illusory. It's done. He didn't really write necessarily about all of his methods or study size or anything like that, but he felt like he kind of settled it. 15 years later, there was a guy who picked it up again. His name was Je Cooper. He wrote another paper called The Feeling of Being Stared At. And he tried a little more scientifically to figure out what was going on. And he had a pretty cool I thought his technique was pretty awesome. It was okay. He would sit there and have a study participant with his back to him, and he would roll a dice or die. And if it came up even, he would not stare at them for 15 seconds. If it came up odd, he would stare at them for 15 seconds. And then each time, the person needed to write down what they thought, whether they were being stared at or not. Yeah. And it was lined up pretty consistently. But what this points out, and what a few of the other steering studies point out, is if you know you're in a steering study, you may be more clued in, even if you're blindfolded to think, like, oh, I feel like someone's staring because I'm supposed to. Right, exactly. Like you're thinking about being there. Yeah, exactly. So in this J. E. Cooper study from 1913, he found that people guessed at about 50% they were right about 30% of the time. Which is even with chance. Right? Yeah. So that suggests that you don't really have any kind of signal or sense that you're being stared at. You're just guessing, and you're primed to be guessing. Follow up studies have shown that if people are distracted with another task, or if they don't think the studies actually about whether or not they're being stared at, they almost never guess that they're being stared at. Yeah. It only starts to show up in studies where you're testing for that sense of being stared at, and they're trying to guess, but even then, they're just guessing at about the same rate as chance. So Kishner Vancouver and others later on over the years have basically suggested that scope esthesia, or that feeling you're being stared at, is very widespread. Most people believe that they can tell when somebody is staring at them, but that it's actually an illusion that isn't necessarily explained in any of these, but it is a widespread illusion that humans tend to suffer from universally. Well and anecdotally. You might remember the times where I feel like someone's staring at me and someone is but not remember the times that you feel like someone's staring at you and you look up and no one's staring. Yeah, like you don't catalog that. Well, that was another thing they found, too, is that no one has ever found any idea that you can tell when you're not being stared at. It's just being stared at that was supposed to have a sense for all right, well, let's take another break here, and we'll talk about a few more weird staring studies right after this. Hey, everybody out there in podcast land, we want to alert you to what we're going to call a podcasting event. An event like the moon landing, but for podcasting, basically. That's right. It's a new podcast from GE podcast theater in Panoply called The Message. It's an eight episode series that's pretty much going to blow your scientific mind. Yeah. The Message follows the story of Nikki Tomlin, a PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago who follows a team of cryptologists at a research think tank called Cypher. These researchers are trying to decode a message that was received from outer space 70 years ago. It's going to be pretty awesome, man. That's amazing. And if you want to subscribe and you should just go to itunes, look it up, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes, we'll be doing that, won't we? That's right. Available now wherever you get podcasts, including itunes, GE Podcast Theaters, The Message. All right, we're back. And here's a weird steering study. Yeah, they've done a lot of them. And this is from an article, the many creepy Experiments that involve Staring at people on IO Nine. Great website. So this one, the stare as a stimulus to flight in human subjects, I thought pretty interesting and kind of a no brainer. Basically, they would have someone stand on a corner, and then when people would pull up in their car at the light or the stop sign, they would just stare at them in their car. And then they would time how long it took them to get the heck out of there when the light turned green. And of course, naturally, they don't even release the results. I imagine it was about 100% that people sped out of there when the light turned green. Yes. They had a control group that they specifically didn't stare at or look at. And they definitely left that intersection much more slowly. Yeah, because there's not a creep leering at you on the sidewalk. Yeah, that's a weird study, but I mean, I guess it added to the scientific body on staring by 1%. I thought this was interesting because it actually harkens back to what Kitchner studied, too, is that there's this weird part of the psychic staring effect where physically, you can feel like you're being stared at. Like the back of your neck gets hot. Yeah. When I was in college, I used to, like, my scalp would get hot or something. I just knew I was being stared at it from behind. And the study found that we produce some sort of physical effect when we're stared at. Right. So in this particular study, they had a psychologist sitting there, I guess, interviewing a person, and then another psychologist would be staring at the person while they were forced to either read out loud or sing. Yeah. The person being stared at would have to do those things. Yeah. Thank you for specifying that. And the second psychologist would stare directly at their cheek, and the person would blush all over, especially if they were having to sing. But the cheek that was being stared at would blush more. It would get hotter. Like, physically, they would measure this. It wasn't just anecdotally, like, my right cheek feels hotter. No. And no one has any idea how this happens or why this happens, but it's almost like the self consciousness that's produced and being stared at is directed to the specific part of the body that's being looked at. You know, that's very bizarre. Yeah, well, because they haven't figured it out. No. They'll probably isolate something at some point. Yeah, eventually they will. But I mean, if you start to compile, like, this body of knowledge on staring, you get the idea that we have a very loose grasp on the effects of staring and what it does and what it signifies and why it's around. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I always love those episodes. I do too. This other study I thought was pretty interesting called Gay Dar Khan. Igaze is identity recognition among gay men and lesbians. And I tried to find a copy. I couldn't find one that I didn't have to pay, like, $50 for, but I did read some summaries. It basically looks into how gay men and women use a stare to either assess someone's sexuality or to broadcast their own sexuality. Right. And it's not always just a fixed gaze, not some creepy stare, but it was mixed with, like, body language and looking away and, like, a flirtation at times. But I thought it was pretty interesting. It's definitely not just, like, some heterosexual concept. Right. And steering is not just creepy. It's not just for flirting. They've actually found in other studies that it's a way to ask for help, actually. And it gets results, supposedly. Yeah. This one didn't make a ton of sense to me. So, like, if you spilled some groceries, I think is what this one study did. Yeah. If you dropped some groceries and you bent over and picked them up, if you just kind of keep to yourself and bend over your groceries and you're looking down at them, you got it. You know what I'm saying? Yes. In this study, if you look up, though, and are staring at a passerby while you're doing this, they take that as an invitation, if not a directive to come help them pick up the groceries. And people respond to that. It's the same thing. Like, think about it. If somebody is in a situation where they could use help, but it's also ambiguous, like, they kind of got it, but do they really need help? If they're looking at you, they're broadcasting, Help me. They are. It's just kind of funny because I'm trying to think it just seems like a no brainer. Like, if I saw a woman in a parking lot who had spilled her groceries, and I was walking by and she looked up right at me as I was passing and picking up, I wouldn't just say, how are you doing? Keep going. Bummer, huh? Yeah. Boy, you look like you got it under control. Of course I would stop, but if she didn't look up yeah. Maybe I would feel like I'm intruding. Exactly. So they don't want me putting her hands on her groceries. Right. And that is one of the theories behind why we're so adept at catching other people's gazes, is that it's a means of communicating nonverbally very directly. Right. So that woman who dropped her groceries or anybody who drops her groceries, if they're handling themselves, leave them alone. If they're looking up directly at you, they're communicating with you. They've spilled their groceries, and what they're saying is, I could use some help with some groceries, picking them up. And that theory behind that, the idea that we communicate and engage in social behavior just from looking, is called the Cooperative Eye Hypothesis. And it's basically this idea that a bad band name. Cooperative Eye Hypothesis. It's a little wordy, but little. Like, I could see, like a math rock band. It's no Kathleen Turner Overdrive, maybe the best band name of all time. Yes. But this whole thing is that we are able to communicate not just that we need help, but also we tend to follow one another's gaze. If one person is looking off in the distance and clearly looking at something, not zoned out. Yeah. People are going to look over there, and it's basically the same thing. It's like a herd of gazelle looking over at one gazelle, and high alert is suddenly looking at, yeah, you want to have some fun? Go to New York City or any city, and just with one other person and just go stand and both look up and stare at something. And then just sit back. Well, you can't sit back, but have a friend sit back and watch. How many people and in New York, of course, they won't stop and look, but everyone that passes you by will look up and say, what in the world are these. Two people looking at? Yeah. What are you looking at? Yeah, what's up there? You stare at nothing. You just don't say anything. And then a game of telephone will break out. People just start making up what's up there? Yeah. And then it becomes a what do you call it when people all get together and dance at one time somewhere? Flash mob. Flash mob? Yeah. That's an organic flash mob. Yeah. You have a bunch of people staring. It's a very boring flash mob. I got one more. All right. The idea that being aware of being stared at is basically keeps us in line. The idea that we're being stared at or watched. Oh, it makes you behave. Yeah. Another socially pro social motivation. And I got another grocery store example. I was at the grocery store yesterday, and I was walking in the parking lot, and this woman had her cart, and I noticed her, like, looking around, and she was about to leave her cart right there in the parking lot next to her. She saw me looking at her and she just suddenly went and walked it over to the cart corral. I could tell by her movement she was not planning on going to the cart corral until she saw me watching her, and then she took it to the car crawl. I'm like, yes, shame. Exactly. You engage in more ethical behavior if you think you're being watched, and that would explain why we're such a social species. Sure. And just having that heightened awareness that you're being watched is possibly part of that. Yeah. That's one of my couple of big rules in life that are meaningless to most people, but always return your cart. Yes. People like, oh, they pay people to go around and get the carts just because they have to because of you. And the other thing is, always throw your movie theater popcorn and drinks away on your way out. Oh, yeah. The people that just get up and leave the movie theater with their popcorn bag and their drink there. Pretty much, yeah. I just don't get it. I'm just going to go and say that those are the worst people on the planet. If you want to become canonized, Chuck, not only should you return your cart, you can do the opposite and take a cart from somebody so they don't even have to take it back if you're on your way in. Yeah, I've done that. That's the same level stuff. I rarely use the big cart, though. I do a lot of daily grocery shopping. Yes, it's way to go. It's very Dutch. Is it? According to the stuff for the next article, it is. Yeah. Well, I wear my wooden clogs and ride my bike. Very astute of you. Thank you. You got anything else? You know what, this just reminds me. I did have one slight more thing. You've heard of vitalago? What? Michael Jackson had skin condition where parts of your skin are lighter than others. I posted on Facebook there was this young woman who has vitali go on her arms, and she finally just got a tattoo and lovely script on her forum that said it's called the Vidal IGO. Awesome. And I posted about this, and then she apparently listened to the show and she posted, thanks for sharing. This guy awesome. That's great. Yes. I thought it was kind of neat. Yes. But I'm curious to hear from people that have I can't remember what they called them in the studies. Novel biological effectors. Right. Basically something unusual physically that people might be prone to stare at. Yeah, I want to hear from people and how you deal with that or if you've gotten used to it, or if you think it is super rude or if you're like, yeah, I would stare at me too. Yes. That is a great call out. Yeah. And let's see what's in your mail and then we'll hit it up again. All right. Ola Toros. My name is Amy and I'm an English teacher living abroad in Malaga, Spain. I'm a recent fan and only discovered your podcast when I was desperate for something to listen to on the Metro rides. That's why everybody comes to us. The first podcast I listen to is how Nazis invaded Florida. And I haven't stopped downloading. Now, the real reason I'm sending the email is a little strange. I teach many adult classes. My students are always asking how they can practice listening to native speakers. Many people don't know that in Spain, all of the American or English TV series or movies are dubbed. I did not know that. In Spanish voiceover. I didn't know that. I figured, like, a high percentage would be, but not all of them. Yeah. So there aren't many options to practice listening skills. Once I got addicted to your show, I started suggesting that my higher level students listen to you guys as well. Honestly, I didn't think many of them would actually go home and start listening. However, I was wrong. And this is an all caps. Every single one of them are now addicted like me. That's so awesome. And then back to regular non all caps. Yeah. So thanks, guys. My students want me to send an email to say thank you for speaking slow, but not too slow, and using a vocabulary that makes any topic of science, astrophysics, biology, and history easy to understand. I've noticed a big change in their listening skills and even have the entertainment of teaching some puns and slang that you both say on the show. It makes class much more enjoyable. The only bad side is now they want a tour of the UK so we can all come to see you guys live. That's so cool. See everybody in the United States. You guys aren't coming to St. Louis? I can't possibly come see you. People are talking about traveling from Spain to England, to CS. Seriously, come on. Don't go to Milwaukee. I'm in Madison. Right. Keep on selling out this podcast and gracias for Toro. Australoego, Amy Kolver. Amy, thank you for that. I love that email. That's a great email. Ausela, Visa, your class. Thank you very much for writing in, and that's wonderful. I hope you guys keep listening. We're known for our slang, aren't we? Get on the trolley, Chuck. Yeah, that old thing. If you want to get in touch with us to say hi in another language, that's cool. But like Chuck said, we want to hear from you. If you have a novel biological effector and get stared at, and what you do in dealing with that, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepporks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyheaw.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." | ||
How Willpower Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-willpower-works | You use it every day to overcome your lower self (which wants you to eat cake until your vision blurs) in pursuit of the goals of your higher self (which wants you to not develop Type-II diabetes). Yet it was only in the 1990s that researchers began to un | You use it every day to overcome your lower self (which wants you to eat cake until your vision blurs) in pursuit of the goals of your higher self (which wants you to not develop Type-II diabetes). Yet it was only in the 1990s that researchers began to un | Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:41:31 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=20, tm_min=41, tm_sec=31, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=38, tm_isdst=0) | 28904038 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and sitting across from me, putting on his love, Your Mama lip balm. What felt flavored? That is almond, actually. Yummy. Look at that plug right out of the gate. This is Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Hello. Those are nice lips you got there, ma'am. Wow. They're now moistified. Like moist baloney. Yes. Well, the two of us get together as we are right now, and you have yourself stuff you should know. The podcast. Nope. This is the podcast. It ain't going nowhere. It ain't going to change. Don't worry, folks. Yeah. Same as it ever was. If you love the TV show, we thank you. If you don't like it, hang out with us here online. Yeah. Not to be confused with our online presence, our website. Our new website, the home of the Chuck Stuffysheno.com. This is pretty cool. I don't mind saying words about this because we got a new website, and it's awesome. It's got video and blogs and photos, all sorts of cool stuff. It's us. It's our house on the web. Yeah. Really cool. I mean, Stuffyshano.com, it's our website. Mind blowing. Five years of the making. Yeah. And then not to be confused with our Twitter handle S YSK podcast. Not to be confused with our Facebook page, facebook. Comstepyshome. Boy, you're front loading this one. Yeah. All right. All that's out of the way. Right? So, Chuck, you're doing good. You're feeling well? I'm not feeling great, but yeah. You're ready to be done? No, I'm ready to talk about Willpower, though, because it is a topic that I struggle with, as do most people. I think. You struggle with the topic or you struggle with willpower? I think everybody struggles with Willpower. Yeah. Well, as a matter of fact, I think you're absolutely right. There is a very famous guy named Plato, famous Greek philosopher. Plato. Plato. Plato, yes. Not Plato. Right. And Plato decided or suggested that the entire human experience, the sum of human existence, could be basically nailed down with just this. You have a higher self and a lower self. Yeah. And your purpose for living is to overcome the usually more powerful urges of the lower self in order to fulfill the goals of the higher self. I am down with that 100%. It makes utter, incomplete sense. I don't know about the reason for a living, but the struggle, man struggle, or at least okay. Yeah. If you were born, you are going to face that. Yeah. But you're going to face it in varying degrees, because, as we found, willpower, which is what you use to get over your lower urges and pursue your higher goals, it comes in differing amounts for different people. Different people. Yeah. Robert Lambert, the original article from How Stuff Works from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and he points out that we're at odds with our own nature as we have evolved here on the planet because we craved sugary sweet things, because sugar gave us lots of energy back in the day, and back in the day, they didn't have Little Debbie cakes within hands reach at all times. So we're sort of at odds with ourselves. And he points out, sexually as well, we evolved to spread the seed and procreate as much as possible to ensure the survival of the species. Right. And nowadays you can't really do that stuff, or if you do, you're a Flander or a jerk or you're spreading disease and you're a public health nuisance. Yeah. We're at odds with ourselves, with our very existence. Yeah. And not only internally, but you make the point as a society as well. I mean, society and evolution tussle, so you can make the case that society represents our higher self and what we are basic instincts, that we've evolved to our lower selves. So that's what's going on, and it's willpower that will get us over the bumps that come along in life. Inevitably. Yeah. And I think most people relate will power to things like eating or going to the gym or indulging in sexual proclivities and things like that, but I think it's broader than that in general. I think it's the will to, like Plato said, to strive to, I guess, do the right thing. Yeah. By yourself, by others, by society at large. Right. And I guess also how often you come up against that, how often you have to exercise willpower, because you just hit it on the head. Willpower is the act of making a decision. You're deciding to do something or not to do something. How often you do that, it does depend on how you define the world around you. Like, are these things are you surrounded by temptations that you have to ward off all the time, and you're paying attention to it, and they're always closing in? If you like that, then you're going to exercise your willpower a lot. If you don't see the world as temptation, you give in to them all the time. You're not going to if you look at the world as something that you can handle, you're probably not going to have to exercise your willpower too much then, either. Yeah. But those are three different ways of living, and they all are, I guess, described by willpower and how you use it. Yeah, that's a good point. Robert makes a point that is backed up somewhat by science, actually. Completely by science. He puts in terms of a video game, which makes sense, that if you were a video game and you have a willpower meter, that willpower meter is replenished and depleted on a daily, probably hourly basis. And the more you use your willpower and say, you know what? I'm not going to have that Little Debbie cake, your little willpower meter goes down and it depletes itself. So you're not going to have as much willpower, maybe for the next decision. Right. Which is really interesting. Yeah, that's pretty new. Our understanding of willpower like that is very new. The first guy to really kind of put it out like that was Freud, and he basically said, we have this thing called willpower. We have an ego. That's what the Freudians associate with willpower is the ego. Sure. And your ego is this finite thing. It has a finite energy reserve. It uses energy and therefore it can be sated. And then Freud fell out of fashion and everybody just kind of stopped looking at willpower that way. And it wasn't until 1996 when a Florida State University psychologist named Roy Bowmeister, the Bowmer, he figured out through this test using chocolate and radishes. I believe that if you are staving off temptation using willpower, you actually do terribly on another test of willpower. Yeah, they used persistence tests, basically puzzles that you have to just keep at it and keep at it. Not something you could complete immediately. And offered some people chocolate chip cookies and other chocolate treats of their liking and offered other people radishes instead, which is not a fair fight. No. I mean, he really sucks a day, like maybe a radish, a shaved radish in a salad or something. But if all you're looking at is a plate of radish, then I would take the cookie. So what he found out, though, was the people who ate the radishes had more trouble completing the test, I guess, because I guess the idea is they're using up all their willpower to not eat the cookie, so they don't have time for the test persistence. And there was also another kind of follow up study a few years after that by the University of Iowa professor with the greatest name of all of the faculty there, baba Shiv. Yeah. And Dr. Shiv had basically tested willpower by saying, this group is going to remember a two digit number. Yeah. And this group's going to remember a seven digit number, and then we're going to test their willpower by tempting them with chocolate cake. And Dr. Shiv found that the people who were using their working memory, the cognitive capacity to remember the seven digit number, had a harder time resisting. So it basically proves that we use our working memory to resist temptation. And I guess it's something like reminding yourself at the forefront of your mind not to do something until the temptation pass. Who knows? Yeah, maybe I had that cookie yesterday, so man, I can't eat it today. Or we use our working memory to remind ourselves of our longterm goals in the face of a short term reward. Well, that's one of the big keys, I think. Yeah. And that's something Robert hits on, which is, I want that cookie now. And I know bikini season is coming up and you've seen me in a bikini, Josh. It's not pretty. I will never get that out of my memory, working memory or otherwise. Yellow polka dot bikini, please. But that's sort of what we're at odds with is the short term. I think humans as a group tend to enjoy the short term pleasures, and if you truly learn to conquer that in lieu of longterm gain, that's when you're like you're winning, as Charlie Jean would say. Right, exactly. Although Charlie Sheen is not exactly one who's known to exercise the willpower. No, that was a really odd person to tap for that. Well, I think that's the opposite. He thought winning was the short term game. Yeah, I guess. And that is so dated. Yeah. People like, when do you guys record this? But I think today might be the very day where you could get away with it. Okay. So it was perfect. So from all these tests, like when Baumeister put his 1996 study, ego depletion colon is the act of self a limited resource? It just basically kicked off the slew of follow up studies from Doctor Shiv and others. And one of the things that they found was that you can kind of watch people exercise willpower on the old Wonder machine. Oh, yeah, yeah. Using MRIs, they put people in and had them think about, I guess, a sweet or a health food right. And decide between them and the caltech. Yeah. And they found that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lights up when you're making that decision, when you're considering it, which made sense. I think they kind of expected that. But they were also surprised to find that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is located a little further back sure. That lit up as well. And they think that lit up for the people who made the good decision only. Thank you. Right. And they think that maybe that's part of the working memory where you're like, no, I can't eat that, because that's tapping into that higher self goal pursuit. That's the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Right. You did a nice job there, by the way. Thanks. So the Baumer also went on to say that he compares the willpower, your unwillpower, to a muscle or something like a muscle, and you can deplete it. Like he said, if you overwork your muscles, you're just going to deplete your muscles and be worn out at the end of the day. Or you can exercise that muscle in a healthy way and make it stronger in the long term. Right. Do you do this? After reading this, I started to realize that I actually kind of exercise willpower all the time. I think you especially do. So, like, for example, I have a mail key that I used to go get the mail. Right. And we keep it in our car. Got you. And I had to go to the car and get the mail key and then go get the mail. And it was cold out yesterday. And then on the way back, I could have just taken the mail key inside with me and taken it back to the car. The next time I went to the car, it was very cold, but instead I walked up a flight of stairs, put the mail key into the car, and then went back home. So you made that decision and you struggled with it, even in a minor way. Yes, I did it specifically because there was no reason whatsoever for me to do that rationally. And as far as common sense went, there was no purpose to it. But by doing it, I basically just exercised my willpower. It was something I didn't really want to do, but it wasn't a big deal. But doing that accumulates. Yeah. I think you and I are really different in that way. I see you as someone who actively works that muscle a lot on a daily basis, and I don't enough and not that I just have no willpower, but I don't give decisions like that enough consideration. Does that make sense? Completely, yes. I was just like, yeah, I'll just go upstairs and throw the key on the coffee table, which a sane person kind of has that thought. I think that puts you in the same camp. Yeah, but that doesn't ensure that I'm making good decisions for my life. Yeah, but I mean, I don't think you're making bad ones, but it's good to self reflect. It's kind of fun. It's like a game. Yes. It's like, how Ramrod Street can I stand, right? What I'm building towards. So another thing Robert points out from the science side of things is as far as giving into the short term in favor of the long term is, glucose plays a big part in that. And I think they found that a quick shot of sugar I don't think a whole lot, can sometimes stave off or build up that willpower reserve in the short term. Yeah. You were talking about how we have, like, a willpower bar, and every time we resist, temptations depleted a little more and more. They found that a shot of glucose replenishes that will power bar. So is that in lieu of, like, hey, boy, I really want that cupcake, but let me have the juice box instead. That's the irony of it is giving into that cupcake may help you exercise your willpower with other stuff later on. Isn't that weird? Okay. But yeah, I mean, if you had something healthier, that would be the better choice. But the point is, any kind of shot of glucose has been shown to re up your willpower. Got you. And this is very much poo pooed at first, this idea, I think Bowmeister, there's this really great article by John Tyranny in New York Times Magazine. It's from the August before last. It's called? Do you suffer from decision fatigue. Our buddy Chad loves this. He proselytize this article, remember? Oh, yeah. Okay. This is the one. Okay. So I strongly recommend everybody go read it. It's a good one, but in it, it talks about biomeister thinking that glucose has something to do with this. And it was poopooed at first because everybody knows the brain uses the same amount of energy pretty much all day long. So that didn't make any sense. Like, if your ego depleted and you're suffering from some sort of willpower fatigue, but your brain is still using the same amount of energy, those two don't jive right. Again with the MRI, what they found was somebody suffering from ego depletion from willpower fatigue, who took a shot of glucose or whatever. Yeah. Their brains lit up in areas that had to do with exercising WellPower. So while your brain was using the same amount of energy, it was using them in different places when your willpower was fatigued. And that glucose basically was like spinach to Popeye for that part of your brain that's charged with exercising willpower. Interesting, isn't it? Yeah. So what, are you carrying on a pack of sugar with you at all times? I'm on so much sugar right now. Yeah. Also in that same article, they talk about this kind of landmark study of an Israeli parole board, and they found that if you were a parolee and you came to them after it had been a while since a break or lunch or breakfast, your chances of being paroled dropped by like 50 or 60%. Oh, it's a parole board had not had breakfast. Yes or no. If you came to them, like, right after things got started, after breakfast or after lunch, your chances of being paroled were like 50% to 60% greater than people who came to them for identical crimes, like a couple of hours later. I'm sure that makes the criminals in the world feel pretty great. Yeah, exactly. So arbitrary. And what they found is it's not laziness. It's not like physical fatigue, where, like, you can tell you're tired. What our brains do is they employ the strategy where you become risk averse. Like you don't want to make a decision, so you say, you know what, I'm just going to put this off. You're going to go back to jail. I'm not going to grant you parole because that's risky behavior to let you back out in the world, and I've made too many decisions today. But you're not thinking this. They just say parole denying. You have no idea why. It just makes sense to you at the time. But if you had some glucose that same instance, you may be like, well, yeah, I think you're ready to come back out in society. That reminds me of the band Rush yes. That we've talked about before. Of course, I remember this from when I was a teenager. You know the lyric, what song is it? If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice? Free will. Oh, yeah, that's from that song. Of course. I think on the original album jacket. It says, if you choose not to decide, you cannot have made a choice. Is that right? Yeah. My brother and I used to laugh. I think Neil Pert actually wrote a lot of the lyrics back then that Gettylead just, like, etched it out with a pencil, but it's the complete opposite meaning. So it's interesting that at some point, rush, I guess, had maybe a band argument or something. I'm glad. Getty Lee Won. Yeah. You have made a choice. No, you cannot have made a choice. Right? Just shut up. Play drums. Your voice is weird. I remember hearing that the first time. I was like, oh, man, it blew me away. Yeah. Free Will. I can't believe I didn't remember the name. You're like, I can't think of the name of this song, but it's about Free will. Yeah. Was it Red Barcetta? All right, what else we got? I didn't really fully get the Stanford psychologist Walton and Dweck, and that is Dweck. It sounds like I'm saying direct wrong. I didn't fully get that. They said that people who have willpower fatigue tend to slack off when they felt their resolve wavering, but then people who felt their resolve was limitless pressed on. I don't get the point there. It seems like a no brainer. Yeah, I think it is. You may just be looking too deeply into it. It's like what I was talking about earlier at the beginning where depending on how you see the world do you see the world? It's like you have willpower so you can overcome any temptation. You're going to last longer on tests of willpower than somebody who is like, I'm feeling kind of weak today, and then you're just going to give in. Okay, so it is pretty simple. Yeah. All right. I thought it was a dummy. Not only is it simple, I managed to make it more complex and talk about it at length. They do know that people generally there is some genetic component involved. Like if your parents are super self disciplined, then you are more likely to turn out that way. Right. I found that to be true from friends of mine whose parents were like super self disciplined and their kids kind of turned out that way, too. Yeah, but I wonder and Robert makes a point in the article, is it genetic or epigenetic? I don't know. Probably both. Yeah, I would think so. That'd be my guess. We just chose not to decide. We could not have made a choice. And then the old marshmallow experiment, the Stanford not the prison experiment, but the marshmallow experiment. Yeah. From the 1960s, a very famous one where they tortured these kids basically by placing a marshmallow in front of them and saying, if you hold off on eating that marshmallow, in 15 minutes, you will have two. And of course, not many of the kids could hold out, but they found that the ones who did hold out for the second marshmallow went on in life to greater successes, at least if you count Sat scores as a measure of success. 210 points higher than the ones who chow down on the marshmallow and the ones who ate the marshmallow later on had struggles with relationships and stress and attention. Yeah. So I wonder if that has anything to do with OCD. I wonder as well. I wonder how much of our modern problems are really just crises of willpower. Yes, I wonder. There was a follow up to that 60s experiment. There's been a bunch, but there was one at the University of Rochester that was carried out last year that found we are more willing to exercise willpower if we think that what we're holding out for is actually going to happen. And they did that. But this is hilarious. It's funny. Studies with kids are so cruel and funny. I mean, not the really truly cruel one. Any psychological study that has these kids almost invariably has some cruel aspect to it, and this one was no exception. Basically, they said, here's the control group, here's the experimental group and the control group, we want to give you some extra art supplies. Let us go get them. And they came back with some extra art supplies. The experimental group, they said, hey, we're going to get you some more art supplies. We'll be right back. And they came back, they were like, we don't have any more art supplies. We know you were really excited, but sorry, you're going to have to make do with that old red pen. And then they tested them with the marshmallow experiment and found that the ones who had gotten the art supplies, the promise hadn't been broken. Sure. They held out longer than the ones who had been lied to. Yeah, they're like, screw that. You're not bringing me two marshmallows. I'm on this marshmallow right now. Exactly. I'm going to kick you in the shin afterward, too. I'll show you. Yeah, that's not cool. On the level, what was that one kid, remember that we talked about that was tested on, like oh, kept in a closet. No, they tested fear, conditioning and extinction in the kid, Little Albert, where they like, they would put a bunny in his lap and then bang a bar of metal with a hammer and scare the Jesus out of them. That's right. And they seem to like fear rabbits, like the search for them. Right. And they eventually found them, they thought. I think so. I don't remember. I wrote a blog post that I'll have to republish or whatever, because it's been a while. I don't remember. But yeah, they figured out who it was, pretty much. So this isn't on that level. No, this is just marshmallows. Yes, it is. There's one other point I wanted to bring up that I thought was pretty interesting and horrible from that John Tierney article, where with decision fatigue with exercising willpower. It disproportionately affects the poor. And they think that possibly now that poverty exists in a cycle, because if you're a poor person, you have to exercise willpower. You have to make more decisions than somebody who has more resources, more money. Like, say you're walking through the grocery store, I want this soap and this food. If you're poor, you might have to say, I want both, but I have to just buy one. I don't have enough for both. So how much is it going to be? And their willpower, their resources of willpower, of decision making become fatigued a lot faster because they have to exercise it a lot more. And they don't have the resources to get themselves out of poverty to indulge or to study or do more that they already have the deck stacked against them resource wise. But then you throw in this idea of willpower, possibly that makes it even more difficult. Yeah, I never really thought about that. It's pretty interesting stuff. You feel for them even more. Yeah, and it makes me feel bad when I say, do I want the peanut butter ganache cupcake or the chocolate? You know what? Just go ahead and give me both. Right, exactly. Well, you can buy both and then just take one to somebody who's struggling in the grocery store trying to figure out if they're going to buy soap for food. It's a good idea. Yeah. You got anything else, man? No, this is a good one. Yeah. I like willpower. It's fun. Go out and exercise it. In little ways, it's fun or don't. Either that or strap a car battery to your inner thigh just for fun. Okay, well, if you want to learn more about willpower and read this good article by Robert Lam, you can type in willpower in the search bar@howstephworks.com and it will bring it up. And I said, search bar. So it's time for listener mail. Yeah. Josh, quickly, before we do that, we need to say a special thank you to a fan of ours who helped us out with our Wikipedia page. Oh, nice. Thank you. And he was very cool in his name. And he's been mentioned on tech stuff, evidently, too. Oh, wow, this guy's a star. We're not going to hold that against him. And this is how his name is spelled. A-N-T-R-I-K-S-H yadav yadav. And he says you pronounce it ontrack the T is soft, though, as in math soontrich. Yeah, there you go. He phonetically spelled it out. He told me what it sounded like and I still can't quite do it. So we just want to say thanks a lot for helping us with the Wikipedia page. Nice. And now a listener mail that I'm going to call Fysk can help you get. Ladies, this is from Todd in Oklahoma City. Okay, guys and Jerry, I've come to the conclusion that I may owe you a big. Thank you. Your podcast has created the impression, whether fiction or reality, that I am somehow a guy who knows about stuff with the ladies. My new girlfriend, in fact, mentions as one of my winning traits that I am often seeing interesting things, and it's really interested me. So I asked her for some examples of things that I say, and it was notable that every example that she cited was something that I learned listening to your podcast at work. So it is quite possible, sir, that you and your podcast made my baby fall in love with me. Nice. I'd like to shake your hands. Every single guy should listen to your podcast because it may at least get you a second date. And that is Todd from Oklahoma City, who is banking on our knowledge to woo women. And guess who got a girlfriend of it? Good going, Todd. Good for you. We're glad we could help, man. We're married, dude, so we live vicariously through these emails. That's not true. No, I think it's great. I'm happy for Todd. Yeah. I don't mean I live vicariously. I don't know the details. No, I just mean, like, that's great. I'm glad someone out there is getting a date because of this. Yeah. I love helping people find love connections. Yes. As a matter of fact, we should do a speed dating episode. I wrote an article on it once, and it's pretty neat. Yeah. My friend PJ, he met PJ, he just texted me yesterday and said, hey, this girl, he does a lot of online dating. He said part of her profile is that she's, like, a huge fan of you guys. And I said, Dat her. Yeah. Go out on a date with her. Yes. There you go. You're doing it all over the place. Manager let's see. If we have affected your life positively, we want to hear about it. Not negatively, just positively. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can always find us hanging out at our home on the Web. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
a639226c-5462-11e8-b449-5f764c1bfd12 | Jobs of Bygone Eras | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/jobs-of-bygone-eras | Join Josh and Chuck today as they take a fun look at some of the strange jobs that our ancestors did. It's a SYSK top 10, meaning there will only be eight or so. | Join Josh and Chuck today as they take a fun look at some of the strange jobs that our ancestors did. It's a SYSK top 10, meaning there will only be eight or so. | Tue, 17 Jul 2018 13:40:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=13, tm_min=40, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=198, tm_isdst=0) | 57733608 | 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. There's Casper the Ghost, our new producer. Say hi, Casper. Yeah, Jerry's on vacation. Guest producer Tristan came in and tapped the record button with his nose as his per tradition, and then he left. Here we are in that's the new tradition. People just come in and be like, yeah, here you go. See? Remember the old days when guest producers would claim her to get in here and witness the magic? I remember. I can remember now. They draw lots and just go, all right, I guess I'll go hit record, then leave. I like to think it's because they're all overworked that's why. It's not like we're passing. No. It could be both, though, I guess. How are you doing? I'm doing good, man. I'm excited about this one. It's nice to have something that doesn't have that much weight to it. Yeah, I needed a little lighter break and big thanks, by the way, to Denver, Colorado. Just came back from Denver for two sold out shows. Two great shows. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun. I had fun as well. It was a good show. I think the second one, for my money, is the one we should release as the version of that show. Which live shows have we released? I know Chicago was Pintos. PR PR pintos was Atlantic because that was the benefit show. What about DV Cooper? DB. Cooper was Seattle, I believe. And then Gray Robbing was somewhere in the UK, I would imagine. I think it was London. All right, so we have not released a Denver show. No, we definitely haven't. We have not. So this could be the one. If you ask me, it was just on and popping. Well, you know me, I don't like to overthink these things, so I'm generally just prone to say it's good enough for you. It's good enough for me. That's very nice of you. Sure. Lets me get away with a lot. That's right. All right. Well, Chuck, I'm prepared now. Are you? Yes. Well, then let us begin talking about jobs that just aren't around anymore and old stuff you should know. Top ten, which means we'll do what, eight, maybe, if we feel like it's. Certainly not ten, I'll tell you that. I agree. So there's actually this article I thought started out pretty cleverly, talking about some jobs that are probably going to be extinct in the near future, at least as far as the US. Bureau of Labor Statistics is concerned. I didn't even look at that part. So there's a few coming up. Word processors and typists. Not a lot of time left on that profession. Yeah. Door to door sales workers, which I took issue with because I can see people wanting that personal touch of being bothered and harassed by a salesperson. That happened. Yeah. I think now it mostly happens, like, don't you want to sign this petition? Or something like that? Usually the door to door thing, not like, here's a vacuum cleaner set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Do you know how just blown away you would be if somebody came up to your door and tried to sell you a vacuum cleaner? You'd be like, what's your angle? Are you chasing my house? Or encyclopedias? I mean, that's even moral fashion. At least you still use vacuum cleaners. Yeah, for sure. That's true. The last one on this list was mail carriers, which I don't know, man. I could see there's always going to be a need for physical correspondence, or there will be for a very long time. I don't know about that one. But the upshot of all this is this, Chuck. There is this guy who you and I know named John Maynard Keynes, and he is an economist. He was an economist, a liberal economist, and he wrote back in 1030 an essay called Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren. And it's actually like a quick, easy read. Yeah, but in it he basically said, 100 years hence. So by 2030, we will have done away with work. We'll have automated basically every process you can think of, and humans will be totally out of work. And he said that will be a really good thing because we will still be generating wealth, but we just won't have to work. So people will start writing bad poetry and painting terrible paintings, and eventually we'll get better and better, and there'll be like a big blooming of the arts and of interpersonal relationships and things like that, and we'll just be able to hang out and chill and we've come close to that. But there's a lot of holes in Keynes argument, whereas if you're going to do this, you kind of have to figure out a way to distribute the wealthy evenly or else you just end up with the people who own the machines or the ones who get wealthy and everybody else is just out of work. But setting all of that aside, there is a silver lining to the idea that jobs can be extinct. And this list of jobs to me, kind of shows like, okay, we move on without this kind of stuff. Yes, it's rough for the people who had that job, but you can get new training and learn another job, which for my money, is part and parcel with getting rid of one job. You need to train somebody for another job as long as we humans can work. Yeah, and I think with most jobs, it's not like I mean, in some cases, the thing just no longer exists, but if it's replaced by a better or newer technology or both, then that becomes the job. So I've never bought into this whole, like, we need to protect these jobs that are surely antiquated. Sure. Just to keep these people in work. It's like, no, man, you got to roll the times. You do. But I think that one of the roles of government or even industry is to provide training to keep up with those times. Sure. If so, someone so chooses for sure. Sure. Yeah. Now, if it's all robots doing everything all the time, then we should be able to choose not to. And you should have a nice universal basic income. But someone has to build and fix those robots. Well, you build other robots to do that. All the materials at some point I don't think I agree with him fully that nobody will be working at some point. You disagree with Kane? All right, let's get to it. The first job on this list, I don't think anybody was really sad to see go, although that's not necessarily true. There were fans. Well, and I know one person in particular was probably pretty sad. Who? Well, we'll get to them. Okay. Chariot racing. Yeah. That's an extinct job. You cannot anywhere in the world find a professional chariot racer, as far as we know. Yeah, but this was one that was a very big sport back in the day and was literally like NASCAR was today. Very much so. Yeah. If you look at let's say they called the track circuses. If you look at Circus Maximus in ancient Rome, these things started out where people could just sit on the hillside and watch races, but it evolved into Circus Maximus, which held 150,000 spectators. I saw 250,000. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, let's just say it's somewhere between that, then, right between those two numbers. Either way, it's super impressive. Agreed. Yes. And of course, if you don't know what a chariot race is, it's very simple. It's just a race where a horse pulls a man in a little twowheeled vehicle called a chariot. Yeah, everyone's seen the chariot and the depictions I've always seen, from cartoons to movies, actually, apparently were very accurate. It's like, closed off in the front and then kind of tapered down the sides and open in the back. There was one axle with two wheels, and it was connected to a team of horses, usually about four horses, maybe two, maybe six. And it went really fast, and it was really flimsy. So if you collided with another cherry, there was a pretty good chance your chariot was going to disintegrate and you were going to be in trouble. Yeah. I mean, just sort of like modern race cars. The chariots they designed for military battle were not like this. They were very sturdy, often had a lot of metal and reinforcements. But if you were out there racing, you wanted to win. So your chariot was super light, probably just made of wood. You were probably standing on that axle. It's not like you're sitting on some big throne in the center of your chariot. Right. And it was sort of like horse racing. You would draw lots for position, they would drop the white cloth and then up to twelve racers at a time, the gates would open and you are off. Yeah. And at the height of the Roman Empire, there were four, and then later on, six teams. There was a red team, a white team, a blue team, and a green team originally. Then they added purple and gold. Like you said, this is like NASCAR. People devoted to these teams, like they're devoted to racers today or to football or soccer today. Just fanatics. There is a story that Plieney wrote of a guy who was a fan of the red team, and when one of the red team racers died, the fan threw himself onto his funeral. Pire killed himself out of grief. Wow. That happens weekly in NASCAR. Oh, sure. Except they throw themselves on their turkey fryer. I don't know why I picked that. I think that's probably pretty accurate. Man. I bet there's a lot of tricky fries or maybe their barbecue pit. How about that? Sure. One of the two. So the dude I mentioned that was probably pretty sad to see it go. Although he did finish his career. It's not like the sport went away. His name was Gaius Dioclese. I haven't heard of this cat. He was someone who was likely one of the most rich people in ancient Rome that was not a member of royalty or whatever. He raced from the 18 to the age of 42, close to 4300 races. And I was trying to find out some kind of ballpark conversion of their money compared to our money today. And most everyone with a brain on the Internet said, no, don't even bother. Although some people were like, it's really just like a one to one ratio. So I don't buy that. But supposedly he amassed a wealth of 36 million. However you pronounce that, sistersees. I haven't seen that word before, ever. That was their money. I don't know. sesterces. Yeah, I've never seen that. So, I mean, let's say it is a dollar than about $36 million, which made him one of the richest people. Yeah. It is impossible that the ratio or the conversion is a dollar to one to one. I would think so. Right? Yeah. That's totally impossible. Yeah. That was just some dummy on answer This.com or something. Yeah, I'm tired of thinking about this. Just say it's one to one. I think it was from the website, take a stab@it.com. That guy raised from 18 to 42. Huh? 18 years old. And apparently he not only was super rich, but he kept a lot of records of his races. So he's one of the only people we can look back on and say he raced this. He only won about a third of his races, too, it looked like. But even still, just surviving that many races is mind boggling. This is really dangerous. If your chariot basically exploded, you had lashed the reins to your horses around your waist to stabilize yourself better, and you were still connected to your horses by your waist, and now they were dragging you possibly to death. So most racers carried a knife on them to cut themselves loose in case they weren't always quick enough with it. Yeah, and then you had to get your knife out while you're being drunk at however many miles an hour or whatever. They used to distinguish speed. Plus, there is always like a bad guy villain, like in the Ben Her race, who was trying to chop up your chariot and whip you. Yeah, I didn't see rules as far as that went. Were they clean races or was it you could stick a staff through somebody's wheel and flip them over? I did not see I bet there was a range of activities. Yeah, that'd be my guess. Would you want to take a break? Should we already? I mean, that chariot race took up a lot more time than I thought. It's going to be like a three hour episode. Yeah, let's take a break and we'll do what, four more? Yes. Then take another break. Sounds good. All right, we're back. Chuck with another old job that's not around anymore. This one's armourer. Yes. Which is hard to say. It really strains the back neck muscles. Yeah. I mean, there is a modern job called an armourer, but we're talking about the dudes in the Middle Ages who would build your body armor, which was, I mean, extraordinarily skilled craft. Like you couldn't go to school to learn how to be an armourer. You basically had to be born the son of an armourer because the skill was passed along from father to son. And secrets of how to make these suits of armor were kept very closely secret by the people who knew what they were doing because they had a lot of competition. And so, as a result, historians and I guess armor specialists of today still have questions about how some of these guys made some of these amazing suits of armor because they didn't leave any evidence of exactly how they did it. Yeah, I mean, the process would start as just like a what are the people that make suits? Taylor. Taylor. Like a tailor might today. So you would lumber up, you would strip down to your linens and they would take your measurements and then make a replica of your body if they so had the time, out of wood or something. Right. Because it would take a long time. If you wanted a quality suit of armor, you couldn't go in there and say, turn it around in a week. Like, sometimes it would take months and even more than a year. Yeah, I saw years in some cases. Yeah. Because if you want the good stuff, you got to go. And these people made a lot of money. They were like a subset of the Smithy's. Like, you said it was not something that everyone was good at. So they would spend a lot of time with wealthy people, they made a lot of money themselves and so they had kind of a much higher standing as opposed to like a regular smithy might. Yeah. And the suits of armor that we see today, the ones you think of usually like a British night or something like that, wearing it, those were made of high quality steel. But steel back then, this is like fairly early, after we really figured out how to make steel reliably. And it was a real bear to work with because you'd hammer it and then you'd have to heat it up again and hammer it some more and it would cool as you were hammering it and you'd have to heat it up again. So it was really tough to work with, but it was pretty strong. The thing is, because steel was rare, it was also very expensive to work with. And so the suits of armor we see today, like in museums and things usually come from the 16th century. And even though they were making suits of armor similar to that as far back as like the 14th and 15th centuries, you don't see those because they reused that old steel from the old suits of armor into the new ones. And then they finally ended in the 16th century when they stopped making suits of armor. But that's why you only see almost exclusively 16th century suits of armor. That makes sense. I also saw that they tried to set up shop near the materials. So instead of having to transport stuff long distances and it sounds like it was in pretty high demand if like, let's say someone died in battle and then they would say they wouldn't just leave that stuff out there, somebody would go and order up all this stuff. So I think just living near the product or the base materials was a big advantage if you were an armourer. Yeah, and armor kept up their trade eventually. So Muskets came along. Sure. Well, at first it made armor even better. It pushed the development of armor plating along even further. But then it outpaced Musket development, outpaced armor development. And then there was no reason to have armor any longer because you could just shoot right through it. But up to that point, the armor plating got better. But then people stopped wearing as much of it until you basically had a chest plate and a back plate and you would see people battling still. I think even Napoleon's troops wore chest and backplate armor and the American Civil War and that's it. They were naked despite right. They're like, it's so cold. Well, one more thing. In the American Civil War, there were people who sold chest plates. Oh, yeah. And I think that was about as late as it went. Late 19, early 20th century, you could still find an army here. They're wearing a breastplate, maybe. Yeah. I imagine that even later on, with the advent of Muskets, something that could stop an arrow or a nice sword, strike sword, you would probably still feel pretty good about wearing that. Sure. It wasn't too heavy. One thing I saw that I thought was pretty ridiculous was that one of the reasons soldiers didn't wear more widespread in the Civil War in America was, one, it was tough to lug around. They got heavy. So when you're on the march, you don't really want to carry that. But then, secondly, they would be chided as cowards by their fellow soldiers, which is like, are you a coward just for taking an extra step of protection, an extra measure of protection when you're out there on the battlefield. I'm wondering if I'm missing something. I don't know. Maybe back then, it was just getting that time where they were like, old Sally backplate over there, right. He doesn't want to take an arrow to the back. Or if you were Richie Rich because you could afford a breastplate and everybody else couldn't. So they just kind of peer pressured you into dying along with them. Maybe peer pressure you into dying. Yeah, the worst peer pressure of all. It's pretty bad. You don't want to succumb to that peer pressure. So in this case, the armor, and we didn't say in the last one, the chariot racers went away with the fall of the Roman Empire. This job armor went away, basically, when Muskets became capable of piercing steel. Yeah. And after that, like I said, it may help with the odd arrow or knife thrust. Maybe a throwing star, the famous throwing stars of the Civil War. Shall we move on? Yes, man moving along. We're going to stick around. In the Middle Ages, it's just kind of head on over to the court jester. Yes. I think this is one where there's a lot of misconceptions, because while in the Middle Ages, there were court jesters who would dance around with the colored cloths and the little hat with the bells on it and stuff like that. That did occur, but from what I gathered, the general court jester didn't really wear that often. No. And I think one of the other misconceptions, too, is that they were kind of lunk heads or dummies or just simpletons, who knows, however you want to put it, when actually they were extraordinarily, usually among the highest educated people in any given country, certainly in a court, and that they were less fools and more satirists. Yeah. All right, so let's break this down. There are a few different types. The type you're talking about is the legit court jester who would generally perform at the behest of the court. Right. And those are the ones that were sometimes some of the only people who could speak ill of the king or queen as a satirist, but you still would run a risk if you took it too far. Imagine there was more than one court jester who found their head on a stake at some point, for sure. Actually, I think the last one known to have lived, dicky Pierce, who was the fool to the Earl of Suffolk, fell to his death from a pulpit. And the official line is that he slipped, but somebody thinks that he may have actually been pushed by somebody who didn't like his little shove his stick. Yeah. So it says in this one article, I found that three types of fool emerged, and that one was the official court jester. A lot of times they would just wear normal clothes rather than that little outfit that we all know is the court jester. But then there were definitely noble families and wealthy people who would adopt men and women who had mental illness or some sort of physical deformity, and they were a little more they called them innocent fools. And they weren't paid, they were just kept around almost like amusing pets, like Wild Peter from the Feral episode. The feral children episode. Yeah. And they would get like, food and clothes and lodging and stuff like that, which I think was saying quite a bit at the time. Yeah, because that was the value. Right. And then they said the third class was where people of the members of the fool societies that were big in France, and I think these were more of like what we would consider now, like a renfare performer. Yeah, exactly. And they would definitely wear those outfits and really play it up. Right. So the type of fool that belong to a court, they actually had like a really important position in the kingdom because, like you said, they were satirists and they could satirize at their own peril, but they were also capable, I think, of surviving by bringing it right up to the line, by knowing just how far you could pressure the King or the Queen or the court. But in doing this, you provided a service to your fellow countrymen in that you could keep the King from getting bored and maybe going off to war inadvisably or coming up with some terrible new laws. Or if there were some terrible new laws, the jester was in a position to make fun of them satirically and maybe make the King rethink these policies to help out your fellow people. So it was a very important position because you were basically the only person in the entire court who had the ability to speak freely. And again, it was at your own peril to an extent, but for the most part, it was accepted that you could poke fun at the King in the court and policy and the state of affairs. I imagine it was a bit of a nerve wracking job. Sure. You would also do other things. Sometimes you would have other jobs, like Keeper of the Hounds, sometimes they would buy the livestock for the family, and then during times of war, they would actually function almost as like a USO. Might. They would be brought to the front lines to entertain, to do two things. They would entertain their own troops to kind of try and ease them before battle. Or they would mock the other side and try and actually thwart their plan because they would get so mad at the Jester, they would not be thinking clearly and make some kind of mistake. Right. Because of the taunting. Yeah, because the Jester farted in their general direction. Well, it's funny you mentioned that, because I did see, a lot of times they would be rewarded with land at the end of their tenure. And King Henry II gave his Jester 30 acres upon retirement as long as he came back every Christmas to leap, whistle and fart. That's it. He's like, you get one leap, one whistle and one fart. And if your fart sounds like a whistle, then you just knocked out two birds with one seat. Yeah. Nice. So this job, I'm not entirely sure why it went away. I think we need Jesters more than ever. But the last one, like I said, was Dickie Pierce, who was full to the Earl of Suffolk, and he died in 1728 of misadventure. Oh, really? Well, yeah, he fell from the pole pit, maybe shoved. Yeah. Possible homicide. I guess the closest thing we have now are either political cartoonist or the White House Correspondents Dinner or The Onion. Or The Onion. Man, they've just been killing it since day one. Still, after all this time and evolution, the Onion is still just doing great stuff. Agreed. Moving on. Yeah. So we're going to advance forward a little bit to the Victorian England, to the late 19th century. Yeah. And I had never heard of this job before, did you? No. But we have talked a lot in the past about the sheer buildup of horse manure before cars were invented. I can't remember the stats in New York City, but it's astounding I found one in London, that there were 1000 tons of horse poop generated a day in London Street. Thousand tons? 1000 tons. And like, this stuff would just be right there in the middle of the street. There was also trash, there was also human waste. There was just all sorts of stuff, terrible stuff everywhere. And part of the problem was that the Victorian era was really big on pomp and overdoing fashion. There were long trains to dresses, lots of skirts over skirts and all this stuff. So the idea of walking through horse poop was not very pleasing to the upper echelons of English society at the time. No, they would one of their many employees would have to clean that up later. Exactly right. But apparently they were very big with appearances, so they didn't want to even go a second without getting, like, any horse poop or any trash or anything on them. So thus evolved a job from this area called Crossing Sweepers. Yeah. And I saw a lot of different reactions to this from various historical websites that I went to. Some people saw this as a pretty valuable job, and then most people I saw found it a bit of an annoyance in that if you had any skill or were physically able, you would not be a Crossing sweeper. It was what they called a last chance job. Sure. I saw a combination of those. I read an article by a woman named Jerry Walton, who I think did pretty good historical research on it, and she seemed to come up with the idea that you're right on both counts. Okay. There were some people who dedicated themselves to this. They were regular Crossing Sweepers, and they had, like, posts. They had a corner. That was their corner. Right. And over time, they became kind of a fixture of the neighborhood, maybe the eyes and ears of the neighborhood. I read of one Crossing Sweeper who actually helped apprehend a murderer by going to the cops and telling them what he saw. Oh, sure. But I also saw that this was basically the last stop before Baker, but much more respectable than just being an outright beggar. At least you're providing a service. You could also very easily become a nuisance, though, too, if you held your hand out afterward or pestered people who are just trying to cross the street. Yeah, I mean, they liken it in this article. Maybe a little insensitively to people who will clean your windshield at a stop light today. But again, even with that, I have seen a range of window cleaning services that range from like, nice work, here's a good tip to let me spit on your windshield and rub it with my sleeve. And I think it was kind of probably similar back then. Right. Sometimes there were little kids who would do it or super old people, or you might be disabled, and that is your last chance to make money. And people, like you said, had one or two attitudes. Either you're doing it right and this is a good service, or this is sort of a glorified begging. Yeah. And I saw that for the most part, it was kids. The proclaimed King of the Crossing Sweeps was eleven years old and eleven year old boy, and that they would also add some acrobatics in on the side to really drive home just how great what they were doing was. Like, what? Like little flips and probably what we would call parkour here, there today, something like that. But just little nimble kids who were able to just hop around and do some quick acrobatics and then probably hold their cap out and say, thanks, have a good day. Wow, what a time. Yeah. So one thing though, that was good about this is that it was something. That anybody could start as a business and take seriously with just the investment of a broom. That's all you needed. Right. Low barrier to entry is what they call it. Exactly. Right. And then eventually as like, sanitation improved and fashions changed, the crossing sweeper was less and less necessary, and they evolved into the grocery store bagger. You were playing that one at way in advance. It just rolled off of my tongue. Yeah. All right, good job. And as I was saying, I was like, man, this is going to offend the baggers. And I don't mean it like that. No, that's all right. All right. That's a very bad job. Especially public baggers. Who bagged delicious cake all the time. Thank you for what you do. Should we break now or do the last four or do one and then three? Let's do one and then three. I'm feeling good about things. All right, well, we'll move on to the lamplighters. No way. I changed my mind. Okay, we're going to take a break. Okay. We'll get to lampliders right after this. Okay, Chuck, thanks for rolling with me on that one. Sure. So you said lamplighters were doing next. I mean, I guess we're doing all this chronologically, right? It sort of is, in a way, yes. Because we started out with chariots and now we're still in the late 19th century. Yes. And this is something I had a gas lamp growing up at my house, and I really would like to get a gas lamp put in on the front porch of my house. You know, it can happen. Yeah. You just got to run gas to it, right? Yeah, that's it. And then come and pay a lamp lighter to come light it every evening and cut it off every morning. Yeah. I just love to look like there's a few in our neighborhood, and every time I see one, I pine for it. I think you should treat yourself to a gas lamp. Yeah, really says a lot, you know? It does. It says, I have conquered fossil fuels in my very own house. I wonder how wasteful that is compared to electricity. I don't know. I really don't know. Yeah, I think you should find out and just do it. I think you should do it and report back on. Okay. I can always buy carbon offsets, right? Totally. Alright, so Lamp lighters, like we said in the days in the 19th century of gas lamps lighting up all of, let's say, London again, someone had to light these, and there were a lot of them. So it's not like there were a lot of people doing this job. Yeah. Usually you would have something like under 100, but over 50 lamps I saw, at least for Lowell, Massachusetts, but I think Lowell was a mid sized city at the time. It said 70,000 people in the 1880 census. So that's decent size for the 19th century. But it's certainly nothing like what London had at the time. They had tens of thousands of lamps. Right. But I imagine that they probably didn't overtax their lamp lighters more than, say, loaded. So say somewhere around 70 to 80 lamps is what one lamp lighter would be responsible for. They'd have a beat. Yeah. I don't know how far apart their position, but that's a full day's work, I would imagine. A full evening. Well, yeah, it lasted for a while, and I didn't get the impression of what you do in between. But you would wait around until dust came and then you would start your route and start lighting the lamps. And then after any respectable person was asleep, you would go out and extinguish them. Or before daybreak or around day break, you go extinguish them, and then you would eat your breakfast. And then you'd set about repairing the lamps, refilling them as need be, and, like, getting it rid of any certain smudge. And maybe if a lamp got knocked over, you'd have to set it back up again. So it sounded like there's a decent amount of work to it. But supposedly it was a very safe job, from what I've read. Yeah. I mean, they do mention ladders in here, but I also saw that many of them were lit from below with a long lighter or and extinguisher. That was all kind of on one pole. Very ingenious. Yes. I don't know that they were climbing ladders all over town. No, you could just raise it up. It'd be easier to walk with just that long staff than to walk with a ladder. Yes. Because you could also stab somebody in the eye with it. Right. Any master comes at you. Mainly men held his job, but there were some women, apparently, in London that did so. And like you said, it was pretty safe. It's not like these things weren't running on gasoline. Like whale blubber, I don't think is the most combustible thing in the world. No. And then I think there was also natural gas. They eventually laid gas lines to these things, too. So all you had to do is walk around with probably whale blubber torch on the end of your staff and just touch the lamp wick and there you go. Yeah. And then I think they made something like $2 a day for this, at least in Lowell, Mass. It's not bad. In 1888, Kings Ransom. I did see that there are still some people that do this today. There are certain parts of England where they still light the lamps. And I'm sure it's a bit of a novelty. Sure. But I don't know that it's necessarily like, Colonial Williamsburg or anything. I think it's not like it has to be an old relic themed town. Just one that's involved in being charming. Yeah. Lamplider. And if you see a lamplighter, give them a little how do you do off your cap. Yeah. So it's not extinct. It really doesn't belong on this list at all. There are a couple of pints. Their ways. Their ways. Tuppents. Remember that song from Mary Poppins? So depressing. No, but I have high hopes for that reboot. Oh, I hadn't heard anything about that. Please do tell. Well, there's a new movie coming out. They're redoing Mary Poppins. And Emily Blunt is Mary Poppins, which I think it's fine casting, for sure. And I think what's his name, lynn Manuel Miranda himself is in the, let's say the Dick Cavett part. But that wasn't Dick Cavett. Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke, the Chimney Sweep. Yeah. Dick Havitt. That would have been a much different role. Tell me, Mary, tell me about your life. Shall we move on to ice cutting? Yeah. This one I love. Fascinating. You know, my Grandmother Bryant said ice box. Yeah. I would imagine that that was like part of her jam, right? Like an actual like something you would point to and say, that's a refrigerator. But no, friend, there's no refrigeration going on whatsoever. It's just an insulated wooden box that you jam a block of ice into the top of and let it cool the rest of it down. Yeah, I mean, if she looked to be 100 and she passed away probably, I don't know, like eight or ten years ago, she was definitely rocking the ice box when she was a kid, for sure. And into probably like married life, I would guess. The early married life. Yeah. She told me a story one time about when she was like twelve or 13, she and her two friends stole the horse and carriage that delivered the mail and rode it around town for a joyride. That sounds awesome. So she was definitely a link to the past. For sure. It was great hearing those stories. The male horse. Hats off to you, Granny Bryant. Yeah. Hats off, Granny Bryant. So she had an ice box. I just described an ice box. But the question is this, Chuck, let's say where was Granny Bryan born and raised? I don't know where she was born, but she generally lived most of her life in Tennessee. Okay. In Tennessee. So it's the middle of the summer and it's super hot, but you have an ice box. What are you going to do for ice? Well, fortunately, the good folks up in Illinois and Wisconsin and Minnesota spent the winter harvesting ice. And that was a job you could have, was an ice harvester, because before there was the advent of making mechanical ice and mechanical refrigeration, we got ice by literally harvesting it from frozen ponds and lakes and rivers during the winter, packing it away just so. And then come summertime, it would be distributed throughout the country and delivered to homes by, again, horse and carriage, like the mail, apparently. Amazing. So here's how it would work. Sometimes they could use a pond, but generally very slow moving water was best because it formed really good, clear ice. I saw something about ponds weren't great because the ice could become kind of stagnant and not super great. Gross. Yeah. So maybe a very slow moving river would be great. And the first thing that you want to do is probably use a horse drawn plow. Because you don't want that thing packed up with snow on top of it. No, because the snow actually keeps the ice from freezing as well. Because you want cold wind on it, not cold snow. Right, right. So you got the horse keeping the snow clear. That's one step one. Yeah. And this what they would call these ice farms. And, like, you would have an ice farm, like, if somebody came and tried to poach your ice, you had a legal dispute going on. This is a big deal. And during the summer, it was just like a river or an aerated pond or something like that. But come winter time, it became like, big business. You'd have whole crews and operations going on. Right. Yeah. So you've got the horses clearing the snow, and every once in a while, a horse would fall through the ice. Yeah. That's so sad. It is sad. And you would think, well, it's a long horse, but apparently somebody figured out that you could strap a rope around a horse's neck and it would be struggling under the water. And if you pulled the neck tight, I guess you kind of cut off its air enough to get it to quit struggling. Sounds awful. It does. And then other horses would pull that horse out of the water and giving it a fighting chance to survive. So that was a big hazard, not just for horses, but for the people working there, too. Yeah. They would wear special horseshoes that would prevent them from slipping and breaking through as much as possible. But yeah, I would imagine a horse drawn plow on ice is just an accident waiting to happen. I remember growing up in Toledo, we were allowed to ice skate on some of the ponds in the golf course, like across the street from us. But not until dad went out with his work boots on. He stomped around the pond, man, to make sure that it didn't crack. And that was really great that he was doing that for us. But it was also not the best technique you could think of. No. Although it's the only technique I can think of, really. But it hats off to dad, too, for stomping on the pond ice, for us to make sure we didn't fall through. Your dad would do that? Oh, yeah. Every winter. Sometimes a couple of times a winter, depending on whether the ice had started thaw or not. Yeah. I've seen too many movies. That just scares me. Yeah. I guess you don't really think much about your mortality as a youngster, you know? No. It's kind of invincible. All right. So they're clearing the snow, but it gets super frozen when there's no snow. Like, really frozen. And then you would come in and score the ice, because just cutting it is too tough by that point. So you score it by cutting into it, I guess, a few inches and getting it going, depending on your operation, depending on the kind of size of an ice block you want. But they said in our article maybe 2ft by 6ft was pretty standard. And then you would cut it all the way through with another horse drawn device, a horse drawn saw, I think, almost all the way through. And then humans would sell it the rest of the way. And then you've got, like, a floating two foot by six foot by, however thick the ice was. Chunk of ice, right? Yeah. And that's heavy. That's a very heavy thing. So you would kind of push it with sticks through a channel that you had to carve out to the shoreline. And then you had to figure out a way to raise it out of the water onto. Like. A cart or something like that. And then take it to the ice house. Which was probably a cement. Like. Cinder block building that you would pack with sawdust so that this ice wouldn't melt onto one another or melt at all during the summer. And then just wait for summer to come. And then. Bam. Start charging people money. Yep. And this was a job through, like, the 1930s until, you know, refrigeration became a thing. And then people like my grandmother, they couldn't stop saying icebox or tinfoil. Yeah, tinfoil. I hadn't thought about that. I mean, I still say tinfoil something. Sure. Yeah, totally. And olio. She said olio instead of butter. That's grody. How could you eat that if you call it olio? I don't know why she said that. Because she didn't use butter. She used the big Bell Jar bacon grease that she collected. Wow. Sitting on the stove, like, even on bread? No, just for cooking. I got you. But she was old school, man. Yeah, that is old school. It's kind of neat when you have a link to the past like that. One more thing about ice cutting. One of the best Three Stooges ever was called an ache in every steak. And they were ice delivery men. I think I remember that. Yeah. They had a lot of trouble with it, as you can expect. There were probably some tongs placed in the wrong area at one point for Mo. Yeah. And Curly. Yeah, I think they both got it. Probably Curly did at first, accidentally to Mo and then Mo retaliated on purpose, if I remember correctly. All right, two more to go. Yeah. We really are doing eight this time, huh? I think so. Chuck, when you go to a bowling alley, right, and you roll the ball, I'm going to go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt, you would hit a strike. Thank you, Steve Rike. Isn't that how you say it? I don't think so. When you knock all those pins down, an awesome machine comes down. Well, there wouldn't be any pins left, but if there was one standing, a machine would come down, grab it, raise it, and then a sweeper would come and push all the knockdown pins that you hit, which are called deadwood, by the way, back into a little pit. And then a new set would come down and reset and your ball would shoot out. And the whole thing is a marvel of mechanical engineering. It's all mechanical. But there was a time where if you went bowling, there were little boys back there who did all the jobs that I just said that machine did. They're known as pinsetters. That's right. And we have Mr. Gottfried Freddie Schmidt to thank for the automatic pin spotter in 1946 where he debuted this thing at the American Bowling Congress tournament. But like you said, previous to that, they had little pin boys who would for about, what, ten cents per game? Per bowler per game. So if you have like six bowlers bowling in a game, you make sixty cents a game, technically. Oh, really? Yeah, you could make some dough if you really hustled. Wow, that's not bad for a ten year old at the time. Not at all. But here's the thing, too, I guess it's the great way or the best way to pay them for a bowling alley, because you don't want to pay them while there's no one bowling. No, it's like per bowler per game. So yeah, if you're just standing around, you're not making any money. Yeah. So they would set the pins up, they would wipe the pins away by means of carrying them, and they actually had pin bars that they would step on to raise these little metal spikes, and that's how they would align the pins. They just didn't eyeball it. Right. And I read an account by a former pin setter, and so you're hanging out there where people are throwing the bowling ball, where it hits the back like you're hanging out back there. Sure. So there's a couple of things going on. Apparently, teenagers would love to take aim, sometimes drunk in adults, so you had to watch out for people bowling at you. Pins sometimes would get knocked to the back and hit you in the shin or the head or something like that. But this account that I read was this kid was saying that there was no better way to secretly enter the world of adults than to be a pin setter, because adults would go bowl and get drunk and you were in the back, basically invisible. But you're hearing everything. You're seeing everything. You could hear something from way down there. Yeah, from way back there, from what this guy said. At the very least, you could watch their physical behavior or whatever, but yeah, he said he learned quite a bit about human nature by being a pin setter. Yeah. I guess the equivalent of trying to throw your ball at the pin setter is when you go to a Golf driving range. Dude comes out in the 65 Volkswagen Beetle with a ball trough on the front of it, and everybody on that driving range tries to hit that car in unison. Yeah. It's just, I think one of the things you do I haven't been to a driving range in forever, but when that car comes out, there's one objective. Yeah. See if you can hit it. And then the guy driving or the girl driving just screams at the top of their lug, Stop. I'm a human being. Well, and for people who don't understand, these old cars are heavily caged, so it's not like you're going to hit anybody or break through a window or anything like that. Sure you're not. But they also electrify the cage so that the person can't get out. It's pretty fun. I've always wanted to drive one of those. I've never seen a beetle. I've always seen some sort of like a lawn tractor or something like that with a pop mobile top on it. I don't know. I've been playing golf in a long time, but all the courses I went to had just old gelappies. Yes. It sounds like the people running the courses you went to were smoking grass. Growing grass and smoking grass. That's right. So what else about these people? Basically overnight, they vanished. The first moment those automatic pin setters came about, that was that. But that kid whose account I read, or the man whose account I read as a kid, no, that still doesn't work. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I'm not going to say it a third way. He said that it took him about two months to realize that you set the pins and then you roll the ball back to give yourself time to get out of the way. If you roll the ball back and set the pins, by that time, the person has got their ball ready and they take aim for you. Man jerks. Jerks, indeed. Bowlers. Notorious jerks. Some of them, sure. Like John Leguizamo. No. John Turturo. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I like Jesus. You did? Well, except for the fact that he was a petroist. He was a bit of a jerk, too. Yeah, he was a better I forgot about that part. Yeah. Okay, so pin setters. Done the last one. This is my favorite of all time. Yeah. Party line operator. Not to be confused with the party line operators from the party lines of the these are the much more innocent party lines of the early 20th century. Yeah. So here's how telephoning used to work back in the old days. If you lived out in the sticks and imagine even in certain city blocks but if you lived out in the rural areas, you would have a shared telephone line between sometimes ten or 20 houses, and you would have your own special ring that you would be able to recognize. And when someone calls all 20 houses, the phone rings, and you have to know your ring to answer, or you're going to pick up and be listening to your neighbors conversation. Which also happened a lot. Yeah. Apparently it was called rubbering. I have no idea why, but that's what you were doing, your eavesdropping on your neighbor. Yeah. And it's called a party line. Yeah. And so the party line, they had party lines because this is at a time when running telephone line and operating and maintaining it was very, very expensive because it was early in the telephone infancy. Right. Sure. So you rural Nebraska should just thank your lucky stars that you even have a telephone. Don't try to get off anti and ask for just your own line. That would come later. Yes. But when you had this party line, you could ring your own neighbor on the same party line if you knew their ring. Like, when you look at the old telephones, where you have the receiver that you hold up to your ear and you speak into the mouthpiece, you see people crank it sometimes. What they're doing is they're actually turning a magnet inside a spool of copper coil, and they're turning it in a way that it's mimicking the ring of the family on their party line they're trying to reach. So if the family's ring is a long, short, long, they're like, ring, ring, ring. That's how they're spinning. The magnet creates a current, which translates into the ring on all of the other phones in the party line. So you could call people yourself, but if you wanted to call outside of your party line, you had to dial the operator. Yes. Which was a long ring. And you would call central, what they called central, which is where the switchboard was. And someone was there 24 hours a day. Yeah. Lived there. Yeah. In their little apartment that they would have set up for them. And if you needed an emergency, it was generally agreed upon that the longest ring possible was an emergency. So if you're on a party line of, like, let's say 15 houses and there's a tornado coming through, you're the first one to see it. You would do a long, long ring. And everybody on that party line would either just know that's a warning, or they would know to pick up everything. Anyone could pick up the phone at once, and Elmer could say, we got a tornado coming. And then it was like the origins of 911. Pretty much. Yeah. It was a good way to communicate quickly with your neighbors. It was a lifesaver. Yeah. Another reason you should just be happy to have any kind of phone line. You hay seed. So this rubbering thing was like you said, it was quite as. You can imagine, since there have been neighbors there have been neighbors trying to get another neighbor's business. It was a big deal. Like, sometimes they even said in here, you could kind of fashion a speakerphone if you just wanted to listen in, but not staying there by just letting the earpiece drop into, like, a bucket or something and go, Oops, yeah. And it would just amplify the sound. And you could go about cleaning your house and listening in on your neighbor's conversation. Yeah. And something Granny Bryant knew, but took to her grave and never share with anybody, is that if you hung it, dangled it into a crock of bacon fat, it would really amplify it. That's correct. I'm sure she had a party line. There's no way. She lived in Tennessee starting in 1970. A party line? Yeah, for sure. And this actually party lines went on for a while. In the city where people just demanded respect from phone companies, you got your own line sooner than later. But out in the rural areas, they continued on quite a while. And there was actually a movie called Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Pretty great. Cute little romcom from the late 50s. But it was from 1959, and the whole basis of the plot revolved around a party line. Oh, yeah. Like a mix up. An intentional mix up. He toyed with her a little bit. Yeah, that's a good one. I like it. Well, that's it, man. Oh, yeah. For party line operators, they went the way of the dinosaur. When everybody started getting their own line, you didn't need the party line operator. No. So long. Get out of this office that you live in. And now we've evolved to the point where everyone has their own WiFi that's locked down by password and nobody can use it. Yeah. Think about it. Do you remember the times when you would call a number and you could get any one of a number of family members at the same number? And now it's like you call somebody and you are calling that person. Everyone has a phone number. It's like the next evolution from a party from party lines to individual household lines to now, individual people have lines. Yeah. Because you would call and say, Can I speak to Josh? And then mom would say, Josh phone. And then after a couple of minutes, you'd hear mom hang up. Stop rubbering. And then mom would fake it because she needed to know about all your cigarette activities. Yeah, that's right. She'd be like, I didn't know he switched to menthol. That's it. All right. I got nothing else. All right. Extinct jobs. Will yours be next? We'll find out in ten years. If you want to know more about extinct jobs, there's an article. We didn't cover two of them on the site@housetofworks.com, and since I said that it's time for listener mayo. I'm going to call this Christiania follow up. We heard from quite a few people that have been to this little Adelec, or is it Adelaic village near Copenhagen in Denmark? Yes, Denmark, which is where Copenhagen is. That's all right. Hey, guys. Been an avid listener for about five years. I do not live in Christiania. Is that how it's pronounced? I think christiana all right. She may have misspelled it. Okay. But I did visit about five years ago. My cousin lives in Copenhagen. I live in Orland, and he took me on a trip there after dark in the middle of winter. It is a beautiful place filled with arts, crafts and striking architecture. When we first entered, my cousin was quick to point out the sign that said, have fun. Don't run. No photos. Asked him why, and he said, due to the nature of the site, like the sale of cannabis and other soft drugs that are otherwise illegal. And in fact, I'm adding this part myself, they're illegal there as well, because apparently other people said the cops will rate it sometimes. And in fact, she says occasionally it is rated by police, and running is seen as a threat of danger and as his photography for the same reasons. So apparently you don't run there, brother. No. You just chill. Yeah, just take it slow, man. At just 19, I was pretty intimidated, but what I saw was lawlessness, so my cousin mentioned we go for dinner there. He took me up a stairway covered in graffiti and artwork, only to open heavy doors into what remain my favorite restaurant of all time. Yeah, that sounds pretty amazing. Low wooden beam ceilings, white tablecloths, and a simple, gorgeous, entirely in Danish menu that my cousin kindly translated. What followed was the most beautiful and memorable meal I've ever had, and it changed my idea that this place was lawless and scary. Since then, I've urged any friends to visit Denmark to stop by. Next time I visit my cousin, I'll be sure to go during the day and take in the beautiful murals in the sun between you guys and the McElroy's. I hope to never run out of informative and entertaining podcasts. You never will. Lots of love, your your Irish pal. Thanks a lot. Irish pal. That is a great story, man. The idea of going to the best restaurant you've ever been to in an anarchist project in Denmark is pretty awesome. Yeah, and other people, too, I should point out. Just that went during the day, talked about how just insane some of these houses were, because at one point, I think there was a contest or something, and all of these houses, or a lot of these houses were built during that time frame, and they just range from these crazy art looking homes to just very modest things. But it just sounds like some people did send a few pictures. Like decorating your cubicle around a holiday or something, which I don't do. Either of you? No. So if you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can follow us on social. You can go to stuffyouchtnow.com and all of our links are there. You're going to love it. And you can also send us an email. Right, Chuck? That's right. Send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
How Noodling Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-noodling-works | Noodling is a type of fishing in which the participant uses his or her hand in lieu of fishing gear and bait. Discover the origins and practices of this unusual "sport" in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Noodling is a type of fishing in which the participant uses his or her hand in lieu of fishing gear and bait. Discover the origins and practices of this unusual "sport" in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:55:50 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=16, tm_min=55, tm_sec=50, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=5, tm_isdst=0) | 27211036 | audio/mpeg | "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. Chuck Bryant. You can call me Rusty. Yeah, no doubt, Chuck. This is the first time in eight or nine years since we've done this. Weeks. Everyone should know, like, years. This is the first one back from my elementary school Christmas vacation. Yes. It's been weeks. Yeah, it's our first one in 2010. The future. Yes. And I told Josh I'm having reentry problems like I always do. Yes. I walked in my cube and everything looks strange. And it was like being like the first day on the job. Yeah. He's constipated. Yeah, a little bit, actually. That's what happens when you stay away for too long and you wake up set up, like, stiff as a board, and you're like, I have to work today, and poop. How was your good break? Yeah, it was great. Went to the Isle of Palms in Charleston. How is that? It was very nice. It was super cold, but it was nice, right? Went to Drayton. Hall. Don't know what that is. It's the oldest intact preserved plantation of its kind on the Eastern seaboard, as far as I know. You know the difference between a farm and a plantation? The plants. I'm going to start 2010 with the fact plantations only grow one crop. Is that right? That's what I'm told. I would have thought it had to do with the size or something. No. One crop farm many crops. Very nice. Is farm Latin for many crops? I think so. There's a good fact for Mr. Charles W. Chuck. I should quit while I'm ahead and we'll check out here. Yeah. We'll give you the email address so you can say, Congrats, Chuck. We'll give it to you at the end of this podcast, which happens to be on a little something called Noodling. Yes. You may also know it as hogging dogging stumping. Hand fishing. Yeah, that's a popular one, actually. That's what city folk call it. None, actually. I was on the YouTubes, and all those dudes were calling it hand fishing. Have you ever done this? No. Nor have I. And it doesn't seem like a sport that will ever become real popular because it's so thoroughly terrifying. Yes, absolutely. I would never, ever do this. What we're talking about is, as Chuck said, hand fishing. But it goes by all sorts of colloquialisms. We called it noodling in this article on Housetepworks.com. And basically what it is is you stick your hand into a underwater catfish nest, which they tend to nest underwater, and you're in the water. We should point out you're not doing this from a boat. No. And you get the fish to bite your hand and you pull it out and there you've just fished. You've just noodled. Yeah, that's it. That's pretty much it. Of course, there's all sorts of other interesting stuff that surrounds this, which we will discuss at length, starting now. Right. You know what it reminded me of was you saw the 80s Flash Gordon movie, right? Of course. No. Oh, come on. I'm sure you did. I didn't. You didn't see Flash Gordon. No. With the Queen soundtrack and all that? No, definitely not. Wow. Well, Timothy Dalton, in one scene, they have this it's like a test of courage where they reach into these different holes in this big rock type thing, and there's a creature in there that will bite you if you stick your hand down the wrong hole. So they go down to the elbow, and then, of course, one of the guys got tagged on the wrist and, like, green out his wrist. Reminded me of noodling. Did he perish? Oh, yeah. Noodling. Reminds me of that sand monster in Return of the Jedi. Yes. Except it's smaller. Not much. No. And actually, noodling can be deadly. There's all sorts of peril that the sport is fraught with. Let's talk about the history of it first. Okay. Native American and its roots, evidently. Yeah. Apparently the first time it appears in Western literature is in 1775. This is a trader, historian named James Adair traveling the south, and he said, yeah, the Native Americans have this weird thing where they get in the water, and they actually apparently used, like, red cloth, really enticed the fish, like toro. Toro does a catfish, and then yeah, but then they'd use their hands to pull them out. I imagine that the Native Americans would use kind of whatever means they could to get the fish out. And this is one of them. And since catfish is so huge, this was a prized catch. Yeah. Apparently, like you said, there was all sorts of other methods used to fish among the Native Americans, including clubbing them over the head using spears, bows and arrows, of course, and I think scaring them up with torches and then just grabbing them, like, as they came to the surface. Right. So yeah. No dynamite or rods and riots. Right. That occurred in the 19th century. And they also actually, in the article, said that the Great Depression clearly probably in the south, it was a good time to go noodling. Yeah. Because it's totally, completely free, using nothing but your hands, your body, and whatever gas it took to get your pickup truck to the noodling hole. Right. And that's about it. So yeah. Isn't that interesting? I guess it was still around, but then in the Great Depression, everybody's like, we need to start this up again. Right. And then it's passed down from father to son. Although there are female noodlers. Yeah. Much braver women than I am. What's that one girl's name? Misty McFarland. I don't know. She's the champagne. Yeah, she's pretty good. Her father's, like, this well known noodler named Rusty McFarland, who's a plumber. Noodlingphilosopher. Yeah, he was in that documentary I watched. Yeah. I think he's a big one. He likened plumbing to noodling, actually. I'll bet. And he even said the word turd. He did. I hate that word. It's awful. So, Chuck yes, Josh? This is, as you might imagine, a fairly rural activity. Yeah. The rural south. And then Oklahoma is a huge noodling state. Yes, it's Missouri as well. And it's only legal in 13 states as far as we know right now. Right. And that is up from just eight years ago. Only four states allowed noodling in 2001. That's nine years ago now, buddy. That's right. Welcome to the future to me. 20th Century man. Yeah. So 13 states, up from four. That's a big increase. Yeah. It's definitely gaining popularity, thanks in part to that documentary you vaguely referred to earlier. That's right. What's the filmmaker's name? The filmmaker's name is Bradley Beasley. Nice. And he I believe it's called okie. Noodling. Right. Yeah. And he really put it on the map. Not only did he put it on the map, he established the first noodling tournament for the documentary. Right. So he could get better shots or whatever. Because, as it says clearly in the documentary, there ain't no noodle tournaments because no one has taken the initiative. No. That's what one of the guys well delivered. So Brad said, hey, what a great way to end this documentary. I'll start my own newling tournament. And that's exactly what he did. And it's taken off from them, right? Oh, yeah. All right. So, Chuck, we talked about just the generality stick your hand in the hole, the history. Let's get a little more into it. Why would a catfish bite onto your hand, Josh? What's the reason? Well, actually, the reason is that what you're doing is you're reaching your hand into a catfish nest where there are thousands of eggs waiting to be hatched. Exactly. What I find interesting is you're not catching the female. The female comes and lays the egg, and then the male comes along, chases her off, and takes over the duty of protecting the egg. Yeah. So that's why they're doing males. They're guarding when they come after your hand. And apparently how you noodle is you wiggle your fingers around to get their attention, which may be the reason that it's called noodling is your fingers look like wet noodles. That's true. Yes. No one is quite sure. No, they're not. It remains a mystery. Right. But yeah. So you stick your hand in, the catfish goes to bite you, and sometimes it'll nibble and you can kind of get a grasp on it. Sometimes it'll try to swallow your entire arm. Ideally, it sounds odd to say that, but I think that's what you're looking for. Either way, once your hand makes entry into the catfish's mall, you wiggle it down as far as you can to the gills and hook the gills from the inside. Out, and then all of a sudden, now you have a real firm grasp on that catfish. Plus, when you have your hand in something's gills, it tends to really focus on that and freak out a little bit. Right? Yeah. So then you pull it to the surface, and there you have it. You've got your catfish. Right. Although, as we said, this thing is kind of fraught with peril. The first thing you're going to encounter is the teeth. Right? Yeah. They're not super sharp, but there are lots and lots of them. And they likened it to sandpaper in the article. Actually, this is written by my good friend Debbie Ronka, who is freakirl. Yeah, Freakirl.com. And she's about the least likely person on Earth that would ever write an article in New Lane. She did a good job with it. Well, that's the great part about our job. I'm writing about getting a facial at home, and she's writing about noodling. Right. We should switch articles occasionally, it seems like. Yeah. But anyway, Debbie wrote this, and she did a great job, and she says that it's like sandpaper on your arm, which doesn't sound too bad, but if it's really they said they start twisting and turning on your arm, and then it can cut you up a little bit. Right. I read a quote from a noodler that said once they start twitch, spinning, it can plumb rub your hide to the bone, something like that. Right. Yeah. That's good. That's your first problem, is that this catfish, whose gills you have your hand in, is rubbing it's sandpaper teeth all over your wrist, and that can tend to hurt. Also, some catfish can get pretty big. Yeah. I mean, 40, 60, \u00a380. That's the flathead. I think the Blue cats get even bigger. Upwards of \u00a3100, I believe. So if you are in water that say, chin deep, it can pull you under, hold you under, and you are a drowned noodler. Yeah. And the documentary, too. There was this one of the legendary guys, Noodles. I'm not sure how this works, but these highways where the lake and the river is now over the highway, so I guess it's just poor planning or something, but these old broken roads, basically, in the water cool. And they will go under the asphalt to these broken asphalt to get because that's where the prime layer is. And they will get trapped under there sometimes and die. Yes. Apparently, it's also something of a pastime when you're searching a lake for a drowned person. People will also noodle while they're looking for the dead person. That's called killing two birds. Right, exactly. And every once in a while, somebody who's looking for a drowned person and noodling, in the meantime, will end up drowning themselves and getting found. They did this in rivers, too. I saw one guy drowned from the current, sweeping him under a beaver den, which is why noodling is not a sport to ever be engaged in alone. Yes. They always want noodling buddies. You got to have partners spotters, because once you bring the fish up, generally your spotter will help remove the fish from your arm and get it into the boat or on land if you're by the bank. Right. Or if the fish pulls you under. Sure. It's good to have a 200 pound friend to pull you back above water. Also, they help barricade the way so that if the catfish tries to escape, it'll just bump into their legs or something like that. Right. There's one funny part in the documentary where they're interviewing these two guys that are, like, chest deep, and there's only two dudes in the scene, and they talk about you ever worry about your buddy when he's under there for a long time and he says, well, we worry about him sometimes. It's been a long time. That's usually when he pops right up. And as he said that, the guy comes up from underwater like you didn't even know editing. No editing. You didn't know there was a third person there, but he was noodling underfoot during the interview. Right. So because you can drown chin deep water is kind of dangerous, but you have to go where the catfish are. Sometimes you dive down underwater completely. Wow. And sometimes your head is above water. Right. Another danger to noodling. And if you're picking up that this is kind of a dangerous sport, you're a very sharp person, and we should probably take the time to say that how stuff works. Does not recommend you try noodling alone or as an inexperienced person with other inexperienced noodlers, I'll just say. At all? Sure, go ahead. At all. Okay. You can also, every once in a while, stick your hand into a catfish nest that turns out to be a beavers dwelling. Yes. An underwater snake. Muskrats, apparently, are mean. Snapping turtles are real bad, too. They'll take a finger off, and if you encounter one of those guys, you want to take off, as Ronka says, Get out of there. Right. Well, unless you're Jerry Rider. That's kind of the legendary Noodler that was on Dave Letterman. He is a big snake guy, too. So when he sees a snake, he sees that as an opportunity. Not a bad thing. Oh, yeah. So he grabs the snake. Yeah. He'll grab snakes, and he bit him a few times, and he's like, See there? I'm bleeding from these three spots. And that's what it felt like. He was like just kind of like a little hypodermic needle. Yeah. He says, yeah, I'll have them tame pretty soon. So he catches them and tames them. That's what he said. Well, he's a snake guy. Wow. Jerry Riders, snake circus. Yeah. He's the toughest guy I've ever seen. He sounds pretty tough, actually. Normally, unless you're Jerry Rider, you don't want to put your hand in a snake hole. No. Because most snakes that live underwater or near the water are deadly poisonous. Sure. But most noodlers will tell you that they can tell a catfish nest from any other kind of nest just by feeling the outside of the nest. Sure. Experience the reason for that is that the opening will be sandy and clean. Got you. And pretty compact because once the mail comes in and is guarding the eggs, he's just moving back and forth constantly keeping sand and algae off of the eggs and out of the nest. The male catfish keep a pretty tidy nest. Apparently you could not pay me any amount of money to do this. Man. I know. I get a little weirded out. Like I go trout fishing in the North Georgia mountains and I'm up to my waist in beautiful clear mountain water where you can see what's going on. I can see what's going on and my head is still on a pivot when I'm near the bank because I just know I'm going to look up and like a snake is going to drop on my head. But these are like the muddy waters of these river banks. Muddy river banks? Yes. That's where catfish twelve and actually the fact that noodling has become such a popular sport. Noodlers are kind of barometers of the health of a waterway, depending on how you look at it. The Army Corps of Engineers love to keep a tidy river way and so do most trout anglers because you can see what you're doing and that's where trout generally live, in clean water. But catfish like it murky, shady, muddy. But that's how a waterway is naturally. They're not naturally clean or tidy. Right. So apparently the Army Corps of Engineers kind of fell asleep with the switch for a couple of decades in the maybe eighty s and basically let the Mississippi Delta go to pot. Oh, really? Unless you're a catfish fisherman and then the catfish population came back. Right, right. So the fact that new laws are a finding catfish easily is an indicator of the health of the waterway. Right. But there's also a lot of controversy over noodling. Yeah. We have to mention this. Yeah. And apparently it's a cultural thing. Most noodlers, like Chuck said, they're legal in southern states. It's legal in southern states and Midwestern states. Very rural activity. Most city folk aren't going to go stick their hand in an underwater hole and hope a catfish bites their hand. Right. You know why one of the guys in the documentary addresses that? Why? He said because they're on golf courses. That's an excellent point. Chuck and I are fairly certified and of course neither one of us would ever do this. No. I think part of the reason why noodlers are kind of looked down upon by regular anglers is that it's a rural city head collision, I guess you could say. Sure. Because there's plenty of city types that grab their trout boots and go out on the weekends and go trout fishing, that kind of thing. But there's also an environmental concern which may or may not be true. Right. Because clearly what you're doing is you're pulling out a catfish that's guarding a big stash of eggs. And many times you don't return that fish back to the water. You'll keep it and eat it for food. Because catfish is good eating. Right. And even when they do return these fish to the water, which they sometimes do just like catch and release fishing, there's a proper way to do it and they get beat all the heck on the chore, so they think they might not survive from just massive injury. Right. And like you're saying, you're removing this catfish from its role of protecting these eggs. Which means that once that catfish is gone, all manner of predators go, I'm going to go eat me thousands of catfish eggs. Right. And how could that not logically have an impact, a huge impact on the population of the catfish? Here's how. Because most people don't stick their hand in catfish nests in the hopes that it will bite them and they can pull it out and eat it. Yeah, it has gained in popularity, but it's still a fringe. Right. We're talking like maybe 1000 people across the country that do this. Yeah, maybe 3000. That's why there's been no studies. They can't prove anything because no one wants to put any money into a noodling study. Right. Well, I think we should study it to see if it does have an impact. But in the meantime, most Fish and Game DNR departments in the various states where it is legal are hedging their bets and are keeping the number of catches a newer can make from May to August, which is spawning season. Right. It's three in Missouri, I think that's the average. And that's lower than if you're just a hook and line angler. You can get ten in that per day, three per day and ten per day, depending on if you're an angler neutrals, of course, find this unfair, but again, there haven't been any studies, so I think three is an arbitrary number, probably. I wonder if anyone's ever caught a noodler. A dead noodler. Probably hooked a noodler underwater. Apparently there's this boy in the 19th century who went Noodling and he got held under by the catfish he caught. But I guess his grip was so tight that like a day or so later they found the boy and the catfish dead side by side on the sandbar. Really? Yeah. Hand in mouth still. Wow. And that's something that's the way to go if you're a noodler. That is the way you die. Well, and that's what Jerry Rider said. He said, I'll noodle until I die, unless noodling kills me. And he shouldn't have said unless. He probably meant especially if Noodling kills me. Should we talk about the tournament? Yeah, we mentioned it briefly. It is the biggest North American hand fishing tournament. I thought it was the only one, but apparently it's the one. It's the Oaky noodling tournament. That's what it's called. Pretty straightforward. It's in July, it's at Bob's Pig Shop in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma, and there are prizes up to, like, two grand. I think if you win, there's different categories, like fish of the day and then total catch, total pounding of your three stringer. There's also natural and scuba noodling. And scuba noodling is exactly what it sounds like. Yeah. I imagine they're frowned upon. I didn't get any wording. So is gaffing, which is noodling with the hook. Right. Because basically you're a wolf. Is that what that means? Pretty much, yeah. Because you're not sticking your hand in there, you're sticking a hook in their gills and pulling them out. Number one, you're immediately doing more damage to them, I imagine, but you're not using your hand. It's hand fishing, not hook fishing. They even frown upon gloves. Dude. So this is how these guys are? Well, yeah, they frown upon gloves because you can't tell from touching whether it's a snapping turtle or a muskat or a catfish. But also they can get snagged on things underwater and keep you under. So, yes, these are tough fellows. And women. Yes. Josh, there's a DVD series even called Girls Gone Grabbing. Yeah, I heard. Or Grabbing. Grabbing. That's a typo. It's just grabbing. No, I don't think it's a typo. Maybe it's called grabbing, then. And there's been some records. Apparently, every year somebody sets a new record at the Oki noodling contest. And what's cool is these people aren't all in the same hole. They're all over the state. As long as the fish is caught within Oklahoma right. Within a 24 hours period, from 730 p. M. On Friday to 730 p. M. When they're weighed on Saturday, there's a gentleman's agreement to not go into the same noodling hole that some other people are already in. Yeah, it's like a fishing spot. Same deal. That's pretty much it. Oh, the fish has to be live when it's weighed. Right. But other than that, that's pretty much it. And the most recent record was set this past July 2009. What are we talking about? 2010? Now? That's the future. \u00a368.6 by a guy named John Bridges. And he had a stringer. The three fish that you're allowed to catch in that 24 hours period, he won that one, too? I don't know if he won that. I don't see how he didn't, because he had another fish they caught. It was almost the same weight wow. As part of his stringer. So I imagine he won the stringer that year. Josh, do me a favor. Close your eyes and picture a 66 pound catfish up to your elbow. 68.668.6. Can you imagine that? Don't you think I've learned by now the hard way not to close my eyes when you tell me to. Yeah, good point. That's a big old catfish. Do you like to eat catfish? Yeah, I'll eat it. Okay. Sure. I'm not that certified. Well, just a foie gras, of course. A bareblock sauce. Right. Thank you. Chuck and catfish always the 68.6. That's huge. It's definitely not as big as they get. You know, every, like, rural area has a legend of a catfish that's like, \u00a3250. Did you ever see that King of the Hill where I think he was trying to catch General Sherman? No, that was the Simpsons. Yes. I think it was like calling it, like, General Sherman or something like that. It was this huge catfish, and he and Homer and Marge were on Save Our Marriage retreat, and Homer sneaks out to catch the fish. I think I did see that one. Hilarity ensues. That's good stuff. Yeah, I think it was like, season five or something. Yes. But you do hear definitely hear the rumors, like Hogzilla. It's the same thing. Is it? Well, you'll see about, like, several hundred pounds. Sounds like Arkansas. I think it's real, though. I don't know about hog zillow, but the huge catfish definitely are. Chuck, let's send this by mentioning that Noodling is not necessarily exclusive to North America. No, it's not. Josh no. Since 1934. There's a tournament in Nigeria, or a festival, I guess. You're going to take this one. Should I? The Arungu Fish Festival. No argument. Argungu. That's how I take it. That's exactly right. Argumentu. That's a difficult one. That is. That's why we live in Georgia. Well, this is a 1 hour long contest, which is kind of cool, but I think you can catch a fish any way you can. Right. Well, it is hand fishing, but you can use nets. I think you can't use, like, hooks and poles. Okay. So you can use nets. And in 2008, the winning fish you're right, Josh, was \u00a3140. Right. And they take their hand fishing very seriously in Nigeria because they found out that the winning fisherman in 2008, Bello Jacob, they found out that he brought a dead fish from another river and said, oh, look what I caught. And they arrested him. He was arrested for fraud in a fishing contest. I want to know how you sneak a 140 pound fish into a river. That's probably how he got caught. I mean, you can't you can't do it very covertly. So somebody saw them and rattled him. Fellow Yakub cheated. And they went chink and through the book. And those were handcuffed, by the way, just so people understand what that sound effect was all about. So, yeah, that's Noodling. Right. I don't think there's anything else to add. It wasn't too bad for our first one after eight years. Yes. On a Monday morning. Right. So if you want to learn more about Noodling, you can read Debbie Ranka's Riveting tail in article form by typing Noodling into the handy search bar. Howstepworks.com which, of course, leads us to listener mail. Listener mail, josh, before we read listener mail, we're going to send a special shout out to our friend Chance and his little sister, who have had a really rough go of it over the holidays. We're not going to get all into it, but Chance did say it would really make Keena's little sister's day if we said hello. And so we're saying hi and hanging there, guys. Happy New Year to you. Yeah, happy New Year. So having said that, Josh, I'm going to call this we are frauds and we've been found out. No. Hey, Josh and Chuck. Allegedly, I am writing you a very distressed 15 year old boy living in northern Illinois. The reason for my distress is that after closely examining the last several podcasts, I can come to the conclusion that your podcast is a sham. 15 year old Colin yeah, he's just figuring this out. The evidence for this is that after listening to one of your podcasts on healthcare, I noticed that the voice quality seemed different, leading me to believe that you two never actually sit down and do the podcast together. But the podcast is merely a series of recordings and phrases cleverly put together through some sound editing equipment. It's really just a series of Chucks and Wright, right? And then Jerry just makes it all happen, right? After listening to that podcast, it made me wonder, and I went through other ones and noticed that you two never skip over each other when you talk. Not true. We are talking over each other. We are right now. To further reinforce the suspicion, I recently viewed the webcast on December 2 and Chuck was disappearing into the background of the drape. You know how sometimes the blue screen will mess up and I'll disappear? That's what that is. That if this is just an honest technical mistake, or if this is the work of clever video and audio syncing gone wrong, please write back to confirm your existence. Until then, I have no choice but to assume there is no podcast, but merely a series of recordings played with editing equipment from Zack. Zack, I think you would very much appreciate one of our fellow podcasts here@houseworkscom called Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. It's about conspiracy theories. I think it'd be right up your alley. You can find that free on itunes, right, Chuck? And of course, you can always find us for free on itunes, which is probably where you found us to begin with. Yeah. If you want to send us an email accusing us of fraud, we wouldn't be the least bit surprised. You can wrap that up and address it to stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more? HowStuffWorks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
How Pinewood Derbies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-pinewood-derbies-work | Tens of millions of Scouts, and their parents, have taken standard blocks of wood and turned them into cars that zip along at up to 20 mph. Learn about the origin, physics and more of Pinewood Derbies in this episode. | Tens of millions of Scouts, and their parents, have taken standard blocks of wood and turned them into cars that zip along at up to 20 mph. Learn about the origin, physics and more of Pinewood Derbies in this episode. | Thu, 14 May 2015 15:44:02 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=15, tm_min=44, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=134, tm_isdst=0) | 42145827 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today, this July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there with her timer wagging her finger, which means it's time to start Stuff You Should Know. The podcast got out a ruler. She had to wrap us on the knuckles. Yeah, and get out of line like a nun. That's right. And Chuck, before we get started, I want to tell everybody they can follow us on Twitter at sisk podcast. Oh, yeah. They can join us on Facebook. Comstepyshonow. Are we going backwards? Okay, if you want to send us an email, you can send it to stuffpoadcast@howstopworks.com. Yeah, we have a beautiful website called Stuffysheno.com, where all sorts of other neat stuff happens, too. All right, so this was in the mail. I'm just going to call oh, wait. Sorry. You got to save it, Chuck. Yes. Were you in? Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts? No. I went to one Cub Scout meeting and didn't go back because the very first meeting I was at was their beginning of their candy sale. The ritual sacrifice? No, the beginning of their candy sale. And as a little kid, for some reason, I didn't like my first meeting. Them saying, here's a bunch of candy. Go sell it. Yes, but, you know, they front you a bunch of candy, they let you walk away with a box of candy. It turned me off, and I'm not knocking it. It's a great organization, but I just never went back. I can imagine it's not the best one to start out on. Plus, I did Cub Scouting things just in life because I was big into camping and stuff, and I was taught wilderness survival at a young age. I had my own Scouting troupe. Your parents just dropped you off in the woods once, right. And made you find your way back. Yeah, it all worked out. Yeah. Made my way back about a year later. No worse for the wear. So you never made a Pinewood Derby car? No. Well, I'd never made a Pinewood Derby car, but in industrial arts class, I made the CO2 racing cars. Remember those? Yeah. It's sort of like the Pinewood Derby, but it's powered by noxious gasses. Right. Is it noxious gas now? It's actually CO2. Yes. I think it might be noxious, though. Yeah, maybe it is. It's not obnoxious, but it's noxious and that it'll kill you. Well, it's kind of a funny story, actually. My brother won, of course, because he's my brother. Sure was Allen, all of their cheering him on. No, he won the school, and then he won county, and then he went to State for the and I don't think he won State. No. But he did place most handsome. He did. Most handsome racer. And then I, of course, like everything else, I tried to copy my brother. Oh, no, I'm still doing today. No, you're not. Sure, I am. And I tried to copy his design, and mine just turned out a little crooked and not quite as straight. And I didn't even win in my class. Not alone. The school, man. So that just goes to show you my brother's better at everything than me. That was a great story. His was awesome. And that thing flew, and mine was like, knocking against the track. He was missing a tooth. Yeah, it was a pale impression. Pale impersonation. But that is a great lesson. You got to forge your own way. That's right, my ugly little car. That's the lesson of this Pinewood Derby episode. You have to create your own Pinewood Derby car, and not just figuratively, but metaphorically, as well. Well, what's the Pinewood Derby? I think some people there's a lot of people that are like, oh, my God, this is the best. And then the other 98% of you are like, what? So the Pine of Derby is the nation's premier gravity racing event? Yeah. It takes place around the country around this time, I think. Right. Does it beat street luge? It's a great point. So this is the second best. Okay. Miniature gravity racing. All right. What about mini street luge, man? Yeah, I think it takes place around this time of year. Oh, is it? Yeah cub Scouts and Boy Scouts around the country around the world, I imagine. Are they into it now, too? They're into it now to make little wooden cars and race them. And it uses nothing but gravity, the force of gravity, little angular momentum. Sure. Reduction of friction, that kind of thing, to see whose car is fastest. Yeah. So we'll get into the details in the history, but it's basically, like you said, a track that starts on a hill, and it has a little call it a pin, but it's like a little stick, basically, that holds the car in place at the front, and then they pull a lever, and those sticks drop, and then it's like the starting gate, and then it rolls. Right. Because anyone who listened to our slinky episode, when the cars are up there pressed against the starting pin, they've got tons of potential energy. And right when that starting pin is removed, that potential energy turns to kinetic energy, and gravity pulls them downward. Yeah. To the tune of, like, 20 miles an hour. But the cool thing about Pinewood Derby racing is that all of the cars start out the exact same. They're blocks of wood with the same wheels, same axles, and it's up to the Cub Scouts and their dads and moms to craft this thing, to make it slightly different enough that it wins the race. It beats these other cars that were also the same kinds of blocks of wood that before yes. Or you're not so concerned with winning and you just want a cool looking car and you want to have a good experience with your parents. That was me with my car. The Pinewood Derby car I made with my car. Oh, did you do it really? One most creative there's a Coke bottle no way. Way. And are like a real Coke bottle or you got the piece of wood and carved it into a Coke bottle. Yeah, the wood okay, because other people there are all sorts of things you can do now. Yeah, but you couldn't use a Coke bottle and do it. You'd be disqualified on the spot and maybe laughed out of the place. No, there's different versions now. There can be the regular hardcore rates and then the one that's a little more fun, where you can use different oh, I got you. Yeah, I got you. That's not the origin. The origin was, like you said, just straight up wood blocks. Right. Let's talk about the origin of this year. Well, did you win, though? I want to hear about your speed. One most creative. No at all. So you're into just the cool looking thing? Yeah. As a Cub Scout or Boy Scout. Cub Scout. Did you boy Scout. No. You had enough? I did, actually. My dad was the denparent. Oh, that's nice. I quit mid season, and he continued on as the dead parent. Really? There was more than one awkward Boy Scout meeting at my house where, like, I just went and hung out. You, like, wander through eating a Twinkie? Yeah. My dad's like, I can't believe this. Interesting. So he stuck it out. Yeah. That's kind of admirable, I guess. I had a thing where the Cub Scouts teach and Boy Scouts teach that you just respect your elders as a rule of thumb. Absolutely. Well, I'd met too many elderly people who I didn't feel deserved respect across the board, and then I disputed this idea enough that I left. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. That was why I left, because I had to sell candy. You left because there were a bunch of jerky old people in your community. I just didn't think that everyone deserves blank respect. I think you earn respect. Absolutely. Hey, this is a pretty forward thinking thing for a little young judge. You just didn't want to go. No, it really was that you're like the meetings were the same as the 18. Yeah, there was one meeting where I just sat there and watched the 18 really loud while my dad and the rest of the scouts are trying to meet. That's pretty good stuff. So, yes, my dad and I won. I think it's most creative category for the Coke bottle at Southwick Mall in Toledo, Ohio. That's where they had the races. That's pretty funny. And you still drink like a Gazillion, cokes a day? Not Coke or Coke Zero or whatever. Yeah, I've tried to limit it. I don't drink a Gazillion. I would say I drink a lot of water and coffee, too. You get beveraged up like no one I've ever seen. No, it's weird. It's like I constantly have to be drinking something. I don't get it. Hey, that's your thing. It's no big deal. It's not like you're like downing bottles of vodka all day long. Just Red Bull. Right? All right, so you want to talk about the history of this thing? Don Murphy, may 15, 1953, is when the first Pinewood Derby was held in Southern California. Manhattan Beach, California, which is where Yuumi's and my friend Molly is from. Oh, really? Yeah, you can be from worst places in the world. You know who else pretty sweet either is from or lives in Manhattan Beach. I looked this up. Who? Kevin Nealon, Owen Wilson. Oh, wow. Don Dawkin and then some other people, too. I think our buddies Luke and Catherine Ryan live in Manhattan Beach. Oh, do they? That is a nice town. Sure. It's like a small town feel on the California's coast, like on the boardwalk that connects, like all the other towns. Pretty nice. Where the Lost Boys live, was it? No, I think they were like Santa Cruz or something like that. Yeah, I think they're a little more north. All right, so very nice. History of Manhattan Beach residence. Don Murphy was a Cub Scout leader for Pack 280, and he had some kids that wanted to because there's this other race called the soapbox derby. This is when you actually put your child in this thing to be injured and push him down a hill. But he had some kids. You have to be a certain age to do that. And his boys were like, dad, I want to be in the soapbox derby. And he said, well, son, you're too young. So he tried to think of something that you could do together with his boys. And I came up with the Pinewood Derby, which is a pretty cool idea. Yeah. It's basically making a soapbox derby racer too small for a human to fit and be injured in. That is correct. Yeah. Much safer, I would imagine. So apparently at this first one, they pulled out all the stops immediately. They came up with regulation wood blocks, wheels and axles that everybody had to use the same things, right? Yeah. I think the axles are just nails. Yeah. But they had wooden struts that the nails went into, too, and they came up with a pretty cool track, like a 32 or 40 something foot track. The first one was 31. Okay. But they also used old doorbells to create, like, a timekeeper. So whichever car passed the thing first would set off a light in that lane, above that lane. It's got a little more advanced since then. Yes. But I get to I mean, that's pretty advanced for the first one. Yeah. Not bad for the early 1950s. No. And so this first one on May 15, 1953, in Manhattan Beach, apparently it was just such a total hit that the guy who invented it, Don Murphy, was like, this is a thing? Yeah. How can I make money on it? Apparently he didn't. Now he didn't. But, boy, a lot of people have since then, which we'll get to as well. Yeah. A lot of entrepreneurial fathers were like, hey, I can make some dough on this by designing these things. Yeah. Good for them. Don Murphy went the other route and said, I want to share this with the world. This is my creation, and I'm going to get in touch with the Boy Scouts of America and say, hey, guys, I've got this thing. And the Boy Scouts said that's great. We're sending out Boys Life magazine to cover this. Yeah, big deal. It's going to be hot off the presses. Remember, that an airplane where the nun is reading Boys Life magazine and the little boys reading Nun's Life magazine next to that pretty funny. So Boys Life magazine is, like, the official magazine of Boy Scouts, right? That's right. And they came out and covered it in, I think, 1954, the next year. But it was just kind of like a little blurb, a little write up, a one pager, and it didn't really get the extent of this across. Yeah. By 1955, they had over 300 people racing for the championships in Las Griffith Park. And now, I think since its inception, over 50 million kids have done this, and 90 million, including parents, which is a little lazy to me. I think they were just like, we just had two parents per kid subject a few. Let's make it 90 million. Yeah. But yeah, it's become a huge hit and a tradition that lives on today and kind of the same way. I mean, they've gotten way more involved in making these things as fast as possible, but the general gist of it, and the rules are about the same. Yeah, let's talk about the rules right after this break, huh? Sure. Capital One offers commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services custom tailored to your short and long term goals. Backed by the expertise, strategy and resources of a top ten commercial bank, a dedicated team works with you to support your success and help you achieve your goals. Explore the possibilities at Capital one. comCOMMERCIAL what if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listening is host Veritude a thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, Force Multiplier, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, to make these things fair, all pinewood derby cars start off the exact same little wood block. Some regulation wheels and axles, right? That's right. And then it's up to you, the scout, to make it your own. And this article, funny enough, says that aerodynamics don't really play a role. That is not the case at all. No, they play, if you want to speak scientifically, an 11% reduction in speed just using the wood block. Yeah, if you make it more aerodynamic. So it matters, but it doesn't matter quite as much as you think it might. Right. But it does have some effect. Absolutely. 11%. And so there are some guidelines to making a soapbox derby racer. Plymouth. Man, it's going to get me all episode. That's okay. Just remember, soapbox equals death of child. Right. Pinewood equals fun for child. Great. Okay, I think I got it now. That's right. No car can weigh more than 5oz. None. And we'll get to the tricks of the trade later. But you want your car to weigh that 5oz. Yeah. You don't want it to weigh four. No. Because faster cars, or heavier cars can be faster. That's right. Because of gravity and mass. Well, sort of. I mean, technically, a heavier car, it's all about weight distribution. It is. But a heavier car is going to be subject to the force of gravity more than a lighter car, because it has more mass for gravity to exert. An effect on cars cannot be longer than seven inches. I think initially they were a little bit longer than that, but they settled on seven, which is good. They cannot be more than two and three quarters of an inch wide. And the clearance of the car on the track must be no more than three eight of an inch. And the clearance is very important because Pinewood Derby cars are called rail cars. They ride along a central rail where the car and the wheels straddle a rail that goes underneath it. Right. It's not just in a lane to bump back and forth. Yes, very good point. Thank you. And the last rule, of course, we mentioned, it's all gravity fed. You can't have any starting device or any CO2 cartridge or motor or anything. It's just wheels guiding it down the track. If the jet flames shoot out of the back of your Pine or Derby car, it's going to get disqualified. That's right. So you'll get some wows out of the crowd for sure. Well, you'll also get some wows if you carve a cool Coke bottle or make a NASCAR generally is a big one. Oh, I'm sure. But what I basically found in researching this is you can't have both. You can either have a really cool looking car or a really fast car. Right. Because the faster ones are not very great looking. No. And a lot of people just go with a wedge. Yeah, because the wedge is aerodynamic. It's a lot more aerodynamic than just the block. It's easy to make. And apparently they're very fast usually. That's right, they are. I saw one. If you type in cool Pinewood Derby cars on a Google Image search, it comes up with some cool Pinewood Derby cars. But one of them is this kid holding his car. It's like this weird reddish brown, and it has spiders painted on it. Oh, cool. He named it Derby Death. My favorite pint of a derby car. That's your favorite kid? Yeah, cool kid. Mine would have just been me holding up my sort of oddly shaped thing that says not as good as your brothers. You start off with either like a balsa wood or what's the other kind of wood? They suggested? Pine. Pine. It's a little softer. Yeah. Easier to carve. What's? The Pinewood Derby car. Oh, well, yeah, that's true. But boss is, I think, lighter. It is, but again, you don't necessarily want lighter. Well, that's a good point. Thank you. But again, you want the weight distribution. Correct. Right. So you may want the body lighter so you can control that weight more. Yes. It's just a little tip. No, that is a good point right there. You want to control where the weight goes. That's right. So, yeah, maybe Boss is the way to go. Well, they do have the kits you can buy that are fully stocked with everything you need, or you can go a la carte, because there are a lot of companies out there now, that make all manner of add ons and special wheels and axles and all kinds of things to make your car faster. Yeah. And if you are building a Pinewood Derby racer right now and you're like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. I got some money to spend on this thing, you will want to check your local council's rules. Yes. Because some of them are like, no, you can use nothing but what comes in the official Pinewood Derby kit. Right. And other places are like, all by us. Right, exactly. And now go sell some candy after the Pinewood Derby is over. That's right. Then other places are like, yeah, go nuts. Most places agree. Like, you can't send the kit off to a third party and have the third party make your Pinewood Derby racer for you and send it back. Oh, yeah. No way. Other places say, well, no, that's the whole point. It's supposed to be, like, a parent kid activity of learning about physics, engineering, building, winning woodworking. Yeah. Probably losing sportsmanship. Yes. Not throwing a punch when you lose, stuff like that. And if you just basically buy a racer, what kind of, like, villainous rich kid are you if that's what you're doing at the Pinewood Derby? Yeah. What's his face from pewees. Big adventure. Oh, man. What is his name? Do you know it? I'm completely blanking. I can picture him chewing that black gum. Yes. I can picture him in that big bathtub swimming pool in his home. Well, we'll figure it out. It'll come to one of us. Yeah. Don't feel the need to email because this will be weeks later. We got it we got it covered. Or you could be the antagonist in the movie down in Derby man. Yeah. Did you go to IMDb on that one? Very briefly. Did you see the movie poster? Yeah. That is, everything you need to know about that movie is captured in the poster. Yeah. There's a film about a Pinewood Derby two parents who, of course, two fathers who are lifelong rivals. Yeah. That's all you need to say. Well starring the boss from Ally McBeal. Yes. Greg German. I'm a big German fan. Sure. I think it's good. He was great in that show. I never saw that show. It was a good show. Wasn't he on the west wing to know you're thinking of Bradley? Oh, I like that guy. Yeah. Great incentive. A woman. Bradley Cooper. No, not him. I know who you mean. Whitford. Yes. His best role, seriously was in Billy Madison. I never saw that, either. What? I know, right? Yeah. You got to see that one. Gilmore are classic films. I've seen some of Happy Gilmore for some reason. Those Adam Sandler and the Chris Farley movies I never really saw I didn't see Black Sheep. Well, Black Sheep is fine, but you never saw Tommy Boy parts of it. I know. I don't know what was going on. One of those, like, when I was in college or just right after. But yeah, maybe there was, like, a dark beer being a little too sophisticated for those. No, not at all. They really are great movies, though. If you don't like them, you're just being a snob. They're just funny movies that anybody can enjoy on just a basic level. I can assure you I didn't avoid them out of snobbery. Yeah, but I think that was just like a weird period where I didn't see many movies. You were just watching nothing but Felini. No. I don't know. What were you doing instead? I was watching TV. I got to find out what year they came out. I would say probably between 94 and 97. Yes. That was college, and I don't know. Okay, we'll just leave it at that. I just didn't see them. Got you. All right. Where are we? We're sidetracked with a bad movie. Oh, I've got one. If your council does allow outside help, if you can buy other parts, sure. Because a lot of times it's like, no, you have to use these. But some of these companies have figured out ways around it. Like, your Pinewood Derby car is going to be inspected, conceivably, especially if it's really fast and it's a winning car, they're going to really look at it to make sure you're not cheating. Right. One of the ways that you can make your car faster is with wheels, lighter wheels. So less mass equals less friction, I believe. So they spin faster and it moves faster. Right? Yeah. They call them onion skin wheels. Right. Now, you usually can't use those, but some of these companies offer ones that outwardly look the exact same. It has all the markings and everything, but they've removed a lot of the mass, so they bought, like, official Boy Scout Pinewood Derby wheels and have altered them and then sell them for, like, $35 for a set. Wow. $35 to cheat at Penwood Derby. Yeah. So disheartening. It is a little disheartening also, because even if it is legal or allowed, it's like I guarantee that all the kids parents are going to be willing to spend $35 on aftermarket wheels that have had some of the mass removed to make the car go faster. Yeah, we're the kid who can't afford that kind of stuff anyway. It's not on a level playing field. That's what I mean. It just stinks. Yeah. Well, I mean, beyond the parents saying they shouldn't pay for that. Right. You know what I mean? Let's talk about the track. The starting gate is generally about 4ft high, and I thought, this is adorable because that's a good height for a little Cub Scout. Like, it made sense. They didn't want to make it so high that they couldn't do it. Although usually the kid is not actually placing the car. It's an official that's doing that. Yeah. The kid's hands are usually too sticky. Yeah. Like lollipop guns all over them. And that's another reason why you should mark the front of your car in the back of your car. Because if you don't do the best job at the aerodynamics, you might not be able to tell the difference between the front and the back. Right. And it might not be you placing it. So just put a little like F and a b on the underside to make sure they know what they're doing when we do it. Yeah. It'll either be you placing the car, the official placing the car, or the grand marshal of the race, Greg German, placing the car as part of his duties. So it's 4ft high, about 32 to 45ft long. The number of lanes are from two to six. Although they talk about the semi legendary twelve lane model, which was probably pretty boss. Sure. I say speed this thing up, get as many lanes going as you can. I know that you could have 10,000 scouts racing with a twelve lane yeah. In an hour. Yeah. You know, Chuck, this track thing is kind of like say you have a twelve lane track, depending on the type of race you run, it could actually make the whole thing go a lot longer because a lot of people say these tracks, some of them are great. There are companies that do make tracks, like one's called Micro Wizard, I think, and this guy came up with this company to build like really awesome aluminum tracks with timers that are sensitive to, I think, to 10,000 of a second. So this guy is making these really great tracks, but not all tracks are created like that. I think that whole setup is like two grand. So if you have maybe an older wooden track or something like that, some critics of those kind of tracks say, well, then everybody needs to run a race in each one of those slots. And then you take the combined times to come up with an average because some slots are going to be better than others. That makes sense. So if you had like a twelve lane track yeah. You would have a very long day ahead of you. So that would not speed things up. It would do the opposite of speeding things up. All right, so I'd smash ten of those lanes. Like you said. Most of the really nice tracks are aluminum now, although they can still be wood. Sometimes the wood has surfaced and like Masonite or some like really slick surface to make it as fast as possible because that's what it's all about. So we're going to get down to business, what everyone has been waiting for, and tell you guys how to make your regulation Pinewood Derby car as fast as possible. Right after this, capital One offers commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite. Of financial services custom tailored to your short and long term goals. Backed by the expertise, strategy, and resources of a top ten commercial bank, a dedicated team works with you to support your success and help you achieve your goals. Explore the possibilities at CapitalOne. comCOMMERCIAL what if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in Is, host Baratunde Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. So, Chuck, we happened to go on to Boys Life magazine today a couple of times. That's right, we do every day. It's our homepage. Yeah. And we looked at ways to make your pinewood derby car faster. One of the articles you found was from Mars Curiosity Rover Engineer, who he and his son are into scouting, and they made a pinewood derby car, and they decided to apply the scientific method to figuring out ways to make it faster. Pretty cool. And this dude came up with these pointers, basically. What is his name? His name is Mark Robert. He's a NASA engineer. Nice. Yeah. And he and his son are to be thanked for these pointers. All right. Well, speaking of point, the first thing you want to do is avoid a pointed nose on your car. Good point. You want it to be flat across the front because sometimes it will affect how it gets how it reads across the finish line, which you don't want. I saw a hammerhead shark. Pinewood derby. It was boss. Yeah. That's a pretty good example of what you want up front. Right. That flat nose. And the other thing, too, is it may affect the way it rests on that pin at the start of the race. Yeah. Because if it's cocked off to one side or the other, no good. That car is going to hit that middle rail and it's going to be Friction City, and you're going to go home crying in your pillow. That's right. You want the weight, like we mentioned, at the rear of the car, about within an inch of that rear axle. And proper weight distribution accounts for about 36%. I thought you said. Oh, no, that was aerodynamic. Yeah, I was going to totally nail you on that one. The weight 36%. That's huge. And what that means is you've got more potential energy because the center of mass is higher up on the track. Right. With our Water slides episode, the higher up you go in the stairs, the more potential energy you have. So even that extra, like, half an inch of weight distribution toward the back, higher up, the more acceleration you're going to have on your car. Yeah, because if you think about the track, like once it flattens out at the bottom, if the weight is on the front of your car, if you've got two cars side by side and the weight's on the front, that one's already done. Right. And the one with the weight at the rear, it's still pushing it, and that extra couple of inches is going to make a big difference. Good point. And you might say, well, then I want to put my weight all the way on the rear of the car. No, you don't want to because that means that the front might pop a wheelie the whole way down. Again, it'll look cool. It'll be a crowd pleaser, but you're probably not going to win that way. I would totally be a crowd pleaser because I know I couldn't win. Right. The speed portion. Yeah. So I would just make one that like pops weelies and that's cool things. Maybe that's why I was never a cup scout. I was thinking outside the box, maximum weight, like we said, you want it to be that 5oz. Very big. Oh, they recommend baking the wood block. Good. First start to get all the excess moisture out of that. Yes. Bake at 250 for a couple of hours, 2 hours. And it should make your block of wood that much lighter. Because, again, you want weight. You want the full 5oz, but you want to control you want to control where you put that weight. Not Mother Nature, not God or earth or anything like that. You want to control where that weight goes. Yeah. And you want your parents help with all this. Don't go throwing wood in the oven and cranking it up because it can catch on fire. You don't want that either. Well, yeah. 250. All right, here's one. Oh, man. I know you're going to talk about the three wheeler. No, that wasn't it. Okay. You need to check again with your rules. But apparently in some leagues, they allow you and this is a very common thing. Now, if they allow it to have one wheel not on the track at all, like the front left of the front right. Why would you want to do that? Well, because less friction. So they say about 160 of an inch higher. So it never actually touches the track. And that'll give you a 9% speed increase. Right. You only have three wheels touching the track at once. Pretty smart, but also probably cheating if they don't allow it. Yes. You want to check your rules again, because, I mean, that would suck to go to the trouble of measuring that out and being like, I'm going to win, and being disqualified because you didn't read the rules. Hope Stash, what were you excited about me saying? So a little more basic than that, but also very thrilling is these things ride rails. You don't want your wheels to touch the rails. You don't want your car to touch the rails. So you want as true and straight in alignment as possible. So it goes straight down with as little friction as possible, right? That's the old thinking. Okay, well, let me finish my old thinking. Okay, so that means you want the straightest axles possible. And this is a really cool way to figure out if you have straight axles or not. There's going to be several axles that come in a package in your kit and you want to figure out which ones are the straightest. You can't really tell just by looking at them. So what you do is you get an electric drill, right? Ideally you put it in a vise grip so it doesn't move at all. And you take your axles and you put them in the drill like a drill bit. And you turn the drill on. And if the axle wobbles, it's not straight. The axles that wobble the least as they're spinning around in the drill are the straightest ones. And those are the two that you want to use or the four that you want to use. It would be two. Those are the two that you want to use? Yes. And not only that, but once you find your two, you want to polish them. Don't just throw it in there because of little Burz and Nicks and things that are going to slow your car down. So they say again with your parents, either put it in that drill or a drill press is even better. And just spin the nail and get a sandpaper and sand those things down and keep going with that grit until you get to like 2000 grit and you polished that axle to where it's almost like a mirror, right? So some parents are going to come home and they're like, seven year old kids going to have a block of wood in the oven on 250 with a belt sander and they're going to say, Josh and Chuck told me too. No, always get your parents help with this stuff. Again, that's the whole point anyway, activities together. So I mentioned that was the old thinking. This blew my mind, the idea of bent axles and rail riding. Okay, so that's the latest and greatest with the axles they recommend now. And they make these devices, these little jigs that will do it for you to bend where the wheel actually connects about 2.5% of a bend. So it actually reduces friction and makes alignment easier. This makes sense to me. So what you've got then is your front tires angled inward and your back tires angled out. And that makes what you want, like if you put it on just a flat surface and rolled it, you want it over the course of like 10ft to steer about an inch to the left or right, because rail riding is the new fastest way to race your car. So I don't get that. Well, what they said was, this is the video I watched, this house explained to me at least once you get to the bottom and level out, no track is perfect. And even if you have your car perfectly aligned, it's going to start wobbling on the track and slow you down. So the idea is if you have that one front wheel angled in it the right way and your back wheels angled the right way, you'll actually touch the rail and use the rail as a guide to keep you as straight as possible. Weird. So the friction is lost, is overcome by how straight it is and the lack of wobble. And they call it rail riding. And that's like the newest thing to do, which goes counter to anything you would think in straight car racing, which is to make everything perfectly straight. It doesn't move right. Sort of blew my mind a little. Mind blowing, man. I'm with you. Graphite is something that you want to add. It's a dry lubricant and that'll add about 7% to your speed. Pretty much everybody allows that. The graphite. Yeah. And everything I saw says just to get whatever kind of graphite the cheap stuff is just as good as the yeah, it's all a big marketing scam, apparently because they said powder graphite. Graphite is graphite. Exactly. So they'll put like super speed graphite and charge you more. It's not like the cheap stuff has like, glue or seashells mixed in with it. No. So those wheels you talked about, lighter weight wheels, will account for about a 16% increase in speed if it's allowed in your league. Yeah. You want your wheel base to be as far apart as possible, from what I understand. Yeah, totally. Like you don't want the wheels up in the center of the car. That would be weird looking anyway. It would be. Plus, apparently it also takes more energy to steer it off of the rail. But I guess that doesn't apply anymore if you're rail racing. Rail riding? Yes, rail riding. What else? I got nothing else, man. You got nothing else? I got nothing else. I only have one more little thing. And this is about what obviously is going to happen in any competition in the United States. Parents are going to get involved and they're going to become big jerks. The whole basis for that movie, I think, and I went to the Boy Scout site, I guess it was the Boys Life magazine site. And there's a big problem now with like, who made your Pinewood Derby car? And they said a big red flag is when mom or dad comes in holding the car and the kid isn't even holding it, and they'll always say, Give it to your kid, and we'll deal with him. Or I guess Girl Scouts are doing it now, or her. And let's get to the bottom of this. Who actually built this thing? And while I do point out that they take them into the other room and see if they can break them right. Yeah. They have to detail, like, every single thing they did. Exactly. We know you're lying, Jimmy, to try to get around this, because they do acknowledge that these are, like, seven and eight year olds, and you can't use a bandsaw if you're seven or eight. I would guess it's pretty obvious when a parent has had the lead on all this rather than taking a supporting role like I think you're supposed to. So they just had different parents chime in on what they do and what they've done and what works in their leagues. And they said a lot of times that the kid will design the car and then, like, mom or dad will cut the wood, and then the kid will assemble the wheels and stuff like that. So the kid plays a part in it, but the adult is doing, like, the dangerous stuff. Some places they have dad's divisions so the dad can build his own car and race another dad. Well, yeah, there's, like, whole racing leagues that are adult leagues. Technically not Pinewood Derby, because Pinewood Derby is like Boy Scouts only. Right? Or Scouts only, but there's, like, non Boy Scout affiliated adult racing leagues of this stuff. Yeah. Gravity Racing, apparently. At the Pinewood Derby, though, they'll also have dad racing. Got you. I see. Just so hey, you haven't matured to the point where you can just participate as a father so you can raise your other dads if you really need to. Yeah, that's pretty great. Some people have carbuilding days where they all get together as a big group and do it, which is kind of fun, and that ensures that it's more level playing field. And then this one this is my favorite one. Where is this? I don't think it said where this was. This one boy Scout troop gives out awards and categories. Like, you had originality craftsmanship, finish. I think it's common. And then they'll give an award car most likely made by a parent. Awesome. And so it's sort of a shame award. Public shaming. Sure. Yeah. Humiliation. Yeah. But I think that would humiliate the kids, too. What if they gave you, like, a patch to you just earned your patch in public humiliation. Right, yeah. It's just got a red Face Scout on it. Yeah. I don't know. That seems like it would totally embarrass the kids. Yeah, it's like rubbing your face and your poop. It's exactly what it's like. What else you got? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. So apparently, as far as scale goes, some of these Pine of Derby cars get up to 20 miles an hour. And if you scaled it up to a normal sized car, that would be in the area of 200 miles an hour. What? Yeah. Oh, wow. Pretty neat. Pound for pound, they go pretty quick. So I guess if you're interested in the Pinewood Derby, go join the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts or look for just a recreational league in your town. Right. Kind of made me want to build one. Oh, check. There is nothing stopping you. Yeah, well, actually me, because after about five minutes, I was like, yeah, I got you. It's fun to read about, though. Well, if you want to read more about Pioneer Derby's, you can type those words into the search barhowtuffworks.com. You can also go onto stuffyshadow.com and find the podcast page for this episode, and it will bring up all sorts of cool links. And I said search bar in there somewhere. Which means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Alan Alda experience. That's the second Alan Alda appearance in this episode. That's right. You can't have enough, Allen. All the references. The Onion went on a little tear where, like, Alan Alda made an appearance in every single one of their slides. Oh, really? Yeah. Nice. Dear Charles, Joshua and Jerome, I want to share a quick story about the time I met Alan Alda. I wanted to meet him for most of my life. Like Chuck, it was a goal. While other kids were watching Full House, I was watching Mash and Dragnet. So it was like, me too. I never watched Full House, which is coming back, by the way. Did you hear that? No. Was the original cast or they're remaking it? No, I think it's the original cast. Yeah, it's the original cast. Well, but it may concentrate on the kids version of their house or something. I don't know. Who cares, right? I work as a producer for a radio morning show in Pittsburgh. My station sponsored a series of talks in which Mr. Aldo was a part of, and I got a chance to meet him at a dinner and shake his hand and hand a copy of the book to him, of his book to sign. And when I went to do this, a gentleman in quote, who I can best describe as a 45 year old child who looks like he comes from old money cut in front of me. I know what that guy's pinewood derby car would be like. Yeah. He said he think Dudley Moore and Arthur, but without the charm. He looked like he had a scotch in his hand. He slurred. The question was Hot Lips Hoolahan. Really hot. Handled the situation gracefully because he's Alan Alda. And after a few more embarrassing questions, a guy left and I got to introduce myself properly and a little bit later, I went up to him again to get a formal picture and he remembered my name. I was so excited. I didn't write to brag or make you jealous, Chuck, but I've been trying to find a reason to write you guys for six years. The talk he gave was very compelling. He talked about living life to the fullest and about his near death experience on a mountaintop in Chile and how it changed his life. And then he recommends Alan Alda's memoir, which I've also heard is great, so you can just look that up. I heard it's a really good book. I'm going to read it. Yeah, just type a few random words into the search bar and it should bring that up. I think Alan Aldum memoir should do it. Sure. So that's how I met him. And next on my life goal list is to meet Josh and Chuck. So that is from Andy Lindberg, who's a radio producer like Jerry. Oh, yeah. Hi. There you go. In Pittsburgh, PA, they run into each other at the convention every once in a while. Sure. How do you stay awake when you guys are doing this stuff? I don't know. How do you stay awake? Hardy Hard. Getting anything else? No. Sick of radio producers making fun of us. If you want to get in touch with Chuck, me or Jerry or the three of us, or any combination, there, you can tweet to us at fyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstafworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
What is Collective Hysteria? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-collective-hysteria | Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think? | Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think? | Thu, 20 Nov 2014 16:07:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=16, tm_min=7, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=324, tm_isdst=0) | 39852488 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's. Over there to the left. And that makes the stuff you should know. Got the ateam in the hissy. I call Face. What? I'm Face. Of course you're Face. Looking at you, I would be a combination of Murdoch and Mr. Kia. Yeah, well, your hair is kind of spiky in the middle today. Yeah. Jerry, I don't know what she'd be. I guess she'd be the leader. She'd be Hannibal. Oh, yeah. She's smoking a cigar right now. Wearing a black glove. When did you start smoking cigars, Jerry? That's weird. Very timely. I said 18. I don't want to slag off guest producer Null. He's not exactly B Team. No, we'll just call ourselves the OGS. Okay. Now that we have that established we are the OGS. That's right. We need bowling shirts that say as much on the back. Are you feeling good? I'm feeling nauseous and dizzy. Oh, well, Chuck, did you happen to see somebody else who is nauseous and dizzy? Well, Jerry was last week, and then a few more people in the office, so I just figured we all had the same thing. All right, I'm going to diagnose this. Okay. It's called collective hysteria. Also known, I think, more appropriately, is mass psychogenic disorder. I think when you add the word hysteria to this, it takes on certain dimensions that a lot of people could find very objectionable. Sure. Hysteria. It's like dogs and cats living together. Yeah. But I think it has a definite gender specific connotation to it from over the years. Like, women were supposedly very hysterical. The idea of diagnosing somebody as hysterical under any circumstances is heading out to patting them on the head. Yeah. Here, nice lady. You're just a little hysterical. You just go calm down and bake something. Right? Yeah. Stop being crazy. Mass psychogenic disorder instead, is just kind of like, whoa, your brain just did something pretty neat. And that is the case for mass psychogenic disorder, if you ask me. In this article, Chuck, written by Jacob Silverman, Jeopardy champion. Yeah. He won on Jeopardy. That makes him a champion, right? Yes, I think so. He wasn't like the ultimate champion, but he won a couple of episodes. Right. Which is why they should have a word for champion, is, like, the one who won it all. Ken Jennings. Yeah. Or Watson. Who's that? The IBM computer. Yeah, sure. So, Jeopardy. Winner Jacob Silverman wrote this article years back, and he did a pretty good job of citing a contemporary outbreak of mass psychogenic disorder that had been going on around that time down in Mexico. Down Mexico way in Chalko, Mexico. At boarding school. There apparently was a girls boarding school, and the girls that went to school, they were ages twelve to 17, and all of a sudden they started well there was an outbreak. Yeah, a weird outbreak. There was vomiting, I believe. Trouble walking. There was fever. Yeah. That's weird. Got you. And so the people running this boarding score like, what's going on? This is not good. Yeah. And they had no idea. The girls went on Christmas break for ten days, came back, and the thing just took off again like wildfire. Yes. 600 of the 3600 girls showed these symptoms, and nobody could figure it out. They did a lot of tests. They brought in people to check out the facilities, because, as you'll see, there's a trend there, you know, here in the west. They start to blame it usually on environmental poisoning of some kind. Right. There's some sort of toxin present that has poisoned everybody. But they didn't find anything there. And eventually they said, this is what do you call it? Psychosomatic. Mass psychogenic disorder. Okay. Mass psychogenic disorder. But no, that is one of the names. Mass psychogenic disorder. Collective hysteria. Mass hysteria or mass psychosomatic reaction. Yeah. They're all saying the same thing. They are? Well, I was about to say you're not really sick, but that is not exactly true, because that's one thing that differentiates this from something that's just in your head, is you actually do manifest physical symptoms. Right? Yeah. There's this article written by an MD named Timothy F. Jones from the Tennessee Department of Health way back in the heady days of the year 2000, the Future. Wow. And he writes that if you are experiencing mass psychogenic disorder, it is not just in your head that the symptoms that you have are actually very real. Even though there's no toxic cause, they couldn't find some sort of environmental poisoning or anything like that. The symptoms are extremely real. It's just psychosomatic. It's just basically the brain has been tricked into causing this response. Yeah. And this has happened. They've documented about 80 cases throughout history, and apparently the National Institutes of Health gets about two cases per week reported. That's way more common than you would think. Yeah, I would think there would be more than 80, because these have happened. If you go back and look at there's all sorts of crazy lists on the Internet about these cases that date back to, like, the 14th century. Medieval dancing mania was one of them. Yeah. The dancing plague. Yeah. That's in there. The Salem Witchcraft Trials. Sure. Or the Salem Witchcraft. I guess what led to the trials was supposedly attributed to this kind of thing. Yeah. One weird thing about this condition is, more times than not, it affects females. Yeah. And young females. Even more specifically, teenagers, or even younger, which is, as far as it goes right now, inexplicable and it's kind of a prickly issue. Again, you kind of come back to the idea of calling it hysteria. The fact that it does tend to afflict women or girls more than boys is apparently one means of diagnosing psychogenic disorder. Mass psychogenic? Yeah. That's like one of the first things they'll say is all the sickness is happening in this place, the school, wherever. And the doctor will say, Is it a bunch of girls? Yeah. And then that will clue them in that, hey, this might be what we're dealing with here, but the problem is no one has any idea why. And there have been explanations of things like, I guess, girls this is girls culturally acceptable outlet for raging against the patriarchy. Sure. Even. And if they don't necessarily feel that that's what they're doing, this is the symptoms of that. That's one? Yeah. I thought this was a pretty interesting part. What article is that from? Slate? Yeah. One called Masses in upstate New York by Ruth Graham was on slate. That was a good one. It was a really good one. And we'll get to that case in a SEC. But I thought it was pretty interesting in one part. And this is a quote from someone writing about something and said, inform if not in conscious intent, it is to protest the sexual repressiveness, rigid double standard of female teen culture. But they were writing about beetle mania, which is interesting because it sort of has a similar vibe of young ladies being repressed, not having an outlet. And so they see the Beatles and they go berserk and faint and cry and scream collectively. Whereas boys, they're more prone to just act out if they're not feeling good. Girls are trained to keep things inward. And they also point out that ladies and young ladies are more prone to seek a doctor's help for something they say that may account for the bias right there. Right. Like I just won't go to the doctor. Exactly. You have to be careful, though, in just diagnosing mass psychogenic disorder. Physicians out there who are listening that encounter a case like this just by basing it on the fact that it is affecting more girls than boys. Because there's at least one case in Great Britain where I think girls were afflicted by more than half, more than double the number of girls were afflicted by this. And it turned out that they were tainted cucumbers being served in the lunchroom. Yeah, and everyone knows boys hate cucumbers, so they didn't need any. Right. But this is one of the issues with dealing with mass psychogenic disorder in that it looks and acts a lot like some sort of weird epidemic that basically it looks like either something like bioterrorism, a rapidly spreading affection infection, or affection if they and then acute toxic exposure. That's what it looks like. It's like one person gets sick. This is your index case and all of a sudden everyone around them suddenly has the same symptoms. Yeah. And like you said, it's super dangerous to just dismiss that as though it's all in your head. Silly little ladies. You can't do that because what if it is something for real. But it's also a double edged sword, as that doctor pointed out. You start ordering batteries of test and it can go both ways. What the old saying is if you order enough tests, you're going to find something. Right. So it can fuel that fire, but you also can't not run any tests and just dismiss it. So it's a very fine line that physicians walk when dealing with stuff like this. For sure. Indeed. Apparently study of mass psychogenic disorder has found that it's more prevalent in isolated communities and in situations where there are highly rigid, formalized, structured rules. Like a Catholic school in Mexico. Exactly. Or again Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century. And apparently between 1973 and 1993, half of all the outbreaks of psychogenic illness took place in schools. Oh, yeah. So that's possibly in part by due to kids being susceptible to it more. Right, but also because of that rigid formalized structure. Yeah. And there's also usually a top down effect, like it'll start with a teacher or an older student and then the younger students follow suit. Which if you're talking influence, would make sense for sure. There was one very famous case. Apparently there's not very many actual academic studies on this, but there's one that came out of the New England Journal of Medicine that described a case in 1998 in Tennessee where a teacher noticed some weird gas. Like the chemical kind. Yeah, not like the guy on the front row tooted. Right, exactly. And she apparently started suffering symptoms and all of a sudden, like 180 students and teachers had to go to the emergency room. The school was shut down for two weeks. They did all this environmental testing, couldn't find anything, and finally traced it back to a mass psychogenic disorder, if that's what did it. And then most of these cases, we should point out, everyone starts feeling better. Yes. Like in Mexico and then the school in Tennessee. It's not like they went on to die or anything. Yeah. So in the school in Mexico, these girls or at a boarding school, they were only allowed to see their parents think like three times a year. Yeah, they couldn't even call. It sounds more like a prison. Right. No phone calls, they were allowed letters when they went home, immediately their symptoms cleared up. The problem is that doesn't automatically say, oh, well, it's obviously mass psychogenic disorder. It could be an environmental toxin that they are being exposed to still at the school and we're removed from. But I think the definite prognosis is mass psychogenic disorder in this case. That's right. What we're talking about is a sort of version of the nocebo effect, which we've talked about before, and we will get into that right after this break. So the nocebo effect, we talked about that in what? The placebo effect? Well, that makes sense. Yeah. I was trying to be more clever. Thought we were more clever than that. No, SIBO. I think we said in that other podcast, it was Latin for eye shall harm. And that's basically whereas you take a placebo thinking it's going to help you out, and it does help you out because the mind is powerful. The nocebo effect is thinking something bad will result. Like my teacher's getting sick. I think I feel a little sick, too, right. My neighbor's feeling a little sick. I think I'm feeling a little sick, too. Or this drug trial that I'm on, I was told that I could possibly get some sort of gastrointestinal distress. Yeah. And even though I've been given a sugar pill right, I'm now going, yeah, because in my mind, because of the nosebo effect, there was a famous experiment or case from 1886 where there was a woman who had a rose allergy and they showed her an artificial rose and she began to I guess it was convincing, and she began to have her allergic reaction. And they said, AHA, it's fake and you're faking. And she said, oh, well, I think I'm feeling better now. And supposedly that curator of her real allergy to real roses. Right. I couldn't find a lot to back that up. But it is a story. Yeah. Well, no, it was in I can't remember the journal, but it was really well, yeah, it was a real deal thing. And I didn't get to the bottom of why they presented this woman with a fake rose or whatever, but they definitely did, and this definitely happened. Even the author of the study was saying, like, this woman, she wasn't faking. Right. It was like she had real symptoms. Sure. Hives are hives. Exactly. You can see those. I think they call it like a rose cold or something like that. You can get stuffy, your eyes are watering, your nose is running, that kind of thing. And what's interesting is some researchers have studied the nocebo effect, and they basically have isolated this chemical that gets released when the nosebo effects going on. And again, we should say it's not just making your nose running or releasing histamines or anything like that. It's pain, too. You can experience pain even though nothing is there to give you pain just because of the nosebo effect. What they found was, I guess, hormone, I believe. Are you ready? I'm going to try this one canon. That sounds great. Thanks, man. I haven't looked at the word, but it sounds right. Cola cystokinnon. Yeah. Do you see it now? Oh, yeah, that's totally right. I totally did. So it's a hormone, right. And it gets released and it actually helps you experience pain. So it's a nasty little hormone. But they found in testing with the nosebo effect that if you block this, you can also block the nocebo effect. So that proves two things. Does that block pain, though? Like your pain receptors? Yes. So does that mean if you slam your hand in the door. You won't feel it if you can block this. Wow. Yes. So if you can block cola cystokinnon right? Yes. It will keep you from hypersensitivity to pain, I believe. Yeah. And this guy named Fabrizio Benedetti, who I think was also in the Strokes back in 1997, there was a fabric. Right. Yeah. He was testing out the nosebo effect and found that if he told people that he was giving them an injection, which is a pretty cruel test, but effective. Yeah. These post office people who had just come out of surgery were given an injection and told, this injection is going to increase your pain in 30 minutes. I'm sorry, we have to give it to you. It's part of the procedure. He gave some people an injection of saline and they reported an increase in pain. And they all went behind the two way mirror and laughed. Right. Yeah. They're like, what a chump white. And then they gave somebody, like, the other group, the control group, a chemical and injection that blocks that pain. But they were told that it was going to increase their pain. Right. But they were given a chemical that blocks cola cystokinen and the noticebo effect didn't take place. They didn't report an increase in pain even though they were told they would. Yes. Wow. So this guy is saying, like, the nosebo effect is real when they say it's not just in your head. Sure. You're experiencing the same thing as if you are experiencing somebody stabbing you. Well, what it is exactly when you have to start asking yourself those deep philosophical questions. Right. Interesting. There's another case. Have you ever seen the movie Safe? The Todd Haynes movie with Julianne Moore. No. It's from the mid ninety s. And she played a lady that started to have environmental sickness just in the air. And she got sort of like increasingly crazy as the movie went on as far as scrubbing things and locking herself in her house and making her house a clean environment. Sounds great. It was good. And there's a true story, though, of a lady in London named Debbie Bird. She's a health spa manager that says that she's allergic to EMF electromagnetic fields. And it's an actual thing. Now, there's more than her claiming it's called Es electromagnetic sensitivity, where she has basically transformed her house. She painted it black. She said she's allergic to computers, cell phones, microwaves. She had her house rewired to make it basically EMF free. She and her husband sleep under a silver plated mosquito net to keep out radio waves and covered all our windows with protective films. And she said she's feeling a lot better now. So I saw that. Yes. Electromagnetic sensitivity. That if you expose somebody to an electromagnetic field and then just tell them that you are and don't, they have the same reaction, which would suggest that it's no SIBO. Well, it's super fascinating because you see cases like this, from that to gluten sensitivity becoming a big thing now. And some people contend that it's maybe a collective hysteria going on. And if you think you're going to be sensitive to gluten, then you're going to be sensitive to things that contain gluten. And I'm not saying that people because that's a very hot topic. Sure it is, but some people have claimed that, well, we'll talk a little bit more about things that exacerbate the mass psychogenic disorder and the nosebo effect right after this. So, Chuck, back in 2007 in New Zealand, a drug called Ltroxin, it was a pretty widespread drug in New Zealand. It's a hormone replacement drug and it was the only one that the government would pay for. So most people who were on this hormone replacement therapy, we're using L, Troxin, and it been that way for like decades. Yeah, it was just an established truck GlaxoSmith. Klein what was it for, though? Hormone replacement. Oh, okay. A GlaxoSmith. Klein I think just those there's no welcome involved changed just the inner qualities of it, like the shape of the pill, the color, and I think that's about it. But the active ingredient was exactly the same in 2007. And when they released it, all of a sudden some reports of bad side effects were starting to trickle in and the government was like, wait, what's going on here? It got a little bit of media attention and more reports started trickling in. And then the media attention grew and the reports grew and grew. And apparently the reporting of adverse effects of Ltroxin increased 2000 fold in a year and a half. Because of the look of the bill. Because of the look of the bill. Yeah. They went back and studied this and they found that in areas where there was more reporting about these adverse effects being reported for electroxin, the more adverse effects were being reported in that area. And that kind of reveals one of the risk factors for mass psychogenic disorder, is the media. It's actually spread through the media most easily. Yeah, they have a point, though. I know in this article, too, it points out that pills that are blue and green are usually associated with drowsiness. Pills that are orange or yellow or not. And I don't know if that's why they market it that way or if it's the opposite. We just see it that way because of products like NyQuil and Daquill. Right. But the one that makes you sleepy is green and blue and the one that keeps you awake or keep you awake, but doesn't make you drowsy as orange. I thought about it. What do you associate with, like, daytime sunrise? Yellow, orange. It really makes sense. What do you associate with night time? Like something tranquil of lake blue. Yeah. Scotch amber. Yeah. I think the pills came after the association rather than the other way around. Yeah. I think when I get a prescription for something. When I see the pill, I make a judgment on it before I've even had it, just by saying, look at that thing. Yeah, that's a horse pill. Or that's a capsule with powdery stuff inside that's different than the chalky one. I think you just make an association. I don't think I have any preconceived notions on what a larger pill will do to me. Right. Or a capsule will do to me other than a tablet. But I think it's interesting, though, how you make these judgment calls, but without even thinking about it. Yeah, totally. You probably don't sit there and look at a pill in your hand. You just take it and just make some sort of almost unconscious judgments about it. Yeah. It may remind you another pill that helps you that you're not even remembering. Exactly. So that would be placebo. Yeah, that's great. No placebo effect. Not great. No. And it poses a lot of problems. For instance, there was a study, I think, in the 90s that found that women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were four times likelier to die of heart disease than women who didn't believe they were prone to it, even though they had all the exact same risk factors. Basically the same risk factors. There was nothing differentiating, these women, aside from a belief that they were going to die from heart disease or a belief that they weren't, and that led to a four fold increase in deaths from that just basically from a belief, is what it suggests. Yeah. Well, it's sort of like I know it's kind of cheesy, but the PMA, the positive mental attitude, I think we've all known someone who walks around so and so sick. Oh, I know I'm going to get it. I just know I'm going to get sick, or I just know I'm going to get cancer because it runs with my family. I think that has an effect on things. I have to agree. I know some of our more skeptical listeners are pulling their hair out right now, but I totally agree with you. When we did our show in Toronto on the way back Yuumi. And I flew out to Buffalo, and I was feeling a little down, but at the point where I feel like you can talk yourself into staying healthy. Positive mental attitude, I guess, is what you call it. BMA. But we were leaving right at about dusk, and the sun was just beaming through the windows and illuminating every single visible microbe in the air. I could see them going into my nose, in my mouth, and I'm like, oh, no. I couldn't stop. I was like, I'm not going to get sick. I'm not going to get sick. And man, did I ever get sick. Yeah, but I noticed that right when we took off and no, you know what it was? Somebody shut one of their window covers. Yeah. The shade. Shade exactly is the word that I was looking for. Somebody shut their shade and I couldn't see it anymore, and I immediately started to feel less symptomatic. Wow. Immediately it was like turning off a light. Yeah. And I still got sick, but I was just drowning. And basically what my brain was interpreting is like being assaulted by foreign invaders, which I am all the time, but I normally can't see them. Yeah, I do that all the time. When I open my curtains in the bedroom and I'll see you in the morning, I'll see that stuff in the air and I just think, oh, man, that's what I'm walking around, right. Breathing in and breathing dog hair and cat hair and Emily hair. So your lungs are just chock full of it. So one of the problems this poses, Chuck, for physicians, is that we expect doctors or we want doctors to be transparent, to not lie to us. Yeah, we've talked a lot about this lately, I feel like. Yeah, we've talked a lot about diseases. Some of our hypochondriac listeners have been like, please stop talking about diseases because now I've got morglon. I'm going to have, like, some sort of toxic exposure toxoplasmos yeah. And then very soon, leprosy spoiler. So the problem is. If you tell somebody that's going into surgery. Hey. By the way. You might have trouble walking. You might feel nauseous for the next six months. All this stuff that could be associated with which we demand from our doctors. It's been shown that if you are fearful or in despair going into surgery. That's associated with longer healing times and a higher risk of postoperative infection. Right. So if you have the nosebo effect where doctors are saying, okay, if I tell somebody, and it's been proven time after time that in drug trials, people who are still are given placebo will drop out of drug trials because they're experiencing these negative side effects even though they're given the sugar pill. Right. So if you're a doctor and you know that you are telling somebody something that ultimately may end up harming them, and you've sworn an oath to do no harm, you've got a conundrum going on right now, and that's what the nosebo effect poses. It's the problem the nosebo effect poses for modern physicians. Like, how much should they tell you? If you're going to tell somebody that they're going to feel nauseous for six months, even though they probably won't, should you tell them and give them a chance to basically have the psychosomatic symptom or tell them they're going to feel great? Well, that's another one. Somebody says the solution to this is just frame it differently. Right. Don't say there's a chance you're going to have nausea for six months. Say half of a percent of patients who go through the same procedure that you're about to go through have nausea for six months. 99.5% don't. Right. You're giving them the same information. It's just framework positively. Yeah. And that one doctor who wrote the article on collective history said what he recommends is not naming the illness, said that can help out because as soon as you give something a name, then instantly you have something you can call it and everyone's calling it that or the media picks up on it. Right. And it's a thing. Yeah. And that's actually, again, one of the risk factors in the spread of mass psychogenic illness is the larger the response, the emergency medical response to it, and then hence, the larger the media response to it, the larger the outbreak tends to be. It's called line of sight exposure. Just knowing somebody is sick or seeing somebody sick can give you the same symptoms. I'm sure if you see a news story that all the other news agencies are running that says there's been some weird chemical leak in the air in Atlanta, people are going to start walking around and coughing and saying, I'm not feeling so good. I have a bitter taste in my mouth. There's microbes everywhere. Well, here's the case from that article you sent that I think is super fascinating, the one in upstate New York. Because it is not a rash or a cough or nausea. It is Tourette Syndrome. 16 year old young lady named Lori Bronwell. What year was this? A couple of years ago? Yeah. Not too long ago, I think. 2012 in Corinth, New York. Was at her school's homecoming dance and lost consciousness. This is after she had bang, did a concert. Sorry, man, I thought you were going to leave out like the best part. Yeah, she was headbanging at a concert. I wish I knew what concert that was. Me too. I didn't find it anywhere. Apparently passed out there and had passing outfits, involuntary twitching and clapping, started twisting her hair, fluttering her fingers. Hey, starting stuff like that. And the doctor said, you know what? You've got Tourette syndrome. So Tourette syndrome is we've had a podcast on it. It's a real great one. It's not psychosomatic. But since that time, 14 other students, along with her 13 girls and one boy started exhibiting at Leroy Junior High School. Sorry, junior senior high school started coming down with Tourette. Right. Which is not contagious. It is not contagious at all. Aaron Brockovich got on the case, famous environmental activist, and she said, no, I think this has got to do with this train derailment from 1970 that dumped cyanide all over this town. Right. And I didn't see where they found any legitimate effects. Right. Again, that's the confounding thing about mass psychogenic disorder is that it is still possible that there is some weird toxin in the environment that is causing this. Like maybe there was exposure to cyanide that got in these people's brains and all gave them Tourette. And if you stand back and look at it, you're like, tourette Syndrome isn't contagious. That doesn't mean that you can't all come down with Tourette Syndrome from exposure to autoxin. It's just still X factor that's out there that you can't just necessarily rule out. Yeah, and I believe in that case, too. Those 14 students didn't end up with Tourette Syndrome. That was a good episode. Man. Love Tourette Syndrome one. Yeah, it's an oldie oldie, but a goodie. And it all came from headbanging. That's how it started. Fitness at a nickelback show. Yeah, because current is near Canada. Canada doesn't let Nickelback out any longer. Oh, really? Are they caged in there? Yeah. Nice. There's another case of the toxic lady. Did you hear this one in Riverside, California? A woman named Gloria Ramirez. Yeah. She was dubbed the Toxic Lady in 1094. She had cervical cancer and was being treated, and all the medical staff started to get sick that was treating her. This sounds gross, but they said her body exuded a garlicky fruity smell and her blood had a flex of what looked like paper, which sounds kind of like Morgan, actually. Nice. You like that? Yeah. And they said that most of the people that got sick while treating her were women, more women than men. And they all took a blood test and came back normal. And the health department said, Masters are. So that's funny, because I remembered that story and I was like, I wonder if that was mass hysteria. And I looked it up and I found that no, it was an environmental toxic. Oh, it was. That's what I found. So they called it necessary at the time and then later found out, I think, like a year or two later, she was using some sort of sav or something on her skin, and they think that it interacted with her biochemistry and really did produce a toxic gas. She said it may be this fruit garlic sauce. Exactly. That's interacting badly with my pancreas. Oh, well, this list needs to be updated. That is a fascinating case. It is. People got really sick from that. I think I remember hearing about that, too. Well, I'm glad they found a real cause in that case, from what I understand. But that's the point. You can say, well, obviously women were more effective than men. Right. Well, is that because there's more women in the nursing profession and there were more nurses in the room? Yeah, maybe. There's a lot of different things you have to take into account before you just write it off. Sometimes it is real. Like sick building syndrome. Yeah. That's a tough one, because after the OPEC Oil embargo, apparently people started designing buildings to be more airtight. So your ventilation system was really important. And these buildings haven't aged necessarily very well. So the ventilation system is not doing what it's supposed to any longer. And so they think possibly that's leading to what we know is sick building syndrome, which is malaise. It's when you don't feel good when you go to work. Exactly. Which is everybody else. But some studies have found, like no, that is the better predictor of sick building syndrome is job stress or job dissatisfaction. Yeah. If you have a building full of people who don't like their jobs, you're going to have a building full of people with sick building syndrome. But if you go on to say, like a local government's website or whatever, and you look at sick building syndrome, it's treated as a real thing. Yeah. Well, it definitely affects your gastrointestinal, like stress does. Also, apparently, it can set off bouts of asthma, which is another reason why they think it might have something to do with volatile organic compounds in the ventilation system or new carpeting, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Offgassing, man. You smell that stuff when you open up a new product, right? Yeah. There's also the dancing plate, which we mentioned briefly. Tell me about it. Frau Trophy, July 14, 1518. Went out on the streets of Strasbourg, France, and started dancing, even though there was no music and dancing like a maniac for three straight days. And all these people started dancing with her, saying, this is a good time. Said within a month, 100 people were dancing with her and couldn't stop. And hyperventilating hallucinating, some drop dead of heart attack and stroke and exhaustion. And the authorities said, let's just hire a band and let them dance it out because they've got the hot blood, is what they called it. All right? And so they did. And a lot of people died as a result. It said 400 people in the end were struck. I don't think they died, but were dancers. Right. And then it just stopped. And that's when they blame a lot of people blame on ergot poisoning, which we've mentioned before. Please go with ergot poisoning. Yeah. Those people are clearly tripping on something. They got the hot blood. What it sounds like you just described is basically how Tom Hanks invented jogging in the 70s. Jogging? Yeah. He just started running and people started following him. I wish that part had been cut out of that movie. Oh, really? Yeah. I thought that it was a weird thing that should have been on the editing room floor. They really kind of derail things for a while for me. Yeah. I don't think that movie is aged well, though. Other people say, though, that it was sittingham's chorea disorder linked to strep throat and rheumatic fever that causes dance like twitches. And then, of course, modern medical historians say it was mass psychosis. I would go with that one. Yeah. Back then it made more sense, though, when during the Salem witch trials and before they knew anything about medicine and could just say, you got the hot blood or you're having the fits, the devils possessed you. Yeah, exactly. These modern cases are the ones that really freaked me out, because so much is explainable now. Well, here's the thing, though, Chuck. We've always explained it was something that comes easily to mind. So back in the day before science and medicine, it was the devil possessing you. And don't think that people weren't freaked out when they thought that the devil was there possessing people in the same way that you're freaked out by the idea that it's cyanide in the soil from a train derailment from beetle mania. Exactly, which is the deadliest of all the maniacs. But it's just as real to the experience there. And it all comes down to people just basically being sick of the establishment and letting loose for a while. Don't want to go to work? Nice. So I'll dance. You got anything else? No, sir. If you want to know more about collective hysteria, which is the name of this article, type those words in the search barhouseforce.com and it will bring it up. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this episode on grief. We got a lot of great feedback and that continue to roll in. Yeah. Hey, guys. Just stumbled upon your podcast through my tune in radio app. I guess that's a mini plug. We're available there. Now, I've devoured almost all of the 600 plus shows. It may be a new listener, but I'm already a lifelong fan, so while I'm writing in guys is I lost my twin sister back in 2010. It was a rough time because as a fraternal twin, me being the boy, I looked at her not only as a sister, but as a mother and friend, too. Long story short, I wanted to comment on the grief show some time ago. I've dealt with my grief through my artwork. I'm a small town artist from Johnson City, Tennessee, and I rarely can get noticed for any attention with my art. I wanted to share my new piece I just finished after listening to how comic books work. I'm a huge fan of Marvel comics, and I hope you both enjoy this. And he sent this really cool. I think it was like every member of the Marvel universe had to be in this picture that he did. I didn't see that one. It's really neat. Just jampacked full of Marvel comic heroes and villains. So, Josh and Chuck, thanks for the inspiration, laughs and getting through every day at the office. PS. My twin Jessica passed away from Epilepsy, actually a condition called Suda sudden unexplained death of Epilepsy. My mother is trying to raise awareness because November is Epilepsy awareness month. So if you guys wouldn't mind mentioning this on the show, she would be so happy for that. Also, an Epilepsy show would be cool, too. Not a lot is discussed about it. And that is Jason Flack. And Jason. I wrote you back. That is heartbreaking about your twin sister. Yeah, I do very sorry to hear that. And we will definitely do a show on Epilepsy. And since this is November though, people should go out and find out what they can during National Epilepsy Month. Yeah, we'll follow up with the show. I don't know if it'll be in November, but we'll get to that one for sure. Yeah, and thanks for that piece of art. And if anyone's interested in a great comic book artist from Johnson City, Tennessee, a lot worse than Jason Flack. Jason, thank you very much for sharing that with everybody. That means a lot to us. If you want to share with us and all of our listeners out there, you can tweet to us at xyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychannow, you can send us an email with attached artwork to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at home on the Web stuffysheanow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarref in 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." | ||
431e267e-53a3-11e8-bdec-efcc2dc07a46 | How Morphic Fields Work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-morphic-fields-work | Biologist and science historian Rupert Sheldrake is known as a heretic of science, mostly for his deeply strange ideas about what connects all living things. But his pokes at science help keep the field from growing dogmatic and for that we salute him. | Biologist and science historian Rupert Sheldrake is known as a heretic of science, mostly for his deeply strange ideas about what connects all living things. But his pokes at science help keep the field from growing dogmatic and for that we salute him. | Tue, 03 Mar 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=63, tm_isdst=0) | 51325463 | audio/mpeg | "If you've ever been at home and wondered, Josh and Chuck, is it really worth going to see them perform live? The answer is a resounding yes. Yes. And if you live in Vancouver, BC, or anywhere near there, come on out to the Chant Center on Sunday, March 29 to see us and find out for yourself. And then the next night, if you live around Portland, Oregon, you can go to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and we'll be there ready to go on Monday, March 30. That's right. You can get all ticket information@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. And there's guest producer Dylan sitting in this fine Wednesday morning of weirdness. Everything is out of whack and strange. I know, right? Hopefully our voices sound normal. Chuck I was worried about that. So not that anyone cares. Yeah. But our regular Tuesday session got pushed because our computer took a dump. Technical difficulties. And then we said, hey, let's just do it tomorrow morning. A few more technical difficulties. But here we are. Going strong, buddy. I'm tired. Are you? No, I'm okay. I've had enough coffee that I'm not tired. It's weird for us to record in the morning. Everything's out of whack. I would call it eerie, I think, because I do the movie Crush, Mini Crushes on Wednesday mornings. Usually I'm just making dumb jokes and cussing a lot with Noel right now. Right. I got to switch my brain back into G rated mode. Yes. To talk about Rupert Sheldrake. That's what we're doing. You can curse if you want. We'll beep it out. Sheldrick depending on yeah, I think that's how the scientific community refers to it's. Just one of those names. It seems like it should be yelled at like that. And I like to call him Rupert after I know Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Remember he called Steve Martin's name at one point was Rupert. There's a cork on the fork. Yeah. Man, that was a good movie. It was. So we're talking about a different Rupert or Rupert Rupert Sheldrick, who is widely considered in the scientific community. A heretic fraud, hoaxer, a pseudoscientist, all sorts of things. And normally we don't entertain that kind of stuff or specifically people who are considered as such because we tend to be like, yeah, pseudoscience is not so great. But there's something about Rupert. Shell Drake there is kind of a gym, maybe a little bit, something like that. But he is different in some ways. He kind of stands alone. He's got staying power, to say the least. He was first branded a scientific heretic in 1981 and he's still around doing his thing, ticking off the scientific establishment. Yeah, but see, he's also, in certain circles, labeled as an open minded scientist. Right. And someone not afraid to kind of question the unquestionable and someone who flies in the face of what some people call the scientific orthodoxy, or dogma, where everything is so rigid that there is no room for new ideas to be explored. Right. Basically, the scientific orthodoxy that you refer to kind of says, we are on basically the right track. We generally have the parameters kind of figured out. We know the math we need to be using. We know the places we need to be looking. We have generally, in everything from physics to biology, an understanding of the general structure. Now it's just a matter of filling in the details. Yeah. We look under the hood and we know what's going on. Generally, we know that it's a combustion engine and not an electric car, that the universe is that kind of thing. That's theoretical electric car. Right. So when somebody comes along and says, no, that's not even a car that you're looking at, that's a boat, the scientific establishment, or really any establishment really tends to get shook by that kind of stuff. They don't like that. And one of the reasons I was trying to figure out why people get so invested in this I think there's a lot of people who come and say, I am a person of science. I believe in this. I subscribe to it. And they end up going so far as to pin their identity to it. And this happens with just about any structure. And when you pin your identity to something, when that structure is attacked, you take it as a personal attack. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people are so rapidly against Rupert Sheldrake. So should we talk about this guy? I think we should. I think, Chuck, we should explain one of the reasons why he has such staying power and what makes them different is that he is about as trained a scientist as a scientist can be. Yes. And as we move through this, you'll see that what makes them stand out from other kooks is that he's a very intelligent guy. He's not a kook. No. So that's why certain people listen to him. One of the other things I really want to point out at the start of this and this is what really differentiates him from a lot of people on the fringes today is he's not an a hole. He's very polite. He's very calm. He's very measured. He doesn't engage in ad hominem attacks against his critics. He engages with his critics. He's actually a very congenial person. He's just on a different side of the coin from the scientific establishment in almost every respect. Yeah. And when I've read articles and interviews with other people from the establishment that have hung out with him and done experiments, they're all like, he's a really affable, kind of fun guy. Exactly. Even though when you look at him and when you hear Rupert Sheldrake, it doesn't scream fun. And affable. No, but he is. Yeah. He's got a lampshade on his head. 910 at the time. Oh, man. Can you imagine? The lab parties, beer bong. You get freaky. All right. So he started out his career kind of right down the middle of science wise. Went to Cambridge as an undergrad. He won a botany prize there. The University of Botany prize. He then went to Harvard. Studied philosophy. He studied the history of science. That was a big one. Went back to Cambridge. Yeah. Apparently, he's just like a savant when it comes to science history. Went back to Cambridge, got his PhD. In biochemistry and then a postdoc with the Royal Society in Plant Development and the Aging of cells. So I think that's unassailable unimpeachable. It really isn't. Had he just kind of continued along this is largely in the 70s. Had he just kind of continued along this path he probably would have been a really widely respected although pretty obscure plant scientist or biologist of some sort, right? One of many. But one of the things that happened to him was he went to India and studied and lived at an ashram for about a year and a half and apparently smoked a lot of hashish while he was there. Now, is that true or you just goofing the hashish part? Yeah, I'm just goofing. But surely he did, right, surely. But the thing is, around this time he elaborated on an idea that he had that he learned about probably in his history of science classes that science can't explain how you can take some cells that start out as, like a seed or something like that. And that little seed grows into an oak tree. And that oak tree looks startlingly similar to other oak trees that you can dig up from 1000 years ago or imagine that they'll basically look like a thousand years from now or that are spread out on different continents. Science can't explain how morphology works how something becomes the thing that it is and that resembles something else. And you say, well, it's genetics. That's kind of the common thing. But here we get to that point where science is like we've got the broad strokes, we just don't understand the details. And genetics can possibly be the thing that explains this later on. But we really have no idea how this stuff works because it's really intricate how something like that happens. Yeah. It's almost like Shell Drake was like Tom Hanks and Big in the boardroom when they're talking about the toys. And he's just like, I don't get it. Yeah, because he'll say, oh, well, it's DNA. And he's like, yeah, but I don't get it. Like, how does the tulip become the tulip? Well, it's DNA. Yes, but that really doesn't explain it all. Well, it's DNA. We understand DNA. He's like, yeah, I don't get it. Yeah. And to him, specifically, DNA is a chemical that dictates how other chemicals are produced. Right. He's very overrated. He does. Which that in and of itself is heretical. But it's pretty funny too. But it is. But with morphology, with how something takes the shape that it has eventually and it's a mature state, there's a lot going on there. There's like little cells that have to set up an arrange on a certain pattern that later on down the road, after all these processes play out, will form another pattern. So there's basically planning, there's timing. Like all that process has to happen at just the right steps and just the right stages for the end result to be what it's supposed to be. There's differentiation of cells where one cell can produce a new cell and the new cell has totally different genes turned off or on that will allow it to specialize. And these are the things we don't understand what's guiding it. And so Rupert Sheldrake kind of tapped into a thought that started, I think, back in the 1920s among biologists that there must be some unseen guide or force that basically says, I've got this. I know what the end result is. I can take the starting bit and guide it into this end result and we don't understand what that is. Yeah, there were a couple of scientists in the studying what they call morphogenetic fields, which is sort of like the idea that there is this invisible mold that we don't fully understand that gives the shape to these things. A guy named C. H. Wattington in 1936 had a paper called Morphogenesis in the field concept. And then a Russian biologist named Alexander Gervitz kind of had the same thoughts. But I think he came independently to these thoughts, which was, hey, there's something else going on here. We're calling it morphogenetic fields. And this is, like I said, this idea that there are these invisible molds that we don't fully get that gives things their eventual shape and that's why they all look alike. Right. So on the ashram in the late 70s, early eighties, sheldrick was kind of vibing on this idea of there must be some field, these morphic fields or whatever that guide the development of something living into its mature form because we just don't understand it. So hey, maybe that's just as good an explanation as our current understanding, which is really nonexistent. So he took it further though, and he wrote a book. He wrote a book called A New Science of Life. It was his first book, as far as I know. At the very least, it was his first book that really kind of made a splash. And in it he kind of said these morphogenetic fields we're going to call them morphic fields now. And not only do they guide the morphogenesis of a living thing, they guide its behavior from that moment on, from the moment of conception on to, I guess it's death. And then when that thing dies, the life that it's led will contribute to this morphic resonance that carries on to the next generation and the generation beyond that. And so you eventually have this long line of tulips that know not only how to grow into the right shape, but how to behave and do all the things that tulips do. Because of all of the living tulips that came before it through this process of morphic residence? Yes, and not just like that tulip growing nearby at the same time. But he said, what if it just was across all of space and time? And the tulip in Africa in the 19th century has informed the tulip in Florida in the year 2020 how to grow. Right. And everyone went, Good. Hashish over there in India in the 19 seven S, right? Shell Drake right, yeah. We'll get to how it was received in a minute, but you want to take a break and then come back and kind of explain how he says it works a little more? Yeah, but I also think I've totally spoiled how it was received. But that's okay. It's all right, man. All right. Okay, so we're at the point where Rupert Sheldrick has published his 1981 book, a New Science of Life, and in it, he's talking about this morphic residence that basically says anything that self organizes from a molecule to a giraffe knows how to take the shape or is guided by a process that shapes it, called morphic fields. But even more than that, it's behavior, future behavior is shaped by the same morphic fields. All of the things that the giraffes that came before it learned and knew and saw and ate and figured out becomes this kind of body of consciousness that's passed along to every new giraffe that's born. Yeah, I think we should read this quote. Okay, there's a great interview in Scientific American. Who was it interviewing? And I can't remember now. Was it Rose? No, I'm not sure. It was a contemporary who was more traditional, mainstream science. But he, again, was like this Sheldrick guy. He's got something, he's got a quality. So here's how Sheldrake himself answers the question of morphic resonance. Morphic residence is the influence of previous structures of activity on subsequent similar structures of activity organized by morphic fields. It enables memories to pass across both space and time from the past. The greater the similarity, the greater the influence of morphic residents. What this means is that all self organizing systems like molecules, crystal cells, plants, animals, and animal societies have a collective memory on which each individual draws into which it contributes. And here's the key here, I think he says, in its most general sense, this hypothesis implies that the socalled laws of nature are more like habits. Yet scientific establishment really particularly doesn't like that last bit right there. Yeah, sheldrake just called out the laws, socalled laws of nature. Right. So there's something in there that kind of stuck out to me that I was curious about, I couldn't find an answer to, is that he says the greater the similarity, the greater the influence of Morphic residents. But what is the similarity, say, in like, a Giraffe embryo that allows the Morphic residence of all the Giraffes that came before to be like this? This is the thing we need to exert our influence on. Like, what similarity attracts that Morphic resident. I took that to mean maybe not in the case of Giraffes, but in the case of different varieties of an orchid, like the more similar because that's why they're all different ones. Maybe not. Yeah, but what is the initial similarity that that Morphic field recognizes in that specific kind of orchid that says, oh, I'm going to influence you, or is it just we should call them. It just naturally happens. I don't know. But these are the questions that you start to wonder about when you read Sheldrake stuff, which is, I think, the reason why I like him. It just makes you think. You just start to think differently than just like it's DNA. Yeah. Where are you with this guy overall? I am sympathetic to him because I admire that he has a tremendous amount of courage and willingness to take tons of flak and I'm sure in this day and age, lots of hate and threats. I think that I am critical of the fact that he stopped publishing peer reviewed papers all the way back in the mid 80s. That makes him currently less of a scientist and more science communicator, but he's also kind of making up his own science, too. So I don't know if he qualifies as science communicator, but I generally like him and I appreciate the role that he plays in with science. What about you? I'm kind of with you there. I admire his chutzpah because I don't think that he is a charlatan out just to make money selling books like some people think. Yeah, I don't either. I think he's a really smart guy who has given his whole life to deep, deep thought and research on this stuff. And I read some of it and I think he may be on to something. I read other stuff and I think this sounds like magic. Right. And we are men of science, we are podcasters, but we have always roundly sided with the scientific method as sort of the baseline. And if you can't satisfy the scientific method, then we typically kind of poo poo it. But there's something again about the way he's gone about it that just doesn't seem like he's just some wacko out there making stuff up. Yeah. And I think he also kind of tunes into something that I dislike, which is he's really critical and really challenges hardened dogma of a lot of the scientific community, where it's like, this is just how it is. Well, why? I don't know, but I was taught that. But that's just how it is and stop questioning it. And I really dislike that, and I like him that he challenges that as well. Yeah, there's a rigidity in science that turns us both off, I think. So. Turned off right now. I was going to make a joke, but I'm not going there because I'm in the mini crush mode. Right on. Keep it in. S YSK all right, so let's look at a few examples of claims that he makes about things that he thinks Morphic residents might explain in nature, specifically with animal behaviors. He says things like fish, schooling butterflies, monarchs flying thousands of miles to the same place, homing pigeons, termites in Africa that are blind, that build a ten foot tall nest with ventilation structures. He said all this stuff. Or more importantly, we'll look at this a little closer in a minute. A dog and their owner, and a dog anticipating their owner's return, even though it might vary on what time that happens. Right. Like the sense that the dog knows and is waiting by the door. He thinks that's all explained by Morphic resonance. Yeah, it's curious. How does a bee know after it makes that wax ring in a honeycomb? How does it know to melt it into a polygon shape rather than just a circle or those termites? Like, why does the termite nest look almost identical to other termite nests? DNA. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of behaviors that we can't quite explain that if you do kind of buy into this Morphic residence idea, you could say, well, that's actually really interesting. Now, and this is a real good criticism of Morphic residence is you could also just as equally say magic or God or whatever. No one's proven that Morphic residence exists. This is just sheldrake saying, here are good examples of what I'm talking about. This Morphic resonance stuff. Yeah. And this is kind of important, too. He talks about the fact that humans are not as sensitive to this. And this is where he kind of got me a little bit thinking. He says, we're so distracted by technology, and we don't need collective memory of past humans to survive anymore, so that's why we can't really sense these fields. And I kind of disagree with that in some ways. Like, I think if it does exist, it still is. It still survives in humans and things. Like, think about how easily the average human can pick a snake out of the grass with peripheral vision. Right. I wasn't raised around snakes. My parents didn't drum it into my head to be really wary of all snakes, and yet I'm a pro at picking a snake out in the grass with my peripheral. Are you really sure? And it's been shown that people can pick a gun out as quickly as they can pick out snakes and spiders. And we're really good at picking out snakes and spiders in our environment. And this would be a pretty good example of that, if you ask me. That is the most common descriptor, I think, when people say, What's Josh like? He drinks a lot of beverages. Coffee, water, energy drinks. He's a hard worker. And, man, you should see that guy pick a snake out of his peripheral vision. It's uncanny. It makes a gunshot ricochet sound like I don't go for a walk in the woods without them anymore. Sometimes you're nice and carrying me on your back when I get tired. Here's a couple of things with human morphic residents that this is where it gets a little wacky to me, he says. He claims that a crossword puzzle is easier to complete later in the day because of all the other people that had solved it earlier in the day. And they are broadcasting this morphic resonance out into the universe, I guess. Yeah, just their general awareness of the answers. That gets a little wacky to me. Yeah, a little. The other one is not as wacky as that feeling is in the back of your head, like you're being stared at. That's the thing. He says that's morphic fields yeah. That your morphic field extends beyond your head and that it's sensitive and is the first thing contacted by that person's stare. And it lets you know, basically, that you're being stared at. Yeah. This is where he's going in the right direction. Then I hear that and I think, oh, boy, that sounds a little wacky. I read another really good explanation for that, that it's a self fulfilling thing where you say you're in a library or whatever, and you get the sense that you're being stared at by somebody at a table behind you, and when you start to turn around, the movement of your head, they look at the person's attention. Interesting. And when you finally complete that turn, that person is looking at you. That makes sense. Especially if you're like, For God's sake, then you turn around, right? Yeah. Then they're definitely going to look the next time you turn, too, because they're keeping an eye on you. That's right. Or they're just looking for snakes. So, Charles, as you kind of said earlier, this has not all been very well received by the scientific community. They tend to think of it as hokum, the fact that he doesn't publish peer reviewed papers anymore and then Said writes books directly to the public. The fact that they claim that his stuff isn't false viable, but if you read his explanations and descriptions, he's like, no, actually, this all is false viable. And I try to run experiments all the time. Sometimes it comes back with positive results, but they generally don't like the stuff that he's saying. And in particular, there was one guy who, looking back, made Rupert Sheldrake's career, and his name was Sir John Maddox. And at the time that what was it? The new science of life. Yeah, new science of life. When that book came out, sir John Maddox happened to be the editor of the journal Nature. Nature and Science are the two most prestigious scientific peer reviewed publications in the entire world. He's knighted, for God's sake. And this guy, right, was the editor of that. And he got his hands on the new science of life and wrote not just a book review, an editorial about this book from the editors of Nature, claiming that it was an infuriating track and that it was the best candidate for burning there has been for many years. Yeah. Also this in a 1994 interview, he said, Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science. And that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo for the same reason it is heresy. Right. So if you were curious about how Sir John Maddox felt about the dogma of science, the fact that he used the word heresy kind of says it all, right. And this was 13 years after that first and he poked the Pope. Yeah. He was doubling down on this and he didn't mention that. It turned out Galileo was right, even though he positioned himself in science, in the Pope position, in this one. The fact is, he used the word burning. And his defenders later on will say, like, if you read the whole thing at the end, he says, no, we shouldn't be burning books. But he does say that there hasn't been a better candidate for burning. But if we were to burn books, this would be the first one on the file. Right. And so from that point on, Rupert Sheldrick's publishers are like, we'll be using that on the dust jacket of every edition of this from now on. And it made his career. He went from somebody who might have never been anybody to the premier heretic of science, thanks to that dusty old crotch. Sir John Maddox. Yeah. Here's dusty old crotch. Yeah. I'm not a big fan of it. Oh, man. Or anybody who suggests we should burn books. So here's another quote from another professor of biology at University College London. Louis Walbert morphic residence is rubbish. It is unmitigated junk and a great insult to the people who do real work in the field. Yeah. And I'm sure we could spend the next 20 minutes finding quotes like that about that book. Yeah. And Sheldrake's response has always been, I mean, he'll go back at people, for sure, but not in a sort of a poopy pants way. Right. He basically is, like, in any idea that doesn't conform to this religion of science. It's denounced. And he said it's closed minded. It's a closed minded system. It goes against the nature of what science is, which should be discovery and investigating hypotheses and the fact that they are valid until they are proven or disproven by experimenting. So get off my back with your dusty crotch. And in fact, some scientists in the field or a number of fields have kind of come to Sheldrake's defense. Not so much that they've criticized John Maddox. I get the impression that you don't criticize Sir John unless the editor of unless you're Josh Clarke. Right, yes. Well, I'm not a scientist. I've got no skin in this game. But they came to Sheldrick's defense and that they said, okay, if you're saying these are falsifiable, let's do some experimentation. Let's take this to the point you're putting it at, and let's apply the scientific method to this. Yes. Here, smoke this hash. All right. Now, Sheldrick said that to them. For the data to make sense, you got to smoke this first. That's right. Okay. Got it. But that's why everybody likes to hang out with him, because he's got the good stuff. Right. All right. So should we talk about a little bit about what he claims and what he's tried to prove? Yeah. So, again, he's run these experiments, but there have been I just want to say there have been a few people who have come up and been like, you know, that was BS, what Sir John said. We shouldn't be burning books. I'm going to extend an olive branch on behalf of the scientific community, and we're going to test some of these experiments. Yeah. So he drilled down in a few different areas that we're going to talk about. One is the one I talked about about humans being stared at. The other is the dogs anticipating their owners in return. Right. Basically human dog telepathy. Right. And then yeah. Boy, as soon as that word telepathy is thrown out there, that's a science killer. Yeah. And that's a big, easy criticism of children's ideas, is that they include telepathy. That the idea that we're tuned into this general body of conscious knowledge that was accumulated by all the living things that came before us, and that exists outside of our minds, and we can connect to it with our minds. That's telepathy, and there's no way to put it otherwise. Well, inside in general, which we should probably do a podcast on at some point. Sure. I mean, we've been chipping away little by little, but yeah. And then the third one that he kind of drilled down on was the idea that successive generations of lab rats can solve their little puzzles and problems faster and easier than generations before. That is because of Morphic residents. Yeah. And there's been data. He's either carried out experiments himself or he's pointed out to publish data before that have shown that I think back in the 30s. There was. I guess. A biologist or psychologist who was training Matt Or Rats how to run a maze. And he found. To his amazement. That rats of successive generations over. Like. 36 generations. Did better initially on these mazes than their predecessors. Which would suggest well. A lot of things. But apparently controlled for genetics and. Environment and said, it's possible that this is somehow being passed down from one generation to the next, outside of genes. Yeah. So let's talk about the dog thing, because we have dogs, and we love to think that our dogs are little people and that they sit by the door waiting on us and look out the window and are just sad until we get home. Sure. And so he did this experiment and then later on did some more experiments with a partner, which we'll talk about here in a second. But he found a lady, a British woman, who her name was Pam, and she had a dog named JT Jaytee. And she said, hey, use me, because I got this dog who waits by the window before I come home, no matter when I come home. Right. So it doesn't matter if I come home at five or 10:00 at night or three in the afternoon. This dog is by the window. So I think there's some telepathy going on. And sheldrake said, well, step right up and let's see what's going on here. Yeah. And it wasn't just that her dog sits by the window the whole time she's gone. It's that people had noticed that her dog was suddenly sit up, go to the window, and then within a few ten minutes or something like that, pam would come home right. And started singing True Colors by Cindy Lopez. Right. And she would come home at different times of the day. It was a remarkable thing. So apparently, over 100 different tests, sheldrake found that 84 out of 100 times this dog accurately predicted when Pam was coming home. And she'll rake's whole hypothesis within 11 seconds. Well, people should understand not that this dog hears the car pull in within 11 seconds of her leaving to go home. Right. Leaving her office, I think, miles away. Exactly. And again, this is at different times of day. They apparently experimented so that she would come home in different kinds of cars, including taxis, so that the dog couldn't somehow hear this particular of Pam's motor or something like that. But he controlled for a lot of stuff. And this is something you have to understand about Rupert Sheldrake. He carries out scientific experiments under the scientific method. What people disagree with is his interpretation of the data, typically. But he controlled for all this different stuff. And he found that 84 times out of 100, JT accurately predicted roughly when Pam was going to come home by getting up and going to the window to wait for her. Right. Yeah. I think that first one, though, was not quite so scientific. Wasn't that the deal? This is why they redid it? No, they didn't redo it because it wasn't scientific. They redid it because one of his greatest critics, Richard Wiseman, who is I can't think of psychologists, but also like a professional skeptic, said, this is BS, but let me carry out let me replicate your experiment and see if I get the same results. Okay. Because he had an Austrian documentary crew and they said that the test wasn't scientific. I'm sorry. Right. They're filming what they did was not scientific, but he had already previously carried out in private that no one saw. Yeah, but I mean, you know, the scientists do that all the time. I don't think he has been accused of fudging his methodology. I think he's just roundly accused of cherry picking data or misinterpreting the data or interpreting the data to suit his needs, that kind of stuff. But I don't get the impression that a lot of people are like, this data at its core is hokum. All right, well, Wiseman, like you said, noted skeptic, professional poopoor of things, experimental psychologist. He comes in and says, all right, let's do this together. He said, alright, this dog did not on four different occasions or four different experiments, this dog failed. Right? And this dog is going to the window a lot. He's a window hanger outer. Yeah, this dog loves that window. And so they said, all right, let's rule out some of these false positives and let's say let's define what the real signal would be that's if this dog stays at the window for two minutes, not just pops up to see if it's raining or to sing it stands of true colors, but really sits there for two minutes and then let's see what happens. They did that and Wiseman said, alright, and we got to also say it's got to be within ten minutes of her leaving from home, not eleven minutes, right. Shaved off 1 minute. And in all four of these experiments, this dog gives a signal before that ten minute period, before she even started for home. So Weisman said failed. So if you read, Sheldrake's rebuttal to Weissman's findings and Wiseman ran around not just saying failed, he gave, I think, four different talks about this experiment. It didn't amount to anything. And so sheldrick responded to it and he was like, well, this two minute duration was an arbitrary signal that you came up with. That was part of my original methodology. And then also, I think all four of those experiments, maybe all four. So the dog went to the window early, and then afterwards, if he went to the window again, which apparently he did, to wait for Pam, that was thrown out because he'd already gone to the window before. It was like, well, I never said the dog only went to the window when Pam was coming home. I just said he would go to the window to wait for Pam within some certain time frame of her leaving. And apparently the dog continued to do this, but it wasn't included in these tests because he had already gone to the window. So it's really detailed and you can read it yourself if you want to, but he has a good explanation for why Wiseman's interpretation of the data was or his methodology was flawed, but it's all very civil. Like you were saying before, he's not like Wiseman's moron who couldn't do science if it sat on him and caused him to stop respirating or anything like that. Yeah. The other thing, because the thing that Wiseman poopooed was the fact that the dog started this behavior before she started for home. And sheldrick was like, hey, I think that further proves it, actually, because I think that Pam is sending signals before she starts for home that she doesn't even realize. Like, maybe she gets her coat and goes to the restroom for a few minutes or something. Even. That's the beginning of the going home process. Yeah. Or she was with Wiseman's assistant, and Wiseman's assistant was the one who knew what time they were going home. So he said maybe Pam was picking up on the guy looking at his watch or something like that and knew when she was going to go home anyway. He has a lot of explanations for it. It's very interesting to kind of read the back and forth, but Wiseman won that one because everyone wanted Wiseman to win that one. And I think that's kind of par for the course for Sheldrake. He's like, well, no, here's all these other explanations for this interpretation, and people just kind of ignore it. Unless you want to believe what Sheldrick has to say. That's right. If you don't want to believe what Sheldrick has to say, people like Wiseman and other skeptics provide well, here we cared about this experiment, and now this is Disproven. Right. Another guy who did that is a really big critic of Sheldrake. His name is Stephen Rose. I think he's a no, I'm sorry. Yeah, he's a biologist and a neuroscientist. Stephen Rose, and he carried out another experiment about how chicks might be able to learn, kind of like that Labrad experiment, how successive generations learned how to do a maze. They did this with chicks, and they did this experiment together, and they had different interpretations of the data, and it went back and forth in different journals or whatever. But the fact is there are scientists out there, skeptics, who are critics of Sheldrake and his ideas and methods, but still scientists that are willing to engage his ideas. And I think that that's healthy, even if they are coming at it from the standpoint like, this is bunk, this is hokum, they're still willing to go through with these experiments, and I respect that. That's right. You want to take another break? Yes. All right, Chuck, we're going to take another break, everybody, in case you didn't hear. All right, so Stephen Rose and this quote kind of really puts the nail on the head of the critics of Sheldrake. And this actually is one that spoke to me because it's not an attack on Sheldrake, it's more of a sympathetic view which is this sheldrake is so committed to his hypotheses that it is very hard to envisage the circumstances in which he would accept its disconfirmation. Right. It's a very sweet way of saying, like, this guy really believes this stuff so much that I don't think he is able to look at the data in a sort of level headed, unbiased way. Right. I mean, that's tough. It's a very cutting criticism because how do you show that's not true, other than to say, well, no, these are wrong. You have to admit that your hypothesis is wrong to get away to get around that, and then once you've done that, you've just lost anyway. So it's a very shrewd criticism. Yeah. So She'll Drake, over the years, he's written a lot of books. He has been accused of he's been accused by some of, like, hey, this guy's just out there writing books to make money, and has sort of made himself the superstar of the alt side of science. That seems to be the biggest explanation for why he's doing what he's doing. Yeah, he found it an easier and quicker path to fame and recognition and probably money writing these books about his own made up ideas rather than writing academic papers like everybody else. Right. And on Sheldrake side, he's like, listen, what he calls the default worldview of science. And these dogmas, he said they should be sort of pushed back against and questioned. Yeah, questioned. What about the Big Bang? He's like, everyone thinks they have it all figured out and all laws in the universe are constant. Well, except for the big bang. And then we can't fully explain that. And there's another great quote from a philosopher named Terrence McKenna I love this quote is, give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. Yes. And when it comes to things like the Big Bang, that kind of holds true. Yeah. Specifically with the Big Bang, I think is what he's talking about, that if you can just allow for their piece of magic, nothing that came before, and all of a sudden all the matter and energy in the universe suddenly existed, then we can pretty much explain all other physics from that point on. Or we can use that. And that's the big question, is what happened right before the Big Bang? Yeah, exactly. But we also have other questions about the universe, like, is it inflating? Is there going to be a big bang, or is there going to be a big crunch? Or we have a lot of questions and a lot of misunderstanding about it too. But physics needs the Big Bang to have happened the way that we think it might have happened. But even still, the way we think it might have happened doesn't follow the physical laws as we understand them. And so She'll Drake and others point to that one, and they're like, come on, guys, this is just one of several examples of science just saying, this is the way it is, even though we don't fully understand it or the data we're getting suggest otherwise. Right. And, man, how can I say this in a way that's not, like, controversial if there isn't one? It's not the same as when, let's say, a creationist saying, well, you can't really explain the Big Bang, so it's all magic and that's okay. Right. It's not along those same lines, there's something different about what sheldrick is saying. I think what he's saying is, yes, in some cases, he's like, we don't understand this. So here's my interpretation. I think in his most recent book, the Science Delusion, which came out in 2012 in the US. Is called science set free. He's saying, here are some essential dogmatic beliefs of science that are worth challenging, and that if we don't challenge them, we might end up going down this wrong path of scientific inquiry, and we need to be a little more free to differing ideas because we don't understand these things like everybody generally believes we do. Yeah. In the book title itself, you said, in America, science set free. That kind of encapsulates. I think he sees himself as some kind of emancipator of science rather than a cook who believes in telepathy. Right. That stuff. And Dave Russ helped us with this research. Yeah, I did a great job. He did. And he points out and he's right, morphic residence sounds very strange and weird. Yeah. And it also sounds like something that would sell a book. Right. But to throw him in there, I think it's rose said he's basically no better than someone who endorses crop circles and creationism. Right. It's pseudoscience. Yeah. And I don't think that's necessarily fair. No. If you take away things like Morphic Residence and things like, well, Morphic residence, basically, if you take that step away and just look at him as, like a challenger to scientific dogma, you can appreciate him on that level as well. You can peel back different layers of this guy and appreciate different parts and also disagree with different parts. But so in his most recent one, The Science Solution, he basically says, here are some things that science believes that we shouldn't necessarily believe. Like that matter is unconscious. And there are people out there, including physicists, who are like, you know, if consciousness were just a property of all matter, and that the more matter you put together, the more sophisticated consciousness you got. That would explain a lot of stuff, including human consciousness. That's just an emergent property of all these particles that came together to form human beings. But currently, scientific establishment says no matter is unconscious. That's just our understanding of it. That's the way it is. Yeah. Although that is being challenged by more people than just Rupert Sheldrick. And then there's another one. He gave a Ted Talk, a TEDx White Chapel Talk that I think was later banned. Right. Or not banned, but they took it from their YouTube channel and then inserted it into a blog post. You can still see it, but they put it in a blog post because their science advisors have been like, this is pretty heretical, and I don't think you should just be presenting it like you need to couch it in some language. So they did, and they put it in a blog post, but you can still see it. It's not like they just took it down altogether. But it's a really interesting talk. It's only like 20 minutes long, but in it, he makes a really good case about how the laws of nature, like the gravitational constant or the speed of light, aren't actually constant. And physics need those things to be constant for it to do its inquiries, for it to do its formula and equations, for the current theories to work. And he's saying, no, there's been periods in history where we've measured these things and gotten different measurements, and that during that same period, all these different scientists around the world were getting roughly the same different measurements from what we thought it was before. Right. How do you explain that? I think that point is really important because if something like the speed of light does change, and understanding that it does and how it does could give us an even greater understanding of physics. And that right there, I think, is the greatest role that Rupert Sheldrake plays is to say, no, stop looking at it through this lens. This lens is possibly incorrect. At the very least, don't burn all your old stuff. Don't throw it away, but just step to the side and approach it from a different way just to see if that's the truth. And if it is the truth, then we'll have a greater understanding of how things actually work. Yeah, because the unexplainable are only unexplainable until they can be explained. You're right. Well done. At various points throughout history, there were a lot of claims that things were unexplainable until they figured it out. Yes. And again, we're not touting pseudoscience here because we have a pretty good track record of roundly siding on the side of science. Yes. And expertise, too. We both have a tremendous amount of respect for expertise. People who go study things for years and years and years and apply themselves to understanding, that one thing that's an expert, and they should generally be listened to. That's right. And Sheldrake has proven himself out enough to be listened to, I think. He's not aliens, man, whoever that guy was. Make up your own mind. Go read about them. Go read both sides about them. If you're interested in this, don't just listen to us. Like, he's definitely one of those people. You should make your own mind up. And if you disagree, great. If you agree, fantastic. We just kind of admire thinkers like that. That's right. Are you got anything else? I got nothing else. Rupert Sheldrick. That was it. If you want to know more about them, go read his books. Go do what you want. And in the meantime, since I say go do what you want, it's time for listener mail. Yes, this one is a little long, but this was a first hand account from the Iowa caucus, so I thought it beard reading. This is from Lauren. A student at University of Iowa participated in her first Iowa caucus. She said I went I went last. Well, she did say that I went because it's such a big deal here, and since I'm graduating, I thought it might be my only chance. However, this week's events, it's looking like it may be the last time anyone is going to participate. There were several logistical issues, in my opinion, that led to issues where I was participating. My caucus location was downtown Iowa City at the Englert Theater. My roommate and I arrived about 45 minutes before to make sure we could be in the door before seven. Since we had been told if you weren't in the door, then TS for you. Two lines for the caucus wrapped around the block. One for people who registered in the correct precinct, and one for people who needed to change their registration to the correct precinct. There were over 700 people in our caucus location alone, far more than the Democratic Party of Iowa had expected. Since my caucus location was a theater, it was almost impossible to distinguish where different candidates were in the room. The Bernie and Warren groups were so large, they had locations on the floor and had to have satellite spots in the balcony when it came time to do the head count. The overcrowded space led to issues tallying people. All of the campaign volunteers had reported numbers. Caucus delegate informed us that the total number of people under each candidate was about 50 under the amount of total people checked in, so they assumed that 50 people had chosen to leave before the votes were all tallied. But the campaign volunteers demanded a recount. All in all, it took about two and a half hours to get through the first round of caucusing to find out which candidates would be viable. My prediction is that because Iowans are so passionate about their caucus system, they'll probably happen again next election cycle. But since their faux importance is brought to public consciousness this year, they'll eventually die away to a primary system soon. That is from Lauren Cheshire. Lauren, that was a great account. You're basically like the Hunter Thompson correspondent of stuff you should know. We appreciate that big time. That's right. The Iowa traits after that right. The name of the subject line of the email was the Iowa Caucuses Depraved and Decadent. Very nice. So if you want to get in touch with us to let us know something that's going on in your neck of the woods. While we want to hear about it, you can go on to Stuff You Should Know.com. Don't know why you would want to these days. Instead, just send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1235161145682hsw-sysk-stop-junk-mail.mp3 | How Junk Mail Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-junk-mail-works | Almost no one likes junk mail. It's seen as wasteful, unproductive and -- potentially -- harmful. Listen in as Josh and Chuck take a closer look at the nature and effects of junk mail in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Almost no one likes junk mail. It's seen as wasteful, unproductive and -- potentially -- harmful. Listen in as Josh and Chuck take a closer look at the nature and effects of junk mail in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=57, tm_isdst=0) | 18995897 | audio/mpeg | "What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges like climate change, education, access, US. And global health. Listen in as host Baritoon de Thurston connects with impactful organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky. Plus inspiring individuals like Amy Allison and Juan Acosta to discuss ways to maximize our impact. Listen to Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And I'm me. Sorry, I was going to do the thing. And I'm Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know. Terrible. That was totally off the cuff. That I think we should say I think it's chuck, you ever been to Austin, Texas? Yeah, I love Austin. I've heard nothing but good things keep Austin weird and all. I've never been very cool sound. But I do know that if you go to Austin, Texas, right now, and you go to MLK Boulevard, near the corner of Alexander Avenue, you're going to find a little gallery, and it is called the Flatbed Press Art Gallery. Interesting. And if you go into there, like I said, right now, you're going to find a piece of art, an art installation. It's called Free Paper. Have you heard of this? Yes, because you told me. Well, I'll tell everybody else then. There's a woman named Annette Lawrence and she's a Texas artist, right. And basically what she did was she saved a year's worth of junk mail, right? And it came to total \u00a3265, by the way, just junk mail goodness. And she tore it into two inch strips and then basically installed it, put it together in stacks by months and then put it on shelves. So there's twelve little separate it's almost like a cross section of junk mail. Right? And the way she did it, I wouldn't have thought to do it this way, but she really gets the point across with minimal space. It's quite beautiful until you think about it's. Junk mail. Right. As I understand, she's not the only junk mail artist that's going on right now. No surprising. There's a bunch. And I have another one here, and her name is Barbara Hashimoto, an American artist. And she works with junk mail. She does provocative, like, art installations, interactive type of thing. She's a provocateur. And what she's done and this is generally like most junk mail artists are probably making a political statement, an environmental statement, and that's what she's doing. And she is in Chicago and she set aside the junk mail from her business for a year. So it was quite a bit more obviously than a person would get. And she ended up with 3000 cubic feet. Then she shredded it, actually with a paper shredder. She had one called Junk Mail with Grand Piano. And what she would do is she got this piano player with a grand piano and put them in a room facing a street with glass that people could see in, obviously. And he would start playing this symphony not symphony, but some nice piano music. Sounds like it's such a lunk head there. I'm a musician too. And so he's playing the piano and she starts dumping the shredded junk mail on him and on the piano as he's doing it. And basically it's a process. And at the end of it, this guy can't even be heard anymore. He's completely covered. The piano is completely covered. And you hear just these little muffled, hammered sounds of the piano string. Nice to point across, didn't it? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Okay, so for the rest of us who have neither the time nor the inclination to play with junk mail right. And make statements with junk mail, I should say, obviously it's annoying. I shouldn't even say that. It's just so blatantly obvious. But it's also kind of harmful. Junk mail is harmful? Extremely. Number one, you can very easily become the victim of identity fraud just from pre approved credit card applications. I think there's something like 400,000 cases of identity theft every year really? That are attributed just to pre approved credit cards. Interesting. That's SIG Kirsten, by the way. That's his figure. Okay. He's a consumer guru. That's good. Yeah. So that's a problem right there. My wife is a master shredder. She is on top of our household as far as the mail and the bills. And she shreds everything like that. She shreds things that I've been like, oh, stupid, you don't need to shred my Sports Illustrated re up thing. And she will. And coincidentally, we've never had our identity stolen. So people that just tossed that I know people that just tossed that into the trash. It's really not very smart. No, it's not. I usually burn mine. Oh, that's good. Seriously, just out of spite. Oh, I don't have a shredder, but I don't want to just toss it in the trance either. So you heat your home with it. Or sometimes this is kind of weird, but sometimes I will take the most sensitive parts of it and tear it off and then eat it. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. No going through that trash, pal. Well, that actually what she said before about burning it leads me to an interesting stat that I've just flown in from the home office. 250,000 homes could actually be heated from a single day's worth of junk mail in the United States by burning it. That would be awful. Not a single household. Obviously it's all the junk mail in the country. Right, but I'm saying I don't think we should be setting this on fire. Right? Well, no, it's just to kind of drive the point home. Got you. 4 million times a year in the United States alone. And a final stat, Josh, if you're interested. Oh, of course. This is a really sad 144 percent of all junk mail goes unopened and is put into a landfill eventually. Yes. And Chuck, I have another stat for you. This is our heavy junk mail podcast special. Did you know that with the amount of paper that's thrown out by Americans every year for junk mail or just paper? Well, junk mail is part of it that includes junk mail. This is just paper. But it's going to lead me back around in a second, so bear with me. You could build a twelve foot tall wall from New York to Los Angeles. Really? That's annually. They should build that wall. Think about how incredibly thin paper is. You can make it 12ft tall and all the way from New York to La. How thick? I guess paper width. Yeah. Okay. That wouldn't be much of a wall. No, I mean like you're laying a piece of paper flat on the ground and stacking them up. So it'd be what, eight and a half inches wide. I thought you were taping it all together so you could just poke. That would be stupid. Well, this is the Clean Air Council. I would like to think that they wouldn't toy with me like that. But as always, as Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies. Lies, damn, lies, and statistics. You should always take statistics with a grain of salt. But how about this? Clearly there is a ton of junk mail that's wasted every year. Can we on that 4 million times? Yes, that is a statistic, too. Okay, so you've got credit card fraud, you've got waste. But not just waste, it's also input. You have to consider the input. It takes a tremendous amount of water, actually to make paper, which is kind of odd because paper is dry. But to separate the fibers and make this into a pulp, they add tons of water. There's actually a process where first they wash wood off, right. Any impurities, and send it into a steamer for 4 hours. Then they chop it up and turn it into a pulp. And then they add water to a ratio of about 200 to 1200 parts water to one part pulp. Wow. Yeah. And then they dry it out. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K twelve.com podcast, and start taking charge of your future today. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM. Let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comitoimation. Right. Were you laughing at my amazement? No, I was laughing at this astronomical use of water to make paper. Right. And then they dry it out, and when they're drying it out, they're actually using steam heated rollers. So there's more water. Right? There more water. There's another part to the end before they do the final dry, where they add more water and then dry it out to make it slick and glossy. Wow. Yes. That's a lot of water. Of course, a lot of trees are used specifically for paper. About 100 million a year. Is that right? That's what the University of Oregon says, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's a lot of trees. It is a lot of trees. And it's kind of sad to think about it, but there's many are grown specifically to become paper, right? Yes. I must say that paper mills do reuse water. Oh, they do? Just for cost effectiveness. Right, of course. So they are reusing water, but still, there's 28 billion gallons of water used annually to produce paper. Right. That's input. So if they're reusing it, they're still using a lot of water. Right. And I hate to use day. I don't mean to be inclusive and exclusive in group and out group. Like, the paper industry is just the evil tobacco industry. God knows they're evil. But you're holding paper right now. I am holding paper. I use paper, but I recycle all paper. Yeah, me too. Yeah, we have that single stream recycling thing where all the waste baskets at the desks are basically recycling. I never throw anything away in there. It's only paper. Yeah, I practice what I preach, friend. I'm not calling you to test, but all right, that's fine. I can settle down because my fight or flight response is just pumping. I know, it's kicked in. Okay, so Chuck, it's a waste, right? It's annoying. It's potentially threatening. As far as finances go with identity threat theft, what can an individual do to fight the good fight against direct mail? Well which, by the way, can I give you one more figure? Yeah. This is a figure, not a statue, so it's much more reliable. First of all, did you even know that there's such a thing as direct mail pharmaceuticals? No. You get pills through the mail. Now you can get pills through the mail. Yes, but this is like advertising direct mail advertising for pharmaceuticals. Interesting. I have never gotten one. I don't know, it's probably because I don't have a primary physician. But the direct mail pharmaceutical market alone in 2008 racked up 10.6 billion in sales based specifically on direct mail. Wow. Their return on investment for one dollars was ten point $0.27. Every dollar they spent on direct mail advertising wrecked them in $10.27 in 2008. That's just one sector. Well, we're in the wrong business. I've always said we need to start making our own pharmaceuticals and selling them. It's just not paying. We're not making 10 billion, I'll tell you that now. We're not or anything, actually. So what can be done? I'm going to leave the second part to you about the official websites and things. I thought you left the first part to me. No, I'm going to go with the first part. One thing you can do is you can actually send it back. This is not about stopping it from coming to your home, but instead of being angry and just burning it or whatever you do, shooting it with your gun, eating it and processing it through your own miserable body. Some ink is better than others, I can tell you. I bet you can actually send it back. Junk mail is usually first class or third class, which is called bulk rate. And if your envelope is stamped address correction Requested or returned, postage Guaranteed, you can return it unopened to the sender by writing Refused return to Sender on the envelope, stick it back in your mailbox and flip up your little flag. Flag? I didn't think you were going to say flag. Yes, flip up your flag. Got you. But you can only do this on bulk mail with that special notification on it. If you have a solicitation sorry that has postage paid reply envelope, then just put a note saying that you want to be removed from the mailing list and include that mailing label or write refused on it and you might actually get taken off that list. So that's one way to do it. Well, thanks to our friend, the Internet, it's gotten a lot easier to stop getting junk mail, right? Yes. There are actual sites that are dedicated to you not getting junk mail. Remember the do not call registry. Right? Well, there's been several attempts to create a do not mail registry, basically, and it hasn't taken off. It may in the future, who knows? But as it stands for now, it's up to the individual to take care of their own junk mail stream. Right? Right. And like I said, the Internet is a great tool for that. Opt out Prescreen.com is one place you can go. And basically the reason we have junk mail is because your name and address and personal information is actually valuable. It's valuable on its own in a very small amount and fractions of a cent as a single individual. True. When you put it together with thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of other people millions? Millions. I'll go with millions. Sure. Then all of a sudden that list as a whole becomes valuable. Right. So people who have your information or millions of people's information can put these things together and make some extra scratch on the sides by selling it to direct marketers. Right. And one group that aggregates this information, our credit reporting bureaus, they are allowed by law to give out certain personal information about you, like name, address, preferences, stuff that you've provided to sell it for their own behalf. You get absolutely nothing for it except and they make money off of it. Yeah. And what you get in the end is junk mail. So the opt out Prescreen.com website basically makes it so the four major credit reporting bureaus can't sell your stuff any longer. Right. And it will take a little while to get off the lists, but you will eventually, hopefully be purged. And that lasts for five years. Or I think you can also do a lifetime block I'm selling. Why wouldn't you just do that? It would be great. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. In five years, I might want to get this junk mail, so I'll just go with the five. Well, you know, actually there's this group called the Direct Market Association, and they may be the bane of most people's existence. How's that? Because they're actually a trade association of direct marketers. Right. And luckily, they have a nice little website that you can access to opt out. It's called Dmaconsumers.org. And they have basically the same thing that you'll find an opt out prescreen. They have 5200 member companies, and it's not just for profit business. Nonprofits political action groups are members of the DMA. And when you get taken off the DMA's list, you get taken off of all these people's mailing lists. Right. So that's another thing you can do. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride Career prep is helping change that. Stride career prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. What if you were a 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. There are steps you can take, or actually there are steps that you cannot take that can keep you off, right? Warranty cards. Warranty cards? Like, think about this. When I researched this article, I hadn't thought about it at the time, and I thought back to when I filled out a warranty card, because I must admit, I am one of the suckers who actually has filled out a warranty card and mailed it in. Why? The Cuisine Art company whose blender I just purchased would care whether my household would be most interested in hunting and fishing magazines or Skydiving magazines. It didn't dawn at the time. That's a little odd. And I think I even remember checking a box like, well, we're not really into hunting and fishing, but we're more into Skydiving these days, so check. And then all of a sudden, I got Skydiving magazine. Come on, there's a Mastercard is sending me, like, a pre approved card with a Skydiver on it. Like, we know you'll like this sucker and it's bad. So never fill out a warranty card because we talked about extended warranties before, right? You have your receipt. That's your warranty. Because if they say you have a warranty and you have the receipt, then you have the warranty. You don't need to fill out a card to ensure that you have the warranty. Exactly. It's just a big scam. It is a huge scam. You know those bits that sometimes you'll hear like the morning radio shows do, where they'll call the head of the telemarketing company at midnight and wake them up and say, how do you like it? You do know your company and all that stuff. We should find out the person. There's one person, I'm sure where all the junk mail originates. Find out where this dude lives and let's just go and like, wallpaper his house with grocery store flyers. His name is Rusty. Yes. Rusty would wake up and try to look out his window, and all he would see is like, ground beef. He'd be like a piano player with a bunch of junk mail dumped on him. He didn't hear his screams. Sorry, Rusty. Exactly. You brought this on yourself, Rusty. Chuck, we're not quite done here. Okay? There's actually businesses that you can subscribe to that will go to the trouble of getting you off list. True. And our producer recommended one. Yeah, it's Green Dimes. I believe. And basically, our producer, Jerry, said that there's a free service where you can just kind of, I guess, do the basic job. Right. But there's their $20 annual membership fee. Actually, these people actively work if they can't send something in on your behalf, like it needs your signature or maybe your Social Security number, which you will be asked for once in a while. Sure. This is not you being lured into an even bigger scam. Right, but they need it for verification. I'm not certain that they need it, but they require it for verification. So if Green Dimes can't just do it as a third party, telling somebody else to back off, they send you all the stuff, like these form letters you sign, mail them back to them, and Green Dime mailed it for you. Right. And then they monitor and by the way, I don't own any stock and Green Dimes or anything. I'm just kind of taken by this company. They may not be publicly traded anyway. Well, my dad didn't find it, if that's what you mean. Okay. They monitor all these mailing lists every month on a monthly basis to make sure your name stays off. And if not, they go after the people. That's worth $20 a year, if you ask me. And they plant five trees when you join. Really? Yeah. Oh, well, there you have it. $4 a tree. Yeah. That's awesome. Sure. Well, it depends on the tree. Yeah, that's true. I'm going to sign up for that. I didn't know about that. And remember, never fill out a warranty card. Don't never respond to a Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. What does it say on the you may have already won? Yes. But a lot of times it's not even your name. It'll just say Occupants or something. Yeah. If you respond to that, you will end up on what's called a sucker list. And that's actually what it's called in the industry, because you have shown that you are gullible and your junk mail will increase tremendously, and your name pops up on the sucker list. And that's when all these companies go, oh, we got one. We got one. Exactly. Get in there. Yeah, that's the lead of leads right there. Right. And that's my impression of a junk mail dude. Yeah, that's good. Thanks. So, there you go. I also want to recommend an article on MSNBC by SIG Kirchheimer, whose name I mispronounced at the beginning of this podcast. Sorry, Mr. Kersheimer. It's called hey, Junk Mail. Follow these steps, mr. Kersheimer has gone to the trouble of basically giving every name, address, telephone number and website you would need to completely rid the life of junk mail. So it's definitely worth reading. And if you want to read our take on it, you can type Can I Stop Getting Junk Mail in the search bar@houseupworks.com? For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.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 Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural, science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog of top five health needs better than leading brands? 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d948a520-361e-11ea-91dc-e7340bf2068f | Short Stuff: Foie Gras | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-foie-gras | Foie gras means “fatty liver” in French, which makes sense because it’s made from the overripe livers of force-fed ducks and geese. | Foie gras means “fatty liver” in French, which makes sense because it’s made from the overripe livers of force-fed ducks and geese. | Wed, 10 Jun 2020 13:08:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=13, tm_min=8, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=162, tm_isdst=0) | 12169755 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's wandering around the hall somewhere, stuffed to the gill like a fattened goose with miso. Gross. Yeah, that makes sense. She eats balls of miso, doesn't even chew them, just swallows them like a duck and they get stored in her liver. And eventually we will kill Jerry and eat that liver. It's going to be delicious. I'm surprised that a miso manufacturer and distributor hasn't I guess they don't manufacture it, but packager has not tried to custom brand a miso Jerry brand. I think maybe we should do that. Maybe. Not my best idea. It's not a bad idea, though, you know what I'm saying? Sure. It's not one that just makes you go, like, let's just keep talking and pretend you didn't say that. I appreciate that. Like, there's a few bucks in it for us, I think, down the road. All right. Okay. So we're talking about fat and liver, because if you translate the word fatty liver into the French, it comes out to be foie gras, which you may have heard of before, you may have even eaten before. Nope. You may detest. Yes, but it's like one of the most controversial foods ever. And I mean, like, seriously, you could have never even seen the stuff and have just heard those words and you probably are aware that it is an extremely controversial food. Yes. And this is something I've never tried, certainly because of the practice, but even before I knew how it happened, I just don't eat organ meats. And fattened goose liver just would not appeal to me anyway. I don't like pete's and stuff like that. So it never would have been on my culinary radar anyway. I have to admit that on a visit to Italy, I ate any kind of organ meat, I'm sure literally morning, noon and night for days on end. And it was just a dream. Now gosh. The thing is, there's a lot of people out there who say, hey, fat boy, why don't you quit eating that stuff? Because there's a lot of animals that suffered to make that and they have a really good case. So much so that there have been bans specifically on foie gras. In fact, in New York in 2019, they passed a ban bill 1378 that prohibits get this, storing, maintaining selling or offering to sell force fed products or food containing force fed products, which is basically targeting foie gras because foie gras of force fed product, hence the controversy associated with it. That's right. India, Australia, California, other places that have banned foie gras from being, I guess, at least sold and served in restaurants. And the practice you're talking about, this force feeding, is it called gavage? I believe so, yeah. That's how I would say it. Gavage. And this goes way back to at least Egypt when they were force feeding these geese, when they saw that waterfowl developed large fatty livers after eating large amounts in preparation for migration. And then this goes to the Mediterranean and then into France, where a lot of our culinary traditions were born. And there was a chef there named Jean. Joseph klaus or Klausa. That might be German klaus. And he is credited with creating the first foie gras in 1779 and patenting it in 1784. Yeah, and he got 20 pistols from King Louis the 16th saying, thanks a lot, pal, for creating foie gras. I love it. I slather it on my naked body every night. Go shoot some geese. This is based on this idea that ducks and geese naturally fatten up, storing fat on the liver. They store it under their skin, too, like we do. We also store fat on our liver. But geese and ducks are just evolutionary aces at storing fat in their liver. And it just so happens that somebody said, I wonder what that tastes like, and they tried it and we're like, this is astounding. And most of the time when you have pate or foie gras, it isn't a pate form. Which is to say it looks a lot like cat food, Inconsistency. Very similar color, maybe even a similar smell. It's the taste that really differentiates. It not just the taste, but also the price. They can get up to like $80 a pound, usually. Forty dollars to eighty dollars a pound for foie gras, which is a lot of money for a pound of any kind of food. But one of the reasons why is the production is so labor intensive. Right? Yeah, big time. And then also the stuff that goes in along with it, like very fine brandy's truffles. It's about as decadent of food as you can find. Yeah, just really well, I guess it reeks of Henry VIII or King Louie the 16th and people like that who got gout when they were in their twenty s and just surrounded themselves with fats and meats and liver organ meats and things like that. I'm sure I'm making you hungry. I'm about to vomit. I'm just remembering all the terminals. But if you're on the other side of the coin and you are into animal rights and stuff like that, you might say, hey, ducks hyperventilate sometimes. Sometimes they bleed, sometimes they are shackled. When you are force feeding them, they rallied for that bill, the 1378 bill that you're talking about, and you can be fined anywhere from $500 to $2,000 starting in 2022. In New York City. Yeah, when it takes effect, I guess all of New York. Or maybe just New York City. So you would think, like, what's controversial about this? It's just rotten. It's wrong. It's mean. All the produce, like one of the most decadent foods around. There's really nothing controversial about that. It sounds pretty one sided, and a lot of people feel that way. There is, however, another side that argue against it, and we will visit them right after this. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. 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No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off Ups to stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, so there's a lot of people out there, Chuck, that say, we hear what you're saying, but you're all dumb and you're wrong. And they actually say it's like that. A lot of chefs, especially celebrity chefs, have actually taken a stand in favor of foie gras, saying that it's unfairly targeted. One of the reasons I saw, I read a couple of posts on Sirius Eats in defense of it, and they said this is a type of food that's associated with the very rich. It's really easy to get people riled up because you hear things like force feeding and jamming tubes down animals necks, making their liver ten times their normal size. You put all that together, and foie gras becomes unfairly targeted. And it's kind of hard to swallow at first. Very sorry about that one. The idea that anybody would defend force feeding an animal to fatten its liver to ten times its size so that goutridden old riches can eat a little bit of this stuff, but if something is unfairly demonized, it is worth looking into and unpacking. And they do make a couple of good points here. There? Yeah, there's a group called the Catskill Foie Grate. Worst band name ever. And they produce most of the foie gras that you would get in New York City. You could still get, I guess, once restaurants are open for the next couple of years. Yeah. And they have challenged the ban, and they say it's unconstitutional. You don't have jurisdiction over what we do, de Blasio, and these are our businesses, and you can't shut us down. And I guess the leader, the President Marcus Henley of the Catskill Foie Grack Collective, says, you know what? This little tube is really not causing any discomfort. Ducks aren't like us. They're built different than us. And this tube, they love this thing, trust me. Basically, in that serious heats article, they went to the greatest foie gras farm on the planet, and the ducks came over to get their garage feeding. But that's definitely not par for the course. There's a lot of videos out there of some really abusive duck and geese farms where they're stuck in cages and their beaks are broken and they're bleeding out of their noses and they're lost feathers, and they have, like, vomit around their mouth, and they're still being force fed. There's some really awful operations out there, but apparently, if you're getting good foie gras, you're getting it from somebody who's treating their animals very well. And the case they're making about ducks and geese being built differently than us is that their Esophagus their esophagi, I guess, are not connected to their trachea. They're two separate ones rather than shared, like in humans. And their Esophagus is allowed to stretch. They can eat fish that are many times over the size of their actual esophagi, so they can stretch pretty easily. So that's where they say it doesn't really give them much discomfort, if any, and that their liver fattening to, like, huge sizes that it's actually kind of built to do that. This is just human speeding up this process or kind of making it in like a simulated way. Like the ducks and the geese aren't doing this to migrate, but they are responding naturally to this kind of simulated packing on the weight and that if you kind of start to understand it, you will probably change your mind about foie gras. I don't know if that's a foregone conclusion, but from what I read, it isn't quite as bad as I presumed. The one that got me though, Chuck, is that they say if you are fine with eating eggs, you don't really think about where your chicken eggs are coming from. You've got no leg to stand on going after foie gras because the chickens that are producing those eggs that you're eating are being treated just as bad, if not worse than the worst cases of the ducks and the geese that are being fattened up for pate. That is the one point that I find difficult to challenge. Well, yeah, I very famously worked in the chicken farming industry, unfortunately, as a marketing person, and it's terrible. But these days you can get chickens from one of your neighbors, most likely. And that's what we do. Yeah, it does smell like a what about ism? You know, I think it smells like it because it very much is. Exactly that. Yeah. So I mourn foie gras. I don't think I can really eat it anymore. I haven't eaten in a very long time. But I do have my memories with it. The livers of dead, abused ducks that I've eaten. I'm sorry, quack. That's okay. Quack thing. I wonder if you said that they were meant are not meant to, but their livers would fatten up anyway for migration. I guess they are meant to. I wonder if these ducks run over there to get this force feeding because they're like, this is going to get me out of here, man. I'm going to fly, fly, fly pretty soon. I got to get out of here. This is the worst. Oh, goodness. And the unconstitutional thing, I'm like, what are they talking about? Supposedly state wise, it's unconstitutional because they're trying to regulate interstate commerce. But I don't know if that necessarily holds up. Interesting. So there you go, foie gras, everybody. Go make up your own mind about it. Go do a little research and see what you think. And in the meantime, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Black Boxes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-black-boxes-work | Black boxes are designed to be the only survivor of plane crashes so they can live to tell the tale of what went wrong to prevent future accidents. Learn about how these grim devices are made, how they're tested and the tales they've told. | Black boxes are designed to be the only survivor of plane crashes so they can live to tell the tale of what went wrong to prevent future accidents. Learn about how these grim devices are made, how they're tested and the tales they've told. | Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:46:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=14, tm_min=46, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=72, tm_isdst=0) | 34366765 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from houseoffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and they're sitting by me as Chuck Bryant across from you and Jerry Rowland beside us. Yes. Here we are. Yeah. This is stuff you should know. Hey. And this is a fan request by one of our younger fans. Yes. One Cormac Rondalzo. That's right. Our buddy Joe's son and wife Cat. They all listen as a family, and it's adorable. They shout at their stereo as a family. Yes. Apparently Cat shouted at the stereo when you didn't remember 13 year old girls doing finger spelling, sign language. Joe said Kat was like, how can he not have known this? That's all we did. It wasn't around in Toledo. Yes. And you know what? Emily didn't know about it either, and she was in Ohio, so maybe it's everywhere but Ohio. Yeah, Ohio. Colon left behind, as usual. It's pretty funny. Yeah. But Cormac suggested that we do an episode on Blackbox flight Recorders, and that's what we're doing. Yeah. So, Chuck, if you'll indulge me before we get started. Yeah. I don't know if you remember, but a couple of years ago, a fan sent in some day planners for us that were like year long day planners. These ones made out of old library books. Yeah. And they had decoupage liquor stuff on the cover. They were great. Perfect. Can't find anything even remotely that good anywhere. Been looking for a while. So, dear listener, if you are still out there and you are listening, get in touch with us because I would love to buy those from you every year. Oh, yeah. You like those? Great. Yeah. Yummy. Went crazy for it. Nice. So if you are that person, get in touch with us. Yeah. Stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And put in the subject line, I'm the person Josh is looking for. Or day planner or day plan. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Chuck. Sure. So we're talking black boxes. That's right. It's pretty interesting, I thought. Yeah. We should probably put to rest the main question of if they can make something like a black box that can survive an airplane crash, why don't you just make the whole airplane out of a black box material? And the answer is, because it wouldn't fly. Yeah. Simple as that. So I'm glad we got that out of the way. Yes. And also we should go ahead and say right up front, they're not black. No. They're generally like bright orange with reflective tape and things because you want to be able to find it. Yeah. Amongst the rubble, as of the I think the 60s or 70s, there became a mandate where you had to paint them bright orange so you could find them. But they think that they were called black boxes originally because either the original ones were black or because it was kind of a grim moniker, because the boxes would become charred in the wreckage and turn black yeah. I saw another explanation, too, that I don't think holds water, that they were initially, like, round and red. And when they first debuted it, someone in the room said, oh, what a nice black box. Is a smarmy thing to say, I guess, about something that's round and red. I don't know if that holds water, though. Yeah, it's weird all around. And apparently in the aviation industry, they don't call them black boxes anyway. That's like something for the news media and church like us. They probably call them crash survivable memory units. I think what they call them is either one of the two things that are either a flight data recorder or a voice box. Well, there's a lot of yeah, it's not that hard. But because of the media and in part because of this article, it's very unclear that black boxes are different things. Yeah. There's two different we'll get into it, but there's really two different kinds. And what you would think of as a black box is actually a group of components the system yeah. That form the system that's meant to record the flight data and the cockpit sounds, which is the discussion and the beeps and the pings and all that of every single flight that goes into the air. Commercial flight. Yeah. And then it's housed in a way that it will survive even a horrible plane crash. Frequently the only survivor of a plane crash. Yeah. And we'll get to the testing of these, which I thought was kind of the coolest part later on. Yes, I thought so too. And the whole point is, of course, is to get all the data to figure out what happened in a plane crash. What happened? Because very frequently, again, if it's the sole survivor, then there's no one there to say, oh, well, there's fire. Somebody lit a fire in the cabin and the plane blew up. Yeah. But you could hit play and hear the pilots going, someone lit a fire in the cabin. Right. Yeah. And there you have it. But it's a little more complicated than that and goes back to in the 1940s. There was a Finnish aviation engineer named VA Ho, which doesn't sound Finnishalla. There is immigration, and he did some of the first flight recording was something called the Matahari for World War II. Planes test flights, basically. But I think it was only like instrument readings at the time. Really? It wasn't recording any voices like cockpit recording. Well, supposedly the Wright brothers had some sort of recording device to record their propeller rotation. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's like there's been flight data ever since there's been flight. That's awesome. I found that an Australian named David Warren was the one who really came up with the black box recorder. Yeah. He's the one that brought the voices into it. The actual audio recording of okay. Yeah. He was a member of a crash investigation for a mysterious plane crash, and he thought it would be really good if we had a recording of what was going on at the time. So he developed them. Yeah, he's like, that couldn't be too hard. Right. And that was the believe. And they became widespread and mandated in the 60s. Yeah. In Australia, it was the first country, and I guess even continent to make the mandatory, so go ozzy. Ozzy. Ozzy. Yes. Good on you. So initially, the black box recorders were recording on magnetic tape, and then they moved in, strangely enough, in the late nineties, early 2000s. It wasn't until they fully switched yeah. That the FAA mandated. Really? In 2005, there was a list of proposed rules, and one of them was, let's get rid of magnetic recorders, which no one uses anymore. That's 2005, after all, and go to solid state digital recorders. Yeah. Right. No cassettes, even. And the FAA thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and finally said, okay, fine, we'll do that. One of the big reasons why was with magnetic tapes, you could just record the last half hour of a cockpit conversation. Yeah. It would rerecord over itself every 30 minutes. Right. Which is probably that's all you need. Yeah. You want to hope that your plane doesn't take 30 minutes to go down. That'd be pretty bad. But the big superiority that solid state has over that is that the recording time is far greater. The recording media is smaller, more durable, the fewer moving parts. Yeah. And so it can't break down as easily. And if one part breaks, you can still take the solid state memory sticks and reconfigure them and get the data off of them still. Yeah. They cost between ten and 15 grand each and are usually come straight from the manufacturer. Like they work with the airplane manufacturers themselves to preinstall them on these planes. Right. Yeah. So you have a black box manufacturer who sells them to the airplane manufacturers, who sell the airplanes to the airlines with the black boxes are installed. It's like a part of the plane. That's right. So we should probably explain this now. It's been long enough. Okay. A black box can be one of two things. Well, one of three things, really. It can be the flight data recorder or it can be the cockpit voice recorder. That's right. Or it could be the crash survivable memory unit. Black box refers to all three of those. Yeah. The important thing, the only thing that really needs to survive the crash is the crash survivable memory unit. Right. That's where the data is sent and housed. And that's the one that's super beefed up to survive. Like a nuclear war, basically. Right. So on any flight, on any commercial flight, you have hundreds, if not thousands of sensors going on at all times. And they are measuring things like air speed, altitude, cabin pressure, cabin temperature, wing trim, everything. What are your flaps doing yaw. Yeah. You don't just guess it yaw. You got to measure it, right? That's right. And so all of this information is coming into the flight computer and plugged into the flight computer is well, basically it's like an upstream passive eavesdropping unit called the Flight Data Acquisition Unit. And it takes all of this that's upfront right. That's up front with the pilots, and it takes all of this incoming information and it records it. So not only are the pilots and the ground control getting all this information, but it's being recorded as well. And it's being routed to the recorders through the Flight Data Acquisition Unit, right? That's right. Also up front in the cockpit, you're going to have at least four microphones and in some newer planes, also video cameras. Yeah. That's the latest graze on. Right. Which you can't do that on magnetic tape. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. They have to start drinking vodka instead of like brown liquors. What do you mean? No, the pilots like it's water. I'm just having some H 20. Right. Not the gray Goose. Yeah. I'm joking. Okay. Although pilots have been known to drink here and there and they get in trouble. Yeah, they should get in big trouble for they should. You're the DD, okay. If you're an airline pilot, there's no way around it. Yes. The only thing shouldn't do is drink and do drugs. Right. So up there to eavesdrop on the pilots and not just the pilots, but also all the sounds going on in the cockpit are these microphones and they're recording everything through the cockpit voice recorder. Yeah. And you talked about the sounds. That's a big deal. Like only do you want to hear Captain Jim say, holy crap, our wing is on fire? But they want to hear 30 seconds before that if they hear just some weird noise. Right. And they're trained to pick up all that ambient sound. And experts are trained to listen out for things that you would probably never notice. It's just a regular dude. Right, exactly. And they can sit there and hear a ping or a thud or a knock or a combination of those things and be like, oh, I know what happened. Somebody smoked in the laboratory and kept while they were on their cell phone is loaded. So again, you've got the cockpit voice recorder, you've got the flight data recorder, and all of that info going out to those two guys is going through the Flight Data Acquisition Unit and it's sending that info all the way to the back of the plane where the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are located. And why is it located in the back? Because the front of the plane takes up most of the force of the impact and it's far likelier that. Something placed at the rear of the plane, specifically like the tail cone or the aft galley ceiling or something way in the back is going to be, likelier, to survive because the rest gets smushed. Yeah, we talked about that in our surviving a Plane crash episode. And while they won't come out and say it outright, it is a little bit safer in the back of an airplane because you usually go nose down. And by all accounts, if you drive a plane into a mountain, the captain and the copilot are going to suffer the worst of it. Maybe if you're in the back bathroom having your cigarettes, you're shaving like an airplane, you might have a chance to survive. Oh, yeah. Like cutting itself. And speaking of mountains, Chuck, as good places I need to put it, there's something called planecrashinfo. Comlastwords. And it's not just the site. There's a lot of sites that have recordings from black boxes no, thanks. From the last seconds or whatever. Yeah. And this site also has just, like, transcriptions of the last couple of sentences. And one of them was mountains. That was the last thing. Last thing. Wow. But then there's other ones, too, like, Ma, I love you with one, the last word. The one pilot. Another one was Pete. Sorry. So I guess somebody screwed up. Another one was, Hang on, what the hell is this? No good. Yes. And then other ones seem like they don't realize what's about to happen. This isn't as bad as I thought it would be, right? Yeah. But it's pretty interesting stuff. Some of it is pretty grim, some of it's super sad. It's, like, not an uplifting thing to read on a Friday afternoon. Oh, no, it's not uplifting, but it's definitely interesting. Yeah. I would not recommend reading that before you take a flight. No. As a matter of fact, umi, was traveling recently while I was researching this and go send it to her. I was like, I can't send her this. She's got to fly back here. That's awful. All right, let's go ahead and talk about the flight data recorder. You mentioned that there are all kinds of data being recorded. Like, up to 700 types of data can be recorded. They can tell when you just turn a switch on that's, like it's logged all of a sudden, captain turned on. Even interior cabin light switch, that's all recorded. And the FAA, they require pre 2002 planes to have a minimum of eleven to 29 parameters if it was built after 2002, at least 88 parameters. Right. I don't see why they just don't log at all if they can. Well, apparently that rule that forced up to 88 parameters to be recorded, like, cost the airline industry, like, $300 million or something. That's the reason they're notoriously tight. So that's why they keep fighting it. And it's the NTSB that's saying, like, let's push this along. It's 2005, we need to stop using magnetic real. Right. And the FAA is like, I don't know. Well, the FAA is being pushed around by the airline industry. Well, scary enough, I guess it's a good time to mention this. There was something called the Safe Act. Safe Aviation and Flight Enhancement Act. And it's been up twice and has not passed this legislation either time. And all they're trying to do is provide a second recorder, and one of them should be deployable in the rear, which makes sense. Like, if the plane hits an impact, this thing pops off the back of the plane altogether. Oh, yeah. It'll cost us like, $50. I guess so. Because they said the FAA has a long history of delaying much needed upgrades in this equipment. And I guess it's because of the price of the airplane lobby, right? Yeah. When your federal agency is actually like, a safeguard to protect the finances of the industry is regulating. That's not good. No, it's not. All right. Why can't everybody just do things right? I know. It's frustrating. And money is typically at the root of it all. It always is. Yeah. All right, so we talked a little bit about the testing. I guess we should just talk about what these things are built out of, why they survive the CSMU back in 1945 in Roswell, New Mexico. No, but there are three layers of materials to keep these things safe. You got your aluminum housing on the outside of it, and it holds all your memory cards. No, the aluminum is inside. Oh, yeah. Okay, that makes sense. It's the weakest link. It's on the inside, surrounding it's. The last stand of protection, I guess. Right. That is like you said, it's holding the memory cards. Yeah. Which are the one thing you really want to survive. The only thing, yeah. Besides the people. Yeah, I guess it's a good point. And this is the Crash Survivable Memory Unit, which is actually a part of the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, but it's also separate. It's kind of like the Holy See. No. The Holy of Holies. The temple within the temple of Jerusalem yeah. Like everything else will get mangled, and it doesn't matter. But all you need, as you said, are those memory cards. Right. Okay. So go ahead. There's an aluminum housing around the memory card. That's right. And then around that, you have it insulated with a dry silica, one inch of it. And that is because a lot of times, some planes crash. They catch on fire. Yeah. You want to retard fire, put an inch of silica stuff around this, around whatever you want. Your hand, your head. Sure, just do it. You won't get burned. And then around that is your outer shell. It's either stainless steel or titanium. It's about a quarter inch thick. And that's like that's your bomb casing. And all of that is why you can't build a plane out of all this. Can't be too heavy. Yeah. And so this one, two, three punch of Crash survival Memory Unit. It's a cylinder did you say that? I thought it was implicit. So imagine like a steel box, and you can also go on to how stuff works and type in how black boxes work and it'll bring up images. Sure. But imagine like a steel box that forms like an L on its back, right. So the foot is sticking upward into the air. And then on the part that's along the ground now of the L is it's cylinder that's coming up? Looks like it's holding some oil or something like that. It's an oil cylinder. It's like a fat squat barrel. Yes. Then attached to that is this little tube, another cylinder, but longer and shorter. That serves as the handle for the whole unit. Yeah. But it's also a beacon. Yeah. And that's super important. And actually, we'll get into that. But you got to find these things. Right. There is no good if it's hidden behind a tree or at the bottom of an ocean. They like to hide. They do. So we talked about some of the testing that these things go through and it's pretty awesome. They do 12345 six tests, the first of which is just a basic crash impact. They shoot it out of an air cannon at 3400 GS into an aluminum honeycomb and it smashes it with a force equal to 3400 times its own weight. Right. It's just like I want to see this thing in super slow mo, basically. Which not only does this simulate the impact of a major plane crash, it actually probably overstates the force. I think they overstate everything. Yeah. And these things survive, they say. Okay, good. All right, let's take it onto the next test. And the flight data recorders. Like, wait, what? Yes, exactly. And they take it onto the pin drop, which I think it's funny that they call it the pin drop. Yeah. It's nothing to do with sound. It's like engineering humor. Yeah. They take like a 500 pound weight with a quarter inch steel pin coming out of the end of it. It's like a little spike. And they drop it from 10ft to spike onto the weakest axis of the black box. It's like a puncture test. Yeah. And nothing happens. So they move it onto the next test. Yeah. The static crush, which would be a good band name. Five minutes of \u00a35000 per square inch pressure applied to the six major access points. So it's just a constant, not an impact thing. But just let me see if I can just crush you over time with brute force. Yeah, it's like a headlock. The worst headlock you can ever imagine. And then the fire test, which they fire a propane fireball with three burners at about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and just let it sit there and see if it melts or does anything or explodes or whatever. Yeah, it just sits there. And then the planes frequently go down. Well, when they go down. They frequently go down into the ocean or the sea. So your black box has to survive underwater. So they do a deep sea immersion test, which is like a pressurized tank of water for 24 hours. And then they also do saltwater submersion test. So this thing has to basically sit around in salt water for 30 days. That's right. And finally, they will let it soak in other types of fluids, like jet fuel and lubricants and fire extinguisher chemicals and anything else in a plane that it might end up submerged in. And if it can withstand sitting in jet fuel for a period of time, then you're good to go. Yeah. And then after all this, they put a little mortar board on the cylinder and send it along its way to be installed in an airplane. That's right. Where it sadly, will only be used if something really bad happens. Yeah. All right, so we've set this all up. These things are sturdy, they're solid, they're good to go. I think we should talk about what happens in the event of a crash right after this. All right. So your plane has crashed. Yeah. We're both dead. Right. But the black box has survived. It lives on. What happens to it? Well, they have to find it first. And like we said, these things are tested to make sure that they can withstand deep sea and saltwater immersion, which they sometimes have to. And in the event that they are going to go into the water, the little handle that has an underwater beacon installed in it actually has this water detector. And when water comes in contact with the beacon, it starts to set it off and it sends out a ping, I think, every minute or 30 seconds for the next 30 days or something like that. Yeah. It's 1 /second for a month. Yes. And this ping, you couldn't hear it if you were listening for it. Right. But if you were listening through sonar, you would be able to pick it up and the beacon sends out the ping and the people go find the ping and they get it. Yeah. They can transmit, ideally, but it can transmit up to 14,000ft, which is pretty impressive. Right. And if you can find the beacon, thanks to the ping, that's awesome. There have been cases where the black boxes have been found long after the ping stopped. Air France flight four four seven from, I think, 2009, it went down in the Atlantic. Remember that one? It was awful. It just disappeared into the Atlantic. And they couldn't find the records for a very long time. I tried to block out plane crashes. It was a bad one. It was one of the worst, most recent ones. But they couldn't find the black box for two years. Wow. And they finally found it in seawater at 12,000ft after two years. And when they brought both of the black boxes up, they were able to get all of the data off of them. Wow. So they were well made. Was it dumb luck, or were they searching for it? Oh, they're searching for it, okay. Yeah. Even though it stopped pinging, they just kept looking. Yeah. Wow. So you do recover it. Hopefully. And then you need to analyze the data. So they're going to transport it to a lab at the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, we should say the country that this happens in, or if it's like, in international waters, the country that the airline is registered in is responsible for leading the investigation. Yes, that makes sense. So in the United States would be the NTSB. Okay. Yeah, sure. And just like any relic you find, if you know about finding undersea items that have been in saltwater, you want to transport that in its own state, that you found it in its own mess. Yeah. It's the same thing as if you find a piece of sunken treasure. You don't want to bring it out and dry it off with a hair dryer. You want to keep it submerged in salt water because that's where it's been living, and that's a sunken treasure. Pro tip from Chuck. I did an article on that, actually. That's how I know this. But yeah. So if they find it in the ocean, they want to transport it in salt water and a cooler to a lab where they can really treat it. Right. Give it the VIP treatment. Right. Yeah. And if the whole black box is still intact, you can actually just use its computer interface. It's already installed as part of the recorder. You can just plug it in and download all the stuff off of it. Yeah. It can be super quick. Right. But oftentimes that stuff, like we said, is mangled and burned away. And so you have to just take the memory sticks and then hook it up to a different machine so you can retrieve the data. That's right. Which takes a little longer. Yeah. It can take weeks or months when you get the data. Obviously, when you have the flight data recorder data, you can feed that into a computer and create a simulation using a model to visualize what the plane was doing based on all those readings from all those different arrays. When you put them all together, it can create a computer model of the plane to show what it was doing at the time of the crash. The cockpit voice recorder uses a little more of human ingenuity to piece it together, and this takes way longer. Yeah. One thing you're going to have is a representative from the airline. You're going to have a representative from the plane builder because they don't like their planes to go down. There's going to be, I guess, whatever country you're in, your version of the NTSB is going to be there. And then sometimes they might have a translator or language specialist, depending on what nationality or your pilot was. Right. Because it might translate some stuff. And you have people who are trained in deciphering beeps and pings and knocks in airline cockpits, and they put all this together. It's a pretty interesting job. Yeah. And you take that information, you put it together with the model, the simulation from the plane, the flight data recorder, and then these days, also, the flight computers send out warning messages, like Flight 447, Air France, it sent out like 24 warning messages in the four minutes before it crashed. So they had that already on hand. Right, but nothing else. Yes. And then they started to piece it together after they went and got the wreckage, which we should say, in some cases, when possible, they'll actually piece the entire plane back together. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. Yes. They'll get like a huge airplane hanger and take all the wreckage and pieces together piece by piece, and try to get the plane back together to help that, to help give a complete picture of what the heck happened. Did you see the flight to Denzel Washington movie? No. I heard it was so depressing. It was good. Was it? Yeah, man. They filmed that here, too, in Atlanta. But yeah, it was intense for sure. Okay, I'll check it out and then chuck. It's not just airplanes where you can find black boxes, buddy. That's right. They're on trains. Planes. They're already on planes. They're on trains. And sort of a newish thing is putting versions of these in cars, either to give you like an insurance break. I think you can opt for these sometimes to prove that you're a safe driver. And it basically tracks, like how fast you go and if you're speeding and taking turns too fast and stuff like that. Yeah. But they're a little controversial, I guess, because I think in England you can actually get traffic tickets based on is that right? Yeah. I knew that was coming. Yeah. But there's some car manufacturers that manufacture, basically, flight data recorders into their cars already. It's not necessarily recording like your cockpit conversation or anything like that, but it is keeping track of your car. It's like, you know how your car will tell you that your tire pressure is low or your door is open or something like that? Yeah. There's something that's recording all that stuff, including all of your engine stuff and everything else that's part of your car, too, which amounts to a black box, because we said that the point of having a black box is to figure out what the heck happened. We didn't quite go far enough, because the point of figuring out what the heck happened, since it's a satisfied curiosity. But if there's a problem, that's going to translate to other planes, too. You want a mechanical failure, right. You want to go be able to fix it. Or if there's. A way to make planes safer in the future or prevent an accident. That's the whole point of the Black Box, is to learn from tragedy. Yeah. They should put the voice recorders in cars. For trunks. Yeah. For DUI crashes. That sounds drunk. Pull them over. All right, focus. Like, you start hearing stuff like that, you're in big trouble. Oh, yeah. Like no one else was in the car. You're saying that out loud to yourself, but you're arguing about whether you should focus. I shouldn't be driving. It's fine. Right? We shouldn't be joking about that. That's, like, super sad. Well, this is a pretty sad episode. Yeah, but we should make it pretty sad episode suggested by, like, a four year old. I know what's going on with Cormac. I don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of that. I don't know what kind of parenting is going on. You great parenting. I'm sure. I don't have anything else. I don't either. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, we should let Cormac this is how we originally got the idea for this episode. We should let him play us out to listen or mail. Let's hear it. If you want to know more about Black Box, you type that into the search bar and you can have fun at our fun and entertaining home on the webstoffystemote.com. All right. Well, that was just too adorable. It's pretty cute. Maybe we should make that a regular thing. Yeah. So I have an idea. Okay. You guys out there in podcast listener land, if you have a cute kid, you should record said cute kid doing our sign off for whatever, saying, if you want to get in touch with me in Chuck Tweet to us on Facebook. A cute kid that's a fan of the show. Don't just train your kid and force them to do something they don't know what they're doing. Exactly. So send us that. Email it to us. Email your permission for us to use it. Sure. And maybe we'll put it in some kind of supercut or whatever. Yeah, include whether or not you want us to say your kid's name or not. Right. All the safety standard safety stuff. It's very exciting. We haven't had, like, a call out for anything in a while. Yeah, this could be cool. Okay, so it's listener mail time, right? Yeah. I'm going to call this clearing up some kosher things. Okay, we've had a great response with our episode on salt, so thanks for everyone that wrote in so far. Slight correction for you guys on kosher salt. You were correct on its use of drawing blood out of meat, as eating blood is against Jewish dietary laws. Simply salting the meat, though, will not make it kosher, which is a common misconception. To have a kosher meat. Firstly, you must have a kosher animal, one that chooses cud and has split hooves. Sure. While pigs have split hooves, they do not chew their cud. They are not kosher. It cannot be a scavenger. So no catfish or lobsters? No lobsters. That's all that seinfeld. Yeah, that's right. Although fish is not considered meat, it is called parv, P-A-R-V essentially meaning neutral, as in not meat or dairy, which are never eaten together. Right. And it cannot be a predator. So no hawks or chickens or no chicken. Hawks are chickens, predators. If you're a worm, a chicken is a predator. You know what I mean? All right. Secondly, guys, and this is key the animal must be killed in a ritual called shifting by trained rituals on the T-I-N the Second Age, through Me check thing. This process involves a super perfectly sharp, rectangular ended knife. It's about twice as long as the particular animal's neck. It is forbidden to stab or tear the flesh, hence the squared in sharpness in one swift motion. The esophagus, trachea, carotid arteries, and jugular veins are all cut. The animal may not even feel it. Well, who's to say it will pass out and then die in seconds? The blood is then drained from the animal, and after butchering, it is salted with kosher salt to draw out the remaining blood and rinsed. You know, I knew a lot of that because I read this very interesting article in Harper's several months ago, and this guy basically infiltrated the meat industry in Nebraska or something like that. And he describes, like, a kosher process of slaughter and how different it is from regular process, because they have this special guy who's like a rabbi or something, who works on this line at the slaughterhouse in Nebraska. He's like a super specialized dude. Throat cutter. Yeah. Wow. But he uses, like, this incredibly sharp instrument. It's really good. He's a shifter. It's a really interesting article. I can't remember the name of it, but I recommend anybody going and finding it. You know what? Maybe you can post that in your blog. I have a blog? Yeah, you do. Your blog post about the best things you've read this week. Oh, yeah. Maybe you should throw it in there. All right. So those are the very basics of kosher meat, guys. Jewish dietary laws and certification are much too lengthy for an email or a single episode for that matter. It's very convoluted. I highly recommend a delightfully witty book called Kosher for The Clueless But Curious by Simon Apostorf. Jesse's making words and names. I hope I've shed some light on this highly complex aspect of Judaism. That's for Michelle and Cedar Park, Texas. Thanks, Michelle. Just near Austin. Nice. If you want to set us straight about something, we are always glad to hear more information. Like, this is we're kind of like Sponges. Agreed. You can tweet a short burst of information on Twitter at sisk podcast. You can post this information at facebook. Comstuffysheanow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast and you can hang out with us at our home on the Web stuffyoushouldhno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
c4b9d6b6-5460-11e8-b38c-dbc10e501a83 | SYSK Selects: How Sushi Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-sushi-works | Sushi grew out of a way to ferment fish a couple thousand years ago and in the late 20th century began to take the world by storm. What began as traditional, rigid food has come to evolve with new delicious innovations being added to the original canon. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | Sushi grew out of a way to ferment fish a couple thousand years ago and in the late 20th century began to take the world by storm. What began as traditional, rigid food has come to evolve with new delicious innovations being added to the original canon. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | Sat, 17 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=291, tm_isdst=0) | 49453429 | audio/mpeg | "Good morning, everyone. Happy Saturday. We're gonna take you back in time this week to July 15, 2014, the little episode that we like to call how sushi works. This is making me hungry just thinking about it, and I remember eating and sushi for probably, like, three or four days straight after we recorded this one. It's a good one because Josh and I are both big sushi fans, and it was really cool to learn the history and sort of the ins and outs of how sushi works. So here we go, everyone, with how sushi works, welcome to stuff you should Know, a production of iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, it's the Dower, charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry, who's snorkeling over there, which is kind of like a laughing through your nose. Yes. I thought dower I thought it meant, like, I'm gloomy or something. Yeah, you seem a little gloomy today. You kidding. No. You think the smile is fake? Yeah, that one. Man, I wish I had a picture of that. We could put that on a t shirt. Yes. And then I could wear that t shirt, and then you could get a picture of me wearing that t shirt and put that on the t shirt and wear that t shirt and so on and so forth. And we'd be like Ryan Gosling. And who do you do that one? McCauley Culkin. Right? Yes. That's I get to be Macaulay Caulking this time, though. This time. Yeah. All right. You're always making me be Ryan Gosling. I know. Who wants that? Nobody. How are you? I'm good, man, I got to tell you. So we're about to do sushi, by the way, this thing made me really hungry. Oh, my God, I want sushi so bad now, and I have for days now. Just remember the yawning episode, and people are like, oh, I listen to this, and I yawn the entire time. Well, prepare to watch sushi, everybody. Even if you don't like sushi or never had sushi, I guarantee you you will want sushi by the end of this, or we will give you your money back for this episode. That's right. So you've had sushi. Yeah. I mean, it's one of my favorite foods. I could live in Japan and eat sushi every day. Yes. I'm going to Japan next year, and I plan on eating sushi every day. I would not get sick of it. No. It'd be really tough, too. Yeah. Especially with the variety I'm sure everybody thinks sushi is basically like a little bite of rice with a bunch of ingredients tucked in it or on top of it. Yeah. Or maybe it's like, a little lump of rice with some fish on it or something. There's a whole galaxy of sushi out there. Yeah. Especially when you go to Japan. I mean, just prepare to have your mind blown. I mean, you've had it before, but my buddy Jason lives over there, and it's not like Sushi Avenue here in Decatur, Georgia. Does he ever mail you sushi? No. It probably wouldn't stay very well, but if you figured out a way to stick it into one of those live organ courier things, it would be great. I don't think so. Well, if you eat raw sushi here, with the exception of tuna, and by here, I mean the United States, it's not fresh. It's been frozen by law. Yeah. Except for tuna. And I couldn't find out why tuna was the only exception. But all fish that's intended to be served raw has to be frozen. Flesh frozen is fine, and then, of course, thawed back out. But it can't just be from the ocean to your plate. Yeah. And before the pedantic ones among you start emailing, josh said sushi when he was talking about raw fish. In fact, sushi is rice, and that is sashimi. True. Thank you. I was using the colloquial. Exactly. When people say, hey, let's go out for sushi, it's like a genre of food, like, hey, let's go out for Italian. Right. And you don't go and they say, actually, that's a Sicilian item of foods you're eating, not Italian. Yeah. If this is ringing true to you and it's reminding of yourself, you need to do some personality changes. If this is your friend, then you should surround yourself with higher quality people than that. Yeah. I mean, go out for sushi. That means you can have miso soup, and that means going out for sushi, and you can have, like, edamame and seaweed salad. And that's all part of the experience that's going out for sushi in this country. It basically is shorthand for Japanese. You're going out for Japanese. Yes, sort of. But not hibachi. No, hibachi is not Japanese. It's strictly a rocky Ayoki American. Oh, is it? Yes. I mean, they do have hibachi girls and stuff like that, but the experience, the Benihana version, totally American invention. I've never been to one of those places. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like there's a guy, like, chopping and cooking and going yeah. And, like, tossing stuff into his hat and everything. I've just never been all right, so, Chuck yeah. Thank you for pointing out the sushi thing, because I am going to do that a lot. Yeah. And we should say if you are specifically talking about sushi in Japan, you're talking about vinegar rice is roughly what the word means. Yeah. Medium or short grain. Vinegar rice, the stuff that's on top the netta, which is a fish seafood topping that you put on sushi is actually that raw fish is called sashimi, like you said. Yes. You can eat that by itself as well. If it's fried stuff, it's called tempura. Different types of sushi have different kinds of names. But let's get into this, shall we? Let's talk about the history, because this whole thing didn't even start in Japan. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I mean, if you look at sushi, there's a lot of folklore surrounding it, a lot of mysterious origins. One of the old wives tales from Japan is that funny? It just appeared out of nowhere one day, mysteriously? No, it just means it can't be. I know. I'm just teasing you're, joshing. I am joshing the truck. That's right. There's an old Japanese wives tale about an elderly lady who would hide her rice from thieves and osprey nests, and she would forget where they were and they would ferment the rice wood, and then the seafood that the osprey would eat would fall down in there and voila. That was the first sushi. Yes. That's a great story, but it's a lie. Yeah, it's not a lie, it's folklore, which are lies. I guess it's old by old lady. Very harsh way to say it. The earliest sushi supposedly was around in Southeast Asia, I don't know, like 2500 years ago. Okay. They were taking cooked rice, which does ferment, and packing fish in it. And then the fermentation of the rice. Yeah, I kept it long before refrigeration, but it also kind of pickled the fish. But then once the fish was pickled over the course of a week, and they would place it under like a heavy stone or something like that to basically compress it. And once the fish was pickled, they'd throw the rice out and just see the fish. Yes. And in fact, a sushi kitchen can be called a suki BA or pickling place. Yeah, that's bam. The original version of sushi was basically fermented fish that was fermented with rice. Pickled fish, fermented with rice. Yes. Then they threw the rice out. Somebody said, Wait a minute, what is this rice taste like? Oh, my God, this is delicious. Yes. And what would it taste like if I put this fermented fish on the rice? And they went, oh my God, this is even better. So they said, well, let's try this a different way. If we're not going to throw the fish or throw the rice out, let's actually gut the fish. And this is the 10th century, by the way, and by now, this is in Japan. Let's get the fish soak it in sake, which is Japanese rice wine, and then pack that thing full of rice and let that ferment. And then after a few weeks, we'll just slice it and then eat that. Yeah. And each of these steps basically is speeding the process up a lot. Like the very first process took about a year and a half. Oh, did it? And it was only for the uber wealthy. Once they added sake, though, that speeded that up. That speeded that up. And that stuff is still around. It's called narezushi or rice sushi. I'm sorry, ripe sushi. Yeah. And apparently you can still get that. And it's a little like for your American taste buds, it might taste a little funny, but I'll bet once you get used to it, you're like, I have to have this all the time. Probably. So then, in the 1600, early 16 hundreds, japanese military leader named Tokugawa Iazu. And we're going to do our best with these Japanese pronunciations. Yes. Give us a break. He moved the capital from Kyoto to Ido, which would later become Tokyo. And by the 19th century, it was a hoppin city. And in the mid 1700, they sped up that process a little bit more by skipping the sake and using rice vinegar. Yeah. Which made it like, a matter of days after that couple of hours. Right. Which is what I was following up with. Yeah. That's super quick. And then slice it into pieces. And again, just cutting that preparation time. Yeah. And then in Kyoto, which was the former seat of power in Japan before it was moved to Edo or Tokyo, they would take that vinegar and some ingredients, maybe a little cucumber, a little dried seaweed, which is known as nori, and they'd put it in a box and press it together. And you'd have oshi sushi, which is Osaka style sushi. It's like a square of sushi. Right? Yeah. And there was a guy who lived in Edo in Tokyo in the 1820s, and his name was Johey Hanaya, and he had a little cart where he was making oshi sushi. And everybody liked it and all that, but apparently, as the story goes, some of his customers were like, I'm very busy and important, and I don't have time for you to press this into a box. Just hurry up, make it snappy. So he took some of that rice, that vinegar flavored rice, and roll it up in his hand a little bit. And then he would take some fish that was taken out of Tokyo Bay or Edomay. Yeah. I mean, he was set up right there on the water. Exactly. And he cut off a little bit of slice and put it in there, maybe with the strike of wasabi, and handed it to the people. He said, Here, jerk. Is that fast enough? That took me, like, three minutes. Exactly. And they said, well, by God, this is Japanese street food. That is fast food that we can use our hands for. And eating two bites and nigiri sushi, what a lot of people think of as sushi was born. The modern sushi was born right there in that food stall. That's right. And then the great Kanto earthquake hit Tokyo and land prices went down, and all of a sudden, there was a lot of retail space. And so the sushi cart said, hey, maybe we should move these things inside and start a legit restaurant. And it happened all over the place. And by the 1950s, the sushi restaurant was where it was at. Yes. Basically, in the 1930s, next to refrigeration, you could chip fish. By the postwar economy, people were loving the stuff. Yeah. So it started to boom, like, all over Japan and then started to spread to other parts of the world. It did. And in the United States, it was first adopted in the 60s in Los Angeles. Of course it was Los Angeles. There was a place called Kawa Fuku, and that was the first big American embraced sushi restaurant in the United States. And then the yuppies came. And you think, like, eighty s and sushi, right? Do you? I do. I always have. Yeah. But apparently it wasn't until, like, the sushi really hit New York, and it was because of an unknown man named Robert De Niro, who talked to the chef of Nobu, whose name is Nobuyuki Matsuhisa. I'm going to be in so much trouble when I get home. So DeNiro talked the chef of nobu, nobu yuki Matsuhisa. I think that's it. Yes. It's really close if not to open Nobu, which was already in La. Icon in New York in 94. So apparently sushi didn't hit New York big time until the 90s. Even though I think of it as, like, total American Psycho fodder. Yeah, I mean, it was around I think it probably the explosion didn't hit. I mean, it was very much a California thing. That first restaurant was in Little Tokyo in La. And then in the 70s, they opened one in Hollywood called Osho. And that was when the celebrities started going, and they were like, oh, my God, this is so exotic and delicious, and I could eat it every day. Yeah. And something really big happened in 1973. There was a place in Los Angeles, and there was a sushi chef there. His name was Manashida. And Manashida created an inside out roll, a maki, which is maki sushi is a hand roll. Oh, no. It's a role that you use the bamboo mat for. We'll get into it. So was it inside out or regular? Inside out maki roll. Okay. With avocado, crab and cucumber. That's right. Yes. Okay. And he made the California roll, and that became the entree. That's the gateway drug to sushi for a lot of Americans. Yeah, because it doesn't have the raw fish in there. If you're creeped out by that, you can start on the California and be like, oh, this is just sort of like a salad. All right. And then once you go and eat California rolls enough times, you're like, well, maybe I will try a bite of that. And once you do, you're never going back. I can still eat a California roll, like a bite of it or something like that, but I'm more like, that's a waste of sushi. I want good Nigeria. Yeah. I'll put that $6 towards something else. Exactly. For sure. Yeah. But I'll make a California roll at home because it's oh, you make it my home. Yeah. Nice. We'll get to all that. So, Chuck, that's the history of sushi up to. Let's talk about fish in a second. Let's take a message break first. Okay, so we're talking about fish. Raw fish is a common ingredient when you go to a sushi restaurant, but if you're not into that, there are plenty of other offerings. You've talked about tempura, we talked about the California roll. You can use veggies. This article says virtually any type of vegetable, but I completely disagree with that. Yeah. Like, you're not going to roll up broccoli or cauliflower and sushi, are you? No, but, man, I am crazy for ground up cauliflower as, like a rice substitute or something like that. Or like a mashed potato substitute. Like collitators, like pureed cauliflower. So good. Yeah, I've been making collietaters for years, dude. I've spent my entire life, up until, like, a couple of months ago hating cauliflower. I never told you about caulifators? No. I've heard of it before. I just never really tried it. But Jimmy and I started making it, and I'm like, wow, this is good. Yes. And I hate it when people say it tastes just like something. It doesn't taste just like that. It's got to taste. But it's got its consistency, and it's good, right? It mimics the consistency, not the taste. Yeah, but the taste isn't too far off. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, it doesn't taste like rotted horse meat compared to, like, mashed potatoes or something, but I think it's like it's its own distinct thing. It is. So that's my treatise on cauliflower. Yeah. You won't put cauliflower in your sushi, though, but you can find asparagus and sushi fairly frequently. Yeah. Cucumber. Sure. Well, I guess that's it. No, there's some more stuff. Mushrooms. Oh, yeah, mushrooms. It's a big staple of a lot of sushi. That was the third one. Yeah. Some nice shiitakes boom. Have you been to umi sushi yet? No. It is amazing. Yeah. The one I've been on lately is shoot, I can't think of the name of it now. Miso, I think, is the name of it in the old fourth word. And it's good. A little pricey, but, you know oh, yeah. Miso is akaya. Yeah, it's supposed to be really good. It's good stuff. It's like nouveau sushi, which I guess, umi sushi is kind of but they have an old traditional sushi chef running the place there. Yeah. I mean, in America, you're going to find some variations. In fact, the Inside Out role, apparently, is a totally American thing, even though it has now since found its way over to Japan. But it did not originate in Japan. No. The reverse roll or inside out. It was like an echo that came back by storm. And if you don't know what we're talking about, that's when the rice is on the outside of the roll and the nori is on the inside instead of the other way around. Yeah. All right. So, Chuck, if you are going to use fish or you're ordering at a sushi place, most of the fish you're going to see is saltwater seafish. Yeah. You don't want to trout roll. No. And the reason why is because roll freshwater fish are much more prone to parasites than saltwater fish. Parasites don't like salt as much. Right. But occasionally you will see a freshwater seafood. There's, like, a type of eel that's really good. That's fresh water. Yeah. I love the eel. Is that unagi? I always get the two eels confused, and after all these years, I still can't commit it to memory. Right. And about every third time, I order the wrong one. Oh, really? I don't think I've ever had the saltwater eel. Yeah, I mean, it's not bad, of course, but I like the you like the freshwater more? Yeah, I do, too. And you can buy that's one of the ones that make it home. There's a great Japanese market over by the cab. Farmers market? And you can buy it in the refrigerator and bake it in the oven. Yeah, because that's the thing. If you order the freshwater eel, it doesn't come raw. Like it's seared or something like that. Yeah, seared and then like, a teriyaki sauce. Right. So delicious. It is, man. It's elevating. Okay, so you're going to have fresh water fish. Yeah. Or freshwater seafood. Most of the time. No saltwater. Salt water. Thank you. Man and one of the most highly prized seafood that you're going to find in sushi of any type is tuna. So good. And there are different types of tuna. They'll use yellow fin, big eye blue fin. And bluefin is the most expensive one. Apparently. It wasn't until the Japanese came to prize bluefin, like, before they used it for cat food, they wouldn't even eat that stuff. Yeah, that's what I heard. Like, the belly was originally and now it's like the prize, and the belly now used to be, like, they wouldn't eat it. Yeah. Actually, the record for the highest priced fish ever sold, I believe anywhere, was sold at the Tokyo Fish Market last year. It was a 490 pound bluefin tuna. How much? $1.8 million. Holy crap. For just that tuna. Wow. And I guarantee they made their money and then some. Man yeah, that's a big tuna. I feel kind of bad for that guy, even though I love to eat him so much. The tuna. Yeah. Well, there's definitely a moral thread that runs through tuna or not sushi. Like, apparently yellowfin tuna, farm raised tuna, or raised a lot like veal baton until their muscles deteriorate alive. And then, of course, there's the have you seen the raw or live frog video? No. There is a type of sushi that is called iki zukuri, which is live sushi, and there's an ikizakuri video. And if you have a light stomach at all or anything like that, bothered by animals being killed, you should not watch this. But the point is, you eat the thing, while it's basically part of it is still alive on the plate, looking at you like, this frog is sitting there blinking. It's a frog. There's a frog. And I can't remember what the other one is, but they showed two things being prepared. Have you seen old boy? The original? Yeah. Remember he eats that squid live. Oh, yeah, that's live sushi. Wow. Like, that was real. Yeah, not for me. Yeah, you get pretty adventurous. So would you do that probably just to try it? Yeah, I know. Everything is killed that we eat. Right. But it's just, like I don't know, being confronted with it, who knows? I can imagine some of the people who are into the slow food movement are like, oh, yeah, that's the way you should do it. You should have to confront the death while you eat. No, I mean, a lot of people would say it's hypocritical to not do that. Right. But a lot of it I'm a hypocrite. Yeah, a lot of people are comfortable with that. Emily won't eat anything that reminds her of an animal. Like, she doesn't even like bones in her chicken, and if someone served her a fish with a head on it, like, fully cooked, she would just be like, no, that fish is looking at me. It's like the duck and a Christmas story. Yeah, he's smiling. Okay, so we were talking about tuna. Tuna is delicious. Salmon is delicious. Yellowtail and hamachi and surf clam, and there's all sorts of delicious seafood that you can get on your sushi or in your rolls, and then you just spread out from there. If there's a fried chicken in there, it might be a little too Americanized. Although if that's what you're into, then great. Well, it would be considered tempura chicken in that case. Yeah, but yeah, come on. If there's fried chicken and mayonnaise rolled up in rice, then that sounds kind of good. Well, I know, but is it sushi? Rogers roasters? I feel like there's been kind of there's definitely a traditional thread of sushi, right? Yeah. I don't mind mixing it up a little bit, and there's, like, traditional preparations, and then there's traditional ingredients. But then it's like you said in the 70s, when the California roll was made here in America, it was sent back, and now you can get a California roll pretty much anywhere in Japan, and it's expanded from there. Yeah. I think sushi is kind of this evolving thing. I've seen cereals added. Have you seen that? Like cornflakes or Rice Krispies on top. Yeah, I'm not into that either. For crunch yeah. Or squirting a bunch of sauce on top. I'm not a big fan of that either. Yeah, well, that's another thing that we'll talk about when we talk about how to eat sushi. But really, there's a lot of sushi that's prepared that you're not supposed to do anything to except eat. Yeah, true. So I guess we should finish what can be in sushi thing by mentioning roe and tamago. Roe is the fish eggs. Like the little delicious orange. Sounds like caviar. Yeah. And there can be little tiny ones and larger ones. I'm sure there's a difference in the name. Do you know? I didn't look that up. No. Cherry's nodding. Is there a difference in the name? I'm sure it's not necessarily by size, but probably by fish. Yes. I think the smelt row is the smaller. I think so. Yeah. The little tiny beads. Yeah. And that's usually added with a roller on top of something. And the other larger ones, a lot of times that's just wrapped in the nori. And that's all you're eating. Yeah. Or there's just, like, one on top of the thing. Oh, yeah. Like a little bead for presentation. Yeah. I once ate a coil egg on top of yesterday. This was raw. Okay. I didn't realize it was going to be raw. I ate it anyway. Like you said, I'm adventurous, but, man, I was like, I'm never ordering that again. Was it not good? No, I'm not too big on raw eggs. Except, strangely, in, like, a tataki or carpachio or something like that. Yeah. That's weird. I guess I'll just have to keep ordering it then, whether I like it or not. All right. Tamago is egg and sushi, but it is cooked, and it's an omelet. It's made by adding little layers of egg. I've seen some people, like, bake it in a pan. It's probably the shortcut method. There's probably a more traditional method, but because it's sweet omelet, it's almost like a dessert sushi. Yeah. And it's like an inch thick and a slice. And you put it on some sushi rice with little band of nori tied around it, and that's delicious as well. TomGo avocado. Is that how you say it? Avocado. That is very popular. And that means tuna of the land in Japan. Yes. The word for avocado means tuna of the land. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Avocado is, like, a great addition to anything. Yes, I agree. And very good for you too. It really is. This is a good fat. Yes. Good for your heart and your brain. What else goes along with sushi? The soy sauce. The soyu? Yes. It's a type of soy sauce. And you can dip your sushi and soy sauce if you prefer, but you're supposed to use it very sparingly. Yeah. And supposedly you're not supposed to dip the rice either. No, I drown it. You want to talk about how to eat sushi the proper way? Sure. Okay. I don't do it. That's fine. Yeah. A lot of people eat it with chopsticks. Supposedly. It's an insult to the sushi chef to drown your sushi and rice. I drown it in that soy sauce, you mean? Yeah. And where would I be without you? Well, just saying wrong stuff here and there. No big deal. So basically, let's say you have a piece of nagiri, which is just a little lump of sushi with some topping on it. Say tuna. Okay. You kind of lightly grab the nagiri on one side with your fingers on both sides. With your fingers? Yes. You don't need to use chopsticks. So she was originally a finger food, and you can feel free to eat it the traditional way, using your hands. So you grab the sides kind of lightly but firmly. You tilt it over. You tilt the Nigeria over, and then you just basically have it. So you're holding onto the tuna and holding it almost like a basket. So the rice is on top and the tuna is on the bottom. You just flipped your sushi over. Yeah. If you want a little bit of shoyu, you can just kind of just barely pass it through the show you the soy sauce. Just the tip yeah. Of just the seafood. You're not supposed to touch the rice to it. Yeah, that's what I hear. You take one bite, depending on the size, you can put the whole thing in your mouth and eat it, but you want to put it the topping side down. Okay. And then if it's a big piece of nigiri, then you can bite it and then eat it in two pieces. All right. Here's Chuck's method. I take it and I dump the entire thing in a big bowl of soy sauce, and then I pull it out and I stick it in my mouth and chew it up and eat it all. And then I wash it down with a sephora. Well, that's customary. I'm a happy guy. You would probably like chirashi sushi, which is basically a bowl of rice with sushi toppings. Yeah, I could be down with that. Is there the nori in there, though? Because I love the nori. I think everything you want is in there. Okay. Whatever kind of sushi you want. It's just like, in a bowl. It's just like a KFC bowl, but with sushi. Yeah, man, one of those awful beef bowl places out west. The yoshi naki or something. Beef bowl? Like in the shopping malls? Yes, I know what you're talking about. I can't remember the name of them. Are they not good? Well, I mean, you tell me. You get, like, a three pound beef and rice bowl for, like, $3. Oh, wow. That sounds good. I don't think they're known for their high quality meats in Canadians. So by beef you mean cat yoshinori. What is it called? It's a chain. They're all over La. Yes, I know what you're talking about. I don't think they have them here in Georgia. Wasabi. I don't do the wasabi just because I don't like the taste. I know most people like to put it in their soy sauce and mix it up. Apparently, that is an insult as well. It's abnormal. That's what yummy does, though. Yeah. She puts it in her. Soy sauce puts a lot of it in there. Yeah. So does Emily. She loves that stuff. But the thing is, most sushi is going to already have a little streak of wasabi on top of the rice beneath the topping, so you don't necessarily need any. And if you've ever wondered why your nostrils are suddenly clear and you're breathing very easily, even though you didn't use any wasabi, it's because it was already on there. Yeah. And here in the United States, you're not eating wasabi anyway. No. Although you can get it at, umi, sushi. Oh, really? But it's going to cost you. Yeah. So that's the fact of the podcast. For me, what you're eating is horseradish and mustard paste that dyed green. And they call it wasabi. Wasabi. When people say it's Japanese horseradish, it actually isn't even horseradish. It's like a cousin of horseradish. And it is expensive. It grows by the river and you're eating a root. It lives in a van down by the river. Yeah. Apparently, it's so pricey, like, you've probably never had real wasabi unless you're, like, highfalutin like you and go to fancy sushi places. Yes. I'm sure nobu has real wasabi dress like a little gentleman. I wear a velvet jacket and velvet shorts with knee socks, a little hat, and they sing while they serve me. It's wonderful. Well, that's funny you mentioned that, because being a sushi chef in Japan, you're also supposed to be kind of part performer. It's a very social thing to sit at the sushi bar. Yes. You're not necessarily performing, like, at a hibachi place. It's not like that. You're performing not a clown. You're friendly, you're helpful. You want the person to feel like they are welcome and that they are being led in on your expertise. Yeah. Like, ask if you've never been and you want to try it out. Sit at the sushi bar and ask. I like it anyway, just because I like to watch it. But ask the chef, like, hey, man, what's good today? Yes. What are you in the mood for? I say, hey, man, because there's still a lot of discrimination in Japan, even with women becoming sushi chefs. Yeah. It's still a thing. Yes, it is, Chuck. Yeah. Which is no good. And apparently, regardless of your gender, if you're a sushi chef, you are required to work at least two years if you're working at a decent sushi place, which sounds like a lot, but it used to be ten. Yeah. Well, I saw two years just to learn to make the rice and then another year of training with a knife. Yes. Okay. And that's in Japan. Here in America, they're turning them out because there's such a need. Right. But once you're a trained sushi chef, you can become a journeyman and go anywhere in the world these days and open your own place. Have you seen Giro dreams of sushi? Yeah. Yeah. That's highly recommended. I think that's streaming on Netflix, too. And you recommended that, I think, to me for the first time. Yeah, we went and saw it in the theaters. It was good. Yeah, it was really good. Talk about wanting sushi. Yeah. And you don't even have to like sushi if you just appreciate art and craftsmanship and being the best at something. You should rent that movie. And family, too. It's cute. It's the man and his two sons. I think Giro has been making sushi for, like, 70 years or something like that, and his two sons are following in his footsteps, and it's really intimate documentary about that family. Totally. Yeah. So we talked a little bit, or I mentioned drinking a nice, cold sapporo. People, I don't like sake myself. I just don't dig the rice wine. But that is a big thing for a lot of people when they go out to eat sushi, is to drink sake. But apparently, because it is rice based and that your sushi is rice based, it doesn't complement one another. So you technically shouldn't be drinking sake as you eat the sushi. I think it's a lot like putting wasabi in the soy sauce. Just do what you want. Yeah, well, all this stuff is, of course, as long as you're not insulting the sushi chef overtly and calling them things like sensei and stuff like that really buttering them up. I think you're doing okay. Do people do that? I'm sure they do. I haven't yet, but it's probably a good idea. All right. They recommend, like, green tea, light beer, even water. But again, drink whatever you want. But if you're drinking sake, supposedly you're not supposed to pour your own. You're supposed to pour your buddies, and then they pour yours. Yeah. And this is if you want to be traditional, sure. But it makes sake for sharing by definition, by that one. Moray. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Like, if you can't pour your own sake, you're up the creek. If you're just drinking it by yourself, what are you going to ask? Like a stranger? Sure. Make a buddy. Make a new friend. Not in Japan. No. All right, we're going to talk a little bit about how to make sushi right after this message break. All right. So you've never made sushi. I'm surprised you guys haven't tried it. I've never made sushi now. Well, I have. I haven't done it in a while. But you can get your nori sheets and grocery stores. I eat that stuff like a snack? Yeah, of course. Good. You can find your little crab sticks and cucumber, and where it gets a little tricky is the fish itself. Like, if you live in a big city, there's probably a place where you can get sushi grade fish. If you live out in the sticks, you may have a harder time, but you definitely want to get sushi or sashimi grade fish and ask if it is sashimi grade. Like we said no freshwater. You don't want to trout roll. No. And you want it to be nice and vibrant in color. You don't want there to be any weird, like, dark or soft spots. No, that's rough. Yes. The tuna should be, like, really bright red or pink. Like dark pink? Yeah. If you know how to spot it, you know the difference if you get a little practice. Yeah. And if you're not like Emily and you're buying the whole fish, you want the eyes to be, like, not sunken, and you want them to be still just kind of popping out, like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is happening kind of eyes. Yeah. It shouldn't smell too fishy, either. If it smells super fishy, that means it's probably not super fresh. Right. But once you have your fish and you've bought your nori, you want to buy your rice. That's the first key ingredient you need to master. And like we said, in Japan, they spend two years learning how to make the rice properly. So don't beat yourself up if it doesn't go well at first. No, but the rice you're making, you want to start with sushi rice, which is a short or medium grain rice. And if you go to the store to buy rice, like you go to an Asian food market or something like that, they're going to have rice that says sushi rice. Yeah. And it's going to come out like you want it. It's going to be clumpy. It's not going to be like mushy. It's going to be nice and sticky. White rice. Well, if you make it right, you can mess it up pretty bad, I've learned. Well, sure. I use cow rose. That's something here in the United States you can look for. That's good stuff. Yeah, it's a real popular I think it started in California. It's another one when we eat all the time is I think it's like, nishi, I believe. Is that like, the brand? Brand? Yeah, cow roast is a variety, so it may be a cowroast, though. Oh, it's not a brand. I thought it was a brand. Now it's a rice variety, medium range, medium grain. So the key here, when you're making the rice, there's a lot of keys, but the first big key is you don't just throw it in a pot and cook it. You have to rinse it. And what I do with my friend John, chef John, he taught me to just put the rice, the dry, uncooked rice in a pot and start just like a slow, cold water run and just let it go, like, walk away. And the rice will kind of stay at the bottom, and the water will just kind of overflow. But it'll that continuous water movement, and it's a little bit wasteful if you don't like to leave your sink running or your water running. But what you want to do is just rinse the rice until the water is almost clear and you'll see it. It's real cloudy and kind of grainy, and as you keep washing it, it'll clear up. And you want to do it with your hands and be gentle with it. You don't want to mash it up. Don't use a strainer because that can beat up the rice pretty bad. Just treat it respectfully and sort of wash it with your hands until the water is clear. Right. So that's step one. Then you got to soak it for an additional half an hour in cold water. Okay. Just walk away and leave it there. Okay. Then you're going to add wait a half hour is elapsed. Okay. We should just sit here for a half hour after the half hour has elapsed. If you want, you can add a little sake to it. If you want, you can add something called dashi kanbu. It's a dried kelp. I've never done that. But you can it makes it pop. Does it? Sure. Okay. Then you're going to cook it will probably stay on the package, but then you're going to cook it a lot like traditional rice. You boil it, cook it on a medium heat with a pot on for about 15 minutes, then simmer for about 20 minutes over low heat. And then they recommend here I've never heard of this. To turn the heat up to high for a few seconds at the end. I'm not sure what that does. I think it maybe just burns off any excess moisture. That's what I would guess it does. All right. And then leave the lid on and let it sit for about 15 minutes, completely off the heat after that. All right. So now the vinegar, right. You want to start with rice vinegar. That's the kind you have to use is rice vinegar, appropriately enough. No other don't think, like, oh, I can use apple cider vinegar or white vinegar. You could use sushi vinegar, which is prepared rice vinegar. Right. But it's got to be rice vinegar. Right. But if you want to make it yourself, you use a little rice vinegar, about a quarter cup to a tablespoon of sugar and one and a half teaspoons of salt. Yeah. And that's four, five cups of rice. Right. And you mix all that stuff up until the mixture is clear. And you've got yourself some homemade sushi vinegar. Yes. Once your rice is ready, you want to turn it out into a bowl is what it's called. Yeah. Dump it out into a bowl. Yes. And what you should get is, if you're trying to make sushi, you probably bought a couple of things, like your little bamboo rolling mat and a little wooden paddle, they call it. And it's basically a big flat spoon. And that is what you use to turn it traditionally into a wooden bowl. You can use anything but metal. Don't use metal. No, because it'll react with the vinegar. Yeah. That's no good. You turn it out with the sushi paddle or rice paddle, which, by the way, you, me, and I have seen the world's largest rice paddle. How big was it? It was big. Bigger than me. Like, as big as this table? No, it was like the size of a long canoe. Oh, I said the world's biggest rice paddle. Well, the flat part was it as big as this table? Easily. Okay. In which for everybody who's not in the room with us right now, the table is probably about 3ft across, three in diameter unit. Well, did they use the thing? I don't see how you could or was it just one of the silly things, like the world's biggest spatula? That it was far from silly, but it was big. It was on Miya Jima, which is a neat little island off of Hiroshima. Cool. And they have the world's largest rice paddle on display. So you're going to use that rice paddle to pry the rice out of the pot into your wooden bowl, and it will come out kind of like a cake almost before you start messing with it. And then here's the thing. You don't just dump the vinegar that you've made all over the rice. You want to pour it over the paddle and then spread the paddle around over the rice so it sort of gently falls and distributes evenly. Right. And then you want to fold it in and mix it together gently again. Make sure everything's coated pretty well, and then cool it down. You're supposed to be fanning it while you're doing this. And then cool it down to room temperature, and then you're all set to go. Yeah. And then you want to take your hands and rinse them in vinegar to prevent the rice from sticking just kind of lightly. Yeah. You should have the paddle as well. When you're spreading it, you need to soak that as well, it works well. Right. And then you're ready to start making nigiri sushi, which is the easiest sushi to make. It's just basically finger sushi. You take a little lump of rice and just kind of roll it into an oblong shape in your hand. Press down one side on one side with a finger, and that's the side that's going to be the bottom. So basically you're adding stability. Yeah. And you don't want it super firm, but you don't want it falling apart either. Right. And then you take a little bit of wasabi, smear it on the top, and then top it with whatever ingredients you want, say, tuna. Yum. And they have little molds, by the way, if you don't feel like you should try and make it in the palm of your hand. But they do have little prefab molds that you spoon the rice into. And, like, you press a little thing on top and then pop them out, which would make it basically oshi sushi, the Osaka style remember they have the press mold. Oh, is that what it is? Yeah, but there's strictly, like, a box. Got you. Yeah. This is like, eight little individual compartments. Yeah. They're shaped like flowers and hearts and stuff like that, too. I haven't seen that. Oh, they have. Mine is just rectangular, but I don't use it. I did it first, and then I was like, no, I'm going to try it in the palm of the hand. Have you ever made nagiri sushi that you were just like, this is perfect? No, I guess it's just practice. Ten years at least. Yeah, it tastes fine. And they even point out in this article it'll take some practice before it looks as good as it tastes. Sure, the taste will be there, but it's not what you're seeing in the restaurant properly. Right. Those guys are pros. Yeah. That was nigiri sushi I just mentioned. The little hand rolled, finger sized pieces of sushi. Yes. You could also make maque. Yeah. And that's a sushi roll. That's when you have the full sheet, you want to spread about a third of it with a thin coating of rice. And you want the nori shiny side down, right onto the mat. The bamboo mat. Yeah. And so you spread your rice you don't want it super thick. On top of the north. Yeah. On top of the nori. And this is a little bit of if it's your first time, there'll be some trial and error involved. I put way too much rice at first, and then it was hard to roll, and it looked like this big burrito, essentially. So you're going to want the rice a little thinner than you think, even. And then you put it on the sheet, it's on the mat, and you put your toppings across, kind of like you're making a burrito. And then you fold the bamboo mat over, you roll the nori into the toppings. And this description feels a little convoluted. You basically just want to roll it in the mat. And I give it a good squeeze at the end to make sure it's all together and to let it know it's loved. Exactly. Yeah. And I imagine this is another thing that comes out of practice. Like you said, at first, it looks like a burrito. Yeah. But if you roll it and I would guess your hands need to be kind of away from the center so that you're putting an equal amount of pressure on the roll, and you're lightly rolling it, being careful not to let the mat get rolled up into the sushi. Yeah, I've done that. Just rolling it over the top. But you're rolling the roll together, and then you got a little roll squeezed at the end as per chuck. And then you take a really sharp knife right, and cut it in half. Then you cut that in half and so on until you have eight pieces. And, my friend, you have a maki. Sushi maki? Yeah. And like I said, it's a little hard to describe. The best way to do it is just to throw yourself in there and try it. And if you've ever seen sushi rolls, then your instinct will kind of tell you how to do it and just mess around. It's fun. Like, don't put pressure on yourself. Don't plan a big sushi dinner party on your first try. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Just try it out yourself and then sorry, what we just described was fudomaki. If you wanted to make an inside out role, like a California roll, you would be making what's called urumake. Yeah. And basically you follow the same steps, but just reversed. You start with the rice and then you start with the bamboo mat and put the rice on that, then nori, then your toppings, and then you roll that up and did you say it was covered in plastic? Oh, yeah. You want to put the bamboo has plastic on it and then the rice goes on the plastic. Like Saran Wrap or something. Yeah. Basically, you just take Saran Wrap and just cover both sides of your bamboo mat with that. Got you. And then, of course, there's one of my favorite things to eat at sushi places is the Han roll, the tamaki. It's like an ice cream cone of sushi. Yeah. And you can make those. I've never had a lot of success with making those. Those seem like the easiest, aren't they? Not for me. I never got it to come out right. Got you. But you make it in your hand. That's why it's called a hand roll. You hold the nori and you spread the rice on one end, cover about a third of it, and then you put your toppings diagonally. You're going to fold your bottom corner up over the toppings and then roll it in the same direction. And just picture a waffle cone. And that's what you're trying to emulate? Yeah. And stick some softshell crab in that mug and chow down nice. And I want some sushi so bad. Do you like softshell crab? You ever had that? I don't think so. I like crab. I mean, that's when the whole crab is just fried shell and all. Oh, no, I have that. Yeah, it's good. In fact, when I was in DC, I went to that farmers market at eight that I was telling you about. They had this place that was on, like, crab cakes and softshell crab sandwiches. So good. Is it crab season now? I don't know. It's crab season that day for me. I got one more thing from the book, the Story of Sushi by Trevor Corson. Just some surprising sushi facts. Oh, yeah. I think most of these we actually covered. They said in Japan they eat miso at the end of the meal to aid digestion instead of an appetizer. The soup. Yeah. I never knew that. I like the miso soup, though. Yeah, it's good stuff. And it says, American chefs have probably never eaten a proper nagiri because sushi chefs pack it too tightly on purpose because Americans like it that way. Apparently it's looser in Japan. Not enough rice. Did you experience that? Was it looser in Japan? I've had it looser here. Oh, yeah. Like the nice places. I mean, you can tell us by looking. You would never point to it and be like, that's a dense lump of rice. Right. You can see, like, a few of the individual grain. You can see the detail in the rice a little more. You can find it here. Yeah. And his final little fact, he said that the knives used by sushi chefs are direct descendants of samurai swords, aka katana. Did not know that. I didn't know that either. There was one more factor that I thought was interesting. Of all the bluefin tuna caught in the world is used for sushi. Oh, really? Yeah. And the other is grilled rare and put on a salad. I don't know what they do with the other 20% grilled for tuna. $2 million per man. That's a lot per pound. Yeah. It had to have been the size of the fish and the quality of that fish, too, I would guess. Yeah. Because the guys at the Tokyo Fish market know what they're doing when it comes to fish, I would imagine. They don't just look at some aged rickety tuna and say, like, how much do you want for that? Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. So let's figure this out real quick. Chuck, you dividing it? Yeah. So $1.8 million divided by \u00a3490. Is that what you said? I don't remember that's. $3,673 and rounding up forty seven cents a pound. Wow. That must have been one special tuna. Yes, man. At the very least, he felt special. And that's crazy. Cut them up. I got nothing else. Well, we could probably sit here for five, 6 hours and talk about this, but we're not going to. Instead, if you want to learn more about sushi, you can type that into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And I said search bars means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this amputation feedback. Hey, guys. I was interested in how amputation works, and I thought I'd share an offshoot topic. In one of my classes, we studied a procedure called rotationplasty, which is an infrequent operation. Occurs when only part of the limb requires amputation, like a bone tumor in the lower part of the femur or upper fibia. Excuse me. Traditionally, it's done on lower extremities, although a few upper extremity cases exist. The operation consists of removing a portion of the leg ranging anywhere along the femur into the tibia fibula region, ultimately removing the knee. The ankle joint is still functional, so the surgeon removes all the muscle and bone, keeping the nerves that connect the two regions intact. The foot and ankle are then turned around to face backwards and reattached along the femur. I feel like we talked about that. I do too. Yes, it may not have been in that one, or maybe it was, but the reason the foot place backwards is because it doesn't have the stability for it to be. It adds more stability now. Is that what it is? Yeah. She said the ankle comes the new knee joint and results in a high range of movement, which helps many patients continue active lifestyles. Yeah, we definitely talked about that. Well, this isn't news to us then. The end result is it looks really strange, but gives a huge opportunity for the patient. At least check out some of the crazy images. So. Kelly Kravitz of the Colorado School of Mines. Go 49 or so. Apparently we discussed that, but at any rate, it's still interesting. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Kelly. Yeah, Kelly. Thanks, Kelly. If you want to describe in greater detail something we mentioned briefly, we are always happy for that kind of thing. Indeed. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshono. You can send us an email to stuff podcast at how. Stefworks.com and join us at our beautiful home on the web stuffynow.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iheart it radio app app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
42a2d30c-53a3-11e8-bdec-67ba1d3872f7 | How Carbon-14 Dating Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-carbon-14-dating-works | Some of the carbon dioxide in your body is radioactive! Don’t worry, it won’t harm you (not sure why we used an exclamation point there). Instead, it might someday be detected by future archaeologists to determine how long ago you walked the Earth. | Some of the carbon dioxide in your body is radioactive! Don’t worry, it won’t harm you (not sure why we used an exclamation point there). Instead, it might someday be detected by future archaeologists to determine how long ago you walked the Earth. | Tue, 26 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=330, tm_isdst=0) | 53336685 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, San Francisco. We want to get back to our city by bay. So we are this January. That's right, man. We're going back to Sketch Fest. It's become an annual deal for us there at the Castro Theater. Always some of the best, best audiences of the year. You are our peeps and we love coming to see you. So get your tickets to see us at the Castro. What day are we there? We're going to be there Saturday, January 18. That's right. For a primetime show. Yes. So go to sysklive.com and follow the links to get information and tickets. We'll see you guys in January. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. There's Jerry right there, just laughing it up. Yeah. This is stuff you should know. The jokes are jerry Edition Dentscience Edition aka chuck Eyes Slowly inside Edition no, it's not. You're going to do just fine. This is all so intuitive. It's wonderful. I'm not worried about not doing fine, but thanks for the research. Sure. Well, then I'm really excited about this. If you know that I think you're going to do fine, you are going to as well. I'm going to see to it. I think Jerry is going to do great. Jerry, how are you doing over there? Okay. She's pressing buttons like I've never seen her. Press button. Stop doing that. I wonder what kind of weird sound effects just happened after touching all those buttons. Jerry just laughed. I don't know if the mic picked that up. All right, everybody's like, okay, you're officially stalling now, Jerry's. Quiet laugher, though. You ever notice that? It's all nose. Yeah, she's all nose. This is Jerry laughing hard. There's some serious right now, serious ASMR triggering going on right now. That's right. And there's a little bit of snot on the microphone cover. All right. Carbon 14 dating. It works. Sort of the end. Yes. It's not the worst description of it ever. We can do better than that, though. Yes. And luckily you did a great job with this. But also my advice to anyone, if you don't understand a science thing and you're an adult, just don't worry about what anyone behind you thinks. Just looking at your laptop and you go to the most rudimentary children science website you can find, and that always helps. There is no shame in that. No shame. Because seriously, the people who write those websites are probably some of the best science explainers on the planet. Yes. And they know how to really just not dumb it down. Because kids are smart. Right? That's funny. You flip flopped on kids, apparently. You mean stupid kids. Yeah. You always said they were dumb until just now. So good for you, Chuck. We're all over the map. Well, I feel like we're really growing up these days. So carbon 14 for those of you who don't know is this really clever scientific method where you can actually kind of look inside of a material and figure out how much carbon 14 is in there, and by doing so, you can actually tell how old it is, or at least how long ago it was since the thing you're dating was alive. Yes. And it is a comparative oh, there's another word for that. What's it called? Relative dating. Yeah, relative dating. I guess comparative isn't the worst word. Right. Especially if you're talking about literature. Right. Because what they're doing is comparing it to things that are alive today. And because of all the gobbledygook we're about to talk about, that equals a pretty good estimate. And then from there, there are even further things that one can do if one were so inclined as a scientist. And there are a lot of people who are inclined to do this. This is a very exciting, energetic field of science right now. If you want to jump into an ever evolving, constantly moving, BA field, b a Barack's Field kind of science, start studying radio carbon dating. You actually it wouldn't be a BA Barakas field, because didn't that stand for bad attitude? Did it? I think so. Right. No one in radio carbon dating has a bad attitude. No, but they are bas. Right. But you're right, it is ever evolving, and they're constantly looking for better ways to pinpoint more accurate timelines on things. Right. So it's not like a job you're going to get in and be like, oh, this old thing again. Right? No, and it's just like they're constantly filling in blanks and stuff like that. It's good work. It is. So what they're looking for, the people who do radio carbon dating, is carbon 14, which I said, and that is radio carbon. It's called that because it's a radioactive form of carbon. That's right. And it's everywhere on Earth. It's just all over the place. It's part of the carbon cycle, and it's part of the web of life. But it starts out way up in outer space as a cosmic ray. That's right. Should we give the basis definition before we jump to the ins and outs of radiocarbon dating? Yeah, sure. I think the most rudimentary definition might help some people out. But like you said, carbon 14 is everywhere, including inside us, because it's in plants via photosynthesis, and we eat plants, and animals eat plants. Some people eat animals. Sure. And because of that, it's kind of in every living thing. Right. And carbon 14 dies away very slowly. And because we know this, because we know it happens predictably, then we can measure that in a sample and then compare it, like I said, to something living, and then you do a little math. IpsoFacto. It's probably an IPSO facto. Is it presto change? O, yeah, presto change. ODing badabing Bon Jovi. What was that? Bada bing bong bonjo. That was yours, was it? Yeah, man, you came up with that on a carousel at Zoo Atlanta in about 2012. That's right. That's where that's carbon dated, too. But because we know that we can compare it to something that's alive today, and then with a little math, we can figure out a rough estimate of how old it is. Yeah, I mean, that's radio carbon dating in a nutshell, for sure. That's right. But like you said, it starts out as cosmic rays way out in outer space. Right. And so a cosmic ray, we're not entirely certain where they come from, but they're super high energy particles, usually like pieces of atoms that are just shooting toward Earth and through outer space at incredible speeds. And when they encounter the atmosphere, they start running into the atoms that make up the atmosphere. And because these particles are so high energy, this cosmic rays, when they smack into atoms and other particles and molecules and all that, they just burst them apart. Not just burst like an atom into like it's protons and neutrons. It will tear apart a neutron like it's nothing actually creates other high energy particles like muons Pyons xrays. What else? Saxons. Is that right? No, that was a video game. Was it, Zackson? Yeah, sure. With a Z. Yes, I think it was Z Axon. I am not familiar with that, but it's okay. It wasn't a stand up game, actually. It may have been, but I played it on Atari because I could see a kid in a Kiss t shirt playing that game stand up in an arcade. Yes, it sounds like that kind of game. That would have been me had I not been deathly afraid of Kiss, because they were devil, they were knights and satan service, obviously. That's right. Yeah. Okay, so all these muons x rays pioneer, all that stuff, there's one other little particle that can be created when a cosmic ray collides with an atom, and that is a neutron. A high energy neutron, right? That's right. Okay, so what's happening now is a chain reaction because cosmic rays are bombarding the atmosphere. That's right. And what can happen is they can get really pushy. If a high energy neutron collides with, let's say, a nitrogen 14 atom yeah. They'll get really pushy and they'll just knock the proton off and move right in there and say, this is my house now. Right. So what was once a stable atom, nitrogen 14, which had seven protons and seven neutrons, seven each, is now an unstable atom with six protons and eight neutrons. And now it's no longer nitrogen 14. What you have, fella, is carbon 14. Yes. An unstable meaning radioactive, but not radioactive meaning like, scary and dangerous. No, it just means that it's in a higher energy state and it's temporary. It eventually wants to decay back into that nitrogen 14 state. And it does that. Yes. Eventually, sometimes spontaneously, sometime down the road, that neutron will turn back into a proton, which sounds like magic until you realize that atoms and all of the particles that make up atoms are really just vibrations of energy, and it can temporarily go to a higher energy state or a lower energy state. And that is how something would change from, like, a high energy neutron back to a proton. Right. And you said that carbon 14 is everywhere, which is true, but that doesn't mean there's like tons and tons of it relative to carbon 14. Or wait, carbon twelve? Yes, there's a lot more carbon twelve. Right. So carbon twelve is the stable version of carbon, and it's way more abundant than carbon 14. Carbon 14 is kind of like a freak, a monster that gets made accidentally that's right. And is extremely rare, even though there's a ton of it. But compared to carbon twelve, it's very rare. Something like one carbon 14 atom for every trillion carbon atoms. That's right. That's pretty rare. But it also gives us a ratio. Chuck and this is a big initial point. Yeah. And like you mentioned before, too, or maybe I said it, this is part of the carbon cycle. So it's inside all the plants, and the animals are eating the plants. We're eating plants. Some people eat animals. So it's inside all of us and it's everywhere. But that ratio is really important because, like we said, it starts to decrease because it craves homeostasis and wants to get back to its former life as a stable particle. Right. Or the stable boy. Stable boy, crush that horse. And it would be an atom, because it's going from a carbon 14 atom to a nitrogen 14 atom. Right. But that ratio is important because as it dies away, they're going to be fewer and fewer carbon 14 atoms with that dead organism over time. Whereas if something is alive, it has that steady amount. And that's where the comparison comes in. Right. Because as far as a plant or you or a dog or anything living is concerned, there's no difference whatsoever between a carbon 14 molecule of carbon dioxide and a carbon twelve molecule of carbon dioxide. Yeah. I mean, it sounds hard to digest because we said it's radioactive, but there really is no difference as far as we're concerned. Right. It basically takes a human scientist to analyze it, using an extremely sophisticated machine to be able to tell the difference. That's right. So that means that when it does come down out of the atmosphere, spewed out by a volcano or something like that, it just becomes part of the food chain, like any other atom of carbon that's locked in with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. So as you're living, like you were saying, you're constantly taking it in, you're constantly eating. It's just a part of life as carbon 14 and carbon twelve. Right. But when you die, you stop taking in carbon of all kinds, and all of a sudden, a clock is set because of that decay of carbon 14. That's right. And that decay, like we said, it happens spontaneously. And atom might suddenly convert from carbon 14 to nitrogen 14. You can't predict when that's going to happen because of the uncertainty. That's part of quantum physics. Right. But if you have a large enough sample, then you can start to predict when x number or x percentage of that sample of carbon 14 will have spontaneously changed from carbon 14 to nitrogen 14. And that's called the halflife, which everyone has heard of. That's half life. That's just standard stuff. Yeah, I think everyone has heard of half life, and I bet 90% of the people that know that term don't really fully grasp it. Well, yeah, it's just the amount of time it takes for half of the radioactive atoms in any given sample to convert back into a stable form. Yeah, that's it. It's pretty easy. And we know in this case, the half life, and we'll get to how we figured all this out. But the half life of carbon 14 is 5730 years. If you keep going, it goes to a quarter life, then I guess an 8th. Yeah, it just keeps going. So, like, if you have 100 carbon 14 atoms, if you come visit it in 5730 years, you're going to find you have 50. And if you visit in another 5730 years, you're going to have 25. And then twelve and a half, or 13, maybe. I don't know. It just keeps going until there's ultimately none left over a long enough stretch of time, which is with carbon 14, like 50 or 60,000 years. Yeah, I saw 60,000 mostly, but then I think it start can get a little hinky at 50. So 50 to 60 is pretty good. And I think it gets hinky at this point because of the equipment we're using to measure it. Oh, really? I think as our equipment gets more, more and sensitive, that time will go further and further out, because as long as you have two atoms, you should still be able to measure them. Yeah, for sure. Or even one, probably. I'm not going to go out on a limb for that one. I'm going to caveat that with the probably. Okay, well, let's take a little break here, and we're going to come back here in a second, talk about the very smart dude who figured all this stuff out quite a few years ago. All right, Chuck, just to recap real quick. So I think this episode bears it. Okay. Okay. You've got carbon 14. It's part of the food chain. You take it in as you're living. When you die, you stop taking it in. And so those carbon 14 atoms start to decay, which means that if you compare the dead organism to a living organism and the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon twelve in the dead organism compared to the living organism, you'd be able to tell how long ago the dead organism was alive and taking in more carbon. That's the basis of radio carbon dating. That's right. So we have Amanda Thing from the University of Chicago named Willard Libby. That's a great name. I heard his name was Wild Man or Wild Bill. Wildman Willard Libby. Yeah, because he's just crazy. I guess he must have been a party animal. Who knows? You don't get a nickname like Wild Bill no. For nothing. They don't go around handing those out to just anybody. Yes. Not even just figuring out carbon 14 dating? You wouldn't get a wild man for that. No. Like even Chris Farley wasn't called Wild Bill. I think Willard Libby had a side gig. Yeah. He was the party monster, maybe at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, perhaps. So he figured out how carbon 14 works and how it could be used to do this before we were even positive science even knew for a fact that there was such a thing as carbon 14. That's pretty impressive. And in fact, in 1046, it was just a few short years after we had discovered cosmic rays. So he was really on the leading edge of science. He was a wild man. Yeah. Right. He's like these particles. We're not even sure they exist, but if they do, we could figure out how to use them to date dead organisms. And he won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for this, I think. Rightfully so, in chemistry. Yeah, for sure. Even though, as we'll see, he got a few things wrong. Yeah. And the one thing that's kind of tough to wrap your head around here is it just is what it is at this point, I think. But he selected the year 1950 as year zero for his experimentation, and he compared all the samples against this, and that is still what we do today. Right. We didn't revise a lot of this stuff. Interesting. No, they definitely are. Like, okay. I think the reason why is because by the time it started become sophisticated and more refined, so many samples had gone through that it's like, we're just going to stick with this for now. It's really interesting. So 1950, when you're radio carbon dating an object, that is year zero. So anytime you get a date back, which we'll talk about, it's actually saying, this is how long before 1950 this thing was last alive. Right. And we're not talking it doesn't have to be like a plant fossil, because we said carbon is in virtually everything. Right. So a leather belt comes from a cow, and cow ate the plant. What else? Wooden chips ate a pig fabric. Yeah. We find poop, of course. Old poop, old alcohol, old beer. Because of yeast. Right. There are many, many, many things, obviously. Bodies. Oatsie. Yeah. Our pal. Yes. As long as whatever you are dating was at one point alive, which means it wasn't a rock or a mineral from birth. You can date it. You should be able to date as long as it's about 50 or 60,000 years or younger. Yeah. But there was a problem early on in this process because you needed a lot of this material to basically destroy to find out how old it is. And people didn't want to give up these great finds, a skull, right. And they're like, well, can we destroy that skull to find out how old it is? And they would turn around and say, no, it's my skull. Right. And then the radiocarbon researchers say, like, I was just asking to be pleasant. Give me that skull. Yeah, but then you would say, no, it's my skull, and I'm just happy to call it old. Right. And Willard Libby would step in and just do like the wild man, a pile driver on the guy with the sky, got the name. He would just come in and crush people. Yeah. He'd be hiding maybe in another room and back or something, just pound. Someone would go, caught. Yeah. Huge storm. But here's the thing, we've gotten a lot better over time. The equipment has gotten a lot better, more sophisticated, so we don't need that much now. And people are giving up their fines because you can have a little gram of bone from the skull. Right. And I think everything will be okay. Yeah. And so because of that, it's gotten way more common to radio carbon date stuff. I read in the UK, they really started dating everything they found, because the UK passed a law that said if you're a developer and you turn up any sort of archeological evidence on one of your buildings or developments, you have to pay to have it dated. And so it started to kind of get the burden for paying for it was shifted to industry and so it started to really blow up and that helped kind of push the technology along and help lower the expense and increase the sophistication of the machines that were being used. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty neat how that happens. Well, here's what you've got to do if you're going to start out this process, is you got to really clean your sample very well. Otherwise it can mess up everything and not just the test that you're making. If you have what's called a hot sample, which means you didn't clean it well enough or it's contaminated a gram of hot sample, you can destroy a lab, basically, to the point where they'll just have to shut down for weeks or even months to get everything right. And everything in there might be destroyed, like all the other samples that may be super valuable. My skull. Yeah. Sorry. So it's a big deal if something isn't cleaned right, because it really throws everything off and can ruin everything else. But once you do have it cleaned, when you date it. There's a few different methods that you can use, but the one that I saw is the most common is actually turning that carbon based sample into carbon graphite, like pure carbon. And then you take that little piece of pure carbon that you just created, and you shoot a beam of energy through it. A lot of energy. Yeah, like 2 million volt, which is a lot. Not all at once. I think they ramp it up, don't they? Yeah. Over time. But at some point, it's been accelerated to 2 million volt of energy. Right. Okay. And then so once you have this thing, basically a mini particle accelerator, it's passed through a spectrometer, which can actually measure the different masses of the atoms in this beam that you've shot through the graphite. That's right. It's detecting the little bits of carbon. Yeah. That's pretty impressive stuff. This is the level of technology we're at right now in 2019, and this has been around since, like, the 80s or 90s. Just think of what's coming next. What did they use before the spectrometer? They used something called beta counting, and it was clunky and expensive and not nearly as reliable. But basically what it did was something different, where it would sit there and study a piece of graphite or gas. They often gasify stuff, too, pure gas. And then it would just, like, shoot a beam through and study, I think, a beam. It would somehow study the sample for days, maybe, and it would count the number of atoms that had spontaneously converted from carbon 14 to carbon twelve. Wow. And then it would do a little mathematic rigmarole and say, at this rate of decay, this is how old this organism is. Well, thank goodness we have the spectrometer now, then, because it's much more precise, and it sounds it sounds more futuristic, too. Yeah. Mass spectrometer. Yeah. So you're going to shoot this beam. You're going to throw it in the wonder machine. Actually, not the wonder machine we've already taken that's a thoughtless piece of graphite. And then you compare that ratio to the, again, year zero, which is the ratio in 1950, which is still a little confusing. Yeah. It's clunky. It is very clunky. And then that difference, basically, like we've said eight times now, shows how many years have passed to produce that amount of decay in that sample. Right. So if you took, like, a sample of wood from an old ship, an old boat, you found out right. That's the new right. By the way, did you say route? Yeah. Okay. And you analyzed and you found that based on the amount of carbon 14 in there, it was something like it dated to, like, 845 BCE. Okay. Okay. You'd be like, Great, now we know where this ship is from. But if you tried to go out and publish a study with that, hopefully your radio carbon colleagues would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's a few more steps involved here, and that's like the most precise radio carbon date anyone would have ever given. You'll be laughed out of the field if you do this. Yes. Don't do that. Instead, there's a couple of things that you have to do first. So radio carbon dates are given as a span of time. Sure. But of a range. Right. Also, because it's comparing to 1950, it's given not as a date like BCE or Ad or Ce or anything like that it's BP before present. Years before present. That's right. So for that piece of wood say you would actually get something like 2715 years before present plus or -30 years. So is it always 30 or is it no, it can depend it can range. Dramatically. Right. Like Etsy is they have them down to about 300 or 350 years. Okay. And the shorter the span of time, the plus or minus years or the window of years that you get, the less confidence you have. So maybe you'll have, like, 26% confidence that it's from 845 BCE to 855 BCE. Right. But you have 95% confidence that there's like this 200 year span, it's somewhere in there. That makes sense, because I have a million percent confidence that it's it's somewhere within the last 18 million years. Exactly. Right. It just keeps the larger the window, the more confident you are. But, I mean, still, you're talking 200 years, depending on how old the sample is, how good the sample is. Still pretty. They can zero it in pretty well. And that's science's job is to not say, well, let's just make a really big range. Right. And that'll be good enough. Right. They want to zero in as much as possible and still be accurate. Right. So the thing is, though, is if you do the math and you say, well, wait a minute. On your example yeah. 2715 years before present, plus or -30 years gives you a range of between 726 and 666 BCE. But that's not even close to what you said. Yes. Which was 845 before, right? That's right. Yeah. So why wouldn't 845 be in the sample, Chuck? Well, because, like we said in the very first sentence, radiocarbon dating is not super accurate. I mean, it's accurate on a wide range, but it's a little clunky. It is. Part of it is because there's actual problems, like known problems built in to the actual process of radio carbon dating and the results that they get back. I'll bet that pause. I just had sounded really long in the replay. Probably so felt like it, but yeah. Let's take a break, man. All right. We'll come right back and talk about more science right after this. Was this from how stuff works and you and your brain. Yeah, and a bunch of other places, too. She and you and your brain. Sure. Okay. But there's an interesting thing to note here, which is science makes a lot of assumptions when it comes to dating stuff, right. And this is the best way to say it. If they find, like, a leather shield that they dig out of an archaeological site, they get super excited and they can date the shield. And they probably will say, well, whoever this heroic person was in the battlefield died around this date because that's where the shield is dated from. Right. But that is not necessarily true because they're dating the shield from the cow skin that's on the handle, let's say. And that just says when that cow was alive last has nothing to do with when this person made the shield, how long that leather had been around before they went out onto the battlefield and took an arrow to the forehead. Yeah. Maybe they were, like, super into vintage leather to use on their shield handle. Sure, it sounds ridiculous, but it's totally possible. But the thing is, archeology is based on making assumptions and presumptions based on the context. Right. And it's like, this is totally fine. This is widely accepted. This is not new or scandalous at all, but that is part of archaeology's job, is to say, here's the context of this find. Right. And based on this radio carbon date of this, it's a pretty good guess that they killed the cow, made the leather, made the shield, and then the guy died, probably within a ten to 15 year window. Sure. It would be even weirder assumption to think that it was an ancient hipster who collected old letters, right. Check out my new that's right. And then the other part of it, too, is they also use it to compare to other stuff. Like if they're in a pit filled with other soldiers from a certain nation or clan or whatever, and they knew of a lost grave, they may have found that if it roughly correlates to the date they were thinking, there's a lot of stuff that they put together. They don't just say, here's what the radio carbon date said. So this is what it is. That's right. So because science does this. Libby was certainly doing this. The Wild man was doing this, and he was making assumptions, and he was and hey, we're not knocking the guy because he won a Nobel Prize for this. Yeah, but he assumed a couple of things that were not correct, one of which was he got the half life wrong. He said the half life of carbon 14 was 5568 years. We actually know it's 57 30. Like we said, not that close. And he also presumed that carbon 14 in the atmosphere is very steady over time, and it's something we can really depend on, like there being a certain amount. And that's not really the case either. No, it's not. The second one is a big one. Like the first one, you can just mess around with some math and be like, oh, okay, well, this is the actual. Half life. Well, but it's interesting that's what we've had to do, because that's another thing we didn't go back and change because it was all done on the basis of 55 68. Right. So the initial dates that were done when Libby invented it were based on a half life of 5568. Right. But from I don't know exactly when they figured it out, but at some point in the ensuing decades, they figured out, no, the half life is actually 57 30. And rather than just go back and reanalyze the old samples, which actually may have been destroyed by this time right. They said, we're just going to stick with this convention and follow it. We could just do the math and just say, actually, this is the real half life, convert it to the Libby half life and then have a radio carbon date. Yeah, but the other thing he got wrong, like you said, is the bigger problem, because it can't just be solved with math, and that is his presumption that carbon 14 in the upper atmosphere is produced at a steady rate. We know now that there are all kinds of things that can and have affected that rate over the years. Everything from ocean currents to super volcanoes to solar flares to the Earth's magnetic field. It has fluctuated a lot over time. Yeah. From year to year. We're starting to find that it's not at all steady. And that's a big one, because one of the foundations of radio carbon dating is this idea that it's like a reliable clock that just starts clicking backwards at any point in time. Whatever year you come in on, you're going to be able to compare it to a modern sample and get a coherent radiocarbon date that will make sense. That's just absolutely not the case, because of all those fluctuations. Right. That's something that this field is definitely grappling with, which it will be able to overcome, and largely has already, because they use other types of dating to calibrate their radio carbon date. Yeah, which is really cool. We were talking about the relative dating of carbon 14 dating. What they're now trying to do well, not now, they've been doing it for a while is absolute dating, like what you're talking about, comparing it to known quantities, and one of those is tree rings. Yeah, and I'm surprised we've talked about tree rings a little bit here and there, but I wonder if it could be a shortty on its own. Sure. At least. Yeah, maybe more. We'll just start wrapping on it and if it turns into a real deal episode, we'll go with it. Yeah, we'll just cancel our dinner plan. Keep going. But tree ring dating is called dendacrinology counting tree rings, and not all trees have tree rings. We'll get to that, which can be a problem, but a lot of them do and some of them grow every year, just like you've learned, and everyone probably thinks it's true from kids science class. Right. It's like once a year, a tree has a ring. So if you cut a tree down, you can just count the rings and know how old it is, which is, I mean, basically, right. Depending on the tree. Exactly. But here's the thing, is trees absorb that carbon 14 just like everything else, but those tree rings don't. Once they have completed a tree ring cycle, that tree ring is essentially dead inside the tree and is not accepting any more carbon 14. Yeah. It's like a fossil. It's like if you look at the outside of a tree, that's the living part. Like, as big as a tree is and enormous as it is, the actual living part of it is just this outside veneer and, like, the leaves and everything, right? Yeah, I guess. So. Everything inside is what used to be outside, but is now inside that's right, because a new ring of growth grew around it. So since it's not taking in any more carbon, it's like a snapshot of the carbon 14 that was in the atmosphere the year that tree ring grew. Yes. And we know this, and now we have something to compare against those carbon 14 data results. Yeah. Because if you chop the tree down today, you would say, thank you, father tree, mother tree, for sacrificing your life for science. That's what you have to say first. And you start counting the tree rings backwards. If you get to another tree that's much older, but the lifetime of which overlapped with the tree you just cut down, you can eventually jump over from the tree. You just cut down to this older tree and keep counting backwards. And then just keep if you find enough old trees, keep leaping from tree to tree, counting tree rings as if it was one big old tree. That's really cool. It is. And there are very old trees that do exist on Earth that you can count backwards over very long spans of time. But you can also use multiple trees. Yeah. And, like, if you're sitting at home or in your car thinking, well, why don't they just find the oldest tree and go there? Like, you want that overlap because you want a complete record, because stuff you're dating might fall. They need everything to fall in that range. Right. And so this has been extremely helpful for radio carbon dating because they have managed to compile, basically, a library of tree ring data going back, like, 14,500 years. It's amazing. It's called the Holocene Tree Record, and I didn't even know it existed. Now I love it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I want a bound copy of it just for the coffee table or something. And lay in a hammock in the middle of Pando and read it and read it and be like, oh, look at this year Pando. What do you think? What happened this year? And Panda would hug you. So I was trying to think of something you would do back to Panda. I would go and blow on Panda's lease. It feels good. Sure. So there are other places in nature that have the same kind of snapshots. If you wanted more, because you need more just than the Holocene tree record. They can use coral reef because there's clearly carbon in the ocean, stalactites and stalagmites, which are called spliofyms. If anyone ever busts that out at a party, you'll know what they're talking about, just back away slowly. Yeah, you probably should, because everyone else is just going to be talking about I can never remember which ones are which exactly. Oh, you mean spleoside. Just let me educate you. Goodbye. They are made of carbon and they are deposited in layers just like the tree rings and the coral. In fact, they have found some in China kind of recently that go back 54,000 years. Yes. I think they really recently found so much so that hasn't been fully vetted. But they were super excited about it. The idea that it gave basically a long, mineral rich tree ring library of 54,000 years of the carbon 14 concentrations in the atmosphere, that's awesome. If it does pan out, that would be amazing. And what's the deal with the lake in Japan? It reliably puts down a new layer of sediment every six months. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And so they've taken core samples, and in these core samples, they've turned up like leaves trapped in single layers in something like 650 different spots. So all they have to do is count backwards, find and they'll know the year that this leaf is trapped in beside the tree rings. And then test the carbon 14 in the leaf. And you've got like a picture right there. And that is called what we'll call a library of atmospheric carbon 14 concentrations. Yeah. It should have a name. It does. It's called IntCal. Okay. Intcar. And there's different programs that you can run all this through. Before, back in the they were, I guess, using slide rules and stuff like this to come up with these. Now we have basically machine learning algorithms running these computations for us, but they have programs that use this calibration library to basically say, here's what the radio carbon date is saying. What does this library of absolute date say? And then what they do is they actually well, the computer, I should say, overlaps what's called the wiggles. And they hold it up to the light. Yes. And they find where these kind of wiggles overlap, which are confidence intervals, I guess, and where it's most confident that you have a pretty good idea of what the range is for the age of the sample. And that means we know exactly how old everything is always, right? Precisely to the day. That is not true, because all the things we just mentioned, the Spele of the coral, everything has its own individual problems. Right. Coral, turns out, isn't a great material for Calibrating, this stuff, because ocean concentrations of carbon are not the same as in the atmosphere. Right. So that kind of throws it off right there. It does. So if you're comparing, like, something that lived on land to coral in the library, in Cal library, yeah. It's not going to Calibrate very well. Tree rings are a problem, too, because they figured out that depending on the hemisphere that the tree grew in, it will give you a different atmospheric concentration, because the southern atmosphere has more oceans, and those oceans absorb more carbon dioxide. So there's actually less carbon 14 on the land in the Southern Hemisphere than there is in the Northern Hemisphere. So if you checked out a waterlogged oak that grew in Ireland and 1082 Ce, if you found a coyote tree a what? A coyote tree in New Zealand that grew that same year, they would have different radio carbon dates. Right. Because they have different radio carbon concentrations. So there's a lot of things confounding this stuff that's keeping it from being less precise. That's right. And it gets even worse because there have been long stretches of time on Earth in our history where carbon 14 production really increased every year over hundreds of thousands of years or tens of thousands. Yeah. Well, there are stretches. So all over the radio carbon calendar, there are these things called plateaus, and I think the longest that they've ever found is a few hundred years when I said tens of thousands. Yeah. Just like a radiocarbon date. All right. I don't feel so bad. They found this thing called the Hallstatt Plateau. More like the Hallstatt disaster. Yeah, that's what some people call it. Am I right? I'm sure that's what Will or Libby called it. Sure. But basically, there are periods during Earth's history. This one in particular goes from 760 to 420 BCE, where the production of carbon 14 in the atmosphere just increased basically steadily every year. So nothing ever got older relative to new stuff. Right. Which means that if you radiocarbon date something in 760 BCE and something in 420 BCE, they're going to give you the same exact radio carbon date. Does that make sense? That was your response. Hey, there's people out there thinking it to the Hallstatt disaster. All right. Willard Levy would be proud. He was the wild man. So while this is important, is not just to put a date on something so we know how old it is, and we can just put it down in a museum or a history book or whatever. Right. It really opens up all of science and all of ancient history to interpretation and kind of rocked the world about a lot of things that we thought were true that aren't true. Yeah. They call it the radio carbon revolution, and, like, for good reason. Really? Yeah. Well, one good example is in the UK. There we talked about stonehenge. They used to think that stonehenge was the result of the how do you pronounce that? I don't know. Mycenae? You'd think I know my senate? I think it's the Mycenae civilization in Greece. But the A and the E on the end, it's got to do something more than, like, why not just add a Y instead of an E? I'm with you. And sometimes you see the A and the E together conjoined. Sure. Like Ronnie and Donnie Gallion. Wow. So what is that? It's its own thing. So we used to think that came from an ancient Greek civilization, but because of radio carbon dating, they said, no, no, no. We had the age all wrong. And stonehenge came before that ever happened, before the civilization was even there. Right. So it really helps clear up a picture of everything from otsi the iceman to knowing that the shroud of Turing was only 700 years old. So it can confirm things and it can quash other things. Right. And then the way that they used to do it before was they would just kind of dig in the earth and turn up artifacts. And because an artifact was closer to the ground right. Than another one, it just meant it was more recent. That's, like, as precise as they could get. Radio carbon was like, not only are we going to do that, but get this, pal. Here's a date, and a pretty good estimate of a date that this thing existed. That's how much it changed things. They used to be like, this is older than this. Now, See, the Ice man was running around in 3300 BCE. Right. And in doing that, it also changes everything in that they're saying, oh, well, see, was also found with tattoos on them that seemed to suggest Acupuncture, which apparently they didn't think anymore. But that changed our idea of how old acupuncture was. Right. And then he had certain tools on them. We didn't know that they were making these tools back then, but now that we've reliably dated Etsy, we know that this tool making complex is much older. People have professions much sooner than we thought. Yes. It just opens up everything when you have a date, for one thing. Yeah. The tendrils are far reaching. Right, exactly. And broad. And it happened actually here in the United States, too, in North America. We did a whole episode on the Clovis police. The idea that the Clovis people were the first American, and they came over from crossing over the, I guess, the Bering Lambridge when the ice sheet receded. And so Willard Libby did a test that showed there was no way that the ice sheet was open anywhere before 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. So he actually set a baseline. This is when the earliest people possibly could have been here. Well, we've been finding and radio carbon dating settlements that are older than that. They found one in Idaho on the Snake River. I can't remember the name of the island. That's like almost 16,000 years old. And it shows definitively that since the ice sheet was there, they couldn't have come over on the Bering Lambridge. So now we think the first Americans came over by boat. That's right. All because of radio carbon dating. Amazing. But we're screwing it all up for the future. Because of human activity, we're burning a lot of fossil fuels and we are releasing a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. And so much so that consistent, previously reliable ratio of carbon twelve to carbon 14 has been knocked all out of whack because of us. And in the next, what, 30 years? Yeah, 30 to 40 years. We may not be able to date things accurately using this method anymore. Yeah, because when they say, well, you burn fossil fuels, you release a lot of carbon dioxide. Well, those fuels used to be alive, so they used to have carbon 14 in them. But they're so old, there isn't any carbon 14 now it's all just carbon twelve. And we're releasing tons of carbon twelve into the atmosphere that wouldn't normally be there. That's right. And nuclear tests that we conducted actually had the opposite effect. Between 1955 and 1963, the concentration of carbon 14 in the atmosphere doubled. Almost doubled, yeah. So there's all screwy now. It is a very screwy. So much so that now they have modern samples. They have a beet harvest from the they used to replace a beat from France from 1950 that they used to be like, this is the baseline now for modern. This is what we're reduced to, is sampling Beats, for God's sake. That's how much it screwed things up. I love beats. But they have figured out how to use this kind of modern screwiness to also date recent remains, which everyone thought was just impossible, that you couldn't tell when a body lived or died if it were just a decade or so dead or less. But we have historical records for all this stuff. I know it's a big deal and we're screwing stuff up to the future, but isn't the utility of carbon 14 dating because it was pre history? Yeah, that certainly helps. And yeah, I guess you're right. Having a record would definitely help quite a bit. I'm not saying, like, who cares then? Right? But at least we have that going for it. Yeah, that's a good point. It'd be like, well, the leather seat from this automobile is the same age as this leather shoe from 3000 years before, which is which right. But yeah, they have figured out how to use it for forensics based on your teeth enamel, which are like tree rings, and then based on your soft tissues. But your soft tissues degrade, so they figured out that they can actually test the casings from the larvae that eat your soft tissues as you're decomposing so the soft tissue is the carbon 14 in this scenario? Yeah, which you're constantly remaking, and then as you die, it stops being taken in and then starts decaying. And as you're being eaten by these bug larvae, they shed their casings, and the casings don't degrade. So you can come along and test the casings, and they ate your carbon 14. And you can figure out when that person, that body, last lived based on the casing of the bugs that ate it. And in a million years, if I were not to get cremated and they were to bury me into the ground, the only thing that would remain of me are the three titanium screws holding in my three fake teeth. That's neat. A million years. Who'd have thought? Yes, there he is. Yeah, there's Chuck. One, two, three. You got anything else? There may be more than that by then, too. It might be four or five. So anything else you want? We can keep talking about this. I have no dinner plans. Okay, well, I think we're going to stop with carbon 14. We don't want to press our luck. It did go pretty well, Chuck. I told you. I think so. And since I said it went pretty well, it's time for listener mail. All right. I was preparing for the next episode. Yes, we got listener mail first. Look at me. All right, I'm going to call this soup follow up. If you remember, we talked about Camp Soup in a previous episode on what else? Augmented reality. I think we were pegged as a progressive, guys, because you spoke up first. Yes, with a name brand. Right? I'm a Campbell's man. Hey, I don't discriminate. I like Campbell's chunky too. I just kind of went along with it. I didn't want to ruffle any feathers. Okay, I didn't speak up, but this is about that. Hey, guys. There are no words to describe how much I enjoy your podcast. I've listened to every single episode and continue to do so each and every week. Thank you for bringing wonderful science exploration for knowledge and laughs to my days. So far, so good. I listened to the latest episode on augmented reality while on a plane to Boston, and I could not stop laughing. When you got to a full on st tangent about canned soup, I thought, this is my moment. This is my chance to ride in. I've been to Starstruck before, but here we go. I know canned soup all too well. I spent seven years right out of college working for General Mills. Yes, they make the cereal, but they also own progressive. I worked in sales, managing our businesses with our East Coast and national accounts. Three years ago, I left General Mills and went to work for Campbell's Soup. It's like a dies and puma over there. I guess so. Just outside of Philadelphia. I guess you could say I, too, have a thing for canned soup. I currently manage our soup and prego business and one of our largest East Coast grocery chains. And although it doesn't seem complicated, I can tell you a lot of work goes into you enjoying your can of red and white chicken noodle soup. I still love that Campbell's chicken noodle. Oh, yeah. So good. It's like, how do you mess with the classic like that? But there's also Progresso creamy chicken noodle, which is the bomb. When you mentioned this episode brought to you by progresso as a joke, I was just waiting for you to plug that you liked Campbell's as well, and even more haha. Either way, I'm just glad you both enjoy eating our soups. I'll be happy to give you a tour of Campbell's soup HQ if you're ever in Philly. Thanks to the entire team for all you do. You guys are a legend combined into a singular. That's from Kathleen and Kathleen. No shade to progresso. But I'm a Campbell's man. I eat three soups a day. I eat Campbell's chicken noodle. I ate chicken corn chowder. I don't know if I had that. That's so good. And I eat the New England clam chowder. Yes, that's good. Who eats Manhattan? Clam chowder. I don't know. Or I'm sorry, manhattan clam chowder? Not even Manhattan at nights. They're like, Get this away. Give me the real stuff. Yeah, give me that creamy goodness. Do you ever have meatball alphabet? No. I don't know what in those meatballs, but I grew up on them, and look at me now. That's all the soups I eat, so it's weird. I have three soups. Yeah, you don't do the chunky stuff. Campbell's chunky. They come in large cans. It's like a hungry man. Well, that's the chicken corn chowder, and the I have had that, and it's good. Those are chunky. Have you had the chicken pot pie? No, but I just made a homemade gluten free chicken pot pie. Biscuit topped. How do you make a biscuit without gluten? You make it with one to one flour instead of wheat flour. What kind of flour is not wheat flour? What? It's like, the white flour. Do you never have gluten free pasta? No. I mean, I've heard of it. I haven't eaten it. It's just made with flour without gluten. It's called one to one, as in the ratio. Oh, I see. I got you. So basically, you buy the gluten free flour. Sometimes it's rice flour. Okay, tapioca. But have you had chickpea flour? I don't think so. It's not bad. I mean, I'm not gluten free. I did this so Emily could enjoy chicken pot pie. Sure. But you lay out you make the little biscuits, and you lay them on top of your pot pie. That sounds nice. And then you brush it with egg yolk. Nice. And then that bronze is up to a shiny brown top, like people laying on the beach in Rio. So good. That is nice. Man. Yeah. Make a good chicken pop. Have you had it already? I've had it this past weekend, but I have not had the soup, which is what led me to that tangent. It's good. I don't discriminate progressive Campbells. It's all good. Well, Chuck is checking his phone to see what time it is, so I guess we should probably end this episode. If you want to get in touch with us to offer us a tour of where you work, that's always nice. Thank you. You can go on to Stephenshernow.com, check out our social links, 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 show. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
2aa1d66c-3b0f-11eb-a672-8f0ffe3c2d38 | How Effective Altruism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-effective-altruism-works | A branch of philanthropy led by philosophers is dedicated to finding the most impactful ways to help humans survive and thrive. Anyone can find that agreeable, but it can be tough to hear it also means your donations to local charities are kind of a waste.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | A branch of philanthropy led by philosophers is dedicated to finding the most impactful ways to help humans survive and thrive. Anyone can find that agreeable, but it can be tough to hear it also means your donations to local charities are kind of a waste.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 03 Mar 2022 13:51:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=13, tm_min=51, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=62, tm_isdst=0) | 45823870 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here. So that appropriately makes this stuff you should know. Before we get going, we want to give a little special plug to our good friend John Hodgman and our buddy David Reese. Yes, because they got a season two of their awesome animated show, dick Town, as in Private Detective Dick, by the way. Yeah, I mean, it's cool enough to get one season of a show, but if you've gotten a second season and they're tossing you on FX these days, you've made it. So the show has finally made it. And it's well deserved too, because it's a pretty awesome cartoon. It is. It's very funny. It is actually live now. It premiered on March 3 at 10:00 PM. On FXX. You can watch it on Hulu. And the whole jam here is that John and I watched the whole first season. They're short episodes. The whole first season is less than 2 hours long, which really makes a great case. We're just streaming the whole thing and laughing a lot in one night. But it's about two detectives john Hodgman and David Purefoy. David Reese. And Hodgman is a private detective. He was a former boy detective, like Encyclopedia Brown type. And Dave was sort of his bugs, meaning his nemesis in high school reference, is now his buddy and his sort of muscle and his driver. And they solve cases together. And season two, I think, is even bigger and weirder and it's sort of Scooby Doo. It's just a lot of fun. A really fun show. Yeah. The first season they did nothing but solve children's mysteries and they were humiliated by that. So they've kind of expanded now to be grown ups. They've resolved to be grown ups and they're solving grown up mysteries for grownups now, which is really something else. So, yeah, like you said, you can stream the whole first season on Hulu and you can catch the second season on FXX. I wasn't aware of the extra X. Two X. I don't take back what I originally said. It's still big time, but FXX, that's right. And it is rated PG 13. So if you're 13 and up, you should enjoy it. Got a few swear words, some adult themes here and there, but it's great. It's a lot of fun. Happy for Hodgman and Reese. Happy, happy Hodgman. Happy, happy Reese. And I just like saying Dick town. Sure. It's a great name for a great show. It is. Should we talk about effective altruism? Yeah, I was going to say we're talking about that today. And this one kind of I don't know if you noticed a similarity, but this one really kind of ties into that short stuff that we released before the end of the year about charitable giving. Did you notice? I did. Although in that episode, it was like, yeah, find a cherry that speaks to you and maybe something is local, or if you have animals, or if you have a family member with cancer. And this basically says, don't do any of that. Right. The only way you should give is by just kind of coldly calculating what would help a human the most on planet Earth. Yes. So effective altruism is one of those movements. It's a pretty new movement. I think it really started in earnest around 2010. And it's one of those movements that illicit passion one way or another. It's a very polarizing idea if you just take it at its bare bones, which people love to do. And the reason why people love to take it as bare bones at its extremes is because it is at heart a philosophical movement rooted in utilitarianism. And utilitarianism is even more polarizing. It has been for centuries than effective altruism is. And I think if everybody would just move past the most extreme parts of it and just kind of took effective altruism at its most middle ground where most of it seems to have accumulated and settled and where most of the work is being done, it would be really difficult to disagree with the ideas behind it. It's when you trot out Peter Singer and some of his most extreme views or when you say, oh, it's all Silicon Valley billionaires. When you just look at it like that, that's when people get all riled up and they're like, I hate effective altruism. If you really just kind of take it in a much more level headed way, it's actually pretty sensible and pretty great because at the end of the day, you're saving people's lives and you're figuring out how to save the most lives possible. Yeah, I think anything that has some of its roots and philosophical movements of tech bros, it's a hard sell for a lot of people. But let's talk about a few things that it is, which is the idea that there's a lot of good that can be done with money. And if you can provide for yourself and your own basic needs, you should be probably giving to charity. You can take a cold, hard look at your finances by literal, strict calculations, financial calculations. If you are a person without kids making $40,000 a year, you are in the 97 point fourth percentile on planet Earth as far as your wealth goes. And that you might not think, if I make $40,000 a year and then I have taxes and people with a lot of money should give to charities, I really don't have enough to spare. The idea is that now you have some to spare. You can give a little bit like 10% of your money and still be in the top 96 percentile and you can literally save human lives on planetary. That's the big thing that they're trying to get across here. That like the money that you're giving is saving lives that otherwise would be crippled with disease or just not around like they would die if you didn't give this money. And the fact that you are giving this money, those people are now living what are called quality adjusted life years, where they're living in additional healthy year or more because of that intervention that you gave your money for. And that, yes, it's based on the premise that basically everyone living in the United States is rich compared to entire swathes of the rest of the world. And that basically anyone living in the United States can afford to give 10% of their income and forego some clothes or some cars or something like that to help other people literally survive. And so, right off the bat, we've reached levels of discomfort for the average person, especially the average American, that are really tough to deal with. So that's the first challenge that effective altruists have to do, is kind of tamp down that overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility and shame at not doing that, that people immediately that crops up in people when they hear about this. Yeah, so I think maybe let's talk a little bit about the history and some of the main organizations that are tackling this and maybe through that what some of the founders describe as the core commitments. Like you said, it took hold in about 2010. And there's a group of organizations under what is now an umbrella organization called the center for Effective Altruism CEA. And it started off with philosophers Toby Ord and Will McCaskill founding a group called Giving What We Can selfdefined as an international community of people committed to giving more and giving more effectively. A couple of years later, McAskill and a man named Benjamin Todd founded something called 80,000 Hours. The idea is that you might devote 80,000 hours to a career. So when choosing a career, be very thoughtful on the impact that career has for both good and evil. We'll get way more into all this. And then there's other sort of not fringes and weird groups, but just on the outskirts called the Life You Can Save. And then animal charity evaluators, which will get into how animals figure in. But let's talk a little bit, I guess, about Will McCaskill and what he sees as the core what he calls the core commitments of EA. Yeah. And Will McCaskill. He's out of Oxford. And so is Toby Ord. And I first came across this truck when I was researching the End of the World podcast, and I deeply admire Toby Ord on a personal level. He actually walks the walk. He and his whole family does. They donate a significant portion of their family income to charity and forgo all sorts of stuff. And he's literally trying to save the world in that sense. I'm really kind of open to the ideas that come out of that guy's mouth. You mentioned The End of the World with Josh Clark. Available wherever you can find your podcast. Yes, you're wonderful, highly produced, ten part series. Thank you very much. That was a nice view. Where did you tackle the existing existential risks of the universe? Yes. Okay. I just want to make sure one and the same. And I was not doing that to set you up for a plug. I was doing it in, like, kind of full disclosure that I'm probably a little less than objective at this one. Yeah. But that's a great show, and it's still out there. Just because it is a few years old now. It's very evergreen. I think it's at least in these times. Yeah. The world hasn't ended yet, so it's still evergreen. Exactly. Good point. But I mentioned that in part to kind of fully disclose that. I think Toby Gordon is one of the greatest people walking the Earth right now, but also Will McCaskill, who I don't know, seems to be in lockstep with Toby, too. And so he's kind of one of the founders of this movement. And he said that there's four tenants he wrote a 2018 paper. And so there's basically four tenants that form the core of effective altruism. One is maximizing the good, which we can all pretty much get on board with. Like, you want to make as much good as possible for as many people as possible. The second is aligning your ideas, your contributions with science. Sure. Using evidence to create where you're going to put your donations, to use that to guide you rather than your heart. It's a big one, so it's a tough one for people to swallow. Another one is welfare ism where by maximizing the good, you're improving the welfare of others. That's the definition of good in that sense, of maximizing the good. And the last one is impartiality. That's as hard for people to swallow. That's harder, I think, for people to swallow than science alignment. Because what you're saying then, Chuck, is that every single person out there in the world equally deserves your charitable contribution. Yeah. And that's a big one, because I'm trying to find the number here of how much Americans give abroad. Where is that? Okay, here we go. Out of the what is it, $470,000,000,000 that Americans donate? Yes. Four hundred and seventy one billion dollars. Twenty five point nine billion of that went outside of America to international affairs. So it's a lot of money, but it's not a lot of money in the total pot. And the idea for EA is to sort of shatter your way of thinking about trying to help the people in your city or the people in your state or your country, and to look at every human life as having equal value. Yeah, not even human life, but every life. Yeah. They include animals, too, like you mentioned before, and we'll get into a little more. But the key is that if every single person living on earth is equally important. And you're trying to maximize the help you can do from a strict EA perspective. You're wasting your money if you are donating that money, if you're an American, if you're donating it in America, because just by virtue of the value of a dollar, it can do exponentially more good. $1 can in other, like, developing poverty stricken areas of the world than it can here in the United States. So that right there sets up for critics of EA like to point out that, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you saying that we shouldn't donate locally here at home, that we shouldn't save the animals in the animal shelter, that we shouldn't donate to your local food pantry, that you shouldn't donate to your church? And if you really back an effective altruists into a corner, they would say, look, just speaking of maximizing your impact and everybody around the world is equally important. No, you shouldn't be doing any of those things, and you certainly shouldn't be donating any money to your local museum or symphony or something like that. Yeah. And they say that with their head down and they're kind of drawing on the floor with their foot. They're saying, like, yeah, that's kind of what we're saying. That's right. Yes. And that's really tough for people to swallow. It's just this huge, jagged pill that they're asking people to swallow. But if you can step back from it, what they're ultimately saying is, look, man, you want to do the most good with your charitable donations? Here's how to do it aside. Yeah. Do you want to feel good about it or really do the good? Exactly. And that's what they're doing. That's the whole basis of effective altruism, is they're saying, all of your charitable giving is for you. You're doing it for yourself. That's why you give this take that out of the equation and says, now you're giving to genuinely help somebody else. All right, I think that's a great beginning. Maybe let's take a break now that everyone knows what this is and everyone is choking on their coffee, they just donated to their local neighbor organization. And we'll come back and talk about some of the other philosophical founders 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, learning stuff with God. So a couple of people we should mention really quickly because they're going to come up. As far as organizations, we did not mention give. Well, yet they were founded in 2007. They were a big part of the EA movement by Facebook co founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife. Is it cari or Carrie tuna? I'm going with Carrie, I think. So it's Cari. So they had partnered up to create open philanthropy. Philanthropy sounds weird. I wanted to say philanthropy too early in the episode for that. So they're big donors and big believers in the cause. And then another person you mentioned is well, first of all, you mentioned utilitarians in this philosophical movement they were developed by. And then we talked about Jeremy Bentham before. And John Stuart Mill. But the idea that people should do what causes the most happiness and relieves the most suffering and the other guy you mentioned, that's sort of controversial, I guess you could say, is Peter Singer. He is an author and a philosopher and a Ted Talker who kind of became I don't know about famous because a lot of people don't know any modern philosophers, but in these circles became famous from an idea, a thought experiment, from his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, which is, you're going to work. You just bought some really expensive great new shoes. You see a kid drowning in a shallow pond. Do you wait in there and ruin those new shoes and rescue the kid and make you late for work? And 99% of people, if asked, would say, well, of course you do. You let that kid drown. So the flip to that is, well, that's happening every day all over the world, and you're essentially saving your new shoes by letting these kids die. Yeah, you're buying those new shoes rather than donating that money to save a child's life. Morally speaking, it's the exact same thing. And in the essay I read it last night. It's really good. Do you want to feel like a total piece of garbage for not doing enough in the world? Read that. He basically goes on to destroy any argument about, well, that's a kid that you see in a pond. You're actually physically saving that kid. He's like, well, it's so easy to donate to help a child on the other side of the world right now that for all intents and purposes, it's as easy as going into a pond to save. Easier. These days it is easier. You don't even have to get wet. You just call in your credit card, basically, yes. So he just destroys like any argument you could possibly have. And he is an extremist utilitarian philosopher in that he's basically saying not just that giving money to the point where you are just above the level of poverty as the people you're giving, like really cutting into your luxuries to help other people. Not only is that a good thing, if you do that, it's actually not doing that is a morally bad thing. It's morally wrong to not do that. So he will really turn the hot plate up under you and just really make you feel uncomfortable. But he's saying like, this is my philosophical argument and it's pretty sound if you hear me out. And if you hear him out, it is pretty sound. The problem is he's a utilitarian philosopher and a very strict one too. And so there's a lot of like, you can take that stuff to the nth degree. There's some really terrible extremes to where it becomes so anti sentimental that it actually can be nauseating sometimes. Like, strictly speaking, under a utilitarian view, this one's often trotted out it is morally good to murder one person to harvest their organs to save the lives of five other people with that murdered person's organs. Technically speaking, in utilitarian lens, that's maximizing the good in the world. The thing is, if that's what you're focusing on and you're equating effective altruism's desire to get the most bang for your donation buck to murdering somebody to harvest their organs to save five people, you've just completely lost your way. So you can win an argument against utilitarianism in that respect. But the fact that it's leveled and trained on this movement, this charitable philanthropy movement, is totally unfair. Even though, yes, it is pretty much part and parcel with utilitarianism. Yeah. Singer is a guy who I think is one of his philosophies is the journey of life. And that interrupting a life before it has goals or after it's accomplished goals is okay. So if you mention his name, there are a lot of people will point to this idea that he says things like it's okay to kill a disabled baby right after they're born in some cases, especially if it will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy and productive life or an older person who has already accomplished those goals. And the idea being that the disabled baby doesn't have goals yet. That's obviously some controversial stuff. Yeah. Just a tear and he's a hardliner and doubles down on this. But again, to sort of throw that in, that has nothing to do with effective altruism. No, he wrote that paper Famine, Affluence and Morality, which basically provides the general contours of the effective altruist movement. Yes, but it's not like he's just the leading heartbeat of the movement or anything like that. No, that's not their bible or anything like that? No. And unfortunately he's an easy target that people can point to because the effective altruism movement has kind of taken some of his ideas. They're like, oh yeah, you like singer. Well, what about singers arguing about this? It's like that has nothing to do with the fact of altruism. He makes a really good, easily obtained straw man that people like to pick on. That's right. Let's talk about numbers a little bit. We mentioned that in the United States, $471,000,000,000 was donated in 2020. About 324 of that came from individuals, which is amazing. Yeah, those corporate guys are really pulling their weight. Yeah, no kidding. Individuals. And that boils down to about $1,000 per person in the USA, which is not that much money if you think about it. And out of that there are a couple of pledges that EA endorses. One called Giving What We Can, which is promising to give away 10% of your lifetime income. And then another one called the Founders Pledge, where if you're a startup founder, you promise to give away a percentage of your eventual proceeds. And then there's also Try Giving, which is a temporary pledge to donate. And it's only about twelve years old. Only about eight to 10,000 people have taken these pledges so far. Right. That's a decent amount of people, especially considering that most of the people involved in this movement are high earning, extremely educated people who are probably like 10% of their income is going to add up to quite a bit over the course of their careers. And that's the thing they're saying, like, I'm going to give this 10% a year for my career. And the reason why they've really kind of targeted careers, that's part of 80,000 hours. 80,000 hours is this idea that we spend about 80 0 hour working. So if you took that 80 0 hour and figured out how to direct your energy the most effectively towards saving the world, you can really do some good just by the virtue of having to have this career to support yourself. And so there's a couple of ways to do it. One is to have a job that you make as much money as you possibly can at and then you donate as much as you comfortably can. And then maybe even then some say 10% or some people donate 25%. There's a NASA engineer named Brian Ottins who is profiled in the Washington Post who said he specifically got the most stressful, high earning job he could handle in order to give away, I think, a quarter of his income. Right. And that's great. That's one way to do it. But another way to do it is to say, okay, actually I'm going to figure out something that I really love, but I'm going to adjust it so that it's going to have the most impact possible. Yeah, I think it's interesting, like there are two ways to think about it. The first one that you were talking about, they call it earning to give. And the idea that if you are capable of getting like a really high paying job in the oil industry with the idea that you're going to give most of that away in the earning to give philosophy side of things, they're saying, yeah, go do that. It doesn't have to be a socially beneficial job. Make the most money you can and give it away. Don't go get the job at the nonprofit because there are tons of people that will go and get that job at the nonprofit. Someone will fill that position. 80,000 Hours doesn't they say that that's not the best way? Theirs is more the second one you mentioned, which is don't take a job that causes a lot of harm. Right. Being happy is part of being productive and you don't have to go grind it out at a job you hate just because you make a lot of money so you can give it away. Like make yourself happy. Don't take a job that causes harm. Do a job where you have a talent. Policymaking is one field media. I would argue that we have a job where we didn't know, but it turns out we have a talent for doing this and we can leverage our voice and we occasionally do, to point out things that we think make a difference in the world and to mobilize people. That's not the goal of our show, but we can dabble in that, which is great. That's not what we intended going into it, but I think we woke up one day and found that we had a lot of years so we could throw in episodes. I think that lead to good, right? Yeah, great. Which means we can shave a little off of that 10% we're morally obligated to donate every year, right? About 7%. So a good example of that, of figuring out how to direct your career path more toward improving the world. On the 80,000, our site, they profile a woman who wanted to become a doctor and she did some research and said, well, this is cool, but most doctors in Australia treat Australians who are relatively well off and very healthy. And so instead she decided that she wanted to go into a different field of medicine. I think she went into like epidemiology and figured out how to get how to direct her interest in medicine toward getting vaccines out to market faster, to get them through the clinical trial process. And so she's not going to get to be a doctor, but she's going to get to focus on medicine and she's going to get to have the satisfaction that she's improving the world demonstrably through her job. And she might not donate a dime of that. I suspect she's probably going to because she's on the 80,000 hours website. But even if she didn't, she's still figuring out how to use evidence to make evidence based decisions, to maximize the 80,000 hours she's going to spend in her career to make the world a better place. Right. Because one of the ideas of EA and a lot of the charity Navigator and Charity watch like good websites that we endorsed that were not poopooing at all. But they tend to focus a lot on how much goes to overhead. How much goes to the programs. Which is good. But EA is like no. What we want to see are data and literal scientific data measurables on how much return you're getting for that dollar. And some charities do this and are a little more open about it, but they basically say every charity should say here's how far your dollar goes and exactly what it does. Right. And the charities of the west said come on, really nervously, right when they're asked that, when they're told that they should be doing that, because they just don't. Part of the reason why is very expensive to run. What if effective altruists like to use as the gold standard random control trials where basically what UX testing is user experience testing. For a website, there's a B testing where you've got some people who are using your website and they're getting one banner ad and the B testers are getting a totally different banner ad and you just see which gets the most clicks. It's basically that. But for a charity, for the work that a charity is carrying out, some group gets malaria nets, another group doesn't. And then you study which group had the best outcome and then you could say, oh, well, these malaria nets increase these life adjusted years by 30%, which means that it comes out to life adjusted years per dollar compared to zero two life adjusted years for the control group. Ergo, we want to put our money into these groups that distribute malaria nets in Africa, cause they are demonstrably saving more lives than groups that don't like, they want data like that and you just don't get that with most charities. The good thing is they're pushing charities to do that because if you do care about that kind of thing, then if you can come up with that kind of evidence, you can get these effective altruist dollars and there's a lot of dollars coming from that group, even though it is relatively small. Yeah, it is interesting because in that example, if you were to just say on your website people with malaria netsfarebetter duh, right, everyone knows that, but they really want to have that to drill down and have that measurable where they can point to a number and say that this is the actual result. We all know malaria nets help, but maybe they think it speaks to people more. It certainly speaks to them, but I guess they think it would speak to the masses because these things cost money. That's one of the criticisms of. These randomized controlled trials is that they're sort of expensive and maybe that money should be used to actually donate instead of doing these trials. But it's a good one. They must think it speaks to people to have actual data like that. Well, it speaks to them because the way that you figure out how to maximize your money is to have data to look at, to decide rather than your heart. It makes sense. These are techies because they're all about that data. Very much so. And there are some problems with that, with relying on that. There's some criticisms, I should say, but it's problems too. One is that there's a lot of stuff that you can't quite quantify in terms like that. If you're saying like, no, I want to see how many lives saved your work is doing per dollar, well, then the high museum is going to be like zero or saving zero lives. But that doesn't mean that they're not enriching or improving lives through the donations that they're receiving this art museum, you know what I mean? Olivia, who helped us with this article, gives an example. She's saying, like, you couldn't really do a randomized controlled trial for the 1963 march on Washington. For sure, that helped solidify the civil rights movement, right? And yet it'd be really hard to argue that that didn't have any major effects on the world. So that's a big argument then. The other thing is that sometimes these randomized controlled trials, like you can hold it one year and then in one part of the world and go to another part of the world the next year, and what should be the same is just not the same. And so if you're basing all of your charitable giving on these things, they better be reproducible or else what are you doing? Yeah, I mean, you get why this is such a divisive thing and why it's such a hard sell to people, because people give with their hearts. Generally. They give to causes they find personal to them, like I mentioned earlier, a family member with cancer or a family member with Ms, or just name it anything. Generally, people like have a personal connection somehow which makes them want to give. And that's sort of the heart of philanthropy, has always been the heart. And it's a tough sell for EA to say, I'm sorry, you have to cut that out of there. It's a very subjective thing to what constitutes a problem. Even when it comes to the animal thing. Like when people give for animal charities, they're generally giving to dogs and cats and stuff like that. These great organizations that do great work here in America, but the concentration from the EA perspective are factory farmed animals. And that 1% of charitable spending in the US. Goes to the suffering of farmed animals. And that's what we should be concentrating on because of the massive, massive scale. Again, to try and do the most good. You would look at like, where are the most animals? And sadly, they're on farms. Yeah. Just from sheer numbers, you can make a case, utilitarian speaking, that your money would be better off spent improving the lives of cows that were going to be slaughtered for beef, that will still eventually be slaughtered for beef, but you can improve their welfare during their lifetimes. And that, technically, is maximizing the impact of your dollar by reducing suffering just because there's so many cows awaiting slaughter in the world compared to all the people, humans, that are dying in Africa. Heck yeah. That's a tough sell. And I think this is where it makes sense to just kind of, like, maintain a certain amount of common sense, where it's like, yeah, man, if you really want to maximize your money, go look at the EA sites, go check out 80,000 hours, get into this and actually do that. But there's no one who's saying, like, but if you give $1 to that local symphony that you love, you're a sucker, you're a chump, you're an idiot. Nobody's saying that. And so maybe it doesn't have to be all or nothing one way or the other, which seems to be the push in the poll. And I think the issue here yeah, we should read directly from Will McCaskill. He defends EA and he says, this effective altruism makes no claims about what obligations of benevolence one has, nor does EA claim that all ways of helping others are morally permissible as long as they help others the most. Indeed, there's a strong community norm against promoting or engaging in activities that cause harm. So they flat out say, like, the whole murder someone to harvest their organs, like, we're not down with that. That's not what we're about. Please stop mentioning Peter Singer. Right, yeah. And he says, it doesn't require that I always sacrifice my own interest for the good of others. And that's actually very contradictory to Peter Singer's essay. He says, no, you're morally obligated to do that, and if you don't, it's morally bad. They're saying, like, no, let's all just be reasonable here. Yeah, we're philosophers, but we can also think like normal human beings, too. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to take this kind of philosophical view based in science, based on evidence, and try to direct money to get the biggest impact. Yeah, like you said. Can we stop bringing up Peter Singer, please? How about we take another break and we'll talk a little bit about jeez, what else? Long termism and EA's impact, right? Sufficient. 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 long termism is part of the EA movement, and this is the idea of, hey, let's not just think about helping people now. If we really want to maximize impact, to help the most people, which is at the core of our mission statement, we need to think about the future because there will be a lot more people in the future to save. And so long termism is really where your dollar is going to go the most. If you think about deep into the future, even. Yeah, like if humanity just kind of hangs around planet Earth for another billion or so years, which is entirely possible if we can make it through the Great Filter, there will be like quadrillions of human lives left to come. Yes. Philosophers who think about this kind of thing kind of make the case, or can make the case if they want to, that their lives are probably going to be vastly more enjoyable than ours just from the technology available and not having to work and all sorts of great stuff that's going to come along. And so technically, just by virtue of the fact that there's so many more of them, we should technically be sacrificing our own stuff now for the benefit of these generations and generations and generations of humans to come. That vastly outnumber the total number of humans who have ever lived. Like 108,000,000,000 humans have ever lived. We're talking quadrillions of humans left to come. That very much details with the kind of discomfort you can elicit from somebody who says that your money is better spent relieving the suffering of cattle awaiting slaughter than it is saving children's lives in Africa. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And they're not just talking about climate change and obviously that kind of existential risk. They dabble in AI and stuff like that. And I know that we don't need to go down that rabbit hole. You should listen to The End of the World with Josh Clark. The AI Episode I mean, it's all about that. But it does have to do with that kind of stuff. It's not just like, we need to save the planet, so it's around in a billion years. They tackle, like, all kinds of existential risk, basically. Yeah. And they dedicate like, a lot of these guys are dedicating their careers to figuring out how to avoid existential risk because they've decided that that is the greatest threat to the future that would cut out any possibility of those quadrillions of lives. That's literally why they have dedicated themselves to thinking about and alleviating these risks, because they're trying to save the future of the human race, because they've decided that that is the best way to maximize their careers for the most good, which is just astounding if you stop and think about what they're actually doing in real life. Yeah. Pretty neat. We mentioned the kind of money that's, even though it's not a huge movement so far, I think we said somewhere around 8000 people have made these pledges. I think overall, the co founder of 80,000 Hours, Benjamin Todd, says about $46 billion is committed to EA going forward. Like you said, it's because there are a lot of rich people and tech people that are backing this thing. So a lot of that money comes from people like Dusk and Moscowitz and Kari Tuna and Sam Bankman. Fried, he's a cryptocurrency guy, so a lot of that money comes from them. But they're trying to just raise awareness to get more and more regular people on board that if they have $2,000 or $3,000 to give a year, they're saying I think they estimate that three to $4,500 is like the amount of money it takes to save a human life and to give them additional quality years. Yeah. So if you cough up that much and you directed toward one of the charities that they've identified as the most effective through their sites, through, like, GiveWell is a place to go look for charities like that that have been embedded by effective altruists. You are literally saving the life of a child every year. It's like you're saving a child from drowning in a pond every single year, and all you're doing is ruining your new shoes more than your new shoes. But you're ruining your really nice vacation that year. Right. Because you sent this one thing. I don't know where it came from, but the idea of someone running into a burning building and pulling a child out or a kid out of a pond, they're written in the newspaper as a hero, but you can do that. You can save a kid a year or more every year for the rest of your life. It's a little less dramatic. You're not going to have a newspaper. You're not going to be above the fold. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, but EA is, like, all about it's the antithesis of that. Antithesis? What is that? Antithesis? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's no frills version of antithesis. Yes. The thing is, too, is also I mean, it's still very relative. Like, $4,500 is relatively a very large amount or so size amount or not much amount, depending on how much you make. And again, nobody in the effective altruist movement is saying that you should personally sacrifice unless you really want to, unless you're driven to, but you're not morally required to personally sacrifice to cough up that $4,500 when it means you're not going to be able to eat for a week or you're not going to be able to have a place to live. Like, nobody's saying that and nobody's being flippant about the idea that $4,500 isn't that much. What they're saying is $4,500 can literally save a child's life. And if you stop and look at your life and think that you could come up with that, you could donate it to a certain place that will go save a child's life in real life. That's what they're saying, yeah. This will be a hard sell to Emily. I'm thinking about our charity conversation we have every year, and I'm trying to imagine myself saying, what if we don't give to the local animal shelter and neighbor in need like we usually do, and instead we do this? She would just be like, I see what you're saying, but no, get out of my face with that. But you could be like, well, how about we do both? Exactly. So I think that's the thing that's my take on it. Like, we support coed and like that's. I have no qualms about supporting coed. Even after doing all this research and understanding effective altruism even more. No qualms whatsoever. I'm sure that that money could be directed better to help other people in other parts of the world. I still think it's money well spent and it's helping people, and I'm very happy with it. I think that's great and I don't have any guilt or shame about that at all, and I don't think I should. What you're saying at that point, like with Co Ed, it is an organization dedicated to helping children in a not very well off country live better and longer lives. So it essentially is effective altruism in a way. Except effective altruism is like, no, the data says that this one is look at the numbers. It's point this better and goes further. It's a numbers and a data game that makes it tough for a lot of people to swallow, I think. Yeah. It's anti sentimentalism, basically in the service of saving the most lives possible. I know it's interesting, and it doesn't surprise me that it has its roots in philosophy because it is really a philosophical sort of head scratcher at the end of the day. Yeah, for sure. It's pretty interesting stuff, isn't it? It really is. I think it's fascinating. Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot more to read, both criticisms and pro EA stuff. And seriously, you could do worse than reading Peter Singer's essay. What is it called? Famine affluence and feeling bad. Famine Affluence and morality. Yeah, it's like 16 pages. It's a really quick read. It's really good. So read that too, and just see what you think about yourself, too, and maybe take some time and examine if you could give to some of these charities or if you're not giving to charity at all. Seriously, do spend some time and see where you could make that change. Yeah. And since I said make that change, and Chuck said, yeah, that means, of course, it's time for listener mail. This is follow up to Albinism. I knew we would have someone who has albinism to write in. I'm glad we did. I knew we had listeners out there. And this is from Brett. Hey, guys. Longtime listener. I have albinism, so I thought I'd throw in my perspective. First off, I know you were struggling to decide how to describe it albino or albinism. My preference is using the term albinism like you guys did. To me, it denotes a condition while saying if someone or something is albino, it feels like you're delegating them to a different species. Right. Being called albino always used to bug me growing up, and that was usually because kids were trying to get a rise out of me. Fortunately, I was a big kid, so it never really escalated to physical bullying. I like this idea. Yes. Like, the kid with Albinism is, like, huge. And someone said something, they're like, excuse me, what did you just say? Yeah. I didn't say anything. Being a child of the like you guys, it was pretty rough at times. On the physical side, my eyes are very light sensitive. They're blue, where, again, while growing up, some of the kids would keep asking me why my eyes were closed and it was bright. And of course, the low vision comes into play as well. I'm considered legally blind as pretty much every other person with Albinism I have met has the same issue. There are ways to adjust in school and ways they could assist me with large print books, magnifiers, monoculars, or the teachers simply letting me look at their slides afterward and have more time with them. Yeah, that's great. As for how people with albinism are portrayed in TV and movies, I don't think being portrayed as a hitman or even someone with magical powers bug me as much as the fact that I know that it was fake, because it would be really hard to be a hit man with the kind of eyesight that we have. I love that. So practical. Yeah. And Brett had a lot of other great things to say, but that is from Brett and longtime listener. Thanks a lot, Brett. That was great. Glad you wrote in. Yeah, thanks a lot. If you want to be like Brett and get in touch with us and say, hey, you guys did pretty good, or, hey, you guys could have done a lot better, or, hey, I'm mad at you guys or whatever you want to say we would love to hear from you. We can take it all and you can address it all to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more Podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1237902375827hsw-sysk-deja-vu.mp3 | How Déjà Vu Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-d-j-vu-works | Does this episode seem strangely familiar? If so, you might be experiencing déjà vu, a topic that scientists are beginning to study seriously. Discover the myriad theories about how déjà vu works in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Does this episode seem strangely familiar? If so, you might be experiencing déjà vu, a topic that scientists are beginning to study seriously. Discover the myriad theories about how déjà vu works in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:50:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=13, tm_min=50, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=83, tm_isdst=0) | 23702612 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom. And be sure to check out the new Stuff You Shouldn't, blog now on the HowStuffWorks home page. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of spoken word entertainment. Get a free audiobook download of your choice when you sign up today, log on to audiblepodcast. Comstoday for details. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W, chuck Bryant. And you put the two of us together, you know that you have stuff you should know, right, Chuck? That's right, Josh. What's you doing there, Chuck? I know you're laughing because I am doing a little thing. I have gunk in my ear, and I could use Q Tip if you have one. Hey, fun fact. Did you know that QTIP originally called baby gays? Baby Gays? I don't think I knew that, but it sounds familiar. Yeah, true story. Very cool. I like starting off with the fact yeah. It has nothing to do with our show. Sure. Right. So, Chuck, speaking of having nothing to do with our show, let's talk about deja vu. Have you ever had it? I have. And let me add, this is a listener suggestion yeah. Dedicated to one Peter Harrison of Pittman, New Jersey. Keeping it real. In New Jersey. In the Garden State. Yeah. He actually had deja vu when he was listening to, I believe, our exorcism podcast. Weird. There you have it. Unsettling one to have deja vu over, I would think. Yeah, it turns out we had a great article on it. So away we go. Yeah, let's do this. Chuck, are you part of the 30% who has reported never having, or I guess just hasn't reported having deja vu? Are you part of the 60% to 70%? 60 to 70. I definitely have had deja vu many times. I was actually surprised to find that number was as low as it was. I thought it'd be hovering in the then the other people were just too lazy to ever say, yeah, I've had deja vu. It seems like something everybody would have. Right, right. Or nothing familiar has ever happened to me. Exactly. I don't pay attention to anything at all. I just watch Dancing with the Stars all the time. Right. All right, Chuck. Well, let's start with the nuts and bolts, shall we? Deja vu. French four. French four already seen. And I believe it was named by Emil Borac, who was a French scientist. First guy to ever study it. So he hated its name. Yeah. In his 1876 book Lavender Del Seas Physique. Wow. Thank you. Three years under my belt, pal. I feel like you just channeled Pepe le Pew. Yeah. So deja vu, as everyone knows, is a feeling that you've seen or experienced something before when you know that you have not. Yeah. It's a sense of familiarity. Unplaced familiarity. Right. For instance, I walk into a store I've never been in and see a person I've never seen. I think, wow, this feels eerily familiar. Yeah. What usually happens to me I'm part of the 60% to 70%, too, of course. Self reported. Sure. And what happens to me usually is there's about three different things that are going on in conjunction with one another. Like a fish jumps in a lake and a woman walks by with a baby stroller, and then, like, a cloud passes in front of the sun. That's how my deja vu is. And I'm like, wow, I've been standing in the same spot watching the same group of things happen, and then it just kind of passes. Interesting. I'm like, Whoa. I don't know if I could categorize mine that specifically, but well done. Thanks. Thank you very much. That's my deja vu. Cool. But yeah. So essentially what was the guy's name? Warrant. Yes. He mentioned deja vu, but he didn't really go into detail about it. The first really respected, I guess, scientists to really take up the mantle was Freud, right? Yeah. And he basically created the theory that was the driving explanation behind deja vu throughout the 20th century, and that was that he believed that deja vu was the result of repressed memories. He said that about everything. Everything. If it wasn't about the penis or the vagina, it was about repressed memories and possibly mother's teeth. Right. Yeah. I went to the Freud house. Did you? You have a nice photo in front of it. That's great. Just slide bar. Yeah. What city is that? Vienna. I am almost positive it was Vienna. We'll find out, won't we? Yes. I trapezed around, though, and all those memories aren't firmly rooted. There's a deja vu joke in there somewhere. I just can't find it right now. So we'll just keep going, huh? Sure, we'll edit it in later. All right. So at some point, as we said, Freud deja vu explained. And then once Freud basically was found out to be basically a fraud well, a coca dictated postulator. Okay. Rather than maybe a real scientist, in my opinion, I'm more of a Youngian than a Freudian. Of course. I'm a doctor. Phil Guy You can't go wrong with that guy. Eventually, at some point in time, deja vu was attached to the paranormal. Right. I'm not entirely certain when this happened, but you've heard that kind of thing, like it had to do with precognition. Yeah. And real scientists wouldn't they kind of just brushed it aside. Well, actually, one does explain deja vu through precognitive dreams, but we'll get to that later, right? That's right. But yeah, anytime you put the stank of paranormal onto something that's arguably real, science just turns their back on it. They can't stand things that they can't apply the scientific method to, whether it's real or not. Right. So everybody just kind of dropped at least the scientific community kind of dropped deja vu until our great friend, the functional MRI was invented. Yes. Aka the Wonder Machine. And it sparked this renewed interest in research into deja vu. Right, yeah. Because now you could actually look at the brain function and try and figure out the science behind it instead of just doing the Freudian thing. Right. Which is makes stuff up. Right. So this is really new research. I mean, just last several years. Right. So the jury is still definitely out, which is good for us and our listeners, because we get to talk about a bunch of competing theories that are super cool, and there's a lot of them. I think the article is, like, over 40 theories of what deja VUX is, and I think we shouldn't go into all 40. There's no way this would be a four hour podcast. But they basically split deja vu into two broad categories. Right? Yes. There's associative and biological. Right. And which one is associative? Well, that's the one that most people out there probably are more familiar with. And that's when your sense is reacting and you see, hear, smell something that stirs up a feeling inside you. And it's memory based. And it's very fleeting. Like ten to 20 seconds. Minor. Shorter than that, actually. Yeah. I would say less than ten, usually. Is there a baby carriage involved? No, never. This is a deja vu among generally healthy people, right? Yes. So we're not really attaching any real meaning to it. It's more like a, whoa, that was cool. Deja vu kind of thing. Right. The other one, biological, is actually the result of some sort of structural impairment to the brain, say epilepsy. Exactly. It's a big one. Yeah. Possibly schizophrenia. And these episodes are much more vivid deja vu than associative. Deja vu. Right. And people who experience biological deja vu have much more of a tendency to attach real meaning to it and really believe, like, they're experiencing something twice. Right. It's not like a fleeting feeling. No. And if you're an epileptic and you have a case of vivid deja vu, prepare for a seizure. Oh, it's right before the seizure. Right before, yeah. And apparently they also smell flowers sometimes, too, or oranges. That's what I've heard. Interesting. I agree. So those are the two broad categories, right? Yes. Still, it doesn't really explain anything, right? No, it doesn't. It seems like researchers have the biological explanation of deja vu. Down a little more pat. Right. It's a little more medically based. Yeah. It's like a temporal lobe malfunction, possibly. And actually, it seems like the temporal lobe has everything to do with deja vu, whether it's structural or associative. Right. Because that's where our conscious memory is happening, basically. Which would be a pretty appropriate place for deja vu to take place. Right, absolutely. So basically, there's a temporal lobe region called the medial temporal lobe. And that's, like you said, the part that's responsible for processing conscious memory. And there's this guy named Robert Efron. Yes. And he's a neurologist, I take it, from Stripe. And he did some investigation into the temporal lobe and he found that it receives information, same sensory input twice right. In the early nineteen s. Sixty s, too. Yeah. And it's still held up as valid. It makes a lot of sense. Okay, so what Efron postulated was that if we're getting the same information twice, one is direct to the temporal lobe, which processes sensory information. The other one is slightly indirect. It gets routed through the right hemisphere of the brain and then shoots over to the left hemisphere of the temporal lobe right within milliseconds. But there is a delay, there's a lag. And so what Efron said was, if this delay is longer than normal, extended by even a couple of milliseconds, the brain has the potential to confuse, I guess, kind of timestamp or what, situation or context that this sensory input was taken in and maybe assigned an incorrect category. Hence we get the feeling that we've been there before, we've experienced this before because we're confused. And that's what deja vu is, which makes tons of sense. Right. Pretty cool. Yeah. That's certainly not the only theory of what deja vu is. No cell phone theory. Shall we talk about that? Yeah. This Dr. Alan Brown is a guy who's done a lot of research in this area as well, and he did studies at Duke University and SMU Southern Methodist with Elizabeth Marsh. It's a lady's name. And what they did was they worked with subliminal suggestion, which is one of my favorite things, I think it's really cool and interesting. Agreed. They showed photographs of different locations to students, and the plan was to ask them which ones were familiar. But before they did this, they showed the same photos at subliminal speeds. So like ten to 20 milliseconds. Got you. And what happened was the brain, of course, registered it unconsciously and that they found familiarity with these slides of locations that they'd never been to. Like, they showed the people the same picture once in a split second, and then later on they thought that they hadn't seen it before, but the brain had already unconsciously processed it. Right. You got it, buddy. And there was an increase in deja vu among those people. Yeah. And I saw a thing on YouTube, and this isn't exactly deja vu, but this is a really cool thing. There was a guy in England named Darren Brown. He's a magician and mentalist, which I think is a great title. And if you look up on YouTube, Darren Brown and Subliminal Advertising, he did this cool deal where he brought in these two advertising guys and said, hey, I want you to come up with an advertising plan for me based on taxidermy. And that's all I told him. And then he set down an envelope and said, this is my plan. And don't look at it or anything like that. Sealed. These guys came up with a little sketch and a logo and a tagline. He came back in ten minutes later, or however long it was, and opened up his envelope. And the logo, the tagline, everything was really similar. And these guys, these ad guys were just blown away. And then it showed a replay of their trip to the studio where they did this. And he had placed these little subliminal suggestions everywhere. One is a little sticker on the inside of the cab. One was on a road sign that they passed. One was a group of students that were wearing a T shirt with a logo that passed in front of the car, and their brains picked all this stuff up. It was a really cool thing. What is the guy's name again? Darren Brown. Okay, what was the name of the clip, do you remember? Darren Brown. Subliminal advertising. Nice. Very direct and appropriate. Yeah. So what are you doing there, Chuck? You okay? Well, yeah, my ear got some gunk in it. Yeah, I could use a QTIP, actually. Hey, Chuck, did you know that Qtips were originally called baby gays? Gay as in G-A-Y-S-I didn't know that, but that sounds familiar. Yes. Back in the 20s. Interesting. Weird. Another aside sorry. Okay, Chuck, that cell phone theory, right? That's what it was called. That was Allen Brown. Yeah. So it applies to deja vu in that, I guess Dr. Brown is saying that when we're not really paying attention, when we're distracted, right. We're still processing sensory information unconsciously. So then let's say you walk into a room and you're not really paying attention, you're talking to somebody. When you do turn your attention to your surroundings and you start taking that sensory input in consciously, that's where potentially where deja vu comes in, right? Because we're comparing this new consciousness of input to something our brain is already familiar with, and we're like, Whoa, I've been here before. Right. I know. They found that some people that are stressed and have anxiety are more prone to it. They also found that people who are refreshed and rested are more prone to it. So, yeah, we're still getting a handle on deja vu, right? One study says one thing and the other says the exact opposite. I love those. I've got another study. Beautiful. Let's hear it. It's called the Hologram study. Good one. Okay, so this guy's name is Herman Snow. S-N-O-W he's Dutch. And he basically has a theory that memories are like a hologram, right? Like a 3D construct. Right? And if you take just a small piece of it, you can reconstruct the memory from it. Right? But if you take a very small fragment, the memory is not going to be completely accurate or true. So Dr. Snow's theory actually, I think he's a philosopher. Maybe his theory is that we have little snippets of memory brought back. We recall them that are triggered by something familiar, but then we reconstruct those memories incorrectly and we use that immediate experience. Right. Say, getting into a car. We have a memory that we've forgotten about a similar car, but we still recall a little bit of it, but we reconstruct it around the car that we're in right now, and we feel like we've been there before. Right. He's a psychiatrist, by the way. Thank you for that. Thank you. No listener mail on that one. Fact checking as we go. Yeah. You're quick, Chuck. Thank you. You got any more? Well, I know you probably wanted to hit the precognitive dream thing. Yeah. And I don't remember who came up with this one, do you? Yeah. Swiss scientist Arthur Funkhouser. Okay, so Funkhouser with the coolest name on the planet. He believed that we actually have dreams that pretend the future essentially very cool and that it's generally mundane stuff that we easily forget. And he actually conducted a study, I think, back in 1939 of a bunch of kids at Oxford and found that somewhere around, like, 12.7% of their dreams eventually bore a striking similarity to future events. Right. And he said it's as simple as that. We somehow have an ability to see what's coming down the road. Right. And that's where deja vu comes from. Well, I did like you said, it was usually more mundane things. He theorized, and this makes sense, too, is that if it wasn't mundane, we're more likely to remember it and are just waking conscious. Right. And these are the ones that slip between the cracks. Right. And since it was mundane, since we can forget it, that would explain that kind of hazy quality that deja vu always has. Nothing's quite right all of a sudden. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And actually interestingly. His theory was backed up by another study from 1988. I found similar results, except that it was more in the 10% of dreams pertain the future. I think it's actually 10% of the people have dreams that could not. 10% of dreams? Are you sure? Yeah. I would say ten to 12% of my dreams come true. Really? It's happening right now. You dreamed of having a podcast with me one day. Nice. 1 second. Should we talk about jamaibu? Yes, please. Jamaicu is the opposite of deja vu. I know a lot of people say vu, jade, but that's just kind of a funny way to say it. Jamie, vu is actually a real term. I passed over this part in the article. Chuck, I'm not kidding. This is brand new to me. It was not in the article, my friend. It's called supplemental research. Oh, good. You should try it sometimes. No, JAMA vu is a real thing. It means never seen, and it's when a familiar situation is not recognized. It's like face blindness. Not really. Okay, those were the shot, Chuck. Right. Actually. Have you ever had a situation where you said a word, like, over and over in your head and then the word starts to sound funny? That happens to me when I see it spelled right. Exactly. That's jamevu. And basically what's happening there is the word is just existing in its form, so the function and meaning is lost. So weird. You're not applying the function of meaning. So you say ex benedict 15 times, and by the end of it, or if you write it out 15 times, you're going to be thinking ex benedict. What are eggs and Benedict and what is hollanda sauce? This word looks so weird. That's one example of John. Don't forget the Canadian bacon. Chuck. Who can? Yeah, I don't know. Our Canadian friends, we love your bacon. They just call it bacon up there. Well, we call it ham. That's true. So wow. Chuck, you dazzled me just now. Good. Yes. I like to do that from time to time. Well, that's deja vu, I guess, for now, until somebody finally cements down exactly what's going on. And again, I think the wonder machine is going to be the utility that does it for us. Deja vu all over again. As Yogi Bear once said, Great man. And Chuck, I think it's time to say hi to the people at Audible. Audible.com are one of our beloved sponsors. Even better than that, let's tell everybody that the people at Audible are trying to say hey to all of our listeners. If they go right now to audiblepodcast. comStuff and sign up, they'll get one free download. And this is actually kind of big. They have 50,000 plus titles on the site. You can get a book if you want. Yeah, you get stand up and actually, I was looking on the site, and they have a bunch of George Carlin, and specifically a place for my stuff. RIT, arguably his greatest work ever, is my personal favorite. So, yeah, there's all sorts of it's not just audiobooks. I love Carla. And speaking of which, this is an audiobook either, and I'm surprised you didn't pick this one as your plug, but the Gonzo Tapes the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. These were just recently released, and it's a long series. I believe it's in a bridge version on Audible.com about but you get about 6 hours worth of famous author extraordinaire Hunter S. Thompson speaking into a tape recorder over the years he did this, and they've gathered all these tapes, and it's really awesome. I have found my one free download. Yeah. So what I will be doing is going to audiblepodcast. comStuff and signing up. So, Chuck, I know you love plugging the blog. You want to take the opportunity. Sure. I would like to direct everyone to our new blog, which is an Internet term for blog. And Josh and I write on this thing a couple of times a day, and we talk about cool stuff. And basically the idea here was to get The Stuff You Should Know nation involved with each other and leaving comments and talking to each other and reading about cool stuff that they should know, instead of just listening to us say it. And also, don't forget to join these Stuff You Should Know nationwide, actually buying a plot of land. Right. We'll be sending details out via our blog, ironically enough. Yeah. And you can access it through the homepage on Housetoforce.com. Yeah. And it's called stuff you should know. Yeah. Appropriately enough. And you can see lovely photo of Josh, who looks cute as a dang button, and Chuck in his flat cap. That's right. Looking good. It's good stuff. So now there's a blog plug. Let's do listen to a man. Right? You're ready for this, josh I was born ready, Chuck. I have a couple of Stuff We Should Know, which is our new nicer name for corrections. I thought it was stuff we should have known. Sure. Okay. Sounds good. All right. Christine Lee of Toronto, Ontario. And as a quick side note, I can't remember his name, but we had a Canadian friend write in and say, it really bugs when we say, like, Montreal, Canada. He said, that'd be like saying, Atlanta, United States. All right, we need to start saying the problem bacon. So Christine Lee is of Korean descent, and she said in the Friday 13th podcast, we talked about unlucky numbers in China and Japan. And again, can people die fright? We talked about the same thing, and it's actually true in Korea as well. And she feels like Koreans are often slighted to their Chinese and Japanese friends. Really? So we need to start looking into other Asian countries, basically. Yes. Currently, four is an unlucky number in Korea. And thank you, Christine Lee, for that. Sorry. Christine and Chris from Pennsylvania. You're going to love this one. He said he listened to the Comments podcast. I'm surprised that between Josh's Magnum Pi knowledge and Chuck's movie Knowledge, you guys never brought up the connection between Magnum and the 1978 movie Coma. Tom Selleck was actually in that movie, and I haven't seen it in years, but I remember him being one of the coma patients that was suspended on wires. And that is indeed true. I don't remember Tom Seleak in that one. My earliest memory of Tom Celic in a movie was Looker. No, he wasn't in that. Okay, what was the other one with the robots then? Right. You're thinking of Runaway. Very nice. Yeah. Are you sure he wasn't in Looker? Yeah, that was Albert Finney. It was a great movie, though, for an eighty s sci fi. I agree with Susan. Daisy. It too yeah. All right, well, we should probably get out of here before Chuck and I say something to embarrass ourselves right. Further. Yeah. So thanks for listening. I would advise everybody to go on to the site and check out how deja vu works. Find an article written by her colleague Leanne Opener. There's a nice little Easter egg hidden in the article that may induce deja vu in you. You can find that by typing in how deja vu works in our handy search bar, howstep Works.com. And if you want to send Chuck and I a message via electronic mail, a non haiku related message. Yes, Chuck, yes. Non haiku. You can alert us at 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? Yeah." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1217274987434sysk-run-out-water.mp3 | Exactly what happens if we run out of water? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/exactly-what-happens-if-we-run-out-of-water | In 1995, World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin declared that "the wars of the next century will be about water." Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn what happens once we run out of water. | In 1995, World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin declared that "the wars of the next century will be about water." Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn what happens once we run out of water. | Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:08:37 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=12, tm_min=8, tm_sec=37, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=213, tm_isdst=0) | 12396081 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects and resolve online fraud. Safe, Secure Visa. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. It's Josh and Chuck here. Josh Clark and Charles Bryant. Just a couple of staff writers@howstepworks.com. That's all we are. That is it. Chuck. Chuck, I imagine you're familiar with Darfur, right? Yeah, I am. I keep up with the news. Have you heard about basically the peace agreement falling apart lately? Yes. I think you should tell people though. Okay, well, basically in 2006, the Sudanese government had a piece of court established with this loan rebel faction. And there's a multitude of rebel factions fighting each other and the Sudanese government right now in Sudan. And basically one rebel group, the Sudanese Liberation Movement, stepped forward and said, you know what, we'll come up with the ceasefire. Let's come up with an accord, a power sharing agreement, that kind of thing. And everything was going pretty well until apparently the Sudanese army bombed some villages that are under SLM control. Right. This happened like yesterday, basically. So now, all of a sudden, the SLM leaders accusing the President of Sudan of even further war crimes. The President Al Bashir, I think is his last name, he is basically about to be indicted by The Hague and he's in big trouble. Crimes against humanity, war crimes, the whole shebang. So it sounds like things are falling apart as if they couldn't get any worse. Right. It's pretty heavy stuff. But did you know that one of the reasons why the conflict in Suzanne has taken like 200,000 lives so far started in 2003. It was in large part started over access to drinking water. Right. And that's not unusual. Safe drinking or clean drinking water in third world countries and around the world is getting more obsolete and it's kind of a problem. It definitely is. As I understand it, 1.2 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. Right. That's like 20% of the world population. I know. And sadly, I think 6000 children every year die because they don't have access to safe drinking water. That's a very startling statistic. Yeah, then there's plenty of them. I mean, we could sit here and rattle them off. Basically all of what they add up to is that we're running out of water and we're beginning to see the effects of that. Africa seems to be kind of at the cutting edge of all things horrible for some reason. Right. And right now it looks like what we're seeing in Africa as far as water goes, is what the developing world is going to see in 20 or 50 or 100 years. Largely because we don't value water. It's cheap. Right. It's cheap, and people use it like it's free. Yeah. I mean, I think it takes like twelve gallons just to stay in a human being every day. Twelve gallons of water. That includes everything. Right. Bathing and drinking water and cooking, toilet cooking, the whole shebang. Right. So you've got twelve gallons that you need to stay alive. Right. Americans use, I think, 158 gallons a day on average. Every single one of us, on average, uses that much. And true American spirit. We don't treat it with much respect right now. No. So, I mean, what will happen if we start to run out of water there, Chucker? What happens when we in the developing world, I should say run out of water? Well, there could potentially be wars fought over water. I know that the World Bank vice president at one point said that the next wars in the next century will be fought over water. Yeah, he said that, like 1995. And we only had to wait like eight years, three years into the 21st century when Darfur breaks out. Right. It was the first war fought over water in like 4500 years. The last one was among Mesopotamians, I think. Right. So and what happened to them exactly? It's a cautionary tale if I've ever heard one. Right. I think part of the problem is that water is a lot of times the countries and even states share borders with bodies of water. So it's not the kind of thing you can really claim ownership of. So here in Georgia, we had a situation recently where we're still in a drought, but we have a situation with Alabama and Florida and I think Tennessee even, where we're kind of all battling for the same water. Well, we drew Tennessee into it by suing to have the Georgia border go into the middle of the Tennessee River all of a sudden, rather than at the bank. Right. Based on an old survey that they said was incorrect from the no one really cared much until now. And now I kind of need that water. But it's not a problem when there's neighboring states and everyone's good friends. We're trying to work it out diplomatically. Yeah. There's no war crimes going on yet. No. But it can be a problem in developing nations where they're not exactly the best of friends. Right, exactly. And it's a little more dire of a circumstance. And so you can't have wars break out over water. Well, even beyond boars, I imagine a predictable model of what will begin to happen when you start to run out of water. The first thing that would go would be crops. Right. Because we need food in much less supply than we need water. But water is the basic essential ingredient of everything. We can go like two days without water, but like eight weeks without food. Right. Yeah. About 60 days. You can live without food as long as you have water, but three to five days without water, and it's dehydration and death. Right. And ironically, though, we need water to raise that food. So even if we have drinking water, we're still going to need food eventually. So you run out of water. You run out of food if you run out of food. Right. All of a sudden, the farmers who were once raising these crops in livestock still need money to survive. They still need money to get by and to be able to purchase whatever food is available. Right, right. So they start moving to the cities. Exactly. And then the city experiences this big population boom that strains the infrastructure, the sewer system, which eventually is broken and becomes polluted, which takes out even more of the water supply. Right. So it really is a trickle down effect, and it's excuse the pun here, but it affects everything all the way on down, and it's wide reaching. Yeah. So basically, this is kind of the nightmare scenario that we're facing. And one of the things that I questioned when I was looking into this for this article exactly what happens if we run out of water? Okay, well, we've got climate change going on right now. Clearly there's some climate skeptics, also an article on how stuff works.com. But for the most part, most people can see quite clearly that some 18,000 year old glaciers around the world that have sustained humans for as long as humans have lived near them, are suddenly losing 60% of their mass in the last 20 years. Right, right. So why don't we just drink all that? Sounds like a good idea to me. It is. The problem is we rely on these glaciers, which support billions of people in, like, Asia, South America, Central America. They rely on them for their drinking supply to kind of melt in a predictable rate each year and then be replenished by snow. Right. Well, if it's too warm to support, like, a snow peak or a glacier any longer, it's not being replenished. It becomes part of the rain cycle and eventually becomes salinated water. Right. And we have water water everywhere. Right, exactly. So most of the Earth's water is either ocean or locked in ice right now. For the time being, it will eventually be mostly ocean. Right, right. Which we can't drink. We can't or can we? Well, I know that if you drink plain salt water, it'll dehydrate you even more. But I think you might be talking about removing the salt from the water. Yeah. Desalination. Right. And that's actually in progress right now. There's some desalination plants around the world that are providing fresh water from saltwater, but it's like super expensive technology right now. Yeah, that's one of the problems. I know another one of the cool ideas that they're working on. Bioengineers are trying to produce crops that need less water, or they can live through artificial irrigation, which I know a lot of people against us think it's kind of creepy to eat this bioengineered food. Right. But it might be a good solution if it will save us water, I think everybody will just kind of get on board. Hung exactly right. And agriculture as it stands is basically one of the biggest users actually the biggest user of water. I think it uses 70% of the global water consumption goes to agriculture. Right. The problem is our irrigation technology is just so terrible we lose like 42% of that water. Yeah. It's not a very efficient system. That's a big problem. That would definitely help as well. In addition to creating those hybridized crops, that kind of thing. Yeah, I know. Drip irrigation is, I think, 90% effective. Yeah, or efficient. That's the wave of the future, in my opinion. I think you're right. So check. Do you know anything about carrying capacities? I know a little bit, but I think you might be the man in this room. Well, I did study anthropology at dear old University of Georgia, and that's where I first learned about carrying capacity is basically the total number of people that anything can sustain, especially with food, water, that kind of thing. Before we over text the planet to the limits, we used to run around as hunter gatherers. Right. Some of us still do. Right, that's true. But at one time all of us did. They can sustain like 20 million people. Then all of a sudden we come up with agriculture 1012 thousand years ago and all of a sudden we can sustain 12 billion people with that. Right? Right. That switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture gives some people hope that technology is going to be able to stay ahead of this curve and that we will never actually reach the carrying capacity. We'll have moved on to something else and the day will be saved and we will create statues for scientists. Right. That's what I'm hoping for. Yeah, me too, Chuck, because the alternative is kind of scary. Yeah. And thirsty. Yeah. Well, I'm going to drink my out of date fresca and really enjoy it for once. Thanks, Chuck. If you want to learn more about water and exactly what will happen if we run out of it, type in exactly what happens if we run out of water on how stuff works.com. And stick around for Chuck's recipe for a water free breakfast movie right after this. It's good stuff. You should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket? Or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera? But thankfully, we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. So, Chuck, give up your secret. Tell us this great recipe. It's really good, Josh, and good for you. Good. What I do is I prep ahead of time and make them kind of throughout the week. So I'll get a bunch of strawberries and some raspberries and blueberries, and I'll chop up the strawberries and I'll freeze it. And that's one of the keys. Everything's got to be frozen. I hadn't heard that one before. Oh, yeah, it's good. That's why my smoothies are terrible, I guess, right? Well, it keeps you from having to add ice if all the fruit is frozen. So you put all that in a blender or food processor with a banana, and then you add some orange juice, and then you add the secret ingredient is vanilla protein powder, which you get at your health food store. I can eat that stuff dry right out of the canister. I know it's good. So you blend that all up, it gets nice and thick, and you've got a delicious breakfast smoothie on your hands. That's fantastic, Chuck. Now you can find all sorts of great recipes, not necessarily Chuck's water free breakfast smoothie recipe, but some other really great ones on the Food Channel on howstepworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housestepworks.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's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more. Because 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." | |
Ethnobotany: How to Get Drugs from Plants | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/ethnobotany-how-to-get-drugs-from-plants | In 1820, most of the drugs listed in the American Pharmacopoeia were plant-based; by 1960, it was a mere 5 percent. Yet in the late 20th century this trend reversed. Why? Join Josh and Chuck as they get to the root of ethnobotany and plant-based medicine. | In 1820, most of the drugs listed in the American Pharmacopoeia were plant-based; by 1960, it was a mere 5 percent. Yet in the late 20th century this trend reversed. Why? Join Josh and Chuck as they get to the root of ethnobotany and plant-based medicine. | Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:04:13 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=20, tm_min=4, tm_sec=13, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=216, tm_isdst=0) | 36602868 | 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 this July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know from our beloved website. HowStuffWorks.com it's right. We work for a website. Did you know that? Yeah. You know when people ask me what I do? Like, I don't know, I met some friend, Emily the other day and she's like, what do you do? I always just say, I work for a website. Do you? And it starts in on stuff. I'm just like, I work for a website. It's easy that way. Not only do you work for it, you are the website is what you should say. I have lobbied for how Chuckworks.com people would sign on to that man. Yeah, sort of in a much better way to start out the future of the Internet one, huh? Yeah, probably. So instead we're going to go back, way back, Chuck, back in time. Was that Hughie Lewis? Sort of. He's playing tomorrow night or tonight where I think he's doing Chastain. He's doing like the Memphis Stacks music. Memphis soul show. What? Along with your favorite Huey Lewis classics. What? I did not know this. How did you not tell me this? Would you be seriously wanting to I would totally go to Huey Lewis. Dude. Have you ever heard sports? Yes, I had Sports when I was one of the greatest albums ever released. It was one of the top albums of that year from beginning to finish. That was a great album. Anyway, yes, I would see to be Lewis and now I can figure out how to get there in a few hours. I don't know if it's tonight, but I heard a promo for it today on the radio, so it's good to know. Well, Chuck, we're going to go even further back than the height of Hughie Lewis career. We're going to go several thousand years before that. Okay. Now we'll go back to about the height of Huey Lewis's career, maybe a little before it when I was a young lad and I was watching TV remember those Time Life books that we talked about here? There you love them. So there was one set that it was like mysteries of mankind or mysteries of History or something like that. And I remember clearly it said, how could ancient civilizations perform brain surgery and patients survive? And there's this kind of like weirded, almost caveman looking guy with like a scar on his head, and he looks at the camera like, I'm still alive, but it hurts. I saw that and I went it just captured me. Right. Well, I came to find out that that was a real thing and that apart from a lot of the stuff you find in time, like books, it was correct. There's such a thing as trepidation, and people actually did survive it. Did you talk about this in the lobotomies? I think so, because I know we had to have it. But trepidation and has been around as a surgical procedure. It's brain surgery in that the brain is affected by it. Sometimes they went in and poked around, but for the most part it was just cutting away a piece of the skull in the scalp to relieve pressure on the brain. Right. And they did the same thing in a much more sophisticated way these days. Sure. For like, swelling of the brain. Right. And some traditional societies still carry out trepidation. Really? Today? Yeah, but as I said, it was successful. Some Indian cultures showed evidence of like, at 80% success rate, which is pretty good as far as 70%. Right. Not bad. But this is a really ancient procedure. This is Neolithic, right? 7002 thousand BC. That's a long time ago. Yeah, that's like four to 9000 years ago. And if you think about that, four to 9000 years ago, if they could successfully 70% of the time, they could successfully open your skull up. Well, they could produce that with 100% success rate. It would have living. They could remove your heart. You could do all kinds of things, pull it right out. 100% success rate. So trepidation is this ancient form of surgery. And about the same time, probably people started figuring out that not only could they perform surgery, but if they wanted to, they could hang their shingle out and practice medicine if they knew what they were talking about with plants. Yeah, right. That's right. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. 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. So for a long time, we suspect indigenous groups had some sort of idea or understanding about what plants were, what plants could be used for. That's right. But then about 1500 BC, there is this explosion, right? Yes. This was after the ancient Egyptians and pharaohs poked around the Sumerians with medicinal plants. China, Africa, and India. That's what really exploded. And they actually started to list these things and put them down on paper or whatever they were using at the time. To papyrus. Well, in Egypt, in Chemite, if you want to be technical, there's a papyrus that's dated to 1553 BC that lists 700 different drugs, a lot of which are plant based. Probably almost all. Yeah, I would say so. They weren't doing synthetic chemical stuff. No. But about the same time, like you said, in Africa and India and China, all these people started just jotting down their understandings of plants. And it was extensive, right? Yeah. Like, rub this on your that and it will ease your pain and suffering. Exactly. So we should write that down. A lot of trial and error, I imagine. Isn't that Shax line from that Icy Hot ad? From this there and it'll laser pain. I think so. Do it. Can you dig it? So this understanding, this knowledge is, like, added to and subtracted from over the course of centuries and then millennia. Yeah. And then about the 19th century, there is like a sharp divergence, right? Yes, Josh. That is when, in the first edition of the American Pharmacopia, early 10 00 18 00 drugs at the time were 70% plant based. FlashForward 1960, only 5.3 were plant based. So what happens is you've introduced people that could figure out how to synthetically duplicate a lot of these plants. Right. So are they still plant based? Does that even count after a while? I think it's kind of like how people say, like, this is made with our product not tested on animals. Right. That's because it uses stuff that was tested on animals 30 years ago and found safe. So I think it's much the same way where once you synthesize something enough or, you know, a synthetic alkaloid has this effect, you can use it in all these different ways with something else. Right. Does that make sense? So that represented a real separation from the west and traditional cultures. Right. Just medicinal rift is what I just called it. Kind of like medicinal rift. Yeah. As our understanding of chemistry and the effects of drugs on the body grew, then we just kind of diverge from traditional societies. But there came to be an awareness at some point in time that all of these rainforests that were destroying and all of the uncontacted tribes that were running out have a wealth of information that wasn't listed in these early pharmacopias. Right, sure. That there's a bunch of understanding of how to cure all sorts of diseases out there and we kind of need it. So out of that has grown this whole field. The subdiscipline of anthropology called ethnobotany. Yeah. What was the Connery movie? They were searching for the cure for cancer in the jungle. Rangoon. Beyond Rangoon. No, that was rangoon, man. No, I can't remember the name of it. The attack of the Rangoon. It was the lady from The Sopranos and Good Fellows. And then Sean Connery. And they were in the jungle, I think, searching for a cure for cancer or something. Good movie. But that's the point, though, is that the cure for cancer may be out there in some leaf that we just need to locate and synthesize. Right. The problem is the field of ethnobotany isn't training people to go out and eat leaves and write down their thoughts on it. No. I guess they're interviewing people, local tribesmen, indigenous folks, and saying, hey, tell us what you know about medicine. Maybe we can learn something from that. And this is a very long process. An ethnobotanist is probably going to be somebody who is trained as a botanist in undergraduate school sure. And then trained in anthropology, linguistics, possibly chemistry in grad school. Got to be a people person. Yeah. You have to be able to chat it up with possible head shrinkers. Sure. And you go out in the field and you have to gain the trust of the people who have this information. It might not be common to the whole tribe. So you have to gain the trust of the person who knows what plant to use for what and then get that information from them in a way that's agreeable. There's a debate among ethnobotany that's pretty much resolved these days, but for a long time the end justified the means. Like, if you could cure athletes foot with this plant and this guy doesn't want to give it to you, don't you have a moral obligation to basically take that information from them? Steal it, as it were? Now there's a movement toward making sure that these people are like their trust isn't broken, that they're willing to share it, and if they're not willing to share it, you pay them, pay the money, pay them. Either way, compensation is kind of becoming more of a thing among Ethnobotanist rather than, thank you, you've done something great here, bring in the trucks. Yeah, well, not only just what the plan is, though, but obviously they need specifics, they need to know what part of the plant, because I wrote that article a while back on how you can, I think, the universal editability test some parts of a plant, like eat the leaf and you can sustain on it. Eat the root and you die in 10 seconds. So what part of the plant? How much of it do you use? Which would essentially be the prescription. Right. So the Ethnobotanist finds the stuff out, takes it back to the synthetic chemist, who basically has to go over. Hopefully the Ethnobotanist is like, it's the leads just focus on the leaves, rather than having to do this on the plant and the stems and the seeds or the flowers or whatever. What a crazy job. Imagine how difficult that is. It is very difficult to synthesize something like that. Well, first they have to isolate it. They got to find out what because the local shaman, he's not going to be like, well, it's his alkaloid in there that's going to really get you off. Right. And by get off, we mean healing you. Exactly. It's the synthetic chemist who isolates the active ingredient, right. And then figures out if they can put together a synthetic version of it. Because one way to get medicine from plants is simple extraction, right? Yes. But it's not the most reliable. No, because you can extract, let's say, the essential oils from one bit and it might be, like, really potent and another bit might not be, so it's not consistent across the board. Right. And if one bit makes it into one jar of that stuff and the other bit makes it into one, somebody who's in pain is not going to get any relief. The other person is going to die because they're going to get, like, 80 times or feel really good, depending on what happens. So synthesis is the artificial synthesis is the preferred means of figuring out how to make a reasonable facsimile of what's in the plant. You're trying to mimic the compounds? Yeah. And more compounds. If you make it and it's the same thing, it has the same molecular structure as what's found in the plant, but you made it in the lab, it's still the same thing. Right. It's like a test tube baby. Like, the baby is still a real human, this is still a real compound, I guess, on a molecular level, sure. But yeah. I don't know. That's a good question. I thought somebody much smarter than us probably is, like, oh, boys, I'll send you an email. Right. I'll let you know. I'm looking forward to that one, I have to say. Me too. And cheapness is the other reason expense. Yes. Well, it's cheaper to synthesize something. Yeah. Once you figure it out. I'm sure it's a very long, expensive process, but once you figure it out, you're like put a couple of hydrogens in with that helium and want staying back. Yeah. And better for the environment too. Like if something has to stay plant based, you're going to need a lot of that plant. That's true. You know what I'm saying? So we have a lot of success stories in synthesizing drugs from plants. Right. Quinine a part of one of my favorite drinks, gin and tonic. You know it quinine is pretty across the board. Pretty awesome thing, I guess. Yeah. That's why tonic water is called tanic water because it has quinine in it. And it's for malaria. Yeah, it's very small amount, but I guess it gets it that signature taste. And don't go with the diet. It's awful. Oh, diet tonic. Oh yeah. It's never good. You know, I taste that is super bitter. Remember when we did the how taste Works article? I figured out that I am a super taster of bitterness. Like I can barely tolerate tonic water, it's so bitter. Really? Yeah. Interesting. And Kampari don't even get me started, but sometimes I torture myself and just have some anyway. I have Campari and tonic. I've never mixed it with tonic. I think my head would explode. So quinine is used to treat malaria, right. Based on the chinchona bark. Then you got, let's say another example. I'm sorry, dioxin treating heart conditions. And that comes from the lovely fox glove. The lovely, lovely fox glove that you grow in your garden. We do grow it in my garden. Although my fox glove is dead right now. It's kind of depressing. Is it? Yes, it is very dead. Oh, no, I mean Depressing. Yeah, of course. Look at dead plants. It's awful. Why are you not watering it frequently? I don't know what the deal was with the fox club. They might not have yet transplanted it soon enough or it might not do well in 110 heat index heat. Is there enough shade? Sort of shady. Emily is the gardener. I'm just the gardener's assistant. I got you the heavy lifter. Another great example that you listed. This is your article, right? Yeah. Okay. Is the alkaloid from poppy plants was synthesized into diocetomorphine and sold commercially by bear for twelve years as heroin. Yeah, that's where heroin came from called heroin. I'm just going to go to the drugstore and get some heroin. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And what's crazy is the heroin that's created today you can make a case is synthesized every time a batch is made because it's derived from the opium poppy. But then you screw with it a little bit to make something different. Slightly different. But yes. Bear invented heroin. Wow. Yeah. It's amazing. And then bear also invented aspirin, which is derived from willow bark. That's right. And are you going to say aceticlic acid? Nice. Okay, that's aspirin. But what's the natural compound? Salison. Yes, Salison. Everybody's known about willow bark for at least in Hippocrates, who wrote about it, and he was a Greek, and he lived in probably like the third century BC. Fourth century BC. Yeah. I wish we used zero more in this culture. It's so screwy. I know, but I love it. Anytime you're trying to place a time like this, you always kind of give this look up like you're trying to remember hanging out with that person. No, I think that was Thursday, if I remember correctly. Yeah. So, yeah, it was an anti inflammatory and a fever reducer way back then. Still is. And that's one of the cool things when you people that poopoo Eastern medicine and things. It's like a lot of the stuff we use today is just a synthesized version of rubbing bark on your face and a lot more than you'd think L DOPA, which is used to treat Parkinson's derived from a plant. There's a whole awesome list. If you search plants or drug synthesized plants and a search engine, I think the first result is going to be this list from the year 2000. Modern drugs that were derived from plants. Yes. And possibly my all time favorite volume was derived from valerian root, which I found out and just started taking a lot of Valyrian root. Now you can make a tea from it. Does it chill you out? Really? Yeah. It will knock you out, too, if really valyrian concentrated. Wow. But it stinks to high heaven. And I want to COA right now. I am not in any way, shape, or form recommending anyone try anything that I ever say that I do. Ever. Even like Larry and routine that's in a supplement store, right? It is. But you know what? That's funny, you're saying that because I was listening to why doesn't the FDA regulate herbs? And we had this conversation that it's like because it's in a natural food store, we just think that it's like, oh, it's fine, it's harmless. Right. You could totally OD on any number of things in a natural food store. It's because the FDA doesn't regulate it that it appears harmless, even though it is creatine bulk. This brings up a point, Josh, that I think have always believed that there is no disease that wherein the cure is not somewhere on the planet Earth. Do you believe that? I've always thought that, and this is true. Look at all like, every plant that is eventually synthesized into medicine. I think the answers are all out there. It's just a matter of God's. Great scavenger hunt. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, I like that idea. Okay. I've been hitting you with the humdingers lately, haven't I? Yes, you are. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to sex by cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun's shining, the daylight lasts longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story, isn't there? There sure is. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, you can tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right Media. That's right. Part true crime and part comedy, My Favorite Murder takes you on a journey through small town mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. That's Right hosts Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hard stark banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales, and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great, and it's a fun show, and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today so you can kind of see aspirin's been around for a while. Heroin's been around for a while. Tonic has been around for a while. We're still making stuff from plants, but we've also figured out another way to use plants for medicine, and that's to use enzymes from the plants as catalysts and chemical reactions. You sell as little petri dishes? Almost. Yeah. Basically, if you want to carry out a chemical reaction in a safe environment, inject it into a plant cell. It's a great little house for it. And they're little factories. They make all sorts of stuff we need in chemical reactions to synthesize drugs. So they help in all sorts of ways. So up with plants. Yes. But not just plants. Chuck. Not just plants that we might like to just chew on once in a while. Like Valyrian, right? Yeah. But also poisons. For just as long as medicinal plants have been used as drugs, we've also used poisons as well. Yeah. That papyrus you were talking about from luxury Egypt, that listed all the drugs and plant based drugs. It also listed a lot of poisons and a lot of antidotes to those poisons. Yeah. Because once we figured out there's such thing as poison, we started looking for ways to cure them. Right. And that kind of follows your logic that there's an antidote to every poison. Yeah, right. For every malady. I believe that. And not because of any deep research, but just because of things like this. And because I think the Earth is structured that way. Yes. Balance. Right. But even before that, homeostasis. Yes. Even before. That papyrus, though. About 1500 years before, there was a chemite Egyptian pharaoh named Menis, and he was the first person documented to conduct research into poisons. Yeah, because they killed people with poison for years. Yeah. Socrates was famously killed in 399 BC. That's the fourth century. I wonder how they first discovered that some poisons could actually heal you. I don't know. Maybe by killing someone. Maybe. Right before they died, they were like, jeez, my back feels great. All of a sudden they're like then they die. Yeah. I don't know. Just an idea. We have had a lot of hair brain ideas of what can cure you. Like whiskey to cure a snake bite, right? Yeah. If you're in the Old West, pour some whiskey on it. Right. So in the 1920, some Brazilian researchers put that to the test and found that not only is it patently untrue, but it actually makes things worse. Yeah. It speeds up the blood flow. Yes, the alcohol does. So the delivery of the venom is just much quicker. Yeah. I think the whiskey remedy I would choose is, here, drink a lot of this because you've been bitten by a snake and you're going to die. Right. So you might as well just numb the pain. Yes. And no one ever had a patient where it actually worked. They just heard of a patient where it worked. That's right. But the same Brazilian doctors came up with a way to cure a snake bite, didn't they? Yeah. And this is amazing to me too. Everyone knows about antivenom, which most people call antivenom. It's venom. It is. Although I think I've heard seen venom is acceptable now because so many people use it or something. Well, some of our linguist friends and more progressive ones are like, just let language go where it's going. Exactly. Decimate, for instance, what they found out was they can use poison to fight poison. So by injecting a snake venom into something large that can take it, like a horse, they would build up an immune system. I bet there was some trial and error there too. Yeah, but I can't just see where they inject the horse with the band and go around to its face and punch it. So they would inject it into the horse, punch them in the face, and then the horse would eventually build up an immunity and produce antibodies called antivenon. Then they would extract that from the horse, the hemoglobin from the blood. Now we got an antivenom that we can use on humans. Right. And so the antivenin, those antibodies, when somebody is bit by a snake, when you use the antivenon that's derived from that snake venom, those antibodies go into the human, find the antibodies, find the venom and cling to it so that you can't do anything. It's like, get off me. Yeah. No, I'll never let you go. And I want to know how that first started too. Who was the first person that thought maybe this poison that kills us can heal us? These Brazilian doctors were the first ones. So let's inject it into a horse and see about it. I mean, it's so massive. No, that makes sense. But just the initial idea, the spark of curiosity, which we always talk about. It's pretty amazing. Gorgeous. Yeah. So, Chuck, no one knows this yet, this is the big secret, but this podcast, this episode, is based on two articles. And did you find the common thread between the two articles? Sean Connery? No, willy nilly. I use it both willynilly in both articles. You say that a lot, though. I could see that. But did you know Willynilly's Hyphenated? I did, yeah. I thought it was capitalized, like a name. Just the Willy part is capitalized Willynilly. So these Brazilian doctors figured that out, right? They were not the first to figure out that, hey, this thing that kills me could also make me stronger, right? Yes. In a certain way, at the very least. This is very disparate. Using poisons right, to cure other problems is very logical. It's saying this poison does this and this malady does the opposite. So if you apply this poison to this malady, it should bring you back to homeostasis. Yeah, hopefully. Which is what we're all searching for. And one of the first guys to follow this reasoning to the very dangerous conclusion of Here, Take This Deadly Night Shade was a Scottish researcher named Thomas Fraser. Are you going to try this word? Acetylcholine stereos inhibitor. Wow. Thank you. You practiced that one. That was the first time I said it out loud, although I mouthed it a few times. Well, he use atropine as that thing that you just said that's found in deadly nightshade. Beladona, very potent hallucinogen, very dangerous poison as well. And this atropine, which is an active ingredient in it, contains an alkaloid that this Thomas Fraser figured out combats the effects of anthrax. Yeah. So anthrax and seren gas. Similarly, they're both nerve toxins and the way that they kill you this is horrible. I know, it's unbelievable. So you have this thing called acetylcholine sterease and it's a normal enzyme in your body that basically tells your neurons to fire your nerves. Fire because it says, hey, go fire, and it breaks down naturally. What Saran and Anthrax do is they prevent it from being broken down and it just hangs out in your synapses and tells your nerves to keep firing and firing and firing, and your body just overloads on electrical charges and you die very painfully. Very painfully, because you feel everything, because all the nerves in your body are firing way more than they should be. So what Scottish physician Thomas Frazier figured out is that atropine is an acetylcholine stereo inhibitor. So it goes in and basically binds the receptors where the acetylcholine stereo would normally bind itself, and hence atropine. This poison can. Prevent the effects of anthrax and serena. And that's still used today, ironically, from the deadly Night shade plant. Yeah. The whole concept of using poisonous medicine is just dripping with irony. It is. Josh, another thing they're doing these days at the University of Buffalo is they are using Chilean tarantula, rose tarantula, to combat heart attack death. So cell walls have these little channels that open when the cell stretches, and they basically help to contract and release your heart muscles. Or probably just contract. Well, they channel the ions through these are ion channels. The ions give it the electrical signal, so it's part of the pumping. Right. But if these things get too wide, there will be too many positive ions. And that is basically what could potentially lead to a heart attack. Right, because it throws off the rhythm, and your heart attack is just an a rhythmic heartbeat. So this tarantula event binds to these channels and blocks it from passing through and potentially saves people from heart attacks. Tarantula venom. Yeah. And scorpions. Yes. I told you that I knew someone who was undergoing that therapy. We talked about that. What's the most venomous creature on Earth? One. I thought we did, yeah. And I tried to find research on him today to see if he is still fighting and fight with cancer, and I could not find out. But there is a guy I could ask. Okay. I got a lot of hope. This guy was a big inspiration for me. Well, that's good. Let everybody know. I will. Unless it's bad news, and then I will just not speak of it. Okay. But what we were talking about is scorpion venom is being used to treat, in this case, brain cancer, the Israeli yellow scorpion. And it has a protein that binds itself to cancerous cells found in gliomas, and that is brain cancer, actually. And it basically keeps it from replicating itself, keeps these cells from spreading. Well, it does. And they also figured out that you can attach basically, a radioactive iodine to this venom, the protein found in the venom. And so the venom goes and seeks out the glioma, and it brings with it along for the ride, this radioactive iodine. And as we all know, cancer cells don't like radiation. So it basically seeks and destroys it's like a vehicle for it. It is. Is this the iron oxide nanoparticles? I don't know. All right, here's the deal. This is what I got. Chlorotoxin is the chemical that affects the protein, and the protein is what helps spread the cancer. This is new. I think they have a new study where they got chemically bonded iron oxide nanoparticles. They put that with the lab made version of the chlorotoxin, and they created these nanoprobes. Each nanoprobe can carry 20 chlorotoxin molecules. Did they paint, like, a 40s pin up girl on the front of your cell? It's basically what it is. So a tumor cell uptakes a single nanoparticle, it's absorbing a lot of this chlorotoxin at once. So basically, they did this on mice and they found that with the nanoparticles or the nanoprobes that they're using, it fights the tumor by 98% compared to 45% of just the venom. So I guess they've given it a little super car that can hold a lot of the stuff in the trunk. That is really cool. Yeah. Good. Up with mice, up with mice. Up with scorpion venom. Yeah. Down with cancer. Right. Well, you got anything else? I do not. I don't either. Chuck, I think this turned out better than I thought. Oh, yeah. This turned out exactly how I hoped it would. Really? Yes. I thought it was going to be great, and it was. That was very nice. If you want to check out these two articles, you can type in poisonmedicine and plant medicine into the search bar. Howstepworks.com that will bring both of them up, along with a bunch of other cool stuff in our wonderful search page. And since I said search bar, you know, that means it's time for what? Facebook question and answer session. Very nice. We do this from time to time, Josh. We throw it on Facebook. Hey, ask us anything. We'll zip through as many of these as we can. The next couple of episodes, I like how people do ask us anything and then we ignore a lot of it. Save these, by the way, because we may not be done with these. I printed them out for us. Go ahead. You take the first one. This one is from Cyrus Brohas, the time I'm going to pronounce his name. Do you guys really have cubes right next to each other at the office? Not only do we have cubes right next to each other now, Chuck, you moved and we don't share a wall anymore, but there's nothing but open space between us. Yes. I'm behind you and you are behind me. We're like 5ft from one another. Yeah, she did not like it first. I disliked it. It was just weird, man. It was so weird. So now I spend my days just kind of staring at Chuck while he researches and things. Yeah. This is from Emily Tran. What has been your most interesting or memorable dream to date? I, Emily, have celebrity dreams all the time where I am really good buddies with Larry David or Jack Black, whoever my heroes are. That's awesome. And they're really realistic and I always wake up and very disappointed that that's not the case. You have some friendships with some of your heroes these days. Yeah, sure. But not Larry David Black yet? Maybe one day. Maybe one day. How about you? Got a memorable dream? Yeah, I do. I don't remember the dream, but I'm going to bring you me in here on this one. She tells me that for three nights in a row, I would sit up and point at the ceiling and be like, what's that kid doing up there? And she'd be like, what are you talking about? And we barely look, and there'd be nothing there, of course. And she'd be like, what do you mean? And I got nothing. Go back to sleep. I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Your house might be haunted, dude. I have no idea what that dream was or anything like that, but there's a kid, like, in our ceiling, scored three nights in a row. Tom Blake. There's a bustle in my head. Row. What should I do? I think everyone knows the answer. Don't be alarmed. Yeah. Technically, that's a first step, though. That's like, first, don't be alarmed. Then something, right? So what comes after that? We'll have to ask Jimmy Page. Or maybe Robert Plane wrote that. I say go back inside. Go into your house, okay. And beware of the child on the ceiling. What country would you like to live in other than the States? I've always wanted to live in Spain. I think Spain would be really neat to live in. Although the government is in so much turmoil, and they have a whole separatist region. If everybody could just mellow out in Spain, I would drop out. You'd never hear from me again at the end of the island or something. Would you do island living? I could do island living as well, if they had electricity and all that stuff. Like, it has to be a rich guy's island. Okay. Rich guys island. Yeah. Let me see. What is your favorite thing? This is Jason Carpenter. What is your favorite thing a listener has ever sent you in the mail? Beer ranks pretty high up there. Beef jerky, little bit sweets. I always like seeing that package, the honeycomb one. Did you have those? Yeah, because my all time favorite little bit sweet candy coffee. You've gotten coffee? Yeah, the beef jerky was really high up there. It's like buds smoked meats or something. Sent from a listener out in California. Oh, that lady that printed her photographs on the paper that she made. Oh, that's cool. That was pretty neat. Yeah, we get lots of cool stuff. I don't want to hurt people's feet. Handmade mugs were pretty awesome. I still use that. Unicorn tears. I like the Joe Gardens book. Yeah, that was nice. We get a bunch of cool stuff. It's tough to really separate it out because we've gotten some cool postcards even, right? Yeah. And I want to say my last one, the last one I wrote from Jeanette cPatrick. I realized I forgot to ask her to tell her that. Tell her a couple more. Yeah. How about one more each? Okay. Classic debate. Power to be invisible or fly? I would fly. I don't think I'd want to know what most people have to say about me when I'm not around. Yes. I would fly, too, because that means I wouldn't have to fly commercially anymore, which is something I hate passionately. Okay. And that one, by the way, was Shannon McCann. Thanks for that. I'm going to finish up with Melissa Rosenthal. When you were children, what were your favorite books? That's a good one. I am going to say generally, anything by shell silverstein. When I was young. In my little tween years, I got really into Bloom County. The comic got all those books. And then my favorite book, though, the first book I ever read really read, was when I was like eight or nine. I read the Great Christmas Kidnapping caper and it was released in 1978. Award winning children's book about these mice that live in Macy's in New York. Sounds cool. Santa Claus is kidnapped and they have to figure it out and crack the case. Why is everybody always kidnapping Santa Claus? I don't know, but I have no idea why this hasn't been like a Disney movie. It was excellent. I read it every year for like seven to twelve. Nice. And it was really good. What's yours? Probably my favorite little kids book was Super Humperdinc Not Him, which is in that Doctor Seuss camp, but not a Doctor Seuss book. You know what I'm talking about? Sure. I read a lot of Richard scary and Baron Stain bears. And then as I got a little older, I read Ramona Quinbi books for years. Oh, really? Love those. Never read those. We both did. Encycle CD Brown too. Yeah, that's cool. I'll always remember he knew that that one kid was crying and that he was the culprit because the kid put fake tears, like on the outside of his eyes, but you always cry from the inside. What a dumb kid. Everyone knows that a lot of the kids he'd grapple with were pretty stupid. Yeah, that's true. I'd like to read those today and see if I could figure them out. But you just can't read this. Well, if you have questions for us, you can always post them on Facebook facebook. Comsteffyturnknow. You can also tweet to us at syskast and you can reach us regular snail email at stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? Check out our blogs on the Houseupworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com.com." | ||
Does owning a gun change your behavior? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/does-owning-a-gun-change-your-behavior | Back in the 1990s, Congress effectively banned the scientific study of gun violence. Still, a handful of researchers plugged on and produced a small body of work about the effect of the presence of guns on the human psyche. Chuck and Josh look at the evid | Back in the 1990s, Congress effectively banned the scientific study of gun violence. Still, a handful of researchers plugged on and produced a small body of work about the effect of the presence of guns on the human psyche. Chuck and Josh look at the evid | Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=269, tm_isdst=0) | 28783268 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. You want to give like just a general COA out of the gate. Yes. This is a hot button issue. Guns right now in this country, in the United States, it's very tough topic. And we're are here to talk about do guns change your behavior and studies that they've done on that. We are not advocating for guns or advocating for gun control. We are just presenting evidence that some people have presented. Yeah. How's that? Well, we should say also that I think especially people who are pro gun. I mean, your sensitivity might be a little high right now. Yeah. But I'm saying, like, this particular podcast may strike you as biased, even though it's not simply because the studies have found things like there are increased homicide rates and suicide rates associated with guns and things like that. Sure. So, again, we're just reporting some compiled body of work, and we're presenting it in an unbiased manner. Good job. Thanks, man. So we just kind of let the cat out of the bag. Yes. If you are into guns, if you are pro gun, you will probably point out that you own guns for sport, you own guns for home protection. Yeah. And you may point to a statistic that ownership of guns in the United States is higher than it ever has been at any point. And not necessarily coincidentally, the homicide rate has dropped since 1991. That's right. So there's an inverse correlation, you could say, between gun ownership in the United States and just by number of guns and the homicide rate. Yeah. Which gun advocates will say, give people more guns and there will be less violence because if everyone is armed, then there will be fewer people, like invading your home because, hey, I know you got a gun in there, that kind of thing. Right. Now, the other side, people who are in favor of gun control would point out that, yes, the homicide rate has dropped, but there are actually fewer people who own guns than ever before. Fewer households, yes, with guns, but more the people that have guns have more guns. Right. Yeah. As Mark Twain famously said, there are three types of lies lies, damn, lies, and statistics. Sure. And this is a pretty good example of that. This is one statistic that can be looked at two different ways. Yeah. Like, there's more guns in the United States than ever before, and the homicide rate has dropped. There's also fewer people in the United States who own guns than ever before, and the homicide rate has dropped. Right. It's just fewer people owning more guns. Right. And boy, you are dead on with the statistics thing in this topic, because depending on how you want to research, you're going to find statistics to support your way of thinking. Probably. Yeah. So what we encourage people to do you probably have your mind made up anyway on this issue. I doubt if a statistic is going to change anyone's mind, but go out and just look at all the non biased research, is what I say. Yeah. Don't go to the NRA and get your stats and don't go to whatever the NRA equivalent, anti gun equivalent is and get your stats. Try and get them from unbiased sources. Yeah. And one of the former unbiased sources that used to put out a lot of gun violence studies, unbiased, as you would imagine, is the CDC. Yeah, and the CDC put out a lot of stuff. And then there was a dearth of it beginning in 1996, which I didn't know about this until today. Did you? No, I didn't. In the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to stop funding the CDC's work on gun violence. Yes. And this is where it gets a little nitpicky with the wording. They didn't specifically say you can't research gun violence. What they did was they reduced the amount of funding by the exact dollar amount that they spent the previous year on research and attached this quote to it in the appropriations bill. None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control. So pro gun folks that say we never said they couldn't do any research, what we said was, you can't do research that has findings that support gun control. So if the findings support gun control, you can't do that, basically. Right. Any finding that showed that there's an increased risk of violence linked to guns, you could interpret under that sentence as advocating gun control. Yeah. And in 2003, the language is updated to include, in whole or in part, which expanded things, and then in 2012, it expanded the restriction to all health and human service agencies. Although January of this year, president Obama has now called for funding specifically for he had, I think, a 23 point memo of what he wanted to get through in terms of research. Yeah. Those are the executive orders that he could carry out that had to do with gun control, basically. Yeah. $10 million for additional research, which is a lot more than they used to get. Yeah. It peaked in 1995 at 2.6 million. So throwing $10 million at this today, even adjusted for inflation, that's going to produce a lot more studies on gun violence for the CDC and people. Before you get worked up, this is research. They are saying we should do research on this. They're basically framing it as a public health epidemic because people are dying. And hey, we study how violent or how automobiles kill people. We study how alcohol and drugs kill people. We study how everything kills people except the guns. Right. So we should start researching this just to get some current statistics on it. And if you want to get riled up about anything, get riled up about the idea that Congress banned scientific study, period. Yeah. And you can basically, from the research I found, you can lay this at the feet of Bob Barr and Newt Gingrich, basically the two representatives from Georgia. Newt Gingrich had almost as much power as Clinton in that was pretty much who was responsible for this? Well, Jay Dickey, the representative who sponsored the amendment back then, has now recanted and said, you know what? He's no longer in office. But he wrote an editorial stating that, quote, scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners. Basically, he's come out and said, you know, we should research this stuff. Not saying ban guns or go to people's houses and grab the guns, but at the very least we should do the research so we know what we're talking about and so the American public can make their own informed decisions one way or the other. Right? That's right. Okay. So that's why there's been a dearth of reliable statistics since 1996. But CDC is not the only people carrying out this kind of research other people have who are independent of Congress for funding. Yeah. Not a ton, though, because there's not a lot of funding, period. So it's pretty sad. I read this one article on that. A lot of the people that did this, it's not like you can just pick any old researcher and say, research gun violence. It has to be your specialty. Oh, sure. And a lot of people have just don't do this anymore because of that ban. Sadly, it's hard to find people qualified enough to even do it now. Yeah. I mean, no matter what it is, people go to where the money is, right? Absolutely. So the stuff that we do have, though, the studies we do have, reliable studies that we do have pretty much across the board, point to an increased risk of death if a gun is present. But I guess before we talk about that yeah, I think now is probably a good time for a message, Rick. Okay, let's talk about the weapon effect. Yeah, this is a very touchy subject as well. In 1967, these two dudes, Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony La PAJ, did a little study where they brought people into a room, had the participants antagonized, basically by someone else just to get them riled up, and then they left the room. And we're told that they could give them electric shocks. Some people had a gun in the room on the table, and they said, don't worry about that. That's just here from a previous study. Some people had bad mitten rackets and they said, don't worry about that from a previous study. And they found that just the presence of guns in the room caused people to shock more and harder at a higher voltage. Wow. So they dubbed the weapons effect, saying just the mere presence of a gun in the room, even when told to ignore it, increased aggro behavior, basically. And that's been backed up by other studies. There's one in 2006 that showed that interacting with a gun actually increases the testosterone levels of men yeah. By 100%. Wow. That is a lot. That's a huge increase, right? Yeah. So this study basically they said, Here, play with this gun, and then now firstly took a swab and tested the testosterone levels. Then they said, Here, play with this gun, and afterward we're going to take another swab. But in the meantime, we're also going to let you put hot sauce in the water of somebody who's going to have to drink it. And the men who handled the gun and messed around with the gun for a while put far more hot sauce into the water than the men who didn't handle the gun. Yeah. Three times as much hot sauce. Yeah. And the same two previous guys, Berkowitz and La PAJ, did another one that I found really interesting. They put a pickup truck in traffic with, well, different pickup trucks, some with guns in the rack and some without a gun rack at all and made them sit at a traffic light that had turned green for 12 seconds to see how people behind them responded. And surprisingly, people were more likely to honk their horns if there was a gun in the truck ahead of them, which they said that meant. See, the presence of a gun just makes people more aggressive. Whereas I was kind of like, that's sort of weird that they would be more aggressive towards someone with a gun when you didn't have one. Yeah. Well, it's almost like possibly that people interpret that as a threat. Just the presence of a gun, maybe someone else is flaunting to the rest of the world is just kind of some sort of veiled threat just by its very presence. We detect guns actually faster than we detect snakes, spiders. These are things called fear relevant stimuli. And guns syringes. They fall into this category as well. And humans are hardwired evolutionarily to be able to pick out a snake out of a landscape faster than, say, we can pick out like a wood chuck, a chipmunk or something like that, because we know from eons of evolution that these things are very dangerous to us. Studies have found that we can pick guns out faster than we can pick snakes out. Quick evolution. Yeah, that's very quick evolution. It's called the threat superiority effect, where we can identify threatening objects faster than non threatening objects. And apparently guns and Sorrentis, too, I think, are really topping the list these days. They also found that drivers who have a gun in the car were significantly more likely to do things like make observed gestures at other people, 23% compared to 16% follow too close aggressively 14% to 8%, or both, 6.3% to 2.8%. And then they even found that even when guns weren't around, just the mere suggestion of aggressive words, as opposed to non aggressive words like gun, people were more aggressive in these studies. So a lot of people have supported the Weapons Effect study and said, no, it's perfectly valid. And a lot of people have said, now you know what? The weapons effect is BS. And that study is invalid. So which one is larger? Yes. Right, exactly. Which I don't know. I think, as with all things, it depends on who you're talking to. I don't know if it's been broken down like that. Okay, so there seems to be some sort of evidence, at least, that there's the potential for increased aggression with the presence of a gun. Right. There's also studies that show and this is the one, apparently I don't know why people aren't talking about this more, especially with the gun debate that's going on now, but if you want to talk about a correlation, talk about suicide and the presence of guns. I I think that's one that's pretty much not been refuted. No. A lot of gun deaths in the US. In 2011, 11,000 of them were homicides and 19,766 were suicides. All with firearms. Yeah. So twice as many people took their own lives with a gun than took someone else's life. Yeah. And not only that, in again, I hate not having more recent research, but it's not our fault that we can't point to a study from three years ago. Yeah. But a 1992 study by the CDC said that if you have a gun in the home, you're five times more likely to commit suicide overall. And in 2003, there actually was another study that said access to a gun made someone more than three times more likely to commit suicide than without. And 80% to 90% of people who shoot themselves succeed in dying. Well, that's why they think that the correlation is so strong. So that's for people who really want to end, it not the cry for help. Yeah, but you're probably not going to shoot yourself in the head if it's a cry for help. Right. But what the people who are saying this is legitimate research are pointing to is that suicide is frequently an impulsive act. Right. And when you're in the midst of a crisis and you decide to end it, if you do it, if you try hanging or pills or carbon monoxide or whatever, you are less likely to be successful than you are with a firearm. Right. And so the presence of a firearm in the house during that time of crisis increases your likelihood of committing suicide by a firearm. Okay, but also, Chuck, there's another study that found that people who own a handgun and commit suicide are far more likely to use the handgun than another type of method. Right. Even though that's available to them as well. Right. Well, I guess, like I said, those people that probably really want to end it all. Yeah. Interestingly. The Israeli Defense Force found that their suicide rate dropped 40% among its soldiers just by saying, you can't take your weapons home this weekend. So they banned them from taking the weapons home. Over the weekend, suicide rate dropped by 40%. Regardless where you stand on this issue, it has pretty much been proven that guns and suicide, there is a direct correlation going on there. Yeah. Okay. Homicide. Shall we move on? Yes, let's move on. So there's a 1992 study that found that family disputes that turned violent were three times more likely to result in death if a gun was present in the house. There was another study by the CDC that found that homicides are about three times more likely for family members in a house where there's a gun. Two studies have found virtually the same thing the presence of a gun, at least in the swing and 90s, having a gun in the house meant that each of the family members was three times more likely, apparently, to die by a homicide. Right. And that is the domestic dispute that gets out of hand. If a gun is around, then your chances are higher that it's going to be murdered. Well, one said, a family dispute that turns violent, you're three times more likely to result in death. The other one, the CDC one, I think, was just plainly saying, just having a gun in the house, you're three times more likely to die. Got you. By homicide. Right. Okay. I guess it's fair to point out, though, that most murders don't happen at your home unless yeah. You're a woman, a child, or elderly. So basically, if you're an average age man, you're less likely to be murdered in your house. Everybody else is more likely. Right. But if you were killed in your home, the vast majority are people who knew the perpetrator. Like, basically, the cases of someone breaking into your house who you do not know and ending in death are much lower than here it is right here. Fewer than 30% of burglaries in the US. Occur when someone's at home, period. And the 7% where violence does occur, it's more likely to be someone you know. So 5% of all the crimes perpetrated by strangers occur, only 5% occur in the house. Got you. So basically what you're saying is the home is a pretty safe place by and large. Right. And so just having a gun that you keep at home, the studies then suggest, actually increases your likelihood of you or someone you love who lives in that house killing one another rather than somebody coming into your house and you protecting yourself using that gun. Yeah. And they went to the streets in 2009 in Philadelphia and looked at 677 shootings over a couple of years, and they found that people that carry guns were four and a half times more likely to be shot and 4.2 times more likely to be killed. And I guess the thinking there is, if you have a gun, you may just feel more aggressive or more likely to act rashly or put yourself in a bad part of town because, hey, I've got this protection. Or to be aggressive because you've got the protection. That kind of thing. Yeah. And there's this really great article from 2010 that was in Harper's Magazine. It was in the August 2010 issue. It's called happiness as a Warren gun. And it's this guy, basically his life carrying a gun and just what it's like. It's just a really great look at what it's like to have a gun on you at all times. And like, what that means. He says you're in Condition White, which is basically you're constantly on high alert because if you're carrying a gun, you have a sense of responsibility, not just for yourself, but you also need to protect everybody else. If somebody starts shooting or if there's a robbery or something like that, that's why you have a gun on you. So you feel a sense of stewardship of just other people, strangers in public. Well, sort of like you're the police all of a sudden. Yeah. And so you live in this thing, this state called Condition White, where your threat response is constantly on at some level, which gun control advocates, I'm sure, are all about Condition White. Right. They're like, yeah, that's exactly what we're looking for, is people to be alert and armed. Yeah. This guy, I believe, came to the conclusion that he was tired of living in Condition White. It was just too exhausting, and I think he stopped carrying, maybe. I don't remember how it ends, but it's a really great article. I would recommend anybody on either side of the issue to read that happiness is a war and gun in Harper's. I saw a dude in the grocery store the other day with peace on his hip checking out in front of me, buying a six pack of beer. Yeah. And it definitely like, I don't care who you are when someone walks in the room with a gun on their hip these days, it changes the mood. I'm not saying it makes things bad or good. I'm just saying it changes things. I think it probably always has. Yeah, it's a weird thing. I definitely see where people get divided on the issue, because here in Atlanta, there's a lot of crime. You hear about a story where some dude went to carjack some guy and the dude had a gun in his car and shot the guy, and that guy is behind bars. I can see how people be like, Good, he stopped a criminal like a cop would have. Whereas cops generally investigate already happened crimes. Rarely does a cop thwart a crime in progress. It's just right place, right time. So, like, random how that works out. Whereas if the citizens had the guns, they could do that themselves. So I can see how people get all up in arms and say, yeah, there's a case of a person that defended themselves successfully, and then the other person might say, yeah, but what about that guy whose son accidentally shoots himself in the house when the guns out? Yeah. Two separate four year olds yesterday accidentally killed two different people in two different states. Really? Yeah. The wife of a sheriff's deputy was killed by a four year old at her house. Yeah. With every story, no matter how you feel about it, you can pick cherry pick a story to fit your beliefs. The issue is very far from clear cut, and, yeah, it's just very hard to not see both sides. I agree with you. There's a guy named David Hemanway that wrote an article called Risks and Benefits of a Gun in the Home for the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine in 2011. And this is sort of a newer thing where they're starting to frame it, like I said, as a health issue. When people are dying, you should look at it as a health issue. So he investigates it as such and came out on the side of the American Academy of Pediatrics who officially have said do not have a gun in the home if you're a parent. The result of the study. At least from him and Way says the evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the house is more of a risk factor for completed suicide and general violence than the benefit side. There are fewer studies that come out saying it's actual a benefit to having the home. And Kenneth All of Georgia is a big people point to Kenneth All out because it very famously had a law passed that mandated that you have a gun in your home, and people have always says, well, looking Kenneth All, crime has gone down. He says. Hemingway says that that is not true, and if you look at the evidence, it is not shown to decrease burglary reports at all. And also famously, in Morton Grove, Illinois, there was a ban on handguns. And he points out him and Wai says, a careful analysis points out that in Morton Grove, the banning of handguns actually followed was actually followed by a large, significant decrease in burglary reports. So no one had guns, and there were fewer burglaries, which flies in the face of what Kenneth I was trying to do, saying guns in the household will prevent burglaries. And I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but there's a pretty good stat. Like, England has very strict gun control and very low homicide rates from guns. And I think a lot of people also point out, like, okay, well, if you don't have guns, you're still going to have knives and people are still going to kill each other. But I think that if you are a gun control advocate, you would point out that it's kind of like the completed suicide thing, right? Yeah. People are still going to try to kill themselves, but they might not be successful. And afterwards, they might be glad that they weren't successful because their situation might improve. If you go to kill somebody in a fit of rage and you have a gun, you're more likely to be successful than, say, with a knife or a baseball bat or something like that. Right. And therefore not being able to complete this homicide, this situation may improve for both people, especially the one who's not killed. That's true. All right, well, that's guns. I hope you guys made it through this one. Yeah, I think we should do one on the NRA just to learn a little bit more about that organization and round this thing out. Sure. Okay. We'll look for that one in the future, I guess. Yeah. If you want to learn more about guns, type that word into the search bar, howstop works.com, and it will bring up a bunch of stuff, including how guns work. I already said that whole spiel about the search bar, didn't I? Yeah. It means then. Friends, it's now time for message break, and Chuck, take us out with some listener mail. Yeah, this is another Peace Corps email. We get a lot of these because we find that A, we did one on the Peace Corps, but before that even, we got a lot from Peace Corps folks because I think they're world travelers who are curious and like to listen to things on the chicken, but you know what I'm saying? I wanted to send you guys an email since I finally finished the long list of stuff you should know podcast that I downloaded to pass the time while riding on chicken buses throughout Ecuador. As a current Peace Corps volunteer in a gold producing region of the world and a former outfitter in Yellowstone National Park, I really enjoyed the podcast on Peace Corps coffee, gold, bison, geysers, and thoroughbreds. What I know about these topics, you guys are pretty much spot on, and I'm also a bit of a plant nerd, so I really enjoyed the Randy Moss joke from the Moss episode. That's a good one. Well played. What I was really emailing about was to see if you guys would give a shout out to my long time friend Catherine. Lifelong even. She and I grew up in South Dakota together and have been friends since kindergarten. Even though we went to colleges across the country from each other, we have managed to remain close friends the last 20 years. Unfortunately, due to being in the Peace Corps, was unable to make it back for her wedding amidst the opportunity to be her maid of honor. Although she doesn't have any hard feelings, I still haven't made that one up to her, and she would love it if you guys gave her a shout. She turned me on to the podcast, in fact, in saying she enjoys listening to it on her own way to work, I've been hooked on it ever since. So thank you guys, Chuck and Josh and Jerry, for providing Catherine and I with another link in our friendship. That's awesome. Not to mention the fact that you provide me with weekly trivia facts that I plan on using the 20 something bar scene when I moved back to the states. So that is from Whitney. And hello, Catherine. And that's nice that you gave Whitney a break for not being your maid of honor. Yeah, she's in the peace Corps, after all. Yeah, much better. Bigger than your little wedding. Jeez, the Peace corps is bigger than anybody's wedding. I'm sure Catherine would disagree with you, but that was very nice. Who is the person who wrote in? Whitney. That's right. Thanks, Whitney, for writing in. If you have a story that you want to share about how Chuck and I have brought you closer to somebody, we love those let us know all about it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@discovery.com. You can join us at our home on the web. That is www.stuffyouchildnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com like a good neighbor state farm is there with 18,000 agents across the country who are ready to help you. 24 7365. That's getting to a better state." | ||
3f2629ea-5461-11e8-b6d0-c31484fcf675 | SYSK Selects: How Bigfoot Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-bigfoot-works | For centuries North American tribes have told stories of a hairy wild giant in the wilderness, and once Europeans arrived they claimed to see it, too. Chuck and Josh examine the claims of believers and the rebuttals of skeptics in this evenhanded episode from the SYSK archives. | For centuries North American tribes have told stories of a hairy wild giant in the wilderness, and once Europeans arrived they claimed to see it, too. Chuck and Josh examine the claims of believers and the rebuttals of skeptics in this evenhanded episode from the SYSK archives. | Sat, 10 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=284, tm_isdst=0) | 32573313 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK selects I've chosen how bigfoot works. We released it on the very first day of the very heavy year of 2013, and we explore both sides of the issue, the very possibility that Bigfoot might exist. Although here's a spoiler. We conclude it probably doesn't. But we don't poopoo the whole idea because it is possible. So just listen with open ears, open mind, and open heart. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff? You should know the podcast. Right? Is that a wookie? That is me messing with Sasquatch. It sounded more like Frankenstein from Sarah Live. I remember that. I love that. Frankenstein. Tarzan. Tarzan classic skip, have you seen the commercials messing with Sasquatch? Yeah, jack Winks is pretty funny. Yeah, all of them are. It's one of my favorite spots, actually. Well, it contradicts eyewitness reports that Paint Bigfoot is kind of a benign, shy creature. Yeah. As far as Jack Links is concerned, he goes aggro when you mess with them, I guess, is what it is. So I have an actual intro for this one. All right, let's hear it. We're talking Bigfoot, and very recently, there's some enormous, huge news. We should probably preface this one. If you are skeptic, don't worry, we're going to give your side of this, too. But we have found over the years that it's very respectful to give voice to both sides. We try to, yes. And we're not insulting you by speaking the other person's side. We'll express your side as well. And when we do that, we're not insulting the other side. And at the end of the day, it's about bigfoot. So let's not get so worked out. Calm down. It's all just fun. There's a self professed veterinarian with 27 years experience, including forensics named Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, and she supposedly, she claims, got her hands on some samples of Bigfoot hair. Okay. And has been testing it, running genetic tests on it, and recently announced and wrote a paper that's under peer review, as it stands now, that she managed to isolate three separate nuclear DNA, okay? That came from three separate groups. So one is the nuclear DNA. Remember, you have nuclear DNA is the mixture of the mother's and the father's DNA. Okay. Mitochondrial DNA is strictly from the mother. Okay. So the researcher found that the nuclear DNA came from a human, Bigfoot, which is a hybrid of the human. And this third species, a non human species, doesn't know what it is yet, but supposedly that's what this hair sample showed. Really? This is just now, right? Yeah. I believe they made this announcement, like, in late November, early December, which is now under peer review. It is under peer review. That doesn't mean that it's going to pass peer review. She submitted the paper for peer review. Now, she said that the mitochondrial DNA in the sample was human, which means that this third thing, bigfoot, is the product of a female woman. And this non human species, the mystery species, reproducing and forming Bigfoot. And she says that she isolated it to about 150 years ago. Wow. Now, anybody who has followed Dr. Ketchum's career can poke holes all in this. There was apparently I read an early draft of the paper that she said this third species was an angel. And skeptics love beating up on people like this, but my hat is off to her for, first of all, undergoing this, using the scientific method to root out the unexplained, that's extremely fortunate in nature, and I love that stuff. And then secondly, to put it up for peer review and to face that kind of criticism. One of the big problems is she isn't saying, like, where the sample? How she knows this is a sample of Bigfoot's DNA. She didn't say where she got it? Not that I could find. And I actually saw in one article that she's not saying where it came from. So there's a lot of holes in it. But if you wanted big, current bigfoot news, that's about as big as it gets. That's right. Not quite as current as our own law officer here in Georgia last year or the year before. The one up in North Georgia. Yeah. Man with his freezer. I didn't follow that very closely. I'm going to go ahead and say that I really want to believe in bigfoot or not want to believe. I want there to be a Bigfoot. I don't think there is. That means you want to believe in Bigfoot, but I want to believe it's out there because it would be so cool. And when I saw that story, the sheriff and I think he was a sheriff or deputy in North Georgia, it was a hoax, of course, but he said he had a body in a freezer, and they showed pictures of this. It was a gorilla suit. Right. That's what it ended up being. And it had guts. It had, like, animal entrails, but it looked like initially, like, oh, man, that looks like a dead Bigfoot. And then you look closer and it's like a suit that you can get online. I wish I had that kind of time to do stuff like that. Yeah. Apparently portrayed a hoax. Apparently they were trying to drum up potential business for leading bigfoot tours in North Georgia. It's a sound way to do it until you get found out and then ultimately either retire or get fired. No. As a law enforcement officer. Still work. Oh, well, okay. He lost his day job is what you're saying. Yeah. You can't do stuff like that if you're a cop. You can't pull a hoax. No, you can't pull a hoax and try and snow people for money. That's not legal. I don't know that it is illegal to snow people for money to promise them something that's not true. And charge this guy says that he call it fraud. No, it's a hoax. There's a big difference between fraud and a hoax. If he had the business, it would be fraud. No, that would be like if he promised that you are going to see bigfoot, not a bigfoot tour, but he said, you're going to see bigfoot on this tour, and then you could get him for fraud. I think he would still be fraud if he founded that business and advertised it on a false premise, which is I found this thing. Look at it. Yeah, I see your point. Yeah, he's a jerk. What do I say? Let's talk about bigfoot. This guy up in North Georgia is pretty far from the only person to pull a declared bigfoot hoax. What keeps this thing going is that there's some stuff out there that's considered this body of evidence of Bigfoot's existence that hasn't been definitively debunked or proven. Right. Yeah. One of the other things that I think people who are believers in Bigfoot, like the ones that are out there, like, looking for bigfoot and believe in bigfoot, one of the things that keeps them going also is this correlation between bigfoot sightings among people of European descent and bigfoot legends of Native American tribes long before the Europeans ever got here. And if you look at the names of these different tribes, have you take a step back, you're like, wow, these tribes were all over the place. Some are in the Pacific Northwest, some are in Florida somewhere in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. And all of them have this weird, tall, giant, hairy man legend that they have a name for, even though they're geographically scattered all over the place. And it's possible that all of these different legends share a single common ancestor that is further back, maybe located on the steps of Eurasia. Yeah. But it's also kind of noteworthy that they all have different legends for it. Sure. The Himalay is even the yeti the inomitable snowman in Asia. Very popular. Apparently. You hear that one more than you see it. Yeah, which I didn't know. But we should call this thing Sasquatch because that is the most common name they use nowadays. And even though some of the names from Native American tribes wendego that was great. Omaru and Bulks is some of the names that this has gone by Native American lore. But Sasquatch Shashquatch comes from I have no idea how to pronounce that. It looks like that word. And another word from the area around British Columbia were similar enough that the 1920s white school teacher named JW. Burns coined the term sasquatch. And basically that's the umbrella term for any bigfoot like man. Right. So even though these sightings have varied in their description over the years, there are a few hallmarks that pop up. One is that this is a tall beast between seven and 15ft. 15ft is enormous. Yeah. I haven't most of the ones I've heard of between, like, seven and 8ft. Have you seen the Troll Hunter? I saw that recently, actually. That first troll that they watched, the guy zap and turn his tone, that thing was about 15ft tall. That's huge. Yeah, that was a pretty good movie. I buy 10ft. No way. 15ft. No way. Yeah. Did you like that movie? Oh, troll Hunter was excellent. Yeah, it kind of wore on me toward the end. I thought it was a little long, but it was pretty cool. Yeah, the imagination that it used was just beautiful. Totally agreed. Control Hunter, people. It walks on two legs. That's a big one. Was that Bipedal? Is that what they say? It's upright and has a looping gate. Seen that Elf, right? The movie Elf. Yeah, the one shot where they mimic the famous 16 millimeter film. Oh, yeah. Where it says Will Ferrell in Central Park. And they, like, have that from frame 352 of the 60 millimeter film. It's pretty funny. So Will Ferrell is doing such a thing? Yeah, it says, like, the strange elf was seen wandering through Central Park, and they mimic that, but it's Will Ferrell. Sure. Yeah, it's very good. Long, reddish fur. That's a big one. Reddish brown. And that's really interesting. That Sasquatch is typically described as having long, reddish brown fur. That's a really specific thing for everybody to report. And again, it's possible that people have heard other reports and said that's what they're expecting to see. Sure. Or that's what they're reporting, because that's what Sasquatch has. But it's still significant. 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% offs. 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 said that the yeti was more heard than seen. Yeah. Bigfoot is usually more seen than heard, but when Bigfoot is heard, he makes gurgling noises, howling noises. Noises that sound totally alien to the people reporting it. Yeah. I've heard weird noises in the woods camping all my life and I've never thought, oh, that's a Bigfoot. I just think that's just something some animal making a strange sound that I've never heard. Right, because you live in the city. That's right. Supposedly, this Sasquatch also has sort of a manlike face and reports from either being really, really smelly to not smelling at all. Oh, yeah. That's not in this article. I forgot about how smelly Bigfoot's supposed to be. Yeah, supposedly, I've heard that many times. They're also supposedly very wary of people, but also, at the same time, intensely curious about us. And a lot of people who have made eyewitness reports say that they weren't scared, which is weird. Yeah, most people say that. I didn't feel threatened. Right. And that kind of jibes with most Native American legends about Bigfoot that it's a benign creature and often it has intellect and it's given spiritual powers in Native American lore. So it wasn't something to be afraid of. Right. Sasquatch is your friend. Yeah, they usually are by themselves. But there have been reports of several of the Sasquatches hanging out together and chatting. Yes. But for the most part, they're usually alone. Right. Yeah. So you put all this together and you've got, like, a pretty good common it's like the AKC breed for Sasquatch. These are the characteristics I love it. Okay. If you take this at face value, which you should sure. If you're a skeptic, you should always look at things at face value and not just immediately dismiss it or poopoo it. Yeah. Try to get to the bottom of it. And that's what we're about to do. Now, the first question is, could a creature that matches this description possibly exist? Yeah. And it's important when considering this, to point out that we have never, despite all the sightings and little still shots and film clips and audio clips, there's never been any conclusive evidence. They've never found bones, but that's huge or anything like that. A lot of footprints and stuff like that. So moving forward, could this exist, perhaps in the Gigantopithecus? Right. Because that's a creature that actually did exist at some point. And it says here in the article that the Gigantopithe pithecus, which is the largest primate in the fossil record, lived between one and 9 million years ago. Actually, I saw an article that had updated that to about 100,000 years ago, which meant that humans in Giganopithecus lived side by side. Have you seen this thing? I have looked like a Bigfoot. Well, I guess if someone saw that in the woods, I would think it was a Sat scatter. Right. It lived in Southeast Asia or in Central Asia? And it's a relative of the orangutan. Yeah, big time. It looks a lot like one. Yeah. This is all extremely interesting stuff, in case you didn't know, because orangutans, for starters, have reddish orange hair. So that's one connection to Giganipithecus. Yeah. They got the long arms like that. Yeah. They walked upright, about 10ft tall, usually about one \u00a3200. And since orangutans are the closest modern relative of Gigantithecus, it makes sense to kind of look at them, look at their behavior. Does it match bigfoot stuff? Yeah, they have teeth similar to humans, so that could account a little bit for the man like look that people often talk about. Occasionally we'll make allowed howling calls that sound odd to other orangutans. Another thing that kind of separates them, too, aside from being Asian, whereas most primates are African, is that they tend to live solitary lives, so they don't aggregate in groups. They live by themselves, mostly. Okay, so chalk one up for the bigfoot enthusiasts. Yeah. Again, they're like, okay, well, that's it Giganopithecus. They live a long time, and because they are widely dispersed, they may not even see other orangutans for many long stretches. Right. So of course, they may not see a human either. Exactly. You know, and if they're intellectual or if they have intellect, as people who believe in bigfoot like to point out, they would be able to successfully hide from humans, probably. Sure. Especially if their habitat was the woods and the mountains. And so you put all that together that they have a long lifespan, meaning there's not a lot of them dying frequently. Yeah, they're spread out population wise, and they tend to live in remote geographic regions. If you add all that up, it's a pretty good reason why you wouldn't have found any bones. Yes, because bones can decay in the wild like that between five and ten years. And the author of this was this, The Grabster. This is Tom Harris. Tom Harris, he's a good one, too. He is good. He points out that people have never gone on bigfoot bone hunting expeditions. So people aren't looking for these things, so they may not have found them. Well, yeah. There is a guy, actually, who's looking for bigfoot. He's an Idaho State anthropology professor, and he's crowdsourcing blimp to hunt for bigfoot with thermal imaging cameras and stuff like that. And it's three hundred k, and if you're interested in it, you can check out that. I thought it was, but he's got his own website called Falcon Project, and that's what he's trying to do with it. So there is at least one person trying to do a rigorous scientific hunt for bigfoot. But, I mean, there's all kinds of groups looking, right. There's even a show on Animal Planet, one of our Discovery Channel stations, I would call it a sister station, but not a station, one of our colleagues. And it's what's it called, finding Bigfoot. Yeah. And these people are out there hunting bigfoot, and I've even watched bits of it because I just think it's cool and interesting. And it's kind of a fun little show, so I recommend it. We weren't even asked to plug that. I'm just plugging it. Do you have a possible link between the orangutan yeah. Right. And Bigfoot. And that link might be Giganopithecus. Right. Question is still remaining. How did Giganopithecus get here? Well, we walked over the was it the land bridge? Yes. Bearing land bridge. Yes. Just like we did. Sure. Both not you and me, but, you know well, that's one theory. But the big problem here, Chuck, is the absence of proof doesn't prove anything. The fact that we haven't found bones, even though you can explain it, we still haven't found any bones. It doesn't mean that something exists. And it's a big problem in this debate. You can also point to, though, very happily, the selakanth. Right. The silkanth was thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. It's a fish thought to have gone extinct in the late Cretaceous period, and then they found it swimming off the coast of Africa in 1938. So you can point to that and say it's entirely possible that Giganapithecus survived somehow and we just didn't know. Yeah. And scientists, they'll point out that there are all kinds of creatures that are still undiscovered, but most of them are sea creatures. And that makes sense, too, because we don't spend very much time under the sea. No, we don't. Whereas we spend a decent amount of time in the woods. Okay. So if you're a skeptic, everything we just said probably made the hair on the back of your neck bristle and irritation. And here's why. Because, like we said, the absence of proof doesn't prove anything. Sure. And it's entirely possible that all of this evidence, this body of evidence, is just basically a bunch of independent hoaxers fooling a bunch of people over time. Yeah. Or innocent mistaken identity. They're not all hoaxers. Some people have perhaps gotten confused about things. Sure. Boy, that mangy bear doesn't look right. It's standing up on its back legs, too. Yes. Or the recent photo. There was that still image captured at night, and that's what they said it was, a mangy bear. But that thing was kind of weird looking. I think I saw that one. Yeah, it was like an item and shot, and it was on four legs, or four. I don't know if their arms or what. And it looked odd, but they explained it away as a mangy bear. Sure. But yeah. Lots of hoaxes over the years. Yeah. And if you go into the woods and you're even the least bit familiar with any kind of Bigfoot lore, and you see something that possibly fits it, you may be the victim of wishful thinking or being impressionable or what have you. Yeah, that's a pretty good accusation. A skeptican level against somebody who reports a Bigfoot sighting. Sure. And the first and easiest way to hoax someone to pull a hoax on someone is the old fake footprint. Yeah. Not too hard to do. You make a fake foot, you wear it on your feet, and you perhaps run along in the woods, maybe lope, maybe leap to make the footsteps the gate. Correct. Right. And then you make a plaster mold of it. The problem with these is they've been so many over the years that it's, like, clear that their hoaxes. Because this one has two toes, this one has claws, this one has eight toes. And people aren't getting together on these and making them consistent. Yeah. Probably the most contentious bit of Bigfoot evidence was that 16 millimeter film you mentioned that was made in 1967 by a guy named Roger Patterson. Yeah, the Patterson gimlin film. And it's from Bluff Creek, California. And basically it shows Bigfoot walking across, basically clearing into the woods. And Bigfoot is aware that he's being watched, and he turns and looks at the camera. Like you said, will Ferrell didn't help. And I remember years ago, like, watching this when I was back in my Time Life books phase. Sure. I don't believe anything. Just tell me. Yeah. And they were saying that one of the reasons that this thing was so convincing that it was Bigfoot was that when he looked over his shoulder, rather than looking with just his head, just turning his head, bigfoot turns his whole shoulder and torso along with his head, which is something that a primate would likely do, a nonhuman primate I should do. Or someone in an apes suit wearing shoulder pads, possibly. That's another possibility, too. They also point out that Bigfoot is walking with his knees bent in this. That's another sure sign of primate. I did that today, by the way. Is it hard? Well, it's not the easiest thing, but what it makes you do is sort of lope along with kind of a funny gate, a looping gate. Yeah. That's something that Bigfoot enthusiasts point to, is that this thing was walking with knees bent. And I didn't realize this until I read this in the article, but humans lock their knees with each step. Yeah. We don't walk with our knees bent. And then also, lastly, that the creature's fur is clearly rippling, like the skin beneath the rippling. And like some costume, some apesuit isn't going to do that on its own. Yeah. Put all this together. And if you're a bigfoot believer, this is irrefutable evidence that there is such a thing as Bigfoot. 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. If you're skeptic, you can shoot a hole in all of those, can't you? Sure. Since this film came out in 1967, it's been, like the most reviewed and made fun of or backed piece of evidence ever for Bigfoot or Sasquatch. And Roger Patterson, it turns out, was trying to make a movie about Bigfoot. Yeah. So he wasn't just some guy out there that happened to have a camera. He was trying to put together a film. Since this has come out, there have been various people. One guy came out and said, you know what? I made the suit for him. He paid me $1,000 to make him the suit. Well, the guy who supposedly did make the suit is never admitted to. Well, now there's a bunch of guys that's not the same guy. There's Chambers, and then there's this other dude. They aren't the same people. That's why it's kind of hanky, because multiple people have claimed they made the suit. This one guy says that he was the guy in the suit, but his suit story didn't match up with the guy who claimed he made the suit. Did match up with his suit story. But then people said, you know what? Patterson could have altered that original suit to match the guy who said he was in the suit. Right? Then there's Chambers, who other people say it made the suit, but he says he didn't make the suit. Well, it's a longstanding Hollywood rumor that actually John Landis, the director of American Werewolf in London, came out and said, yeah, this is true. When he was a young pup, he was working at one of the studios and he became friends with John Chambers, who did the apes suits for Planet of the Apes, which came out right around that time, right? I think so. And he had heard that Chambers had done this, and he befriended Chambers and said, yes, it's true. This is John Chambers. And Chambers has never taken credit for it. Right. He's never come out and said, yeah, I did it. But if you ask the average special effects guy or makeup guy these days, if you show them that, they're like, yes, this is Apesuit. There's a water bag underneath that's making the skin ripple. And that's a guy. That's a man. Right? I watch it again today? Like five times. Yeah, me too. It's really neat. Yes, it's kind of fun. I mean, just the detail they went into, like the crooked legs, the bent knees. Yeah. The shaky cam, like it looked like someone scared and discovering something. Yeah, it's perfect if it's a fraud. It is perfect because think about it. The thing was shot in 1967, it's 2013 and people are still debating whether or not it's authentic. Yeah. And it's gone through lots of rigorous testing by people that study whether or not the film was tampered. And they have determined that nothing was tampered post shooting. Like, if it was anything that was a dude in an apesuit and they really went out there in the woods and shot it. Sure. But like I said, this is all just kind of fun to me. People get so worked up over this. I don't get it. Who knows? Yeah, what's the harm unless someone's like, defrauding people out of money. You know, there are people who dedicate their careers to this. There's a woman named Kathy Moscowitz Strain, and she is a forest archeologist for the US forestry Service who basically became an anthropologist and an archaeologist so that she could hunt for bigfoot. And she's very respected even among skeptics who counter all of her arguments. But she is very much searching for bigfoot and has been for many years. And she believes, or just wants to get to the bottom of it. She believes that there's a Bigfoot, that there's another species out there, some primate species that is what we call sasquatch or bigfoot. Yeah. The arguments against to me, if you can't say something like, well, somebody would have definitely seen it by now and proven it, you just can't say that, like, the Pacific Northwest is so vast that an animal could probably hide if there was only a few of them left from people. But on the other hand, you also can't say it exists because of this hoaxes and these sounds like you need some sort of scientific evidence. Agreed. Bones would help. You do need that. Unless you're just enjoying thinking about it. Yeah. Another thing you can enjoy that's kind of related is watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 of the Legend of Boggy Creek Two. I haven't seen that one. It's arguably the best episode. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. It's hilarious. Strong, safe, but it's related. It's based on a bigfoot, like, creature. Yeah. Well, Tom points out, too, that the reason people want to believe in stuff like this is the same reason some people want to believe in aliens, that the sense of adventure is seemingly lost these days. There's nothing new to discover. And God, if we could just discover a Bigfoot that would be so huge and so monumental. And I get that. That's probably why I want to believe, you know, it would rock the world of science. Oh, it totally would. But. Then we'd put it in a zoo. Yeah. Poke it with electricity. We humans. Yeah. All right. Well, let's see. If you want to learn more about bigfoot, you can type that word into the search bar. How stuff works. There's an adorable picture of a baby orangutan in this article, so you want to check that out. That's Bigfoot, and it'll bring that up. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this I don't even remember what this was. Oh, meth showers. Josh, Chuck and Jerry. A-K-A-L. Chucktran. My name is Jimmy Griffith from Lenore, South. North carolina or Linux? I'm not sure if pronounced that I'm originally born in Brazil, a relatively young listener, and after listening to how meth works, reminded me of a story from my college days. I used to know these identical twin brothers that went to Appalachian State with me. It goes on. That's cool. Yeah. They beat Michigan with a bunch of hippies. Which party kids? Sure. I had friends that went there at one time. One of them was having unexplained hallucinations. See what I mean? And other weird psychological issues. The twin with hallucinations feared that he might have schizophrenia, but that did not make sense since his identical twin did not share the symptoms. As I understand, if one had the disorder, the other would also have it, since they're identical. I'm not sure if that's true. It's probably like a percentage, but I don't think it's automatic. After dealing with this issue for a little while, the twin with hallucinations decided to see a doctor and after running a few blood tests, tested positive for meth, which made no sense since he had never used meth. After a few questions about the daily routine, they found out that most of what they did was similar, except one of the twins preferred to take baths, the one suffering hallucinations and the other preferred showers. This led to further investigation of the rental house they lived in. They found out there was a high concentration of meth on the bathtub, on the porcelain of the bathtub, which indicated who ever lived there previously made meth in the bathtub. As you would expect, they shut down the house. The twins moved out. The cleaning crew with hazmat suits moved in. The twin with the issues ceased to have hallucinations involuntarily. He says, don't know. I probably need to point that out. And he came back to his old self. Just wanted to share that. Hope you're having a great week. Someday I hope to visit the studio in Atlanta and meet Jerry. Yeah, right here is Jimmy Griffith from North Carolina. Originally from Brazil. Dude. Thanks, Jimmy. We hope you're having a good week, too, and we're glad your friend turned out okay. Jeez, can you imagine? You tested for meth? It's like Elaine testing positive for poppy seed bagel. Yeah. Opium. Yeah. Or poppy seed heroin. Yeah. That's a good one, man. Was that Seinfeld? Yes, I have one. If you are a skeptic and a believer in bigfoot, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com STUFFYou Knows. And you can send us a good old fashioned email too. Stuffpodcast@howstepworkscom. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
c5aa9952-5460-11e8-b38c-63f8643fb24b | Selects: How Empathy Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-empathy-works | Empathy can often be confused with sympathy and regular old compassion. But it's not exactly either one of those. Some say a lack of empathy can indicate sociopathic tendencies, but that's not always true either. So what is empathy and what makes someone prone to empathize? Listen in to this classic episode to find out. | Empathy can often be confused with sympathy and regular old compassion. But it's not exactly either one of those. Some say a lack of empathy can indicate sociopathic tendencies, but that's not always true either. So what is empathy and what makes someone prone to empathize? Listen in to this classic episode to find out. | Sat, 02 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=275, tm_isdst=0) | 50303555 | audio/mpeg | "Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. Good Saturday to you. Chuck Bryant here podcaster co host stuff You Should Know. To introduce the Saturday Selects episode. My pick this week, everybody, is Empathy. We all need a little empathy in our lives, and I remember this being a pretty good episode. This is from April 6, 2017. Listen close and take heed how Empathy works. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W chuckleen on my shoulder. Bryant and Jerry How about a hug, Roland? No, actually, I'm sorry. Jerry's here in spirit. Our guest producer today is Noel. That's right. My beard heals all brown. Yes. Everybody knows it's Noel Brown. Are you using your empathy voice? Yes. Is it working? You ain't fooling nobody. Oh, really? It's the BDIs that say, I cut you for $10. How are you, sir? I'm feeling empathetic. Good. I'm doing good. I have some very strong opinions on empathy, and not just empathy, but empathy research in particular, as I'm sure you're not at all surprised to hear. I'm not at all surprised to hear. Did you come to the same or similar conclusions as I did? I don't know yet, because we don't talk about this stuff beforehand. That's true. That's the magic going blind. Did you know that there's, like, an Atlanta magic thing now? What do you mean? Like a society something. I just saw a sign for it in Old Fort Ward, but there's, like, a seems to be legitimate magicians. What's that? Castle in La. Oh, the Magic Castle. It's not that, but it's probably something that the people who do the Atlanta thing or I'm sure aware of the Magic Castle, probably. And then you did a double take at the sign, and it disappeared in a poop of smile. That would be great. I went to the Magic Castle once. Lucky. Yeah, it's awesome. I think we had this conversation because I asked you if you'd seen that documentary about the kids competition at the Magic Castle. Yeah, I have not, but it's really good. Chuck yeah. I highly recommend it. If you can get in, you got to know somebody. You got to know Ben Stiller. Oh, really? No, there's a movie that he was in that took place in The Magic Castle, and he was, like, the bad guy, I think. I don't remember what it was. Maybe it was that documentary. Well, let's talk empathy, chuck all right. Wait, hold on. I have an intro. I have an intro. Okay. Are you familiar with Frank Rich? The left leaning or lefty as heck Saistist? I don't think so. He's good. He's about as good an essayist as you'll find on the left. Okay. He's a consultant on Veep. He's hilarious, and he knows his stuff great. Right. He usually writes for Harper's, but he's also got a regular gig in New York Magazine and in New York Magazine. Recently, he published a column, I think this week well, this week as of when we're recording this, and I think it was called, like, no Sympathy for the Hillbilly or something like that. And it was basically, this is really astounding coming from him, but it was basically him saying, you know what? I know that on the left, people tend to be bleeding heart liberals and want to empathize with everybody and feel everyone else's pain and understand where people are coming from. But I believe that if you voted for Trump and you're angry or I believe if you're angry at the people who voted for Trump or angry that Trump is president, you should be angry at the people who voted him into office as well. And he basically is beating a drum, which I also started to see in other places as well, where it's like, no, you don't have to understand people who voted for Trump. You don't have to love your enemy. Let's just go to war with these people. And it's legitimately, totally serious, too. And it amounts to basically a call to go to the dark side, to resist everything that the left has traditionally prided itself on and just go full bore, like culture war against the right. And it just seems like a really bad idea to me. But one of the things that stuck out to me about it the most was that it was so contrary to the ethos, the prevailing thought of the time, or at least what made up the Obama administration, which was, we need to be more empathetic. We need to understand people's plight more. And even after Hillary lost people, one of the big post Mortems was Hillary didn't connect with blue collar workers who were out of work. She was totally out of touch with that she couldn't empathize with them. Well, I think further, poor Mortem has been like, hillary could have empathize with those people all day, but they hated her and they were never going to vote for her. And now Frank Rich is saying, so hate them back is the thing. Again, I disagree with that. But it really points out what a fragile turning point we're at right now, this path in history on America. Are we going to stay and just keep trying to be empathetic or again, just going to go full board of the dark side and just everybody's going to hate everybody who's not like them? Wow, quite an intro. Thank you. For a coastal elite. Oh, I'm not a coastal elite. I'm just kidding. I just like that phrase. I hope I'm not man. I really don't think I am, and I hope people don't think I am. I do stick my pinky in the air when I take sips of water, and that water has been strained through a Franciscan monk's mouth first. I don't think the only water I'll drink I don't think you can be a coastal elite if you have your roots in Toledo, right? Exactly. And I don't forget where I'm from, man. And my family has long routes in Tennessee and Mississippi. If you know this by reading my Wikipedia page, right? Does it say that you parked chocolate on there yet? Oh, I'm sure it will soon. All right, so we're talking empathy here. A lot of this sound familiar, so much so that I quadruple checked that we had not done this. And I think we've just talked about it a lot, mainly in our mirror neurons episode. Yeah, and I thought about that one a lot when I was researching this. Well, I think it's definitely a component of empathy, but it's not to be confused with empathy. It's like part of it, I think, is the impression. I have agreed. So empathy, if you look at our not so great article, they do define it. Everyone kind of knows what it is. But just to be clear, it's not sympathy. You can feel and share someone else's emotions is empathy, which is different than sympathy, and that you're not feeling it, but you do care about it. Right. It's like you can understand why someone would be feeling like they're feeling intellectual. Sympathy is from the brain and empathy is from, say, the heart. Yes. And a lot of these words, when we get into the definitions of empathy and versus compassion, it gets a little I don't know, sometimes I feel like people are kind of splitting hairs with major. That, to me, Chuck, is a huge red flag that the field is not nearly as established as people like to think. Like, if there's still confusion on basic terms like empathy and sympathy, and they're used interchangeably, it just means that no one is doing the right kind of hardcore research or publishing the right kind of hardcore papers and say, this is what it is, or this is what it isn't. Yes, agreed. I almost just said, this is what it not is this is what it ain't. No coastal elite, but there was an original German word, Einstein, which means feeling into. And that's where empathy comes from. And if you talk to an expert or researcher these days, they're going to talk about a couple of types of empathy, effective or maybe emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. And the distinction, as it turns out, is pretty important. Well, to me, this is where a little bit of the splitting hairs comes in, because as far as talking about effective empathy versus compassion, is it the same thing or I'm sorry, cognitive empathy would be more like compassion, because you're not really taking on someone else's pain. So compassion, I think, is even like a third word. So this is what I came up with. You've got cognitive empathy, which is sympathy, right? You can understand why someone would be feeling a certain way, then you've got effective empathy or emotional empathy, which one dude calls it okay, which is like you're really putting yourself in that person's shoes and you're feeling how they're feeling right then. But then compassion, it seems to me, is the end goal of this. That's where you actually move to act. It's where you do something about it. It's where you put your hand on someone's shoulder and say, it's going to be all right, or here's a check for $500, get some groceries with it. Who knows what you're going to do? But I think to me, compassion is the act, like the action, the end goal of empathy, whether it's cognitive or effective. That's what I think. And, you know, what this feels is so unestablished that I can just say that stuff. Yeah. And it's probably right. Let's just say that that's true. No one can really come along and say definitively that you're not right. So to put giving you an example of what that might mean, effective or emotional empathy, if you have a friend or family member going through a very hard time and they're distraught and then you are also distraught, just like they are, then that is definitely effective empathy. Whereas you're not just like, oh, man, you know, your uncle passed away. I'm really sorry to hear that, and I feel terribly for you. But if you are actively taking that on to the point where you're crying too, and you didn't know the uncle because that would be the differentiation, right? I think so. You don't have a personal stake in it, but you're still taking it on as if it is your own. Yes. And then depending on your view of things and we'll talk a lot about this, there's this really great psychologist named Paul Bloom who has basically dedicated a lot of his life to shooting down ideas of how great empathy is. Yeah, I thought he made a lot of good points, and some I don't quite agree with either. But he's great. He's really good at poking holes in the concept of empathy. But he points out that I guess it's probably good if someone is in a great mood and you're empathetic and sharing in that great mood and amplifying it. But on the flip side of the coin, if somebody is in a horrifically, tragically, sad mood and you're sitting there amplifying that by joining in part and parcel with it, then you're doing a disservice, right? Yes. So in some ways well, I'll just say Paul Bloom's whole thesis, and I subscribe to it as well, is that cognitive is far and away the superior of the two types of empathy as far as the ultimate goal, which again, to me is compassion. Yeah. You want to just pepper in some of his stuff as we go? Sure. Does that make sense? Yes. Because here's a great spot, too. And this is one of the studies, I imagine. I don't know if you had a problem with it, but I had a problem with a lot of these studies. Yeah, me too. But there was a study, at least one, where psychologists said, how much money will you donate to develop a drug that would save one child's life? And then another group was asked, how much would you donate to develop a drug that would save eight kids? And it was about the same answer. Where things changed was when they asked a third group about the one child. But they showed a picture of the kid and said, this is Joey. He's 14 years old, and this is his sad little face. And then donations really shot up. And this is where what was his name? Paul Bloom. Paul Bloom, a psychologist. Yeah. This is where Paul Bloom says that this emotional empathy is for the birds because A, it's narrow, and B, it's very like people tend to want to help people that are like them. So it's biased. Is that the right word? Super biased? Yeah. And it makes no sense. Not only does it not scale upward as the number of people affect by, say, like a tragedy increase, it actually goes the other way, where the more people that are affected by something, the less empathetic a person tends to be. Whereas if, say it's one person and you know that person's name and you see that person's picture on the news and yeah, they look like you or your neighbor or your daughter, you're going to empathize a lot. Sure. But at the same time, the same thing could be happening to 50,000 other people. And if you'll just vote a certain way, you can alleviate their suffering. You wouldn't lift a finger to do it, especially if it meant slightly higher taxes for you. So in that sense, empathy makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, he even quoted Mother Teresa in this essay, which is, if I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will. So he's going with the heavy hitters there when you bring Mother Teresa in there to kind of make a point. Yeah, but he makes a good point. And that study does I didn't have a big problem with that study because it does kind of prove that out. Right. That was Tealia Koga and Elana Ritov. They're psychologists. And then Ritov and another co author conducted another study where they kind of pointed out one of the problems with empathy. Which was they said, okay, two different groups of people heard this, that a vaccine maker cost a child her life. They killed a child because of the vaccine. Now, should the vaccine maker be fined? And then one group was told that the fine would probably make the vaccine maker follow guidelines even more strictly and would probably prevent accidents and then the other further accidents. And then the other group was told that this fine would probably make the vaccine maker get out of the business and more people would die because they couldn't get the vaccine. And both groups said that, yes, the vaccine makers should be punished with the highest fine possible right. With extreme prejudice. Right. So the upshot of all of this is that especially with effective empathy as we understand it, it doesn't follow any kind of rational guidelines and the basis of rationality being that two is more important than one. Right. And empathy just doesn't go in that direction. Yeah. But interestingly, while you can train yourself to be more empathetic, it definitely to me feels like something that you are sort of born with to a certain degree or maybe in the formative years you might gain. But in Bloom's article, he talks about babies. And as soon as a baby can get up and start getting around, they're going to try and comfort. Like if you go into a preschool and there's another baby crying, you will probably see another little baby walking over there and patting the little baby and stroking the baby. There's nothing more adorable than that. Pretty adorable. And it happens in the animal kingdom. Although they did note this, franz Dewal the Prymatologist notes that it kind of follows humans in a way and that a chimpanzee might really hug a victim of an attack, but it's got to be another chimp. Like they will smash the brains out of another kind of monkey, maybe if it wanders into their little village. Right. That to me kind of underscores this whole thing. Like when we look at empathy, the first question that people have is like, why don't we have more empathy? Or why don't we have empathy for everybody? We're all humans. And it seems like based on Franz Dewal's studies and other studies about the evolution of in group and out group behavior, we evolved over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. I guess more than that, if you're also looking at the great apes right, sure. To see other groups that aren't like us as threatening. Right. It makes sense in an evolutionary speaking way. Right. And it's only in like the last 1011 thousand years that we settled down and started forming cities. But even then there was in group and out group people you didn't recognize were coming to kill you for your crops. So you needed to fight those people. You didn't need to empathize with them that, oh, you're hungry, so you're going to take my life, I understand. Right. That didn't jive with natural selection. Right. But then you add jets into the mix and then TV and then the internet and all of a sudden we're exposed to more in groups and out groups and are expected to get along more civilly than ever before. But our evolution hasn't caught up quite enough. Right. Yeah. So now we're faced with this point where it's like, okay, we just need to figure out how to empathize more. And this last vestige that's holding back a completely civil global society will fade away. And Franz DeWalt put it pretty well. He said, this is the challenge of our time. Globalization by a tribal species. That's what we're facing right now. And right now, it feels like, at least in the United States, we're backsliding. Yeah. Well, that's a good place to take a break, I think. Yeah. All right, well, we're going to come back in just a minute and talk a little bit about something called the racial empathy gap right after this. All right, so I promised some talk about race, and there's something called the racial empathy gap. Studies have kind of I mean, if you walk around as a living, breathing human being, you can probably tell that's something. But they have done studies on it, and a lot of these studies are a little hinky to me. But in one, they showed video clips of a needle going into someone's skin, notably a white person's skin at first. And what they found was white people reacted more or with more empathy when the needle went into white skin than when it went into dark skin. Right. Or they showed more signs of distress, like, they started to sweat a little more. Their heart started to beat a little faster. Yeah. That's where I think mirror neurons might come into play. Right, yeah. That's what brain wiring that's a huge problem with reading about empathy in the popular media. There are huge jumps from mirror neurons to full on effective empathy with just the switch of a sentence or the stroke of a headline. And so people are not talking about the same thing. And I'm sure there's plenty of empathy researchers out there that are just like, guys, this is not like you're making huge jumps to the conclusion everyone's like, Shut up. Doesn't matter. We're selling clicks. Right? Yeah, sure. It is. Surely setting off mirror neurons. I don't understand how it's being translated into empathy, aside from I think a lot of the empathy studies involve self reporting. Right. So I think what they're doing is they're saying, oh, well, subject 1329, their heart really started beating, and look at this on this questionnaire they filled out, they really consider themselves an empathetic person. IPSO facto, an empathetic person is responding very empathetically right now to seeing this needle. Yeah. Like, what if they showed painted someone's skin green? Well, they have. They've done violet tinted. And actually, tell you the truth, as far as correlating with self reports, that does tend to be a pretty good control, to tell you the truth, because apparently all people respond to that one. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it is, actually. There is something going on there, though. I mean, we're not, like, discounting that because they have done studies that show that minorities maybe don't get pain medication like they should compared to white people. And I don't know. It seems like a racial empathy gap is a pretty decent explanation for that, for sure. Or in the criminal justice system, which we've talked a lot about, or maybe just in empathy altogether between races. Yeah. So if you're a judge, though, and you're not following sentencing guidelines, you're just using your own personal biases to hand out sentences, and you have people's lives and futures in your hands. Yes. You're not following the law. You're following your own bias. You're a piece of garbage. Well, it has nothing to do with you being an empathetic person or not. What about that judge who remember the guy, the swimmer who raped the girl by the dumpster? It was obvious. That judge was kind of like, oh, look at this kid. Oh, I don't want to ruin his future. Yeah. I don't want to ruin his future. Like, that could have been my son, kind of like me. It was clearly bias and empathy going on because he was like him. Right. And there's no way, if that would have been some black kid that he wouldn't have ruled differently. No one can convince me that that's not the truth. Right. And I think that there's another distinction that's eventually going to be hammered out, too. I don't think he was empathizing with that swimmer kid. If he was, I could be wrong. Who knows? But I think he was, at the very least, exhibiting a bias that, yes, he let the kid off the hook because he looked like him. I think he might have been sympathizing with him, though. Sure. Yeah. Because even flat out said, like, this could ruin his life. Right. Yeah. He was definitely sympathizing, at least for sure. Boy so going back a bit to philosopher Adam Smith way back in the day sure. I think, was clearly talking about mirror neurons, even though he didn't know that was a thing at the time, when he wrote that persons of delicate fibers who noticed a beggar sores and ulcers are apt to feel an itching or an easy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies. That's absolutely mirror neurons firing off. And we've been saying that a lot. If you don't know what we're talking about, listen to our can you feel someone else's pain? Yeah. Can you feel someone else's pain? It was from a few years ago, but it was one of my favorites we've ever done, just because it's so fascinating. It really is, man the brain is wired like that, and it's the reason why. And this is the easiest way to explain it. Like, if you see, like, in a football game, someone's leg gets broken and you literally feel, like, pain shoot through your body. Those are mirror neurons. Did you see there was a Simpsons recently where Kirk Van Houten is back in college, and he goes to, like, high five. He's like a lacrosse player. He goes to high five the college mascot, which is, like, a guy in a suit of armor, and he breaks his wrist in, like, 50 places, and they show they cut to the sideline, and Joe thisman takes his hat off and throws up into it. Man, I remember that seismic thing. I think we talked about that in the episode. Yeah. I don't think I still have ever seen it. You don't need to. I think I do, though. How can I be walking and talking through life and not having seen Joe Thisman break his leg? Well, it's one of those things when you see a body get bent in a very unnatural direction. It's just that your brain is hard wired to not accept that. I know. It's pretty cool. It makes you faint because your brain's like, I can't see anymore. Speaking of the brain, Chuck, let's talk a little bit about the brain. Right? All right. So we've already kind of touched on one of the issues that I think we both have with empathy research is that the designs of the studies are just so shoddy, it's mind boggling. But then the other part of it is like, well, just leave it to neuroscience. But neuroscience is still using the same old MRIs that it was before. And again, all it's showing is that's where more oxygen is in the part of the brain. Right. Then we're going to correlate that to that part of the brain being lit up. So that means that this part of the brain has to do with looking at pictures of boobs. This is the boob region. Right. And this is like the level that neurology is at as far as behavioral studies goes. Right. You put these two together. This is the state of the art with empathy research. But with the brain, as far as that goes, they have kind of isolated a few different parts. And again, this is kind of like we think that this has to do with this process just because in trial after trial, the same circuit has been followed or the same region is lit up when we've applied this stimulus to different people. There's good evidence that this does have to do with, say, empathizing or whatever, but it's a rudimentary understanding at this point, I think, compared to, say, like, 50 years from now. Right. So what they think they figured out is that there's a part of the brain and I love parts of the brain the effective empathy part of the brain is called the insular cortex. That's where they think that the effective region or part of the effective region lies. Yeah, the anterior insular cortex. And then the cognitive empathy is thought to reside or originate in the mid cingulate cortex. And actually, those came from a Monash University research paper that looked at the concentration of gray matter, the density of gray matter, and that's like the neurons, whereas white matter is like the connecting material, right? Yes. And so they're saying people who have really effective empathy have denser insular cortexes cortis. And then people have really serious cognitive empathy, have dense mid singular cortices. Right. That's where it's at right now. Yeah. They did a pretty interesting test, this Tania singer, and this dude named Matthew Ricard, he's a Buddhist monk. And I get the idea that they pick this guy because he can very much control his brains in emotion. Right. So what they did was, he's a Buddhist monk, they did some fMRI brain scanning on this guy and they said, all right, sir, Mr Ricard, he's like, Please call me Matthew. Matthew, we would like you to engage in some different types of compassion and meditate and direct that meditation toward people who are suffering. And then they hook them up to the brain scan magic machine and they found that the meditative states that was actually surprising to them, it did not activate parts of the brain that are usually activated by non meditators when they think about pain. But he said it was good for me, basically, it was a warm, positive state. And he said, all right, now put yourself in this, what they would call the emotional empathetic state. And I guess he's able to turn that on like a switch. He's like, Watch this. Yeah, exactly. And blood just comes out of his nose yeah. In different parts of the brain, lit up. And he said, this empathetic sharing very quickly became intolerable to me. I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burnt out. So that's one of the big arguments against this emotional or effective empathy, is that you can't take on everyone else's pain like this. Let's say you're a social worker or you're a nurse or a doctor. It's going to drive you insane. Oh, yeah. You'll burn out. It's called empathy distress. Yeah. And when they've talked to patients, like hospital patients, they don't want that either. They want maybe someone who has some sympathy. But patients are more likely to feel better. I was just imagining a doctor coming in and just falling to pieces at your condition. Doctors aren't coming. Like you said, you don't want a doctor. No. They feel better if their doctor is kind of clinical and reassuring and really seems like they have it together, which makes sense. Yeah. And you don't want somebody like, frankly, I could care less whether you live or die. You want somewhere in between those two. Yes. Which is where oh, my God, you're going to die. You don't want that out of your doctor. No, but it seems like the middle of those two ends of the spectrum is where cognitive empathy comes in. Yeah. Well, Chuck, how about we take a break here? Second break. That sounds good. And we'll come back. We promise. All right, ma'am, what do you want to talk about? Sasha Baron Cohen. I still have never actually looked up whether that's his brother or cousin or what. Simon they're related? Yeah. Psychologist Simon Barron Cohen wrote a book. In 2011 called the Science of Evil. And he's way down with empathy. Yeah, big time. Yeah. And I guess they describe him as a thoughtful defender, is what Bloom describes him as, of empathy. And he has a ranking system, an empathy curve from zero to six. And zero is no empathy. Basically, your sociopath. And six is, I guess, the most hardcore of emotional empaths. Yeah. You call it a constant state of hyperarousal. Right. And he had this one woman that he used in his little example named Hannah, who was a therapist. It's probably a great job for her, but she's just one of these people that, by all accounts, is just wired that way, like her friends and her family and her patients. She just really feels for them. All right? It's not just her job, which is in some ways, it probably helps some people, but in other ways, it's really probably number one, off putting. And even if everybody liked it, it's bad for her in the end. We're not designed to carry everybody's problems and issues with us all the time. Yeah. And that's kind of the main point Bloom is making, is that people like Hannah are headed towards burnout, headed for. And he also does make the point that friends and family don't like they need a certain amount of that empathy. But you don't want someone that's always in that state. Like, you also want someone that's like, all right, let's turn that frown upside down and let's go out and take a walk. You don't want someone that always cries when you cry, right? You're just going to be like, I thought I had it bad. And you can extend that also to the way that people react in some ways to say, like a mass tragedy or something like that. Right? Look at Newtown, right? The Sandy Hook shooting. 20 small kids were killed. Six adults were also killed at the elementary school. It was the most horrific tragedy, I think, that ever took place in the United States. It was basically the one that everyone who believes in very strict gun control was waiting for, knew it was going to happen sooner or later, and thought, this is going to be the tipping point. And it didn't happen. Right. What people reacted to with was outpourings of donations. Lots of stuffed animals, apparently there were three for every resident of the town were sent stuff to animals. Yeah. And lots of thoughts and prayers. And if you ever have seen Anthony Jezelnick, yeah, he's he has a Netflix special, I think it's still on, called Thoughts and Prayers. And you watch that, and he explains to you just how valuable your thoughts and prayers are, especially on Twitter. But Paul, Bloom points out, is like, this actually proved to be this outpouring proved to be an additional burden on this town, which is already suffering tremendously. There were something like 800 volunteers who were tasked with handling all the donations, whether it was stuffed animals or money. And they apparently had to get a warehouse to put all the stuffed animals in. And I think even some of the public officials were like, please stop sending us stuff. Send stuff, but send it to other people. We've got everything we need. Send it to other people. And everyone said, no, shut up. This is about us, not you. And I think that that's part of effective empathy, that outpouring of stuff that seems like a nice gesture that makes you feel better, but doesn't actually help in any real substantial way. I think that kind of underlies or betrays what effective empathy is all about and why we are moved to do something with effective empathy. Because we're feeling something right then. And writing a check or sending a teddy bear is a good way to feel better, for us to feel better. Whereas cognitive empathy would be like, I'm going to see to it that every senator who blocked the gun control bill following Newtown is voted right out of office. Right? That would be cognitive empathy. You're empathizing with the parents, you're empathizing with future kids who haven't been killed yet, and you're going to do what you can to make sure it doesn't happen, rather than writing a check or sending a teddy bear. Those, to me, are the real distinctions between cognitive and effective empathy as far as that ultimate goal is concerned, which is, again, compassion. But compassion is doing what you can to improve the outcome for the greater good. Yeah, that's interesting. And another thing that kind of jumped out to me was these psychologists, vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz, they were researching why women are more likely, I think twice as likely as men to get depressed and experienced depression. I saw that, too, and they said, you know what? I think it's because women are more empathetic and emotionally empathetic, and they take this on and they said that there's propensity for what they call unmitigated communion, which is an excessive concern with others and placing others needs before one's own, end quote. And they gave people and this is one of those, like a nine item questionnaire, how much can you really learn? Right? But some of the statements agree or disagree with were like, for me to be happy, I need others to be happy. I can't say no when someone asks for help. Often worry about others problems, and kind of across the board, women score higher than men do on this. And I think a lot of that probably has to do with evolution, too, with women having to care for their babies right out of the gate, which took wife, although it took we know never took a wife, right. Got around. You got around. But the women that took tuck would knock up, right? They would immediately be in charge of those babies. And that's what that primatologist talked about, too. This is kind of straight up evolution or natural selection is right out of the gate. We have this empathy because we have to care for young. Right. And then I think we already mentioned too, and then that definitely evolves into protect the tribe. Right. Because we're better off if the people around us are healthy and happy and ready to ward off attacks. Yeah. The idea that women are more prone to experience, say, effective empathy or just even empathy in general, it has a biological basis, to tell you the truth, too, Chuck, in adolescence or puberty, apparently, girls have they score high for effective empathy throughout their entire adolescence, where between about ages 13 and 16, boys effective empathy decline. Yes. They take a little vacation. Yeah. And they say, oh, you feel bad, they become jerks. You're about to feel worse because I'm going to give you a swirly. Yeah. I don't know what a swirly is, but it's where you stick someone's head in the toilet and flush. Oh, swirly. Never heard of that. Fortunately, I'd only heard of it, never witnessed it or had it done to me. We did. Noogies. And was it wedgies when you did the underwear? Sure. Yeah. They're terrible. They are terrible. And that's bullying behavior. And there are some theories about bullies, too, that they actually use empathy to manipulate people, like they'll use it against them. Yeah. They used cognitive empathy to calculate the best, most effective way to hurt somebody, and then they turn off any potential effective empathy when they're actually carrying out their active bullying. Yes. And with the teenagers, too, they say that if you develop effective and cognitive empathy, that you're going to be happier, you're going to argue less with your parents, and you're going to have more healthy relationships, which kind of all makes sense. Sure. And they also were saying, too, and we'll get into how to increase your own empathy, if you think that kind of thing is a good idea. But babies learn empathy out of the gate by being empathized with, by being treated warmly by their parents and other adults, being responded to in a warm manner. That that actually is the beginning of empathy. And it's like you said, you can see a little kid in a preschool go over in comfort or console another little kid who's in distress. But that's why when I hear about neglect, like baby and infant neglect, it's just, oh, man, that's like the most heartbreaking thing you can imagine. It's like a baby just, like, left in a room to cry and cry and cry forever. Plus, also, when we were talking about the breastfeeding episode, that body to body contact being held shows or has been shown to affect their development if they don't have it enough. Yeah. There's just all sorts of terrible things that happen to you when you're neglected as a baby. Yeah. It's terrible. So, Chuck, there are plenty of people who say, well, we need to empathize more, so just get out there and learn how to empathize. And there's plenty of people out there who will teach you techniques on empathizing with people more, and they may be worth trying. I found them very helpful in a lot of cases, especially on interpersonal communication. Right. But as far as changing the world on a massive scale for the better, is it a good idea to go out and just empathize, empathize, empathize? Because there's a big question mark with that. Who exactly are you supposed to empathize with? Like, with just about every problem, there's a group that's being helped by something and a group that's being harmed by something, especially when it comes to public policy. Right, yeah. So which group you're going to empathize with? If you empathize with the current victims and you change public policy to help them, well, then you're leaving the people who are currently benefiting out in the cold. Right, right. So there's a big question of who you should empathize with at any given point in time, which makes this whole behavioral, science, nudge, politics BS that is ultimately behind this whole push to empathize more. That's not taking that into consideration. And then there's kind of a second facet to that, which is studies have found that when you increase empathy in people, they tend to empathize more with their own group, but it also in kind increases hostility in those people toward out groups. Oh, wow. You know what I'm saying? Like, they see their friend who's being hurt is more of a victim and how could you do this to them? And now I want to get you back. Because one of the sour sides of empathy is that it frequently comes with a taste for retribution, too, I think is how Paul Bloom put it. Wow. The dark side of empathy. Yeah, there is a dark side. There's a dark side to everything, isn't there? Yeah. Except you. I'm all dark side. You're all white. So we'll finish up here with a bit on people with autism, because there's this stereotype that if everyone's probably heard it, that, you know what, people with autism lack empathy and they don't understand emotions. And if you know anybody who either has autism or as a parent of a child with autism, they will dispel that myth pretty straight up just from their own lives. But these people did some studying and some research because they were like, that's not good enough for me, and it's not good enough to just say that autism is different for everyone. Right. So some people have empathy or some people with autism show empathy, but everyone's different, so who cares about investigating that? Yeah. So I really love the approach they took here. They were kind of really wanted to keep digging, which I really respected, so they said, you know what? I think it might be going on here. There's this other condition called alexithymia. And alexathemia means you have a difficult time understanding your own emotions. So you might have a feeling that you're experiencing an emotion, but you just don't know what it is. And about 10% of people have it in the regular population. About 50% of people with autism have alexithymia. They're not the same thing. No. And these guys actually found that people with autism who do not have alexithymia tend to display empathy. Yeah. And even lots of empathy. Right. Lots of empathy. Yeah, empathy. They got binders full of empathy. Binders full of empathy. That's a call back, huh? Oh, yeah. I remember when that was the most controversial thing going in politics. Oh, man. Finders full of empathy. Yeah. They scored very strong when it came to measuring empathy, and what they did was it makes sense the way they did it. I really like this study. They had four groups individuals with autism and alexa. Individuals with autism without it, individuals with alexithemia, but not autism. And then people that didn't have either one. And it basically seems to kind of prove that. Yeah. It's just not true that people with autism don't have empathy. It's really alexithymia is what's going on. Right. Which is, I think, a novel finding or a novel hypothesis. I don't think this is part of a larger field. I think these guys came up with that. Yeah. And did you see that other study from Goldsmith University of London about the facial expressions? Yeah. I thought that was pretty interesting, too. Yeah. They investigated that if you expose people with autism to the sounds of people's voices and asked them to rate what emotion that person is experiencing, they're far better at calling that correctly than faces. And apparently it's because people with autism tend to spend much less time studying faces, not because they can't empathize. They just aren't using cues that people without autism use to conclude what emotions people are experiencing. Yeah, really interesting stuff. And I don't know why this didn't get more play, because it still seems like people are kind of banging that drum that people with autism aren't empathetic. Yeah. I don't know why either. This makes sense. Yeah. We need to do an entire episode on autism. Yeah, maybe. Alexis amy, I've never heard of that. We also need to do one on psychopaths, too, which is another group that tends to be pointed to kind of incorrectly as far as empathy goes, where if you're lacking empathy, you're a psychopath. It actually turns out that if you have what's called a shallow affect meaning across the board, emotionally, you're pretty stunted and shallow or superficial. That's what really qualifies you as a psychopath. Not just missing empathy. Right. But yet again, it's another popular misconception that's being allowed to persist. I'm just irritated, Chuck. I know. I've got a great quote, though, from Paul Bloom, and I also want to say that I think that empathy also the different kinds of empathy also get divided among the genders as well. And we even said, we even talked about that study that concluded that women tend to suffer from depression because they're more empathetic. Right. I think that maybe that's the case, and there is a biological basis for it in adolescence. But one thing that seems to persist everywhere is that different types of empathy or different techniques for empathy to produce empathy, can be learned. They can be taught. And I think if you just say, like, wait a minute, I really want to solve this problem. I'm not going to fly off the handle or I'm not going to lose my marbles, I'm going to really put some thought into it, and I can still be compassionate, but I don't have to completely experience someone else's pain. I don't think that that's a biological imperative one way or another. I think if you decide to make a choice or a change in the way you approach situations, that has nothing to do with gender. So I just wanted to point that out. Yeah. And as far as teaching empathy, there's been a little bit of poopooing of emotional empathy, but I think it's definitely a pretty good thing to do as a parent to try and teach your child to, like, hey, how would you feel if someone was doing this to you? That's how they learn. Yeah, exactly. You don't learn it on your own. I think it has to be imparted by good parents. Agreed. And again, the goal, and this is a Paul Bloom quote, the goal isn't to love every single person like you love the people closest to you, but to value other people just for the very fact that they're human beings. Right. That's the goal that everybody's looking for with empathy. And he says, quote, our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family. That's impossible. It lies instead in an appreciation of the fact that even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love. That's the key. Very interesting. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. We should subtitle this one. Empathy. A Lucy Goosey episode, also known as what Paul Bloom says. Thank you, Paul Bloom. Yeah. Big ups to Paul Bloom. And since I said big ups to Paul Bloom, that means it's time for listener mail. Chuck, I'm going to call this Hook Worms. Nice. Hello from the sunny South United States. Southerners aren't lazy and dumb. They just had hookworm. Great title, by the way. Josh thank you. I brought back a childhood memory, and I finally had to ride in. Guys. I grew up in Florida, so we spent most of the summer with our shoes off. And I remember my mother distinctly reminding me to wear shoes so I wouldn't get the ground ditch. This never happened. I called my mom, who was now 88 years old, to verify a few facts and about when I was a little girl, I believe around five to seven or eight years before school started, my mother would give me a worm treatment on my feet. I explained to her what I'd learned during the podcast about hook worms and how they affected the body. When I mentioned how they caused severe anemia and caused the body to be more susceptible to illness, she remembered a story about my father's cousin. Apparently, the cousin became so incredibly ill, she was very close to dying. They took her to the hospital and found out she was severely anemic, and before they began any other diagnostics, they decided to test her for hookworm and bingo. As my mother said, she was full of them. She had a high worm burden. She did. Mom said it took three treatments to get rid of the worms. The story was she was so infested, they literally came out of her mouth when she was being treated. Oh, my God. Wow. That is the best story I've heard in a while. She put in parentheses. I know, right? Because I think she anticipated that reaction. That's why you don't want to be a 6.0 effective empathetic person. Yeah, that's right. This cousin is actually still alive and in her early 90s, so this would have been in the 1940s. I hope she doesn't listen to this show. Hookworm and fancy free in Florida. That's from Terry Brunson of Panama City. Nice. Thanks a lot, Terry. That was a great email. It had everything. It was a roller coaster ride. There was a cousin who had worms coming out of her mouth. Yes, I laughed. I cried. There was a mom, an old mom and an old cousin. I'd like to know what the worm treatment consisted of. I'll bet there was a dead cat in there somewhere. If you want to tell us about your family's weird remedies, we want to know the ingredients. You can tweet them to us at syscapodcast, or you can hang out with us on Facebook@facebook.com, Stuffyshow or Facebook.com charleswchuckbryant. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com and join us, as always, at our home on the web, STUFFYou know.com stuff efficient. 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." | |
c55745ae-5460-11e8-b38c-eff6896790b3 | Selects: How Nitrous Oxide Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-nitrous-oxide-works | For about 175 years people have been huffing nitrous oxide for everything from vision quests to anesthetic to get plain old high. And after all that time we are only now beginning to understand how it works on our brains. Get the scoop in this classic episode. | For about 175 years people have been huffing nitrous oxide for everything from vision quests to anesthetic to get plain old high. And after all that time we are only now beginning to understand how it works on our brains. Get the scoop in this classic episode. | Sat, 29 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=149, tm_isdst=0) | 51578754 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com. Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. Happy Saturday. It's chuck here of stuff you should know. It is February 8, 2016, and Saturday select time, because we are going back to that day to talk about how nitrous oxide works. And honestly, the reason I picked this as the select is that I don't even remember doing this one. So I'm going to listen again, and so should you. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio Wang wang. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Wong. Wang. Wang. There's charles W, Chuck, Bryant Wan. There's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. I'm giggling like a schoolgirl. You're making I think I just topped you, schoolgirl echoey reverbi sound. So this could only be about one thing. Nitrous oxide. That's right. N 20. That's right. Hippie Crack, the Bitter Mistress Whippets Jazz Juice yeah, why not? Yeah, I mean, those are the street names that has medical applications. Some of those are made up. Yes. We're going to cover the whole gamut here. Yeah. Medical use and recreational use dangers. Yeah. We're going to do an episode on nitrous oxide. That's right. So, Chuck, we should probably start not at the beginning, but not at the end, somewhere in the middle, because the history of nitrous oxide is extraordinarily interesting. Just the history. Yeah. We're going to tell it out of order. Like Pulp Fiction. That's right. See if you can recognize characters from other movies, like Vincent Vegas brother. Yes. Michael Madsen was Vincent Vega's brother. Did you know that? Yeah. Oh, you knew that. I did. Well, I don't think that's not the most heavily guarded secrets. Did you notice that Red Apple cigarettes make an appearance in more than just Pulp Fiction? Yeah. All right, I'm done. Did you notice that Quentin Tarantino likes to write 275 page scripts? Yeah, but that's nothing compared to the 580 page tome that Humphrey Davy wrote on nitrous oxide. Very nice, little segue. All right, so we're not even talking about Humphrey Davy yet. He's at the beginning. He's not even at the beginning, but he's toured the beginning. We're going to talk instead about the sad saga of one Doctor Horace Wells, DDS. Very sad. Yeah. So, Doctor Horace Wells was a dentist in New Haven, Connecticut, I believe, in the 1840s. What is DDS? Is that Dennis? Dennis C. Is that what that means? That's what I've always assumed it was. And at this point, everyone knows we just make most of the stuff. We stay up. That's right. So you're right. So he was a dentist in Hotfood, Connecticut. Oh, it was Hartford. I said, New Haven. What's the difference as long as it's in Connecticut? This was in the 1830s. Oh, really? I said 1840s. Oh, man. Really? Yeah. Maybe we should start over. All right. He was a dentist in the 1830s, and he recognized something that all dentists of the day recognize, which is everyone hates your guts because you are causing excruciating amounts of pain on a daily basis to your patients. Yeah. It's like. Here's some whiskey. Maybe bite on this broomstick. Well, actually, you can't do that because you're doing dentistry. You can't even do that. Yeah. You ever heard the term? It's like pulling teeth? That's where it comes from. Right. And so Horace Wells, DDS, dentist, dentist c. He felt pretty bad about this, enough so that he went to a traveling exhibition once that came through town, and this was in the 1840s, and it was staged by a man named Gardner Colton. That's a great name. Gardener Quincy Colton. Yes. He sounds like a rich kid from Texas. Yeah, or like a side showman, which is what he was. Right. And he actually was in medical school for a little while, and while he was in med school, he was introduced to the wonders of huffing nitrous oxide. Yes. And he said, I'm not going to do medical school anymore. I'm just going to drop out and hit the road with a tank. The old hippie crack. Yes, exactly. And show people what's what. And so at one of these demonstrations in Hartford sometime in the 1840s, he saw Colton give this demo, and I guess right afterwards saw a man run into the stage or fell off the stage and hurt his leg. And Wells went over, and he's like, Are you okay? And the guys like, what are you talking about? And he said, the bone is sticking out of your leg, sir. And he's like, what's? A bone? No, it wasn't that bad. But he did say, interesting. Yeah. Here's what I'll do. I'll get Colton to come into my office tomorrow, and my buddy colleague John Riggs, I'll get Colton to administer the gas, and I'll get Riggs to pull one of my teeth. And he did so, and he said, I did not feel so much as the prick of a pen. And he said, I think we're on to something here, something called pain free dentistry, aka please stop hating me. Right. And so Wells followed in this really great tradition that really stopped in, I guess, probably about the 20th century, mid to late 20th century of where if you're a scientist, you were your own first human test subject. I bet people still do that. Yeah. Apparently in Marvel Comics, they do. One of the greatest articles I've ever read in any magazine anywhere in all time, throughout the universe in perpetuity is called Blood Spore, and it was about the murder of a mycologist, a scientist who studies mushrooms. Wow. And it's really interesting. There's all sorts of weird cold case stuff to it, but there's also, like, an underlying thread where if you're a mycologist and you discover a mushroom, you try it out on yourself. Right. That's just what they do. Still today, I think that you try it on yourself after you fed it to your children, just to see what happens. Maybe your dog first, and then you try it on you. Man, I'll bet those mycologist dogs were bandanas and are super laid back. What's the name of the article? I want to check that out. Blood Spore in Harper's, which means it's behind a paywall, but it's almost worth a year's subscription just for that one. Wow. And Harper's archives are definitely full of good articles. Agreed. So Wells was pretty happy because he knew he was onto something there, and he said he performed just dental procedures for the next few weeks and months on dozens of patients, and they were all like, this is great. Worked great. Didn't feel a thing, Doc. And he said, I think I'm ready. I want to present this to some Harvard medical students and the establishment. And he got on stage, and he went to pull a tooth, and the guy started screaming. Yeah. So after all of these tests, successful tests, when he finally gets up the gumption to give a successful demonstration, it goes as bad as it could. And it's actually called The Humbug Affair because the medical students shouted, Humbug. And what was the other one? Swindler Adam. And he's like, no, I'm not. I'm not. I swear, this is for real. I really care about my patients. And the room started spinning, and he fell over, and when he came to, he was on skid row, hooked on chloroform and nitrous oxide. Yeah. He later went on to say that, although, let me clarify. You technically can't get hooked on nitrous oxide, but he was huffing a lot of nitrous oxide. Right. Well, although Davy well, we'll get to that. That could be a spoiler. He went on to say that he thought that he had probably withdrawn too much too soon from the guy, because as we'll go on to talk about here in a little bit, when you stop breathing in nitrous, you go back to normal pretty quickly. Very quickly. So he kind of just aired. I don't know. I would have gone a little bit overboard for the demo. Sure. On the safe side, I would have been, like, 99 pal, but became well, like you said, not hooked, but a heavy user of ether and cloriform. Oh, yes, ether. On his 33rd birthday, he was, I think, awaiting arrival. He ended up living alone, moved, and was waiting on his wife and kid to come to London. But by this time, he'd sunk into, like, a terrible depression. Yeah, right. And he was alone because his family wasn't able to join him yet. And he flipped out on his 33rd birthday and went out on the street and threw acid on these two women. Flipped out after going on, like, a chloroform bender. Yeah. And went to prison. And in prison, he sort of reached he kept doing chloroform and ether in prison because I guess you could get it and hit rock bottom and under an ether binge. Slashed his femoral artery and his thigh. Died. Well, yeah, he talked to the guard escorting him home to get his shaving kit. And at home, it's like a needle, big razor, I think. At home or maybe back, if he's getting chloroform in prison, it could have been there. He huffed a dose of chloroform to anesthetize himself, and then he cut his femoral artery to the end. He was a believer in anesthesia. I guess so. However, years later, in 1864, he was recognized by the Ada, the American Dental Association, as a pioneer of using not ether. But what are we talking about? N 2000. Yeah. And do you know who got him to that point? Well, yeah. Gardner Colton. That's right. He set up practice as a dentist, after all, and it was his successful demonstrations that got the Ada on board. Now we need to go back in time. Yeah, even further back. That's sort of the middle. So we're in the way back machine. I guess we didn't point out we were in there already. I think everyone just assumed and we go back 70 years previous to Horace Wells, to a guy named Jason Priestley. Yeah. Dylan. Sorry. No, Brandon. Joseph Priestley. Oh, that guy. Jason Priestley's dad. Yeah. Or great great grandfather. I don't think there was any relation, actually. You don't know. You're right. Joseph Priestley, he was an Englishman, and he began just like Jason Priestley. That's right. And he was an enlightened thinker, and he was a contemporary Ben Franklin, and he was a smart guy on a lot of different subjects. He's a polyglot. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Cool guy. No, I'm sorry. He was a polymath. A polymath. A polyglot is somebody who speaks a bunch of different languages. Polymath is somebody who's in a bunch of different fields. He may have well done both. Yeah, probably right. Now, he was an Enlightenment guy for sure. And in the 1770s, he was studying I think we should go back to using only old terminology, because what they called gas back then was the study of the heirs, which is great. Totally makes sense. Yeah. Gases that needs to shoot a duck. And he actually lived next to a brewery, so he had a lot of access to CO2 and very smartly created a device called the pneumatic trough to isolate gases, collect and isolate these gasses. And he was good at it. Well, a guy named Steven Hales actually created the first pneumatic trough, which is actually pretty simple invention. It's neat, though. So if you have a tube, let's say you have a fire and you want to collect carbon monoxide from it, you basically have a tube that collects it the smoke that's coming off of it, and the tube goes into a VAT of water and up into a glass bell jar that's upside down. It's inverted so that there's a bomb. There's air at the top. I think the principal is similar. The smoke goes into the water and then goes up and is filtered through the water. And what gas you have on the other end is whatever you're looking for. Yeah. Or a bunch of different gases that you can study in pure form. Simplistically. Beautiful. It is. So Priestly had his own that he made the pneumatic trough, and this guy actually isolated eight different gasses or airs for the first time, which apparently is a record still. Yeah, I don't know what the record is like. Most gas is discovered in a single lifetime. Okay. I guess. All right. That's good. It is. I don't know that there's any more gas to discover. I wonder. And who studies that kind of thing? What do you call somebody who studies gasses? An error. An errors. Well, if you do, that right into us, because I want to know all about that and if you guys think there's any gases left to be discovered here on Earth. Agreed. All right, let's take a break before we talk about Humphrey Davy, okay? Because this is where the story gets really good. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM consulting to bring together data and workflow so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame, and chocolate covered goodness with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building where you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a milk steak flamers chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquillum house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis as an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling who's ah, well, then there's a place that has everything you love from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only burners in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment getaway hulu check into your obsessions hulu subscription Required terms apply visit hulu.com for plan details that was quite a break. Yeah. I can't believe you broke that lamp. I was upset. All right, humphrey Davy, he worked at a place called the Pneumatic Institute, and they use gases for curative therapies. Yeah. And he got into using them on himself, which, like you said, was sort of the thing to do at the time. You experiment on yourself. Right. Plus, as the author of this Rolling Stone article from 1975 that I read pointed out yeah. He was also, like, 20 at the time. So it totally makes sense that he would, like, huff a bunch of nitro soxite, right, and then call it science. Right. But it really was science. So this guy apparently had tried it a few times before. But then his big experiment, his first huge experiment was on Boxing Day of 1799. Right. Which is December 26. It's very important that you remember December 26, 1799. Why is it important? Well, it was Boxing Day, but it was also literally Box Day because Humphrey David got into a box and had some guy pump in. Was it like 20 courts? Yeah, he stepped into a sealed box and he requested a physician, like a real doctor, to release 20 quarts because otherwise it'd just be crazy. Right. Release 20 quarts of nitrous oxide every five minutes as long as I'm conscious. That must have been the safe word as I'm passed out. And he went for an hour and 15 minutes like that in this box. Not bad. And then he stepped out and apparently grabbed some oil skins, or also called gas bags, and huffed another 20 quartz right afterward. And they were like, how are you still standing? And he goes, I'm not. I'm flying. He basically did. He had a great disposition to laugh, which eventually is where laughing gas would come from. He talked about shining packets of light and energy. He talked about objects dazzling in their intensity and sounds amplified into a cacophony that echoed through infinite space and losing all connection to external things. It's pretty cool. There's this really great article on the public domain review, and it's called Excellent Gas Bag. Is it gas bag or airbag? Airbag. Airbag. I'm sorry. Which is a quote from a poet that was friends with Humphrey Davy, who became the poet laureate of Great Britain later on. And the author really does a good job of describing what nitrous oxide does to you. Almost suspiciously good. So they say that the first signature was a curiously benign, sweet taste, followed by a general pressure in the head as he continued to inhale. Within 30 seconds, the sensation of soft, probing pressure had extended to his chest and the tips of his fingers and toes. This was accompanied by a vibrant burst of pleasure and a gradual change in the world around him. Objects became brighter and clearer, and the space in the cramp box seemed to expand and take on unfamiliar dimensions. Now, under the influence of the largest dose of nitrous oxide anyone had ever taken, these effects were intensified to levels he could not have imagined. So I keep going. Sure. Do you want to take over? No, go ahead. I think it's better when we break it down. Well, I'm going to read the Southy part. Okay. His hearing became fantastically acute, allowing him to distinguish every sound in the room and seemingly from far beyond, a vast, distant wan. Wah wah wah. Perhaps the vibration of the universe itself. In his field of vision, the objects around him were teasing themselves apart into shining packets of light and energy. He was rising effortlessly in a new world whose existence he had never suspected. Somehow, the whole experience was irresistibly funny. So Robert Southey, his buddy, you mentioned, the future poet laureate. Right. He brought him in afterward. He was like, I got to get some more people in on this. Fantastic. Right. I got to share that. Yeah, that's what you do. So he brought in Southie, got him high, and he wrote his brother Tom a letter that said, oh, Tom. Exclamation point. Such a gas as David discovered the gaseous oxidam again, exclamation point. I have had some. It made me laugh and tingle in every toe and fingertip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. Oh, Tom. I am going for more this evening. It makes one strong and so happy, so gloriously happy. Oxalate airbag. Exclamation point. Pretty great stuff. No wonder he was the poet laureate. So, in summer of 1799, after they closed the shop down the Pneumatic institution, during the day, he would invite surgeons and playwrights and poets and chemists and anyone who is interested who we could get the word to come in there and huff nitrous. I was about to say under the guise of experimentation. But it really was because he learned that he was really finding that it was a language experiment, because no one could accurately describe what they were feeling with English words. Right, exactly. He found that very strange and insignificant, that people would just come out and just couldn't put it into words, their experience. Sure. It was a brand new sensation. There was one guy, James Thompson, said, we must either invent new terms to express these new and peculiar sensations or attach new ideas to old ones before we can communicate intelligently with each other on the operation of this extraordinary gas. I think Samuel Taylor Collarge, the great poet, put it best. He put it really succinctly. He basically said that it was like coming in from the snow into a warm room. Yeah. So what happened was he did these experiments with these people, they eventually got kind of tired of it. He experimented on himself, like not even in the room. He just would fill up a big balloon or not a balloon, but a silk bag and just walk around England. Huffing. Right. And he found himself getting psychologically hooked, at least, because he said he confessed that the desire to breathe the gas is awakened in me by the sight of a person breathing. So he would just see someone walking and breathing and think, oh, man, I wish I had some gas. That's why they call it hippie crack. Yes, exactly. Sure. So everyone else fell away. He was only experimenting with himself for a little while. Then he brings in coleridge and they really buddied up. And I think they were just kind of saw eye to eye on the gas. Right. Neither of them wanted to cease using it again, though. You have to point out, all this time while he's under, he's just huffing nitrous basically constantly. Humphrey Davy is still remaining a man of science, right? Sure. So remember December 26, 1799 was the day that the Boxing Day experiment took place, right. By Easter, just a few months later, he'd written a 580 page scientific treatise on nitrous oxide and its effects on humans and animals. Should I read the title? Yes. Researches Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning nitrous oxide, or man what is that word? Deflagisticated nitrous air and Its respiration. Nice was the name of it. Yes. So in that book, he mentioned something kind of, I guess, offhandedly. He says that as nitrous oxide appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place. Yeah. So not like open heart surgery, but maybe if you're going to set someone's broken arm. Right. So he says this, but it's another 40 years before Horace Wells starts trying to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. Up to that point, it's basically just a high society drug that people have, like, nitrous parties with. That was the fate of nitrous oxide from 1800 to about the 1840s. And then Horace Wells picks it up and it becomes brought into the medical field. Yeah. They finally start using it for its intended well, what would end up being its intended purpose? That's still used today. Right. And in fact, nitrous oxide is the number one inhaled anesthetic in the medical profession. Ask for it by name. And here's the deal, though. When you get it at the dentist, they can actually vary it, but it never goes more than a 70 30 mix. I saw that, too. This article says it's always a 50 50 mix. That's not right. So it's no more than nitrous. Yes. Which is very much key, as you'll learn, because one of the big dangers of doing it recreationally is not mixing it with oxygen. Right. If you mix it with oxygen. You're fine. You're totally fine. Right? So it's kind of nuts, Chuck, that with nitrous oxide. We spent at least 150 years, and still today we're not a million percent sure, but at least 150 years using it medically without understanding how it worked. Yeah. Like you said, though, it's still a little dicey. It is a little bit dicey. No, it makes you feel good. Right. It does the trick, and it kicks in your dopamine and all the pleasure receptors. So it's classified as three things. It's an analgesic, which means that it kills pain. It's an anesthetic, but it's actually not a true anesthetic. And it's anxietytic, which means it diminishes anxiety. And so I found this 2006 paper, and it basically says, here's what we think is going on. All right, hit me. So, within anxiety, it triggers the same response in the brain as a benzodiazepan, which is like Valium or Xanax or something like that. So it actually does cut down anxiety, which is why dentists will use it for little kids or patients who are nervous about going to the dentist. Right. Get a little gas, probably not a 70 30 concentration, just a little bit, and it will cut down on your anxiety, and you're totally fine, Doc. Go ahead and do whatever you like. Yeah. As far as an analgesic is concerned, it actually does have a tremendous amount of ability to cut down on pain, and it does so by activating your opioids. Those are released, opioids are produced in the brain, and your opioid receptors are activated as well. And then it also goes to your spinal column and messes with its ability to process pain there, too. And they say that something like just a 30% concentration of nitrous oxide is equal to about ten to 15 milligrams of morphine. Yeah. And that's if it's 50 50 or below with oxygen, it's on the analgesic side. Right. I think up to the 70% is when it is known as an anesthetic. Right. So it's not technically an anesthetic in that if you huff that until you lost consciousness, you're probably in big trouble. You don't want to use nitrous oxide for that. And nasty to know that kind of thing, but it's used usually as an aid to a general anesthetic. Right, right. And it does have anesthetic properties, but it's a dissociative anesthetic, kind of like ketamine, which means that it goes after your NMDA receptors, which have to do with memory formation, and they control, like, neural firing. Right? Yeah. And it has a dissociative effect, which is why when you're on nitrous, you feel like you have left your body, you've gone back in time, you died and are being reborn. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more about childbirth later, but one of the quotes I saw from a childbirth nurse, they said the mothers who use it during childbirth, sometimes they can still feel pain. They just don't care about it. Which would be the disassociated quality. Exactly. But I don't get because you said it was an analgesic. Yeah. Well, I guess maybe childbirth is so painful. Sure. You can't knock it out completely. And also, I mean, like with anesthetics of any kind, or even analgesics, any person is going to have different reactions, varying reactions to different drugs. Sure. So that's kind of the current state of understanding with what nitrous does to the brain. Right. You can also find nitrous elsewhere outside of medical settings, too. Right, yeah, you can find it in a can of Ready Whip. Or a lot of chefs will have their own nitrous canister to put whatever they want in it to be used as a propellant. So it works really well with fatty liquids and heavy creams and things. So what happens is the gas is in there, compressed into a liquid and mixed with the cream because it's fat soluble. Yeah. It mixes really well. Highly pressurized. Right. But as soon as you open that thing up, it turns back into a gas and expands it, like four times. Right. So that's why the whipped cream will come shooting out. What's neat is you could buy Ready Whip 20 years hence after it sat in a garage in Tampa, Florida, say, somewhere hot and muggy sure. And shake it up and pour it out. And that whipped cream will be totally fresh, not the least bit rancid. That's because nitrous oxide totally displaces air and oxygen, so no bacteria can form inside a can of Reddy Whip or any other instant whipped cream. Well, and that displacement of oxygen is also why you can die if you, let's say, put a bag over your head to intensify your high if you're using it recreationally. Well, we'll talk more about that later, right? Yes. Okay. Before we break, though, let's mention cars, because anyone who has ever seen Fasts and Furious or is it Sammy Hagar Solo fan, I Can't Drive 55. That's right. Does he talk about nitrous? No, but it's just assumed that there's nitrous involved. Well, you may have heard or seen on TV or movies about using nitrous in your car, like that little tank. Or you may see one of those cheesy cars in the parking lot with the little tank in there. And basically what it does is cars run, burn hotter, engines burn hotter and go faster with more oxygen. And if you crank in that nitrous oxide, it's just basically going to ramp up the oxygen levels going into the engine. Right. And with more oxygen, more gas gets burned. Right. More gas gets burned, more horsepower is produced because the gas is expanding those pistons even harder. Then you're too fast and too furious for the roads. Maybe even doing a little Tokyo drifting. Have you seen those? Any of them? No, but I believe they're the most lucrative movie franchise in the history of all movies, because they made seven of. Them. Yeah, but like the first one made a billion dollars. The last one made like a billion dollars. It's crazy how I think I saw the first one. I've never seen any of them, but that's about it's. Just not my bag, if you like that kind of thing. That's great. I've never been a car guy. I like my cars, but I've never been like, oh, man, look at that sports car. Sure. I sure would like to drive fast in that. Well, remember when we hosted or judged that Red Bull thing? Oh, yeah. I was talking to young Jock and I was talking to him and he started talking about cars and I'm like, wow, we don't have anything in common, do we? Yeah, Josh and I judged a soapbox derby contest sponsored by Red Bull and young jock at Local Atlanta rapper who is super cool. He's a very nice guy, but he was a car dude and I'm not a car dude. I know you're not a car dude either. Well, I got my pickup truck. Yeah, I'm like look at those tires. Pretty neat. They really make contact with the asphalt, don't they? Alright, well, let's take a break and go learn more about cars and we'll come back and talk about some of the recreational use and dangers. But we're done talking about cars, right? Yes. 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. Are you looking for an escape? Or a relaxing getaway? Or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building where you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a milkshakes flaming flamers chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquillum house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis as an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling who's a? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only burgers in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway Hulu check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription. Required terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details 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? 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By the way, if you want to know about cars, if you're into that kind of thing and you love us and you're not getting your fix from cars from us, go listen to car stuff. You're definitely not getting your fix about cars from us, I can tell you that. You can get it from car stuff. Ben and Scott have it locked down over there. Yeah, I bet you they've covered Nitrous. I'm sure in the automobile they've covered everything. All right, so recreational use, it has this medical purposes and it's food and auto purposes, but nitrous is very famous for becoming especially at concerts, it's what they call a hippie crack. In the 70s, you started being able to buy this stuff, like a big balloon full of it at, like, a concert festival or, let's be honest, at a Grateful Dead show. All right, I'll post that Rolling Stone article on the podcast page for this. Really interesting. It is, but it's also what is that? It's called second hand embarrassment. Like what people get from watching the Jeb Bush campaign. Second hand embarrassment? Yes. Somebody yes, exactly. You definitely get that from reading this because the writer is very earnestly. Super seventy s. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, one of the people who is interviewed as an expert at source is the guy from High Times. Only in the mid 70s did you get away with calling up the High Times guy and just using him like a regular source. You'll see what I'm saying? Like, it sounds normal. Read the article and you'd be like, yeah, this is super 70s. Well, in the 70s is when it started becoming a big concert going activity. Oh, wait, I know what I was going to say. College dorm rooms. In this Rolling Stone article, they were saying if you go to, like, a lot of it said in Berkeley, California, and there are places all over, not just at concerts. Sure, it was everywhere in the 70s. Yeah, because a lot of people were like, acid is cool, but this stuff, like, you can just stop in five minutes later, you're back on your feet. Yeah. So it's like a big deal to them. Well, which is one reason they call it hippy crack, because the high is short lived. And you want to do another one? Sure. And go listen to our crack episode. Should we talk about why the highest short lived? Well, let me finish my thought. Sorry. So earlier in the 19th and 20th century, though, like you said, when it was sort of the back room parlor game of the high society, it made its way into Hollywood and back in the days of making high Times and movies like not high Times. What was the one? Casablanca? No. The famous pop movie. I'm totally blanking out on the pot movie. Reefer Madness. There were movies about huffing. There was charlie Chaplin was in one in 1914 where he played a dentist. Well, someone posing as a dentist who had huff gas. Have you ever seen that Chaplin thing where he does coke in jail and ends up pulling the bars apart? It's pretty hilarious, actually. And there were several movies early on called Laughing Gas. Not just one. Right. And they weren't sequels. There were just multiple movies called Laughing Gas. Yes. I'm sure you could get a decent amount of people into a theater to watch people doing laughing gas. Sure. And then they thought, man, I could go for some laughing gas myself. All right, so what were you going to say about why the high last such a short period of time? So it's constant while you're huffing it, right? Because you're huffing nitrogen oxide gas, right? Yeah. And it's displacing oxygen. I'm sorry, nitrous oxide gas. And it is displacing oxygen. But as long as you're huffing in a safe supply of oxygen as well, your brain is continuing to function. But your opioid receptors are also going crazy. And your dissociative NDMA receptors are going crazy, too. You're high, but you're staying alive because you're taking in enough oxygen, right? Yeah. The thing is, your body doesn't metabolize almost any of that nitrous oxide. Something like zero 4% of nitrous oxide is metabolized for the most part. You huff it in, it's dissipated through your lungs into your bloodstream and then brought back out and you exhale. It resembles almost exactly the same form that it went in when it comes out, which means that there's no hangover and it's expelled from your body through breathing, just normal breathing after you take the nitrous away. Which is why so many people were like, you can have crazy visions on this. This is what the hippies were saying. Sure. You can have crazy visions on this, and it takes you to other universes, and then five minutes later, you're fine. Sign me up. Let's call the High Times guy and see what he thinks about it. Let's get a quote from him. I did find a study, though, and I think it was last year published in Clinical Neurophysiology that they hooked people up to an EEG and had them huff nitrous. Really? Yeah. And the guy there said nitrous oxide has control over the brain in ways no other drug does. And what they found was it basically created slow delta waves for up to three minutes across the front of the brain every 10 seconds. I wonder if that's what makes the war sound. Well, basically what they found is that lasted for three minutes after you think you're okay. Oh, yeah. So it's still doing damage even though you think you feel fine for three minutes, which completely surprised them. Yeah, I could see that. Especially if the effects wear off. You would think you would physiologically be back to normal, too. Exactly. That is surprising. Yeah. I found another study from I'm not sure when something is in the last few years, where they studied the effects of it on rats and found that short term, low concentration exposure and low concentration, meaning like, 50 years, like what they use medically, the effects of it on the brain neural cells is reversible. But it is very true. And this is why everybody hears about nitrous oxide, that when you huff, it kills brain cells. That's absolutely true. Yeah. It creates apoptosis, which is preprogrammed cellular death in your neurons. It causes your brain cells to die because of a lack of oxygen. Nitrogen or nitrous oxide displaces oxygen and your brain needs oxygen. And when your brain cells don't get oxygen, they die and your brain undergoes hypoxia. Right. Not good for you. No. Plus the fact that it goes after NDMA receptors, which are responsible for the myelin, which is the sheath that coats your nerves. Right. Yeah. That can lead to brain damage. That lasts, too. The thing is, and this is a rat study, it seems like it's prolonged exposure or exposure of super high concentrations that create irreversible damage. Yes. They've done a lot more studying about it in the UK than here because up until this year, it was legal. Oh, they outlawed it. Yeah. I guess the results of the study weren't promising. Well, I mean, this was only what is it now, mid February? Yeah. It's only like two weeks ago that literally came on the book. Oh, really? Has officially law. And there were big demonstrations in England, like massive huffing parties on the lawn of I don't know where they decide these things. Is it Parliament? Buckingham palace? Sure. Say Buckingham Palace because they're like, what are we going to do at Glastonbury Festival every year now? Sure. Nice buzz marketing, by the way. What, the Glastonbury Festival? Yeah. Well, we're not going to that. I know, I was saying nice. Okay. Well, they do it a lot there. That's why the festival people said it's like a big litter offender, because I could totally see that canisters and balloons are just everywhere, and birds pick up the balloons. They tried to fly off of the canisters, tear their legs off because they're not strong enough to lift them. So, worldwide, in 2014, it was the 14th most used drug in the world. Really? Yeah. 14th. Would you think it would be higher or lower? I didn't even think about it. That stat just totally caught me by surprise. 14th and the Independent said that the UK's largest drug and alcohol charity, Alistair Bomb, they said, you know what? We can't credibly deny that compared to other drugs, it's relatively low risk. The risk from taking it from balloons are quite low. And to back up what you said, he said, where there have been stories about deaths, they tend to be from people who are using canisters and masks when you get into danger. That's stupid. Let me get out this old World War II gas mask, or let me put a bag over my head, or let me get in a car. Right, and then you're not getting that mix of oxygen, and then you die. First of all, kids, if you are putting a plastic bag over your head for any reason, you're a dummy. Yeah. That's a dumb thing to do. Well, yeah. You're going down the wrong path in life. That's a great way to put it, because I don't want some kid to be like, I am a dummy and that's why I do these things. That's self defeating. Come on. Come on, son. But there have been plenty of incidences of death. Joseph Bennett, a 17 year old from North London, died in 2012 after falling into a coma. And then just this year, a 21 year old student was found dead in his room with 200 spent cartridges. Oh, well, just chasing that high is no problem. Yes. I mean, you shouldn't try it at all. Right. But you're going to die when you have those high concentrations. Yeah. That's the problem with nitrous. If you're being administered nitrous, even in a medical setting, you can have a bad reaction to it and it turns out you're allergic to nitrous and you're dead. Or you're in a coma, at least. Right. But even if you're in a medical setting, you're flirting with death. You're right there on the edge of death. And if you're doing it outside of a medical setting, your likelihood of dying or suffering some sort of horrible adverse reaction to it is even more through the roof. Right? Yes. Especially if you're taking heads straight out of a tank and you're not taking breaths of clean air in between. Yes. You very likely could die. And it's not just hypoxia that gets you, or asphyxiation you can also die from passing out and hitting your head. Yeah. Or I saw this one sad case, I think it was in the United States, this lady's son wandered out into traffic and got hit by a car from nitrous. Yeah. Because he did nitrous and was just, like, so spaced out, he just kind of walked out into traffic. Wow. Because you're not aware of what's going on at the time. And chasing that high like I was talking about, it would feel so good. You're like, but it's so fast. Well, how can I prolong that experience? I'll just stop breathing regular air in between. What a waste. Yeah. It's not smart. No, it isn't. I think we got that across any. I think so. You know who doesn't do nitrous? No. How? No way. Who? Scientologists. Why? Elon Hubbard hated nitrous oxide. Really? So much so that he stopped going to the dentist. He had famously terrible teeth. He did have bad teeth, and he didn't go to the dentist. And in 1938, he did go to the dentist to have some work done, and they put him under with some nitrous, and he had a near death experience and came back and he wrote a manuscript called excalibur, and it's unpublished. And in excalibur, Elron Hubbard claimed that anyone who read it either went insane or committed suicide. I remember reading about that. And all this knowledge was given to him from his nitrous oxide experience. So he determined that nitrous oxide is very bad. It's a hypnotic, it makes you too suggestible, and you should avoid it at all costs. Interesting. Yeah. He writes about it in Dianetics, saying it's bad jam. He's the only person to ever do it and not say, this is great. You had a bad time on it. Well, let's talk about childbirth. Unless you have anything else. No. So in Canada and Finland, australia and the United Kingdom, traditionally, women have used this and still do today during childbirth. Up to 60% in the UK. And about 50% in those other countries, but it's not in the US. In 2011, less than 1% of hospitals even offered it. I've never heard of that in the US. Well, that's all changing now, basically. The medical establishment is basically saying there's really no good reason not to. It's just sort of stubbornness in our history and being fixed in our ways of offering the epidural and other kinds of drugs during childbirth. So there's been a big push lately to have it as an option, at least for women. Labor machines are only 50 50. You can't even alter the setting to go any higher than that. And it's self administered. Like, the woman has the mask, and she breathes it when she feels like she needs it, and at any point she can be like, no, I want the epidural. The thing is, epidurals can be really expensive. Nitrous is super cheap. It is super cheap. And again, it's as effective as ten to 15 milligrams of morphine for taking care of pain. So they're basically saying women should have the option at least, right? If they want to try it out. It's a lot cheaper than an epidural. Safer. And they haven't epidural. I mean, they're narcotics and epidurals. There are a lot of side effects and they really haven't found any side effects with that 50 50 mix under a controlled, supervised setting. Well, the big fear, though, is that aside from dizziness, the kid is going to absorb some of this and there's going to be neural cell death in the baby as it's delivered. Has that been proven wrong? They don't think there is any danger to the kid so far because they said it's filtered through the lungs and not like the narcotics that are filtered through the liver. Right. So they said so far they haven't found where it hurts the baby in any way. Plus they let you remember being born. I just think the self administration part is pretty interesting. Yeah, it lets a woman feel more in control, supposedly of their own comfort. Right. So I'm all for it. Why not? Well, yeah, I mean, if it doesn't have any adverse effects, why not is a pretty good question. You got anything else? I got nothing else. That's nitrous oxide. O. Humphrey davy, the gas. If you want to know more about nitrous oxide, type those words in the search bar@housetoforks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listing or mail. No, Chuck, no. What is it time for? It's time for administrative. So, Chuck, first and foremost, I really want to thank John Morgan over at queen Charlotte's pamela cheese royale. Oh, yeah. He has hooked us up. Good stuff. Wonderful stuff. PIME cheese? Like the best pimento cheese you can buy on the planet. Better than palmetto cheese? I think so. All right. Yeah, it's good. And there's like some yeah, it's really good. Go try that stuff. Queen Charlottes Feminine Cheese Royale. All right. We received the Christmas cards from the Cavanaughs, the Lee's, the Lowses and you know Hillary and Mike who we are talking to? They hook us up with the cheese. Yeah. With a flathead lake or just flat head cheese. I think it's flat head lake. I think it is too. Good. It's delicious. Hillary, you're the best. Yeah. Thank you. And the Nelsons. So thank you for those Christmas cards. Mike over at Shaker and Spoon and the rest of the gang, I thank them before for sending the box. Go check out Shaker and Spoon. It's awesome. Great gift for yourself or somebody else where they send you all the ingredients you need to make cocktails, including recipes. You just add booze and wow your friends. And what better time to go off a page and thank Crown Royal when we off handedly mentioned that the Crown Royal Rye whiskey won the whiskey of the year, right. And I was like, man, I'd love to try that. They sent us some. So we heard it and they sent us six bottles of Boots. That's right. Nice guy. Holy cow. Did you try it? Not yet. I guess you just found it today in the office. If you tried it, that'd be we should mention Crown Royal basically every time, every episode. So Crown Royal. Ashley Miller, thank you for the wonderful Lego candy that you gave us in San Francisco. Yes, thank you for that. And I think in Los Angeles too. Remember, she just follows us around with Lego candy. Well, at least in California. Lucy Brooks sent us a nice letter. Good luck with the rest of the granny list. Lucy, thank you. Congratulations. And best of luck to Alison and Chuck for their wedding in Cleveland. Yes, Connor and Beatrice marinen sent us our beautiful wine cork greek Chuck. Is that who said that? Yes. Jerry loves it, too. She won't set it down. Good luck with your alcoholism. You're right. Just kidding. Thanks to Eric Young from Squamishbc for the typewritten letter. Eric has a site called Pigeonsandinc.com, where he offers the service of writing typewritten letters on others behalf. And he uses a square space site. Pretty awesome. How about that, Kelly, from the Elephants trunk? Send us some awesome toys. Thank you very much for those, Kelly. Thank you to Em from Melbourne, Australia, via Knoxville, Tennessee, for the homemade sourdough hot cross bun. Yes, that was good. And then Elizabeth Henry sent us a signed copy of who Killed Mr. Moonlight by the one and only David J of Bauhaus. Oh, wow. And I made a joke about Bauhaus. And Elizabeth Henry said, oh, David j Is my boyfriend's dad. I'll get him to sign a copy of his autobiography and mail it to the guy. Who is he in Belhouse. He played bass. Wow. Yeah. He also had a good solo career, too. Yeah. Sean Erskin, thank you for the stuffy. Chanel bottle cap, logo art, that was great. Yes. Jeremy and Irene Kamiya. K-A-M-I-Y-A sentence glass on tick. Which is amazing. Chuck, let me just describe this. They basically take an awesome piece of teak driftwood. Sure. And then blow a glass bowl so that it molds on the bottom to that specific piece of teak. And then, buddy, you've got yourself a beautiful place to house a goldfish. Put use for a hurricane lamp for candle, keep your keys in there, maybe hold those jelly bean counting contests with who knows? Sky's the limit. But it's awesome and attractive and it looks really cool and mid century modern. So go check out Kamiyacocom. Dorian Wilson, owner of Revival Ltd. They make cool shirts. And the proceeds of those shirts go to people in Brazil displaced by the World Cup. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Wow. And you can find that information@revivalglobal.com? Yes. Johnny Wood, who works for Yakima, the outfitter, the biking outfitter. Sure. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yakima, they make like, bike racks. Thank you. Yeah, he sent us some swag. Yeah. I got a tuk that I wear. Yeah. And he travels around selling Yakima stuff, which probably sells itself, you know what I mean? Yeah. And he listens to us on the road. So thanks a lot, Johnny. This is one of my favorites of recent memory, robbie Zupta. He made the bullet pin man, and he sent us so long ago and we've just been lack. So thank you for those. It's really neat. He has a series he's an artist called the Mightier Than series. Pin is mightier than the sword. And he takes, like, bullet casings and makes these fountain pins from bullet casings. It's really neat. It makes a statement and it's cool looking. Yeah. We got a nice letter from Jenny Cochrane. We want to thank Matt for the handmade hinge game. H-E-N-G-E as in stonehenge. And Laurie Gush for the copy of her kids book, COPPERLIGHT. A really crappy story. Very nice. And she sent us some real copper lights, which is fossilized poop. Oh, that's right. I remember seeing that. I have a piece tucked in my cheek right now. Thanks to our buddy Gary for the homemade cookies. And then Beth Vanic Lopez sent us a copy of Unbound how Eight Technologies Made a Human Transformed Society and Brought the World to the Brink. By Richard L. Courier. Thank you very much for that hard copy, no less. In my final one, I had a bunch of people send very lovely gifts for Ruby. Oh, yeah. My baby when we got her. And I'm not going to read off all of their names, but you know who you are. And it was very, very nice. They do. I've got a last one. All right. Which seems chumpy following that heartfelt thing. But thanks a lot to Brett Goodson for sending us pork cloud stuff. Pork cloud, pork grind, chips, soap and pork dust, if you're like. I'm not too big on breadcrumbs. I'd rather them be porky. Pork cloud has you covered. I think that was decidedly non chumpy. Thank you. Nice. Thank you, Brett Goodson. Thanks. All right, well, we're going to finish up. We have quite a few more and we're going to finish up in the next episode, I think. Yes. And as always, thank you to those who send in good thoughts and letters and handmade fun gifts. Yeah, very nice. We really appreciate it. It's the best. So if you want to get in touch with this, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.com. Stuffyhow is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
7bcbe731-cd0b-4552-a0b9-ae5f0101f65f | Why was Titicut Follies banned? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-was-titicut-follies-banned | Titicut Follies is a documentary made famous by its banning. But why was it banned? And what was it even about? Listen in to learn all you need to know about this infamous doc.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Titicut Follies is a documentary made famous by its banning. But why was it banned? And what was it even about? Listen in to learn all you need to know about this infamous doc.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 22 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=81, tm_isdst=0) | 47606469 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is stuff you should know. Just us today. Jerry's on vacation. Vacation. And that's cool. Yeah. Jerry's in the Disney world. Yeah. And it went right after me. She's in the D. I said, hey, Jerry in the south bathroom of Frontierland, above the toilet. I've taped a gun. Go shoot Mo Green. Oh, my gosh. Go shoot Mo Green in the restaurant booth. Wow. No, Mo Green got it on the massage table. Oh, that's right. The police commissioner or the police chief. Yeah, he was tangential to the hit with the bathroom. I don't remember who was trying to hit I goosed that up. Hey, shout out to wait. No, I'm not done sorting this out. Okay, go ahead. Name all the hits in The Godfather. Go ahead. Shout out to our pal and friend of the show, Kevin Pollock, because that made me think of the great, great show that is one of my favorite shows called Better Things from the wonderful talented Pamela Adlon. They are entering their final season. And I watched the first episode the other night, and Pollock, who plays her brother on the show, had a great line that I knew was improv to where he was getting in his car. And I can't remember what they were talking about. He said right in the eye like mo green. And I texted him immediately, and I was like, Right in the eye like, Mo Green. I was like, that was yours? And he went, oh, yeah. He said that was improv nice. It was very fun. It's always fun to be able to watch a TV show and text your pal that's on that TV show, right? Yeah, he's got the best parts. He just pops up in all the best stuff, you know? Yeah. He's in Maisel. And I've talked to Pollock about this and he's like, yeah, I agree. I think he could star in a really great indie film. I just think he's a really great actor and he's great at comedy, but I think he's on top of that. Just a really great actor. Didn't he star in that Project Greenlight film? I don't know. Did he? I'm pretty sure. I think the first season oh, boy. I don't remember those movies. I know that Shia LaBeouf, that was where he got his start. Is that right? Was he in one of those the Battle of Shaker Heights or something? I think that might have been the one that Pollock was he in that? I think that movie, but I mean, a really good movie, and I'm not sure the Project Greenland movie. It was a cool show, though. I dug it. Yeah. I'm surprised they hadn't brought that back in the iPhone filmmaking age. Yeah. It's a little surprising who would bring it back, though, now Ben and Macken bring it back. I mean, that's who did it the first time, right? Sure. But I mean, are they still relevant? Aren't there two, like, younger versions of the new Ben and Matt better? I don't know who the new Ben and Matt are. How about Wiz Khalifa? Charlemagne, the God? Sure. Thank you. All right, great. Anyway, Kebabox a great actor and a good dude. Yeah, agreed. And probably somebody, I would guess, who's seen the movie that we're going to talk about today. I would be really surprised if he hasn't seen it just because I feel like if you are into movies, if you're a movie maker, if you consider yourself a cinema file, if you want to get punched in the stomach, you've probably seen Kitty Cut Follies, right? Yeah. I mean, this is one that I saw in film class in college. There's about a 50 50 chance that you will see this if you've seen it in film class. And a college people like KC, our colleague Casey Peggy, no doubt is a Frederick Wiseman fan. I'm surely if I texted him, he'd be like, oh, sure. Weissman yes. Although I found Titticut Follies was not one of his greater work. Yeah, that sounds like Casey. God bless Casey. All time greatest movie crush. Guest but yeah, Fred Weizman made this film. He was a law professor in his thirty s and the sixty s and made this documentary film about a mental institution, specifically one for the criminally insane is what they called it. Yeah. And it was a movie that gained a lot of reputation as like the most disturbing film you've ever seen. And it's been banned in this many places and that kind of thing. But when you kind of peel it back, it's just a very straight up sort of cinema veritae documentary about an institution that needed to get their act together. Right. And that was kind of wiseman told Jam he's made 48 films, I think he just turned 92 couple of months ago. Amazing. And starting in 1966, he made about a film a year. And he has his own style, like he says, cinema verte. Which I feel like we should probably kind of just go ahead and explain, don't you? Sure, yeah. Go ahead, go ahead. Phone guy. Well, cinema verte. I mean, what's the direct translation? Direct cinema. Yeah, direct cinema. And it's the idea that you kind of set a camera up and let life happen in front of it for whatever your subject is. You don't do interviews, you don't do talking head shots. One good example is that documentary, of course, now I can't think of it in the 70s about the American family that ran on PBS that was so groundbreaking, where they just set up a camera and followed this family. And if you're thinking sounds a lot like reality TV, I think in its purest form, reality TV can be this, but it really turned into something else entirely. Yeah, it's just so deeply manipulated by producers behind the scenes who tell them to do this or that or whatever. Cinema verdes would not want to do that. They just shoot and hope also that people act like themselves. It's another thing, and one thing frederick Wiseman, the guy who made Titticut Follies, said he believed that people basically acted like themselves when the camera was around, because people are, in general, lousy actors we have, they're behaving like you would expect them to behave. So they're probably acting like they would without the cameras. Especially in the cinema verite kind of set up because it's intrusive. There's a camera there, but it's not nearly as intrusive as, like, a camera on, like, some rig that's flying around. Like there's lighting people and a craft services table that's calling your name. It's just much less intrusive than that. It's minimally intrusive as far as filmmaking goes. And that's the point of it, because they want to document reality without leading the viewer as much as possible, from what I understand. Yeah, that's exactly it. And I love cinema verote documentaries, especially, and I also like sort of quasi cinema verite where there's a lot of, like I don't mind interviews being put in there as long as there's a lot of just sort of watching life happen. It's really amazingly engrossing. There were these two filmmakers that I think inspired Weissman, richard Leecock and Robert Drew, who I think in the early nineteen s, sixty s were kind of dabbling in cinema veritae documentaries. And they made one in particular called Mooney versus Foul, which is about a high school football championship. And Mooney and Foul are the two coaches. And I watched the trailer for that today. I'm guessing it's his daughter that put this up on vimeo, along with some other interviews with her dad, Drew's daughter, that it's really engrossing just to watch, and especially because all you see, if you're a modern person in 2022 and you're like, what was life like in the 1950s? You don't get that from I Love Lucy and Dick Van Dyke. Like, those are great shows, but to be able to just sit in and take a peek at these high school football coaches and these people, the community and the stands and these players, it's just so engrossing to me. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I really like it. Yeah, no, totally. But yeah, I feel like even if it isn't your cup of tea, you would, like, you said, be engrossed by it. I don't think there's any way to just be like I don't know. Some people probably find it dull. I'm sure there are, but it is engrossing. I don't think there's any other way to universally describe it. Yeah. And Drew, I sent you that one little interview snippet. I don't know if you saw it, but he sort of was talking about being a new form of journalism, where he talked about they're like, well, what is this, though? He was like, well, it's like a play without a playwright or a movie without actors or journalism without opinions. And I was like, oh, well, that's interesting to say in the 19th, all the way back then. Yeah, but they saw it as Le Lock, and I think Drew saw it more as a form of journalism. And I feel like that's what documentaries used to be, and that's changed a lot. Sometimes for the better. It can be all things, I guess. But it seems like documentaries used to be way more journalism and less big time entertainment. Yeah. How do you feel about recreations in documentaries? I think it can be cool if you have a good, like, a new spin on it. Kind of like when the kid stays in the Picture came out, the documentary about the producer, what's his face? Robert Evans. Yeah. Robert the Godfather. Yeah, exactly. Full circle. They did those recreations through animation and this really cool style of animation that was really engaging and awesome. And recreate can be really cool if you do it right, I think. Or really bad if it's like some dumb cop show on TV. Yeah, but those are kind of fun, too. Yeah. You mean like the one headline news shows 100 episodes a day? Forensic Files. I haven't seen it, but if it's the recreate I'm thinking of where it's like they recreate a murder. I'm like, you got $500 to shoot this. Yes, that's exactly right. You're thinking of forensic files. But still, if you watch enough of it, it'll really like your whole life will turn dark. You have to be careful with Forensic Files, everybody. So should we go back and talk about Bridgewater State Hospital? Yeah, because it's the place where Frederick Wiseman showed up with his camera, with permission, as we'll see. And by the time he got there in 19 I think he shot in 65, maybe 1965. Okay. When he got there, it had been around for over 100 years. It didn't start out as a state hospital. It started out as a poor house in Alms House, I think, all the way back in 1854. Yeah. And it's interesting when you read these it's disturbing, but when you read these old timey classifications in medicine or especially in mental health, where the description of someone that might be put there might just be bad, that's one of the descriptions. Right. They'd be on par with labeling them alcoholic or schizophrenia or something like that. Yeah. But if you had an alcohol problem or you had legitimate mental health issues, or if you were pregnant, maybe, or blind or you had syphilis, you might have been put in this poor house in 1854. Right. In Massachusetts, by the way. Yeah. I don't know if we said that or not. Yeah, so that's how it started out, and then over time, they started adding criminals and focused more on criminals and the mentally ill. And then by the time 1895 rolled around, it became the state asylum for insane criminals at the state workhouse at Bridgewater. And then eventually it became known as Bridgewater State Hospital. I think by and then very crucially here, it was handed over from the state Board of Charity because, remember, it started out as a poor house over to the Massachusetts Bureau of Prison. So for all intents and purposes, at least, bureaucratically speaking, it is a place where the criminally insane, how they were termed in the 20th century, are held. Yeah. And there were some bad criminals in there. There were murderers. There were people who were convicted of cannibalism, of rape, of children, just generally of rape. So there were some bad dudes in there for sure. But then there were also and this was sort of one of the saddest things about sort of that time in this country. Those people were right alongside other people who either committed a very minor crime or maybe didn't commit a crime at all, and they were just, quote, unquote, being held there temporarily. But that could stretch on into years. Yeah. There's still something today called civil commitment, and it's basically that you were being held not because of a crime or because of a minor crime, and you maybe even served your sentence, but you're being held because you had been deemed mentally unfit to return to society, even though maybe you didn't even start out, like, in a mental hospital. Maybe you started out in jail and then you're just a troublemaker. They considered you a troublemaker in jail, and you got sent to the hospital. At that point, your sentence, it just went away. You were there until a doctor decided you should be let out. And the problem was getting the attention of a doctor long enough to say, oh, actually, you're fine. We can let you out, was really difficult to do. And so it was a really desperate place, especially for people who didn't feel like they should be there or belong there because after a while, it seemed to exert its influence on your mind and your outlook, and it would bend you to reflect it so that you kind of needed to be there after a while, even if you didn't start out that way. Yeah. I mean, anyone who's ever seen one floor with a cuckoo now is kind of exactly that happens in the plot. Like, people got worse at these places. Right. And you mentioned the actual medical attention. President of the Massachusetts Bar Association at the time. Paul Tamborello. And big thanks to Libya for digging this up and putting this together for us. But he told the Harvard Crimson back then that of the 650 men held at the hospital at the time, actual medical staff were able to see less than half of them one time a year for about 20 minutes. Right. So other than that, you're like, well, then who was it if it wasn't medical staff? It was, like, prison guards, basically. Yes. And even then, when you did get that 20 minutes, you were confronted by a person or group of people who were going on the premise that everything you said came out of your mouth was loony and not based in reality or fact. No matter how well you put your case or stated your case or complained, like, any show of emotion would just prove to them that you were meant to be in there for another year until they could hopefully see you again and reevaluate you. Yeah. There was just one example Olivia found of jeez. It's hard to believe. Matteo Kalakochi was arrested in 1927 at my daughter's age, almost seven years old, for stealing $7 from a grocery store, which is pretty good. Take 1927, by the way. Sure. And he was found incompetent to stand trial and then kind of sent all around over the years to different institutions after he tried to escape in 1935, was eventually landed at bridgewater. And this was another one of those archaic terms, was charged with bad habits and resisting authority. And this seven year old eventually ended up here later in life, but stayed there for 28 years and released in 1963. So that's just one example of how, like, sort of a small petty crime, but if you maybe have an attitude or you're troublemaker as a kid and you bounce around from place to place, you just might wind up here with no one advocating for you. This all made me think of, like, what families were doing, but I guess at the time, some families were kind of, like, maybe convinced themselves they were better off there or they didn't want to deal with the trouble, or there were no family. I don't know. Yeah. Or their family was poor and had no influence over anybody, so they couldn't do anything about it. Very sad. Yeah. So we take a break, and we'll come back with wiseman in his tenure while he was at bridgewater. Hey, everyone. 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Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So Frederick Wiseman had an interesting origin story as a filmmaker. He went to law school at Yale, supposedly to get out of the Korean War draft. But then when he graduated, he still ended up getting drafted anyway, and he was in there for almost two years, kind of after the war. But yeah. Yeah, I'll bet he was not happy about being drafted either way. Sure, I guess he went to Korea for a couple of years, and then after the army, he and his wife what is her name? Zapora Batshock. Great name. Yeah. She was a law professor as well. They went to Paris, lived for a couple of years, and then decided they need to move back. So they moved back to the Boston area. But while there, Freddie Weisman got into filmmaking. He started just shooting stuff with a little eight millimeter camera about the time that Cinema Verde was being developed in France. That's right. So, like he said, he came back from France, started teaching law at Bu, and sort of had that filmmaking bug still. So he bought the rights to a book, a novel called The Cool World about poverty in Harlem, and he hired a woman named Shirley Clark sorry. To direct it. And it was a very small I don't think it was much of a big film at all, but it was a very small sort of indie film at the time, which is to say, it was probably not seen much. But why someone was like, hey, if Shirley Clarke can do this thing, I can do this thing. And I don't like law school. I don't like teaching law. And one of the things he did, because he didn't love teaching law was taking his class on a lot of field trips, I guess, just to mix things up. And they used to go to Bridgewater. And after a few visits, he was like, Wait a minute. I think everything kind of came together. His love of filmmaking, his cinema verite kind of becoming popular, and his interest in that. And then his interest disinterest in law and interest in Bridgewater. So he had this idea to make this film there. Yeah. So as we'll see later, this is kind of crucial. He got permission to show up. He said many times in later interviews, bridgewater is not the kind of place you just kind of parachute in at night, do all your filming, and then creep away at dawn with all of your footage. He had to get extensive permission from sounds like he's done that before, though. Just kind of cool. Yeah, we've done that before, too, in grocery stores, remember? Oh, that's right. So he got permission from the lieutenant governor. He got permission from the Department of Corrections head. He got permission of the superintendent of Bridgewater. They all knew he was there, and they would have figured out eventually anyway, because he spent 29 days filming in Bridgewater. And he would just do his cinema veritate style, where he would just walk around and just film stuff, film, whatever he could just film, film, film. And I saw something where he said that for his documentaries, he films anything from, like, 75 hours at a minimum, chuck up to 250 hours. And then he goes through it all and edits all the stuff he likes. And then after, like, month eight of editing, he'll start piecing it together into, like, a story arc wow. Which boiled down, in this case, to 83 minutes of a movie. And the name Titticut Follies comes from I think Tittercut was a Native American name, I would guess somewhere in the region. I didn't really pick, I think for the Bridgewater area. That's what they called it. And the Follies, where the film opens up with a musical performance by the I guess they were inmates with the song Strike Up the Band, where they're all dressed the same. And you can see quite a few clips on YouTube. But as Livia points out, like, Weissman has always been really guarded with how his films are exhibited. And so I don't think you can just go YouTube this thing up and watch the whole thing still. Even I did last night. On YouTube? Yeah. Okay. Not on YouTube. No, it was on vimeo. Interesting. All right. I wonder if that's, like some sort of pirate upload. It was a VHS copy put online, so I'm thinking, yeah, it was pirated. Did you watch it all? Yes, I did. I'd never seen it before. I was familiar with it. The title. I had not a lot of idea of what it was about, but yeah. What do you think? Certainly striking. It was really something like it had ups and downs and highs and lows, and I think it was everything Wiseman wanted me to feel about it. It was pretty great. Yeah. I mean, it is great. Even at 83 minutes, it's tough to sit through the whole thing because I think, by its nature, cinema verote can be taxing. Yeah. Even while in Grossing, it can be pretty taxing. That's the best way to put it. But it's also obviously, in this case, it's not about a high school football championship. It's literally watching these people. I mean, I guess we should just talk about some of the scenes, maybe. Yes. And a lot of the people are going to go back and be like, joshua, this is great. Bear with us, everybody. Yeah. I mean, hey, you're a cinephile. That's right. Punch me in the face. No, the stomach. Face is way too hostile. Stomach. A little bit of friendliness left in it. Yeah. Like Houdini style. Yeah, that'll do. Well, one of the scenes that Livia picked out. That certainly stands out in my mind, too. And I think you can actually find parts of this one on YouTube is a guard, I guess. Was he dry shaving him? It looked like dry shaving. Or was it a wet shave? No, they put, like, shaving cream on them and everything. Okay. And everybody seems to characterize it as, like, really rough, forceful, kind of almost like he's being tortured with the shave. It was fast. It was fast. Yeah. It didn't look like it hurt the patient. And it didn't seem like the guy was trying to torture him. It just seemed like he was being very quick and efficient. And he does, like, cut him at the edge of one of his mouth. One of the edges of the corner of his mouth. Sorry. Right. So he's bleeding a little bit, but he doesn't seem like he doesn't seem in distress at all while he's shaving him. At the very least, he's not in distress because of the shaving. Right, but then what happened? Well, there are these at least two guards, right. And this inmate, by the way, is named Jim. He's probably the most famous character in the movie, or patient, I should say. He's not character. It's easy to get a rise out of Jim as hard as Jim tries to not let you get a rise out of him. If you press his buttons, he's going to, like, yell. He's going to get mad. He's going to try to contain himself. And there were a couple of guards that were guarding Jim while he was being washed and shaved and all that stuff, who just spent the entire scene trying to get a rise out of them by saying, like, why is your room so dirty, Jim? Is your room going to be clean tomorrow, Jim? You got to keep your room clean. Jim just ceaselessly and incessantly, and we see eventually when they take him back to his room, it's totally empty. There's a window. There's nothing in the room. And in fact, Jim has kept naked in his room. So there's no way for Jim's room to be dirty and also no way for Jim to keep his room clean. These guards, you realize we're just trying to get a rise out of gym. And they do over and over again. And it's really hard and sad to watch Jim just get upset. He's trying so hard to just not let these guys get to him because he knows what they're doing. He's fully aware of what they're doing, and he just can't help himself. Probably like five different times, he reacts and then tries to regain his composure again. Yeah. It's almost as if they're trying to drive him mad. Yeah. And they're also doing I saw somebody describe it as they're goading him with the kind of. Like. Board desensitization or desensitivity of somebody who does this every day and know exactly what he's going to do. And there's no fun in it anymore. But they just kind of do it to amuse themselves as much as they can from it. Which is even worse because they're just torturing this poor guy mentally. Yeah. And we should point out, too, that Weissman showed scenes like this, but it wasn't like a 100% indictment on the people who work there, because he did also show some parts where there was some care taken. I haven't seen the whole thing since college. So what was your net on that? I think the thing that I got from it was that Wiseman treats everybody as human and equal in that he's not expressing, like, empathy necessarily. He's not trying to even get you to empathize or sympathize. He's not trying to get you to form an opinion. He's just showing you what he found. Right. And if he is trying to get you to form an opinion, it's so obtuse that it's tough to put your finger on. In retrospect, maybe you respond exactly the way he wanted you to, but very rarely does he hammer you with it. So I feel like he just treats everybody the same. Like, there's a patient who talks about all of the children he's raped, and he knows that it's bad. He knows that what he's doing is wrong and he can't help himself. Wiseman makes no effort to make this man seem despicable or evil or anything like that. He might as well be talking about, like, a car. He's thinking about buying for how Wiseman portrays it. And so if he's treating that guy equal, he's definitely treating, like, the guards and the clinical staff and everybody equally. But I think more than that, he just turns the camera on and lets them behave as they're going to behave. He lets them present themselves to you rather than him trying to manipulate it so that you see what Wiseman wants you to see. Yeah, I mean, that's the purest form of cinema verite, which it's interesting how conditioned we are to even hearing an ominous musical score exactly. During a scene where a guy might talk about crimes like that. And when all that stripped away, like, it can be, like, more unsettling, I think, than hearing that score. Totally. It reminds me, and this is certainly not the same thing, but we went to a Cleveland Indians baseball game one time when Emily's family still lived in Ohio, and it was this throwback game where they didn't do any modern things at all. And you don't really think about that. You're like, oh, it's a baseball game. What do they do? All they had was the Oregon player and the announcer going out to bat. Number five, so and so and so. Awesome, man. Done. You didn't play a song when they came up, the batter picked out. They didn't have the Home Depot hammer and nail and shovel chase each other around the field between innings. In a race. You don't realize when you go to a pro sports game of all the extra boy, especially an NBA game. Sure. All the extra stuff that's there until it's gone. And it was really weird. I liked it. Our family was like, I'm bored. And I was like, I think this is kind of cool. Do they have jacks, at least? Oh, yeah. I mean, they sold the stuff and it wasn't throwback prices, of course. But it's weird when you're so conditioned, though, kind of like with film just to background noise and just sort of the things that we hear in movies lighting or a camera move or cinema verita is all about sort of just locking that camera down or hand holding it. Sometimes when all that artifice is gone, it can have a reverse effect. That all the artifice has. Like you're using it for. Yeah. And I think in addition to what is added to kind of manipulate you emotionally or unconsciously there's also a lot that's removed a lot of reality that's removed, like, the background noise. If they put background noise in it's fully artist. It's not the actual background noise that was there when they were filming. That's not what Weissman does. This film is replete with disturbing background noise. Like televisions that are on that you can't see other people's conversations that you can't make out what they're saying. The lighting he uses is only the lighting at Bridgewater. He doesn't use any of his own light. It's all whatever it's called, available light. When you just kind of watch it, you're like this is just like looking in on real life. Which makes what you're seeing all the more disturbing because in addition to almost being there, you almost feel guilty. Especially if you have half a conscience of witnessing the stuff that you're seeing because you're seeing some of these people, like Jim, when he's taken back to his cell after those guards got arise out of him while he was being shaved. He's naked, fully naked, stomping around, basically throwing a tantrum, trying you can tell he's trying to calm himself down. This is how he's, like, getting out. His anger and wiseman just sits there and films the whole thing. Yeah. And you're forced to watch as the viewer I saw somebody put it it's basically like you're the one standing in the doorway. Even after the guards have left, you're still standing there watching this man in one of the probably one of the several worst points of his recent life just gawking at him, basically. And that's the hard part of it, for sure. Yeah. Or the other end of the spectrum. There's a scene with a guy named Vladimir and this guy is very lucid and he's speaking very clearly about I think I've deteriorated since I've been here. I think all this noise that you're hearing, all these TVs that are always turned on full blast it's sort of driving me crazy and I would like to go back to prison where I actually could work out in a gym and I could take classes, and this medication that they're giving me is making me worse. I feel that it's harming me. And when the guards take him out of the room, then there's a scene of the clinicians, like, discussing things, and it's sort of like, sounds like we need to up his medication and his tranquilizers because he's paranoid. So when you see something like that, it's sort of the other end of the spectrum from Jim. Equally disturbing, but part of the beauty and the rawness of this film is like, these people are all in here together. Yeah. It's never lost on you. This is a particularly sad case. Yeah. Because you can tell, like, no, he's with it this guy, he knows what he's saying. He's not trying to manipulate. He's pleading his case in a logical way. He's trying so hard not to get worked up. How would you not get worked up when you're pleading your case to be released from a mental institution, from somebody who's just taking you as, you know, nuts? So why should you be listen to there's even one of the medical staff at that meeting after he leaves the room and they're discussing him, what did she say? She's like, if you take his basic premise as true, then everything he says from that is totally logical. But of course, his basic premise is total hogwash, or whatever she says. Something like that. I'm paraphrasing just to say it's. Like, the guy who never had a chance, he just wasted his breath. They were never going to listen to him. And it's like Red and Shawshank said, yeah, was he not supposed to be there? He was supposed to be there, wasn't he? Well, yeah, but every time he came up for parole, he would plead his case, they would deny it, and then finally, in the end, he was like, it doesn't matter what I say in here, you're not going to let me out anyway. That's by Morgan Freeman, but it sounds a little more like Boss Hog on tranquilizers. What? Yeah, that was Boss Hog sedated. Oh, man. Let's do it again. No, maybe Gerry can edit that. I can't ever do my Morgan Freeman again. One of the great voices. But yeah, he basically says, you know, institutionalized, you're not going to let me out no matter what I say. And of course, that's when they let him out, because it's a dramatic film and with a great, wonderful, happy ending. Not like Titicut Follies. No. One other thing that I think we should point out, too, for people who haven't seen the movie, like, we know Vladimir's name and Jim's name, just because it comes up, like, in discussion, like they're calling him Jim or somebody addresses Vladimir's Vladimir. There's no chiron at the bottom of the screen says Vladimir or Jim. There's no one explaining how Jim got here or what Vladimir did. There's no nothing. Nothing is explained. It's just here's a scene, here's another scene. Here's another scene. Here's another scene. Nothing necessarily leads into anything else. There's one part that Wiseman says he regrets because it was so he calls it ham fisted, where it's really hard to watch. It is the main doctor, the main clinician, who's a recurring character whose name we have no idea who it is. If you just watch the movie, he force feeds a patient who stopped eating and with a nasogastric tube stuffed down his nose all the way into his stomach. And this guy is just stoically taking this. He's decided he is not going to eat. They even give him a choice. You can drink the soup, or we're going to force feed you. And he's like, you're going to have to force feed. But I don't even think he says anything. Yeah, so there's a force feeding scene. You watch an emaciated man who's starving himself force fed, and he intercut that part with scenes from the man's preparation for burial to kind of show like he didn't make it. He was successful in ending his own life through starvation. And then also, I think what Wiseman was trying to get across was that he's really being cared for. He's given, like, a decent burial, and I think he has eight paw bearers from the institution, and he's treated very well compared especially to this force feeding through a tube down his nose. And Wiseman thought that was a little ham fisted. That is cinematic part of the entire movie. Nothing else is anywhere remotely like that. It's all just scene, scene, scenes, scene, and no explanation of who these people are or what they are trying to say. All right, should we take a break? Yes. All right, we'll take our second break and be back right after this. Hey, everyone. 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Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So before we talk about the sort of court cases and whether or not this film could be banned or exhibited, it's interesting. You talk about like it's just scene, scene, scene, scene. But on the flip side of that, it is like such a carefully curated edit from all those hundreds of hours of footage down to 83 minutes. And that's one of the things that Weissman sort of talked about, was he didn't apparently he didn't I don't know if he came around, but he didn't even like the term cinema verte because he felt it sounded too much like you were just shooting stuff and putting it in front of people. And he said, I am manipulating people, but it's through the edit. So while you may not think that, I guess he was a master at it because you probably shouldn't feel manipulated, but he's still putting together that careful edit. Interesting. He is a master edit. And it's pretty remarkable. This is his first film and he was that masterful at it. Yeah. So I said earlier that it was crucial that he had gotten permission to film not only from the lieutenant governor and the superintendent of Bridgewater, but also from everyone he shot. He got either written permission from them or verbal permission, audio visual, I guess, on camera, then giving him permission to use them in his film. So he was covered up in permission. And don't forget, he was a law professor, too. And when the movie first came out, when he finished, he showed it to the superintendent of Bridgewater and to the lieutenant governor. They both apparently liked it, according to Wiseman. But it wasn't until the movie came out into wider release at the very beginning, I think, a New York Film Festival or something like that. And people started responding by saying like, this is barbaric, this treatment at Bridgewater. What's wrong with the state of Massachusetts? That they suddenly turned on the film and Wiseman had on his hands what would come to become a band film. Yeah. So one of the central players here is Elliot Richardson, who was that lieutenant governor you referenced at the time, had loftier political aspirations. So when it came time to run for an office higher than that, tried to suppress this film, thinking it would count against him, and it became sort of like Libya calls it a political tool. It's exactly what it became. And Richardson would end up accusing Weissman of double crossing the state. And it all sort of hinged on the idea. Not like, oh, you showed these awful things, but it hinged on the idea of permissions. And privacy was sort of the legal framework of it because the argument was, sure, you might have gotten the permission from these men, but they are in no state to give real permission. And so there were a series of court cases over the years that sort of debated this, like, for many years. In 68, there's a judge, Spirit Court judge named Harry Callis, who found that it breached privacy. And this was interesting, though, because I get that as a legal basis for argument, but this judge said he kind of attacked the filmmaking process and said it's just a hodgepodge of sequences with no narrative and said each viewer is left to his own devices as to what's being portrayed and in what context. And in the meantime, Weissman's over there going, that's what cinema verote is. But I thought that was like this judge just said you should destroy, not should, like, ordered it to be destroyed. Yes. He also called it a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities. And so the negative has to be burnt. Yes. And of course, Wiseman was like, well, I'm not burning my negative. I'm going to fight this and appeal it. Oh, sure. That case, by the way, was the first one in Massachusetts history where court affirmed that a right to privacy exists. It had never been affirmed in a court case, and it was established in that case. So it was not cut and dry, though, because Weissmann has a First Amendment right to freedom of expression. So it became freedom of expression versus freedom of privacy, or right to privacy, I should say. I think the ACLU got involved and they submitted an amicus brief that basically said, we think that this film has value, but to a very limited number of people, specifically lawyers, judges, law students, medical students, psychiatrists, people in those fields should be able to see this, and that is about it. And so that kind of became the ruling shortly after that initial, you need to burn the negatives on appeal. That's what they came up with. Yeah. And so for a number of years after that, for those reasons, it was shown in, like, film class. It was shown in medical schools. It was shown in the library. Yeah, it was shown in libraries. That was a great place to see something like this or in different institutions would show this and say, this is what not to do. You can't do stuff like this. And this is sort of through the some attorneys got involved that said there were some suicides at Bridgewater in the mid to late 80s. There were some class action lawsuits that followed by patients where the attorneys said they could draw a direct line, basically, between a patient dying by suicide and the fact that this film wasn't shown. Like, it should be allowed to be shown for these reasons. Yeah, like, had it been shown, there would have been a public outcry for more reforms, and that wouldn't have led those reforms, might have prevented those suicides in Bridgewater. And so Weisman said that he never gave up on the film being released to a wider audience, and he saw that that was a good time to bring this up again. And it actually worked out. He got a judge to basically say, like, okay, yes, you should be able to show this, but we need to blur the faces of the men out. And Wiseman said that's impossible. This is film. It's not video. Work with me here, man. Right. He said, Also, it'll artistically ruin my film. You remember when we did that one gorilla filming in the supermarket? We ended up having to go back and blur every single thing in the supermarket out except for us. It kind of screwed it up a little bit. I could see where he's coming from. Right. And so he appealed again, and finally they said, you know what? Not a single inmate at Bridgewater, and none of their families have ever filed a formal objection to this film being shown. So how about this? Just show it. It's unbanned officially by the early 90s. Right? That was a 91 with Judge Andrew Gilmeyer of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. And then after that, it was still, because Weissman is, like I said earlier, very picky about how his films are exhibited. And so it wasn't like it was just everywhere. I think PBS aired it in 93 in full. You could always buy the DVD from him from his website, or if there was a film festival or a film class, like I said, when I saw it was in college film class from a VHS tape that the professor owned. Probably bought it from Weissman, and that's sort of how it lived his life. I mean, it's interesting that this still is a relevant topic and a relevant film and is being talked about today, like, in 2022, I think in 2017, he even tried to or I think he successfully finally got it on a streaming service called Canopy with a K, which is also kind of through the library system, which is awesome. Yes, you can watch them for free. If you sign up for a Canopy account with your library card number, you can go watch, I think, all of Wiseman's films, all 48, which is pretty great. But there seems to have been some direct effects of the film on Bridgewater. But still, from what it sounds like, there's still a long way to go with Bridgewater, too. Yeah, I think they made a lot of strides, and then they found, even as recently as this year, that they were using what they call chemical restraints. Basically just doping people up more right. Than they said they were doing. So this is ongoing there. And then Weissman, like you said, made 48 films, and they had names like Hospital or high school. And it's just sort of that very bare bone cinema verote look at a single topic that's sort of been his bread and butter. I think it's a really cool thing. Yeah, it is really cool. He's just fascinated with institutions, although he even says he has no idea how they work. And I think he's even said he's not quite sure he understands his film himself. This is pretty awesome to say. Yes. And Zipper Films is named after his wife who passed away a couple of years ago at the age of 90. And he's, like he said, still going strong. Yeah. What's his latest one? City hall. Yeah. About Boston City Hall. Yes. It came out in 2020. Pretty cool. Well, if you want to know more about tidycut Follies, you should probably go watch it. But be warned, it is really rough, even though it is great in the term of a Cinema file would use it. How about that? A Cinema file. I always add an extra syllable. So that, of course, means it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this follow up on the Effective Altruism. One of our favorite things is when we talk about a topic and someone from that topic gets in touch and is a listener. Yeah, for real. And that's what happened in this case with Grace Adams. Hey, guys. We are so excited that you covered Effective Altruism and you did so wonderfully. And Grace is with giving what we can. Giving what we can. Would love to give your listeners a free book on effective altruism. Very cool. If you include this link in the show notes, which we don't have, but we'll just stay here. People can opt to have a free book sent to them, including the precipice by Toby Ord anywhere in the world. We love sending out books and things is a great way for people to engage more with the ideas. Wishing you all the best from a big personal fan, Grace Adams. And I should have made this into a bit later. Should I do that real quick? Yeah. All right. So you just talk to people while I do that. Okay. Well, hey, everybody, actually, we could edit this together. Toby Orde wrote in and said the same thing, too, but he also sent us well wishes and said we did a good job on the Effective Altruism episode, which I thought was pretty good because I like to think we're fairly fair handed with it. We weren't too over the top subjective, don't you think? I think so. Although we did get one email from someone that's kind of acted like we didn't point out any of the downsides. I disagree with that, too. But anyway how's that bitly coming, Chuck? Okay, my friend, I am done. I have the bitly. If you go to bitbit lyskgive, you can get your free book. Yeah, pretty great. Free books on effective Altruism and free books by Toby Ord on existential risks, which I mean, come on. If you want to get in touch with us, like Grace from GiveWell did, we would love to hear from you. You can send us an email whether you want to give away free books or not. It's okay. You don't have to send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. 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45bcd56c-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-1716edc06538 | Short Stuff: The Man Who Didn’t Eat for a Year | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-man-who-didn-t-eat-for-a-year | In 1965, a 456-pound man walked into a hospital in Scotland and asked for help with a fast. That was the last day he ate for more than a year. Learn about the medical marvel that was Angus Barbieri. | In 1965, a 456-pound man walked into a hospital in Scotland and asked for help with a fast. That was the last day he ate for more than a year. Learn about the medical marvel that was Angus Barbieri. | Wed, 31 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=212, tm_isdst=0) | 12033526 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and there's Josh. And with us in spirit is a fascinating person named Angus Barbieri, who is is the person who went one of the longest of all time without eating solid food. Yeah, we've covered fasting before here and there. Did we do a show on only fasting? Yeah, I think it was called fasting colon deadly or what? Right. And I know we covered the very famous hunger strikes here and there, maybe in that episode, but this one was not a hunger strike so much as a man that weighed \u00a3456 in Scotland in 1009 six five, which little known fact is 20 1 st. That's right. And he is not little known if you're from Scotland. Little known to me. But he needed help and he went to the doctors. They put him on a short fast, thinking that, all right, here's what's going to happen. We're going to put this out on a fast. He's going to lose a little weight. I don't know if he'll keep it off or not, but maybe this will kickstart a better lifestyle for him. Yeah. Once he started not eating, he said, I can do this. And he didn't eat for a few weeks, and he didn't eat for a few more weeks. And he said, I want to get down to 180 from 456. That was his goal week, so I am going to not eat. Well, he didn't proclaim this at the beginning, but in the end, he did not eat for 382 days. Nothing at all? No, nothing like not fruit? Not nothing. He drank coffee, he drank tea, drank sparkling water, and then he took some vitamins, which we'll talk about in a second, but he just didn't eat for over a year. And what's even more astounding is that he didn't just stay in this hospital in Dundee, he went about his normal life. He had to quit his job at his father's fish and chip store. Yeah, I would think that's the first line of business, but other than that, he was going to and from the hospital, he would go and spend a couple of nights overnight, but he was being treated as an outpatient. And so you might think, well, okay, clearly this guy was fudging this. He didn't really go a year without eating. Well, his doctors thought of that, too, and they tested him, and the test showed that he probably was really not eating this whole time. Yeah. So you mentioned the vitamins. He had a lot of body fat, obviously, at \u00a3456. Right. And you can survive on your body fat for a while. But he also took a multivitamin. He took vitamin C. He took a yeast supplement, a sodium supplement, and a potassium supplement that's going to help maintain his electrical conductivity. And he was doing okay. He would describe being weak sometimes and a little faint here and there, but he was not like, falling over every couple of hours. Right. It's pretty remarkable that he was able to do this on an outpatient and not completely under doctor's care and supervision. Yeah. Not bedridden for a year. He was walking in and out of the hospital. He was just living his life. He just wasn't eating this whole time. And it is astounding to the point where it's basically a medical mystery and it's not so much like Angus Barbieri was particularly special. What Angus Barbieri points out is how little we understand how the human body in general functions and how much less we understand how it functions among individuals. Right. They just have no idea how he did this. We just know that he did it because it's documented. There was plenty of newspaper stories after he broke the fast and news came out, but his doctors also documented it scientifically and released it as an article in the Postgraduate Medical Journal in 1973. And it's only, like, ten pages, maybe a little longer, but it's a really interesting read about detailing this process that this guy went through and what his body was doing at the time. All right, so let's take a quick break. And during the message break, everyone try and think of what he did not do besides eat as well very often. That was very awkwardly worded, and we'll give you the answer right after this. Okay, so he's not eating much. No. And I put him he's not eating anything. A little teaser question before the break on what else he was not doing. And if you guessed poop, you're correct. What did they get, Chuck? They get nothing. They had on the back from me virtually through the airwaves. All right. He went generally between, like, 40 and 50 days without pooping. So he did poop occasionally, and I don't even know what that would have been. Just his body? Yes. They say in the study that it was basically just like cell detritus, cell delete. You imagine that? Yeah. Cellular poop, I guess. Yeah. But I don't know if it'd be any better or worse. It'd be no more offensive than warm biscuits, I would think. Nice callback. Thank you. But he did poop. But that's like bottom of the barrel poop. But I mean, that's a lot of dead cells to form, like, a visible poop. Even if it was just one little poop, that's a lot of dead cells that he was getting rid of. Yeah, I mean, I guess he only pooped probably, like, what, seven, eight or nine times? Yes. For this whole year. Not bad. Not bad. He had a clean fanny the whole time. Oh, this is for our friends in the UK. So you shouldn't say that's. Right. He had a clean rectum the clean bomb. It isn't that the universal name? I think so. Okay, so at the end of this whole thing, he got down to that ideal weight of \u00a3180, if you think, well, sure, but then he starts eating and puts it all back on. No, not so. Five years later, he just weighed 196. Not too bad at all. When he came back from his fast, and this is very important, I was waiting tables in Arizona one time and a woman oh, yeah? Fell over in the restaurant. And I think this was during the fasting episode, I told the story and an ambulance came and we were like, what happened? Her friends were like, she fasted for a week and then celebrated by eating steak and drinking wine. That's not how you do it. You got to take baby steps. And that's what he did. He broke his fast with breakfast of boiled egg, a slice of bread with butter, and then that black coffee that he had been drinking right before he ate that, he said that I forgot what food even tastes like, and afterwards said, I feel a little full, but I enjoyed it. And it went down okay. Yeah. And so, again, his doctors were testing him on a pretty much a daily basis, urine test, blood test. And they were keeping track of things like his blood glucose level. And that's a really good indicator. You can't really fake a blood glucose level if you eat something, it's going to show up on a daily test. And one of the reasons why Angus Barbieri is this medical marvel is that he was walking around with a blood glucose level of 30. If you are eating normally, your blood glucose level is about 140. And if you fast overnight, like, say, you don't need anything after five or something like that, the next morning when you're tested, you have about a 70. This guy was walking around with a 30. And the fact that he wasn't just feigning constantly is really impressive. But the thing that gets me, Chuck, is the hypercalcemia. That's right. As expected. He developed hyper calciumia. Which is very high. Higher than usual. At least amounts of calcium in the blood. And he's paying out a lot of calcium or higher than normal amounts of calcium in his E. So the fact that he had a lot of extra calcium. People like what's going on here. And they think it's because he was losing so much weight so fast that his bones knew that they didn't need to carry that kind of weight anymore. And they started dissolving. He lost so much weight, he shed skeleton, too. That's amazing. It is amazing. So much weight. That the Guinness Book of World's Records in 1971, before they decided it's probably not good to encourage world records for fasting. He was the last one to be, I guess, awarded by the Guinness Book for that kind of notoriety. And then after that, they said, due to its specialist nature, right, and not due to the sheer danger, we're not going to open this up for any other people. There is one other guinness record about eating that's even longer than Angus Barbiers, the world record holder for a hunger strike. Angus didn't eat for 382 days. A guy named Dennis Gayler Goodwin didn't eat for 385 days. So he went three more days without eating before he was force fed through a tube. He was protesting his innocence about a charge of rape. I saw no follow up. No, he was actually guilty. He was actually innocent. Whatever became of him? The only mention I can find of him is that he didn't eat for 385 days. Yeah. And I love that on day 385, they're like, We've had enough. Right? Exactly. We're going to force feed you through a tube. Yeah. They didn't do that on day 40 or 60 or 200 or 300. Really? They're like, all right, fine. You got the record. Now stop showing off. We're going to force feed you. And so, as you know, if you listen to our fasting episode, fasting is not a good way to lose weight. It's very extreme. It can be deadly. You can literally drop dead of what they just call sudden death at, like, the six or seven week mark or before, depending on how much you weigh. If you're skinny, you can enter that danger zone really fast and just be sitting at your desk, feel a little faint, and then you're gone. Right. And it's because your body eventually goes through fat, and even if you still have some fat left, it starts eating other things, too, like muscle. Well, it turns out that your heart is made of muscle, and eventually your heart tissue might start getting eaten by your body, and that's not good for your heart. It can kill you. And then there's also another danger, too, like that lady that fainted from eating steak and wine after fasting for a week. There's a real issue called refeeding, Chuck, and it's like that's how I want to say a lot of people people have died. They survived the fast, but when they started eating food, they actually died as a result of it. Food overdose? Yeah. Basically, you get an overdose of nutrients. We don't understand how that works or how to refeed somebody, which makes long, extended fasts over something like 40 days from what I've seen, which seems really biblical if you ask me. It doesn't sound scientific. 40 days and 40 nights. Basically anything over that period is very dangerous, because after six, eight weeks, you start to enter a danger zone. Don't do it, folks. If you're going to fast, just keep it at a couple of days. Sure. That's my advice. Sure. But even that, let's just see. Chuck's. No, doctor, don't listen to Chuck. No. Eat responsibly. That's what Dr. Chuck says. Thank you. Well, thanks a lot for joining us here on Short Stuff. We hope you are thrilled and amazed, maybe even a little amused. If not, we'll try again next time. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-02-01-sysk-alcohol-vs-pot-final.mp3 | Marijuana Vs. Alcohol: Which Is Worse For You? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/marijuana-vs-alcohol-which-is-worse-for-you | It's been the subject of teenage conversation for decades already, but now you can join Josh and Chuck as they dive into the science of how pot and booze affect your body, mind and behavior and learn which one comes out on top. | It's been the subject of teenage conversation for decades already, but now you can join Josh and Chuck as they dive into the science of how pot and booze affect your body, mind and behavior and learn which one comes out on top. | Thu, 01 Feb 2018 15:18:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=15, tm_min=18, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=32, tm_isdst=0) | 49674964 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. We are going back on the road for 2018, and we are super excited because we're gonna be doing brand new material, which we are certainly glad for. And if you live in a Denver or Cleveland or St. Louis or Boston or Washington, DC. Then you can come see us. Yes, you can come see us. Specifically if you're in Boston, we're going to be at the Wilbur Theater on April 4, and then the next night on April 5, we're going to be in DC at the beloved Lincoln Theater. We love those two places, don't we, Check? We sure do. And then on the 22 May, we're going to be in St. Louis, Missouri, for the first time ever at the pageant. And then another first for us is the next night, May 23. We're going to be in Cleveland, Ohio, at the Ohio Theater. Dude, I'm very excited about both Cleveland and St. Louis because he wanted to add some new shows. We get a lot of support in Ohio that we know for sure and got family there. And I just can't wait. But wait, there's more. We're going back to the Gothic Theater in Englewood, Colorado, aka right outside Denver. We're going to be there June 28, and it's going to be nuts. We're going to have a great time at all these. So we want you to come see us. You can go to the Wilbur.com. You can go to Ticket, fly for the DC show, you can go to Ticketmaster for the St. Louis Show, searches on playhousesquare.org for the Ohio Theater, Cleveland Show, and then lastly, ax.com to search for us at the Gothic Theater. And we will see you guys very soon. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. And this is Stuff You Should Know because you put the three of us together, roll us up in the paper, add a match to the mix, you've got one great podcast. Or throw us all in a snifter. Okay. Swirl us around. Right? And then we're an aperture. That's nice. And why not just why decide? Why choose one over the other, right? Because then we would kill each other in a car. Well, let's start legitimately here. Chuck, first of all, how are you? Great. Good. Okay. I am, too. But let's start even more legitimately than that. Let's get in the way back machine. Okay. I live in this thing. Emily kicked me out, so I've been living in the wayback machine for a few weeks now. With your dog. Just one of them, though. She only gave me one of the dogs. It's kind of gave me in here, you know? It is. Okay, well, we're in Chuck's Repurposed way back sheet, and we're just going just for a second, Chuck. We're going back to 2014. Great. And we're going to go to New York City and we're going to buy a New Yorker magazine. Okay. And now we can go back to 2018, okay. And we're going to flip open this New Yorker magazine. Oh, look, Chuck. It's an interview with then President Barack Obama. Do you remember him? I do. So in 2014, Obama gave this interview to New Yorker, and he really kind of created a bit of a stir since he first rained in 2008. Everybody knew he smoked pot. There were pictures of it. He never denied it. He admitted to smoking pot. But this interview in 2014 really just changed things, because in it, Obama said that he did not believe that his pot smoking was anything really worse than his bad cigarette habit and that he didn't think that it was more dangerous than alcohol. Right. Which is really saying something, because as teenagers have been saying for decades and decades now, it's crazy that something like alcohol can be bought, like, at any corner store, at drugstores in some states, grocery stores, and that you can drink it as long as you're 21 and get in your car and drive up to a certain limit. But pod is totally illegal in most states still. And Obama was saying, kind of throwing down the gauntlet, saying in a very roundabout way, he was saying, I don't know that that's necessarily right, that pots should be illegal and you should be able to buy alcohol anywhere because pot is not as bad as booze. Yeah. Which was man, times have really changed in the past, like 20 years. Because I remember when Clinton, it was such a scandal that he had inhaled. No, he didn't. Inhale well, the thing came out and he said, well, I tried to and I couldn't. Just a liar. Well, who knows? That may have been true. I just think my reaction was, well, that just means you're super lame. You don't know what you're doing, Bill. But it was just such a scandal. And then here we are now where state after state is legalizing recreational marijuana, which is really interesting to see that change happen. Not even like medicinal marijuana anymore. That was like the gateway legislation. Now it's like straight up, you want to smoke pot to get high just for fun. You can do that. Let's see, Chuck. So it started with Washington and Colorado, right? I think were they the first two? They were back in 2014. And just since 2014, you've now got Oregon, California, Vermont, Washington, DC, nevada, Massachusetts, Maine, Alaska and Washington State. I said Washington first, right? Yeah. The state is so nice. I said it twice. Or maybe they just super, like when you reaffirm your wedding vows, maybe they doubled down a few of this later and said, this is so great, we just want to legalize it again. I think they did do that in Washington. We were there recently for live shows, and I can tell you they definitely renewed their vows with pots. Yeah, we were in San Francisco. We're going to be in Colorado and then Washington and Oregon. And we're going to Massachusetts. We just need to hit Nevada. And we're going to DC. Yeah. Nevada. Maine. In Alaska. And it will be the stuff you should know up in Smoke tour. We need T shirts for that one. Not that we would ever do that. No. But we could still make T shirts that suggest it. Yeah. And my funny joke on stage in San Francisco, we were there literally the weekend that the first recreational pot shops opened. And the joke was San Francisco day after. Exactly like San Francisco was the day before. Yeah. No joke. It killed. It was all right. They loved it. So the upside of all of this is that with all these states, like legalizing marijuana, the comparison between pot and alcohol has kind of become less of like a stoner conversation. It's actually a legitimate academic discussion nowadays. It has to be. There's a lot of different things that come into play. Before it was kind of like, well, ultimately it doesn't matter because Uncle Sam actually Tricky Dick says that it's illegal, so it's illegal. So it doesn't really matter if it's worse for you or not. It's way worse to be put into jail than it is to be tipsy off of alcohol and maybe risk cirrhosis of the liver. Right? Yes. So that ended all conversations there. But as that conversation ender has kind of fallen away, the conversations kind of opened up. So I guess what we're doing here today is doing the best we can and putting the conversation to rest, even though now that we've dived into it, we've seen that the conversation is very far from being put to rest. Yeah, there are a lot of stats. It's a very stat heavy episode, which is fun. But the first thing we should point out is that in terms of marijuana, because it was illegal, there hasn't been a lot of funding thrown at studies over the years, because, like you said, it's like, why bother? It's illegal. We're not going to put our resources towards studying it now. They kind of have to. But the long and short of it is we are still, and will be for many years gathering data on what pot does to the body, how dangerous it is. But early results clearly indicate, at least in the short term, and we're going to run the gamut here, but in the short term, you can start a night out having fun drinking and end up dead hours later just from the alcohol. Yeah. I'm not saying by getting in a car or jumping off a building, like, all those things can happen, too, but you can drink yourself to death in hours. Yeah. So the CDC put out, like, a very famous statistic now that said that every year in the United States, about 88,000 people die from alcohol every year, and that's all alcohol related deaths like liver disease, car crashes, all that. But about half of those are from binge drinking, which is drinking usually for men, about five or more drinks, and for women, I think it's like three or more drinks within 2 hours or something like that, and then going on. And once you start to get to that point, you start to run an increasing risk of alcohol poisoning. Yeah. Your body cannot process alcohol fast enough. You can drink past that amount, like I said, such that you hear sad stories about the kid in college who literally died from drinking one night. That cannot be said of marijuana. Well, it depends. Well, it doesn't depend. Now it does. I think it's literally impossible to consume as much marijuana as you would have to consume over a period of hours to die from it. Okay. Yes, absolutely. You're right. It doesn't depend. That's true. There's a lot of people who points to that statistic where they basically say, 88,000 people die a year from alcohol. Zero people die a year from marijuana. That's not necessarily true. But if you're talking about overdosing, yes, absolutely. People don't overdose and die from marijuana. Many have tried, sure, especially Cheek and Chong. But the amount of THC you would have to ingest is so much more than you could possibly take under normal circumstances that you're just not going to what are the numbers here to figure this out? Well, you're stat, ma'am. I just want to set up that we use high times as a source for this episode because we're like, okay, so how much THC is in pot, and how much does that break down to? Depending on whether you smoke a bowl or smoke a joint or eat an edible. And we said, well, who would know more than anyone else? And it turns out it's high time. Yeah. So here's the thing with pot, too. It really varies according to who you are, how much you typically ingest, how strong the pot is. But are we going to go with these numbers here? 18% THC, which I think is fairly average these days, which is super high. But that's normal. That's a normal amount. I think that's about 180 milligrams per gram of marijuana. Right. And if people don't know, THC is the active ingredient that gets you high in the marijuana plant. Yeah. What is it? Delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol. Oh, you just read the tattoo on your forearm. Yeah, it's misspelled, as you can see. I always wonder what that was. Here's the thing, though. You lose THC when it's burned about 60%. And trust me, marijuana users have tried to lower that number as much as possible for the and to some success, like, supposedly with the vaporizers, you lose a lot less because you're not actually burning the THC. Right? Yeah. They're all manner of ways to ingest marijuana now, partially because of there always were, but partially because of this recreational and I always wondered what that would look like if it was legalized, because I've been to Amsterdam and stuff, and I thought, well, is it going to be like that where you have marijuana and jars and like, they call them bud tenders, which is so stupid. That is stupid. Or I thought, well, no, it's America. I bet you anything is going to be like a cigarette pack that's highly manufactured, but just joints. And it turns out it's sort of not either. I mean, it's very on the up and up. Like, I've been into one of those stores just to look around, and it's like visiting any coffee or tea shop. It's not just dudes with a bag that they throw into another bag. They pull it out of their stock. I guess it's my way of saying the recreational pot shops that I've seen have been very professional and everything is very packaged and it's just like any other commodity. So did you walk in and go, are you the bud tender? I'm from Hot Lana. I'm doing a story for a podcast. Okay. So depending on how you ingest the pot, right, especially whether you're burning it or not, you're going to lose some THC. But if you burn it, you lose about 60%. So if you have 180 milligram per gram THC, it's suddenly down to 72 milligrams per gram. And if you're smoking a half a gram joint, let's say you're even smoking a 1 gram joint and you're getting 72 milligrams of THC from that joint, you're still immensely shy on the level of orders of magnitude difference of how much it would take to overdose on THC. Yeah, I think the number in here is a minimum of, like, 150 joints. You would have to smoke by yourself over a very short period of time. Yeah. Because you're getting 72 milligrams in that joint of THC. But it would take something like at least 15 grams of THC to overdose. So, yes, you would have to smoke hundreds of joints in basically a day to start to build up enough THC in your bloodstream that you overdose fatally. I'm trying to picture the study, like, being behind the one way glass and the guy being like, how many is this? And they're like, 110. And he's like, I can't do it anymore. That's why you would not overdose. There's just no way. Yes, for sure. I would imagine you'd fall asleep or get bored or forget what you were doing or whatever. I think it would be more likely that you would have to eat, like, a triple layer cake made entirely of marijuana. So I'm glad you said that because definitely edibles are different, and they're different in a couple of ways. One way they're different is that they don't burn you're not burning the THC, so you're not necessarily losing a bunch of it. Right. You also can eat more of it than, say, your smoking as far as THC is concerned. So you can definitely increase how much THC you're getting by eating it rather than smoking it. But the other thing about edibles is that your body does something differently with them. And that is that when you're smoking marijuana, you're introducing THC in its normal form, from your lungs to your heart to your brain. THC can cross that blood brain barrier, but it's not the greatest added. It's kind of hit or miss, right. When you ingest THC, where you eat it like an edible, it goes through your digestive system. And that THC is metabolized. It's broken down by the liver and then sent into the bloodstream. Well, what the metabolized version does is it's much better at crossing the blood brain barrier. So you get a much more powerful high from eating an edible, and you get a higher dose of THC, even though it's a THC metabolite. So eating edibles is different, and it is possible that it would bring you closer, statistically speaking, increase your risk of coming near a fatal dose of THC. But again, still, like, the amount you would have to eat is ridiculously high. Yeah. And I think most of the cases since recreational has been introduced of, oh, my God, I have to go to the emergency room, have been people that ate too much pot. Yeah. And also, one of the other big problems with edibles well, there's two of them. One is that people eat too much because it takes, like, hours to kick in, right. They're like, oh, I'm not feeling anything. Let me have four more. Yeah. Which is a real problem with those things. And then secondly, also, kids tend to get into edibles more than they find your pot and roll a joint, which is dangerous because they have lower body mass. Their fatal dose or whatever could cause them health problems. It's a much lower threshold for a small kid. Yeah, for sure. Which is scary. Yeah, sure. All right, we covered the OD aspect well. Do you want to take a break? All right, let's take a break. Let's try to decide. Let's take a break. We'll come right back after this. All right. All right. So we covered the OD things. Like I said before the break. I feel like that's settled now. It's settled all here's. The other thing about alcohol is that the way it reacts and interacts with other drugs is significantly more different than marijuana. Most people know this, but that's why on your prescription bottles, they say things like, don't drink when you take this, because depending on what the drug is, whether it's painkillers or meds for your mental well being, you can either end up having a higher dose of that or a lower dose, depending on what it is, how much you've had to drink. And that's always scary because we've seen all over the place people accidentally overdosing by combining prescription drugs and alcohol. Yeah. If you get a lower dose and it's medicine, you really need to sure, yeah. It's just as bad. And it's because alcohol is either exciting all of the enzymes in your liver and they metabolize the medicine faster than it's designed to be, so you get a big dose, or they hog all of the enzymes and the medicine just kind of passes through your liver unmetabolized and you don't get the dose you're looking for. Either way, it's not good for you. Yeah. And like this article that you put together points out, though, we should mention that marijuana, though, can impair your coordination. So there is a risk of just literally getting hurt because you're uncoordinated. You may trip over your coffee table and fall into your couch or your papa's on or your lava lamp. You don't want to go head first into a lava lamp. No, that's bad. Yeah, I know we're making light. But seriously, that is a risk. Or just your unprotected sex because your inhibitions are lowered. Although the same can be said for alcohol. Yes, that's absolutely true. And I think this article does say it's just in a different spot, but yeah, your judgment can be impaired, too, which can lead to all manner of indirect effects, which might seem like that doesn't count, but actually, they very much do count because you wouldn't have otherwise made those decisions if you hadn't been drunk or stoned. Correct. They count for sure. Yeah. So those are some of the short term health effects from drinking death, but there are long term ones, too, that come on. And this is where the lack of literature studying pot really kind of comes into play because we've been studying alcohol and the effects of alcohol for so long now, we have it pretty well licked that alcohol is really bad for you if you drink heavily, but strangely kind of good for you if you drink in moderate amounts. With pot. We don't know. There hasn't been enough study. And part of the problem, like you were saying, is it was illegal, and since it was illegal, it was kind of difficult to get your hands on study participants because they didn't want to tell you that they smoked pot and maybe have that go on any kind of permanent record or something. Yeah, I mean, for alcohol, the obvious physical effects, it's tough on your liver. And alcoholic liver disease is a real thing that can progress from early stages fibrosis to eventual liver cancer. And they don't really know exactly the mechanism for why some people can drink heavily well into their old age and not have any liver damage or maybe some liver damage, but not die of liver cancer. Right. And then other people are at much higher risk. They don't fully get that. I mean, it's just got to be genetics, right? Anytime that comes up and they're like, well, we have no idea why these people are subject to it and other people aren't. It's always it's got to be genetics. Yeah. Keith Richards alive. I don't know. Medical science will never explain that. He should totally donate his body to science. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he really should, actually. It's like a legitimate jokey thing to say, but it's true. So you've got alcohol messing with your liver. With pot, they're kind of like, okay, well, if you're a chronic pot user, what's the problem? Chronic bot user or chronic bot user? Chronic pot user. I think that's the way you would say it. Yeah. So with a chronic pot user, it's defined differently, which I think is another thing that kind of makes the literature on the topic kind of difficult to study, too, is people I don't think there's a universal this is what a chronic pot user is. I think each study defines it for itself. Yes, but for a long time, there was some literature that said that smoking pot lowers your sperm count, but almost all of those were from the all these studies referred to pot as grass. So no one took them seriously at all. Right, yeah. But in 2015, there was a Danish study that really kind of updated the literature, and they found that there was a 28% decrease in sperm count among chronic pot smokers. And they define chronic pot smokers as men who smoked more than one joint a week, which is a lot of people who smoke pot smoke more than one joint a week. Okay. Okay. So they have found a decrease in sperm production. That's definitely a thing. All right, well, there's the psychological and mental health issues at stake, too, and again, not as much literature as we need. Like, this show ten years from now will be very different, I think. Well, we should revisit it ten years from now. I totally agree. Even if we retire in five years, we'll come back ten years from now to do the marijuana one off special. There you go. It's like getting friends back together. That'd be cool. I get to be Rachel. You're always Rachel. I know. I've got the haircut. So it's funny, the Omnibus podcast did an entire episode on the Rachel. I saw that. So with mental health issues, for a long time, they weren't really sure whether teenagers who had mental health issues smoke pot to deal with it, or maybe something like bipolar doesn't really come on until your mid teens anyway. Maybe pot could trigger that or depression or something if it is laying dormant inside of you. But recently, they have done a little more studying, and they do think that it can, in your earlier years, exacerbate these mental health disorders if you are predisposed. Right. That's kind of a significant finding, too, although it makes sense intuitively, because when you are a teenager, your brain is still developing, and pot has been shown to change your cognitive development. So it would make sense that if there's a biological basis for some mental health issues like depression or bipolar or schizophrenia, that it would stand to reason that pot could have some effect on that. And they finally have said yes. We generally concede that pot probably makes mental health or predisposition to mental health issues worse in adolescence, which is sad. And it's significant too, because at least in the US, pot use peaks among kids who are age 18 and then it starts to taper off or it tapers off fully by the mid twenty s in most people. Yes, the majority of people who smoke pot in the US are teenagers anyway, but these studies are starting to show that the last people who should be smoking pot are teenagers because it can affect their brain development, make them less than sharp. Yeah, I wonder about those numbers. Those seem dubious to me. The 18 pizza 18 and taper off. Yeah, and I'm not just thinking of Willie Nelson here, he does skew the results for sure. You have to wait him differently because he smokes a lot of pot. That's what I hear with pot, obviously, although things are a little bit different these days with, like you said, vaporizing and edibles and stuff like that, but in the olden days when everybody just smoked it bronchitis, obviously in just various lung air passage issues is sort of an obvious risk. Although they are now thinking that the newest data says that marijuana smoke doesn't affect the body like tobacco smoke does and they have no idea why no make sense to them and they're like well, they've started to wonder if pot has some sort of protective chemical in it, it gives the lungs a glass of milk and tucks them in after it's done being passed through there. Well, yeah, and it's also tough because to do studies, like a lot of times people may also smoke cigarettes who smoke marijuana regularly and again with the illegality, it's kind of tough to get good data on this. Yes, and then Chuck, pregnancy is another thing. You can kind of put pot and alcohol head to head with pregnancy and apparently neither one is particularly good. Although the studies are much clearer on alcohol being bad for pregnant women to drink than pot smoking. But again, from the CDC there's a pretty famous statistic that 3.3 million women are at risk in the US of exposing their baby to alcohol. And what they're saying the point is that even if you drink just in the first few weeks of being pregnant, it can lead to what's called fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, like cognitive behavioral, physical development disorders from drinking alcohol while you're pregnant, even in the first few weeks. And so that 3.3 million women number that's like binders full of women, it basically says that is the number of women in the US. The CD estimates have stopped using birth control but haven't stopped drinking right so those two things could conceivably cross over for a couple of weeks, in which it could lead to fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. And they're saying that despite what you hear, that a glass of wine isn't bad for you or every once in a while or something while you're pregnant. Apparently, the literature combined says there's really no safe level of alcohol to drink while you're pregnant. Well, here's the deal is they don't fully know. Like, I did some digging because I know outside of the United States, there is generally a more relaxed attitude, at least in some countries. It says here that this is from an NPR article. A 2015 study found that alcohol consumption range from 20% to 80% in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. Sometimes it was just like a glass of champagne at a special event. Sometimes it was a glass of wine once a night or once a week in the third trimester. Sometimes it was 20 CCS of golden grain injected into their neck. So this one group did, louisa Zukolo, she's a health epidemiologist at Bristol, did a study recently, and she found that consuming up to 32 grams of alcohol per week, two to three drinks, was associated with a 10% increase risk of preterm birth only. Okay, but here's the deal. In America, they basically say, listen, we don't know for sure the threshold of exactly when and how and at what point in the pregnancy these effects can occur. But we do know this. If you don't drink, you have a 100% chance of not having a risk of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Right? And why don't we all just err on the side of caution and wait for that nine months? But that's like a tickler situation for us dudes to be in, Chuck, because that's a real drag. Just be like, just don't drink for nine months. I'm going to go have a beer. But you don't drink. Okay, sure. Some husbands quit drinking to show support or cut. I think that is definitely what should be done. Yeah. I mean, I think people should do it. That works best for them. Sure. But if your wife or your so is not going to drink while she's pregnant, then you should not either. I hear your take on that. Okay. I just wanted to make sure. I'll say it again at the end, I'll circle back up. My take is people should do what works best for them as a couple. Right. And I'll also say this. When you adopt a kid, neither one of you have to stop drinking. Problem solved. Just throwing it out there with marijuana during pregnancy, they don't know for sure exactly how that can affect cognitive impairment, but they do think that they have found some cognitive impairment results from fetal exposure. Right. But again, they don't have, like, thresholds. I've heard some doctors say, we would rather a mother smoke a little pot if she has. A lot of anxiety or potentially depression during her pregnancy, then hopping on pills or having a drink. But again, that's not like some official doctor recommendation. It's very anecdotal. It's like an anonymous comment from a doctor who will go unnamed. Exactly. So I also saw that some studies have found they have linked low birth weight to marijuana use in pregnancy, too. Right. So, yeah, the upshot is, what did you say? That couples should do what they think is best? Well, that's my role. Your rule is everyone follow my role. Yeah, right. So there's also a big distinction between pot and drinking, Chuck, when it comes to crime, too. Like a big one. This is probably the clearest line of all and kind of funny. Yeah, well, not funny, but the predicted result is a little amusing to me because they did find in 2014 that the average marijuana user, as far as partner violence, intimate partner violence goes, is actually lower overall than people who don't even drink or do drink. It's lower than everybody. Right. So, like, if you were just a normal and normal who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, you're like a Ned Flanders type. Statistically speaking, in the first nine years of marriage, you are more likely to commit violence against your partner than a person who smokes pot regularly. It's hilarious. It is funny. You got to look at it in a certain light and just kind of divorce yourself from the partner violence thing. Yeah, nothing about that is funny. I just picture, like, the stone person on the couch being like, well, no, of course I'm not going to get mad and hit you. Right. Why? I forgot what I ought to do. Yeah. So on the other end of the spectrum, alcohol is linked to a surprising and alarming amount of crime. Yes. The Department of justice says that alcohol is a factor in 40% of the violent crime in the United States. And there was a survey of 2 million convicted offenders who were currently in jail at the time of the survey, 37% said they were drinking at the time they committed their crime. Yeah, I bet for partner violence, too. I bet it's way higher even. It is. That was the highest one was men drinking, but also women drinking, too. Those, I believe, are the two highest incidences of intimate partner violence in the first nine years of marriage. If the show Cops can anecdotally tell a tale is that 100% of the home visits where the husband and wife are both bombed and pushing each other around. That's kind of like every episode of Cops, basically. It's definitely got that one. I still watch that show every now and then. Emily gets so upset at me. It's on all the time still. I know. It's like Golden Girls. Sometimes I'll catch a little bit of one and just remember, like, oh, I used to watch this in college and think it was a hoot. And then part of me is, like, so depressing watching it that I can't even watch for five minutes, man. I tweeted the other day that I used to think humanity was on the whole, like, generally decent and good, and then I started watching a lot of Forensic Files. Yeah, I should watch that. I don't think you should, man. It really will kind of change the way you look at people, that people do some really bad stuff. Yeah, it's really depressing. You just kind of lose a measure of faith in humanity, because the way that the show presents it, too, is so, like, matter of fact, this happened, and this person picked up a rock and beat their friend over the head and then took their $5. Yeah, stuff like that. You want to take a break? Yeah, we need to reset. Yeah, let's take a break. And we'll talk about driving while intoxicated right after this. All right, we're back. Here's the deal with driving drunken stone, for sure. You shouldn't be doing either. We're not endorsing either one. But the statistics and studies, roundly say that when you are drinking, you are way more likely to be like, I can take this curve. It's 80. I'm fine to drive. And people that are stoned that are like, I need to be super careful because I'm a little high right now, and I'm going to be extra careful and drive even slower than I should. Yeah, that is what the studies show. Yeah. And the differences are so pronounced that you can look at fatal accident statistics and see that in some areas, the legalization of pot has actually brought the number of traffic deaths down in those states. And they think that the reason why is because people are drinking less and smoking pot more. And that when you smoke pot, you're not a safer driver necessarily, although some studies show that you actually are safer than people who aren't impaired. That's pretty rare. But you're a safer impaired driver for sure. But I think you've said something very true. You shouldn't be driving stoned or drunk because you're taking your own life in your hands. You're also taking the lives of everybody else out on the road on your hands. And shame on you for that. Yeah, but I found it very interesting that some of these studies, like roundly, say that a person stoned is way more likely to say, hey, you know what? I'm stoned, and I need to be super careful, and a person drinking will say, I'm fine. Give me the keys. I'm fine. Yeah, I know for sure. So there are two different ways that being impaired and driving affect you, whether you're stoned and whether you're drunk. And what tends to happen is if you're drunk and you're driving, you typically act more impulsively, more aggressively, more recklessly, which are three things that really go poorly with driving. Yes. So you're going to tailgate more. You're going to pass people more, you're going to speed more, you're going to just be an aggressive driver, but also one whose reaction times are not as good as they are normally. Right, right. When you're stoned, however, the general idea among scientists who are just beginning to study the stuff over the last few years is that you tend to overestimate how impaired you are. Where you've smoked some pot, you feel stoned. Now you've gotten behind the wheel of the car and you're a little freaked out, to be frank. You are worried that you're going to get pulled over, that you're going to cause a wreck, and so you're actually overcompensating for your impairment because you're overestimating the amount of impairment you have, and so you're going to drive slower. Like, much slower sometimes. Yeah. The one dude in the article said the joke is Cheech and Chong driving 20 on the expressway. Yeah. There's a study that just is hilarious to me that in driving simulators, the people who are conducting the study had to remind the stone drivers to keep up to the speed limit. They kept dropping below the speed limit. They also tend to give more distance between the next car and their car, even when compared to non impaired drivers. Yeah. And the one thing that I found remarkable was that when they did the simulated experiments, people under the influence of marijuana performed worse than they did in the real driving experiment. So, in other words, in the room with a simulator, they might have goofed up some, but when they actually got behind the wheel, they again turned on some switch that was like, all right, gotta be super careful. Right. So interesting. Yeah. And even more to the point, if you take the individual things that driving requires, like coordination, paying attention, reaction time, if you test those things individually, outside of the context of driving, people who smoke pot routinely do worse on those things. But again, when they get behind the wheel, it's like, it's serious time for people who smoke pot. So the thing about that, though, is that the studies find that that's true up to a certain point, that when you pass a certain level of impairment, then all of a sudden, your chances of being responsible for a fatal accident go up dramatically. And what they found is that that point correlates possibly to THC content in your blood of about five parts per billion or five nanograms per liter. Yes. Which is very controversial number. It's a controversial amount. Well, and at this point, like a breathalyzer. We did a show on breathalyzers. Boy, that was a tough one. Yeah. Remember how complicated those things are? Yeah, that was very technical and tough, but there's like a magical crystal involved in them. But with the breathalyzer, like, you can tell when someone is literally drunk at that moment. With marijuana, you're doing blood and urine test that shows that you have marijuana in your system. If you are a heavy marijuana user, you could be stone cold sober and show marijuana in your system. So they don't really have a foolproof way of testing pulling someone off the street from behind the wheel of a car and seeing if they were stoned at that moment. And that's one of the reasons why some states are starting to adopt that five parts per billion threshold, because apparently studies find that if you're a regular smoker and you've got a bunch of THC in your body that's accumulated but you haven't smoked recently, you're not going to be over five parts per billion. That's the thinking, yeah. Okay. And then the other one is that statistic that says that your chances of being in a fatal crash increased dramatically at over five parts per billion. So that's why some states are adopting it. But some other studies, especially ones out of Europe, are like, whoa, that is way too high a limit. It should be more like one part per billion. I think they're trying to land on the right number. They definitely are. I think Sweden is adopting a one part per billion limit, and they're apparently famous for being really strict about impaired driving, so they kind of set the trend on the one end of the spectrum, whereas the US. Kind of edges toward the other end of the spectrum, like with blood alcohol content. I think the legal limit in most states is 8%, which is about, I think, for, like, 180 pound man, that's like three or four drinks in an hour. And I mean three or four drinks in an hour. And getting behind a car, that is a lot that you're not driving very well. It's like an arbitrarily high number, if you really think about it. Part of the other problem, too, with testing for whether somebody's impaired by pot or reach some sort of some limit or threshold is that there's no real reliable way for testing it on the side of the road, including that roadside field sobriety test. They make you stand on 1ft. They make you walk heel to toe and then turn around. And I think there's a third part to it, too, and that's actually really good at catching drunk people. It catches like 88% of people who are drunk at the time, but it only catches like, 30% of people who are stoned. So the cops are starting to come up against these new laws where you're allowed to smoke pot, but how much is too much to get behind the wheel of a car, and there's no real guidance, and they don't really have any way of testing. And again, like you said, in ten years, all of this will be resolved. But for the time being, it's kind of like the Wild West as far as driving while impaired by pot legislation is concerned. Yeah, I got pulled over coming home from college to Atlanta one time only time I've ever had, like, a field sobriety test done on me. And he flat out asked me, he's like, Mr. Bryant, have you been smoking marijuana? After he put me through it. Because he did the thing where you follow the finger with your eyeballs. Yeah. That's the third part. And I think it's supposed I'm not sure what's supposed to happen. Like, your eyeball switches or something. Once it reaches the edge, I think it bounces up and down while it's going left or right. Okay. I'm not sure. All I know is he told me, keep your head forward and follow it with your eyes. And I turned my head and followed his finger, and I was nothing. I was sober as a judge, and I was just nervous because I'd never been pulled over on the side of the road and told to walk a line. And he finally just asked me. I was like, no, like 19. I was just scared. And eventually he was like, all right, get your VW Beetle and drive home. Did you take the tack of crying to get out of the ticket? No, I cried on the inside. Okay. Which I don't think you noticed. It was interesting. That's the only time in my life I've ever been pulled over and given that test. And even if you're sober, it's a little nerve wracking. Sure, yeah. It's like that white coat syndrome where your blood pressure goes up at the doctor's office because you're anxious for being at the doctor's office. I know. I remember going, like, in my brain, heal toe, heel, toe. Right. I was like, Wait a minute. This is no problem. Yeah. My balance is never a good officer. Wonder if that ever works. Or ossiper. It's always fun to throw that in, but be totally sober. Right. Just go ahead and sit in the back of that police car after that one. So you got anything else? No. I mean, we should point out that another factor with drinking and driving is you drink at a bar a lot of times, whereas they think predominantly if you're smoking pot, you're probably in your home, so you're not driving. There are all sorts of other factors that go into these big statistical studies, but we're just at the eve we're mere babies as a country when it comes to marijuana legislation and study. Yeah. I'll be interested to see where it goes. I'll see in ten years. Yeah, I'll see in ten. Man okay, well, in the meantime, you can look up well, there's not this article on house stuff works. You can just look at pop versus alcohol, and it'll bring up a lot of great stuff. We worked off of some stuff from Popular Science, from Slate, from actually, there's a House That Works article, now that I think about it. Live Science, High Times. Some good resources out there. Just hit them up. willienelson.com yes. And in the meantime, since Chuck said Willie Nelson, It's time for listener mail. This is overlap of podcasts. I don't think I've read this one yet. Hey guys, my name is Neil. I enjoy listening to Stuff you should know and stuff you missed in history class and roller skating and long walks on the beach. Sometimes I've heard the same subject. Get daylight on both of your programs, though very recently you guys did a Mary Celeste episode. And if I recall, Holly and Tracy did the same story. Not too long ago, Josh mentioned to Chuck about the woman who painted miniature crime scenes and so did they. My question is whether or not we ever swap notes on subjects, cross reference each other's work where there might be overlap. It could be nice, even set up different situations where each podcast looks at the same subject to a different angle. Anyway, it might be a good thing to introduce to the other podcasts to someone who's not listening to it. Keep up the good work. That is from Neil in Washington, DC. I think we've answered this years ago, but we try not to overlap, but no one really pays much attention internally and it just happens sometimes. And the only time it's ever been like, shoot is when it's literally within like a few weeks of each other. Then we might have wished we would have timed it differently. But we always feel like all the different shows bring different things to the table and so it's really not a big deal, but we definitely don't check with each other or share notes or anything. We're all in our own little bubbles. Yeah, but also, I mean, if we are aware that one of the other podcasts has already done something like that doesn't preclude us from doing it ourselves. And we will probably mention it if we were aware of it, like go check out their version of it too, because it's always so different enough that it's usually worth listening to. Both agreed. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. There's an official stuff you should know. One called S YSK Podcast. I've got my own called Josh Clark. I also have a website called Ruceriesclark.com. Chuck is on Facebook at Charleswchukbryant facebook.com charleswchuckbryant. You can also hit him up on facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send all of us, including Jerry and email, to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our homeontheweb stuffyoushenknow.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, 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." | |
02b4b7b0-3b0e-11eb-947e-a796d52e3c48 | The Cleveland Torso Murders | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-cleveland-torso-murders | During the depths of the Great Depression, Cleveland’s most vulnerable and destitute residents were prey for one of history’s most horrific serial killers. The killer’s identity remains a mystery to this day. | During the depths of the Great Depression, Cleveland’s most vulnerable and destitute residents were prey for one of history’s most horrific serial killers. The killer’s identity remains a mystery to this day. | Tue, 18 May 2021 13:17:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=13, tm_min=17, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=138, tm_isdst=0) | 46526459 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's out there somewhere with a magnifying glass and toothpick. We don't know what the toothpicks for, but this is Stuff You Should Know. Yes. Content warning episode, everybody. This is one of our fairly rare, but one of our true crime episodes that is very grisly. Gruesome. Gruesome. But took place in the 1930s, so there's something about old and gruesome that makes it a little more palatable for me. Totally. I don't know why, but you're absolutely right. Time, I guess you know. Yeah. Time heals all wounds, including the torso murders. Yes, it does. Well, heals all wounds except for some of the things that happened in the torso murders, because you can't come back from that. It's pretty crazy. You're familiar with the torso murders already, right? I had heard of these, and the more I read about them, the more I was shocked that there wasn't a good period movie about this. Yes, absolutely. If you haven't heard of the torso killer, that's fine. You're definitely not alone. A lot of people haven't, which is kind of surprising because they are unsolved murders. There were a lot of them, and they took place in the background of a city that was driven into a frenzy by this ghastly serial murderer who continued their murders despite this extraordinarily large manhunt to try to find them. An unsuccessful manhunt still to this day. Yeah, I mean, it has all the makings of a good movie, and we'll reveal who this person is. We'll hang on to it for a second. But he had a famous investigator. Sorry. Yes, he definitely was the famous investigator. Yeah. You thought I met who the murderer was. Yeah, you've got some false starts. You've got some Coen Brothers esque whimsy with the dog discovery. I thought you'd like that. Yeah, I did like that. And, yeah, it has all the makings of a great movie in a cool period setting, which was Depression era 1930s Cleveland, Ohio, which is almost indistinguishable from current day 2021, cleveland, Ohio. Come on. Hey, man, I'm from Toledo. I can totally back in Cleveland and Detroit. That's my birthright. That is your birthright. So let's go back to September 1934, when a woman's torso is washed up on the shore of Lake Erie. Her legs are amputated below the knee. There is no head, which is why I said torso. And it's a suspicious way to find body. A very suspicious way. She was never identified. They called her the lady of the Lake. And this was just sort of the beginnings. Nothing was put together at this point because it would be two years before any other murders took place, and that they finally sort of put together that the lady of the Lake was perhaps Victim Zero. Really? Victim One, but they called her Victim Zero of who would become known as the torso Murderer or the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury. Yes, Kingsbury Run. Like you said, it would be about two years before they started to connect the dots. But in that time, between the time the lady of the Lake was found, about a year passed. And then all of a sudden, two more bodies were found. And now, all of a sudden, because two bodies were found together, this really started to capture people's attention. The lady of the Lake. It was a weird thing. It was a terrible thing to find, but it was singular. This was like, by definition, not singular, finding two bodies at once that were both dismembered, and they were found in the area of Kingsbury Run, which is where the Mad Butcher takes his name. That's right. They were both men in this case, they were castrated. They were also decapitated, which would become sort of a signature the decapitation or any kind of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer. And it's interesting, in that victim, one of these two men was actually one of the only ones that they got a fairly positive ID for. They actually got some fingerprints and matched a man named Edward Andresey. And he was sort of a petty thief that police had brought in before. So he was believed to be gay. And if he was, with all accounts say that he was, this was at a time when, in the 1930s, certainly, it was still illegal. And it was also listed as a mental disorder in the what's it called? Not the DMV. DSM. DSMV. The DMV didn't look too highly on it either. No, that's right. So he, I think, was one of only two that was ever even positively identified of what would end up being probably 13, maybe twelve murders. Yes. And again, these guys were found together, not together like they were within a very short distance of one another. They were found virtually at the same time. And whenever you find a body missing its head, that is attention grabbing. And when you find two bodies both missing their heads, that really starts to get depressed. Juices Running and like we said, these were found around Kingsbury Run. And Kingsbury Run is basically like an old river bed that cuts through, I believe, the west side of Cleveland. No, I'm sorry. I think the east side of Cleveland down to the Coyahoga River. And it was basically like the place where all of the oil companies and all of the heavy industry along the river and along the lake would dump all of their waste. The city put a sewer in there. It was just meant to be kind of like a wasteland, like a literal wasteland. And it kind of stayed that way until the Depression hit. And by the time the Depression hit, things were so bad that people were looking to basically live wherever they could for free. And they started taking up residence in Kingsbury Run. So by the time the Kingsbury Run murders, the torso murder started, this was like a full fledged, full swing shanty town. Basically a Great Depression era Hoover town is what they call them. Yeah, exactly. So it was a grand scene down there anyway. Certainly the fringes of society. During the course of the investigation, there were accusations of the press that they weren't working as hard as they needed to because these were people on the fringes of society and sort of forgotten about. And I think one of the other people identified was a few months later, in January 1936, when they found the body of Flo. Florence Palio was a waitress and bartender and sex worker who was discovered, once again, dismembered, wrapped in newspaper and a couple of bushel baskets, and then about a week and a half later, found other parts of her body. So she was sort of found, and it's very grisly, but found in pieces over the course of a week and a half in different places. Right. So far, as far as anybody can tell, we're up to three and possibly four victims, if you include the lady of the Lake. But it wasn't until the following June, about six months after Flo Palio was discovered, because, again, remember, these people were actually lived on the fringe of society. So just like today, just like Robert Pickton, the pig farmer from Vancouver, and so many other serial killers find their victims in the lowest stations of society because they're the most vulnerable, they have the least protection. And that's kind of what was going on. That's why it took so many victims for the press to finally be like, okay, there's something really going on here. And finally, in June, I believe, of 1936, victim number four, as far as canonical victims go, but possibly the fifth victim was discovered. His head was found first by two boys who were playing hooky and fishing along the Koja Hoga. Can you imagine that, man? No, I can't, because they found, like, a balled up pair of trousers and I guess grabbed them and found that there was something in it. When they opened it up, it was the head of a man in his 20s, never been identified, like so many of these victims. Yeah. And not to trivialize any of this, but again, that stuff is very ripe for movie making. Totally. This whole thing is it really is surprising that no one's done this yet. You would write something like that in a screenplay and this actually happened. I haven't read it, but there's a graphic novel, and maybe it's a series called Torso that is about all this. And I'm guessing that would probably be a pretty good basis for the movie. Yeah. So victim four, they were making great efforts to find out who this man was. The police circulated a photo of his face and made a death mask. If you don't know what a death mask is. I encourage you to go listen to our episode on death masks. Nice. It's basically what you would think. It's a recreation of this man's head. And they put this thing along with a tattoo map. He had tattoos all over himself. An illustrated map of his tattoos in his death mask on display at the Great Lakes Exposition of where 100,000 people could walk. I mean, it was a smart idea in one way because they could blast it out in the best way possible to try and identify who this person was. But it was also, again, like something from a movie, these people going to an exposition all of a sudden or walking by this tattoo map and the death mask of this man. And I'm sure the question came up like, well, where's the rest of his body? Why didn't they just show pictures of the tattoos? They're like, stop asking questions. Do you know the guy or not? No. Go get some ice cream. Exactly. Move along. Nothing to see here. But yeah, despite that, very public search for an identification still has never been identified. And his tattoos were really he had people's names tattooed on him. He had a cartoon character named Jigs tattooed on him. So this guy, you could see his face. He had all his tattoos, and he still has never been identified. But his discovery and I think the very public, like, the cops circulated a photo of his head on a gurney in the morgue at first, before they made the death mask, among other police agencies around the area, and I'm sure to the press as well. So it was kind of public, even though it was kind of quiet. But it got the press attention, and the press started to connect the dots. And all of a sudden, we now were connecting the lady of the Lake to this latest guy and all of the other ones as well. And it became very clear that there was what they call the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury run on the loose in Cleveland, and no one had any idea who it was or when or if they were ever going to stop. Yeah, I think there were seven more victims over the next two years. Victim eight were skeletal remains, but they did think they identified this person as Rose Wallace, woman in her 40s. She had gone missing about a year earlier, and there was quick lime use to decompose this body. And this one, interestingly, had evidence of more of a clumsy dismemberment to me. This one stands out a little bit as one that possibly might not be a victim and could have been misattributed to the Mad Butcher. That's just my personal feeling. I don't know if anyone else is saying this, but it's the one that stands out to me as being slightly different. Same to me. Yeah. The killer clearly lacked a dismemberment plan in that case, is that a ban? Are they good? Yeah, they were really good. They were maybe math rock. Okay. I think they were nice. At the very least, they were alternative. Victim nine had his heart removed. Victim ten had morphine in her system. And I think they're not quite sure how they all died. I think at one point they thought most of them died by the decapitation, but some were found with their blood completely drained from their body. Like I said, this one woman had morphine in her system, which could make sense. We'll get to something else later on of a potential victim that never happened, where drugs might have been a factor, but it's sort of all there were men, they were women, there were black people, there were white people. There wasn't any real rhyme or reason, it seemed like, aside from the fact that they were probably culled from this area of Ohio. Yes. In the fact that the first two men were emasculated, that there were women involved, too, that somebody's heart have been ripped out. There was clearly a sexual element of the whole thing, which made the idea that they were men and women victims very confounding. You just don't normally see that in a sex killer. You see one or the other, and it's usually the sex that the person is oriented to or the victims. And then just to kind of to cap that point off, the killer left victims eleven and twelve within a few yards of one another on a dump, like a trash dump. And one was a woman. Victim eleven was a woman, and victim twelve was a man. Should we take a break? We should, because Cleveland doesn't know it at the time, but those of us looking backwards through history can tell you that this is the last canonical victims in August of 1938. So the killer, as far as anybody knows, is done. That's right. And most of the grizzly stuff is out of the way. And we'll be back to reveal the famous investigator right after this. How's that for a tease? I can't take it anymore. Chuck, please. Who is it? It's my favorite thing. We need playcoy. It was Mr. Elliot Ness, very famous for being the head of the Untouchables, for putting Al Capone behind bars. Good friend of Sean Connery. Very good friend. Oh, that was great. That wasn't very good. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight. You bring a gun, you dummy. Yeah, I think that was the line. If you wanted to do counter evil, you got to have an S in there. Right. But there was no S. Did that, didn't I thought I nailed it. There aren't no S's in that sentence. Right. They're implied. And I would have done that had there been SS. Don't bring a knife to a gun dodge. How's that? Right? You bring a gun, you're jar. All right, back to the serious stuff. Elliot Ness was the after that work in what was that? Chicago, I think. Oh, yeah, that was he became the investigator in charge of the alcohol tax unit for Northern Ohio in August of 34. And then the Republican mayoral candidate, Harold Burton, who would go on to win, said, you know what, Ness? You're a famous guy. I like the cut of your jib. Let me make you, in December 1935, the Safety director for Cleveland, and let me nudge you towards this outstanding case that we have. When he was hired, the case wasn't quite clear that it was a big old case. He came in just after, like, a couple of months after victims one and two were found, and just a couple of weeks before Flow Palio was found. So it wasn't evident that there was a serial murderer on the loose. But that also means that Elliot Nest came in right at the beginning of this thing. So he was the public Safety Director for it. He became the face of the frustrated police effort to capture the torso killer. Right. Although the lead investigator what was that guy's name? Peter Moreillo. Yeah, he was I don't know about obsessed, but it became sort of his main focus of work, was to tirelessly find out who this murderer was. And I assume that it's weird because I really don't know what a safety director was. I don't think. Is that even still a thing? Yeah, I think there is a public Safety Director position still. They basically are in charge of the police department, the fire department, all that stuff. They're the head of that probably the liaison between the mayor and those services, but not the guardian angels, because they do what they want to do. Hey, man, they're staying on their own, too. The coroner, AJ. Pearce of the case I think he was the first coroner on the first case said, you know what we need to do? We need to get together. We need to have a little summit and start sharing information. I'm going to call it the Torso Clinic, which was interesting. I don't know if he did or the press did. Yeah. Either way, because the press was very much involved in this whole run, obviously. But at this conference is where he first put forward a profile, which was, this is someone who would not stand out in Kingsbury. One, someone who knew the area could blend in. We think it's a man who is a powerful man because they need to be able to it takes a lot of work to dismember a body and to haul these bodies around and drop them off in different places. And we think he also might have some anatomical knowledge. Not saying that he's necessarily a doctor or a surgeon, kind of like the Jack the Ripper thing, but this person clearly knows their way around a knife and a scalpel. Yeah, because if you really closely examine a body and look at the places where the body was separated with the knife. You can find hesitancy marks, you can find the hacking. There's all sorts of clues and telltale signs. And apparently this guy had a lot of confidence and had a lot of skill or knowledge about anatomy. So, like you said, maybe not a doctor, but at the very least, a very skilled butcher who had studied human anatomy before, but eventually they finally were like, this is probably some sort of doctor. Yeah. And I think they eventually learned that most of the victims died within a few days of being discovered and most were moved, except for victim five, where they found a blood bath. This didn't happen to the other crime scenes. There was virtually no blood to be found. In fact, I think one was completely drained of blood. Many were. Oh, really? I don't know if that happened naturally, just because of the nature of dismemberment or if it was a purposeful thing, but only one body was found kind of clearly murdered there. Right. So, yeah, I think the fact that the blood wasn't on the scene and it wasn't in the body any longer means they had to go somewhere. So the fact that they were dismembered and packaged, a lot of them are found. The one unidentified tattooed man, his head was wrapped in trousers, but other people were wrapped in newspaper or brown paper like they were meat. One was put in a makeshift box. There was a lot of time dedicated to dismemberment of these bodies, and that leaves a lot of evidence and you need a place where you're not going to be interrupted and that's not easy to come by. So that became a really big point, is we're pretty sure that this person is snatching victims from the Kingsbury Run area, but where are they committing these acts? And they tried to find that place as much as they tried to find the killer. Yeah, I mean, that would be a big clue if they had some murder room, Dexter style. Sure. Which is a dead giveaway every time. That's coming back, by the way. I don't know if you ever watch Dexter. What do you mean, it's coming back? They're bringing Dexter back, man, with the original like Michael C. Hall no. Yes, they are indeed. And I have mixed feelings because we love that show for a long time, but it is it is one of the shark jumping shows of all time. It's like the shark itself jumped, so it's insane. It's amazing. I love Michael C. Hall, though. We're just now finishing 6ft under again. I'm always happy to see him again, but I'll give it a call. Do you see cold in July? No. What is that? It's a little bit like a Straw Dogs type story, but he's having to battle Don Johnson. It's just really like, if you want I know it's weird casting, but if you want to just experience a constant mid to low level dread for 2 hours. Sure. Go ahead and watch that. Just well done in that respect. Or watch the lighthouse. It's probably better. Yeah, it's so good. Let's just stop talking about this and talk about the lighthouse for the rest of the time. All right. So Peter Morello, who, like we said, was the lead detective, he's sort of obsessed with this thing. He starts not only focusing on this land down by the river, but I didn't mean that. But that's what it was. But he started focusing on the railroads and these hobos. What? The railroads. Oh, okay. You know, where trains run on. Sure. Yeah. I just never heard it pronounced the way you did the first railroad. I got a lightening up somewhere. We're talking about dismembered towards. I know, exactly. So he started looking in these box cars and is hobo an offensive word? Can you still say that? I don't think so. I think it's a point of pride, a term of pride for people who still ride the rails. Okay, so he's still out there doing his thing at this press conference. Elliot Ness ends up holding a meeting with the head of Scientific Investigation Bureau. His name was David Cowells and an editor of the Cleveland Press. So this is a big deal. They're actually getting the press involved at this point. Right, but secretly, this wasn't a press conference. This is like a secret meeting. No, not a press conference at all. This was very much a secret. But he's involving the press, and they said, here's what we're going to do. Nest says, let's you go and pick out eight tough guys that can go undercover, that know a lot of bad guys in Cleveland and have all those connections. We'll give them the police support they need, and we'll fund them. How did they fund them? With the press's money. What does that even mean? I think that maybe the owners of the newspapers chipped in, like the wealthy owners chipped in quietly to stuff off of the books. That's my impression of what do you ever chipped in the most? Got to break the story, I wonder. Well, no. I think at the same time, it was a technique for bringing the press into the fold so that there weren't outsiders drumming up trouble for the cops anymore, because the Cleveland Press really made they didn't make the police look bad. They pointed out just how badly the police were handling this or ineffectively. Which is not to say that the police were not trying really hard, supposedly. I saw a figure of 10,000 suspects were interviewed over four years during the course of this investigation. They just couldn't find the guy. They could not find the killer. And the press kind of almost gleefully kept pointing that out. Right. So this is, in a way, attempt to assuage them and bring them into the inner circle. A bit, right? That was my impression, yeah. All right, so the police are they've got these undercover guys working their scene. They're checking cars randomly at all hours. They're canvassing laundromats and places where you wash your clothes. So if there are people, like, trying to get bloodstains out of something, they're kind of doing everything they can at this point. And this is where the Coen brothers sort of moment comes in, which is in Sandusky, a dog and Sandusky now, it's about an hour and ten minutes away by car. I don't know what it would have been back then, but probably less than 2 hours, I would say. Even in an old timey car, a dog shows up in San Dusky with a human leg in its mouth. I want to say that literally happened in a Coen brothers movie. It might have just been a bone of a body, but I can't think of which one it might be. Someone will write in and tell us. Sound like a Barton Fink kind of thing. It is, but it's not. I might be thinking of the kids who ripped the two pay off. The guy in Miller's Crossing. I don't remember that part, although I remember one of the neighbors lost his two pay in the burbs, and they thought it was evidence of his murder. There's definitely a movie it might not have been Coen Brothers, where a dog shows up with a body part in its mouth. Probably more than one movie, but the dog shows up in its mouth and morello, goes to Sand Dusky, and it turns out that the leg was actually surgically removed during a real surgery, not a serial killer surgery, and just didn't get disposed of. Right. Ended up in the lake, ended up in the dog's mouth. Right. But the police were so hyped up in Cleveland at the time that they traveled to sandwiches to chase down this lead, which, like all the other ones, went absolutely nowhere. And so there was, again, just a tremendous amount of public pressure, including something you mentioned earlier, too, a lot of allegations and accusations that the police weren't doing enough because these people were not wealthy, were not well thought of. They were very poor. The poorest of the poor during the Great Depression were the ones who were suffering the serial killer. And so there was a tremendous amount of pressure. And I think my impression is that that pressure is one of the, I guess, the thing that drove Elliot Nest to do something really terrible, because the killer was picking from the shanty towns of Kingsbury Run. Eliot Ness got it in his head that if you did away with Kingsbury Run, you'd do away with the killings. Yeah. And so we raided the homeless camps at Kingsbury Run and roused at everybody and then ordered the place burned to the ground. Yeah. And I'm sure he thought this was a great idea at the time, but he really didn't think it through because the people of Cleveland did not take kindly to that. They hated him for what he did. And this was during the Depression, and everyone was struggling, basically, or not everyone, but most people were struggling at this point. Unemployment rate of 20% in Cleveland. And so the idea of this big shot Chicago Gman coming in and basically running these homeless people out of their only option and burning it to the ground was not a good look at all. However, there were no more murders after that. I know. Strangely, it seemed to have worked. And it depends, we'll talk more about a lot of different views of whether the murder stopped or not, but as far as canonical victims go, he burned the place to the ground two days after victims eleven and twelve were found. And after that there were no more victims. So it didn't solve the murders by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed to have put an end to them. Weirdly. Yeah. I think before we take a break, we should mention there was one and get into who we think is probably the real suspect. There was one suspect in Kyahoga County that the sheriff brought in. He was a bricklayer named Frank Dolzeal who did confess. He was brought in for the murder of Flow Palillo originally because he'd lived with her for a little while, but supposedly he knew Rose Wallace and Edward Andersey as well. But then they looked into it and by all accounts, that confession was not just induced, but in the days where you would literally beat a victim into confessing. Yeah. And then murder him in his cell after he recanted his confession. So was he murdered? Yeah, well, he hung himself, but he hung himself from a hook that was shorter than he was, which, I mean, I guess if you really want to die, you could do that. You could overcome the urge to stand up, disinclination towards self harm, I guess you'd put it. Yes. But his friends at the time seemed to be like, no, he was murdered. So at the very least, his confession was beaten out of him. And no serious scholar of the crime believes that Frank Dozeal was the killer. There was no evidence whatsoever, any kind of surgical knowledge. There was like a lot of boxes he just didn't check. It was basically he knew Flow and he may have known Edward and Rossi, and he may have known Rose Wallace. And the sheriff basically ran them in very publicly. Right. All right, so let's take that break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the investigation and who people now believe committed these horrible murders right after this. All right, so Elliot Ness has run everyone out of the Kingsbury Run camps. Did not go over well. He then says, here's what we'll do. Let's skirt the warrant rules. So. We don't have to require warrants. And let's get together. Since I'm the safety director and I control the fire department. Too. Let's go around and start searching for. Quote. Fire code violations. In. Quote. Basically. So they don't have to get any kind of warrants. And they can just basically go into people's houses and just at will and search and do whatever they want to under the guise of searching for fire code violations. He was desperate. He was very desperate. And again, they were looking not just for the killer, but really more than anything, they were looking for that grisly workshop, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer had put in a place where he was draining the victims of their blood and dismembering their bodies. They didn't turn anything up, but it really kind of goes to show, like, just what linked. Elliot Ness, who was considered like, this squeaky clean law man, was willing to go to this is extraordinarily unconstitutional and underhanded. And he went to that degree and well beyond, it turned out, actually too very much. And I think we're at the point now where we can talk about this mystery person. Right? Yeah. This is why I said he went way beyond unlawful search of homes. He actually engaged in what amounts to kidnapping of a private citizen who he thought was the killer. Yeah, and he kept it very secret. He even used a pseudonym for this person. He called this person this gentleman, Gaylord Sundheim. Pretty good name, good hotel check in name. Yeah. And privately, word gets around a little bit what's going on, but privately, he would describe this person as an alcoholic, maybe bisexual, a doctor who came from a wealthy family and who had a relative in Congress who was protecting this person and took this man under the dark of night to a hotel room in Cleveland, held there without charging him for two weeks. Where they interrogated this person. Yes. And apparently the guy who this gaylord sunshine was in the middle of a bender when he was picked up, and he was so profoundly drunk that it took him three days to become sober again. I don't buy that. I know, but when he did I know, but you got to add those, too. Sure. Thank you for keeping it even keel, though. I've had nights that were a little rough. And you're always okay the next day. I don't know what you're talking about. It's so weird. Like, alcohol affects us so differently. Man, I can have a drink and a half these days, and I'm like, hating life the next day. No, I'm not talking about a hangover. But you're not still drunk the next day. Got you in two days or three days. I think that's what they were saying is that this guy, he had, like, a hangover scooper, basically. I could buy that then. That was my impression. All right. Not that he was still just flying high but that's hating it. All right. I should just about the whole thing. But regardless, they kept him whether he was sober as a judge or drunk as a skunk. When they picked him up, they held them in this hotel room without charge and outside of the legal system for two weeks and interrogated him for up to 8 hours a day. Yeah, but I think he did it, so who cares? That's exactly how Elliot Nessa is approaching this. And again, everybody thought he was this squeaky clean lawman and he's engaged in kidnapping. But the thing is, he brought in the guy who was one of the early inventors of the polygraph. He invented the Keeler polygraph and it was called that because his name was Leonard Keeler and I think he bought him from Chicago. And Leonard Keeler administered a couple of different polygraph tests to this gaylord sondheim and said, if this isn't your man, I might as well throw my machine out the window if I say anything else. Because that's the guy. It's definitely the guy. You got to take that with a grain of salt because especially today, polygraphs are just total junk science. But it certainly confirmed Nessa's suspicions that much more at the time. I think that polygraph back then there wasn't even a machine. Keeler would just sit there and look for a bead of sweat to break out on the forehead, then punch the guy if it did that's. Right, exactly. So the case was never solved. Nessa's reputation obviously took a big hit. He eventually got out of Cleveland after a drunk driving hit and run accident that he was involved with and tried to cover up. So he left in great shame. But back to this gaylord sun time later on, many years later, there were crime investigators and writers who put two and two together and basically identified and in fact, in one case, crime writer Marilyn Bardsley came out and said, yeah, this is who this person was. It was a former World War I Army medic who was discharged for mental instability following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off. And he was an alcoholic, another big warning light. And his name was Francis Edward Sweeney, who also happens to have a relative in Congress. Right. A guy named Representative Martin Sweeney who was a huge critic of the Burton administration, of which Elliot Ness was a major part. And he was just the kind of guy who was a political opponent to the degree that I'm sure Elliot Nest thought if he tried to arrest Clarence or Francis Sweeney, he would be obstructed from up on high by this Congressperson. Whether he would have or not, I don't know. I saw some references to the idea that Martin Sweeney was well aware that Elliot Ness was looking at his cousin for this and was already getting in the way. But I only saw that in one place. So I'm not sure if that's the case or not. Either way, his presence and his connection to Francis Sweeney was enough that Elliot Nest never charged Francis Sweeney, despite apparently going to his grave believing that Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney was the Cleveland Torso Murderer. Have you seen a picture of the guy? Dude, he looks like the definition of a torso murderer. Seriously, you have to be careful with that stuff. Absolutely. If you ever end up a juror can't be like, you look like a killer, but this guy looks like a torso murderer. You're exactly right. The quick sidebar not sure if I ever mentioned it on this show I know I've talked about on a movie crush, but I want to recommend this great, great documentary. And forgive me if I'm repeating myself here, but it's called Crazy Not Insane. It's an HBO documentary about this Dr. Dorothy Otto Lewis, who basically spent her life trying to understand serial killers. And one of the main she was kind of one of the first people to really try and understand what's actually going on. And she put together, I think, like, three very common commonalities among serial killers, but one of them is head trauma. And that's why this really stands out to me about Francis Edward Sweeney was that he was discharged from the army because of head trauma leading to mental instability. It's a commonality in most serial killers. It's some sort of head trauma, especially when you're younger. Well, that's interesting. I did not know that. Yeah, I may have thought I talked about on this, but who was the guy in La that also just had a great docu series on the Night Stalker? Richard Ramirez. He suffered multiple head traumas when he was younger as well. So I think I can't remember the third one. It's head trauma, some sort of physical and even sexual abuse as a child. And then there was, like, one more thing, and those are like that's just a recipe for ending up some sort of sociopath or serial killer. I think the third one is disappointing. Birthday presents? Yeah, maybe. So be warned, you'd really love it's. A really good documentary. Yeah, I'll check that out for sure. It sounds like it's totally up my alley. I'm actually a GOG. That I've not heard of. It. Don't be a dog. I'm a little GOG. All right, come back. So like you said, Marilyn Bardsley confirmed from one of the investigators that Francis Sweeney was gaylord sondheim, but that does not mean that Francis Sweeney was the torso murderer. True. Although, again, like you were saying, if you look at a picture of Francis Sweeney, that's totally the torso murderer. Well, another stuff, the head trauma, the medical training. He was a surgeon in residence at St. Alexis Hospital. His career deteriorated because of his drinking right around the time the first murderer victim started showing up, too. Yeah, he also had a deal, apparently, with the local mortuary where they would give him bodies to practice surgery on, which would explain maybe the kill room or the dismemberment room. He would have a place to go and dispose of these bodies without there being a big blood trail. Right. I mean, this is a place where it wouldn't seem weird that somebody was decapitating a body or draining the body of all of its blood. That's exactly the kind of place. And that didn't turn up until years later. And it was thanks to a guy named James Badal who's written some books on it on the torso murders. And he interviewed one of the early investigators and found out that he had privileges at the funeral home and started to put two and two together. Yeah, there was a couple of other things. He did send taunting letters to Elliot Ness for years. One of them was signed f. E. Sweeney paranoidal nemesis. But was this after he had been kidnapped by Ness? Yes. So he knew Ness by this time. And he also didn't say like, I did it, you didn't catch me, anything like that. I get the impression it was more like, you didn't catch the guy. You're terrible at this, everybody hates you. But still taunting stuff. But yes, this would have been after he was kidnapped because this was up into the 40s. Yeah, that's true. And then I think to me, one of the biggest red flags pointing in the direction of Sweeney is I mentioned a near victim earlier in the episode. This was a transient. His name was Emil French and he was living in Cleveland in 34. And one day he was lured into a doctor's office on the second floor along Broadway Avenue. And the doctor said, Here, I'll give you some shoes and a meal if you come up here. Cronut goes up, eats a little bit of the meal, starts to feel light headed and bolts and makes it to a train, carry wild. Basically passes out for three days and then later on, I think in 1938 was being interviewed after the cops here about this old morello goes to pick him up. And they narrowed down the area to streets along Broadway where Sweeney had a doctor's office. Yeah, he couldn't specifically say that was the place where it happened. And that author, James Badall says that he thinks he came in the back way rather than the front way where they were showing him. But he did say that he had an office right there, right around that area, and he was there at the time. That's some pretty serious circumstantial stuff. I think so. But the thing is, there's no smoking gun. There's no anything that says definitively. And we probably will never have anything definitively. It says it's Francis Sweeney. Right. So we've kind of reached this point, this plateau where it's like you just basically choose a side. Either it's Francis Sweeney or it wasn't. And some people who say, no, I don't think it was Francis Sweeney. Make some pretty good cases. There were other similar murders in the area starting in the going into the 50s that really bore a lot of resemblance to the torso murders. And then other people say, okay, I feel the opposite of that, where I don't think Rose Wallace was one of the victims. I think there were multiple killers doing similarish stuff, maybe copycats even, and that it wasn't all just one person. There is and there's probably always going to be a lot of competing theories about who is responsible. Yeah. The one theory that it wasn't him, that I don't buy. Did you say where he was living in Sandusky? No. All right, so here's the deal. Francis Sweeney was apparently enrolled or checked into the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Sandusky, which I guess is an old like a veteran's home, right? Yeah, I think yes. So that's what it seems like. So he was checked in there and one of the reasons that people say he didn't do it was because he was checked in in this place in Sand Dusky, like a couple of hours away. And I just don't buy that. They later came out and said they could come and go as they pleased. He could easily have, if he didn't want to get caught, be committing these murders in Cleveland and then going back to sand dusky as well. Right? Yeah. Because he was there voluntarily, so he would not have been watched or monitored or they wouldn't have kept tabs on him. And when they figured this out, it was years later, so no one would have been able to recall where he was or wasn't on a certain day. Yeah, I think it's Sweeney and not because of his picture, but there were other murders in the area that it could have still been Sweeney too. Some people connect the black dolly a murder to it because there was a taunting note that the cops got in 1938 that said the cops can rest easy because the killers moved to sunny California. But if you look at the black volume murder, there's really not a lot of resemblance between the two. The MoS are really rather different, so that's probably not the case. Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about the Cleveland torso murders, there's a whole rabbit hole on the Internet and in books, including one by James Badall and another by Marilyn Barsley that you can follow. And if you do, good luck with that. Since I say good luck with that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this we did not help out this gentleman. Okay. Hey, guys. Love the podcast. I've been listening for the past several years. I've almost gotten through the whole library. Has some left from 2018, apparently. I work as a musical instrument repair technician at a local university independently in Greensboro, North Carolina. So I usually listen while I work on repading clarinets and cleaning tubas. Nice. Cool job. Anyway, I was listening to your show this evening on Korean fan Death. Remember that? We talked about it? I don't think it was all about that, but it was it was a short stuff about it. Was it? Okay, I remember that being like a top ten or something. Anyway, I immediately thought, finally a way that I can find some legit reason for getting rid of the fan in our room. My fiance Abby loves having a fan. And that noise when you go to sleep, it's something I can deal with, but honestly, I do not care for it. So when I finally got home, I told Abbey, hey, we got a serious episode. Stuff you should know, we should listen to. I started the episode without pre screening and trusted you guys would pull through for me. Needless to say, an interesting episode, but I did not get the confirmation bias I was looking for. Instead, we had a good laugh and a great evening. Looking forward to getting the book. Wish you guys the best and looking forward to many more. And that is from John Goodman. Holy cow. John Goodman, we love you. And the Cohen brothers stuff. His name's John Goodman. I'm going to plug his business. Goodman custom woodwinds. If you're in the Greensboro, North Carolina area and you need that clarinet repaded, go to John Goodman for sure. And even if you're not, it's probably worth the drive, right? Where else are you going to do it? Charlotte? Yeah, come on. Well, thanks a lot. John Goodman. We appreciate that. Sorry we couldn't help you out, but at least you enjoyed the episode and ultimately in that account. Yes. If you want to get in touch with us, like John Goodman did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast app@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." | |
4040c20c-121b-11eb-ba6a-63a71710935c | Short Stuff: Funny Bone | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-funny-bone | Hitting your funny bone doesn’t just hurt, it feels really weird too. That’s because you’re not hitting a bone at all, but instead the most vulnerable nerve in your body. | Hitting your funny bone doesn’t just hurt, it feels really weird too. That’s because you’re not hitting a bone at all, but instead the most vulnerable nerve in your body. | Wed, 08 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=342, tm_isdst=0) | 11448233 | audio/mpeg | "The Neogen device developed by Rst Syndnexis is a Wellestablished advanced quantumbased medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenreleasepane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenreleavespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just the Juk Chaos Show short stuff. It's a start. I thought something happens when we do short stuff because I'm trying to do something different and then I fail at it. We've been doing such a good job for 13 years and whenever we do short stuff, you're just like, I don't know how to do this anymore. Right. Something. But I think it has to do with just trying too hard. There it is. Okay. All right. They're looser. I think it's fine. Oh, maybe I'm not trying hard enough, then. So, Chuck, since we're laughing here, let's talk about laughing. Great set up. Thank you. Again, I'm not trying hard enough. I don't know where we talked about this, but we did a little sidebar in this many years ago. No, in some episode. I don't know what it was, but it doesn't matter because the funny bone deserves its own little shorty episode. Everyone knows what we're talking about. We're talking about when you whack your elbow, like on the corner of a counter or something and you get that weird singular, singular sensation everywhere around the world. It's kind of painful, but it's kind of stingy and shocky feeling. And it does kind of make you laugh sometimes. It's a weird like I said, it's a singular feeling. Unlike hitting any other part of your body. It's hitting your funny bone. That's right. So that's why it has its own name in its own thing. It is its own experience, for sure. And no one, apparently, from anywhere I could see is quite sure exactly where the funny bone got its name. Because what you're doing there is hitting your funny bone. But what you're hitting is not really a bone. It's a nerve. Although some people think that it got its name from the bone right above this area that you're hitting the humerus, which I like. That's what I heard from the playground. Yes. It's a little play on words. I think I might have heard that on the playground too. That's one of those first little kid factoids that they think you know why it's called that is because it's the humorous bone. Right. I think you're absolutely right. And then somebody else says, hey, you want some liquor made? And the other kid says, I'll sue your dad. That's right. And then recesses over and you wonder where your life's gone? And you just go inside and eat glue and boogers. There you go. Yeah, you get right back on top of the horse. That's right. So the funny bone isn't a bone. I think probably everybody knows that. I regret saying it now that I think about it, but what you're actually doing is hitting a nerve, a specific nerve called the ulnar nerve that's responsible for it's really niche. It's responsible for the sensation, singular sensation in your ring finger and your pinky finger. And you have one on each arm because you have a ring finger and pinky finger on each arm, ostensibly, both are receiving sensation and they're getting it from the owner nerve you have in each of your arms. Yeah, it begins in your spine and it goes from your neck all the way down your arm, all the way past your elbow, all the way to the tips of those little fingers there. And I think there are only three primary nerves for your arm, and that's one of them. And the big role of that is, aside from the sensation of those fingertips, is helping those muscles out, helping your hand coordinate movement, find movement, and your grip, like helping your forearm control grip. Which, by the way, I just had a very weird sensation. I don't get massaged as much, but I just got a massage recently and this dude worked me over in the best way, but he did this thing where he was rolling down the inside of my forearm with his arm and every time he hit, like, the midpoint, like Luke Skywalker, my hand would just clint shut. That's cool. It was so weird feeling. And I laughed. I was like, well, that feels really weird. And I tried to keep it from happening and he would roll down my forearm, my inner forearm, and my hand would just go and close shut, just like Empire Strikes Back. It was very strange. I'll bet it was funny for him to watch you try to play off like it wasn't a thing. Yeah, I tried to, but that guy was like, I'm going to give him another one of these. It was pretty great, actually. So they called it the Kung Fu grip move. I believe that's what it felt like. But yeah, that made me think of those I mean, that's what's going on with those nerves. Yeah. I wonder if he was hitting your ulnar nerve. Probably. But you said something you said a little Jackpot tape bit there, Chuck. That was the ulnar nerve goes from your spine to your neck, down your arm, through your elbow to your hand, and it is where it passes through your elbow that the potential for hitting your funny bone in that extremely weird, singular sensation can take place. That feels like a cliffhanger to me. I think so. All right, we'll be back and tell you what's going on in that little spot. We're ready for this. The Neogen device developed by Rst Syndicate is a well established advanced quantum based medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenrelievespane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenreleavespane.com. Your patience will thank you. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yep. We mean that kid. Your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition for their best health. It's guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. That means digestive health, heart and immunity support healthy skin and coat hip and joint support and strengthen energy. Find Halo elevate at Petco Pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Learn more@halopets.com. All right, here we are. We're in your elbow. And here's the big reveal. You have a little tunnel there. I'm so freaked out that the ulnar nerve goes through, called the cubital tunnel. It's very small. It's about 4 mm long. And it goes underneath you know that little bony bump on your elbow? It's called the medial oh, man, I had it earlier. epicondyle? Yeah, I think so. Epicondyl. It's like Argyle, but Argyle's cousin. epicondyle. All right, so your medial epicondyle, that's that little bony bump on the inside of the back of your elbow there and right there is where that nerve is so much between your bone and your skin. And the reason it's really easy to get hurt is because there's not a lot there. And especially if your elbows bent, it's kind of right there under the skin, right? So when you hit it just right when your elbows bent, you're mashing your nerve between the bone above it and whatever hard surface you're hitting it on. And the reason why you're hitting your funny bone is so weird is twofold. I have the impression, Chuck, that if your other nerves in your body were similarly exposed like the ulnar nerve is when it enters the cubicle tunnel, if you hit those nerves, you would have the same singular sensation. But you don't have nerves that are exposed like that elsewhere in your body, which is why it's just a funny bone. But that's the point. You're actually banging a nerve and you don't normally do that, which produces a different kind of pain than the normal pain you get. Like when you accidentally hit yourself in the testicles. Well, it's funny you bring that up because I wonder if there's a shortty on that, because that is also a singular sensational pain. Okay, save it. Let me just say it's different than when you accidentally punch yourself in the stomach. Okay? You're, like, stub your toe. It's weird that you mentioned testicles, though, because that is a pain that feels different than any other pain. It is, and I think it was a terrible example now that you say that, but I'm glad that I said it because it brought up a future short stuff for us. That's right. But what you're talking about is the difference between no susceptible pain and actual nerve pain. No susceptible being the perception of pain. Like when you stub your toe or something, and your body using the nerves send signals that say, like, you need more clearance around your bed, dummy, don't do that again. Whereas the other kind of pain is actual literal pain on that nerve. Yeah, like the nerves are involved in no section, but they're just kind of like, oh, it's time to get to work and let this guy know to stop doing that. But that nerve pain is the actual nerve being hurt. And so it says, I'm reserving a special kind of pain for myself. Yeah, that's right. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago when I banged my shin really badly, I did some kind of nerve damage, and for six months I had a four inch space where it was just dead on the front of my leg on my shin. It felt like it was the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life. Wow, I'm glad. And it was just kicking my bed. Yes. The numbness was fine. It weirded me out, but when it actually happened, I cried. I crumbled to the floor. And it wasn't crying, but water just started pouring out of my eyes. Yes, I know. It hurt so bad, tough guy. No, I wasn't like, yeah, I know what you mean. It was just like the body's reaction was all right, we're going to start sending water out of your eyeballs now. Yeah, that is a weird reaction response, if you think about it. It is, but the stuff right. The one good thing about hitting your funny bone, in particular, hitting that nerve, is after a very short while, especially if you rub it, for some weird reason, it will subside and you'll go back to normal, like you won't have that pain any longer. And by the way, there's one other thing about that funny bone pain that reveals that it's the older nerve you're hitting. You'll notice that that pain shoots all the way down into your pinky and your ring finger because the older nerve terminates there. I don't know if I've noticed that. It's been a while since I've hit the old funny nerve. That's what I'm going to start calling it. Okay. What about cubital tunnel syndrome? That's another thing, right? It's like a chronic condition. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. There are some cases where you can have a strained ulnar nerve and it can produce chronic pain. Is that tennis elbow or not? I don't know. I don't know why they wouldn't call it tennis elbow. It seems a little bizarre not to, but maybe, who knows? Just curious. Let's see. This is a Methodist Hospital website. We have to thank the BBC site and a couple of other good ones. That was it. Jamaicaospital.org. I love that one. That's a classic. I wish that whole exchange would just be printed on a T shirt. Maybe we could sell that as a nonfungible token. That's a good one. But then somebody's getting sued. No, I didn't hear that. What are you talking about? He's trying to sell Pulp Fiction. NFT he's trying to sell scenes from Pulp Fiction. And Miramax is like, you don't own that. Wow. Yeah. Very interesting. Surprising that he would do that. He's been in the business long enough that you think he would know what he can and can't do. You would think. Well, you got anything else? No. Okay. Well, everybody that means shorts 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." | |
c5aefb28-5460-11e8-b38c-034a8ca29c1b | Selects: How X-Rays Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-x-rays-work | Like many huge discoveries, X-rays were accidentally stumbled upon. That serendipity led to a medical breakthrough still in use today. Learn about how X-rays are created and why they make such delightful images of our bones, in this classic episode. | Like many huge discoveries, X-rays were accidentally stumbled upon. That serendipity led to a medical breakthrough still in use today. Learn about how X-rays are created and why they make such delightful images of our bones, in this classic episode. | Sat, 09 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=282, tm_isdst=0) | 37702502 | 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 SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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. Hi, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen our episode on Xrays. It's from December 2014 because what's more Christmassy than discussing electrons changing orbits? I love this one because it's a great example that me and Chuck can do anything we put our minds to. It's just some great bare knuckle SYSK explaining. So I hope you enjoy our episode. How Xrays work? Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke with Charles W. Chuck Brian, as always. And there's Jerry over there fiddling around with stuff. So it's stuff you should know the podcast, not stuff you should know the movie. That's right. We were sworn to secrecy about that. That'd be a good movie. That would be a bad movie. I don't know, man. It could go either way. I always see I imagine it like Strange Brew. Oh, yeah. They could base it on the stuff you should know. Tell all book I'm writing. Oh, yeah, that would be exciting. That would be very exciting. I'm looking forward to that book. Like, a Lifetime movie of the week. Do you, like, switch people's names? Like am I Joe. Joe Clark. Yeah, exactly. No, it's sort of like, did you see the Save by the Bell movie on oh, yeah. I didn't Screech write a book. It was based on a book by Screech. Right? Yeah. Wasn't it, like all sex and drugs and stuff? It was a bunch of teenagers in Hollywood, so sure, there was some of that in there. I didn't read the book, but the movie was bad and not nearly as salacious as you wanted it to be. Right. I remember a lot of people being disappointed. And I remember I recall two weeks ago when people were talking about it when it came out. It's stunk. I'll watch Emily and I'll watch some of those just terrible biopics occasionally on TV, and it can be fun. Like we watched who is the one actor? Brittany Murphy. The Britney Murphy story. Oh, really? Does she have a heck of a story? Is she alive still or did she die? No, she passed away under kind of weird circumstances because she and her husband both passed away within weeks of each other. Weird. And there were all these strange claims that our house was poisoned. That they were poisoned. And yeah, it was fun. What's your take on it? Oh, I don't know. That the movie wasn't very good. Who played Brittany Murphy? Do you remember? It was somebody Bowen, wasn't it? No, she's in all of us. Someone who didn't look very much like Brittany Murphy. Julie Bowen. I was right. The Ashton Kutcher guy was pretty good, though, I got to say. Steve Jobs played him. They should have just gotten Ashton Kutcher to play himself. He's not doing much. He's on Two and a Half Men. I don't know. That's got to require 15 minutes of work a week. He's selling cameras. Do you remember when that whole Two and a Half Men thing was going down? We were in La. And for the one and only time in my entire life, I see John Crier that day. Oh, during the Charlie Sheen meltdown. Meltdown? Like the day of the meltdown. It happened at night, and within 8 hours, I saw John Crier for the first time in person at a McDonald's. Did you yell Ducky? No. I left him alone. He looks stressed out. Oh, yeah. He's probably like, my career is going down the tubes. But little did he know he's a survivor. Yeah, his career is just fine. So X ray is what we're talking about, right? Yes. It's the lightest part of this podcast. I like this one. This one? It's one of those things where if you can just hang on by your fingernails, it can click and then you lose it again. But that means that it could click again later on. That's what I like about it. Good. I'll leave that to you. I got lots of other stuff about it. Oh, you do? But I totally understand. Good. So have you ever broken anything and needed an X ray or has it all just been dental stuff? You know what, dude? Never broken a bone. Wood. Knock on wood. My injuries were always stitches. I was always getting busted open rocks and sprinklers, and I was always getting cut and sewed back up, but I never broke a bone. That's great. Yes. You should probably knock on wood one more time just to be safe. All of my Xrays, too, have been like just going to the dentist or whatever. You never had a bone broken? I don't want to say because I don't even know if knocking on wood will do it on Laminate Ikea. That would just be so horribly interesting if both of us broke a bone after this. Yeah. And we're at the age where, like, you should break bones when you're a kid, where you're like, Whatever, I get a cast at this age. It's a drag. Yeah. I remember reading, like, a Tom Clancy novel and some kid got an arm torn off or whatever, and one of the surgeons was like, if the arm is in the same room as the kid, it can be healed. Right. That doesn't hold true in your Tom Clancy's age. No. So you are familiar with X rays? Have you seen them before? You've watched er Shirley? Yeah, I mean, I've had X rays for the dental ones, like you said, and then just other various chest X rays for sicknesses and things like that, which I think may be a little frivolous, to be honest. Yeah. And kind of dangerous, really conceivably. Sure. Which we'll get into later. But were you familiar with X rays at all beyond that? Did you know that they were invented or discovered accidentally? Yeah, I did know that. I did not. It's one of the few things I know. I saw a little quickie short on some, like it might have been actually Science Channel. I looked all over. The most I could find was a dude on Siemens just describing it in the most flat aspect. I've watched one single one of his videos. Yeah. I got to five and five didn't load, and I was like, Forget this. Yeah, five never loaded for me. I watched the other 14, though, and the whole time I was going, man, these are a minute long. Please join them all together into one six minute video. No, it was so weird. Yeah, it was pretty silly. But he was good. He was just very dry. Yeah. And they spent zero pennies on any kind of soundtrack or anything. Like, if he grabs papers, you hear papers rustling in the classroom. Was it pretty straightforward? Yes, but that's a very wind about roundabout way of getting to its discovery in 1895 by German physicist named Wilhelm Rebecca. Nice. And he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass, and he saw that the fluorescent screen was glowing when he turned on his electron beam, which wasn't a big deal, but he was like, Wait, who's got cardboard around it? Right. There shouldn't be any visible light escaping. Which is silly to think of now. Well, yes, it is, but you have to put yourself in his shoes. Like X rays hadn't been discovered because he was literally on the verge of discovering them right then. That's right. So he was like, this is very curious, that this is fluorescing. Yeah. And he noticed other things were glowing and eventually he started putting other objects between the tube and the screen. They glowed. The screen did that is finally put his hand there. I read his wife's hand. Oh, really? Either way, come in here for a second. I want you to try something. Small bones projected, and then I guess probably poo pooed his pants and said, man, I didn't come onto something here. Yeah, it was really that quickly. Right. Immediately, the application was clear. It wasn't one of those things where it took 20 years. Right. He's like, Hold on, you can see bones. This could be really helpful. Yes. And you want a Nobel Prize. Very rightfully so. The first one ever for physics. And he named him X Rays because he didn't know what the heck it was. No exact kind of signing your name. I think he assumed that later on, future scientists would fill in the blanks, but they were like, no, we're cool with Xrays. Well, he probably thought that someone would eventually call it, like, the runtin ray or something. He wasn't much of a self promoter. No, he was just like, I'll just call him Xrays as a placeholder, and he didn't patent anything. He never made money off of it. And his wife had hand cancer as a result. Really? No, I was laughing, but, no, she didn't. It was just a joke. You can proceed with the laughing. Plus, I've never heard of hand cancer. It's got to be out there. And then a couple of years later, they were already using it in the Balkan War was the first time it was really put to practical use. First Balkan War? The one around World War One. Well, no, 1897. Oh, that Balkan war. I didn't know that existed until just now. Yeah. And they said, we can see bullets and shrapnel and stuff now, which is helpful. It is extremely helpful. So, like, this guy Roonkin discovers Xrays and their most practical application in one fell swoop, basically. And a little further study revealed that Xrays are actually just another part of the electromagnetic spectrum of which radio waves, microwaves, what we call visible light. What else is on there? Well, I've got the Handy Wallet electromagnetic spectrum card and X rays fall between gamma rays and ultraviolet rays on that spectrum. Right. Which are all below well, you say below. I don't know if it's not really an above or below situation. Visible light and then infrared, microwave and radio waves. So it would be a higher, lower frequency because that's how the whole thing is divided. Yeah. So, like, the visible spectrum of light consists of electromagnetic radiation that has a frequency, a wavelength that our eyes are sensitized to, so we can pick up visible light. But there's plenty of other stuff on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, and all of it is delineated by the frequency, the wavelength. So at the highest end, you have gamma rays. They're like, yeah, that means the squiggly line is very close together. Exactly. And then on the farthest end, you have radio waves that are like and that means this quickly line is far apart. Exactly. And that is called Chuck science. That's good stuff. Yeah. Back in my wallet right next to the what else do you have in there? I just have my Paps Blue Ribbon membership card, which I actually do. Do you really? Yeah, but I've had it for like 20 years. Wow. You got it when you're like seven, eight. Yeah, flatter me. So x rays fall. I guess we're about on the higher end. They have a higher frequency as far as the electromagnetic spectrum goes, but the point is that it is ultimately the same thing. It's a type of electromagnetic energy that is carried on a photon, which is a particle of what we would call light. Yeah. And we talked about photons plenty in the show. And the same, like, photons produce the visible light that we can see. Photons blast out from the sun. How long does it take? It takes like 1000 years to get from the core to the surface and then like eight minutes to get from the surface to Earth. That's right. Man. I love that fact. This is the only part I understand, so I'll lead with it. If you want to imagine an atom, a nucleus of an atom, and rings around that atom, it's new and atom as orbitals. When an electron drops to a lower orbital, it releases energy in the form of a photon, and the electron will always drop to the lower orbital. That's right. So, like, if an electron is kicked off of a lower orbital, an electron in the higher orbital goes yeah. And drops down to that one. Yes. And depending on how far it drops, it's going to determine the energy level of that photon. It releases its energy when it drops. Right? Yeah. Because it doesn't have to drop more than one orbital. It can skip down I don't even know how far, but a long way. Yes, it can. And like you said, the greater the distance between the two orbitals or the greater the energy differential, the greater the energy that photon, when released, will have. Right? That's right. And as we said, photons are the energy carriers of the electromagnetic spectrum. And depending on the energy or the frequency, the wavelength of that photon, that determines what kind of photon it is. Right. Whether it's a radio photon or an xray photon or a photon that we can see that's in the visible spectrum. That's right. Sometimes when these photons are flying around, they will collide with other atoms, and sometimes those atoms absorb that photon's energy and then kick it up to that higher level again. Right. But it has to be, from what I understand, and I saw that there's like, of course it's science, so there's like atomic science, so there's little exceptions to this and that. But from what I could see, Chuck, the energy of that photon has to exactly match the energy differential between one orbital and another on an atom so that it can kick it up. So that it hits that one electron on the lower orbital, kicks it up to the higher orbital, and thus transfers its energy. Which means that atom just absorbed that energy that that photon was carrying, right? That's right. But if it's a little less, it's not going to have the energy to kick that electron up, which makes sense to me, right? Yeah. But if it's a little more, this is what doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't kick the electron up and then the photon carries on in a diminished energetic state. It just doesn't do anything. It doesn't interact with that. It has to be exact. Say, like the energy differential between orbits is eight. Yeah. So a photon has to have an energy of eight or else it's not going to do anything with the atom. That's right. Okay, well, let's say you have a radio wave. They don't have very much energy, so they can't move electrons between these orbitals. They just pass through things. X rays are super powerful, right? There's lots of energy, so they can pass through things, which is key if you want to check out your bones from outside of your body. It is. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run, and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. And you can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right now. 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. Rebecca chuck. And you tantalized everybody by saying that this difference in absorption is what produces x rays. Right. Was that tantalizing? I was tantalizing. Okay. And I even know what's coming. That's how excited I am about X rays. Good. So consider this. Different atoms have different atomic weights. They have different densities. They're just different, like, different atoms are different. And atoms also have what are called differences in radiological density. Right. Okay. So a really high energy, high atomic weight, very dense atom is going to be able to absorb a lot of energy. Smaller atoms that maybe are looser and have a lower atomic weight are going to get kicked around by any old photon that wants to come along. Yeah. And that's key. Like I said, if you want to see bones, because your soft tissue if you've ever noticed when you have an X ray, you'll see the bones, but the rest is sort of a grayish, black mess. Exactly. Because your soft tissue has smaller atoms. Your bones calcium atoms are much larger. So they're going to absorb those X ray photons. That's exactly right. They do it really well. Exactly. So imagine you have, let's say, chuck, let's go back and hang out with Tuktuk, right? Oh, man. Let's get back in the way back when she's been awhile. Okay. Look at him over there. So here we are in France in this cave. Tuktuk has his hand up against the cave wall, as you see, and in his other hand, he's got that little straw filled with red pigment, and he's blowing it on his hand, right? Sure. And now that he moves his hand away, there's the outline of his hand. It's called a stencil. Right, exactly. He just made an early stencil. He's like a banksy, basically. Like a caveman banksy. But if you look at the back of tuktuk's hand, don't get too close, but look at the back of his hand. It's covered in red pigment, right? Yeah. So if you want to equate this to an X ray, the hand absorbed all of that pigment. Right. And the stuff that passed through left the picture on the cave wall. That's kind of what happens with an Xray. Except with an X ray photograph, the Xray photons are absorbed by the denser, calcium rich bones. Yes. And they pass through the softer tissue. So the picture that we have is the outline, the silhouette of the bones, because the X rays made it through the tissue didn't make it through the bones. They made it through the tissue and onto the X ray plate, which absorbed the picture in negative. That's right. And I'm glad you said picture because that's all it is. On the other side of the human being that they're shooting the X ray at, there's a camera, and you're just going to get a regular negative, and they could make it a positive, but they leave it as a negative because you really don't need the positive image. Right. And that's what they'll put on that little screen to show you your cracked femur. Exactly. And they can see the crack because some of those X rays will make it through the gap. That's right. Right. So all you're seeing is the result of X rays that made it through the tissue were absorbed by the bone, so those don't make it to the plate. The ones that make it to the plate cause the chemical reaction that gives you your negative, your X ray. And it's pretty simple, really. Like, if you think about it, at least in principle, it's also extraordinarily difficult to conceive of. But if you understand the principle behind it, it makes uttering, complete sense. Yeah. And it's a pretty focused shot that they're using there. It's not like they don't fill the entire room with X rays. They've got a thick lead shield around the whole device and it contains everything. And it's got a little small window that's just going to let that narrow beam pass through through a series of filters and basically hit you wherever they want to hit you. Yeah. And the reason that they use lead is because lead is an extremely dense element yeah, right, sure. Oh, God, I hope so. With a very high atomic number, which means it can absorb tons of energy. Right. Yeah. That's why you're going to wear a lead apron. If you're getting your skull done, you're probably going to wear an apron on your chest, let's say. Sure. So this lead is being bombarded with X ray photons and electrons and it's just taking it. It's fine. And it's not able to pass through because it doesn't have high enough energy. But yes, when they put that little window in the X ray generating machine, it passes right through there in a concentrated beam. And Chuck, let's talk about the machine. Right. This is basically what we use as X ray machines, is essentially what Rukin was experimenting with when he accidentally discovered them, because if you look for X rays, they propagate naturally. But I think like 20% of the X rays on Earth come from humans. Oh, really? Yeah, we generate a lot of X rays. You don't find them normally on Earth. They're coming from outer space to us, hence X ray astronomy. But the ones here on Earth that are generated on Earth, it's not like rocks put out X rays or something like that. Right. We do humans and lead aprons put out X rays and they use this machine like Rookin, Maine. Yeah. What you have in the machine, you have an electrode pair, a cathode and an anode. And that's inside a good old fashioned glass vacuum tube. Right. Which it's amazing how vacuum tubes are still, like, the best way to do many of these things. Well, it allows things to travel at the speed of light easily that's right. And allows guitar amps to sound great. I didn't know these vacuums in that. Oh, is that a cathode tube? Yeah, yeah. The best amps are still made with vacuum tubes. You can get solid state amps, but the sound isn't as rich. So it's kind of like this old technology that's still superior. Right. They're all pumped out by hand by a 90 year old man in Tennessee. Mr. Marshall. Yes. So the cathode is a heated filament, just like you might see in a light bulb, and the machine is going to pass a current through that and heat that thing up, and then it's going to spit electrons off that surface, and it's going to hit a disk made of tungsten, and it's going to draw those across the tube. Basically, the tube is sort of the key piece right. Because you've got the positive and the negative charge, the cathode and the anode. Right. Yeah. And that difference, that electrical charge draws those electrons down to the anode yeah. With a lot of force. Yeah. And that force means that when those electrons hit the tungsten anode, it knocks a bunch of electrons off, creates a bunch of X rays in the process, and you have a whole box filled with Xray radiation of X ray. That's exactly what it is. They might as well be like a foot crank to this thing, like an old sewing machine. For as technologically advanced as it is, there may be, for all I know, I don't know what goes on in that other room. Right, yeah, true. There's some dude in there with, like his right leg is three times more muscular than his left leg because that's the only one he uses. So in addition, as I said, to X rays being created, the other X rays, other photons, can go on and knock more electrons off. So you have a process of chain reaction starting. Right. It's not like one gets hit and then that's it. And the photons created it just hangs around until it's beamed out. You're just generating this huge amount of X rays. And the X rays are also continuing to propagate themselves because they're knocking more electrons free. And the more free electrons you have, the more interactions you have. Right, right. So one of the ways that more electrons can be knocked off, you don't even need a direct transfer of energy where a photon is absorbed or knocks an electron from one orbit to another or knocks it loose entirely. A photon actually has this really cool capability of just orbiting close by the nucleus of an atom. And when the nucleus basically draws it into its orbit, the photon just takes a hard left turn. Yeah, it just bumps it off its course. But even like the Dodge Viper has to slow down to take a left turn. Slow a little bit, right? Just a little. Just a little. Yeah. But that little bit in photon world means a transfer of energy from the photon outward in an X ray. Yeah. And then the photon, like the photon takes that left turn and the energy is transferred to the atom. Yeah. And one of the byproducts, if this sounds like it's going to create a lot of heat, it's because it will. And in order to combat this, they rotate this anode to keep it. It would just melt down if you kept it in place. And apparently there's a cool oil bath that helps absorb heat as well, which I never have heard of that either. It sounds oily. A cool oil bath? Yeah. It doesn't sound refreshing at all. It sounds like the opposite of refreshing. Yeah, cool and oil don't really go together. And I misspoke that's. An electron that can be drawn to the nucleus of an atom, appropriately enough, because they orbit nuclei anyway. Right. But it doesn't have to hook up with that atom. When it takes that hard left, it emits the photon, like you said. That's right. And like I said earlier, there's a camera on the other side of the patient, and it's going to record that pattern of light when it passes through the body. And it's not so different from a regular camera. And in the end, you're just going to get a picture, like I said, a negative image. Yeah. And if you hook it up with a computer that allows you to take x rays basically in slices, you can come up with computerized tomography, aka CT. Right, CT scan. Exactly. If you get a breast exam, you're using a type of Xray called mammography. Yeah. And then there's fluoroscopy, which the man in the extraordinarily dry presentation from Siemen said was basically like moving picture. It's like a movie. Exactly. And then he showed us what the movie is with a flipbook. Right, that old flipbook trick. And if you listen to this podcast I'm sorry, I just want to apologize for both of us. Siemens guy. Oh, yeah. Hats off to you for doing that at all. Yeah, he's probably saying, well, at least I was correct and everything I said. Exactly. That's a good point, sir. But with fluroscopy, it's basically like a movie of an X ray movie. And you would do this to make sure, like, a heart is beating correctly because you wanted to see it. But you have to have an additional instrument because, as we said, x rays will pass through tissue, like heart tissue and muscle tissue and blood vessels and all the stuff you want to get pictures of using an Xray. So you have to use something called a contrast media for it. Yeah, a contrast agent is basically more. Dense than the soft tissue. So if you want to, let's say, swallow, it's usually like a barium compound. If you want to examine, like, your blood vessels or your circulatory system, sometimes they can inject that. Or you might drink it to see if you're doing, like a gastrointestinal, like a GI tract, you're going to swallow that stuff, which I've never had to do. I think my dad had to do that. Yeah. I don't think it's super pleasant. I get the impression not too, but my dad did it as well. Yeah, it's an old guy thing. Yeah. So I should be getting one soon. And then it allows you to see a moving image, basically, how that liquid is. If there's any blockage, there's all sorts of applications for it. Yeah, because that liquid has a high radiological density, which means that the X rays don't just pass right through the tissue that it's being suspended in, like your blood vessels. It absorbs it for it. So you get a picture of your blood vessels, your circulatory system, which is pretty cool. It's pretty clever. It's also extraordinarily elementary in principle, my dear Watson. And that single picture, I think we mentioned CT and Mammography and all that and Floroscopy, but the single picture is just called standard radiography, and that's when you're taking a photo of your skull, right? Or your lungs or your bones or your teeth. And so, speaking of the lead apron thing, man, it's always made me kind of nervous. Like, if the rest of my body has to wear lead apron, but you're shooting an X ray into my head, am I going to be okay? Well, we'll answer that right after this message. 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All right. X rays. Are they bad for you? The answer is yes. Pretty unequivocally. But like all things, it's in moderation is the key. Sure. In the 1930s and into the 50s, they had x ray machines at shoe stores. Oh, yeah. They could xray your feet to get a better fit. And they didn't realize at the time that they were x raying people way too much. Yeah. Talkative kids in class, they just shoot them with an xray, would they? No, they probably did. I've got you, like, twice. Well, no, I believe that, like, hey, let's look at his brain. There may be a mouse running around inside of it. Yes. People in the 30s were dumb. Well, it's basically radiation sickness. It's a form of ionizing radiation. Right. So what can happen, like, if just normal light hits an atom is it no big deal. But when an x ray hits an atom, it knocks electrons off of it, creates an ion, which is an electrically charged atom. And basically anything from cellular death to mutation can happen at that point. Yeah. And mutation can spread, and it can cause cancer. Right. Because stable atoms are neutral. Right. Because they have an equal number of protons and electrons. You lose an electron, all of a sudden you have a positively charged ion, and that negatively charged electron running around, and it just causes trouble. And you said light, visible light can be absorbed. And it's no big deal because visible light exists on a wavelength that's about in tune with the soft tissues of our body. Right. So we know how to absorb it, and it makes us tan, and that's cool. Right. But with these ionized atoms, these positively charged atoms, like going around in your body, it can cause a lot of problems, like mutations, like cancer. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you break that DNA chain, that's not good. No, it is your cells. And one of the results is the DNA can basically lose its ability to regulate itself, and the cell replicates more frequently than it should. And all of a sudden, you have a tumor on your hands, and that can spread. It can also be a problem if that DNA break occurs in utero, because then that can lead to birth defects, which is why pregnant women shouldn't get xrays. And it can also just lead to plain old cellular death. If you have cellular death, then the tissues that are made up by those cells break down and you have a problem on your hands with that as well. So here's the deal. We get exposed to radiation every day just walking around on the planet. It depends on where you live, but every year, the average person is going to be exposed to anywhere from one to four. It's measured in millisevert per year. Like I said, depending on where you are. I think in higher elevations, it's less than at sea level. So if you live in Denver, Colorado, you're going to be exposed to less well, yeah, because you're higher up in the atmosphere and that makes a difference. Exactly. You have less protection. Right? Yeah. So what they want to do, medically speaking, they want to use or they're supposed to use the minimum amount to achieve the pictures you need. It's not like the old days where they just like, let's do 20 X rays. Like, let's do the minimum amount we need to get the information that we need. A CT scan can you lay down on the tube? And it rotates around you. And your whole body can be photographed in less than 5 seconds these days. But there are concerns if you get too many Xrays. Still, like a dental panorama, I think what I say one to four milliseconds per year, and it's cumulative, too, you should say. It's not like you get one and then eight months later you get another one and that first one went away. Like it accumulates over the course of a year. Yeah. So here's just a few examples of how much radiation you're being exposed to with X rays. A dental panorama is going to be zero one millisevert. So not very much like two. Chest X rays might be zero one. Mammogram is around zero four. Your pelvis is zero six. Your back, upper back, maybe 1.0. I wonder why. Because there's so much bone there. Maybe yes. Maybe you have to do with exposure to yeah, that makes sense. I got a ton of bone in my upper back. A full CT scan, it depends on what you are. Depends on what you're X raying. But CT scan is obviously more like an abdominal or pelvic. CT scan can be as many as ten milliseverts. So that's like up to two or three years worth of radiation in a single CT scan. Yeah, which can be problematic. Which is why they don't say, get in the CT machine, like, every other week. Right. But you know some of the reasons you might if you had a traumatic injury, they're going to X ray you a lot of times for disease confirmation, they'll use an Xray machine during surgery is a visual guide. Like, if you do endoscopic surgery, the surgeon actually needs to look at something. So sometimes it's X rays for that or to monitor your healing process. When you break a bone, it's not just that first Xray, you're going to keep getting them to see how you're healing up. This is right out of the Siemens video. No, it isn't. Okay. I don't think so. I mean, I looked at so much stuff, cumulative research. So I did a brain stuff on sea verte and how many we can take. And it's a little alarming. Sure. How much radiation we're exposed to. People who fly a lot, too, are exposed to tons of radiation because you're, again, higher up in the atmosphere, so you're less protected by the atmosphere. Speaking of flying, of course, baggage, that is X ray. The food industry uses X rays a lot. Archaeologists use it if they don't want to destroy an object and they want to see what's inside. Or Earth sciences, they'll use X rays for rocks to see what kind of mineral composition. So there's all sorts of applications. It's not just medical space. Yeah. X ray telescopes out on satellites, apparently you can see a lot. You can see things you can't detect from an Earthbound telescope because Xrays are absorbed by our atmosphere. So you can't shoot it into space like that. So this article makes a pretty good point, if you ask me. It says, yes, X rays are bad for you, and you should use them with care and caution. And one good point is to always ask if there's an alternative to an Xray, just to basically say, hey, Doc, or Dennis, slow your role. Is there another way we can get this information without an X ray? I know it's the easiest, but what are the alternatives? But then the article makes the point like it's still safer than the ultimate alternative. The thing that X rays replaced, which was exploratory surgery. Yeah. Back in the day, if they thought you had cancer, they would cut you open and see. And this is definitely better than that. Yeah. Or broken bone. Imagine getting that arm cut open just to see how it's doing. They're like, no, it's not broken, and we haven't invented anesthetic yet. Good luck with your dentist, by the way, because I always get the feeling that the dentists are like, no, your insurance allows us to build for so many per year because that's how many you're going to get. These Xrays are putting my kid through college. Yeah. You got anything else on X rays? No, that was a fine amount of stuff. I'm feeling good about it. You feel good about this one? Sure. I do, too. If you want to know more about X rays, you can check out this really informative article on howstep works.com. It's got some great diagrams that explain a lot of the stuff we are saying visually. And you can type X ray into the search bar, how Stuff Works, and it will bring that up. Since I said search bar, it's time for listing or mail. This is from my buddy Poppy in Vancouver stuff. You shouldn't listen to them while I was there. And Poppy as this is, he's got a pretty cool job. He listened to the PTSD show and wanted to write in about another option that he works with. He's a registered acupuncturist in Vancouver with special training in trauma and addictions. He has a program called neurotrophic stimulation therapy. NTSC in a large part of the program uses ear acupuncture and electro acupuncture to promote neuroplasticity in the brain. He says you can't necessarily directly fix the brain, but you can stimulate the ear nerves and will help the brain reregulate certain functionality so it can heal itself. He's been treating trauma and PTSD patients for several years and the evidence for his efficacy is high. It can be done with acupuncture needles alone or in combination with a mild electrical stimulation. Remember we talked about transcranial electromagnetic stimulation? Yeah, transdermal cranial stimulation. He says that's one of the things that he's also using to treat PTSD, which is pretty cool. Wow. And he said it makes cognitive behavioral therapies so much easier to introduce because it promotes neuroplasticity. And the results help a PTSD suffer to be more open to and able to receive positive social programming. So here's a program we want to promote. If you want to see all the components in action in this program, you can visit lastdoor Recovery Society at last door.org NTST. Or you can donate funds to help purchase a brain scanner so that they can scientifically measure the results of the program, which would really help show the validity of the therapies. And if you're interested in helping out Poppy's cause there, because he's really big on treating veterans in Canada, in the US. I shortened his little URL to bitly bitly, and that is from Poppy. And he says namaste. Thanks a lot, poppy, is it? Poppy with Aopoppi. Nice. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syscast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. That's right. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.com. Stuffycheatnow is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
How Jim Henson Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-jim-henson-worked | We've already recorded an episode on The Muppets, but Jim Henson was such a neat guy we delved into him even further. Learn all about the man behind the Muppets who was so much more than just a master puppeteer in this episode. | We've already recorded an episode on The Muppets, but Jim Henson was such a neat guy we delved into him even further. Learn all about the man behind the Muppets who was so much more than just a master puppeteer in this episode. | Tue, 06 Jan 2015 16:54:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=16, tm_min=54, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=6, tm_isdst=0) | 39373917 | 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. 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 housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant, Cody and Jerry. For the last time this year. Just informed us. And she all smiles. She is not very nice. Jerry, how did you like that presentation earlier? The sensitivity training? That's great. Yes, people, because we work for Corporation, we have things like sensitivity training, and in those trainings, you get shown video examples of various forms of harassment. And they are the best, most fun things to watch ever. They're pretty overt. Yeah, I could watch those all day long. I was wondering how much that production company made from that. They did, like, five little vignettes. I'm sure they pay the actors like literal peanuts. They were bad actors. They're like, there's a peanut bucket over there. You can pay yourself. Yeah, the one that really got me was the actually, they were all really funny, but the one with the old guy in the factory loading boxes like a shipping warehouse, and they were giving the old man a hard time about everything. Because he was old. Yeah, because he's old. And they were given a hard time because he was out of work for a while, and they had cover for him, the old man, and he had the back brace on. Did you notice that? And he just looked on his face. He just kept getting a little more, like, pouty the whole time. Yeah. I was like, dude, that's good acting. Stick up for yourself. Tell these young kids what to do. The back brace prevents them from it. Anyway, I just had to bring that up because I just think that stuff is so funny. And what's funny is people really do some of that stuff that you're like, what? Yes. There's some creeps out there. That was a really weird setup for Jim Henson because he's the least harassy guy he was probably ever. Yeah, he certainly comes across that way. He's a genuinely good dude. It's not one of these stories you hear about, like, maybe some of your favorite children's books writers or cartoonists or something. Maybe we're kind of bad people. No, apparently not at all. Yeah. So there's a lot of quotes in this article. I thought John Strickland wrote it. It turns out that's not the case. I'm surprised because he's friends with or down with at least one of Jim Henson's kids oh, really? Who I believe lives here in Atlanta. Oh, wow. But in this article, it's one of those things where everybody who compliments Jim Henson who worked with him, they go to the trouble of complimenting him in a way that's not just like, oh, he's such a great guy. They all back up just a little bit because they're cognizant that that doesn't get it across. Sure. And they want you to understand that they're talking about more than just the great guy. Like, oh, he's dead, and I'm not going to speak of the dead, and he's a great guy. And that's a really thoughtless, polite, in, offensive thing to say. Sure. So, like, Frank Oz said something like, he was a great guy, but at the same time he was a human, but he was still a really great guy. Right. So what you're thinking of is, a great guy, get rid of that and actually replace it with a genuine human great guy. Yeah, because as a filmmaker, he's a puppeteer, obviously, but he was a filmmaker first and foremost, which a lot of people kind of forget about. Did you watch any of these? Oh, yeah. That's a tough, tough job. Super stressful. And you and I have seen it can make good guys and good ladies be real jerks and yell under stressful situations. It's a tough thing. There's a lot of money on the line each day. It's like, everybody relax. It's just millions of dollars. But Frank Oz, I think that's the point he was making. Like, even when he would get frustrated and stressed like that, he was still a good guy behind it all. Yeah. And I guess it was a book review of a biography about him that showed that somebody said it was all just play to him, like work was play. Even though he worked really hard, he was able to commit himself like that to his work because to him, he was having the time of his life all the time. And apparently there was no line between work and play, which, now that we've seen that sensitivity training, it could have gotten him in a big trouble. But he just enjoyed the life that he had, from what I understand, loved cars. He had, like, a Lotus that was the same color as Kermit the Frog. He had a Rolls Royce early on from his work. Yeah. Let's talk about the guy yeah. I just need to go ahead and say, if you haven't listened to the episode on The Muppets, this is what I consider just a more in depth part two on the man himself. Right. But that's one of our favorite all time episodes and from Feedback, one of the great all time fan episodes. Yeah, it was a great episode. Yeah. It was just a lot of fun. And so I hope this augments that one. I hope we do it justice. So that's actually one of the reasons why we can do this episode, because we already did a Muppet episode and they tweeted about us. Do you remember? The Henson Company did? Yeah, they did. Which was they approved. They got their actual approval. That's right. Man. That was something the Muppet says. It's one thing. It's about Muppets. This is about Jim Henson. And it's appropriate that we're doing this because he was more than just The Muppets, even though everybody pegs him with The Muppets. And that is a huge thing. He was more than that. Like you said, he was a filmmaker, but originally started out as a puppeteer, but kind of a reluctant one. Yeah. He was born in 1936. September 24. James Mary Henson. M-A-U-R-Y. In Mississippi. And his grandmother, maternal grandmother, was a painter and a quilter and a needle worker, and apparently was a big inspiration to him just to seek out the creative in life. Right. Which is pretty great. Yeah. And one of the things he got into, while he was originally kind of a fan of ventriloquism a little bit, but he said later on in life that he was never, like, obsessed with puppets or anything like that, like you would have expected him to be. And as he went to college, I think, in Maryland, he started out as a studio artist. That's what he was studying. Yeah. He loved television above all else. Right. From the time he was a little kid, he was just transfixed by the tube. He almost kind of made himself destined to be on television by being obsessed with it. Yeah. But he kind of stumbled into puppetry in college, and he started out as a studio art major and ended up graduating with a homec degree because homec was the only degree that offered puppet making courses. Yeah, he took a puppetry course at first, then a bunch of textiles and crafts courses, which is a great way to start building and making your own puppets. Right, but he graduated with a homecare degree. But by the time he graduated, he was already extremely successful. The Rolls Royce that I mentioned, he bought in time to drive to his college graduation because he'd already created successful shows in his town. Yeah. I think in high school, he was on the local TV station doing little guest spots. And then in 1955, the show Salmon Friends debuted, and he also did work on the side making money with I think he did some of the really cool concert posters of the day, really colorful silk screen posters. And Sam and Friends did really well, but he still wasn't quite sure. I still don't know if I wanted my filmmaker. I did these short films, really sort of weird, abstract short films. Live action, experimental. That was totally experimental. Did you see the timepiece? Yeah, that one was pretty cool. It was great. And it's way and did you see The Cube? I watched parts of the cube. Did you see the end? No. Oh, you got to see the end. I skipped the middle because I was like, okay, I get where you're going with this. Yeah, well, we should just set it up real quick. theCUBE was a show on NBC. It was a 1 hour show. The name of the show NBC did was called Experiments and Television. It was a different thing each week. And he had one week's installment called theCUBE, which was a guy just stuck in a white room, but other people could come in and out of the room, but he could not. Right? Yes. Okay. And he starts to go kind of crazy. And it has the look and feel of a color TV ad, like lots of overacting and Carol Burnett's characters and stuff like that. But the sentiment behind it and everything behind it is really neat. And it really gives you an eye opening example of what Jim Henson was capable of, but also, like, what he was into. Because when you think of him, you think of Muppets and Sesame Street in particular. Sure. And these are weird abstract art films, not unlike you've watched, like a Jim Morrison art film from film school. And it's kind of the same style. That was what was going on back then. Yeah. And he actually got nominated for an Academy Award for timepiece. I think Jim Henson had Jim Morrison beat by a mile as far as experimental films went. Yeah, I agree with you there. So, like I said, he wasn't quite convinced that puppetry was his future because he was a filmmaker and he was like, puppets are still kind of kid stuff. Right. But post college, he did the old tour of Europe, and in Europe, puppeteering is a whole different business. It was a lot more serious and a lot more I guess it was treated as art. Yeah, exactly. And he said, you know what? I am going to give this a shot. Came back to the US, married Jane, and even though he and Jane separated, they never divorced. Oh, really? I thought they did. No, they never fulfilled the divorce. They just stayed separated. Okay. And then he started making TV commercials and formed his own company in 1963 with I don't know if he formed it with Frank Oz, but he hired Frank Oz and Jerry Jewel, who ended up being obviously legendary puppeteers and lifelong collaborators of his. Yeah. But he started out making basically a puppet based commercial ad agency in New York in yeah. And they weren't making funny commercials back then, so he was really pretty, and they did pretty well for themselves. And one of the smartest moves he made early on was all of his contracts said that he retained the rights to any of the creations he made for these companies. Yeah. So he was creating some of the things that would later become famous muppets, like the Cookie Monster was originally made for a chip maker and was this puppet that couldn't get enough of these chips. Yeah. He was the wheel stealer, and he stole cheese wheels. Yeah. Okay. That's what it was. And he ended up being the Cookie Monster. And the reason he ended up being the Cookie Monster is because Jim Henson retained the rights to that creation. He's a very savvy business guy, too. Yeah. And he was using somebody else's dime, these advertisers like budgets to kind of hash out and form and make his muppets. Yeah. Rough the Dog started out on Purina commercials and was later a sidekick on the Jimmy Dean Show in 1063, which I remember that from the Muppets episode. Golf was the first big muppet. He's such, like, a bit character now that it's just mind boggling to think he was the one that started at all. Even before Kermit, before Big Bird, it was Rolf. Kermit kind of stole the show, I think. Yeah. We'll talk a little more about Kermit and where he came from right after this. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about Summer. What's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and light hearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. All right, so it's a big thing happens to Jim Henson. He was invited to be on the pilot of a show created by the Children's Television Workshop called Sesame Street. He did not create it. Some people think he did, but he did make his mark by creating most of the iconic characters. And if you were a fan of the old Sesame Streets back then, not all, but many of those little short films, the little claymation ones and the live action ones, he directed those as well, which is pretty cool. I never knew that. I think I knew that. Did you? Yeah. He was our Rustic. He was there. Russvik that's right. Rustic is ours. That's right. So, Chuck, the whole thing that changed everything for him was Sesame Street. He wasn't a creator of Sesame Street they hired him on, and they actually kind of want him over, because, remember, one of the things that Jim Henson always struggled with his whole career was he wanted to explore places that puppets had never really gone to. Right. In themes that they hadn't gone to, at least not in the modern age. Sure. But he was fighting against them not being taken seriously. Yeah. It wasn't like he was anti puppet by any means, or anti kids, because one of the big reasons he signed on with Children's Television Workshop was their goal to educate kids, meant a lot to them. But like you said, I think to merge those worlds successfully was a big part of his goal. Right. And struggle for a little while. Russ Vick, by the way, made the little interstitial things for the stuff you should know. Television. Yeah. The animation, which is why I referenced it. Yeah. So the Children's Television Workshop, which is now called the Sesame Workshop, from what I understand, they want them over big time. He makes all of these characters from, like, Big Bird, and I think Kermit came before Sesame Street, and he started out I think we talked about this in the Muppet episode, too. He started out looking really weird. Yeah. Like a lizard on it. Yeah. Not cool at all. Like, really kind of freaky, which is something that now that I know a little more about Jim Henson, I think maybe he might have even been going for. Right. But one of the things that Sesame Street allowed him to do was to really kind of explore something that he'd long been obsessed with, which was television and where it converged with puppets, which was all new territory. And Jim Hanson was at the bleeding edge of it, because if you think about it, when you go to a puppet show live, you know, you're looking at what's essentially a mechanism for hiding the human, and there's just a little area that the puppet can move around in. A little tiny fixed stage. Yeah. So Jim Henson stepped back and said, okay, the television is that little tiny area that the puppet can move around in, but it also opens up the whole world for a puppet because you're using camera angles and there's editing, and it's not in person. Yeah. Just frame out the people. And again, we talked about this in the Muppet episode. He created something called Platforming up to where the puppeteers no longer had to crouch down and to maneuver the puppets. Yeah, because he was a tall guy. Yeah, tall and lanky. Man, he was skinny. All those running shots and timepieces. Exactly. Because he was in it. They were hysterical. Yeah. And he weighs about \u00a370 somehow. Big, lanky legs. So yeah, the performers could stand up, which was a huge weight off, but at the same time, because you're working with cameras and stuff like that, and they have the whole universe to move around in, and Jim Henson wanted them to move around as much as possible, it also put them in some weird positions. Yeah. Well, some people might think it's, like, kind of ruining the thing, but I think it's really neat if you just look up on Google Images, muppet show behind the scenes pictures, and it'll show the stage sets, like, 6ft off the ground right. And all the people standing beneath. I think it's awesome to look at, but some people don't. Like, they want to keep that illusion alive. Right. So depending on what kind of person you are, either seek that out or don't. And we gave that warning in the Muppets episode, too. Did we? Yeah. I think they're really cool pictures. I agree. Because a lot of times they're looking at video monitors standing there contorted, using both hands. Right. The way puppeteers work together, to me, is just a miracle, because they're acting as the puppets, but they're still moving among one another as humans right. Underneath, which can be really complicated. In fact, we know some really talented puppeteers here in Atlanta. Yeah. The center for Puppetry Arts is, I think, the nation's largest puppeteer organization. Yes. And that is where we had our TV show debut party, Premiere Party. It was a really cool experience. Like, Emma Otter and the gang are right there on display. I think the Henson and Kermit cut the ribbon for the grand opening back when it opened and ended up donating, like, 500 puppets and muppets to the center for Pup Tree Arts. So if you ever visit Atlanta, people always email us and say, what should we do? I highly recommend going and checking out the center for Pub Tree Arts. Yeah, because they have a museum with, like you said, eminet otters, like a full size, life size skeksi behind glass. Scary, as you can imagine. Yeah. But I was talking about Raymond Carr, our friend, who I hate to keep bringing up the TV show, but it all kind of overlaps. He was a production designer for Stuff You Should Know on Science Channel. Yeah. And he and his friends Brandon and the gang are amazing puppeteers, and they're doing some really leading edge cool stuff here in Atlanta. Like, these giant puppets operated, like, 15 foot tall puppets operated by six and eight people. Have you ever seen the space man? That they do. No. Oh, man. It's unbelievable. It's really cool. I don't know how tall he is. He seems like he's 20ft tall. And they do these at parades and stuff, and it's just really cool stuff. That's awesome. Yeah. But Henson is a huge inspiration to them, obviously. Oh, yeah. I think anybody who works even remotely in puppets has got to be inspired by Jim Henson, man. One of the other things that he came up with that was based on putting muppets or puppets on TV was using softer materials. Everything else is, like, up to that point, stiff wood marionettes, ventriloquist dummies, that kind of stuff. Right. He used foam, and it allowed the puppets themselves to have more expressive faces, which is great for close up on TV. Yeah, absolutely. Now, looking back, you just are like, well, yeah, of course. It's what puppets do. I know, but that was Jim Henson that came up with that, and it changed everything because it took something like I mean, imagine howdy duty it was like, yeah, it's cool. It's howdy duty or whatever. But whether close up or far away, he looked exactly the same. It was like a wood head with, like, a moving lower jaw. And he gave you nightmares with Term of the Frog or something like that. The fact that he could have different expressions and react differently and his emotions could be shown on his face, that made them that much more popular, that much more approachable to people who are into them. Absolutely. Which is everybody. Yeah. Show me someone who doesn't like muppets in any form. I get it if you don't like it anymore, maybe. But your heart is cold and dead inside for a while, and this is something I don't think I knew. He Dabbled on Saturday Night Live in season one. Lorne Michaels got him a deal to perform some sketches, and ultimately, it wasn't a huge success and it wasn't the greatest marriage, but it was pretty cool that he was seeking out different avenues to get those puppets on television. It was. And his big break came in 1975. He wanted to make The Muppet Show, and he had a lot of trouble in the US. Still, even though he had his various successes on commercials and stuff. So he had to go to London, and a TV producer named Lord Lou Grade gave him a deal with Grades ATV Studios and said, you know what? You can make your show. And the Muffet Show was born. Oh, yeah, but I'm bad. A boom. That was it. That was it? And you can really see Jim Hinton's love of variety shows and just kind of well, just the stage in The Muppet Show, because if you think about it, the whole thing is set backstage at a variety show. It's such a great idea. When you look back at it. We take it for granted a little bit because we were kids. But now, as an adult, it's like, what a perfect way to frame this world? Is it's basically like 30 Rock or 30 Rock? Was The Muppet Show? Right where The Muppet Show started. All that? Yeah. I don't know if Carol Burnett was before The Muppet Show. Yeah, it was before. Was it? Yeah. So she did a lot of backstage stuff, didn't she? I wonder if he started that. I don't know. Hers was more sketch. Yeah, but some of it was, like, backstage. Was it? I believe so. I don't remember. That some hallucinating right now to have a good old fashioned variety show again. Yeah, they don't have those anymore. Those were big back in the day. Like, a host comes out and then there's sketches and singing. Remember our Cabaret? No, it was in Cabaret. What was it, the episode we did? Oh, Burlesque. Burlesque? Yeah. How that started out in vaudeville and burlesque. That's where stand up comedy came from. That was an interesting episode. Yeah. I miss those variety shows, though. Like the Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton and Cal Burnett. All the Vandrell sisters. Although Kenny and Dolly could just sit on the couch and stare at the camera for an hour. And I'd watch that. Yeah, they are the best. Great entertainers. I love this, too. All right, so where are we in our timeline? Well, Chuck, the Muppet shows just hit. That's right. Things are going pretty well. They have been going pretty well already for Henson. Apparently. In 1970, Rubber Ducky hit number 16 on the Billboard charts. And for those who don't know, Ernie is voiced by Jim Henson. So Jim Henson sang a song, Rubber Ducky, that made it to number 16 on the Billboard charts. That was 1970. A year after the cube. Before the Muppet show even happened. Before Sesame Street even, right? No. Sesame street was 69. Yeah. Same year as the cube. Wow. That's the new touchstone for his life, the Cube. Yes. PC and BC. So the Muppet show was a huge hit. It won a lot of awards. It garnered critical praise and won the hearts of children all over the world. But it was also for adults, too. Oh, yeah. I think that's why he was able to pull it off in Great Britain, because they have better senses of humor. Yeah. And speaking of adults, he got into some more serious themes with his next great show, Fragle Rock In. I never saw a second of that show. Oh, man. Really? Wasn't on HBO? Yeah, it was one of the first HBO original series we either had Showtime or we didn't have HBO. It was awesome. Fragle Rock was great. And the idea there is you had the Fragile gang, and then you had three different groups. You had the home of Dock, who was an inventor, and his dog Sprocket. You had the Fragiles, who shared caves underground of Fragile Rock with their neighbors, the Dozers and the Gorgs, and these gigantic creatures that are in Gorg's garden. And the whole point of that show was to show how different types of people can live together and work together in peace. Right. It was really cool. I didn't know it at the time, when I was twelve years old, but what I was learning about was acceptance. And he won three Cable Ace Awards, five International Emmys, and Fragle Rock was one of the first big hits for HBO as far as TV goes. Yeah, great show, lots of great songs. He had every kind of like he had reggae, rock, country, bluegrass really. He was all over the map with the music on Fragle Rock. He wrote a lot of songs, too. I think he wrote Rubber Ducky. I'm sure he wrote a lot of the stuff on Fragile Rock. It was just yet another thing he did was write music. Renaissance man. The other show that he came out with in the 80s, in the mid 80s that I was big time into was Muppet Babies. I never saw 1 second of that. I love that show. Yeah. We're just enough apart in age where like, certain things I saw you were too young for, and then certain things I was too old for. You know, it's weird though. I'm just going to say this. So Yummy and I are the same age. Her sister is like five years younger than us. And I used to love Muppet babies. Yeah. Yummy's sister used to watch Muppet babies. So Yummy was like, Why were you watching Muppet Babies if my younger sister was watching babies? And yummy didn't watch Muppet Babies? No, she watched like, Donahue or something like that. I watched Muppet Babies. I'm not ashamed anymore to say, well, when was that? 1984. I was 13, so yeah, I was starting to be a teenager. Mother Baby didn't appeal. I think it was on for like four or five seasons. So maybe I was watching it at the beginning of the series. That's what I've been telling you. Maybe in 84 you would have been, what, eight? Yeah. That's perfect age for mother babies. So I think we just saw it on different ends of the series, is what it was. Is that what it is? But have you ever heard of Ron Funches? Yes. The comedian? Yes. He has a little bit about Muppet Babies. It's pretty hilarious. Oh, really? Yeah, he's awesome. Love that guy. Yes, we saw him live. He's just a beautiful human being. Muppet Babies was cartoon, though, right? Right. It was not live puppets. Correct. At all? No, it was cartoon. Okay. It was so cute. Were they just the regular puppets as babies? Yes. Well, I have to watch that sometime. Yeah, and they use their imagination. And Gonzo had a thing for Indiana Jones, so he was frequently exploring caves and swinging on vines with the Indiana Jones fedora on and that kind of stuff. Well, see, I would probably enjoy that now. You would? Yeah, definitely. All right, I'm going to go get Muppet babies. Chuck, he did even more TV that we'll talk about in a second. Okay. Okay. 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. 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 Arcart 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. Okay, and we're back. And we're still in the 80s. That's right. And you were talking about other TV. As we said, the man loved television and filmmaking. And so he got away from the muppets and puppets every now and then. Collaborated with Raymond Scott, who is an electronic pioneer, actually, on shorts called Ripples and Wheels that Go. You did that for the Montreal Expo in 67. And I know we're jumping around in time, but we're just trying to paint the full picture here. Not going necessarily in order. And then he also did this cool thing called The Floating Face, which was a sketch that was on The Tonight Show and The Mike Douglas Show in the 60s. Did you see any of that? A little bit. It's a little weird. It was like two eyes and a mouth and there were like these invisible wires and background images. And it was definitely a little more on that surreal tip. The Henson surreal tip. Yeah. Not kid oriented, necessarily, but he got into the movies with the Muppet movie, which was a big hit. It still holds up, man. It's still so great. If you want to know more about that movie and some of the cool facts from it, go again, listen to the Muppet episode. Yeah. As a matter of fact, pause this. Go listen to the Muppet episode and then come back to this one. It will probably enhance your experience. Agreed. Or listen to them both at the same time. But he followed the Muppet in two. He made The Dark Crystal, which was puppets, and it was based on some drawings by fantasy artist Brian Froud. And there were no humans. It was all puppets. And I don't think it holds up as well. But it still looks pretty good. Well, yeah, I think it actually is probably better received now than it was originally. Yeah, I think critics appreciated it, but it didn't do so well at the box office. But now it's become like it's a cult classic, for sure. Yeah. And one of the reasons why it didn't do that well at the box office, because audiences didn't quite know what to make of it. They heard Frank Oz, who co directed it, jim Henson and puppets, and I think they went expecting the Muppet movie, this is and they got the Dark Crystal instead, which is really dark. The theme is good versus evil, and the evil in it is really evil. And the stuff that happens to some of the puppets, including really cute puppets, is really horrifying. And I read this awesome quote by Frank Oz, and basically he says, jim thought it was okay to scare kids. As a matter of fact, he thought it wasn't healthy for kids to never be scared. He purposefully was trying to scare kids, and he wanted to take the tradition back to like, grim fairy tales, which were very dark graphics. That's a good point. That's what he was going for with the Dark Crystal. Yes. I think it was ahead of its time, for sure. Yes. If you look at some of the CGI movies today, I think that Dark Crystal was a precursor to a lot of those. Right. Then he went on to make the movie The Labyrinth with Bowie, right? Yeah. David Bowie and Verb crew. Young Jennifer Connolly. No, that was a legend. Okay, good movie. But this was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame and then rewritten a bunch by a bunch of other people, including executive producer George Lucas. Labyrinth was okay. Not bad. Again, not a huge hit for Henson, though, as far as movies go. But he was still out there exploring these cool, fantastical worlds and fantasy worlds. Yeah. And he still had a lot of credit, even in the late 80s. If you think about it. His heyday was the late 70s, early 80s with The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie, and then after that, it was like, yeah, I'll try this with Jim henson. I'll try this with Jim Henson? And even still, he was on a pretty great streak. And at the end of the 80s, he had two TV shows on the Jim Henson Hour and The Storyteller. Yeah, the Jim Henson hour. He was always pushing the boundaries. The Storyteller, looking back now I'm sorry, jim Henson Hour, looking back, was really different from what you were getting at the time, because it was all over the map. You had certain shows that were like four or five sketches in one, and then three of the episodes were full on, 1 hour little mini movies. Oh, really? Yeah. From beginning louie yeah, that's a good point. Actually, one of the little mini movies was called Dog City, which was great. It was narrated by Ralph, and I remember watching this. It was like a film noir gangster thing with puppet dogs. And the main character, ASU was the guy who did Elmo, kevin Clash did the character of ACU. And that was fantastic. I think Dog City went on to be a TV show, and it's on right, too, for a little while. But it was really good. I mean, it's totally gangster, crime, film, war, but it's Ralph the dog. Right. The Gang. I love Ralph. It's really cool. The storyteller I hadn't seen before, I was, I guess, aware of, but I don't know why I wasn't watching it, because it would have been, like, right there for me. Yeah. Because I would have been twelve and 1988. But I watched one today, and it was really good. It's like human puppet interaction, and it's just seamless. One of the things from studying this that I've realized is we take for granted and expect our puppet human interactions to be so seamless that we don't even realize that we're looking at puppets right now. And the reason why we expect that is because of Jim Henson and the people he worked with and inspired to work so hard at creating that illusion. Yeah. The illusion that these are living, breathing things. He would go, I remember Kermit as guests on talk shows. Right. He wouldn't go out as Jim Henson. He would go out as I mean, he did those appearances as well. But Kermit the Frog would be a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or host guest host at the night show and Larry King. Yeah. And it was all a part of this goal of making these real people a real living thing. Not people. Yeah. Apparently somebody who was working with Jim Henson was, I guess, a director of The Muppet Show, will be giving Jim notes on Kermit, and Jim would just respond, like, Let Kermit respond. That was freaking out. And the director said, eventually, you're just sitting there. You turn and you address Kermit. Like, he just force you into interacting with the puppet. Even during a note session. Yeah. And probably without feeling silly or stupid or anything, it probably seemed like a totally normal thing to do eventually, once he forced you to do it. He also pioneered the Henson performance control system and won an Academy Award for that. And that was a remote control system that helped puppeteers out. So he was always pushing technical, visual, stylistic, thematic boundaries as far as he could, and they didn't always work. The movies weren't aside from the Muppet movie, they weren't the biggest hits. The TV show. Neither one of those lasted very long. But I think he was just intent on doing something different. Yes, and he did, too. And he died in 1990 of a staph infection. Organ failure brought on by a staph infection. Did you know that? Yeah. I think pneumonia had something to do with it, too, didn't it? Not that I saw. Really? I saw organ failure caused by a group a strep infection. I'm sorry. Not staph. Very sad. And if you're ever in the mood for a good cry, watch the Jim Henson Memorial where Big Bird sings. It's not easy being green. Tough stuff, people. His children, his legacy lives on through Jane. His wife founded the Jim Henson Legacy to preserve his contributions, chairman with the public. And like I said, he donated 500 puppets to the center of Puppetry Arts. And there is also the Jim Henson memorial and Muppet museum and traveling exhibits. And his sons and daughters help run his foundation, and some of them are companies themselves and run the company. The company has changed hands a lot. I have sort of the boring history. When he was still alive, he was going to sell it to Disney for 150,000,000. Yeah. Because apparently he believed in Disney's commitment to characters, so he thought, like, that would be a good place for the Muppets to live. Yeah. And Disney went, wow. He bought it. Yeah. But he did not get that deal finished. But it turns out 150,000,000 was chump change, because in 2000, his children sold the entire company, including the Sesame Street characters, to a German media company for 680,000,000. Wow. And then I believe that company fell on hard times, and they bought it back in 2003 for 84 million. Isn't that crazy? Wow. The henson children are smart. And in between all that, there are various exchanges of percentages of stakes with other companies and rights of certain characters. A little dull to go over all of that, but needless to say, they made up pretty well. And eventually Disney now does own all the Muppet Studio. They own the Muppets. Apparently, the Henson Company sold the rights to the Sesame Street characters to Sesame Street, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And the Jim Henson Creature Shop still builds the Sesame Street puppets and muppets. Yeah. So they sold the rights to the Muppets and Bear in the Big Blue House characters, which I'm not familiar with that one. Nor am I, but Disney wanted I guess that's sort of the player to be named later. That's included in the baseball trade, right? Man, I'm proud of the Hudson Kids. Yeah, they're great. And I hope we get tweeted about this one from them. They seem pretty great. Brian and Cheryl and the gang, they seem like they're doing right by the dad. And there's other siblings, too. And I think they're all involved, super involved. And sadly, Jane passed away, I think in 2013 at the age of 78. I would have loved to have seen what kind of work he did later in his life. Oh, yeah. The fact that he died in 1990 still had, like, a couple of TV shows going. 53 years old. Yes. If you want to know more about Jim Henson, go listen to our Muppets episode. And while you're looking that up, you can also search Jim Henson on the search bar@houseoffworks.com. I'll bring up this great article, and since it's a search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this smart sophomore. Hi, guys. My name is Matt, and I'm a sophomore in high school. Smart Sophomore. I'm a newer fan of the show, and I listen while I do everything. Just wanted to say the Dark Ages were only dark in Europe. The life expectancy in the Dark Ages is actually a little longer than before, but mostly because there were smaller wars. But things were certainly brighter in the Islamic world. In fact, people in the Middle East were really enlightened during this time. Within about 100 years, they conquered a lot of new land, including Spain. Also, the Arabic language grew to be the language of philosophy, medicine, and poetry. And Baghdad became the world's center of scholarship. They translated almost all of the famous Greek philosophers work into Arabic. Muslims developed algebra to simplify inheritance laws, and they made important strides in trigonometry to help people find a way to Mecca. Architecture grew, too. The Great Mosque in Spain only took roughly a year, while medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Wow. So the Dark Ages weren't that dark. And the enlightenment came earlier than most think. And that is from Matt. Thanks, Matt. That is enlightening stuff, my friend. Yeah. Our numerals are Arabic. Yeah, it's true. We should hit on some more Middle Eastern topics. Let's do it, man. Yeah. In the meantime, if you want to suggest some Middle Eastern topics for us, you can tweet them to us at sisk podcast. You can post them on our Facebook page at facebook. Comstuffysheno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseworks.com. And as always, hang out at our beautiful home on the web stuffyshow.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 podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistics made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com. Com." | ||
How Traffic Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-traffic-works | Whether you've been stuck in a traffic jam or forced to merge and avoid road construction, everyone's had a few bad experiences with traffic. But how does traffic actually work? In this episode, Chuck and Josh take a look at traffic waves (and bubbles). | Whether you've been stuck in a traffic jam or forced to merge and avoid road construction, everyone's had a few bad experiences with traffic. But how does traffic actually work? In this episode, Chuck and Josh take a look at traffic waves (and bubbles). | Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:23:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=18, tm_min=23, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=180, tm_isdst=0) | 31443290 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com objects carry a lot of power. They tell stories about people, places, or a time in history. On mysteries at the museum. The podcast from Travel Channel don Wildman searches for objects that tell shocking stories of American history, like the ordinary blue mailbox that changed the course of a massive spy case in the Cold War. Uncover the histories behind extraordinary objects. Listen to mysteries at the Museum on Apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me. It's Charles. Precious Bryant. How are you doing, Precious? This is the podcast based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Yes, that is absolutely right. Word for word. Right. Jerry just got back because you did a spoiler. Yeah, for Precious. I'm known for spoilers, aren't I? Yeah. At least two home. No, there was 6ft under. And there was another one I spoiled, too, wasn't there? Yeah, there was one you spoiled. That was a really old movie. And I was like, come on. That movie is, like 15 years old. Yeah. There's a statue of material. Was it Buck Rubon's eye? Yeah, I think that was it. Yeah, me too. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever been in traffic? That's the best I got. How do you set this up, Chuck? Do you like Steve Winwood? Yeah, you know, I was going to make a traffic the band comment. Have you ever seen the low spark of High heel boys? Yeah, that's it. Seriously? I'm, like, trying to he was, like 16 or 15 when he first joined traffic. Is that right? Steve Winwood. He's a Lotario. And by that I mean a prodigy. Yeah. Traffic. I've been in traffic, buddy. You yes, I have actually been in traffic. Happens a lot because I don't ride Marta. You ride our fine, crippled public transit system here in Atlanta. I'm never in traffic anymore. It's really been a huge difference in my life. Yeah. Well, I don't ride Marta because usually I tend to avoid the smell of urine, and reading while moving makes me sick. Yeah. Plus, I used to value being able to smoke. Yeah, dude, I was just about to say that's why I used to drive. Yeah. And now I'm just like I just do it out of habit. But I get caught in traffic a lot, and it stinks. I don't see you on a public transport. You're not that kind of social. No, that's the other thing, too. It's like, oh, hey, we work together. Let's talk the whole time. No, I wear my sunglasses. It can be dark and raining. And I've told everyone here that if I have my shades on, that means the office is closed. Nice. The store is shut down. That's very nice. You look super cool. Yeah. All right, so I'm a jerk that doesn't talk to co workers now, moving on, buddy. It's okay. Chuck, do you remember when we recorded Quicksand? Yes. Do you remember how we said that there's, like, a finite amount of stuff out there about Quick thing because there's a finite amount to know? Yeah, there's a finite amount to know about traffic, but there is tons of information out there. Yeah. Lots of little side things to know for sure. Yeah. Because ultimately, traffic happens in two ways. One is there is simply congestion. There's just too many cars on the road to carry the flow of traffic quickly. Right. The other way is there is some unpredictable event. Somebody's pulled over, somebody's broken down, there's a wreck. Whether maybe an event that falls under congestion, police have pulled over a traffic speeder. People always slow down for that. And that's it. That's it. Those are pretty much the two broad categories that traffic can be created, right? Yeah. And what happens in each of those events is somebody up front puts on their brakes, and that one press of the brakes travels backwards all the way through. Right. When you have a bunch of different cars in different lanes doing it at the same time, you have traffic. You know what that's called? Traffic wave. Yes, that's true. It's a domino effect. It's very easy. It is. And I came up with my own idea of describing this. You ready? No. Boy. Okay, so what I came up with is called a traffic bubble by Josh Clark. So the traffic bubble happens when somebody is driving along and presses their brakes for whatever reason, okay? And just imagine that when they press that brake, this big bubble grows over the car, and it starts very slowly traveling backwards. And each car behind that car that created the traffic bubble isn't allowed to accelerate again until the traffic bubble is passed through them. Right, but then the further back the traffic bubble goes, the more it dissipates, until eventually the people far enough back don't have to go through the traffic bubble and they're not affected by it. And does the bubble pass through the front cars to where they can then again accelerate? Is that how you see it? Is it a moving bubble? Yes. The bubble travels backwards over the traffic, and then once it passes over, you're allowed to accelerate again. I believe you've just coined the term, my friend. Traffic bubble. Like that jerk science. No, breaking bubble. That's what I called it. Okay. Breaking bubble. Yeah. Like a piping effect. Yes. I hate that guy, and he hates you. I don't care. So traffic. Josh, we can as well throw in a few stats here. Yeah. This one's stat. Heavy. It is. This article by our colleague Jonathan Strickland at Tech Stuff. Yeah. The Baldness podcaster on staff here. What's a good stat? Here the estimated traffic cost to go and talk about cost of traffic. And about five years ago, they estimated about $78 billion. And that's only fuel and wasted time. They don't take into account, like pollution, environmental damage, health cost due to pollution. I mean, it would really add up if you got to include those things. Yeah. And with extra gas that was bought in 2007. Right. Is that the year that study is connected or covered? We in the US. Bought 2.9 billion billion extra gallons of oil because of traffic, and the annual cost for each individual motorist in America was like $710. Just sitting there just from traffic, not from the gas that you need to actually get from point A to point B, but the extra gas used from Idling. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. And I believe La. Tops it out, obviously, at about two weeks a year you potentially spend sitting in your car in traffic. Yeah. La. There's this group called the Texas Transportation Institute, and I think they're out of A and M maybe. Yeah. Texas. Utah. No, it's an okay. They're awesome. They are like, the leaders in studying and understanding and trying to mitigate traffic. Right. And they came up with this thing called the travel time index, right? Yeah. So basically, you take the amount of time it takes, and it's specific to each city, and it's for each city. It's not compared from city to city. It's compared to a certain time in one city to another time in the same city. So in an off peak time, say you can travel the speed limit, it takes you 1 hour to get from point A to point B. Right. In Los Angeles, it would take 1.92 hours. Doubles your time, basically, during rush hour. So it takes twice as long to get from point A to point B during rush hours compared to off peak. What's the travel time index? Yeah. You have to do this anywhere you live where there's heavy traffic. But when I lived in La. I used to have to always think, all right, well, this would take me 45 minutes normally. And when you work in the movie business, you can't be late. That's just not one of the things you do. Yes, I would think so. You've got to be there on time or early. So you're like, well, it's supposed to take me 45 minutes, so I'm going to give myself, like, 2 hours. I gave myself more than double to get anywhere I needed to go. That's very smart. It's awful is what it is. Yeah. La. Is kind of bad, but Chuck, we have it pretty bad, too. Yeah. Atlanta is really bad. We're among, like, probably, I think, the top three or four. I heard a year or so ago that Atlanta had toppled La. But I never saw any citation for it. Well, it depends on how they are rating it. They rate them differently, like the amount of time you spend in your car commuting or the amount of time you sit idling. So it kind of depends. But Atlanta's way up there. Boston, Seattle, San Francisco. Yeah, actually, I think Boston is absent from that. Oh, really? I think that they have made some moves that have kind of mitigated traffic and gotten them off some of the I know the big dig was messing everything up. The big dig was just killing people. Yeah. And DC is awful. Have you ever driven around there? No, I haven't. You mean, you were talking about how especially during the summer, during the travel or the tourist season, it's just mind numbing. It is? Yeah, I mean, way out into the suburbs in Virginia and Maryland sitting there. You know what they did in La. That I saw one time that I'd never seen was I was going down the highway one day and I noticed everyone was slowing down, and I looked up ahead on the expressway, and there were two California highway patrol cars doing huge slow s's back and forth on the six lanes of expressway, not keeping everyone back. Like a pace car. Yeah, like a pace car. But they weren't driving straight. They were driving these big SS like, don't go by me. I've never seen that before in my life. What would have made it even funnier? If they've been driving those s's with their hands out the window and their guns just shooting into the air while they're doing it. That would really say, don't drive past me. Yeah, that would have been great. And apparently they do that I don't know what they call it, but that's to slow everyone down. It's called being a yes. And on that note, my friend Derek has a joke about Atlanta traffic. And he's right, because Atlanta, before there's traffic, everyone's driving really? What, fast? Yeah, that's one of the great characteristics about Atlanta, as far as I'm concerned. You go as fast as you can. I mean, the average flow of traffic, I would say, is about 70 miles an hour around here. And that's with a lot of people all around you. Yeah, everybody's bumper to bumper going at least 70. And the cops don't pull you over unless you're going over 70. And even then, it's usually like you are going 80 or 90 when you get pulled over because everybody else is going 70. Right. And that's, my buddy Derek's joke, is in Atlanta. And it's really true. It's not a joke. Everyone drives as fast as they can every day. Until then, someone wrecks. Right. And then traffic backs up. Right. Every single day. That's Atlanta traffic. Are we done? Let's just sit here and do traffic stories. Yeah. Just talk about what angers us. So check there's a lot of smart people who study traffic because like you said, there's what was it? How much money in 2000 and 578 billion just from fuel and wasted time? Because think about it, a person's time is money. Right. And if you're sitting in traffic, unless you're one of those jerks like me who has an iPhone that emails while he's driving, then you're wasting money. Right. And actually there's a group called Commute Solutions out of Santa Cruz and they calculated the actual cost per mile of driving, not just traffic, but driving to each person is really? Yeah. Wow. And that includes everything. I don't know how they came up with that number, but check it out. Well, if we're talking about highways and stats, we might as well talk about the same. Texas group did a study and they found that traffic over the past 25 years has increased 131% and by 2015 they predict it will go up another 40%. And here's what's remarkable. Only 1.2% of all our roads are highways, yet they shoulder half the traffic, half the car travel. Yeah. Crazy. It is crazy. And you don't usually think about when you think about traffic. I usually think about the highway myself, although I rarely get on the highway anymore. It's all surface streets that I take to and from work. Oh, really? Yeah. What do you go, drew hills. Yeah. Okay. I go basically up Piemont Road, but it's traffic every day. But I don't think of it as traffic. When I think of traffic, I think of 75 at rush hour. Right. And just like exit ramps backed up. The thing is, our service streets are also intended to handle overflow of highway traffic. Right. Yeah. Not just people who are backed up from the exit ramp back onto the street, but I mean, people who are making a conscious decision like me, to find a different way that doesn't have anything to do with the highway. Sure. Right. And they found that if you want to widen a highway, I think we talked about this in like the urban planning one, that when you widen the highway, there's something called latent demand. It's a theory that if you're why on the highway, people like me are going to be like, oh, well, now there's eleven lanes instead of five, so I'll just hop on the highway. Right. And so the demand increases in step with the widening of the lanes. So it actually doesn't mitigate anything by adding more lanes to a highway. Right. I think they said the only way that will work is if they outpace demand with lanes. And that just doesn't happen. There's too many cars, too expensive. But that kind of makes sense to throw that money then instead into upfront costs for a light rail system. You hippy. Actually, I'm still holding out for personal rapid transit that was a polite and me podcast, but it was interesting. That's a good one. You think? Ramp metering, if you're talking about solutions, that's another one. And they had these in La. And they have them here in Atlanta. Now it's where when you go to get on the highway now they have stoplights that just allow one car through every few seconds. So when you get on at Freedom Parkway, I used to fly around that curve it was a a fun curve and jump into traffic and squeeze in however I could. And I was one of those jerks causing traffic. Well, I think anybody entering it because again, with traffic, especially with just straight up congestion, there's just too many cars in one place. Especially when you have a line of traffic and then more people directly adding to that lane. Yeah, right. But ramp metering really works. They did a study in Minnesota, they have 430 ramp meters and in 2000, they shut them all down for seven weeks. And during that time, traffic accidents increased 26%. Then afterward they reinstituted it and they saw the capacity increase by 14%. And they walked away from that project going like, with their hands in their pockets. Yeah, we should probably not tell anybody about that. I was trying to do a Minnesota accent, but that was pretty good. I couldn't do it. All I said was old. I know. It wasn't bad, though. That's how they say it. HOV lanes is another thing that they've done. Pretty much country wide carpool lanes. Those help. Yeah. I always forget when I have another person in the car, though. Yeah. I'll get like halfway where I'm going and say, oh, man, let's get in the carpool lane. Yeah. I have to say, though, the HOV lane, to me, it's an extension of the fast lane. So you got the fast lane and then you have the HOV lane. And I hate it when the fast lane is just the fast lane. The HOV lane is like, I drive as slow as I want, but I have four people in my car. Agreed. It makes it difficult. It's kind of like the HOV lane to me is you have two or more people and you're willing to drive 10 mph faster than anybody else on the highway. Agreed. And since we talked about pet peeves in our last podcast, one of my largest pet peeves is when I'm sitting in traffic and I'll see people speeding by me in the HOV lane by themselves. Nothing bothers me more than people who think the rules don't apply to them. I hate that, too. I hate those people. Or people who use the shoulder and just drive along in traffic as far as they can to get like 50 cars ahead. Yeah, I almost got plowed over in La. One time. I was getting out to get in the regular exit lane and almost got creamed by a truck that was on the shoulder and I screamed at him that he almost killed me. And he says, what are you, a cop? That's la for you. I was like, he literally almost killed me. Yeah. What are you? A cop. If you were a cop, you'd be making Lazy S in front of transporting my gun into the air. Exactly. What else? Josh Lanes. We already talked about that. Yeah, there's that one. Then there's probably the most contentious idea, congestion pricing, which is basically taxing people to drive. And there's a guy named Alistair. Darling. I don't know if he's still the Transportation Secretary, but he's something of a rock star in the transportation world because he was a huge proponent of this. And he said, in England In England, yeah. He was the British Transportation Secretary. He basically said cars. Exactly. A toll on the environment and on the road just by driving on them. So we should charge people to drive on the roads? What he failed to mention is that we already do. There are things called taxes and those are meant to pay for the roads. Right, yeah. He's forgetting about all the other misused money. But they did actually have one in Great Britain. Do they still? Chuck? No, I don't think they ever instituted they had a pilot program from 2003 to seven in London for sure. And it worked like a champ for them in London, at least. Yeah. There was a 30% drop in congestion, 20% decrease in fossil fuel consumption. Wow. 20% decrease in CO2 emissions. So, like in London, Singapore, Stockholm, San Francisco. San Francisco. Did they institute one? No, san Francisco is studying it. New York. Bloomberg has proposed it and they've studied it. And I just pulled this from this week, actually. Lord Adonis is actually, he's the Transport Secretary. Unless it's a new guy. What was your guy? His name is Lord Adonis. Yeah. Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary. I just came up with a new hotel soon and thank you, Chuck. Yeah. That's where Josh will be staying in New York under Lord lord Adonis. It says it has ruled out the introduction of a national road pricing for the next Parliament, but they uncovered that civil servants are still involved with the project and spending money on research, even though they supposedly took it off the table. It was kind of a secret that they were still tinkering with us. Oh, got you. I thought you were saying these people were paying for this research on their own paychecks? No, but they sunk \u00a37.2 million that I guess the public didn't know they thought it was off the table. So they're kind of under some hot water. In some hot water there. They're in some deep quicks in yeah. They said Golden Brown and Alistair Darling have been caught red handed planning a Spy in the sky system. Spy in the sky. Nice. Yeah. Because I guess we should probably explain congestion pricing. Basically every car on the road. I guess when you would go get your vehicle tag or something, you also get a radio frequency Identifier. Right? Right. And as you're driving, some satellite is tracking you or you pass through some sector or something like that, and all of a sudden you're in a toll area. And much like, say, one of those toll passes, you are sent a bill, or you have to set up like a credit card or a bank account attached that to your tag, and it just draws money from it based on however much you drive in there. In Singapore, when they first instituted theirs, and actually in 1995, they had a flat rate for downtown, which is the most congested during peak hours. You had to pay $3 to just drive around downtown. You could drive around all you wanted. And as they've gotten better at it, they're getting a little fancy schmancy with it. Well, if you want to drive here, it's a dollar 75 for 20 minutes, but you can back two blocks over and it's just fifty cents and so on. Well, that's one of the rubs. That one of the big things is in England, at least in other places, too, I think they've suggested paying more for peak hour. Right. So be flexible in your work schedule. Right. But then, of course, people that are a friend of the poor say that's regressive taxation, because white collar dudes can be all flexible and work from home, but the poor have to get up and go to work during peak hours. Right. So they're basically paying for the road that the rich man drives online. Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's the big problem. Aside from having to pay to drive with a congestion tax. Yeah. What else can you do, Chuck? And also, remember we were talking, this isn't just highways. Surface streets, too. Everybody don't get all anxious. We're talking about surface streets as well. Yes, surface streets. You get a lot of suburban sprawl. Like here in Atlanta, you've got like out in Roswell 20 years ago, it was desolate cow patties. And now it's all young families moving out there who don't want to be around urban types. Yeah. And you have a lot more cars. Again, that one of two ways that you can cause traffic. Just put more cars on the road than it's designed to handle. And then out in the boonies like that, they weren't built for they were built for farmland. All of a sudden, they got all these suburban people moving out there. Traffic lights is something they can do. Yeah. This one disturbed me. So you have a traffic light that is on a timer, right? Yeah. Which is I hate those things so much, especially when they're poorly timed. Decatur is awful. Yes, Decatur is awful. There's another one for the Piedmont Park parking deck. Oh, really? And it just does whatever it wants, no matter what time of day and if there's a car there or not, people have just stopped in either direction. Right. And that's a time light. And time lights are awful. They're awful. Right. Then you have sensor lights, which are awesome because you just come up in the way to your car triggers it. Yeah, those are good. Or you have a mix system that uses timing and sensors and it changes depending on the kind of day where it is. You can set up a citywide comprehensive traffic light plan. Some cities have this. Even the best mixed citywide comprehensive traffic light plan reduces congestion by 1%. Really? Yeah. Atlanta's bad about that, at least in my area. And Jerry can confirm this. She kind of lives over near me. But there's all these scenarios where you'll stop at a light that's timed to not part of the smart light system is that they're all timed to work together. So, like, if you sit here at this corner and you take a ride on red, there's not another red light waiting on you. And then that turns green and then 30 more feet, there's another red light. They should be timed out to where we're green in La. That's one thing I will say. There's a lot of traffic. It's just because the people, they do the best they can. You look down, they have these long, long straight streets in Hollywood, and late at night, you'll be sitting on Hollywood Boulevard at a red light and you'll see you'll see like eight lights turn green on that New Balance commercial. Yeah. With that woman running, and she pushes herself to make all the lights doomed to failure. But still, it was a nice effort. I would go longer in La just to get off the highway, even if it took me longer just to feel like I was moving. Yeah. And Chuck, I'm about to spoil it for all of our British, UK, English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish friends who are typing an angry corrective email about Alistair Darling. He is not the Transportation Secretary. He was the British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Lord Adonis is the Transport Secretary. And me and your hotel name, we were talking about people studying this kind of thing. There's all sorts of really cool quantifications for traffic. My favorite is the passenger car equivalent. Let's hear it. Okay, so you have a passenger car is, say, a sedan, an average sedan, toyota Camry. Okay. All right. Or to be fair, a Honda Accord. Right. Okay. That is like just an average car that you can fit four people into and it drives down the road pretty responsive. Sure. An SUV or a bus or a van is not as responsive because they're larger and because they take up more space, they are slower to accelerate and so they exact a heavier burden on a highway during congestion. Okay, right. So what they've come up with are passenger car equivalent. So an SUV is 14 PCE. Sure. Right. And then a city bus is like 4.4 PCE. That means it's like four cars, right? Yeah. It has the same as far as, like, accelerating after breaking and just the space it's taking up, that's the equivalent of a passenger car. So one good solution to traffic is everybody driving smaller cars. Yeah, no kidding. And virtual slots, right? Yeah. What's the deal there? Each car has a certain amount of space it takes up and don't try and fit into a slot that's smaller than your car. Is that how it works? No, it's pretty much virtual slots, like Tetris. Yeah. If you just imagine that there is basically a rectangle around your car, like bubble. A bubble but not a brake bubble. Okay. You want to avoid the brake bubble, but this is more of a rectangle, and it kind of hugs the sides of your cars, but it's longer on the front and back. Right. And if everybody's car stays in the slots that are on the highway, you just kind of pull into them as you're driving and the slots are going like all the same rate. Then as long as there's not too many cars on the road or more cars than there are slots, there should be no traffic. Yeah, but that never happens because all this is pie in the sky. Well, yeah, because invariably you're sitting in the lane and you're like, oh, well, that lane is moving now. And then you get over that lane, you're like, oh, now that lane is moving. And you keep going back and forth where if you stayed where you are, if everyone stayed where they were, you would all get there quicker. Or if everybody just stayed at home. Yeah. Yes, good point. Put your jobs, stay at home. Right. So that's our two cent. And if you want to learn more about traffic, we've been killing the articles with cool flash animations, haven't we? Did this have one? It has a flash animation about a traffic wave. Cool. No brake bubble, though. I'm going to see about having somebody add one of those. Coin the term, my friend. You can type in traffic. I think it'll bring up a bunch of stuff in the handysearchbarhoustuffworks.com, which means it's time for listener questions, it's time for Facebook questions. Yes. As we said in that other podcast on Quicksand we took, we post on Facebook, hey, give us some questions. We'll answer like ten of them really quickly. We got 180 of them in an hour. This comes from Chelsea. What's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten? Tripe for me, which is intestines. Go ahead. What's yours? I've had fried chicken hearts. I've had beef tongue. Yeah, I've had tongue. My favorite is Bomera. Really? Highly recommend. Anywhere you can find bome marrow, just eat it. The only place down here is Rathburns, and it's okay. Yeah, if you go to Rathburns, you got to get one of. The steaks. No, not Rathburns steaks. Regular Rathburns. Yes. Strangely, it doesn't have bone marrow there, but yes, those weird stuff. All right, I got your questions right there. You want to read one? Yeah, I guess. This one's from Jacob. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around here, and Jacob hyphenates no one which, frankly, I find like Flourish. Nice. Yes. Except for a tape recorder, which absorbs the radiant vibrations and can later play them back as audible waves, did the tree really make a sound? The answer is yes. Kristen says we're Kristen Candace Now and who does the intro for the podcast. Chris Paulette is co host of Tech Stuff Now and has been for quite a while. He's made it. Hometown boy, made good. Candice Gibson Keener has gotten married and she stepped out of the limelight to concentrate on just being an editor. But she's still here. Sits right next to Josh and Roxanne does the intros for the podcast. She's our head of video. There you go. That is not Jerry. A lot of people think it's Jerry. There are some comprehensive answers right there. Rachel says she currently lives in Athens. G a go dog. I'd love to hear more about your experience living here where you hang out your favorite bands and see what other fond or not so fond memories you might have of Athens. She says we have quite a following there. Did you know that? No. I didn't either. My bar was Roadhouse. I hung out at Roadhouse all the time. I was a Georgia bar guy. Did you? Yes. And we should point out that the Georgia bar, the Globe and the Roadhouse made up the bar Muta triangle and you could access them all through the alley to get to the next most decidedly could. Quite often you would hop around depending I just stayed at Roadhouse. I hope Roadhouse is still there. It's got to be. Yeah, it is. And then, of course, I was like Wilson Soul Food and Guthrie, which in my opinion is superior to Zakspeeds, even though it's the same thing. Yeah, I was automatic for the people. Were you? Yes. I lived right around the corner from there. Remember? What was the name of the restaurant I went to? Weaver Dees. Automatic for the People. Yes. That was good, too. I liked Wilson's because the owner walked around and he's like 4ft tall and he shook hands with everybody. Right. Nice guy. And, of course, Harry Besett. I never went there. Oh, my God. That was a fat bar. You went there? I could go. It wasn't just the bar. Like, the food was amazing. I put the food up against any in Atlanta. Euro rap. Man, I need a lot of Euros in college. Yeah. All right. Time. Kristen. No. Randy. Who's the cat who won't cop out when there's danger all about? I think we both know. Shaft. Nice. Who's the cat that won't cop out. It's one of the lesser quoted lines from that song. Yeah, I've got one from Chevon. How do your significant others feel about your legion of man crushes and equally strong lady crushes? Chuck, I wasn't aware that anyone had a crush on us. Were you? I didn't know that. I've seen that before, but Emily thinks it's funny. Does she? Sure. Yeah, it is funny. No, I'm not telling you. If only people could see our stomachs. So much hair and blink. Laura, how many emails do you get for podcast? We get about 300 a week. Laura Allen, who put the bomb in the bomb? Shabbamp. Shabomp. The only reason I read that is because he stressed his mill house in his picture. Nice. And who was your most surprising celebrity fan? We've only got a few that we know of and they're all surprised. Each one is more surprising. I've got one. I can't remember her name. There's a girl who stars in Secret Life of the American Teenager. She's a fan of the show. She tweeted that she was on set, like, in between shooting and listening to Stuff You Should know. Yeah. John Hodgman. I was pretty knocked out by that. That's pretty cool. Bradley Cooper. Yeah. Will Wheaton. Yeah. Renee Zellweger. Aisha Tyler. Yes. And a couple of The Daily Show guys. Wyatt's Nick. Yeah. Joe Randazzo, the editor in chief of The Onion. In fact, if you are a celebrity that we did not mention, we would love to know that you listen to us. We're just kind of thrilling. We're like we're nobody. So when we hear that, I think it's cool. Yeah. I got one more. Pirates out. Shelley says pirates are ninjas. Ninjas. Clearly. Definitely. That's it. Okay. Chuck's given the he's out in Vegas yeah. It's like when the dealer finishes their round or whatever. There's got to be a name for it. If you know the name for that, we want to know. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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How Mars Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mars-works | Sure today Mars would kill you with its thin, toxic atmosphere and cold desert temperature swings of 100 degrees, but early on it and Earth were practically twins. Find out how the two planets diverged and if there might be life on the Red Planet. | Sure today Mars would kill you with its thin, toxic atmosphere and cold desert temperature swings of 100 degrees, but early on it and Earth were practically twins. Find out how the two planets diverged and if there might be life on the Red Planet. | Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:37:46 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=14, tm_min=37, tm_sec=46, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=112, tm_isdst=0) | 49189682 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and his Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. We all have I Boogers, because this is an early morning unusual early morning edition of Stuff You Should Know. Welcome to Morning Edition. We should just talk like this. We got taken to task in a snide email from a morning talk show TV show host. Did you see it about the Inquisition? Yeah. He's like, way to release the inquisition on Ash Wednesday. I was slapping his face, so I responded. I said, Actually, it came out on Fat Tuesday. And by sheer coincidence, he's like, yeah, thanks for the reply. I responded to him, too. Yes. I was like, Man, I wish I was that clever. I said, I had no idea. Yeah. Sounds like our medical marijuana episode being our 420th utter complete coincidence. Guaranteed, everybody, I think over the course of 600 plus shows, you're going to have some weird coincidences like that. Yes. I certainly didn't know it was Ash Wednesday. I didn't either until I went to the mall yesterday evening and a third of the people were walking around with charcoal crosses on their forehead. Nice. It's like, I had no idea Atlanta has this many Catholics. Get going. They're everywhere. They sure are. Well, I mean, they didn't used to be. I grew up Baptist here, and I didn't know many Catholics growing up. Well, Atlanta became a transplant town since yeah, exactly. And I'll tell you about another transplant, Chuck. Yes. Possibly life here on Earth from Mars. Oh, yeah. Is this your intro? Have you got breaking news? No, that was it. Do you remember we did an episode on the origin of life on Earth? Remember? Yeah. And one of the possibilities is that it was from Mars. And one of the pieces of evidence of this possibility was the Allen Hills rock from Antarctica, a Martian meteorite that was discovered in 1984 that was studied and studied and they thought in 1996, basically, Bill Clinton said, we found evidence of life on Mars. And then they studied it again and they were like, maybe not another studying it again. They're saying? Yeah, it's possible. It's very possible that this 4.1 billion year old rock is showing evidence of fossilized nanobacteria. And this is all still Bill Clinton saying this is underwear at home. He's the authority. He's talking to the TV again. Nice. But, yeah. We're going to do how Mars works. Tom Hanks. This one's for you, big space guy. Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. I didn't know if I was missing something there. Like, he did some movie that I didn't know about. No, if I said, Gary Sinise, this one's for you, it would be a Mission to Mars reference. I did not see that. Mind bogglingly. Odd and pretty bad. Yeah, I heard. That's why I didn't see it. That and Red Planet didn't see either one of those Red Planet I don't know about. Yeah. But that kind of brings us to a point that we've long been fascinated with the Red Planet going back to War of the Worlds and early science fiction and Martians and Mars is just always captivated us because sometimes you can see it with a telescope. Yes. And it's not like what's on the other side of is it Venus? Venus, yeah. We don't know much about Venus router and mystery. There are no Venusians that we're afraid will come down here and attack us. I think it's Venusians. Venusians, which is different from Venetians. Yes. Which are people from Venice. Right. Which, strangely enough, kind of coincides with a guy named Giovanni Shia Pereli. He might not have been from Venice, but that man was definitely from Italy. You think? Yeah. Can you say his name for everybody? Chuck. Who? Giovanni? Shepareli. No, it's good, that guy. Man have you been practicing at home? No, I just need a lot of pasta. That's good stuff. Man so Sheparily, in 1877, decided to draw a map of Mars and his conception of Mars. What became the popular conception, if it wasn't already, was that Mars was a lush planet with civilizations, and he named the regions of Mars accordingly. Like Elysium. Yeah. Which culture believes that that was heaven? I don't know. I can't remember. Man I haven't heard that. Yeah, we've discussed it before. Elysium. I haven't retained that. Another part was called utopia. Arcadia. Basically, all these different names for paradise reflected the idea that Mars was very similar to Earth, most likely inhabited by intelligent beings. And as proof, Shia Puertoi drew canals that he noticed on Mars, which suggested that this advanced civilization had dug canals to route water from the polar ice caps, which are visible here on Earth, to the central locations where their civilizations were. You get water to the Martians. Yeah. And this established, like, what Earthlings thought of Mars for 100 years, almost. Yeah. About 40 years after that, a US. Astronomer named Percival Lowell wrote a book, also about Mars where he actually talked about civilizations. And the problem was, he wasn't really based on anything. They might as well have been science fiction. Right. And yet they named the little observatory after him. Oh, really? I believe so. He was an astronomer, so it's not like he wasn't just making stuff up. But he didn't have, like, hard evidence. He made a lot of stuff up. Okay. Well, he interpreted it without any evidence yeah. And then wrote a book. And that became the impetus for Mars based science fiction. Yes. It really captured folks. And that's when, like, I talked about War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Princess of Mars, and it's just always been just out there staring down at us. Yeah. Speaking of War of the Worlds, it even says that in this article. It did not cause a national panic in 1938. That's a myth. Did you know that? I don't know. I'm not sure I knew the full story. Supposedly. Who directed Citizen Kane? Orson Welles. When Orson Welles carried out this radio yeah. It scared everyone. Right. It caused a panic for a wild in the streets, committing suicide, doing all sorts of stuff. No, it isn't true. Apparently the newspapers got wind of this rumor and played it up. And the reason they played it up was to prove that radio couldn't be trusted as a source of news because it was a big competitor to newspapers at the time. Have you done? Don't be dumb on that. No. Maybe I will. Can I plug that? Go ahead. Josh has a web series called Don't Be Dumb. It is very funny and strange and you learn stuff. It's like it's a perfect one, two, three, punch weird funny, and you walk away with some knowledge. Thanks, man. And everyone likes it, that watches it, so we just need more people to watch it. Give me the weird sausage finger Steve McQueen clap. That is weird. Oh, the director? Yeah, he was clapping weird, wasn't he, at the Oscar? Apparently he and the screenwriter who won an Oscar for that movie for Twelve Years a Slave, do not like each other. They shoot over the writing credit. Oh, yeah. The writer walked right past him and Steve McQueen didn't even turn to look at him as he was walking up to get his Oscar. I did kind of notice that. Yeah. Well, if you read Delisted, he rooted it out and found out that it was overriding credit. Is that why he was clapping weirdly? Yeah, he was showing his disdain with sausage finger weird. All right, so this weird early fascination with Mars, like I said, we didn't have a lot of information other than just sort of looking at it from Earth. Right. And it wasn't until the that we started in many countries started exploring Mars, but we started sending orbiters to take a closer peak, and then eventually orbiters led to landers and rovers, and it's been kind of a prime directive of NASA for a while. One of them, and it was when they scrapped the space shuttle program. I remember NASA was saying, like, don't worry, everybody, we're going to go to Mars. We're going to focus on Mars. That's why we're not doing the shuttle anymore. Right. And apparently they are. There was just as recently as yesterday, NASA testified about its budget, and they were saying, well, we've got a really great thing planned. We're going to get this asteroid, we're going to maneuver it with a robot into lunar orbit so we can go visit it later. And the senators at this hearing basically said, boring. Really? Yeah. They're like, what's this backup Mars mission listed? And they're like, oh, well, we're talking about doing a man fly by a Venus and Mars in 2021. The centers are like Mars, Mars, mars. So it looks like NASA is going to be forced to go to Mars whether they like it or not. So it's still captivating if it's captivating the dumb dumbs in Congress. Well, they even said, like, the asteroid mission, that's not going to spur the public the public imagination. Like sending a person past Mars. That's what you want to do, NASA. And NASA is like, all right, but we could probably mine the asteroid. And the senators are like Mars, Mars, Mars. And they all went to a bar afterwards. Yeah. Okay, Jim, you want to go to Mars? He was like, all right. Yeah, I guess so. All right, so where should we start here? Well, let's start with the origin of Mars. It seems pretty appropriate. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I love how scientists piece together ancient history of the cosmos yeah. Without having ever sent a geologist there. Even before the rovers, it was basically all just based on photographs and surmising from those. Now we've got the Curiosity rover, the third rover up there. It's still up there, right? Yes. Or it doesn't come home, does it? No, it won't. But it's still operational. Yeah. And they were thinking I think it was a two year mission, but it could go longer than that. I think it's already gone a little longer than that, because I think it went up is it really? Already? I think it went up in late 2011. Oh, wow. So things been there a little over two years. Well, good going, Curiosity. I might be wrong. All right, so there's basically five things that they surmise happened to form ours, which will list and then get into in more detail. It initially formed from clumping together of little tiny objects until it made a big round planet. It was an accretion disk. Yeah. Just like Earth. Just like Earth. Then there was a lot of meteor bombardment all over the solar system, and Mars was, of course, affected. Just like Earth. Just like Earth. And the Moon. The mantle was very hot and pushed through the crust, lifting up portions of it, just like Earth. And then there were a couple of I don't know how many, but at least a couple of periods of lots of volcanoes going on. Say it just like her lava flows. And then finally the planet cooled down in the atmosphere, thinned out to leave us with Mars. Unlike Earth. Right. And Mars formation was virtually identical to the process that formed Earth. It's about half the size, but in the beginning, as far as makeup and the processes that they were undergoing, they were virtually identical. Yeah. And being half the size is pretty key to why it's not like Earth more. One of the reasons. So I guess we should get into some more detail about this. I think we should. The accretion that you talked about, these small objects took about 100,000 years, and as the gravitational field got stronger, it kept pulling in more of the stuff and it would crash into the planet and get hot, basically, and just sort of meld together. Yeah. It's like, oh, Mars. And that was interesting. I looked up why planets are round, and the reason why is because the gravitational field and the spin is sucking everything into the dense core. Yeah. Well, the gravitational field behaves like it's coming from the center and everything else thinks it's coming from the center, including me. So the only way to get everything as close to the center as possible is to make a sphere. Like, obviously, if you had a square, that would be a corner that's not as close as other parts. That'd be a creepy planet. Like a cube. Yeah. But I wondered, why doesn't it look like an asteroid? Let's say. But asteroids don't have the kind of gravitational force to draw everything in like that to form that sphere. Right. It's called Isota adjustment. Nice. Yeah. I just thought, Wait a minute. All these things are perfectly round or not perfectly round. I want more pyramid shaped planets. That'd be kind of cool. All right. So that was the accretion. And now you have gas being released from cooling after the core and mantle and crust have formed in this hot ball. Right. And as the gas are being released in the hot ball, they are forming this atmosphere. They're supporting an atmosphere. They're floating out and kind of hanging around. So you've got an atmosphere in place. Yes. You have a molten core. You have a softer mantle and then a crust that formed like Earth. Yeah. And as that softer mantle in the molten core press up, you have volcanic activity. Yeah. Which releases even more heat and gas, which makes the atmosphere even thicker. And at this point, they think that there is a period of water presence on Mars where it was raining. So then after you got a primitive atmosphere, and then, as it says in the article by Craig He's, great writer for us. Yeah, PhD. That's right. He said March couldn't catch a break, which was pretty accurate. And it was pounded by meteors in the solar system, forming craters and basins and all sorts of interesting landforms. And the same thing happened here, but we had, like, water and things like that to cause erosion and fill it in on the Moon. There isn't anything like that. So you still see those craters. Right. But the same thing happened on Mars. Yeah. And actually, there was water on Mars. That bombardment that caused the magma to come up out of the core of Mars, creating volcanic activity and shifts in the mantle and the crust all released hot gas into the Martian atmosphere, which thickened it and increased its temperature. Which led to rain. Yes, rain, flooding, erosion. So there was like a period, at least for a little while, of the presence of water on Mars. There still is dude. The presence of unfrozen flowing water. Yeah, there's not flowing water. As of September of last year, they found water in the dirt. Yes. It's pretty exciting. Two pints per cubic foot. Yeah, but it's a spoiler. Sorry. Actually, it can't be a spoiler, but it happened in the batch, right? Yeah, but if no one if you haven't heard of it yet all right, sorry, everyone. So then Craig, likens, to Mars at this point is a soft boiled egg. And as the eggshell is cooling, the yolk is going to start busting through the mantle. And that's, like, on Earth, is what is going to form things like volcanoes. And again, those volcanoes. And the activity led to that atmosphere in the periods of rain and flooding and erosion. Yeah. Olympus Mons. Yeah. That's a good pixie song. Is that a Pixie song for a dream of the Olympus Mons? Nice. Yeah, I don't think I need that one. What was that on? Chocolate Mons? Yeah. Okay. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano there, and it makes Mount Everest looks like a molehill. As a matter of fact, it's the largest point in the known solar system. The highest point? Yeah, the tallest. Remember our mythbusting episode where we showed that Mount Everest wasn't the tallest mountain? It's Mount Aloa. Yeah. On Earth, Mount Aloe is something like 6 miles from the ocean floor. Yeah. Nice chuck. And it's 140 miles wide at its base. Yeah. That's a big mountain here on Earth. On Mars, which is, again, half the size of Earth in diameter. Olympus Mons is 16 miles tall. And that's not from an ocean floor either. No, because there is no ocean on Mars. Exactly. But if you want to see something cool, type in Mars. What would Mars look like with ocean? And people have done, like, simulations of it. It looks really neat, like vacation worthy, like you would want to go there to vacate. That means like a sunny beach with ocean. It looks like Earth, but with weird continents. Okay. And then it's 370 miles across. Olympus Mons. Is that's large? It's big. And they have pictures, if you Google it. But compare it to Everest and it just dwarfs it. That's right. And you can see pictures of it, too. They snap photos of it. It's pretty impressive, right? Big, large volcano, which eventually went dormant. All the volcanoes on Mars went dormant. That's right. Somewhere possibly about 3 billion years ago. And as the volcanoes went dormant, the heat was released. Basically, Mars had no more heat to give from its core, which meant the atmosphere wasn't being fed any longer. So it thinned, which led to a drop in temperatures. Yeah. And how we mentioned earlier how the fact that it was smaller than Earth is one reason why it's not more like Earth. That's the reason it cooled so fast. Yeah. Like Earth wouldn't have cooled nearly as fast. No. And it also kept the magnetic field going. Thanks to its molten core, mars did not any longer. So you got a thin atmosphere, cold temperatures. The atmosphere that was there started freezing and falling to Mars and was stored as ice. Any water that was already on the planet's surface turned into permafrost. And Mars underwent what's called the great desiccation event, where it became a barren, deserted desert planet. Yeah, before that, this kind of happened in cycles for a while, like the volcanic action, and then the gas is being released and like, major flooding from water until, like you said, eventually it's the cold. Not hot, but cold, dusty place that we love today. Yes. And what's interesting is that Earth and Mars were so similar as they formed. And about at the same time, about 3 billion years ago, mars underwent the great Desiccation event and Earth underwent the great oxygenation event which gave rise to all life here on Earth. The appearance of algae, which created a breathable atmosphere almost at about the same time. So they totally diverted two different paths at around the same time. I wonder if the main reason was because of its size. Yeah. The cooling on another earth. Yes. It's interesting. Had it been the exact same size, who knows? Yeah. Maybe we'd be, like, going there and back right now, right? On vacation. Yeah, like Arnold. That was a good one for Colin Ferrell. Did you see the remake? No, although I heard the RoboCop remake was, like, surprisingly good. I haven't seen it. Expecting that. I haven't seen it either. Yeah, I'll definitely wait for TV for that one. You really don't care about seeing that one? No. Not even DVD like TV. Well, I don't watch DVDs. Okay. I'm streaming like the rest of the modern world. Not even a laser disc. Should we talk about what it's like there? Yeah. On the surface? Yes. The surface of Mars. Scientists have divided it into three major parts the southern highlands, the northern plains and the polar regions, which we already said you can actually see from Earth. Yeah. Polar ice caps. Yeah, just like Earth. But the ice caps are made of carbon dioxide. So it's dry ice. Ice caps. And then underneath there is water ice. Yeah. So the southern highlands are vast. I love our morning shows. It's always a little more like laid back, I feel like. Yeah, like I'm sleepy. Yeah. You're not riddled with anxieties yet? No, that comes on about noon. Yeah, I haven't had enough coffee yet. So you've got your southern highlands and like I said, they're expensive and vast and it is elevated. It's the highest part of Mars and heavily cratered. And again, the highest part of the solar system. Right. Because it's where Olympus Mons is. That's right. In the southern region. The southern highlands. And the scientists think it's ancient, these highlands, because of the craters, because the cratering happened close to 4 billion years ago. And that was just meteors kind of just pounding the solar system all over the place. So the Southern Highlands are high, and then there's a very pronounced drop of several kilometers down to the Northern Plains, which are low lying regions. They're a lot like the seas on the Moon, but they do feature raised areas. Plateaus? A couple of them. Yeah. The cinder cones. Yeah. Well, the cinder cones are on the plateaus. I think basically the mantle bulged up through the crust. It's thinner in the northern region, and the mantle just pushed up and formed like continent sized plateaus that are called crustal upwarps. That's a great word. Yeah, I kept thinking I was reading it wrong. No, crestal upwork. And these crystal upworks, there's two of them. One is smaller. It's Elysium. Remember paradise. That's right. And the other one is called Tharsis in the Northern Hemisphere is divided into Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Tharsis is in the west and Elysium is in the east. Yes. Celestial names are so cool. They really are. What do we have on Earth? New Jersey. Not Tharsis. No. Or Elysium. We should start a campaign to Rename, New Jersey. Tharsis and then like, the main city could be Tarsus City, which sounds super futuristic right. When in fact, it's Newark. Every citizen has issued a sparkly silver jump. So you've called out olympus Mons is the highest point. That is where it's in the Tarsus region. Okay. Which this article is confusing because it mentions the Tharsis region in the Southern Hemisphere and in the Northern Hemisphere. And I looked all over the place to find definitively where it is. And I think the discrepancy comes from the fact that it's equatorial. Oh, okay. It's pretty close to the equator. Olympus Mons definitely is. All right, maybe it's both. Right. But it's about at that point that the Highlands drop off into the Northern Plains. That's right. And Anthracis, you have some pretty impressive canyons, a system called the Valis Mariners, and it makes the Grand Canyon look like a tiny little hole in the ground. It is 370 miles wide and 26,400ft deep. Not to slam the Grand Canyon, but if you've ever been there, imagine something dwarfing that even. Right. And again, Mars is half the size of Earth. Right. And it doesn't even just dwarf the Grand Canyon. It's bigger than the Mariana Trench, which is 1580 miles long. So it's a good 1000 miles longer than the Mariana Trench. And the Mariana Trench is 43 miles wide. The Valleys marineras is 370 miles wide. Yeah. That's nuts. Yeah. So it's a big old trench. You can't even comprehend that kind of size when you're standing there. No, I imagine when you're in it, you can't see the edges or anything like that. Of course you can't be in it because people can't go to Mars. But I know what you mean. We will eventually elon Musk predicts he will retire and die and be buried on Mars. He said it's not a certainty, but it's a possibility. But that's his goal. Yeah. Wow. He's got the dough to make it happen, I guess. And the vision, like, you say the same thing, but you've just got the vision. Right. You don't have the billions of dollars. And it's not even my vision. I'm just reporting what Elon Musk said. I thought you wanted to do that as well. Go to Mars. You want to get shot out of a cannon? I abandoned that a long time. I just did. Yeah. What's the new plan? Just to be cremated and distributed with yummy. Okay. That's nice. Yes. She's really calmed you down. She's like, first things first. This cannonball thing, right? It's got to go. Yeah. The polar regions you can see from Earth, like we said, and it is surrounded by a bunch of dunes. And I think you said it was frozen carbon dioxide. Right. So it's not like the ice we have here on Earth. No. Well, we have it here on Earth. Dry ice. Well, yeah, but just it's not our polar ice cap. And like Earth, depending on the season, the ice caps are going to change shape in the summertime. The CO2 from the northern caps melt away and there's water ice below that. So not dry ice, as they call it in Spanish, agua ice. And that's why, apparently we sent the Phoenix there. They were like, send that thing up there and dig down into the frozen dirt and let's see what it's made up of. Right. And they found water. They found two pints. Phoenix didn't find it. Phoenix found that the Martian soil is filled with perchlorate, which is a big problem for Mars missions. Yeah. That's, like, very bad for human beings. It's extremely toxic. It's a thyroid toxin. It has a very quick effect. It has a developmental effect on infants and fetuses. So reproducing on Mars would be a big problem. And even in adults, it has a big effect on your thyroid, which affects your hormone production function. And it's everywhere. It's in the light Martian dust. And Mars has tons of dust storms that envelope the whole planet, which we'll talk about yeah. For like, weeks at a time. Yeah. And there's perchlori in those dust storms, so it would get everywhere. So they just found out, like, a couple of months ago that this is everywhere. And it's going to be a huge challenge to Mars missions in the future. But they're saying now that we know about it, we can design around it. Yeah. It just seems so uninhabitable. I don't know if in our lifetime we're going to see it a manned mission, maybe. We'll definitely see a flybyn. Flyby. Yeah. Okay. You and Elon Musk. That's not even just me. That's me. Elon Musk in the Senate. Okay. Yeah. Mars. They're all so excited. So, Chuckers, up next we're going to talk about the interior of Mars because it's what's on the inside that counts. That's right. But we're going to do that after these messages. Okay, so we're back and we're talking about Mars'interior. And to talk about Mars'interior is really boring unless you compare it to Earth, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is cool, so let's compare it to Earth. Okay. The Earth's core has a radius of about 2200 miles from the center to the surface and is made up of iron in two parts, the solid core and the liquid outer core. Right. And the interplay between those two creates Earth's magnetic field, which allows for the northern lights oh, yeah. Encompasses what else? That's about it. Okay. Mars core radius is only about 900 between 900 and 1200 miles. And it is probably made up also of iron, but throwing some sulfur, maybe a little oxygen. And they believe I didn't get this. He said it may be molten, but it's unlikely. So they still don't know, I guess. No, they think that the reason they don't think that it's molten, though, is because Mars has a very weak magnetic field, but maybe not always. Yeah, it probably had a strong magnetic field before the great desiccation event. Right. But now it doesn't have one. And they think that if it is molten, there's not a lot to it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Around the Earthscore is softer mantle, like toothpaste, and it's way less dense. And it is iron and magnesium silicate about 1800 miles thick. And that's when you see a volcano and lava flowing from a volcano. That's where that's coming from? Well, it comes from the magma through there, the liquid. Right? Isn't it? I think so. We did a podcast on volcanoes, remember? That was a good one, the volcanoes one. I thought so. I was worried about it. And chuck the mantle pushing up through the surface accounts for those crustal. Uplifts. Upwarps, yeah, that's right. And here on Earth, we have things like volcanoes, active volcanoes and earthquakes. And they're largely due to, if not exclusively due to the fact that we have continental plates. Right. Like the crust of Earth, which Mars also has a crust, earth's crust is broken up into these plates that drift and move around slowly and rub up against one another. And that's where fault lines exist. And along those fault lines, you have volcanoes and earthquakes. Right. On Mars, that's not the case. It has a crust, but it's not broken into place. It's solid. Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah. And that's why there's no active volcanoes right now, for one reason. Yeah. And while we're talking about Mars, well, we probably should have mentioned it on the surface, but it's a neat little tidbit if you ask me. Do you know why Mars is rust colored? No. Because it's coated in rust. Yeah. It's oxidized iron in the soil, which makes it rusted. It's a rusty old planet. A rusty. Dusty, cold, windy, uninhabitable, perhaps planet. Yeah. And again, the reason why it's probably uninhabitable is it lacks an atmosphere. Or it practically lacks an atmosphere. There is a very thin one still. Yeah, I guess we can compare that to Earth, too. Mars's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. 95.3%. On Earth, it's less than 1%. Right. Like you could just stop right there. Yeah. Toxic. Yeah. A lot less nitrogen. 2.7% compared to Earth, 78%. Not much oxygen at all. Only 0%. That's a big factor. Toxic again. And about one 1000 as much water vapor is on Earth. Yeah, you need that, too, inhospitable. Which is why there are proposals to seed Mars to TerraForm it. Yeah. Basically go in and artificially stimulate an atmosphere to form so that in 10,000, 50,000, 10,0000 years, it could conceivably be habitable. Yeah. And we did a show on that, too. This is all coming together. It's a long term plan, but sure. Which means we'll never do it. Elon Musk will, maybe his grandchildren. So the atmospheric pressure on Mars is interesting, too. It's super low and super cold. And that's why there is no water liquid flowing, because it's either going to freeze or evaporate. It can't just exist as water these days. No, but like we said, possibly. Probably did at one point. Yeah. So you've got a thin atmosphere, which means a lot of solar radiation is not blocked, it's not reflected, which means that you have very wild swings in daily average temperature on Mars. Because Mars does have a day, it does rotate and actually it rotates at about the same rate as Earth the Mars saw, which is short for solar day. It's just about 43 minutes longer than Earth's day. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But because it's further out, away from the sun, it's orbit around the sun takes longer. So each year is about twice as long as a year on Earth, 686.98 Earth days. Which means the seasons last longer. Right. Which makes them more extreme, as we'll see. Yeah. And you talked about the temperature fluctuation. It's almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a daily basis. The difference in temperature. This is nutty. That's enormous. Again, not very friendly for us humans. Yeah, well, we'll figure it out. You have to pack a big suitcase. You have to pack your thong as well as your Arctic explorer coat. We could just wear a thong under your Arctic explorer coat. Well, of course. Layers. It's the key to Mars, where layers pack big. Where layers. But like you said, there are seasons. In the spring and early summer, the sun heats up the atmosphere and the dust lifts up and makes it even hotter once that dust is in the atmosphere. Yeah. And it basically is what causes those big dust storms we're talking about. Yeah. The dust particles get suspended and invite more heat, which suspends more particles and it creates wind. 20 miles an hour. Winds. Yeah. Well, just like here, on Earth, it creates convection cells, which creates wind. And as those wind speeds whip up, because the atmosphere is thinner, you have to have higher speeds because the wind has less to push against. That makes sense. Air to push against. So it takes higher speed winds. But once they do hit something like 120 miles an hour, the entire planet can become enveloped in a dust storm that can last months. That's crazy. And again, it's not just dust. It's dust with one of the more toxic compounds known to humanity in every bit of it. Yeah, and it's not going to blow off a Mars rover. These things weigh, like, in the tons. Yeah. I think Curiosity is one ton. One ton. And actually what's strange is the dust storms it says are beneficial because they'll blow any Martian dirt kicked on the solar panels. Yeah, that makes sense, too. Or maybe it might reveal something that wasn't there before, like a pyramid. That'd be pretty cool. Chuck, I want to talk about water on Mars, but first let's do a message break. And we're back. So I guess let's get to the water part. That was NASA's directive. Follow the water for many years. And still is, really, because they think they're in holds. The key to the big question is there possibilities of having life on Mars? Was their life on Mars. Yeah. And we're not talking about Martians, unfortunately. We're talking about maybe bacteria, which could be Martians. I mean, if it lives on Mars, it's Martian. I guess it's a good point. Everybody just basically needs to lower the bar for their expectations of what a Martian is. Yeah, right. You know what I mean? Instead of a little green man. Right. Bacteria. And when this article was written, it was pre Curiosity. But just a couple of months ago, Curiosity confirmed that there is water present in the soil. Yes. And they think it's everywhere. Yeah, it's basically the soil has a very big leaching property where it absorbs water from the atmosphere and locks it in there so that if we went up there, we could extract about, like I said, two pints of water from every cubic foot of soil that's mined. It is pretty cool. Again, though, we have that perchlorate problem. It's everywhere. It would get in the water. And one of the ways that it transfers to humans and becomes toxic is through drinking water. So we'd have to deal with that. But ironically, the thing about perchlorate being there, it's also used in solid rocket fuel here on Earth. Oh, really? So we would need it to get to Mars, but once we got to Mars, we wouldn't want to have it. Interesting. That is very ironic. Thanks. So you're talking, Chuck, about how water could conceivably lead to life on Mars. Yeah, it's vital to life. It's one of the vital parts of life. I can't remember the term for them. Not a building block one of the essential somethings for life component. Yes, I think that is it. Essential component for life. We work that out together. This has been Morning Edition. Now, they found water on Mars and confirmed that it is there. And they knew all along that there was water ice on Mars. It makes that Martian rock from 4 billion years ago seem all the more likely that it is displaying evidence of fossilized microbes. Yeah. And they used to think that there was methane in the atmosphere or trace amounts, but I think that has been debunked now with really upon further research. Yeah. Because, again, when this article was written, it sounds like they thought it was still like they still had detective methane and they didn't know whether it was from biological or chemical origin. Yeah. More recent studies, as of October 2012, they analyzed the atmosphere for methane six times and basically found no more than 1.3 parts per billion. Yeah. That's not good for evidence of life. Yeah. And that's about one six as much as they had previously estimated. And they thought, well, maybe it went somewhere. NASA said no, it would have been super exciting. But methane doesn't distribute and leave like that quickly. Like, it would still be around. So, unfortunately, no methane. Speaking of methane as evidence of life, remember our termite episode? Somebody wrote in to say, did you know termites are like a huge contributor of methane on Earth? They're the second largest contributor of methane after livestock even beating out humans. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, because we shoot a lot of ducks. We humans, some of us more than others. Termites have a speed. They're flatulent insects. So bacteria, martian soil has been known to be, like, formerly chemically active, but maybe not biologically. But it is possible, maybe because they have a good example. In Greenland, they found bacteria that was dormant for 120,000 years, frozen in the ice, and when they unfroze it, it started multiplying again in the beginning of the apocalypse. Yeah. It's kind of creepy, but it's not stopping. Possibly in the polarized caps on Mars. Maybe that's going on, too. Yeah, we just don't know yet. Yeah. They think that it is very possible that you could take some of the extremophile bacteria, ones that live, like, in volcanic vents under sea and things like that, and transplant them to Mars, and some of them would survive, especially mineral, thriving bacteria once that eat minerals. Right. You could put them on Mars and they would do okay. Possibly well, spaceships, if we could possibly bring our own bacteria there by accident as well. Just from I think the International Space Station had E. Coli, didn't it? Yeah. And possibly Legionella. Legionnaires disease on the ISSI. Wow. Yeah. Or the ISS. That sounds like a movie waiting to happen. Sure, I guess we sort of did that with outland. Was it a disease? No, it wasn't a disease. It was just a cop chasing a bad guy. Yes. I have to say that again. I wonder if it holds up. I doubt it. Yeah, if it held up, it'd be alien. Like it would still be in the rotation. But that one doesn't play on cable very often. No, it really doesn't. That is pretty good evidence, too. I remember the outland mad magazine. I didn't have that one. Yeah, that was a good one. So, Chuck, you remember we were talking about way back how the Viking and Mariner and Mars orbiters provided this evidence that Mars was just a dead, barren planet and really undermined the idea that there was possibly life there and that it was lush? Yeah. Well, it also provided some conspiracy theorists pretty solid evidence that there was or is some sort of civilization on Mars. Viking One in 1976 produced a photo that looked a whole lot like a Ferranic type face. I've seen that. The face on Mars pretty clearly a face. If you look at it, it was 2 miles from head to toe, from tip to bottom. So it wasn't like Jesus on a piece of toast. No. I mean, it looked like an artificially constructed monument, the face of a monument. Maybe one that had toppled and was now just poking out from the Martian soil. Wow. So they looked closer in 1998, but there's a lot of cloud cover, so they got kind of a garbled look. Right. And I looked again more recently, maybe 2008 or 2011, and it's very clearly just a mesa. That's disappointing. It is. Especially like when you look at that original oh, wow. Yeah. We don't know. Yes. When you look at the Viking One photo yeah. It looks like a toppled statue head. Yeah, it does. It actually factored into that terrible movie Mission to Mars. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. Which I saw with Hippie Rob, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. Nice. Was that the last time you saw him? It was among that he just walked into the woods. That was Brian De Palma, wasn't it? I think it might have been so disappointing. I mean, it had an all star cast. Gary Sinise, don Cheadle. Yeah, I think bill Paxton maybe or Pullman. I don't think it's pullman, but I might be confusing. Bill Paxton from Apollo 13. Anyway, it didn't pan out very well. Yeah, but you got anything else? Yeah, I don't know why this article isn't mentioned it, but Mars has two moons, Phobos and Davos. Oh, yeah. They didn't get into that at all. No. And pops up in pop culture a lot. There's the Mars Volta. The band. Yeah. David Bowie has a song called Life on Mars, one of the great songs. The Mystics have the greatest mars song. Teenagers from Mars. That's a great song. Yeah. Oh, what's his name? Jared Leto. Right. 30 Seconds to Mars. Yeah. They're going on tour right after his Oscar win. I had never heard any of his music until the other day, I was like, what do they like? And Emily tried to describe it, and then she just played a song. It's not my bag. Not mine either, but good for him. Oh, yeah. I think they're, like, huge internationally. Yes. He's got gout. Do you know that? I did not know that. He needs to lay off the pate. No, I think it had to do with his weight gain and loss for the John Lennon the Mark David Chapman movie he did. Oh, really? Yeah. He got all fat to play Mark David Chapman, then got all skinny again, I think got gout because of it, and then got even skinnier to play rayon in Dallas. Buyers Club. Yeah. Dude, have you seen it? Yes. How thin can two people get? They're pretty thin. The two of them together makes me and there's got to be a safe way to lose and regain weight. But I'll bet there's not very many safe ways to gain weight to make yourself look pudgy. No, I mean and then to lose it again when it's been done. Like from De Niro to Fat Mac on always Sunny. I think they say they just eat, like, lots of garbage and just pile it on. Yeah. That's not healthy at all. No, but that's one of my pet peeves. When you take a fit person and they gain \u00a330 for a movie and you don't look like a fatter person and you look like a fit person who has a distended belly. Right? Yeah. It takes years to get this look. You got to work at it. Sculpt this. Yeah. Okay. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I think this is better than the sun. Oh, yeah. As far as our celestial episodes go, far less physics that we had to deal with. We haven't done the moon straight up, have we? I think we have. Have we, Jerry? Have we done the moon? I think we did because we talked about its origin, whether it was calved, whether it was a separate accretion. I'm pretty sure we've done the moon. All right, we'll look it up. This is getting bad. We need to get a list together. Yeah, we do. So we quit boring everyone with this. Yeah, you'd think we'd edit it out, but we just don't. Well, if you want to learn more about Mars, you can type that word into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this your theory on eating what you crave. Did you see this email? No. Just listen to the Salt podcast, dudes. And Josh posted that you could get along just fine eating only what you crave. I'm not sure how serious he was, though. That's fairly serious. Okay. I'll agree that it depends on whether I'm right. I'll agree that 150 years ago this may have been pretty viable, but these days it's a different story. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of evidence that points to food manufacturers actually designing junk foods that make you crave more of them, mainly sugar and fat, heavy foods. There's one great book in particular called Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Tobbs basically tells the story of how a lot of what the FDA and USDA recommends is wrong and how it got that way. For instance, the guy who conducted the Seven countries study, which is what caused the government to say fat will kill you, simply threw out data that contradicted the result he was looking for. Throw in the fact that corn is subsidized and super cheap, we have the recipe for an obese misinformed population that's addicted to sugar, has been fed terribly wrong information about health for a long time. Yeah, I've learned recently that you're supposed to have fats and there are good fats and there are bad fats, but low fat is not a good way to go. And it has been kind of foisted on us. Yeah, foisted. That is from Steve Baum, the bowmer in what he calls good old New Jersey, or as we call Tharsis. Is he from? Tarsus City. That is Steve Bomb. I don't know if he's from Thars City or not, but he's from somewhere in Tarsus. There is a really good article about how food scientists engineer foods to make us crave them. It was on the New York Times, it was a couple of years ago by a guy named Michael Moss. Yeah. In your defense, I think you meant it more along the lines of craving real foods and not necessarily craving Ben and Jerry's or pretzels. Right. No, I meant like craving a steak or something like that. Yeah, not ignoring that and going with a head of lettuce. Right. I hear you. I can't find the name of the article, but it's a Michael Moss article and it's from the New York Times. And dude, it is good. It's one of those really extensive long form one that should be long form because there's just so much great information in it. Eye opening. Yes. So look it up, everybody. It will open your eyes. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuckysheno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Check out our YouTube channel. Josh and Chuck It's pretty fun. And also be sure to hang out on our website, stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where True crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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." | ||
417decd2-53a3-11e8-bdec-4376206609b9 | Were Nazis Drug-Fueled Crankheads? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/were-nazis-drug-fueled-crankheads | Nazis were bad people. And it turns out a lot of them were high as kites on speed. Was this a recipe for disaster? Yes it was. | Nazis were bad people. And it turns out a lot of them were high as kites on speed. Was this a recipe for disaster? Yes it was. | Thu, 04 Apr 2019 14:11:42 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=14, tm_min=11, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=94, tm_isdst=0) | 42977156 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And there's other Josh over there. The OJ. The OG. Yes, he's the OJ. That's right. We should probably come up with a different nickname for you, Josh. That's right. Yeah. This is stuff you should know. The Podcast Nazi crankhead edition. We've been doing a lot on Nazis lately. Have we? I guess we have. We did the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler. Sure. This one. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. I thought this is interesting, and I remember hearing a lot about this when I mean, there been plenty of people in books about Nazis doing lots of drugs. Right. But the big one that came out called Blitz from author Noman Oler, really made a lot of hay in the news, for sure. It was a big deal when it came out, just, I think, in 2017, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. And we are endorsing. That book is a good read. Have you read it? I read a lot of it. Okay, I got you. I heard it's a very exhaustive book. It's pretty exhaustive. So I have not read it, but it does seem, from some of the stuff I've read about it, some of the book reviews are like, yeah, this guy's got the goods. This guy, Norman Oler, spent, like, five years, at least in the archives. So this isn't just like, conjecture. This is very well researched and fact based. Well, I guess there's a little conjecture to it because it's basically saying drugs drove the third Reike initially. Yeah. And then, just like anybody becoming strong out on a drug, it led to the deterioration and ultimately downfall of the Third Reiche. And that's a big thing to say. There are very few things in history, especially massive, world changing things like the Third Reich in World War II and the Holocaust, that you can just pin one thing on. And I'm sure he's not saying, like, that is it? There's nothing else to it. But he's saying, like, this is a huge contributor of it. And he's not the first person to say, yeah, the Nazis did a lot of drugs. He seems to be the first author to really say, yeah, the Nazis did a lot of drugs, and this was the result. Yeah. And I think from the parts of the book that I read in doing this research, it's not much of a leap. So when you have facts and, like, the number of pills which we'll get into and what these pills were, there's just no disputing the physiological effect that it has on people. Right. And what these drugs do, because that's why they were taking them. So it's not much of a leap, even though it is some conjecture to say, you know, the Blitzkrieg was probably super effective because they were all on crank. Yeah. It gives Blitzkrieg BOP, like, a new meaning. That was totally off the cuff, too. Off the dome. Yeah. So should we talk about old Germany and sort of the seed of this whole thing? Yeah. But first, one more thing while we're kind of on this particular riff. Yes. I don't know, because, again, I haven't read the book. I don't know that Owler is saying, and I don't think he is, that like the Holocaust wouldn't have happened if Germany hadn't been hopped up on drugs. He's not saying that. Some people do say that. There's some revisionist historians who say, yeah, was it drugs that had gripped Hitler's mind? And had he not been on drugs, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened? That appears to be patently untrue. The earliest death executions in the Holocaust that I found go back to and the Nazis had such a tenuous grip on power that they had to basically make it look like these executions of these four Jews at Dacow were them trying to escape. Like they were shot trying to escape. Right. It was such a terrible, obvious lie that three SS officers and the camp commandant at Dacow were indicted for murder. That's how new the Nazis were into power, that these guys were indicted for murder. The indictments went away. But again, this is 1933, way early, way before anybody was on drugs. And that was like, the earliest beginnings of the Holocaust, and it showed this mentality and this drive and desire to carry out the Holocaust later on. Anybody who says that it was drugs that brought about the Holocaust is wrong, from what I understand. So you mentioned 1933. That is interesting. That data is because there were plenty of drugs. The Nazis weren't doing them yet, but they started passing laws in 1933 as one of the big first moves of the Nazis to clean up the land, to clean up the Weimar Republic, which is what Germany was basically known as from 1918 to 1933. Yeah. The Weimar Republic was an experiment at democracy in Germany. And it almost took, like, the last five years of the Republic showed, like, economic growth. It was during the Jazz Age, so everybody was kind of partying, as we'll see. And it wasn't until the Great Depression started in 1929 that this really fragile Republic, this really fragile democracy, just could not handle that kind of economic hit. And it gave Hitler and the National Socialism Party this perfect entree into power by saying, first of all, we can turn things around economically. The Weimar Republic couldn't do it. And secondly, this whole Weimar Republic thing, everybody's on drugs, they're all degenerates. And then they use that idea of degenerate art of people being on cocaine and morphine and tied it in with Judaism. And so anybody who is on drugs, anyone who is gay, anyone who is, say, like a Roma, they were all tied in with the Jews and all of those people were subject to the Holocaust right out of the gate. Yeah. So the stage is set. They're locking up. They're imprisoning, they're sterilizing addicts, denouncing these users. And these are, like we said, cocaine and morphine, which Germany was, like, one of the leading or maybe the leading producer of cocaine in the world at the time. Right. You got to tell them the statistics. Yeah. In the 1920s, Germany companies in Germany generated 40% of the world's morphine and controlled 80% of the global cocaine market. That is, in the 1920s, astounding and so you can imagine that the Weimar Republic is a wash in this. Oh, sure. And so there really was, like, a lot of I mean, there were tons of wow, I almost just said something else. There were tons of horrible, broken lives and addiction. There was a lot of homelessness. There was a lot of prostitution. There was a lot of issues and problems that the society had. But there was also a lot of really interesting and good things that was coming out of this combination of a democracy of washing drugs. There were things like a lot more gender equality than there had been before. There was a lot of androgyny going on and kind of like the art and social scene. There was some really good art coming out. But again, the Nazis came along and denounced it as Degenerate art and actually held an exhibition, Chuck, in 1937, a Degenerate art exhibition where they showed everybody in Germany, this is bad art, and we're going to destroy a lot of this and replace it with the three K's. It was kinder kuch, I think kuch. Yeah. Ku with an umlaut, C-H-E and Kirch, which is family home in church. And that is what our culture is going to be about. So the Weimar Republic provided this really great foil to what the Nazis were kind of rousing Germany out of, like, hey, let's all get off the cocaine. Let's all get off the morphine. And in fact, if you know an addict, tell the cops, you neighbor, you coworker, you family member, go inform on the drug users in this country. Let's clean Germany up. Let's clean Germany's bodies up, and let's move forward with an emphasis on family, home, and church. That's what the Nazis came to Germany with in 1920, 1930. Right. And as this is going on, literally as all this stuff is happening in the 1930s, early and mid 1930s, they're denouncing these people, locking them up, talking about how toxic these drugs are. Germany and companies in Germany were switching over to synthesizing drugs and making speed and all kinds of drugs synthetic, like precursors to OxyContin and meth, basically. There was a firm in Berlin called the Timber Firm, and they were headed up. This is a 1937 by a man named Fritz Housechild, who later on was the sort of leading dude in East Germany's sports doping program. He knows what he's doing. Sure. So they synthesized, basically, crystal meth into something, and at least it has the same kind of active ingredients as a little pill called Pervitin. Pervitin. And it wasn't just the army that use this. And we'll get into all that because the German military was definitely hopped up on what we now know as crystal meth. But this stuff was over the counter at first, and a lot of Germany was using this housewives were using it. And we should say that the same stuff was going on as benzodreen in the United States. Right. It seems like the whole world was hopped up on speed. It was in the 1930s, not just the 30s. Well into the 60s easily. Well, I mean, starting in the 1930s. Right? Sure. And so Pervitin was over the counter at first. Eventually, some alarm bells started going off. So they were like, we might want to make this prescription. And then they said, well, you know what? We don't know if the general public should have this at all, but we totally want our military to still have it. Yeah. It was called the Stimulant decree, where the head of the German physiology department in the Defense Ministry, his name was Otto Ranki, he said, give me 35 million of those Stimulant tabs, because we're waging a war on exhaustion, as we'll see before we hop into the military. You want to take a break? Yes. Okay. I'm ready. We need to shave our heads, too, starting now. Okay. Chuck, in Germany, there's a really important point that I want to gloss over. Germany went from this as far as the Nazis were concerned, it's kind of shiftless high unemployment, fragile economic state, where a lot of people were selling and doing cocaine and morphine recreationally and to stave off depression. I mean, they were in a pretty bad spot as a country or to lose weight. No, not yet. That was not the point of it. It was strictly to get high is what they were doing in the Weimar Republic. So the weight loss was just a perk? Well, no, that was a Nazi thing. So then the Nazis come along, and they say, we're not doing cocaine and morphine anymore. Let's try these other synthetic stimulants that can be produced strictly in Germany. And one of the things that is a benefit is weight loss. Or I saw first date jitters or just self confidence, depression. Anything you could think of that you might need a little boost for? Pervitin was advertised for I almost said prescribed, but like you said, it was over the counter. And so it's really interesting that Norman Owler makes this point. Around the time the Perpetrator came out and started to become into widespread use, the German economy started cranking into full gear. So one of the first points that Olar makes is, without this speed, germany probably wouldn't have been able to get onto wartime footing as fast as it did because it happened overnight in terms of huge social change. And that was a big part of it, was this pervert and the speed that everyone in Germany was on. And now thinking about the health of the German country in Germany itself. Yes. And if you think about a military being hopped up on speed, it has a lot of initially may have a lot of advantages in that. Not only are you feeling euphoric and confident and you're super focused, but you can also battle it up and war it up for two days straight without sleeping and still feel good. So they were passing them out, literally in chocolates. Some of them were called pansa chocolata tank chocolate for the tank drivers and tank crews. And then they would give them to the Air Force, they would give them to pilots, and they called it either pilot salt or pilot's chocolate. And between April and July, just what is that? Four months? Yes. In 1940, more than 35 million doses of perbitin were manufactured for the army and the Air Force alone. That's so crazy. Over three and a half, four months, 35 million doses. And, I mean, there are plenty of accounts, like, on record. This is not speculation at all. There was a Nobel Prize winner named Einrich Bowl who won the Nobel Prize in 72 for literature, and he was in the army back before he was an author. And there are letters home where he's like, perhaps you could obtain some more purbitin for my supplies and just send it on over. So they love the stuff. Yeah, they loved it. Not just like the actual soldiers loved it, which they very much did from all appearances, but also the people running the show of the military. The Vermont's loved it too. They were on it. Well, they were on it themselves, sure, but they also love the effects. It turned German soldiers into, like, super soldiers, basically. They didn't need sleep. They could hike through forests for days on end. And they did. Actually, the Blitz creek into France was carried out over about three plus days. And Norman Oler says in his book that in less than 100 hours, germany gained more land in France than it did throughout the entirety of World War I. It was because it was one big push all the way into France that took place over three days non stop. There wasn't like, let's move like, 20 miles and then camp for the night and then pick up the next morning. It was a nonstop move into France. And from what I understand, no one in the modern world had ever seen anything like that from a military. It didn't make any sense. And that was it for France. I mean, like, this was May of 1940. France fell almost immediately just in the face of this. And they used the same tactic in Poland the year before, and all of this. It's not like, oh, this coincides with the time that the military was ordering purvitan. It's documented that purpose and was the reason that these pushes were able to happen and why Germany looked like they really were going to take over the world in the early stages of World War II. Yeah. And this stuff was I mean, it was from the top down. And we'll get to Hitler's drug use in the third act of this podcast because that stuff is super interesting, but it was definitely top down. Like the head of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, basically the lead physiologist for the German military. His name was Auto Runk. Yeah, I mentioned him. Yeah, he was hopped up on it himself. He's the one that endorsed this from the beginning. And basically, it's like medically documented that he essentially, at a certain point, was living in a constant state of speed. Meth overdose. All right, so the army, the Air Force, everyone's all hopped up on this drug. They are literally, like, prescribing this as these young 1718 year old German soldiers are signing up for the army. Did they sign up or did they just get absorbed? It depends on when in the war you're talking about. Toward the end of the war. They had no choice. They were just drafted. Well, at any rate, they would say, like, here's your outfit. It's very sharp. I think you must admit you're the boss. Yeah. And the soldier would say, thanks a lot. And they would say, here's your weapon and here's your speed. Like, put this under your tongue starting now. Yeah. And then, here's all the rest of your speed to carry around with you. Just come back when you need some more. Yeah. In the short term, we've done plenty of episodes on drugs and on crystal meth. And the short term we've been on crystal meth while we've done the episode, is that what you're saying? No, I see what you mean. The short term effect was great. And like you said, they made so many gains so much more quickly, to the point where Churchill was apparently dumbfounded by how fast they operated. But over time, it's going to have the effect of any other drug. Just because it comes packaged and marketed as a prescription doesn't mean it wasn't crystal meth. And over time, what happens is sleep deprivation and very poor decision making, not sharp focus. And soldiers who would die of heart failure or who would take their own lives during psychotic breakdowns and withdraw when they couldn't get their hands on the permitted. So this very much ended up biting them on their German hyenas even after their initial successes. Right? Yeah. You can point to the places where the war started to turn that coincide with points where it had been years that the German army had been on stimulants and speed for basically every day since then. You could be the most drug naive person in the world, and you still know that staying on speed for three years, there's eventually going to be a bottoming out. And that's not a place where you want to be as a military, especially when you're deep into Russia in the winter if your whole army is bottoming out after matthews yes, that's not good, and that seems to be what happened. One of the reasons why the Russia offensive was not successful is because there was a lot of I keep using the word fallout or bottoming out, what's it called? Crashing from speed. Crashing, sure. And suffering from psychosis and all sorts of other problems. And then even if it wasn't directly like their decision making wasn't affected, or even if you take all that out, being in Russia, caught in Russia in the winter while being addicted to speed for three years, that is not a good place. Your body is not in the kind of place where it can fight off pneumonia easily or stay warm easily. It's severely compromised just on like, say, a first dose of speed in that situation. But after being on speed every day for three years, that's a really bad situation. So in that sense. At the very least. Speed would have contributed to a really huge setback for the German army that a lot of people point to as one of the at least the real nail in the coffin for Germany. Which was Russia not being successful in Russia. Turning the tides and pushing Germany back. Or the German army back into Germany and then chasing it into it. That was a big deal. And it's possible that speed played a really big factor in it. Well, for sure. I mean, we talked about older speculation about some of the stuff, but again, it's sort of a numbers game. There are studies that show that if you take crystal meth a lot for three years, that two thirds of the people who use that drug in that way are going to suffer from serious psychosis. So it's just a math problem. If that many pills were literally being handed out in the army and they were all using it for that amount of time, then that means, according to studies, that two thirds of the German army at some point were suffering from psychosis, drug induced psychosis. That's not good now. And apparently toward the end of the war, german chemists were trying to come up with new drugs. There was one that didn't get deployed, but that was tested, or I think it might have been deployed, I can't remember, called drug nine or Dix Roman numeral nine. And it was basically like cocaine and morphine and then another kind of morphine, and it was meant to combat to get the German army back on its feet, but it was just so over the top that it was never issued in any kind of wide supply because it was basically like here addicts. Here's a brand new super drug that's going to keep you going, but it's didn't quite work. But they found, I saw that in tests on concentration camp inmates. They would hike in a circle like 90 day without rest so it would work. But I think they also tried it on some one man Subs and it didn't work out very well. D Nine. Sounds like the dude in college. It's like, dude, I got some D nine, man. It was this like this German drug back in World War II that was a combination. It's the ultimate super drug. Right. And some guy in Indiana is making it now. Yes, that's where they would make it. When in fact it was just white crosses smashed up, right. And mixed with pillsbury, sugar, cookie dough. Alright, so I think we should take another break. We're going to finish up with what I think is the most interesting part of this whole thing, which is Adolf Hitler's rampant drug use and his own Michael Jackson esque personal doctor who injected it on a daily basis right after this. All right, so there's this doctor, his name was Dr. Morrell, dr. Theodore Morrel. And he kind of wormed his way into he was not a highly thought of doctor. He was not highly credited to begin with. He was sort of known as a quack. He was a dermatologist though. And I think that's how he first curried favor with Hitler was in Curing, his longtime eczema. Right. And he also practiced, he worked on venereal diseases and stuff like that. And starting in 1936, he managed to worm his way in there such that Hitler made him his private physician. And it's like you always hear about these private physicians, whether it's Michael Jackson or Elvis or anyone in this high position of power or a world leader who has their own doctor feel good, essentially. Yeah, and that's what happened with Hitler. I mean, should we just go ahead and talk about the daily routine? Sure. There's so many interesting things here. First of all, Hitler had bad, I guess we call it IBS, notoriously flatulent and diarrhea and just had a bad, bad stomach problems and intestinal issues like gas that Dr. Morell once noted in his journals because he kept extensive journals on treating Hitler, who he called patient A. He referred to it as colossal gas, the likes of which he had never seen before. That was the kind of gas that Hitler was dealing with. Of course. Hitler had the worst parts of all time. Of all time. Worst parts in history. Yeah. So he goes vegetarian, which did not help things. It did not help things because he basically subsisted on a diet of baby food. They didn't call it baby food or serve it to him with a plastic spoon from a little tiny jar. But he ate pureed watery vegetables, basically, which is not going to cure your flatulence and he started to get doped up a little bit from morale and he's like, hey, I feel a little bit better with this stuff. Right? And it got to the point where he didn't care what he was getting as long as the result was that it made him feel better. And so eventually, Morel got up to the point where he was injecting him daily, multiple times a day, with anywhere from I've seen 25 to 90 different drugs over the course of about nine years. Yeah. And so all of this, it started in 1936 and, like you said, ran for nine years. And at first, Dr. Morel was one of the first doctors in Germany to espouse the healing and health benefits of vitamins. Before that, vitamins weren't really thought of as healthy, and he was like, no, they're super healthy. Watch, I'll show you on defure. And remember, one of the things about Nazi Germany was that, like, you kept your body pure to help the German state. It was like a component of fascism, was like being pure and drug free. But if they were vitamins and they were injected by a doctor, that's fine, we can do all those. So this idea of keeping Hitler seeming, like, fit and active and full of spit and vinegar, that was supposedly from Morel's vitamin injections. But then as time went on and Hitler started to suffer more ill health again, some of these vitamins were supplemented by just straight up drugs that were produced by Germany, like purvitan and like, eucadal. Yeah. So Hitler is getting injected. And like you said, Hitler notoriously thought of as a teetotaler. He didn't even drink coffee, he quit smoking. And he was supposed to be this picture of health. All the while, he's getting injected with everything from literal cocaine to morphine to precursors to OxyContin to extractions of bull semen, because Hitler very notoriously had issues in the Ed department, right? Testosterone. I mean, it's crazy. The amount of drugs that he was getting injected with multiple times daily, I saw 80 was the high estimate with one source, I saw 90 elsewhere. But a cocktail, and not just like, here's one drug and then the next day, here's a different drug. A cocktail of up to combinations of up to 90 different drugs during the course of this time, repeatedly getting injections, like daily injections. Apparently, toward the end of the war, hitler's veins had started collapsing. But to Hitler, or at least the way that Hitler pretended, was that this was his doctor shooting him up with vitamins. When he got cocaine, it was given in the form of eye drops. Yeah, well, that was early on. This was before they started shooting him up. They would give it to him and I'd dropped it ten times the concentration, because cocaine was used in medicine a little bit, but at very low doses. So he would ramp it up by ten times, squared it in his eye, and eventually, like anything else, you have to ramp it up to get that same high. So that's when the injection started. Well, he also started snorting it, I saw, to clear his sinuses and keep his throat clean to ease his sore throat, just stupid stuff like that. But it was through that Elvis paradigm, which was, if a doctor's giving it to me, it's legal, it's not a drug drug. It would have been scandalous if it had gotten out that Hitler was snorting cocaine, because, again, the Nazis had associated that with degenerates in the Weimar Republic. So no one did cocaine. If Hitler had been caught doing cocaine, that would have been a big deal. Yeah. And by all accounts, by the end of the war, those final dark, dark days of Hitler at the bunker, we know this stuff because Dr. Morel left behind a treasure trove of documentation to kind of cover his own, but just in case anything ever happened. So we have all this documentation, but from what everyone has written in history, in the final days, Hitler was just a straight up junkie. Yeah, that's certainly how older characterizes the whole thing. And it's not just him. Like, a lot of people are like, no. Hitler's health declined tremendously. He didn't go into the war with too many health problems, aside from eczema and something called spina bifida occulta, which they think is responsible for his problematic bowels and gas. But he didn't have massive problems. He didn't have Parkinson's. By the end of the war, he seemed to have developed Parkinson's. He had trouble walking. He was very much emaciated and sallow. And so Ola, for the first time, really lays this at the feet of Dr. Morel and his injections. Because, again, not only is it like cocaine and morphine and OxyContin and speed that he's giving Hitler, some of these other concoctions are really not good. There was an anti gas pill called Dr. Kuster's. Anti gas pills. It had strict nine in it. Yeah, they hit 16 pills a day. Yeah, Hitler took a lot of those. And if you take a lot of strict nine every day over the course of years, it's going to have some really negative impacts on you. So not only was it that Hitler was addicted to drugs, he was also being given some very poisonous toxic materials by his doctor in other ways, too. And it cumulatively had this effect. But I think the big money thing, Chuck, is like, how did it impact Hitler's judgment? How does that correlate toward the end of the war, and that's where Ola is really going to town, he's like, Dude, Hitler was like, you said, just totally addicted to drugs. Morphine, OxyContin, speed, cocaine by the end of the war, and it had clouded his judgment and even no coffee. No coffee. Still, I think it might have been himler or Spear. One of his close advisers had said, like, man, When the war started, hitler could make a decision in a snap toward the end of the war. By 1943, it was just like a nightmare watching him go back and forth and try to come to a conclusion and a decision, and that was directly related to the drugs he was on. Well, and increasingly sequestered and paranoid. Like, the whole thing was a recipe for disaster. If you talk about morel, what he had to gain was obviously the prestige of being Hitler's personal position. But he had a lot of money in the game here because he was cranking out this preparation that he called Vitamolton that was marketed across Europe, and he was essentially in the drug business. Like, he was making tons of money, and he could trot out Hitler as his star patient. Right. And even went so far as to basically he wrote a letter to the Reich Health Office because eventually doctors and people started coming out and saying, hey, this stuff is not good. We need to outlaw this. This is having a bad effect. And so he wrote the Reich Health Office and said, the fuel has authorized me to do the following. If I bring out and test a remedy and then apply it in the Fierce headquarters and apply it successfully, then it could be applied elsewhere in Germany and no longer needs authorization. Yeah. It's like just try to come back with a response to that. Yeah. And in the meantime, I'm building a factory and getting rich making speed for all of Germany. Yeah. This Vitamolton, there was, like a billion packets ordered by just the Wehrmacht alone, let alone, like, all of the German people. He sold a lot and made a lot of money off of it. But from what seems to be, I guess, Ola's, research has kind of shown that Morrel was very much dedicated not just as a doctor, but personally to Hitler, too, and that he most likely over the years, historians have accused morel of purposefully trying to harm Hitler or something along those lines. But apparently Ola is like, no, this guy really was a true believer and was really, like, very much proud that he was Hitler's physician. He didn't know what he was doing. He definitely turned Hitler into an addict of multiple drugs. I think a super addict is how Older puts it. But he was still devoted to him. He wasn't doing it to cause deliberate harm. Right. Yeah. It's just so interesting, this same thing with Michael Jackson and Elvis. It's like there's this weird thing that happens where these doctors completely sell their souls to work alongside these people in positions of power and essentially kill them eventually right. By just feeding them whatever drug they needed. Like, he was not only on speed, obviously, to counteract that, you need something to bring you down. Right. So then he would get injected with something called eucadol. That's the OxyContin relative. Yeah. He didn't know which way it was up at a certain point. Eventually, he fired morel on April 17. Two weeks later, Hitler put a bullet in his brain. Marl gets tried for war crimes and goes to jail and then, I believe died of a stroke in 1948. Yeah, he was not tried for war crimes, but he was interrogated. No, he wasn't. He was interrogated in prison for two years by the Allies. He just pumped them for all the information they could get about Hitler. He was just in prison being questioned. Yes. Interesting. And he ended up producing or contributing to, like, a 47 page report about Hitler and Hitler's health that the Allies had. They didn't come out until, I think, the but he was a huge trove of information. But more than that and the fact that he got Hitler addicted to OxyContin, that led to Hitler making some terrible decisions, to becoming increasingly paranoid, to stop listening to his generals, to becoming embarrassed for these defeats and, like, withdrawing even further and then ultimately losing the war and taking his own life. In that sense, the world owes a tremendous debt to Theodore Morale. It's kind of funny when you think about it, like, we owe that dude. And imagine this also another way to look at this, Chuck. Imagine that you had gotten behind this cult of personality, this leader, this charismatic leader who said, we are going to take over the world, and you decided that you were on board with that. You're a German who was going along with it. Maybe you were pepped up on a little bit of speed. And then over time, right in the middle of this taking over the world thing, that's actually starting to seem like it might work. That leader decides that he's going to go and get hooked on, like, five different extraordinarily addictive drugs right in the middle of taking over the world, and then that would be the thing that brought about the downfall, which Ola makes the cases like, yes, you can lay a lot of the downfall of the Third Reich at the feet of drugs. Well, I mean, it's certainly you can't fault Ola for going there because it's such a juicy thing to take. All these facts about all this drug use, rampant drug use, and then years later go back and say, like, what if this hadn't happened? Or what was the overall effect? Not just that they did these drugs, but how did it affect history? Right. Super interesting. Yeah, it's extraordinarily interesting. That's good stuff. I found one other thing, too. I want to mention that you got there's something called Mutafloor. M-U-T-A-F-L-O-R. It's still available. It was Hitler's goto probiotic, and it was isolated in 1917 from a stool sample taken from a World War I soldier who, while everybody else in his troop was, like, getting dysentery left and right, he was healthy. And this doctor noticed and isolated a particular kind of bacteria in this guy's stool. And you can buy pills made from that line of bacteria to this day, except it's illegal in the US. For some reason, which makes me really want to see what it's all about. But you're eating World War I poop bacteria when you take this mutifloor, but it was given to Hitler, and apparently it worked. Wow. So Hitler's probiotic, which I'm surefloor I'm sure mutiflora is like, please don't call it Hitler's probiotic. We're still trying to sell that stuff. Well, if you want to know more about Hitler and drugs, just go read Blitz the Third Reich and Drugs by Norman Oler. Or you can go read all the book reviews about it like I did. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this epic pants story. Oh, no. In the Science of Breakups, you were talking about getting pants. Oh, yes, I remember. So this is from anonymous. Hey, guys. It happened in high school. I was gathering up the nerve to ask a girl out on a date that I had a crush on to set the scene and highlight the level of embarrassment I'm setting myself for. It's worth noting that at this point in my life, I'd never actually asked a girl out this boldly. I was going to do it face to face in the classroom in front of her friends and my friends. Jeez, that's not a good idea. Can't you, like, catch her by her locker? She's not surrounded by people. He was hopped up on purveton, feeling really confident. Maybe this is out of character for me, but I couldn't find the courage on my own, so I confided in a close friend who agreed to be my wingman. He was very supportive. Plus he had insider info. He actually heard her say that she liked me. Man. Remember those days? How sweet that was? Yes. Does she like me? Yes. She likes me? Yes. No. Or maybe. The teacher left the classroom for a minute, and my trusty mate said I should go for it and do it right now. So with the encouragement from him, I needed, and I was nervous, h. I walked over to her table of friends, interrupted them, had her full attention, and started asking her out on the date. I was actually doing it, guys. I felt amazing. And then, bam. A super supportive mate had set me up and pants to me in front of her in the whole class. I know. It gets worse. I'm not going to say it. I think you know it's coming. Yeah. The execution was perfect, guys. 100% pants full monty before the whole class and for a whole second before I could halt the process. Dude, could you imagine? I would never recover. No. I move. I'd go home and be like, we have to move to a new school in a new state. Maybe a new country. It's funny you mentioned that because I think every school also had some kid who didn't show up after summer the next fall and when in fact his dad got a transfer. But there would be some story cooked up on why the kids I saw him on a milk carton. There was a kid at our school who supposedly moved because he masturbated in class and got caught and I don't think any of it was true. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. But is there like a kernel of truth to that? You know what I mean? I remember his name later. The playground say it. Actually, don't say it. But it's funny, I haven't thought about that since the 9th grade. I'm going to totally look him up and see if he's out there. Anyway, guys, the betrayal was second to Judas and the wave of embarrassment so gargantuan that all I could do is just take a seat and die inside. We were in art class, but if the subject was advanced panting, my mate would have gotten an A plus. He's like, I was so embarrassed, I couldn't even pull my pants up. When I took a seat, I just sat down with my bare butt and fruit basket right on the lunchroom bench. I just gave into it, guys, and went dan out for the rest of the semester. What? No, no, he didn't. I was like, wow, good for this guy. I was just riffing on your bit. I feel like I'm about to throw up. I look green right now, right? So he keeps saying mate. It turns out he is Australian because he says PS. In Australia, instead of saying pants, we say DAC. D-A-C-K-E-D-I saw that somewhere. DAX, refer to pants like tracky dacks or track pants. To put it in a sentence. My mate is such a dog, he full dacked me in front of this chick I like. And that's from Anonymous. Thanks a lot, Anonymous. I appreciate you sharing that even though it was anonymously. That's right. If you have a horrifically cringeworthy story, we want to hear it. We'll make it through it together. You can go on to stuffyshotknow.com and check out our social links. You can also hit us up via email if you want to stuffpodcasts@iheartpodcastnetwork.com stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Bye." | |
43fb076a-53a3-11e8-bdec-475b40012f6f | Blacksmiths? You got that right! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/blacksmiths-you-got-that-right | Blacksmiths? You got that right. Learn all about this age old occupation in today's episode. | Blacksmiths? You got that right. Learn all about this age old occupation in today's episode. | Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:32:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=14, tm_min=32, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=240, tm_isdst=0) | 48320345 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know if you've heard, but we have a book coming out finally. Finally, after all these years. It's great, it's fun. You're gonna love it. It's called stuff you should know. Colon. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Yes, and it's 26 jampacked chapters that we wrote with another guy named Nell's Parker, who is amazing and is illustrated amazingly by our illustrator Carly Monardo. And it's just an all round joy to pick up and read, even though we haven't physically held in our hands yet. It's like we have Chuck in our dreams so far. I can't wait to actually see and hold this thing and smell it. And so should you. So pre order now. It means a lot to us. The support is a very big deal. So pre order anywhere. Books are sold. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck. Brian over there, and Jerry's out there somewhere. And this is stuff you should know. Did I tell you about my new hobby that started yesterday, but I can guess. Watching blacksmithing videos. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, man. Like, I don't have any desire to blacksmith myself. No, I just like watching these videos. There's something really amazing about them. Yeah, there's one. I don't know if you watched it's on YouTube. It's called blacksmithing forging a bearded axe. No, I didn't see that one. Oh, God. It just reminds me of the sort of the lulling of that show, how it's made. But I watched this video and most of them have some sped up stuff too, because blacksmithing takes so long. That a 30 minutes video. I mean, half of it is in fast motion, so it just goes to show you. And it's edited. And they always do. They always put it to jacket sax. But it's just crazy though, when you see how long it takes to make this one axe and then you think about outfitting armies. Yeah. It just feels like it was every other person a blacksmith. And did they just do that 24/7? Yes. I get the impression there is a Walt Whitman poem about blacksmith, and he's basically like they were the most important people in any community. Everybody loved them. They owed no one anything because they never had any debts, because they were so vital that anything they did probably was worth ten times what anybody else could do for them. They seem to have been pretty amazing people on the whole. Yes. And we'll talk about this more, but when you think about just nails and how many nails built this country and the world right. Those nails had to be forged. Yes. When you watch some of these blacksmith videos, and like you're saying, when you do see how long it takes to just make an average thing that you would, like, buy in a second these days. It really gives you an appreciation for just what a sea change the industrial revolution was. Yeah. Where this was automated and made, converted to mass production. It just could have never happened before, and it didn't happen before, but it was up to the loan blacksmith to equip their entire communities with all this stuff. It's pretty cool. So are we going to do blacksmith history first or the metal history first? We'll do blacksmith history first, I think. Okay. I guess we got to look at the name, because if you look at other smiths, they were a little more specific. They were called bronze smith. Blacksmith are not called iron smith. No. Even though they work with iron. And most of the other smiths were named for the metal that they work with. Silversmith. That's a good one. Yeah. Good silversmith. Sure. It's worth their weight in gold. Silver don't bring up gold to them. Oh, no. But black comes from well, we're not positive, but one explanation is blacksmith comes from the hammer scale. These scales, if you're watching these videos, you'll see when they're hammering the stuff, these little tiny chunky, thin not chunky, actually. Just little chunks of thin scales are falling off every time they hammer it. That's the hammer scale. And it is black. And your hands get all black and your face gets black. Or it might have just been because iron is black. Typically. Yeah, it's pretty dark. It's dark enough. Especially rod iron. It tends to be black. So that's why they think one of those two reasons is where blacksmith came from and the name smith itself. We actually talk about this in our book that's coming out in the episode on keeping up with the joneses. That's right. We talked about you mean the chapter? Yeah, the chapter in our book. We talk about how keeping up with the joneses could have very easily been keeping up with the smiths. Because the two names are so prevalent. And in fact, smith is the most prevalent name in the United States, and it's all derived from blacksmiths and just how many blacksmiths there were, because every community needed one. And then if you're in a large enough community, you had multiple blacksmiths all working because one blacksmith had to do all this work to supply this one community with all this stuff. And they could only keep up with a certain size community. Yeah. And if you had an onsite thing that you were doing, you had a blacksmith with you. If you were out at war, in battle, you had blacksmith there. Because not only do they create these weapons and the armor, but they have to fix stuff. After a big, long day of battle, you go in and trade in your sword and say, fix this thing. And those smithy has got to be working around the clock. Yeah. And they have like apprentices and help and all that kind of stuff, but yeah, I mean, like you get the impression that the community could come to a standstill when the blacksmith was sick for a week or something. Yeah, and there were blacksmiths doing all kinds of work all over the place. So many that they eventually, and this makes sense, would become a little more specialized. And horses were a big deal back then. We still love horses today, but back then they did a lot more for humanity. They just look pretty and run around in fields now. Right. So they had to make horse shoes. And it was a very specialized set of equipment for making horseshoes as opposed to just regular blacksmithing. So that was a very busy job. They were called fairriers. And even when blacksmithing as a whole kind of went away, there were still farriers working. Because it's not like a shoe store where one size fits all. Well, shoe stores aren't one size fits all, but it's very specific to your foot size or your hoof size as a horse. So you can't just throw any old shoe that's close enough on there. You got to make them a la carte basically made them order, I think, in the fashion world. What's it called? Predator port bespoke. Oh, yeah, that's the opposite of predatorporta. Failures continue to work for years and years and years. And I think there are people that still do failure work today, aren't they? Sure. Just to show off. For sure. But I guess you kind of spoiled the ending. Blacksmiths aren't really around much today because of industrialization, but they were around now they're in Brooklyn, New York. I guarantee it. Yeah, they are. For about 2000 years, they were extraordinarily important to society, but society was around for a very long time before blacksmith came around. So there's this really important window in the historical development of human society that blacksmith existed in. Prior to that, we had tools, but they were mostly made of stone. And then at some point somebody said, hey, if you put tin and copper together, you can come up with stuff called bronze. And it's pretty great. You can make some pretty neat things with it. And one of the things about bronze is that it has a fairly low melting point, something like 1742 deg, 950 degrees Celsius, which you could get a hot campfire to that temperature to melt into molten liquid bronze. Which means that you can create casts and molds and you can pour that molten bronze into it. And as it cools, you've got a handy sword that you can make over and over and over again. So bronze fulfilled this purpose for tools for many thousands of years. And these metals were so important that we go back and call these historical ages by the name of the metal tools that were being produced. So you get the bronze age, and that was eventually followed by the iron age. And one thing that stuck out to me, Chuck, I hadn't realized before is that you think of history is progressing constantly. But the Bronze Age, even though it was followed by the Iron Age, the Iron Age marked a period of cultural decline where the Bronze Age, which had come previously, was a period of cultural blossoming. But for the first several centuries of the Iron Age, it was stepped backwards. A lot of the classical or antiquity societies kind of crumbled at about the same time, they think, possibly because of climate change or mass droughts and starvation. Kind of like the Maya. Yeah. So it's not like the iron caused that. But iron, like, really good bronze is probably superior to iron in a lot of ways, I think iron is a little softer. It might rust a little quicker. It depends on what kind of iron you have, for sure. Right. But the iron that they were using, basically they started using and there's not like a demarcation line. Then there is some overlap, and no one knows exactly when the big switch happened, but it was cheaper and it was more readily available than bronze was. So they just started using iron, basically. And it surpassed bronze. Yeah. The Greeks pin a semi mythical group called the Chaliceies who supposedly were absorbed by the Hittites in Anatolia and Turkey and that they were the ones who figured out how to mine iron because originally there was iron stuff. Like King Tutt was found with a dagger made of iron. And it would have been even more highly prized than anything made of gold in his entire tomb. Because iron was so rare at that time, because the only source of iron on Earth, as far as humans knew, came in the form of meteorites. So you had to find a meteorite above ground to find your deposit of iron. So making a dagger out of that, that would have been a very special dagger. And then eventually they say the calibers figured out. Now there's actually iron in rock in the Earth. And people started figuring out that you could take that rock and heat it to some pretty high temperatures, considering, and then hammer it. And you can hammer the other stuff out, the ore out, or hammer the iron from the ore, and you have something approaching what you would consider iron, something called bloom. Yeah. So they just couldn't get the fire hot enough, basically, at first to get to the iron point. Right. But they could make it hot enough to get to the bloom, and they would put it in an oven known as a bloomery, and it would kind of just roast out those impurities. It had iron, it had slag, which is sort of a glass like, byproduct it's so funny that you can just hammer this stuff out, but bloom would eventually I mean, it worked okay. You could heat it up, you could hammer it, and it would get a lot of the slag out, and it was useful enough for tools. But when the blast furnace came around, when you really got larger furnaces and hotter fires that incorporated bellows to really get that oxygen in there and get it super hot, that eventually allowed them to get that ore to pig iron. And pig iron was a pretty big advancement because from pig iron, you could hammer that flag out to eventually get to rod iron. Right? I want to give a shout out to Harold Smith. H-A-R-A-L-D. He wrote an intro to Iron Smelting that talks all about making bloom himself with pictures. It's pretty cool, for sure. And the grabster helped us with this one, right? Yeah, big time. Thank you, grabster. But with pig iron, it was, like, you said, a pretty big change in that, like, you could suddenly make much pure iron because we had a much hotter furnace that we were working with. And the thing about pig iron is in very much the same way as bloom, you've got to hammer out those impurities. And so to make pig iron into wrought iron, you would take this pig iron, which is pretty impure, heat it up and hammer it with a sledge hammer over and over again. Heat and hammer it very much the same process as bloom, but this at higher temperatures and producing a much pure iron. And then eventually you would have raw iron. And they say that they figured out how to use water hammers. Like waterpowered hammers, in part because of the plague of the 13th century, it killed so many people that they didn't have the human power any longer that they needed to hammer pig iron. So it made people devise water hammers. Yeah, water hammers, steam hammers. If you look at these videos today, these people in their shops and their sheds that they have behind their house, it looks like hydraulics, I guess, sure. That are pounding this stuff. And at first when I saw that, I was disappointed. I was like, oh, man. But that's just the big initial work. Like, there's still tons of hammer work by hand, because there's a lot more to it than that initial hammering to get to the rotor stage. But at first I was kind of like, oh, man. What? They don't like swing a hammer anymore, right? No, it's very smart. They don't need to swing a hammer. Right? It's called work smarter, not harder. But there are traditionalists who are like, no, I want to use a hammer. The different types of irons that humans have come up with over the ages, and this is a really important point I think we should point out here, Chuck, like blacksmithing and all of the information and knowledge and ways of working with different types of iron, different techniques, and actually coming up with different types of iron. All of that started with those people who figured out that you could take rock from the earth and hammer the iron out of it. And just more and more people over the ages as it spread and continued to be around for hundreds and thousands of years, all the people working with metal contributed to that body of knowledge. That's I think one of the things that's so appealing about blacksmithing is that it is a genuine human technology that was created by humanity, you know, not just like, a couple of people who had a really good idea. It was this group of humans, countless humans, all working together over thousands of years, contributing to one another's knowledge to create this body of knowledge. And I think that's what makes it so neat to me, so cool and, like, such a brute way of doing it. The finesse comes in, for sure. And maybe that's what I like about it, is both, like, it's swinging the heavy hammer, but it's also doing this really beautiful finesse work later on in the project. Right. Really cool. Yeah. Well, maybe let's take a break and then talk about the types of iron. How about that? Let's all right, we promise you talk of iron types. There's iron maiden. Sure. There's take your iron supplement. That's right. What else? There's really just iron maiden. Yeah, I guess so. That's all you need to know. Iron types, they're based on the carbon content of the iron. So if you hear raw iron, you might just think that's, like, the cool thing that your staircase spindles are made out of, they are not made of broad iron. They're made out of iron anymore. At least it used to be back in the day. Yes. But this is also called bar iron. It's about or less carbon. And this is sort of, from what I saw back in the day, just the main iron that they would mainly use for the most part, the raw iron. Yeah, yeah. And the big difference between raw iron and steel is that raw iron has silicates in it that kind of ends up as, like, these fibrous filaments that get hammered into order, basically, by the blacksmith from pig iron, which gives it a certain structure with steel. Steel, like you said, all types of iron are basically based on their carbon content. Steel has a much higher carbon content than raw iron does. And so it doesn't need to be hammered like Rod iron does, because it doesn't have these iron silicates that need to be arranged just somewhere else. It will make it brittle. Instead, because of this carbon in it, it forms this kind of crystalline structure in the iron that makes it hard and durable, way harder and more durable than raw iron. The problem is, because of that durability and the strength and hardness, it makes it more difficult for a blacksmith to work with down the line than it does. But it's also a much more effective, say, battle axe than a raw iron battle Axe yeah. And like you said, it's not what we use on our staircase isn't rot iron these days. It's not rot iron. And the production of that in a big way went out in the 20th century, pretty much altogether went out with disco. Gosh, I wish it lasted until the 70s. So one thing we should say also to Chuck is we tend to think of steel as like a modern invention. Steel was perfected in the modern times. It was like basically the thing that kicked off the industrial revolution, if you remember from our Robert Barron's episode. But that's not to say that people weren't experimenting with steel long before that. It was just the scientific understanding of it was lacking. Instead, that was replaced by an intuitive understanding among blacksmiths of what fuel did what to iron to make it stronger. They weren't saying like, oh, if I use charcoal or coke, it's going to make this a better steel than, say, coal or something like that. That's right. Then you've also got cast iron. If you have a nice cast iron collection in your kitchen, it's going to be 2% carbon or more. It's very brittle. So you're not going to hammer cast iron. It is formed into shape by casting it. That's why it's called cast iron and use a mold while it's molten and pour it in there. And it's a great thing to cook with. Yes. And we would have never been able to make anything out of cast iron until those bellows were introduced to the forge to really bring that temperature up. Because iron is a very high melting point. Yeah. If you're going to pour it, it's got to be super hot. And we'll get to these temperatures and the different kinds of hot later on, which is very interesting stuff. Yeah. So we've got like the blacksmiths are working with this. They're figuring out that if you add carbon, or if you do this, if you heat the iron to a certain temperature and then take it off and hammer it and then let it cool on its own, it's going to form one type of finished product. If you do something that's called quenching it, which is cooling it down in a bucket of water and usually mineral oil these days, it's going to cool differently. So it's structure is going to form differently. And again, they were passing this knowledge on, but they weren't using terms necessarily that we were using. What's interesting to me is we use terms that they came up with, like quenching and slag and scale and that kind of stuff. Those are all still very much around. And it makes sense still, even after having made the transition to industrialization, they still use words very much like that, if not those same words. Now, do you mean quenching, as in how a human might quench their own thirst? Kind of. But rather than turning up a bucket of water and mineral oil. You'll would plunge the hot iron into that bucket of mineral oil and water. That's right. Very cool stuff. Are you making a joke that I just missed a reference? No. Okay. I didn't know if you were saying the etymology of the word quench was from smithing. Oh, maybe. And that when we Quinch our thirst, it's taken from that maybe. It's possible. All right. Smite. They think that the word smite and smith are from the same word. Right. Because smite means very biblical meaning or not meaning. But they use a lot in Bible times to hit something, right? Yeah. To strike it. To smite something. Right. That's what a smith does. Smith. Should we talk about tools? I think so. One of the cool things about blacksmith is that when you get good, you just start making your own tools. Oh, man. Isn't that neat? Tools to make tools. Yeah. You got to start somewhere, though. Yeah. You got to lay down a little bit of money first. But I saw this one blog post by a blacksmith who's like, look, if you're just starting out, get the bare minimum stuff, get some used things, see if you like it first, and then eventually when you get good, you can invest a little money, and then you can just start making your own stuff. Right. Which is very cool. I did see there was one YouTube video that was like, how to get going for Less than $100. Oh, I'll bet. Yeah. Very basic stuff. So if you're going to be a Smithy, you're going to need some things. It might be less than $100 to start. You're going to need a forge, which is the heat. There are different kinds. The one that I saw, the axe, this is sort of I don't know if it's old timing, but it was actually using coal, and that's very appealing to the eye. If you're watching on YouTube, it seems like the backyard Smithy these days uses a gas powered oven. A gas powered forage were they using coal or charcoal? Because there's a big difference. It was coal. Okay. I didn't know much about charcoal until this. We'll talk about it later. But it seems like these days the gas powered for just kind of what you use. They're not very big. It's sort of like a double size of a bread box, because when you're making something, you're not building a car out of iron, you're making a tool. You're making a dagger or an ax head. Like they're all kind of small, something you can just sort of stick in there. You're going to have your anvil very key piece. Yeah. You're going to have a lot of other tools for the more finessework, grinders and files and stuff like that. And you're going to have a nice collection of hammers, of course. Yeah, definitely. There's different hammers for different things. And like we said, hammering pick iron and a rod iron. People don't do that these days. So you're not using a sledgehammer and they're using like a little more finesse and precision to kind of strike what's called the workpiece. Whatever you're working on is called the workpiece. That's one thing that really stood out to me, watching some of these blacksmith videos, is like, these guys do not miss. At least if you're at the level where you're doing close ups of your work on video and posting them to YouTube, your hammer is not missing. It's going exactly where you want it to every time. Which is pretty cool, too. It is. But I also, and this is not to knock the Smithy's, it seems like a bit of a forgiving craft and art sure. To where you can sort of like if you did strike and it kind of did something you didn't quite like, you can change that. Right. You can restrict it, you can reheat it. There's a lot of trial and error involved when you're first getting started. Yeah, I'm sure, too. And then as you keep advancing, you're figuring out new techniques and all that kind of thing. But like you're saying, the anvil, it's pretty neat. Like I didn't realize all the different parts to it. Like anybody who's seen a Wiley Coyote cartoon can recognize an anvil and tell you probably draw one from memory and you'd probably be pretty close and that's a pretty accurate image of what an anvil does. But all the little different details from the point on the front to the feet of it, all of those serve this kind of group of purposes that come up pretty frequently in blacksmithing. Yeah. So the anvil is super heavy. It is very hard. Obviously, you don't want the anvil itself to be dented or start falling apart when you're swinging this heavy hammer on metal, on this thing or on iron. And so you also want it so it doesn't just absorb the hammer blows too. So it's got to be the right amount of hardness can't be breaking, can't be shattering. You've got a horn on the front. You talked about the pointy thing. Yeah, that's what's on the front of it. And usually in all the animals I saw when I looked them up, to buy one just to have although they were way too expensive. It's got a little dip right before the horn where the horn juts out. Yeah. The horn is in exactly level with the regular base of the anvil. It's down just a bit and it's not by accident. That's very much one of the big uses of the horn is that little step down. Yeah, that's one of the neat things about amville, is like each little detail has a purpose, a larger purpose that's hidden until you understand what you're looking at or what it does. What about those holes? There's like two holes in every anvil. Pretty much one is round and one's square and the round one is called a pitcher hole. And it is basically a hole so that you can punch holes into whatever work piece you're working on. I saw that if you're punching a hole, you actually want to punch it on the face of the anvil, which is the top. You punch it on one side almost all the way through, flip it over, punch it on the other side almost all the way through, and then you move it to the pitcher hole, and then that's when you widen it to the shape you want. So it just allows you to punch a hole all the way through without harming the face of your anvil. Really? Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts of the video I saw, because that was where the axe head hole went, where you would put the axe handle. Oh, yeah. Sounds like how are you going to do that? And just to see it happen in front of your eyes, it was pretty awesome. And then what's the other hole? The hardy hole? Yeah. The hardy hole is actually square. With a D? Yes. H-A-R-D-Y. It's not hardy because it's very tough. Although it is very tough. Sure. But it is a square whole, which sounds counterintuitive, but it's not. And you can put tools in there that allow you, like you might stick something in there and then use that to then bend the hot iron around to make different bends and cuts and shapes and things. Yeah, I saw this one tool in a couple of different videos that fit into the hardy hole. The hardy hole is almost like a dremel tool. Right. So there's all these different things you can put in that square hole that hold it in place. But the difference between them is what tool is attached to that? Square peg? That's right, square peg. Square peg. And one of the ones that I saw looked like a tuning fork. It's like two rods that are very close together. I saw that. And you could put like a hot work piece in between them and then bend it so you can make like an S hook. It's used for very tight creating very tight curves in the workplace. Yes. Very cool. You got to have your tongs. And I think we should have mentioned, too, the anvil, it doesn't have a sharp edge like the edge all the way around. The main work base of the anvil is a little bit round because if you've got something super sharp and you're hammering away, it's going to make little creases in the iron. You don't want that. I think the step is the sharpest edge of the whole thing between the horn and the face. The top of it. Yeah. I think that's where you need it to be sharp. One other thing I saw that I thought was really interesting is when you buy an anvil, you want to. Actually fit it to a block of wood. And traditionally, people will use, like, a good tree stump of wood that doesn't split very easily. And like, man, you fasten it to that tree stump, and then you bury the tree stump whenever you can, about 3ft into the ground so that the anvil becomes part of the tree stump, becomes part of the ground. So it distributes that extra energy that gets lost rather than back up at you down into the ground where it's absorbed, which I just find absolutely fascinating. But you make it so well fastened to the stump that the stump, the anvil become basically one. Yeah, it's like the anvil is essentially connected to the earth at that point. So nice, man. Just keep thinking of Thor and Led Zeppelin. I know all the things. Jr. Tolkien, the Smithy, you got to have those tongs. And these are not like grilled tongs that you have on your back porch. These are those big, thick metal iron. They look like gussied up nail clippers, almost. And that's what you're going to use to put stuff in the forage. And that fire, pull it out. It's funny here, ed says that pretty much no one wears gloves. I didn't see that. I saw plenty of videos with people wearing gloves. I saw both and I saw some where they didn't. I guess sometimes if you're working really near the heat, you might want your gloves on, but you might also want to have the hand feel during that finesse work. Yeah, because I think it's worth saying one more time that forge where the fire is, I mean, it is very small. I saw as little as like a six by six inch little area of extraordinarily intense heat. So it's a small area of heat, but the heat that is there is so hot, it can turn iron white hot. So, yeah, you want to not get too close to it. And even when you're wearing tongs, it's smart to wear gloves. From what I saw. Yeah. We never really talked much about the fuel. I said these days they power it with gas. Mainly back in the day. Back in the day, they would use charcoal. That was the first thing. And charcoal, apparently, if you're going to be a Brooklyn hipster, you want to work with charcoal because that is the superior product and the superior fuel. But it's really messy, very wasteful. It's very wasteful. It's expensive. It takes a lot of wood to make charcoal. So then coal comes rolling around, and there was a lot of coal, and it was super cheap, and they had to kind of rebuild their forges. But coal, even though it has some impurities, like sulfur and stuff in there, they basically kind of made the big switch to coal at a certain point in time. Yeah. And even better is if you can get your hands on coke, which is a derivative of coal. Just like charcoal is a derivative of wood. It's just wood with the SAP and the water burned out. So it's a really energy dense form of it. Coke is the same thing with coal. It's got the impurities generally burned out, so it's a pure energy dense form of coal. But both of them play a really important role in that they produce really high temperatures, but they also introduce a lot of that carbon that gets absorbed into the iron at those high temperatures, which produces better, harder, stronger steel. Can you cook with that stuff? Can you cook with coke? Cook with coke? I don't know, like in a tomato, like, egg type cooker. I don't know. That's one thing that I saw in one of these blog posts about different types of fuel. I think it was like the no BS, but they spell out the word BS, which I'm not going to say here, because they're blacksmiths, the no BS Guide to Different Kinds of Fuel. They said one of the things to consider is what kind of environmental impact is your fuel having? Right. So that's a good question. If you're like, I'm not sure I should be cooking with this. Don't forget, you're going to be in a small enclosed room that's your blacksmith shop with that same stuff. And you probably have a pretty high efficiency chimney, but some of it's still coming back. So that's definitely a consideration to think of your own health and the health of Mother Earth, who is absorbing the blows from your anvil. That's right. You do need good ventilation in your workshop, eye protection. Sometimes, if you really want to kick it old school, you might have one of those leather aprons, like a leather face. And then your quench. We talked about quenching. It's called a Quinch or a quench bucket, and that is the bucket with the water. And like you said, sometimes mineral oil these days, where you'll plunge it in there, just like on TV and in movies when it makes that great steamy sound and the steam rises everywhere, then they pull out a beautiful battle axe or blond sword. Yeah. Apparently it's not that surprising when you consider samurai, but the Japanese were really good at creating high carbon steel blades. And there's one guy named Goro, G-O-R-O who is like, well, widely considered the greatest Japanese swordsmith of all time from back in the 13th century. So he can throw together a katana. No problem. No problem. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We're going to take a break and talk a little bit and get quite a bit wrong, probably, about techniques right after this. All right, let the parade of misinformation begin. These worry me more than other episodes that we do when it's something very technical and very specific, because these guys make battle axes. Yeah. And it's anytime it's a very specific craft or something that you haven't done like we haven't done. You can research it and watch videos and do your best, but until you've actually done it, you can't get it 100% right. I will say, though, the videos help tremendously. Oh, for sure. This is even remotely interesting to you. And hopefully it is if you're this many minutes, 33 minutes or so into this podcast. Go watch some videos. There's a bunch of them on there, and I think you're going to be like, oh, okay. I get what they were saying. Oh, that makes sense forging a bearded x. That's the one. I've got one. Black Bear Forge, this giant man, the giant beard and a tiny little leather cap, and his name is BlackBerry Forge. Adorable. Yeah. The video I watched is called Scarf Theory and Making Chain, which we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's just amazing. So cool. And like you said, I don't want to do it. I want to have a friend that does it. I want to come over to their house and watch them do it. Let's see if we can get John Hodgman into it. Yes, Hodgman. Although he's got very strong forearms, he does freakishly like Popeye. All right, so here's some of the techniques. What you're doing, if you're a Smithy, is you are shaping hot metal. That's what it comes down to. And this is where the temperature of the metal becomes really important, because certain metals have to be at certain temperatures to do certain things these days. Like I said, if you've got your gas powered forge, you can set that baby on whatever exact temperature you want. And it's not quite as still very impressive. But back in the day when they were using coal and charcoal, there was, I feel like, much more intuition and trial and error and actually looking at the color temperature, because the metal will turn different colors at different temperatures. Right? So there's white hot, orange hot, yellow hot, red hot, different kinds of gradients of orange and yellow and white, too. There's glowing white, which is the hottest. Those aren't just expressions people say. No. And again, that's the etymology of blacksmith lingo, basically, that has made it into whitehot. Yeah, like shot. Those ABS of yours are white hot. Oh, wait, that was a different episode. Yeah, that's right. But apparently blue white hot is the hottest of all. But you don't typically see that in blacksmithing. White hot is about as hot as you get. And how hot is white hot? White hot, from what I saw, was 2550 deg, which is super high, and Celsius. Okay. Yellow, I think, is just below that. And then you've got orange, right? And then you've got Lameo red hot, which is only 1400 degrees, 760 Celsius. You can't do anything with redhot. Some very limited stuff. But at that point, the iron is I mean, it'll probably bend a little bit. I saw good old Black Bear Forge was making some change with what looks to be red hot iron at the time. And he was bending it pretty good. But I mean, I'm not the best judge of color. He was making chain. Yes. I'm not going to wait any longer. This guy made a chain, a length of chain. Perfect. Each length was exactly the size of the last oh, God. He was making them, like, in threes and then connecting those threes to other threes. And he was using the chuck. Are you about to satisfy climax or something? No, it's just so satisfying. It touches these parts of my body. It's not sexual at all. Right. You know what I'm saying? Oh, I know what you're saying. I know exactly what you mean. Although I haven't seen it. You never know what might happen. Right. But this guy so you know the horn of the anvil, right? Oh, do I? He would bend the chain initially on kind of like a thick about the middle part of the horn, and then he would bend it even further, moving it a little up the horn. And this guy just so expertly put it exactly where he needed it to be. I think one of the things I like about Black Bear forge guy is that he doesn't seem the least bit pretentious. I'm pretty sure he lives in Minnesota. He's not wearing his little leather cap, ironically. He seems very helpful. He was born in that. He used videos to help. Yes, I think you might be right. And with a white beard. I think he was born with a white beard as well. Well, when you watch this bearded axe thing, what this guy does is he starts with a block of iron and then eventually makes an ax head. But he's hammering this thing out. He's using this little rolling tool and hammering that as he's kind of rolling it forward. And it's almost like, kind of reminded me of baking, like, the way you would use a rolling pin to smooth out dough. And then when it came time to actually make the sharp part, I guess what he was doing was forge welding. And we're kind of jumping around. But this is one of the techniques, and it's also called fire welding. And that's when you combine different grades of iron and steel, and you're joining these things together in multiple shapes together. I think that's what was going on, because what he did, he had this axe head, and the sharp part, he split. And I was like, well, dude, what kind of an axe is that? That's crazy looking. I thought he messed up, but then he put some other kind of metal in between and would use this. And what? I gathered it's. Where is it? Flux. Is that what it is? Flux? Yeah, like sandwich. It looks like sand. Well, it was in a bottle, and it looked like a little sandy chemical. So I guess that's what it was. And he would heat it up and then spray this stuff on it and hammer it together, heat it up, spray some of this and hammer it until that metal becomes one. And the super specific metal that he needed for the sharp axe blade was melded with the rest of that iron, where you couldn't even tell. It was just like they became one with one another. He was probably reinforcing the ax head with a stronger type of iron, totally slightly different carbon content. And then the outside was a harder kind, so it resisted surface deformities. But the interior stuff was strength, was strong, so it resisted breaking, probably. But he was making these two. One, I saw BlackBerry forge do the same thing with the chains. He was using a scarf weld, where you make one end angled and then you make the other end that it's going to join to angled in the opposite direction, so they kind of fit tightly together. And then he would heat it up and hammer it together and it just became one. But he used flux as well. And from what I could tell, when you use Flux, like sand or borax, I think is something you can use. It prevents that joint from oxidizing, which makes it a stronger joint, a stronger seam, rather than kind of a compromised seam. Yeah. And it was also interesting to see how this guy would sometimes that block was out for quite a long time of hammering and shaping and hammering and shaping. And then it looked like when he got into the little more detailed work as it became an ax head, he would put it in the fire and he would turn around very quickly and start hammering. You could tell he wanted to do it very fast and he would hammer it for like 10 seconds and then put it right back in the fire and then pull it out and hammer it really fast for 10 seconds. So whatever he was doing at that point required a super hot piece of what do you call it, ground piece workpiece. Yeah. But I mean, most blacksmiths, you'll notice in their shops, they set the forge and the anvil up within just twisting distance, like you're standing in one place, moving from one to the other so that you can lose as little heat as possible when you transfer it out of the fire. You don't walk across your shop. No, you don't stop and make a sandwich or anything. There's also drawing, which is drawing that metal out into a longer, thinner shape. You might be shaping something into a rod or a block into a blade, like I saw, and it's sort of lengthening it without flattening it out. Right, because you can also flatten it. That's another thing that's called peanut. Yeah. There's also upsetting, which is the opposite of drawing, where you shorten the length of iron or steel by hammering it. And that's what happens when you make a nail. Did you want to talk about making nails here? Yeah, we kind of mentioned earlier the foundation. There were things that were built with dovetail joints and corn cobs to keep logs together, and there were technologies like that. But if you really want to talk about the building of the world, you got to talk about iron nails and how many millions and tens and millions of iron nails that were made in the world by hand. By people. Yeah. I mean, before industrialization, they were all made by hand, and it's apparently harder to make them than you would think. I watched a video by a blacksmith named Nick Kimball on Instructables, and I guess his brother writes for Instructibles and interviewed him, and he's like a blacksmith at one of the colonial model farms, I think maybe Mount Vernon. They didn't say. So he looks like it, too. He looks like a cool dude, but he showed how to make a nail and he says he can make 1 minute. And this guy is an advanced blacksmith. Like, he has a job as a blacksmith. That's how advanced this guy is in the 21st century. And he can make one a minute. Apparently, blacksmiths of your could make ten to a dozen of them a minute. And it's very involved. Like, you actually have to make the tool first to make the nails. So you take an iron bar, flatten that, punch a hole in it using your printer hole and a punch. And then you take nail rod, little strips of the iron that's going to be nails. It heated up, hammer a shoulder into it on the edge of the anvil so that it's narrower for the bulk of it. And then up top, it just kind of is a little wider and boxy. And then you put it into the hole of the tool that you made, and then you heat it up and you hammer the head a bunch of times to flatten it. That's what you have to do to make one single nail. And some blacksmiths in the days of yours could make a dozen of those in a minute. That's how good they were at it. Unbelievable. I would have charged so much for nails. It would have been astronomical. I would have been like, no, let's make you some chainmail instead. What do you need nails for? Let's do something cool. And they'd say, I need to build a second storey in my house. I'd be like, all right, it's going to cost you the Josh Nail. Yeah, the Josh Clark special. Because it would not be fun to make nails, for sure. No. But boy, they made a lot of them. They did. There are also some other techniques. There's bending, we've kind of already talked about when you're creating curves and things. I mentioned the staircase irons, how they're twisted around. That is done with a square bar, which is a bar with a square hole in it and that's placed over a square rod of hot iron. And then you turn that square, you basically sort of like that dribble you were talking about. You stick that hot thing into the hole and you twist it around and you create those little twists. Yeah. And then every time it's a blacksmith tradition, you say, a voila. You got anything else? I don't have anything else. I know we got stuff not quite right, but hopefully the Smithy's, hopefully our enthusiasm won them over. Yeah, let's hope so. Ignorance. Also, there's like a ton that we didn't talk about. This is a countless human, thousands of years long body of knowledge that we just tried to do in 45 minutes and failed at that. But there's a lot to it. So if you're interested in it, go check it out. At the very least, go watch some videos. And since I said, go watch some videos, everybody, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this Olympic torch bearer. Okay. Hey, guys. I was a torch bearer for the Winter Olympics, and it was a lot of fun. The amount of logistical coordination that went into it was incredible. I was told four months in advance when down to the minute, I'd be carrying the lit torch. And it wasn't off by more than a few, actually. A guy came to our hotel with a bunch of toys, vehicles and action figures and modeled exactly what would happen. That's so cool. I had to be reminded by my handlers to ensure that I kept it very high enough so as to not light my hat on fire. The torch is pretty light, but fairly top heavy. I'm sure we were wearing mittens to make it impossible for any of us to make any finger gestures, even accidentally, that could be seen by the world on the live feed. Think about that. Yeah. One term you didn't use that I thought you'd appreciate when one torch bearer passes the flame to another is called the torch kiss. We went through training and practiced just this part on the street. We did a little dance after we kissed, and then I and whoever just finished got back on the bus, as you mentioned, a guy took my torch and extinguished it right afterward. And since it was still hot, they stored it in a rack on the bus. When we got back to the starting point, they removed the fuel cell and gave it back to me, broke it in half. And that is from Matt Jones. We had quite a nice little exchange about this. He said he did get it through work, but he was not a clevel executive. He wanted it through a drawing at his work. Oh, that's totally great. Yeah, that's great. He might as well have gotten it from contributing to society. He's great. Excited, man, I got to thank for that. Matt also, I knew it was called the kiss. I thought I said it was the kiss. And if I left that out, that drives me crazy, man. When there's a fact that I know that I failed to put into the podcast, that somebody then comes and said, you left out this really awesome fact, and I just dropped to my knees like the Liberty Mutual guy in the elevator and go, no. You know how much that bothers me when that happens to me? How much? None, man. It'll ruin my week. My week is just toast now, thanks to Matt. There's the difference between you and I. Well, if you want to ruin my week and have a neutral effect on Chuck's week, maybe even make it more positive, you can email us, go ahead and type it out after that, wrap it up after that, spank it on the bottom, and then send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
42b3b7e4-53a3-11e8-bdec-8bf11db2a69a | Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Gin | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-gin | If there's one thing we've learned about Chuck over the years it's that he loves his gin. And he loves it even more now that understands it. Pour yourself a martini and cozy up to the gin-cast. | If there's one thing we've learned about Chuck over the years it's that he loves his gin. And he loves it even more now that understands it. Pour yourself a martini and cozy up to the gin-cast. | Tue, 10 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=344, tm_isdst=0) | 46910580 | 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. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan. There's Jerry over there. And we are wasted on excitement about talking about gin. Wasted on excitement. I like that. That's a great motto. Yeah. And not the worst band name, but not the best. It's not the best at all. Like an album title. More like oh, yeah, it's a good album title. Maybe it's Jungle X Ray's second album. Wasted on Excitement. Yeah. Or Bathtub Jin. Wasted on Excitement. Bathtub Jin is a fish song. Oh, it is. It's funny. I was walking in the neighborhood yesterday and I saw a car that was clearly, like, the child home for Thanksgiving. It was like this kind of beat up Jeep from Florida. And it had a fish sticker and a Grateful Dead sticker and, like, one other thing, college and this really nice thing. And I was like, oh, man, I bet I wonder how much weed is hidden in that thing. Welcome home, son. What's that smell? Right? Oh, are you being the sun where we play acting? No, it was that civic coffee took went down the wrong pipe. The wrong pipe? Man, what is up with those faulty flaps? I don't know, man. Probably too much gin. I love gin and I love reading about it and researching it. And I might have a martini tonight as a result. I don't think there's any way you could not have a martini after reading about gin for hours and hours and hours. Yeah, because gin and tonic season is over for me, sadly. Oh, yeah. And I'm into wine season. But wine season and martini season, there's some comorbidity there. Martini season is year round. Not for me. I mean, I don't drink that many martinis. It's a mood thing. Or if I'm with Hodgman, we pound them. Sure. You can't not drink martinis when Hodgman's around. Yeah, of course. No comment. But correct. So we're talking Jim because Jen is great. We love Jen. And it turns out Jim's got a pretty interesting history to it. I think so too. And we did an episode not too long ago on a short stuff, actually, on the difference between bourbon and whiskey. Right. Has that been out yet? Even with the way our schedule works? Oh, wait, it's coming out tomorrow. Tomorrow is in today or tomorrow is in after this is released tomorrow is in. The people who are listening to this, the day it comes out tomorrow to them, that's very select group of humans as far as the dimension of time goes. That's right. So tomorrow, everybody, you'll hear short stuff about the difference between whiskey and bourbon. One of the things that really stands out is there are a lot of laws surrounding whiskey, especially in the United States. What makes whiskey whiskey. What you can call a specific kind of whiskey, what you can put on the label of some kinds of whiskey, lots and lots of laws exist. The law of the country. Don't forget that one. The spirit of America, the native spirit of America. That's what it was, okay? But with gin, it's quite the opposite. Basically, as long as you have a neutral grain spirit that is distilled at, I think, 80 proof or higher, you can add whatever flavor you want to it, and you can call it gin. Okay. Which is not if you buy that thing that I just described. Although it's technically, legally gin, it's not really gin. A lot of people call it flavored vodkas, but for gin, there are specific steps you want to follow. There are specific things you want to do, and more than anything, there's probably going to be a taste of juniper to it. Yeah, that used to be very much the case now. And we've talked a little bit about this on other episodes, just tangentially, I think there are many artisan gin makers now that are doing all kinds of crazy gins and some many issuing the juniper altogether. That beautiful little evergreen shrub and those little cones that have that tiny citrusy peppery taste that we love so much. Yeah. By the way, I should say our buddy, Ben Harrison of the greatest generation and friendly fire. I've seen this online elsewhere, but as far as he knows, he invented it. He smoked gin and tonic, where he gets a little like a chef's torch okay. And smokes juniper berries and then throws the glass on top of it upside down and lets it just smoke up and then turns it over and adds the ice and the rest of the mix in there. I would like to try that. I've had, like, smoked Manhattan and smoked whiskey drinks, wood smoked kind. And did they do the same thing? Yes, same process. But I've never, ever heard of a smoked gin and tonic. So hats off to Ben if he did invent that. Yeah, it was good. And also want to and I know shouted it out before, but I get this local tonic now that's delicious. That is the real deal. The chinchona bark very different than if you're used to traditional, like, schweppes tonic. Doesn't taste anything like that. No, you cut it with soda water, and it's a very lovely taste. Oh, yeah. Like good tonic water is just amazingly good. Yeah, and if you're talking about, like, fever tree, we'll buzz market. Sure. That is still a little more of a traditional tonic. This stuff is brown, right, and syrupy. And then you mix it with the soda and it becomes sort of a real version of that stuff. So it's probably very similar to stuff they're drinking in India in the 19th century, I think. So we'll get to all that. Let's go back to gin. All right, so you start off if you want to make gin, and I have a gin making kit from last Christmas I still haven't used. This has inspired me to go home today and actually make my own gin and then pound it. I'll bring some and we can all take a sip. All right, just a sip. But you start with that base spirit ethyl alcohol. That's 96% ABV. So you can power a car on. Yeah. And then you redistill gin. And that is one of the keys. Here a real gin. You redistil that spirit with whatever botanicals you end up choosing. Right. But typically, the main botanical that's used in the main flavor profile of gin, aside from alcohol that you can power your car on, is that juniper berry, that tiny evergreeny. Some people call it like drinking a Christmas tree. What makes gin? Gin. Once you've had a sip of gin, you will never mistake it for anything else for the rest of your life. That's right. And that base spirit can be and you should also wait until you're 21 to have that. Sure, of course. That base spirit can be wheat, it can be rye, it can be corn, it can be barley, but it can be really anything. You can make potato gin or apple gin. I saw this company in Ireland, there was an article in Vice by Elizabeth Rush, ireland's best gin is made out of milk. Yeah, I saw that, too. Bertha's gin. They make it and this is produced fully in Ireland, which is a great thing, because it's a byproduct of cheese making that way sweet way they use that to make gin. It's crazy. Yeah. They ferment the way and then use that. They distill that fermented beer, basically. And then you distill that further in the process of the presence of botanicals. And then you have gin. It's just this multistep process. But because you're starting out with such a ridiculously high proof alcohol, like neutral alcohol, you can use basically an old shoe to make that neutral grain spirit. And it's going to taste virtually the same as neutral spirit made from barley or from whey or from potatoes or grapes. It just is the alcoholic essence of those things. Yeah. And apparently that fermented whey is what makes Bayley's as well, which I didn't know. Bailey's Irish Whiskey. Yeah. Fermented way cool. I did not know that either. I got to try this stuff, though. It's called Bertha's Revenge or Bailey's Irish Cream. I'm sorry, yes. Would you say Irish whiskey? Yeah. No, it's the coffee additive. That's the Conor McGregor stuff for Grandma Bertha's revenge. Looks delicious. And it is fully made in Ireland. And Bertha, apparently, is a cow. Yeah. She died at age 49 after giving birth to 30 something calves over her life. She was a very prolific milk cow in many ways. Yeah. But they're not the only game in town making way based gin. There are others as well, but supposedly, again, they say that there's something in the way that even once it's distilled into its spirit, there's some mouthfeel to it or some flavor profile, but a lot of people argue that that's just not the case, that no matter what you make it from, you're going to arrive at basically the same base neutral spirit. Okay. Okay. We'll find out. Just let me have something. I'll try Bombay Sapphire, which we'll learn later on, perhaps kickstarted the resurgence of gin. Yeah. Did you know that in the United States? No, but it makes a little bit of sense now that I see the dates and the timelines of when it came over. But they very proudly displayed their ten different botanicals on the bottle. Licorice, juniper, of course, kubeb berries, angelica root, almonds, coriander, cassia bark, iris root, lemon peel, and grains of paradise. Very nice. And I like a Bombay Sapphire martini. That's a good fallback for me, although I'm a Plymouth man through and through when it comes to martinis. Yeah. And generally, I like the Hendrix and I like tanker Ray. Good old fashioned Tanker Ray for the tonics. I'll get a Hendrix martini when I'm out and about, but if I'm like making it myself, I used to like the more boring, straightforward London dry gins, the traditional ones for the martini. And then I realized, like, no, man, you want to go the exact opposite of that. You want, like, the most botanical gin you can find for a gin martini because it's basically gin with a little bit of vermouth. Right. So you want to taste your gin. So I've kind of gravitated toward stuff like the botanist or St. George's Botaniver. Those are two really, really, like, I guess botanicals, the best way to put it, gins that are out there that are really tasty. Is that the St. George that tastes like feet? No, that is their aged, like, Ray Poado gin. Yeah. I didn't love that, where they made it like it was kind of a mezcal or age tequila style gin, where it was gin, but it had some quality of really long aged tequila. I think you weren't prepared for it. I wonder if you'd like it now, knowing, like, what it was going into it, maybe. I mean, I'm always hip to try something, but I'd love a good, high quality London dry gin. That's my jam. Sure, I'm with you. I just like the more botanical ones these days than I used to the Britannical, the puritanical ones, the ones that don't have any alcohol at all. So I think we should quickly talk about before we take our first break, about just how you distill it, because there's a couple of ways, and then we'll take our break. But the first way is steeping, and that is you steep tea. And it's the same thing, basically. You have your base spirit heating up, and it simmers, and then you have those botanicals right in there, and the oils are releasing, and it's just confusing through the whole thing exactly the other way. And Emily has a still now. I'd love to maybe get in there and try some of this for real. I did not know that. Does she, like, carry a tommy gun around and wear a floor link for coat? No, she's got a copper still. She goes to Athens, Georgia, once a week to harvest herbs and then distills herbs for her products. I did know that, yes. It's very cool. That is super cool. It's a lot of fun to see you're out there doing that stuff. Yeah, that's neat. And then the other way is vapor infusion, and that is what Bombay Sapphire does. And that is when you have the botanicals in a basket hanging above the boiling spirit, and that vapor rises, and it does it more through, like, that steam, I guess. Right. Or you can combine the two, which is what another kind of St. George gin terroir does, where they use the steeping method for most of the botanicals, and then they use the vapor method for, I think, like, Douglas FIR and bay laurel leaves. So it's got, like, kind of the tea of botanicals brewing, and then it's just vaporizing through those last two. So cool. It is pretty cool, actually. All right, now we'll take a break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the types of gin, which also entails some history right after this. Okay? We've taken our break. We had our little half sandwiches. We're ready to talk about it. I can't believe you still cut the crust off. It's very interesting for a garnish. Well, I just think it's a little I always has, like, a crusty taste to it then I'm not fond. They have always maintained if they didn't call it crust, kids might eat it. Do you think? Yeah, I think if you said, do you want the magic ring left on your bread? I think kids would probably have a whole different view. But if you say, do you want the crust? I disagree. I think that magic ring would be a gross term. Now look at that magic ringy. Old guy. He keeps staring at us. Well, just insert Josh Clark's magic word of choice. Magic ringy. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't even have to use the word magic, but what would you call crust that sounds better to a kid? I'm saying no matter what you call it. I think it would become synonymous with something gross. I know, but I'm asking you to yes, and fine. Let's see. Yes and is not my strong suit. I failed out of improv. Yours is more no but. No, there's no but. Here's why you're wrong. The Rainbow Ring. Okay, great. The Rainbow Circle. I love it. I don't like it. I'll go back and edit this part out. All right, so let's talk about Jen. We already talked about the fact that it has to be, if you ask me, really distilled with these botanicals to be real gin. Otherwise flavored vodka. That name can come up. And that's a dirty word. Yes, but distilled london. Dry gin. Some of the big, big cats, beef Eater and Gordon's and Tanker Ray or some of those big Daddy London Dry. Like I said, I'm a Plymouth guy. I like Plymouth, too. Yeah, but these are not sweet. That's why they're called dry gins. Right. Sweet gins have a long history and they actually predate gin by many years. But the London Dry gin is what most people think of when they think of gin. And London Dry gin is actually a subcategory of a larger category, which is distilled gin. You got gin, which is basically flavored vodkas, which you could literally put any flavor into this neutral spirit and call it gin. Distilled gin means it went through that process, as we described before the break. And London Dry is one of those. That's right. Right. Is that basically what you just said? Yeah. I mean, I was listening and following it, but it just seemed off. Oh, interesting. Well, I'm glad you cleared that up. I'm sorry about that. That's all right. Then we get to Old Tom Jen, and this has an interesting history of his etymology. And I got this from Markvirtholer at Tails of the Cocktailcom. Apparently the name Old Tom comes from these plaques that hung outside of pubs that look like the shape of an Old Tom cat's head. And get this, and this is amazing. Apparently in London, if you had the sign hanging up in the window, underneath the cat's paw was a slot and a lead pipe attached to a funnel, and you could go down the street in England and drop a coin in the slot and get a shot of gin in your mouth. Yes. From under the cat's paw. Amazing. I saw that, too. I saw that it originated Chuck with this guy named Captain Dudley brad street. And the whole reason he started doing this was because there was a law that said that the informant had to know the name of the person who was selling the illegal gin for the cops to have probable cause to raid a place. Interesting. So he held himself up in this house on this one alley, Blue Anchor Alley, and started selling gin that way, anonymously. And because no one knew who was selling it, the cops could never raid the place. Wow. But, yeah, it was under the paw of a statue or sign or something of an old paw or an Old Tom cat. I love it. Too many. Old Tom went away. It was very much sweeter. That was when they were using sugar and a lot of botanicals, because the base spirit wasn't that great, taste wise. So they loaded it up with sugar and this other stuff. And Prohibition basically killed Old Tom gin for a long time. By the time people started, Prohibition was over. They didn't really have a taste for it anymore. And it has made a comeback in recent years, though. A bit of a comeback. If you are interested in trying, you should start with ransom Old Tom Jin. Yeah, it's just beautiful stuff. Is it good? What about Navy strength gin? I love that stuff. Have you ever had that? No, I don't know if I have or not, actually. It will make you blind. Oh, really? Your hangover is noticeably worse the next day for the same amount of booze. What's the brand? Stronger stuff. I think Anchor. I believe Anchor makes the Navy strength gin. That would make sense. I'm always positive that's who's I've had. But it's just like this higher proof, I think gin can be as low as, like, 37 and a half percent, and Navy strength is at least 50%. Okay. And there's just a noticeable difference in it. And the taste is not terribly much different. It's just the potency of it. But it got its name from a pretty great little legend, from what I understand. Yeah. That's in the Navy, they love them some gin in the Navy, and they actually got gin rations. And so sailors would test it out to see if it was up to snuff or if it was watered down, and they would drizzle it over a little pinch of gunpowder and then light it. And if it lit, then it was Navy strength. Yeah. I love it. It's not like a legal classification or anything, is it? It's just kind of like a well, it says Navy strength gen is at least 57.1%. I don't know if there's a law in the EU or if that's just sort of a standard, but that's where the name came from, at least. Yeah. And it's potent stuff. What about Geneva? So that is basically like the predecessor of gin, right? I mean, this Dutch drink that was first drunk for people to get drunk off of yeah. That's made more out of a malt wine, I think. 15% to 50% malt wine. And so it's sort of like the maltiness of a whiskey, but the botanicals of a gin. I think I've always heard that Old Tom in Geneva are a lot alike. Oh, really? Yeah, they bear resemblance. Interesting. Geneva is like a pretty good place to start as far as this history of gin goes, because it was like I was saying, like a proto gen, like one of the first, I guess, the direct predecessor of gin as we understand it today, but even further back than that. The essential component of gin, the juniper berry, has been used at least since the mean, just a straight up 70s. There's a recipe from Planey the Elder for 76 or 77 Ce that used juniper berries. And you just were supposed to boil some white wine with juniper berries and then drink it, and it was a curative and probably got you pretty drunk. And then I thought about this. This was like two years before he died, the eruption of Vesuvius. Oh, interesting, isn't it? Weird? Kind of chilling. Well, at least he had a nice couple of years there at the end. He definitely did. The word Geneva genever is actually Dutch for juniper, and it does come hail from Holland and apparently in the 13th and 14th centuries, and this was when people were using herbs as medicine. They obviously told you that today. That's what Emily's doing. But apothecaries there were experimenting with all kinds of curative herbs and medical tonics and stuff like that, and juniper was definitely in that category. But where Geneva took a right turn was they said, wow, let's just get drunk. And it's not so much a cure all, but maybe it cures some things. But it was a drink that you drank to get drunk. It was like, yeah, the first spirit out of, I believe out of Europe for that people drink. I mean, they had beer and wine and everything before, but Geneva was like the first hard Blicker, I think, that people really drank. And like you said, it was a malted wine, right? Yeah, that's the base, which sounds like something you buy in a convenience store and drink out of a paper bag, like malted wine. But they would add sugar to it. And it had juniper, which is why a lot of people say this is the direct predecessor, gin. And it was how the UK was introduced to Geneva, because I think in the 15th century, maybe something like that, 16th, the 16th century, queen Elizabeth I sent some of her royal soldiers to the Netherlands to fight alongside the Dutch when they were fighting for independence. And the Dutch said, hey, man, take a couple of shots of this Geneva, and you'll fight anybody. You won't be scared at all. And the English like that a lot. And so they brought Geneva back with them, or taste for it, at least. And Geneva eventually got shortened to gin. That's where we got the word gin from. That's right. And about close to 100 years later, the end of the Anglo Dutch War meant you could actually import it legally by the barrel. And they were called strong Watershops was what the early liquor stores in London were called. I love that. I'm sure there are places in America where they have gained that title. Oh, yeah. And they also wear Arm guarders, probably. So I'm so glad you taught me that word, because I've always just called those, like, full time arm bands and never had quite the punch. Yeah. Arm Guards, the first gen distillery in Britain. In Plymouth. Right. Okay. I had a lot of trouble figuring this one out. I saw that in 1840, booths was the first really gin distiller. Okay. And that the Plymouth one was wait, maybe that was, like, the 17 hundreds. I'm not sure. There was a big rush to establishing gin distilleries in this period that we're talking about. All right. I don't have a date for the Plymouth one, actually. Let me look it up while you're talking. All right, well, let's flash forward then to the gen quais, because Jen, depending on who you're asking, was the crack of the 16 hundreds in England, William of Orange, Protestant king of the Netherlands, went to assume the throne of Great Britain during the Glorious Revolution, and they were drinking that, geneva and they loved it as royalty. But the working class could not afford this stuff, so they started making their own rot gut, like bathtub gin. Right. And apparently, bathtub gin or not brewed, it's not distilled in a bathtub. It can be mixed with botanicals in a bathtub. But from what I saw, the main reason it's called Bathtub Jen, is because to water it down and top it off with water, you couldn't fit it in these bottles in a sink, so you had to do that in a bathtub. Okay. But I think they were mixing up botanicals and stuff, too. But at any rate, this rot got gin in the early 1007 hundreds, and by the mid one thousand seven hundred s. That was a full on gin problem in the UK. Yeah, it was called the gin craze. And especially if you read kind of the tracks railing against the time and newspaper editorials and stories about just the depravity that was going on because of gin, the whole country was just totally off its rocker on gin. And not even, like, good gin or even geneva this bathtub rocket stuff that you were talking about, where they would add things like turpentine to give it a piney flavor because they didn't have juniper berries, they would add sulfuric acid to give it a hot aftertaste. Like, it was supposed to have just really, really bad stuff. And it was making people crazy. And there were stories about mothers who there was a woman named Judith Dear who killed her own daughter so that she could sell her clothes to buy more gin. Her parents like selling their kids into slavery to buy more gin, people turning into sex workers just to get gin money. And just supposedly it was like you said, it was just like the crack epidemic in the same kind of response to it as well. Here in the United States, but this is Jin back in the early 18th century. Yeah. And for sure there was a gin problem. Now historians look back a little bit, and they're like, you know what? These articles were written and these op eds were written by the upper class in Britain, and they had basically an obsession with the English character being degraded and dragged through the mud by these gin drunks. So take it with a grain of salt. There for sure was a gin problem. But they're basically like, is a chicken or an egg thing going on? Because they're, like, urbanization is going rampant in London at the time. And was the Jim Craze a product of this poverty or the cause of it? And by all accounts, these days, it looks like it was sort of a product of it. I saw that there were at least two documented cases of spontaneous human combustion from drinking this gin. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Some hardcore gin. Jeez. There were eight different gen acts from parliament over about a 22 year period. Basically, they said different things, but one of the big ones was, hey, you can't put sulfuric acid in this stuff and sell it anymore. Right. And little by little, these incremental laws over these aid acts, like, made it really expensive to have a license to sell Jin, really expensive to import neutral spirits, and just basically made it so that unless you own a large distillery and an established, like, tavern, you could not legally engage in selling or producing gin in Janery. Yeah, I think that's what they said in the act. In January. Yes. I'll shall not partake in January of any kind. Right. Okay. So especially if your name is Mike Cocaine. You finally did it. Did I do it? If I did, it was accidental. No, you didn't. Okay. But over the course of these accident, left just like, these handful of huge distilleries like booths. Plymouth, by the way, was the first it was in the late 18th century. Nice. And a couple of others, I think boodles, might have been around by then, but all the small distilleries went away just by law. And so when this artisanal revolution that we're currently going on now swept over to England, this company called Sipsmith's wanted to go start their own, and they found out that they couldn't by law, that was 200 years old, so they had to lobby. And they were the first company in 200 years to get a license to Bruce or distill small batch gin in England. Amazing. Because of those gin acts. That's pretty great. I think so, too. All right, well, let's take another little break here, and we'll talk more about Jin right after this. All right. So Jen is going strong in the 1007 hundreds. Some might say it's a problem FlashForward to the invention of the continuous still came about. It's pretty big. If you come over to my house, you see. Emily down there, she doesn't have it. She has a traditional copper pot still, which means that you can do one thing at a time. Basically, you boil your mash and the alcohol boil that off. You collect that distilled spirit in the end, but then you got to start all over again. The continuous still was a very and the other bad part about that is your ABV is going to be pretty low. Right. If you're doing the single pot, that's your alcohol by volume. That's right. Because the longer it was, say, distilled, the pure and more alcoholic, the ultimate spirit you captured would be right? That's right. Okay. So if you have a continuous still, which was what was invented in 1830, that means you can just keep going, man. You just keep throwing that mash in there and you keep that process going and you get more and more pure as you go, and you're going to get that beautiful, clear grain alcohol around 96% in the end. And that really, really changed the game. Yeah. Because these continuous stills, or coffee stills, after the man who invented them, it's like the spirit rises through increasingly higher up stages and it's reheated and heated and heated, and so it becomes pure and pure the higher up it goes, and then eventually it gets tapped off and then you have that high test alcohol. And because you could get pure alcohol to use as the base spirit for gin, you had less of a funky, foul, nasty taste that you needed to cover up with stuff like botanicals or sugar or turpentine, which meant that you could produce gin with a much pure gin that eventually evolved into London dry gin. Yeah, and London dry gin, again with the dry, that means it's not a sugary. Apparently, Victorians in the upper class at one point decided to basically lower their sugar intake. I don't know if that was just a major health kick going on. It sounds like John Harvey Kellogg's work here. Oh, maybe so, but that's when they started getting rid of the sugar. And that's why you get this drier version, which became the London Dry Gin. And the rest is history. They started producing some really high quality gins in England at the time. Yeah, they did. I think that's when the booths and boodles and all those guys started beef eater. Beef eater. That was great. That was fine for a while. Like you said, the Navy was getting their rations and then going out to sea with their gin and testing it on gunpowder and all of that. But one of the things that you'll look at, especially with the London dried gin, is while there's no sugar, there's like a really interesting combination of those botanicals and a botanical we didn't really say, but I think it's kind of self evident. It's any kind of like root, plant, seed, leaf, stem, bark, whatever, that's used to add a particular flavor profile to gin. Typically, juniper is like the chief botanical in a gin. But if you look at these lists of botanicals that are frequently used in London dry gin, they come from all over the world. And it's no coincidence that England was at the height of its imperial colonial power at a time when London dry gin developed, because it was in a position to bring all these ingredients from all over the world to the distilleries that had set up shop in London. Yeah, I think even the Bombay Sapphire has each country listed behind the botanical, and they're all from ten different places or eleven different places. Yeah. Pretty cool. It is pretty cool. So the seafaring of the Brits british Sea Power. Have you ever heard of that band? Yeah, very good. I used to love those guys. They were like early Two thousand s, right? Yeah, that was a big La band for me. Okay. I didn't know where they were from. No, that's when I lived in La. Oh, I see. They're British. I always think so. They were from the era of Montreal and Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin and all those kind of indie bands at the same time, right? Yeah, I think so. Love those guys. British Seapower. But that had a lot to do with Jin because the Brits in their navy were very strong and they sailed a lot and traveled all over the world, obviously, because they had certain interests, like conquering your country and making it their own and getting their hands on your botanical. That's right. And also getting there until, like, let's say the tropics, and saying like, wow, I've never been here before. What are these things that we can eat and drink? And what is this disease? Malaria. I don't want to get that. And so they looked at the people from there, obviously, to get their clue on, like, they're fine, how can we be like them? And the natives of South America chewed on that cinchona tree and that bark to combat malaria. And chinchona is pretty wondrous. That bark has a natural chemical, and that is the quinine that you hear if you look at a tonic bottle. It contains quinine and it makes you feel better if you have malaria, but it also disrupts the metabolism of the parasite and kills it. So it's a medicament as well as a help you feel better type thing. I'm in a predicament because my heart's all afloat, I'm at work, something just happened to me. But these doctors were like, hey, yeah, you British soldier. They started prescribing this stuff, this cinchona bark, and colonists in India and South America, and they were eating a ton of it, 700 tons, actually. In the 1840s, 700 tons of chinchona barca year were being eaten by British soldiers and settlers. Yes. And so they figured out how to, I guess, distill quinine, probably using a coffee still, and started putting it into tonic, like making this tonic water. But basically, I'm sure what you're buying is just distilled quinine from the chinchona bark. It's got to be, right? I think I'm going to look at the other stuff in there and maybe I'll follow up with some ingredients. Okay, do. And bring me some too, please. Okay. With quinine, like, you were basically taking a dose of quinine in a shot of tonic water. And so because everybody was sailing around the world on British ships with gin in one hand and tonic water in the other hand, they eventually put the two together and came up with the gin and tonic. Throw a lemon or a lime slice in there to combat scurvy, and you have a complete drink. That's amazing. It is. And apparently a lot of these gin cocktails were born out of the nasty taste of the original alcohol. So we were talking about that rot gut gin. What do you do? You're going to mix it with a lot of stuff to try and make it more drinkable. Right. That is not the martini. However, this is a pretty neat story in the when martinis were born. And this is from a gentleman named Richard Barnett. And this makes so much sense. It's very cool. He said the martini is an embodiment of American history at its most diverse. Dutch and English gin mixed with French vermouth served with Mediterranean olives, german Jewish pickled onions, or Caribbean lemons. And that glass, which, by the way, one of my more annoyances in life biggest annoyances is when you get a martini these days. Some weird glass. Yeah, just get a martini glass. But do you like the big honkin 90s Karen from Will and Grace style martini glasses or like the classic 60s madman martini glass? Well, okay. More compact version. I like them both. I'll take either one. But just give me that conical glass. Don't give me, like, a tulip glass. I've not seen a martini in a tulip glass. I have. There are places around town that serve them in these little tulip classes and just do it right. Yeah, do it right. I mean, it's literally called a martini glass. It's the glass meant for it. Yeah. It's just like serving a margarita. And you can serve a margarita and a lot of different things, I guess. Sure. You can just cup your hands and drink a margarita out of there. And people have including me. That's true. You can get a margarita ingredients poured down your throat. You don't even need to use your hand. That's true. It's senior frog. The 1920s is when the gin craze kind of was reckick, started again because of Prohibition. And they even went back to putting, like, disgusting ingredients in there. Yeah, not the gin craze. Like, oh, everybody likes gin. Like the gin craze. Like, everybody's going bonkers because of the terrible gin they're drinking. Right, well, and everyone's drinking gin because it wasn't just straight up ethyl alcohol from a moonshiner. Like, hey, at least let's throw some quote unquote ingredients in here. Yeah. terpentine again. Yeah. They use the same stuff that they used in the original gin crest, sulfuric acid and Turpentine. I know. Isn't that gross? It's a classic recipe. Yeah, gross, dude. What else was made? The Manhattan, the Gin fizz, the Gimlet. These are all born out of that sort of 1930s post Prohibition cocktail movement. Yeah, we talked a lot about the origin of some of those drinks and how bars work. Live episode, if I remember correctly. Those are very first shows. But it's funny to think, like, some of our favorite cocktails were built to combat the tastes of nasty gin, which is why people are like, oh, yeah, don't use the good stuff to mix. Like, the whole reason for mixing is to cover up the nasty stuff. Yeah, just drink the good stuff straight. Although I cannot imagine just drinking, like, a neat, room temperature gin. That does not sound good to me. Well, let me tell you the story of my first gen experience in Athens and college. Dave Ruse put this article together for us, and he very astutely points out that if you're a child of the seventies and 80s, he probably didn't drink, like, a gin and tonic early on. This is something you may have picked up on later. And that was the case for me. It was late college, and there was a fellow waiter at Mexico Grill that was there for just a brief period named Don. Can't remember the guy's last name. It doesn't matter. And Don and I ended up out on the river, late night at Okoni Springs Park with a half gallon of Seagram's gin. Oh, my God. Just took it too far. And we're drinking it right out of the bottle and waiting out into the river and not being very safe. Quite frankly, it doesn't sound like you, but I'll always remember Don for that. He introduced me to Jim, and he introduced me unsuccessfully to the Dave Matthews Band. It didn't stick. I don't know why those always stick out to me. But Don was the first guy. He's like, man, this band he's playing across the street, and it's crazy. It's kind of jazzy, and they're multiracial, and it's like you never heard anything like it. And that was Dave Matthews. Banned. Yeah, he was right about that. He was factually correct about two things jazzy and multiracial. Man, Seagram's right out of the handle. Oh, boy. It was bad. But I remember very distinctly, like, tasting that pine gin and thinking, like, oh, this isn't a good thing to drink like this. No. It took me many years to finally come around to gym and be like, okay, I liked vodka martinis for that was one of my first drinks ever. Was vodka martinis when you were 13? Yeah, pretty much in my tree houses, smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka. Martinez the summer before 9th grade, I would drink vodka martinis. It wasn't like I just couldn't take the taste of straight up alcohol. But for some reason, I did not like gin. And then I finally gave it a chance. I was like, actually, this is way better than vodka. I've never been a vodka guy. Unless you're talking about that delightful birthday cake flavored vodka. Is that a thing? Yeah. Hey, we don't judge me, if that's what you like, of course. Jen is making a big comeback now, though. Like we said, it may have started in the late 90s when Bombay Sapphire first came to the US. Apparently it was a pretty big hit. Then Hendrix came along in the US in 2003. Yes, love that Hendrix. We're seeing as many brands as possible in the hopes that they'll send us free stuff. We get a lot of whiskey. We never get Jin. Yeah, no. Every once in a while we've gotten Jim. But not ever. No, not really. But the genesis is on still. Nice. Did you just coin that? I did. That was really good. Thanks. Genisance and medicine. Medicaid. Oh, even better. That's a real word, though. I didn't make that up. I know, but you pull it out of the ether. Great. Fantastic. No, I thought you were still going and I interrupted you. And you're going to pick up again. You'd think after twelve years of doing this we would have had that figured out by now. I got nothing else. I don't have anything else either. Except the gin is great. It is great stuff. If you're of legal age, drink responsibly, don't drive, certainly, no. Make it really easy on you to not drive these days. Yeah, man, take advantage of it. Ride hailing apps. You have zero excuse these days. That's right. Well, if you want to know more about Jin again, I guess if you're 21, give it a try, see what happens. But like Chuck said, drink responsibly. If you're not 21, you're going to have to wait. Sorry. And since I said you're going to have to wait sorry. It's time for listener mail. All right, so listener mail. This one is let me see here. Oh, this is a hand type letter. Look at this thing. Nice. Not an email. No, it's a printed email. It's also not written in the Cutout magazine letters either. So this is from Westwood Sutherland, and he's the guy who sent us that beef turkey. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Hey, guys, my name is Westwood Sutherland, currently a college sophomore in environmental engineering at University of Colorado, Boulder, Scobuffs. He says, sure, I'd like to say I'm your biggest fan, but I can't compete with my dad, who introduced me to your podcast. He's been listening for years and even acts on some of your information after hearing your podcast about bees. The first one, not the beekeeping. He became a beekeeper. Wow. Has reaped the rewards for years now and increased production from our fruit trees as well as getting some honey. That's all that he has to deal with. The bear. He sent in that picture of the bear. That's the local cop that hassles him all the time. No, it's a bear going after his honey. And he named the bear Jerry. How great is that? Miso? He also invested money into a stock, into any stock that worked with CRISPR. Oh, smart guy. And after hearing your gene editing podcast and he is very happy with the results. That's nice. I didn't I should have. Yes. We didn't even take her on a bike. That's my problem. Anyway, the reason I got into your podcast, I started a beef jerky company when I was 14. I love that stuff. And I was selling enough that I spent lots of hours cutting, marinating, laying meat, and bagging jerky. During those long hours, my dad would help me listen to stuff you should know, one after the other. And may time go by very quickly. Just want to say thank you for your wisdom, comedy, insight, and making my days of jerky production a bit easier. I've included some samples of my jerky as a thank you, and that is Westwood Sutherland. And you can find his beef jerky at Westside Jerky.com. I believe Westwood comes from a pretty amazing family. And you know what? Let me correct that, too. He does come in from an amazing family. It is Westside, as in Westwood. So westside Jerkycom. The extra S stands for super small batch Flank steak, beef jerky, gluten free and 100% not vegan. That's right. That's what he says on his card. Thanks, Westwood. That was pretty cool. And hats off to your dad, too, for being so cool as well. That's right. We need to do administrative details soon because I came across the list. We've got stuff that was given to us a year ago at shows in October. Oh, wow. Yeah, so we need to do it soon. Okay. Totally. Okay. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Westwood did, you can go onto our social links, start at stuffiest node.com, and you can also send us an email, or you can send us a typewritten letter, but try an email, too. You can send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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." | |
Taste and How it Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/taste-and-how-it-works | Taste seems like a pretty simple sense, but scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. Josh and Chuck explore the complexities of taste, from definitions and physiology to tongue maps and supertasters, in this episode. | Taste seems like a pretty simple sense, but scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. Josh and Chuck explore the complexities of taste, from definitions and physiology to tongue maps and supertasters, in this episode. | Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:36:27 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=16, tm_min=36, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=201, tm_isdst=0) | 33968604 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant put us together. And you've got the podcast duo that's huge in Dallas. Yes. You got a lot more than that. Yeah. Got about \u00a3400 of hairy goodness. Yeah. Slippery hairy goodness. Yeah. \u00a3400. And I'd say at least \u00a3100 of that is hair. Yeah. Right? I wish if I could get a haircut and that would solve that problem. And a shade. You did get a haircut. We have the same haircut. We have matching hair. It's called the five guard. Yeah. Four guard. Is there a five? Yeah, I go a five and I do a four, and then I do a three on the sides. Just feather it up. You know, it's weird, this conversation. Yummy says that she can smell a new haircut. You know how you can smell a freshly cut lawn? She says she can smell a new haircut. And I'm like, no one else on the planet can. We even looked it up. There's no reference on the entire Internet to smelling a new haircut. Right. Maybe she's a super taster. Smeller. I was going to say. I don't think that translates to taste, Chuck. Okay, but is that a segue? I think that works kind of, right? I mean, consider this. When you've ever smelled something and you're like, I know what that would taste like, but it wouldn't taste like that. But you can tell how something would taste or how you would imagine it would taste. Right. The reason it's so easy to imagine that is that smell and taste are similar as any two senses are, because they're both reactions to chemicals. Yeah. Right. Olfactory is smell. Gustatory. We'll probably say those words taste. Very nice. I love gusta. Tory and there are different types of molecules that react to different types of sensors, right? Yes. So you have an odorant that we smell that reacts with our odor receptors. Right. And then you have Goosens or tastes. Yes. I prefer tasting. I'm a gooseteng guy. Are you? That react with the taste receptors on our tongue. Right, right. But because they're so close, you really actually can't have one without the other. Which, if you've ever had any industrial accident associated with chlorine, you'll know that not only can you not smell any longer, you can't taste any longer. Yeah. That's why it tastes weird when you have a cold like patty. And soma they had an accident. I can't remember what happened, but everything tastes like cardboard to do. It was like this off handed thing they said in The Simpsons, but after it sunk in, I'm like, that's the most depressing thing I've ever heard. They were big smokers, too. Yeah, I guess that was my patio. And, Selma, since you mentioned that, we should go ahead and put a little factoid here that worms and other invertebrates actually, there's no distinction between taste and smell. Yeah. They're like, why put any kind of division up? We're just going to call all one thing, but my head looks like my butt, so what's the difference? Right. They distinguished between volatile and non volatile organic compounds. Right. Which means that if you paint a room and put a worm in it, it knows that you just painted that room. Or if you got your hair cut, perhaps. I guess we should talk about these GRCs gustatory receptor cells. Taste buds. That's kind of where it all happens. It is. And the taste buds are a little I guess they're part of the little bumps on your tongue, but yeah, it's actually under. That how that works. It's wrapped up in a package, right? Yeah. It looks like a little spring onion. Like the butt of a spring onion. Or radish. Looks like a radish. It does. Or beet. It looks like one of those maybe even a weird garlic. Or you know what it looks like here? Looks like a hot air balloon. It looks like one of those boxing things. Beat bag. Yes. Nice. Chuck within this little what's called a papilla papilla. Papilla papilla. Yeah. I don't think you're supposed to say it like that. Sure. Within that, there's 50 taste receptors, and they're generally specialized taste receptors. Right. And they're going to be the same kind of taste receptor in every Pepilla. Yeah. Right. So you've got 50 of those some basal cells, which are skin cells. They produce skin cells, right. Yeah. Not basil is in the plant. That would be great if I had basil that lived in my tongue at all times, you would be turned on. Yeah. Remember that's right. It's an epidemic for men. Yes, just for men. Gel. That would be great if you were actually sponsored by things and we just worked them in like that. Yeah. It's called product placement. We did. So you have about 50 receptors in this little pepi, lace and basal cells, and you have a little each receptor cell has a little hair sticking out of it. Yeah. Agustaory hair. Right. It's not Italian, though. No, but all of it does sound Italian. From what I gather from this photo rendition is that is what you actually see poking up on your tongue. Right. The little round thing is actually the little gustatory hairs, isn't it? That's what it looks like. It's coming out of the top of the speed bag. Right. And they come out of taste pores, and it's the goosetoor hair where all the actions taking place, right? Yeah. That's where flavor well, that's where taste starts. Right. Say you put a bite of steak in your mouth right there's. The saliva is breaking down the meat. It's the first step in breaking it down. And it's breaking it into these little molecules called tasteins or gustance. Yes. Depending on your preference. And these molecules bind to the saliva, are taken across the tongue, and they stick to the receptors that are generally designed to if you believe in intelligent, designed to create the sensation that we call taste. Or they just happen to match up if you don't believe in intelligence. Right, exactly. Good luck. And Chucker's, taste is much different from flavor, isn't it? Let's define taste and flavor, because this is a big thing. Yeah. Flavor. I think Sarah Dowdy actually has stuff you missed in history class. Fine. She wrote this. And the way she put it, which I thought was great, was flavor is sort of like a full body, and we'll get into actually that stuff later with the gut cells. But flavor is a whole body experience. It's all your senses, including smell, obviously. Tactile. And she said that with spicy food, pain is factored in as one of the aspects of flavor. Yeah, I love that. So taste is this tasting molecule wrapped up in your saliva, smacking against agusta Tory hair. Yeah. It sends a transmission to your brain. Right. And your brain encodes it and says, mommy. Right. Or salty. Right. There's different voices for each taste, as I'm sure you know already. Oh, yes. Don't ask me to do sour. But we will later. That's just the taste. The flavor is that the pressure that the steak puts on your tongue. Right. The tactile sensation of the kind of ends of the meat. You know what I'm saying? It's just kind of dancing across your tongue. Or if you like your steak rare, medium rare, like I do. Me too. That lump of warmish, Claish, bloody flesh. Right? Yeah. And then, like you said, pain, too. All of our vegetarian fans just turned off are so disgusted right now. But that whole sensation is flavoring. All these different sensations are going to the brain, and the brain is like, yeah. You know what I want to know and actually just thought of this. What is the deal when you eat a piece of cheese? Someone will tell me this, I'm sure. Like, you get a piece of sharp cheddar and it feels like your jaw locks up. You ever have that? With certain flavors? No. Really? Your jaw? I know. With really dill, sour flavor. I'm like. No, I'm talking about Jerry. Have you ever had that with cheese? Jerry's asleep. Like, I'll put a piece of cheddar in my mouth and my jaw just, like, noticeably clinches. I have no idea what you're talking about. Jerry just said yes. Jerry doesn't know what we're talking about at all. Well, that may be we're going to talk about super tasters in a minute. There are different types of tasters. We found out it's not the same for everyone. So maybe that's one of my kinds. Right. And here's a little spoiler about super tasters. The key to super tasters, they have more taste buds. Yeah, that's huge. Boring. All right. So, Chuck, there are, of course, what? Every school kid knows our primary tastes. Right? Yeah. Sweet, salty, sour, bitter. Right. Back in our day, that was it. That's all the taste you get. Right. Sunny. Yeah. And what was it? Salt, sweet, sour, bitter. Yeah. Right. And then what's funny, in the Western world, for a good century after a fifth taste was discovered, we still stuck to these four and didn't recognize that there was a fifth one because the researcher was Japanese and his work was never translated to English. So in about 1919, one a Japanese researcher named Kiku Une akita. Yeah. Thank you. Aikida. Aikida. Aikida. Yeah. In the early 19 hundreds, he discovered something called umami, which means a delicious savory taste in Japanese. Right, right. What he was doing was he was cooking some of that Japanese seaweed that we both love, and he was like, you know what? This is neither sweet, salty, bitter, or sour. So he started researching it, and he found out that he isolated the glutamic acid and found out that it had its own guitatory receptor. So he's like, this is legit. Right. And he said it in Japanese, which is the problem. Right. Yeah. And everybody was like, what's that guy just say? Mommy, what the heck is that? Let's go back to the World Fair in St. Louis. Right. That's my screen. Yeah. So one of the reasons also that it was never really investigated over here is umami is much more of a flavor that is in Japanese dishes, like you said, seaweed. Right. Huge. But also over here we have tomatoes and umami flavor meat. Savory. Sure. Right. And Kayda's research was backed up in the west in 1085. Later. Yeah. When some researchers started to try to isolate the taste for monosodium glutamate. And remember, umami is glutamic acid, right? Yes. So glutamate. Glutamic acid. So they're trying to isolate the flavor of MSG, which is a pretty distinct savory flavor. And they found that no combination of the primary taste bitter, sweet, salty, sour could replicate MSG. I wonder how they did that. I don't know. There's a lot going on in flavor science that it's fascinating. Huge. Yes. I'm curious, but they basically yeah, you're right. They came away with nothing. All the combinations, they can't account for MSG, and it's magical properties of flavor and calories. And it's supposed to make you feel full or something. Is that what they say? No. With MSG? Yeah. I thought that was the deal. Or maybe that was just an urban legend. People like Chinese food. MSG makes you feel awful. No, it makes you feel sick. It's called Chinese restaurant syndrome. That's right, chinese restaurant syndrome. I know. With me, if I eat MSG, it feels like a claws grabbing the top of my stomach really hurts so bad. Yeah. A lot of people are allergic to MSG. And of course, Chinese restaurants are famous for they don't use it a lot anymore, do they? I don't think so. And most restaurants actually advertise whether or not they use it. Well, they advertise that they don't use it. They don't advertise. Like with MSG is a bad thing. Sure. But remember we got a listener mailing once from somebody whose family owned a bunch of Chinese restaurants. And yeah, you guys talk about Chinese restaurants in there. Because MSG found in like snack chips, we get all the blame. Right. And it's not just Chinese restaurants. And a lot of Chinese restaurants have stopped using MSG. So there you go. Listener. We satisfied that two year old listener mail, we finally get around to it. And did you hear what a pro I was? I didn't cite the snack chip that he used as an example. That's how good we're getting. Wow. Yeah. My mind is blown right now. Mine too. So like you said in 2002, actually, is when Akita's study was finally translated into English. So many years, even after 1985. Right. So from that point, Umami was accepted as the official fifth taste. But think about it. So that's like a century, because the taste map, which we'll talk about, the tongue map yeah. It's a bunk that was established in 1001 about the time that Keda was coming up with the Umami. Right. But it was just that sweet, sour, salty, bitter. Right. So for a century the taste map didn't change. Right. And then in 2002, Umami is accepted in the west finally. Right. And then it seems like the floodgates open. Right. All of a sudden they're like, well, wait a minute, if there's a fifth taste, maybe we haven't been paying enough attention. Like fat is apparently now the 6th primary taste. Right. Leave it to the French. There are new studies now, Joshua, that says that they think they've identified fat as its own thing. Like humans have a taste for fat. And the funny thing, I thought if you have a high sensitivity to that taste, you eat less fatty foods. You know, Chuck, that is, I think that's something that's going to become what gets taste research. Its funding is obesity and diabetes and things like that. Because what they found is people who are, when you're talking about super tasters, super tasters who taste sweet things tend to eat less. A lot of people don't really detect the fat as much. People who do have less body fat. You said lower body mass index. Yeah. So you don't eat the foods that you taste the most. Yeah. That's interesting. It's very interesting. Yeah. The lady did the one study on super tasters, and I think she found that women in their forty s at least, I guess that was her set, they gained less weight or they were slimmer than non supertators, but she didn't find because they were eating less of it. Yeah, but she didn't find men, which I thought was odd. I guess men are just like we just shovel whatever. Bring it on. Yes. It's like, oh, you want me to lose some Weight Watch? I'll just drink water for a day. And there's \u00a350 shed. Right. So, Chuck now it's 2010. Yeah. And if you stick out your tongue, please. Stick out your tongue, Chuck. You know, I bit my tongue almost all the way off when I was a kid. Oh, I see that. Wow. It's like Frankenstein's tongue, sort of. All right, Chuck, stick out your tongue, please. Still? Yeah. So we've got, umami we've got sweet, sour, bitter, salty, fatty. And it looks like that's a pretty fat tongue, Chuck. This is worse than the beep boop. I like the beep boop. And we also have recently discovered that we actually have specialized receptor cells that detect carbon dioxide. Yeah. Well, should we finish the tongue map really quick, at least? And why? It's bunk. Sure. Because you were pointing, but people can't see you point, Josh. So the classic tongue map says that bitter is in the back, sour is on the side, salty is on the front edge, sweet is on the tip, and, umami, throwing on the posterior and saying that that's where that is. Yeah. They're like that. Real estate is open. That's where we'll flip stake your claim. But they've also found that there's fat somewhere. Has to go in there somewhere. Right? Yeah. Do they know where that is yet? Still new. Yeah, it's too new, from what I understand. Right. But I think it's going to take the tongue map away. It's going to be done away with because there are primary tastes, certainly. But they're finding that the whole tongue map, when it was invented in a German researcher, basically what he did was to say areas of low sensitivity were depicted. Like, there was no sensitivity there's those lines, like there's actual borders. Right. And yes, maybe this area of the tongue is higher in receptor cells for, umami, sweet or bitter. But that doesn't mean that it's not found elsewhere on the tongue as well. Yeah. And so a lot of tastes are a mixture of all these, number one. Sure. And all he did was interview people. He did, which I thought was odd. Yeah. His research was backed up in 1974 by Virginia Collins. Right. Well, sort of backed up and sort of not. Well, it was kind of like revised, I guess. Yes. He was right in saying this area has higher in sweet receptors than this area. So you could conceivably put a tongue map, but maybe it was just kind of pushed the wrong way and overlap. Yes. Collings was the one who was saying, like, there's a lot of interplay going on, including CO2. Let's get back can we talk about CO2 finally? Now is the time. That's pretty cool. I mean, you sent me this over the emails a couple of days ago, right. And said, dude, you tapped me on the head and said, Dude, you know that bubbly stuff? You think that's what's making that taste in your mouth. And it's not? No, actually, we have a gene that expresses an enzyme that's meant to detect carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. Right. So you can break it down into useful forms. Right. And for forever, basically, we thought that anytime we drank a carbonated drink, it was a popping of little bubbles in our tongue that created that sensation. Not so fast. They have put people in a pressurized chamber, hyperbaric chamber. Right. No bubble giving them soda that has no bubbles present, and people could still detect the carbon dioxide taste. So there's yet another taste. There's no place on the tongue for carbon dioxide, and yet there's specialized receptor cells for detecting it. Right. Yeah. Well, because like everything else, they said, this is interesting, let's get some mice and genetically make them different and weird and test them out. Right. And they did that and they found it was the same receptor as sour. Right. Yes. The sour receptor basically doubles as CO2 detector as well. They remove that in mice. Yeah. And also they put a sensor into one of their nerves, which is pretty interesting in and of itself that we can do that. I know. It's crazy. So those combinations, those series of studies led to this discovery that we have CO2 detectors, and what an important discovery that is. Right. And Chuck, it is, is it? I think so. What does it mean? Well, that's the whole thing. It leads you to the question, Chuck, why do we have taste anyway? There's one obvious answer is that we learn to eat by deriving pleasure from it and we associate some taste. They're pleasurable, right? Well, yes, but early man, it was a lot of times, like warning systems. Well, this is the less obvious answer. Right? Yeah. Like, if they eat something sweet, they would appeal to them. It gives them a lot of calories, and so that's a good thing. If they tasted something really bitter, it might be poisonous. Right. So you should spit that out. Right. Sour could be spoiled. Sure. Something could be a sweet and sour candy, which is yummy. Right. Early man. Right. With early man, we had yet to figure out a way to encode ideas and warnings about not to eat something to the written word. So we had to use our taste sensors on our own. And that's what's so cool. That's why I love evolution all these years later. That's why we're still attracted to sweet things, because it was survival. It gave you calories to live, basically, food, energy. Right. But we have also gotten to the point where you could say a reasonably fat society here in the US. And you mix it together with health consciousness, or self consciousness especially, and all of a sudden you have artificial sweeteners, which you would think is good for your body. But they found that there's a correlation between using artificial sweeteners and type two diabetes. Right. And they figured out through this investigation, they figured out that there are taste cells elsewhere in the body. It's not just the tongue. And we're getting this idea that not only are tastes, they're more primary taste than we realized. Tastes are interplays of different receptor cells, and there's taste cells elsewhere in the body, in the gut, specifically, but also probably in the pancreas, in the liver, in other areas. So these taste, these molecules that are bound us live, and they enter the gut, they start sending out other signals rather than meaty. Right. Like what? We're saying that, like a bitter taste might be something poisonous. Sometimes you'll eat something poisonous, and it gets past the old tongue, right, and you swallow it, and that's when the guts taste cells kick in, and that's why it might spur vomiting. Right. It triggers your vomiting reaction. Thank God. Yeah, that's one way with the type two diabetes, with the sweet receptors in the gut are signaled by something sweet. They tell the blood to start absorbing insulin. Right. They tell the surrounding cells to start absorbing insulin. Glucose I'm sorry, burn for energy. So, insulin, which actually, Chuck, you remember we've talked about before, and I think whenever we talked about longevity, insulin is like the worst thing for your body. Right. But we use it to go into cells, to basically open the cells so glucose can go be burned. Yeah, but if the glucose doesn't arrive, if there's no sugar eating and it's just an artificial sweetener, that signal is still triggered. The insulin still goes and jams open your cells, but nothing gets burned, and the insulin levels go up, and you have type two diabetes. So that's the tie between drinking, like, a diet soda and potentially leading to diabetes. Right. But isn't that interesting that we figured out something new about taste? That it's all over? It's an all over sensation, is what they're coming up with. Right. That's crazy. So what else do we have, Chuckers? Well, I think we finally need to just map out the super taster thing just a little bit more. Right. Because super tasters are pretty cool, and how it all happened is really cool. Shall I tell the story? I'd like to hear the story, Chuck. Way back in the 1930s, a scientist named Arthur Fox from Dupont was pouring some and this is like every ocean. This is the worst nightmare. When they hear stories about this laboratory, stories like this. This dude was pouring some PTC. Do you want to say the long name? I do, but I have to find it first. I'm not prepared to say it. It is Fennel theocarbamide. Yeah. Very nice. Thank you. So he was pouring some of this PTC it's an organic compound, into a beaker. And the way he described it was he says it suddenly became a cloud that started shooting all over the room. And this is when Ocean is like, oh, God. Yeah. And it basically filled up this room. And he was in there with his partner, and his buddy was like, It's awful. It's so bitter. And he was like, what are you talking about? Wow. That's not bitter. What do you mean? And then that triggered the conversation. Wait a minute. What's going on here? You had a really awful reaction. And apparently I've seen studies on YouTube they don't use PTC anymore. Dangerous. Right? But apparently it's so bitter, it's like the reactions are hysterical. So he goes home and he starts putting this stuff on his family's tongue and his friends tongues to see if they react the same way. And he found that there's no rhyme or reason who it happens to, because it's a genetic trait. And they said they used to use this for it's so specific of a genetic trait. They used to use it for paternity cases, like, up through the 1970s. Holy cow. Yes. They said it's one of the most common mendelayan traits right up there with, like, eye color and blood type is whether or not PTC makes you freak out with bitter. Really? Yeah. That's a terrible test. Yeah. And it's a specific gene. There's a dominant allele for the Tas two R 28 gene, right? Yes. They've isolated that. Yes. 70% of people. This is what's weird. 70% gets the better taste. 58% of Australians and 98% of Native Americans in both north and South America. Almost all of them have that reaction. Really? Yeah. Is that crazy? Yeah. I don't even know what it means. I just thought it was interesting. So in 1991, there was a researcher from Yale who coined the term supertasters. Right? Yes. And it's not just bitter, and it's not just people who react to PTC or PCP. Yeah. Right. Everyone reacts to PCP. Yeah. But whether or not you get beat up ten cops, I think, is probably that's a fraternity test, too. Let's see how you react to PCP. Right. It's not just this bitter taste, right? You can have a super taster who really tastes sweet things, right. Really taste, umami really a primary taste, right? Yeah. That's just heightened. And like we said, the spoiler is you just generally have more of these papillas you have more taste buds of the type than other people. Yeah. And it can be a good thing, like, to have a heightened sense can be good in certain respects, but it also apparently, like, coffee and Brussels sprouts and really sweet and spicy things. Supertasters can't handle that a lot of times. So it's a curse as well as a blessing. Yeah. I would say I can't handle broccoli, but it has nothing to do with taste. You know, I like all vegetables. I've been eating beets like crazy lately. Yeah. Ever since that beet salad. Yeah, I've been making my own beet salad. Yeah, I've been grilling beets a little balsam, a little olive oil, not handle. I'll have to try it, put it on the grill, and then the next day you're going to think you need to go to the doctor. But it's just the beets. That's all I'll say. Okay, so that's pretty much it. Like we said, if you're a super taster, also it supports that aversion to foods that you can taste more than other people. Super tasters who are sensitive to sweet, tend to eat less sweets, et cetera. But they also avoid leafy greens, which is not good. No, you got to have that. Yeah. Pregnant. Actually, we forgot to mention they don't use PTC anymore, but they do use PR O P as the test now, which is a synthetic compound. They just call it prop. Right, and they use it in thyroid medicine, right? Yeah. But now that's the standard super taster test to see if you have that better reaction to that. So they just give you thyroid medicine or they drop some Prop on your tongue. I don't know how it works. Weird. And then lastly, Chuck, the answer to why a lot of stuff tastes like chicken, I don't know. This surprise me. Well, at least at Cornell, using gas chromatography, they have isolated 1000 concentrations, chemical concentrations and 900 of her chicken that contain tastes that the human tongue can taste or that the human brain can senses taste. And they used to think it was hundreds of thousands. They're like, no, it's just thousands. And chicken is like 999 of them. Really? Well, I made up the chicken part. That's my theory. Okay. My theory is it's because there's only 1000 instead of 100,000. There's your answer right there. Yeah. And then lastly, check that also makes me wonder if there's 1000 chemicals. And I used to think it was hundreds of thousands. So there's hundreds of thousands of chemicals out there, but we can only taste 1000. It's kind of like light. We can only see within a certain band of light. It makes you wonder how things that we can't taste, taste. You just chew on that one. And if you want to know more about taste, go tohowstepworks.com where you can type the word taste in the handy search bar. And also this is, I think, requisite listening for a molecular gastronomy podcast that we'll do some of the the future, don't you think? Yeah, all right. I'd love to do one on that. All right, Chuck, then you know what time it is, right? Listener mail? Or are we doing some sort of Facebook or anything? Oh, wait, we got our big announcement we got to do. Yeah, that's right. Thank you for reminding us. Go ahead. Our Atlanta event, right? Yeah. We're going to do an Atlanta thing similar to what we did in New York. Yes. Because we got called out by all the Atlanta folks like you. Go to New York. New York? New York? What about. Atlanta. Yeah, well, we're like yeah, we kind of have to. Yes. We're going to do trivia night. Right? All comers can come take us on. Yeah, we'll figure out the details, but we are looking for venues still. Yeah, we could use you people for details. If you are in Atlanta and you have some connections with what might be a good venue to host our trivia, please get in touch with us. Yeah. So we'll keep you posted. If you have any suggestions, comments, whatever about the Atlanta thing, email us. And now well, it should be sometime in August. We should point out. Okay. We don't have a lockdown yet, but look forward in the next six weeks. Right. Now, listen, right. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this rare shout outs because we don't do these very often. Shouts out. Shouts out. I'm like the new William Sapphire. Hi, Josh and Chuck. My husband and I are huge fans of your podcast. We eagerly wait every Tuesday and Thursday so we can hear what you have to say. I guess it proves your fans. Yeah. Now you can be my heroes as well. Next Saturday, July 17, is my husband's 24th B day. Chuck, this is very kind of you. I know we don't do this very often. We just bought our first house. He made me promise not to buy them anything, I guess because they just spend all their money in the house. Yeah. I wonder if you give him a shout. You don't do this often, so let me tell you why he's cool enough to get a one of a kind birthday greeting. His name is DJ Vile. Seriously? He's in your Facebook group. V-I-L-E-D-J file. And I don't think is he a DJ? No, I think that's his name. His name is like Donald James Vile or something. Well, if he ever becomes a DJ, then he's all set. Yeah, he's like, Just call me me. He listens to every one of your podcasts. He's a huge simpsons fan. Yeah, well, I mean, those are good, but there's not a reason to shout out. Okay, but these are okay. He ran a ten k as green man. I know, I saw that. Wow. Is that a root suit? It was either yes. I think Green Man and the root suit are one in the same okay, so he actually ran a full ten K. It's Green Man. And lastly, he'll be spending his birthday driving to present his research entitled this interfaction Variability of Lung Tumor Motion using 4D Cone Beam CT at a physicist medical conference in Philly. And this dude is 24 years old, and he's doing that. I know. My brain is melted. So with that on the 17th happy birthday, DJ Vile. Happy birthday, DJ Vile. Thank you very much for listening. And Julie, your wife sounds like a very kind woman. She does. And good luck presenting your findings and best wishes for your new home. Mazeltov. All right, Chuck. Thank you for the listener mail. Now it's time for Shouts Out to kiva, kiva. Orgteamtafynow. Or if you just go to Community, you can search stuff you should know. Right? Join our Kiva team. We are on a mission to raise a quarter of a million dollars in loans, and we're making it and we're doing it with how many? We have hundreds of thousands of stuff. You should know, listeners. We have like, 2000 and change members on the Kiva team. There's like 180,000 of you out there that are really disappointed. Right. But on the same token, we're very proud of the 2000 and changes who are members of this stuff. You should Know, Kiva Team, because so far they've raised 170,000 and then some. Yeah, so far, we're on the way to yes, we are included. But there's people on there who put us to shame. They're setting it up on their own, too. Yeah, there's some really great people. And there's somebody who's, like somebody got a bonus at work and made a loan. I think an auto repair wasn't as much as they thought, so they used the difference on Kiva. They made a loan on Kiva. The people that just made us look like vile. $20 on the ground. And if I'm not hungry, I might think about not spinning it on beer and giving it to Kiva. I have a similar problem. Yeah. So thumbs up to our stuff. You should know, Kiva Team, if you want Kudos from us, you can join it yourself. Again, that's www.kiva.org teamstuffychannow. It's a very welcoming community of people, right? Great people. We're on Facebook. We have a Facebook page with 12,000 and then some fans, and we are extremely active on it. Yes. It's actually a fun Facebook page, right. I should say Chuck is way more active than I am, but I go on. Yes, I do Twitter, but we're both on there. But Chuck is really good about responding to people's comments and questions and stuff. So if you want to interact with us, especially Chuck, you can go to facebook. Comsteno. We're also on Twitter. S YSK podcast. You can follow us on our stupid Musings. And you get caught up in hoaxes and stuff and he Crow thanks to me, right? Or we get told, you got to take that down. You can't say that, right? You're going to get in trouble. You're going to get everybody in trouble. And then what's the last thing? There was one other thing I don't forget to get it. T shirts. Yeah, the T shirt contest is over. We have five winners, and you can buy every single one of these awesome T shirts. Five different stuff you should know designs at the Discovery Store. Go to store discoverycom and search stuff you should know. And it'll bring up all five T shirts. Yes. And that's it, man. If you have anything cool to say to us. We want to hear it. Put it in an email. Send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. 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8a965b10-4a58-11e8-a49f-cba148258419 | SYSK Selects: The Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-the-star-wars-holiday-special-of-19-2 | Long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, George Lucas allowed the Star Wars Holiday Special to be made. What happened on the night of November 17, 1978 can never be fully explained, but we make our best effort in a very special edition of SYSK. May the force be with us all. | Long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, George Lucas allowed the Star Wars Holiday Special to be made. What happened on the night of November 17, 1978 can never be fully explained, but we make our best effort in a very special edition of SYSK. May the force be with us all. | Sat, 22 Dec 2018 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=356, tm_isdst=0) | 52252106 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, everybody. It's that time of year again for our new annual tradition this is the second year we're doing it. Of releasing our episode on the horrible, terrible Star Wars Christmas special. Bye. Goodness is. I am making this a holiday tradition, and I'm cramming it into our SYSK Select feed yet again. So enjoy getting the Christmas spirit. Happy Life Day, everybody. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Tucker's Bryant and Jerry Jerome. Roland, the wookie mother. Yeah. Mala. That was the Wookie wife. Oh, and mother. Yeah, sure. Chewbacca's mom is not with them any longer. She left. She was not about to appear in that. She went out the window. I'm excited about this, I have to say. We should say happy Star Wars Day. Yeah. Today is December 17. I have my opening night tickets. Do you really? Sure. Wow. Are you into it? Yeah. I will definitely go see it in the theater. But why won't be there opening night? Sure. I've gotten really adept at ignoring, spoilers people, talking about stuff. I could conceivably see this movie a month after it comes out and still going fresh. I'm in Ostrich. Yeah. You black yourself out. Yeah. You go dark. I do. I make myself go to sleep. You go to the dark side. I've been there a while now. Well, happy Star Wars Day, though. I'm sure that I think this pairs nicely with Christmas. Star Wars Day. It's all come together. Yes. We already missed Life Day though, so happy belated life Day. Are they celebrating it this year, november 17? Yeah, but it's every three years. Arcane. Yeah, man. Not a weird job. Okay, so it's every three years started in 1978. Let's do the math, shall we? Quick math break. I believe that 2014 was the last Life Day. We just missed it and then again in 2017. Okay. So 2017 will celebrate Life Day. We'll put on our red robes, our ultra long straight iron wigs sure. And we'll celebrate Life Day the way it was meant to. Yeah. And if you have no idea what we're talking about, we are talking about Life Day, which is a celebration that Wookies in the Star Wars universe have every three years. Yes. It's like their Christmas. Yeah. Or their Veronica or their Kwanza or their Tet, supposedly. It's sort of like Earth Day, too. They celebrate the diversity of their ecosystem and also remembrance of the dead. And they also give them gifts. They're like the Finns, basically. Yeah. It's a very interesting part of the Star Wars canon. It is. And it's almost entirely made up, dashed off, you could possibly say, by George Lucas in the 70s. Yeah. And it's the basis of what has become derided as one of the worst things that ever happened to the Star Wars galaxy. Well, not only that, one of the worst things ever aired on television. In this galaxy. Yeah. At first, that sounds like hyperbole. Like, come on. It's because it was Star Wars and we had high expectations, but it's really that bad. Yeah. The people who say that haven't seen even a second of it. Yeah. However, I watched it when I was a kid, then again this week. And you watched it twice this week. Yeah, I watched it last night and this morning. There's something about it. It's mesmerizing. It really is. It's one of those things you start watching it and you want to turn it off, but you want to see just how absurd it can get. Almost. Yeah. And it starts absurd. It stays absurd in the middle. Yeah. It's increasingly more absurd. It gets a little less absurd, finishes super absurd. Yeah. It's just a train wreck in every single sense of the word, top to bottom. It's extraordinarily difficult to overstate how bad this is. And some people, in researching this, you read about it, you read descriptions of these things, and it just can't possibly be gotten across until you see it. So luckily, as we will see, you can go on to YouTube and watch it, and you may even enjoy this episode more if you pause, go spend 2 hours watching this thing and then come back and laugh along with us. Yeah, there's a great over the years, there have been many segments of it on YouTube from badly dubbed VHS tapes, but there's one really pretty good version of it in full. Brought to you by Whio dayton, Ohio. Channel Seven, Ohio. Because that flashes up on the screen periodically. Man, it is high quality. Yeah, it looks good. It has to basically be the copy that the actual affiliate broadcast. It's like that quality compared to the other stuff floating around on YouTube. It's clearly recorded on a 1978 PCR, which is really expensive. Very expensive. I did some calculating on West Egg. Okay. So the average VCR went for about $1,000. They were brand new. It's amazing. $1,000 in 1978 money. So they're about three $800 in 2014 money. Crazy. Luckily, there were some rich people out there recording this stuff. And the wealthy have saved us all again, yet again, as they always do. Yes. We need to shout out some articles that we use for this. There's a great article in Vanity Fair called The Han Solo Comedy Hour. Exclamation point. Yes. By Frank De Jacoba. And then the Star Wars Holiday Special was the worst thing on television ever by someone we kind of know, alex Pasternak knows from Motherboard. Yeah. Which is not wired, it's Vice. We wrote a little bit for Motherboard back then, and we had a call with that one. We're like old motherboard vets. Yeah. Basically. Wasn't there one more? There was another one, and I don't know who wrote this one. Chuck. Yeah. The title is the Star Wars Holiday Special. George Lucas wants to smash every copy of with a sledgehammer, which is a famous quote, supposedly at a convention by Lucas. Yes. Which is not correct. He didn't ever say that. No. Okay. That sounded like something that people made up. Yes. But if you go on the internet, you will quickly believe that he did, but apparently he didn't. I'm sure he felt that way, though, clearly, because he did appear on robot chicken and I think 2005 on the therapist couch talking about how much he hated the special. All right, so let's set the background, shall we? Shall we go back to summer? Getting the old way back machine? All right, let's do it. All right. Here we are. There's Wooderson. Yeah. I'm just a little six year old excited about star wars. I've just turned one. Yes. You don't know what's up yet. Please forgive me if I urinate myself. No problem. Okay, so what has happened is star wars has become a huge hit, seemingly out of nowhere. Yeah. Establishing George Lucas is one of the brilliant young minds in filmmaking. Even though it wasn't his first movie, it was his first huge breakout hit. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, talk about a breakout hit like no one had ever seen anything like it before. No. 2001 had come out in the late 60s, but it still isn't accessible to all audiences. You know, it's pretty cerebral film. Yeah. It's not an adventure movie. This was star wars. This is like basically swashbuckling on the screen, but in a galaxy far, far away. Star wars just changed everything. And it came on just like a hammer. A new hope, by the way. Yeah. And I know we're going to get stuff wrong. Nerds. Yeah. Just go ahead and get your little fingers ready to email us. If it wasn't driven home that I'm not nerd by the fact that I don't have opening night tickets or any tickets yet. Give me a break. Okay. And by proxy, chuck, too. Okay. Thank you. It's hard to state how great star wars was in everyone's mind. Right. Bill Murray came out with that lounge singer star wars thing. Yeah. It was everywhere. And if you just listen to the lyrics of it, really, it's just bill Murray singing about how much star wars is awesome. Right? Yeah. So by the following year, George Lucas, he wanted to figure out a way to keep audiences just engaged with the whole star wars franchise that he was just starting to build. But he knew the empire strikes back was a couple more years out. Sure. So I think he was approached by some TV executives who said, have you considered doing some sort of TV special? They're all the rage right now. We have a graphic that's really awesome that we set aside just for TV specials here at CBS. Why don't you let us let's get together and do a star wars special. That's right. Producers Gary smith and Dwight Hemion were working over at CBS. And they say, this is a great way to keep the spirit alive while you're making your other movie, maybe move some more toys. Yeah, George Lucas got a cut of all the toys. Sure. It was right before Thanksgiving and he said there would be a lot of people watching TV pre holiday season or I guess in the holiday season. Well, the weekend before Thanksgiving, it's like everybody's shopping, sitting around, family, like, waiting to actually do stuff. That's right. Perfect time to broadcast something on TV. So Lucas says, all right, let's do this. I don't have a ton of time, but how about this? I'll get a story together and then you can go hire a whiz bang team of veteran writers and producers and directors, whatever genre you think is appropriate. And those are the words that will haunt John George Lucas to his grave. Yeah. So Lucas said, here's my idea. I want it to be based on Wookies, and I want it to take place on their home planet of Kazuk or wikipane at c. Is that how you say Kazakh? That's how it's pronounced in the holiday special. But it's also pronounced different ways. Other times I would have pronounced it kashi e e. Spell it K-A-S-H-Y-Y-Y-K. Yeah, I guess that sounds like Chewbacca's planet. Sure. Also called g 5623. WikiPedant c or Edeon is a mid rim planet. Right. So the whole reason apparently that George Lucas was interested in featuring the Wookies was it is what we in show business call low hanging fruit. The reason why it was low hanging fruit was because they had just established the different scenes that would make the cut for Empire Strikes Back. How did you pronounce it? Again, kazukaek had not made the cut even prior to this. Apparently for a New Hope, george Lucas had whipped up a 40 page what's known as the rookie bible. It's like a 40 page supplement that's all about Kazuk and Wookies and Chewbacca and his family and everything about Wookie. Dumb, right? That's right. So he's like, I've got this thing already established. I love rookies. They didn't make the cut. I'm a little sad about that. Kazuki is not going to show up in the Empire Strikes Back. Let's build the entire special around Wookies. It's basically the one demand me George Lucas has. That's it. I'll be totally hands off from this point on. Which he kind of was. He totally was. And it was actually this experience that apparently taught him to be a very hands on person that he is famous for being. It came out of this Christmas special. Absolutely. He was burned and had an iron grip after that on everything. So here's some of the folks behind it. Bruce valanche. Famous TV writer. You probably seen him on Hollywood Squares. Wasn't he suspected of being Thomas Pinch on for a while? I don't know. Or was Thomas Pinchon on Hollywood Squares? I have no idea. I may be confabulating some stuff. Confounding? Yeah. There's some kind of some sort going on. Sounds like it, yeah. So Valanci was hired as a writer. A guy named Lenny Rips was hired as a writer who has some great quotes in that Vanity Fair article. He does. His first quote was, we were really excited because this is Star Wars. How could it lose? Famous last words. Who else was hired? There was a husband and wife team, the Welches, who are the parents of folk singer Gillian Welch, who I'm a big fan of. And I had no idea that her parents there were producers, songwriters of the day. They were big on the variety show scene, which would turn out to be a really key cog in this whole experience. So I feel like right about here, jerry should insert a needle coming off of a record significant. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Jerry. So, Chuck, you just said singer songwriters. Yeah. What would that have to do with Star Wars? Yeah. Well, actually, in this Star Wars holiday special, for those of you who haven't seen it, there are musical numbers. They decided from the outset that there should be musical numbers. And the reason that they decided that there should be musical numbers is because the people who sold George Lucas and at the time it was the Star Wars corporation was what it was called on the idea of doing this TV special was that everyone would love a variety show. Yeah, it was the 70s. Great idea. Let's do a variety show. The problem was this apparently George Lucas didn't watch enough TV and he also overly trusted people who talked to him. Sure. Because by 1978, yes, variety of shows had dominated television for over ten years, but it had come to an end. It was getting stale. Yeah. We're talking Carol Burnett show, one of my favorite, had just been canceled after eleven season. Big red Flag, sunny and Cher had just had its last season. Yeah. I mean, what else? Like he hall was still going on. Probably. They didn't know when to quit. Hehaw still on it. Solid Gold had yet to come on and take up the mantle. That wasn't a variety show. That was a little bit there was talking in between the songs. Yeah. Remember the mandrel sister show? I never watched that one. What was with that country chic thing that happened? Yeah, it was a big deal in the sense it's kind of happening again, I think. Oh, because of that dude, the guy who won all the CMA awards. I don't know, he came along and he's like, actually country. His dad's like a coal miner. For real. From Kentucky. I think I know what you mean, Chris. Yeah, he is good. He's come along and been like, what are you guys doing? Well, there's a revival in good country music again. That's great. Like in the tradition of Merle Haggard and I guess it's probably where the country she came from because there was actually good country going on. Yeah. Johnny Cash had a variety show. Did he really? Oh, yeah. I knew they did, like, a Sunday singing thing, like, out in Virginia. Yes. He had his own variety show was actually pretty good. There's some really great performances. Do you know how many nerds are like, Get back to Star Wars? I know. I'm so sorry. All right, so the variety show is dying, sort of. And so they figure, what a great time to take the biggest movie property on the planet and wedge it into the variety show milieu. I don't know if wedge is the right word. I think maybe nestle it in there and then start hitting it with the blunt edge of an axe until it mashes into that crevice. That's right, because this is the time when Fantasy Island had just started. Morgan mindy was about to change things. Charlie's Angels was getting huge. Basically, television as we knew it from 1980 to whenever the real world came along, just escapist television is what they call it, was starting and it was the hip new thing. So basically, if they had turned Han Solo and Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker into maybe sexy detectives, it might have gone over even better. But they went the other way. They decided to latch onto this extraordinarily stale genre of television and they hired the best in the business. There was a quote from, I think, Lenny Rips who was saying, like, we had literally a dream team, a variety show dream team. And everybody was good, but there were probably no bad welders on the Titanic either. That's a great quote. Yeah. The guy they hired to direct it initially was a dude named David Akumba and he had made his name for a welcome to the Film East. It was a concert documentary with Van Morrison and the Birds in and he actually was at USC Film School at the same time as Lucas, even though they didn't know each other. And he only ended up directing about three segments of the thing yes. Before he walked off. Some say he was actually let go, but we'll get to him in a minute. And who replaced him. Okay. As we get along down this gross road. Well, let's take a little break because I'm overly excited. Okay. All right. So we've established most of the main players. We'll get to a few more. We should point out that Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. Sure. Peter Mayhew, they had no grounds to refuse to be on this, basically. Yeah, pretty much. They were not huge stars, yet they could throw their weight around and say, this is terrible, and I'm not doing it. They were big overnight because of Star Wars, for sure. But they weren't to the adoring public. Sure. Back at the studio, they could still be bossed around, and this is the result of it. And you can tell also, just from watching the actual special, like, Harrison Ford is not happy to be there at any point. Oh, no. Princess Leia is clearly on drugs. Was she on drugs at this point? If you watch it, she's on drugs. Especially the ending scene. Mark Hamill, it looks like he's happy to be there, actually. He was fine, but apparently he said, no, I'm not doing a musical number. Yeah. And if you watch his part, wedging a musical number in there would have been even more painful. Sure. But everybody who was part of the actual Star Wars franchise that wasn't wearing, like, a full body costume was like, I really wish I wasn't here. And you can tell. Yeah. In fact, in the opening credit sequence, they're showing the picture, the faces of the people, and you see Harrison Ford as if he's flying the Millennium Falcon. And you can just hear the guy off screen going, now look at the camera and just give a nod. Just look at the camera and give a nod. And finally you can tell he's pissed off. And he looks up at the camera and just sort of smirks. Yeah. And points to the camera like, okay, I'm looking at the camera. And then goes back to what he's doing. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. I felt bad for him so early on, volanche and others. Did you feel bad for him, though? Really? Come on. It's harrison Ford. Han Solo. He has to go do this for, like, five days. Yeah, I felt terrible for him. I think it's hilarious that they had to do this, especially now. Well, early on, Valanci and others knew that they may be in trouble because they decided not to subtitle any of the Wookie dialogue. Right. And they literally started after a brief opening scene. Setting it up here's. The basic plot is Han Solo is trying to get Chewbacca back to Kazuk in Time for Life Day so he can celebrate with his family. That's the basis of the entire 2 hours. That's the basis of the entire 2 hours. They encounter a space battle and they're delayed. And the next 2 hours are kind of what's going on while the delay is happening. Back on Kazoop. Back on Kazoop. Because you hear like, okay, well, Han Solo and Chewbacca evading the Imperial Guard and all that stuff for 2 hours. I would watch that. Sure. I would, too. That's not what they show. Killing time at the Wookie household. That is what they show. Yeah, that's what they do. It's people hanging out, waiting for Chewbacca, worrying about him, and then killing time while they wait for him to come back. Yeah. Literally. Hold on. So you say there's a set up, right? Yeah, that's the initial set up. And then Chuck, that's followed by this. Yeah, it's followed by literally ten minutes. Ten solid minutes of incomprehensible Wookie speak. So let's join it for a second, shall we? Yeah, let's all enjoy it. And again, you said ten minutes, and you're not exaggerating. You're not being hyperbolic. You can time it. It's ten minutes of Wookies talking to each other with no subtitles. Fortunately, I couldn't follow it at first. I didn't even know who it was. I thought it might have been Chewbacca's mom and dad. Oh, yeah, that's little brother. And I don't find out until later when Mark Hamill shows up via Skype Call and says he really explains everything that had just happened. Like, you're Chewbacca's father. Itchy, you're chubbaka's son lumpy. Yeah. And you or chubaka's wife. Oh, Mala. Yeah. Thank you. So before everybody starts freaking out, we know that that's actually their nicknames. Their real names are his father is Atichikkook. It's really hard to pronounce. Mulato Buck is his wife, and his son is Lumpo. Or Lump, as named by Lucas. Yeah. But Lucas also named him Lumpy Itchy and Mala. So they're all back there wringing their hands, trying to figure out ways to pass the time until they get word from Chewbacca that he's made it to what is it? Ketchup kezuk Kazuk. It's like Ketchup ketchup or Ketchup, if you're fancy. But Chewbacca is having trouble getting back to Khachuk because there's Kazakh, because there's a blockade by the empire, and they're looking for rebels, specifically Chewbacca, who I didn't realize is he's the most famous Wookie of all. Did you know that? Yeah, of course I didn't know that. Well, I mean, he's the only one that really appears in the movies, seeing, like, these people's view of the universe. What about back on Kazakh? Yeah, he might have just been a fly by night Wookie, right? Yeah, but not the case. Very famous Wookie. Yeah. And he really loved to soak in his fame. All right, so he realizes there's a problem. valanche, he goes to Lucas and is like, I don't know, man, this is your world, but it may not be the strongest thing to do to set this in Wookie land and have all this comprehensible dialogue. And he says he was met with a glacial stare. Well, he put it a little differently than that. Well, he said glacial stare. He did. The glacial stair that he got was for this quote. He said, These people just talk and what sounds like fat people having an orgasm. He goes, if you want, you can set up a tape recorder in my bedroom, and I'll do all of the foliating for it. Yeah, he's a large guy. He is. So that's what got the glacial stare. But Valanci later said that there was one development meeting that Lucas attended, and it was here's the Wookie Bible. Tell me what you got. And Villanch said he and the other writers and producers and director were just kind of throwing ideas, and George Lucas would either say, like, no, that doesn't work. Give them a glacial stare or say, yes, that's exactly it. Yes. Let's make this a variety show. Yeah. And there was a little bit of background there. The Cantina players in the band had appeared on other variety shows at that point, and I think it went over fairly well just as a short segment on, like, the Richard Pryor variety Show or Donny Marie. There were a lot of variety shows, but that's what I'm saying. That was television. That's what you did. Like the Brandy's. The show had its course, and then it became a variety show. Everybody loved variety shows. By this time, though, everybody was sick of variety shows. Right. And so it really was a terrible choice. In fact, they even hired a couple of writers from Shields and Yarnell, which I hadn't heard of. Had you? Oh, yeah, I watched it. It was creepy. This Mime couple who had their own variety show, and they figured, these two will be great because they are used to working without words. Right. So there is a certain logic to the variety shows all over the place. It's not just that variety shows were popular at the time. Somebody was like, well, you don't understand what they're saying, so this is all going to be very physical. So these people who did what is it? Shields and Yarnell? Yeah, that's a perfect choice. That makes complete sense. You can see this whole process of leading up to the point where it was produced and shot and everything, a series of like, oh, we have this problem. Well, here's a fix. Yeah, but that leads to another problem. Well, we'll fix it with this. And no one's stepping back and being like, all we've done is create a series of problems that are going to come together and make one extraordinarily large problem that will become legendary. No one did that. And so the whole thing was made. That's right. And that eventually airs on November 17, 1978, friday at 08:00 P.m. Eastern time. That's right. And according to Nielsen ratings, it attracted 13 million viewers, lost the second hour just in the US. It aired in seven countries total. Yeah, but no one cares about that. I guess not, because none of those are on the Internet. It finished second to The Loveboat in the second or I'm sorry, from eight to nine. And then the next hour actually finished behind part two of a miniseries about Pearl Harbor starring Angie Dickinson. So it didn't even win their respective hours. No, 13 million. That's not bad. The thing is, apparently if you look at the Nielsen ratings graph for the first hour yeah, we know about that graph. It's okay. Yeah, we do. And then after a very important part, which we'll talk about soon, it just drops off at the end of the first hour. And that actually probably made the executives at CBS cringe for a number of reasons. Number one is this special was originally supposed to just be an hour, but so many advertisers wanted to sign on that they extended it to 2 hours, and it shines through. You can totally tell that this thing was never supposed to be I think an hour might have been stretching it, to tell you the truth. It's 30 minutes of content. 40 if you're generous an hour, and then 2 hours, it becomes one of the worst things that was ever put on television. All right, well, let's take a break and then we'll talk a little bit more about the actual I don't want to call it content, but it is content in the strictest definition. Sure. Right after this. All right, so the show itself, we've given you the main plot line, which, again, is that Chewy is trying to get back to his home planet to celebrate Life Day with his family. Right. That's it. And again, we almost barely see Chewy. The rest is his family on Kazuk, waiting for him to come back for Life Day. Yeah. So some of the various things they did, they were guest stars. There was Harvey Corman from The Carol Burnett Show, one of my all time favorites. Him or Carol Burnett show. Both. He's great. Yeah. He actually, if you watch what he's doing, you're like, this is a comedy genius. Well, sure. Apparently, he, too was, like, the only one on set that was bringing levity. He was joking around and kind of kept spirits up. Good for him. That's what I say. He had three different parts. Yeah, he played well, I don't even know the names, actually. We could look him up, but he played he played a Julia Childlike cook. There's an actual cooking segment, a long one. A very long cooking segment, where Chewbacca's wife makes bantha stew to kill some time. To kill some time on her planet and in our living room. Yeah. So Harvey Corman is in drag as a four armed Julia Childlike TV chef. Right. I think it's Gormanda. Is her name Gormanda? That makes total sense. Yeah. There's this one weird bit where Chewbacca's son tries to figure out a way to trick the stormtroopers. The Empire had come because the blockade raided the house and other properties. So he tries to trick them by, I think, rigging a.com Lank to speak in a different voice. So he has to watch the instruction manual. He watches an instruction video, which was Harvey kitel as a robot. It would have been wonderful. Harvey kitel did say Harvey Harvey Corman. Oh, man. Harvey kitel murdered someone in the middle of the initial Harvey Corman. And then the final role he had was a bar patron in the cantina that drinks. He has a hole in the top of his head like a volcano, where he pours his drinks, and that's how he drinks. And he loves bee. Arthur. Did we mention B Arthur was in it? B Arthur is not only in. It Chuck. She sings a song. She does. She is the notes to everyone. She manages or maybe owns the canteen. She's the owner. Yeah. What's the Maz what? Mazdaf Cantina? No. Mozdef is a rapper. Oh, yeah. You mean Maas Isley. Yes, that Cantina. She's the owner. B. Arthur is the owner. B. Arthur of the Golden Girls. But in this case, be Arthur of Maud. Because as one of the people who wrote one of the articles we base this on points out she's just basically playing Maud as the owner of the Cantina. Yeah. And her song comes because they basically say there's a lockdown, so you got to call last call at your bar. So she calls last call by singing a song to everyone. Right. And again, we can't possibly have the script lead anywhere else but Chewbacca's house while his family waits for it. So all this takes place as part of a public service announcement basically broadcast by the Empire about how immoral life on Tatooine is. So let's go see what's going on in the Maze Isley Cantina as it's being shut down for curfew. Yeah. Alright. This is incomprehensible, but it goes on. So there in it there's also Art Carney. Yes. He's the honeymooner. Probably the star of the whole thing, really. He has the most lines, I would say the most comprehensible line. Right. So he plays a human trader that has recently been with Han Solo and Chewy and actually gets to Kazuk and says they're on the way, it's all good. Yeah, a trader. Not trader. Yeah, trader is and trades humans for money. No, he sells goods. Yeah, a trader. He doesn't trade humans. Yeah, he's in the human trade. No, he isn't. Really? Yeah, he trades humans like he sells humans. I looked it up in Star Wars encyclopedia. It said that he was in the human trade. So in this Christmas special, apparently they sanitized his background because he's basically just selling gadgets and novelties and stuff like that to the Wookies and the Empire who were occupying the area. Yes. He comes bearing gifts. Yeah. Because he's a friend of Chewbacca's family. Yeah. So he comes bearing gifts. One of the gifts he gives is sort of like a little digital insert to a I guess you would call it a virtual reality hair dryer. Like a beauty shop hairdryer. Right. He gives it to Grandpa. Itchy Grandpa Itchy, sits under this hair dryer, pops in this digital cassette and it can only be described as soft core porn. Apparently the writers who are interview for this said that was totally the intent. They were trying to get what amounted to softcore porn that would pass the sensors. That's right. You can't even say it's innuendo. It's too obvious and overt for innuendo. Instead it's just gross. It's really gross. Diane Carroll, great singer. Yes, she is. A Vegas staple, shows up and starts basically tantalizing Grandpa Itchy again, this is Chewbacca's elderly father who now engages in some sort of well, he's watching virtual reality pornography now, and this is a pretty lengthy segment in and of itself. Well, yeah. And she literally says to him, now I can see you're really excited. Yeah, it's pretty rough to watch. Yeah. So then you've got another musical number, because also again he Shudders yeah, it's really strange. All right, so there's also a I know it seems like we're jumping around, but it's so mind blowing. This is pretty much like blow for blow. Actually, I forgot earlier on in the special there's, one of my favorite sequences is when Grandpa itchy goes over to Lumpy and basically sets up remember the Hologram chess board that they played in A New Hope? Yeah. Basically kind of sets that up and says, Here, just play this. He pushes the button, which is clearly a 1970s cassette recorder. And another, it's like a Cirque du Soleil acid trip gymnast routine. Happens in front of the kids eyes. And again, it's not like it shows a snippet. They show the entire segments, like, 5610 minutes long of all of these things. So you would think, okay, they've gone to this Hologram well, a couple of times. Why not go to it again? Well, they do. To kill more time. While the Imperial Guard is ransacking their house, art carney, apparently, I guess, is trying to get one of the Imperial Guard the leader, I think, or one of the leaders. He looks like somebody from spaceballs, by the way. Very much so. Yeah. And the writer of the Vanity Fair article, by the way, said, this is so incomprehensible. The specialist, George Lucas, didn't even have the Schwartz with them at the time. So, anyway, our carney is distracting this Imperial leader while they're ransacking the Wookie's house, Chewbacca's house with a hologram in this Hologram, instead of being an acrobat or Diane Carroll or any kind of porn or anything like that, is Jefferson Starship. And they decide that they're going to play Light The Sky On Fire, which apparently is about UFOs. It's a little music video, basically. Yeah. It's the predecessor to video Kill the Radio Star, you can tell. And again, it is the whole lengthy song, the whole thing. So every time that somebody's like, we need to escape mentally from what's going on here in our house, let's go into this video world, and they don't cut back and forth. No, it's okay. Here's five minutes of Jefferson Starship performing this song. Yeah. And even the Jefferson Starship guys were like, it's sort of a weird trip. Like, we didn't get it, but we did it right. They gave us some money and some cocaine. Well, probably, we said. Yeah. Chuck, I think, though, yet another segment like this is actually widely regarded as the high point of the whole thing. Oh, sure. Great. There is a cartoon, actually. Yeah. That Lumpy watches. Yeah. Lumpy, the Imperial Guard is still ransacking my house. I think I'll entertain myself by watching a cartoon on my little I guess it was an iPad. And he watches this cartoon and it's actually remarkable for a number of reasons. It's the best part of the whole special. Yeah. Generally agreed upon as such. It's not just us. And it introduces Boba Fett. It's the first time Boba Fett ever makes an appearance in the Star Wars universe. Yeah, it's actually not a bad and you can't find it in the one version I told you to watch. They removed it for copyright. But you didn't watch a separate version. Right. You can find it on its own. Yeah. And it's very much reminiscent of like the cartoon style of the day, like a heman or something. For sure. It's even a little more artsy than that. Yeah. But it does have a plot that you can follow that makes sense as a Star Wars thing. And it introduces Boba Fett, like you said, and it's actually not bad. It's like Luke and R two and C three podcast on a planet or something. Yeah. And Han and chewer you're in it. And it's the first time we see in Darth Vader, it's the first time we see Boba Fett and that he is just doing whatever he can do for money. Right. Like Luke trust him. At first C Three PO is like, you sure you should trust him this quick? And he's like, oh, three PO, you and your non trusting ways. And then it turns out he's selling them out to the dark side. So it's basically boa. Fett is an allegory for George Lucas himself. So the cartoon comes and goes. And that was the thing that came at about the end of the first hour mark. And after that everybody just turned off their television sets. Yeah. I don't remember. Did you watch this when it came up? Yeah, I remember watching it, but I don't remember much about it. Like, if I made it through at all. I mean, I was seven and it was on till ten, so I probably didn't make it through it all. But you're probably deserved it. Who knows? I just remember that I have to ask my brother. He might have a memory of this. I bet he does. I'm sure he met everybody afterward or something like that. He has a picture. Well, he was ten at that point, so cynicism had become a thing in his life probably by then. Sure. When cynicism kicks in, I can see Scott holding out the 1415. Yeah, maybe. So, Chuck, the whole thing finally does in. And actually there's a guy, his name is Nathan Rabin. He writes over at the AV club. He had a great quote. He basically said that one of the great redeeming values of this special is that it does eventually end. Yeah. You know what the first part of the quote is? I'm not convinced the special wasn't ultimately written and directed by a sentient bag of cocaine. Go read his review of the Star Wars Holiday special because he goes on to describe exactly what that must have been like. Development meeting, where the bag of cocaine is pacing back and forth, talking about what should happen. That's what it feels like, but it doesn't, and it ends. It takes this bizarre 2 hours and wraps it up in just a nice bizarre bow. Yeah. So what happens is eventually, Han Solo should we say spoiler alert. Eventually Han Solo and Chewy make it to the planet. They park on the far side of the planet because they know the imperial forces are there and the exercise will do to be good. Yeah. So they have to hike over there. They eventually make it back home. They find the stormtroopers at their house, their tree hut. Yes. Which is the paintings that set this up. I don't think we mentioned I don't even call them matte paintings. It looks like someone painted something on the wall and they just put a camera in front of it. Pretty much, yeah. So they get back, and Han Solo hides around the corner. Chewbacca steps in front of his son to protect them. Han Solo jumps out, and the stormtrooper trips over a pile of logs and falls over the balcony and dies in a holiday special. So they wouldn't even not only could he not shoot first with GREETO, but they couldn't even have him wrestle the stormtrooper and throw him off. He trips over a log. Right. And Han Solo has his hands thrown up like, Wasn't me. It might as well have been a banana peel. But again, this is basically produced by VOD Villians, starring Vaudevillians. Why not have the One Death take place from basically what amounts to somebody slipping on a banana? Exactly. It's a perfect way to end it. So that guy basically represents the end of the imperial threat for the rest of Life Day. And we then see Life Day being celebrated, which is celebrated by lots of rookies assembling in what looks like a giant Olin Mills portrait, and all of them are wearing red robes. Sure. And I know I'm up talking, and it's because my mind is still having trouble wrapping around. And then Princess Leia comes out with C. Three PO. Is Mark Hamill there? The whole gang is there. Okay. The whole gang is there. And then they all gather around to hear a great quote from Princess Leia, which we will read verbatim. This holiday is yours, but we all share with you the hope that this day brings us closer to freedom and to harmony and to peace. No matter how different we appear, we're all the same in our struggle against the powers of evil and darkness. I hope that this day will always be a day of joy in which we can reconfirm our dedication and our courage. And more than anything, else. Our love for one another. This is the promise of the Tree of Life key song. Right. And we should also point out the Tree of Life has never been mentioned up to this point. I have no idea what that was. It makes a sudden appearance at the end. And when you say Q song by Q song, you mean Princess Leia starts singing. Yes. And apparently that was one of the big contingencies on Carrie Fisher being involved. She's going through a phase where she's like, I kind of like singing. Bruce Voluntee calls it her journey, mitchell period. Yeah. And she somehow convinced them to let her sing as Princess Leia. And she does. And again, I've said that she looks like she's on drugs. This is the point where she really does look like she's on drugs. And it's not just me. Other writers who have written reviews of this, it's really obvious that she possibly smoked a decent amount of pot before she shot this scene. But she sings. Okay. It's fine. It's just the fact that Princess Leia's singing. And actually, Bruce valanche had a really great quote, too. He says that she very much wanted to show this side of her talent. And there was general dismay because this was not what we wanted Princess Leia to be doing. Yeah. She did it anyway. So the whole thing ends with her singing this song about Life Day, which is set loosely to the John Williams Star Wars theme. Yeah. So along the way, the director, original director quit. A new director, steve Binder was hired to finish the job and bring it in. And he did over the original $1 million budget, of course. Always, he did bring it in. And at this point, George Lucas, he was working on Empire Strikes Back. He didn't know what was going on. He wasn't around for the shoot. No, it wasn't until Eric, I think, that he actually saw it. Yes. And it was a travesty, obviously, if you haven't noticed that by now. Critics hated it. Star wars fans really hated it. Everybody hated the people who were in it. Hated it. Lucas hated it. Even Harvey Corman secretly hated it. Yeah, even Harvey kyle hated it. Actually, he loved it. But Lucas has been asked over the years about it a lot. And he doesn't talk about it much. But in 2005 and I don't buy this for a second he says it was an interview. He said the special from really didn't have much to do with us. That part is true. I can't remember what network it was even on, but it was the thing that they did. That's a lie. There's no way he doesn't know that was CVS. Yeah. We kind of just let them do it. I believe that it was done by I can't even remember who the group was, but they were Variety TV guys. I'm sure he remembers a few of them. We let them use the characters and stuff. And that probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but you learn from those experiences. Yes. I think they even use some of the footage from the movie at the end. It looks like some of the space stuff, like a highlight reel. The gang well, it looked like they had some insert shots of Imperial cruisers and tie fighters and stuff. Yeah. Remember when Chewbacca leans back and puts his hands behind that's in there? It's like just a highlight reel from the movie saying, if you're like this, go see the movie. Well, and also, that means it doesn't match the look of the rest of it at all. Yeah, that's true. It's just sort of inserted. They tried. They definitely tried. And George Lucas is totally full of it because in 1987, he told Starlog magazine that the Christmas special would be out on video cassette very soon. Yes. And in 2007, two years after that quote you just read, where he's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Basically, he apparently considered releasing the Christmas special as a bonus on the DVDs of the first three. Right. But did not. And apparently Kerry Fisher told Lucas that if you want me to do DVD extras commentary. Yeah, commentary. Then I want a clean, original copy of the holiday special. Yes. So why? So I can play at parties when I want people to leave. It's pretty great. It is. And there is one of those clean copies that's floating around out there, so you can watch this in its entirety. Some of it, like the cartoon was removed due to copyright infringement and that kind of stuff. But as the case with the rest of the Internet, you can just go find it elsewhere and piece it together. There's also the original ads that aired in Baltimore that are just fascinating. Yeah, those are always fun GM ads where one of the guys who's in quality control, he says, did you watch it? I don't think I saw that one. He goes, we really care about these cars. That's no jive man on the GM ad. And he's like, Serious? They're trying to be hip. Yeah, it's pretty good stuff. Here's my final thought on it. I love it. It does not taint my Star Wars experience or my love for the franchise. Okay. And I'm glad it is out there because it's a fun little stain that shouldn't be taken too seriously. I think it adds to it, actually, because it's campy and awful and I don't know, somehow that enriches the rest of it. I'm with you. You like it? Oh, yeah. I mean, I watched it twice. I wouldn't have watched it the second. I wouldn't have made it through the first time. Let me take that back. I'm a pro. Yeah. So I would have made it through the first time. I wouldn't have watched it the second time. If there wasn't something about it. And I figured out I think the thing that I liked the most about it is Lumpy Chewbacca's son, played by an actress named Patty Maloney, who, frankly, is hands down the best actor in the entire thing. Her responses and everything is just awesome. I think my favorite parts are well, there's a great Wilhelm Screamer trips over the lodge. Jerry would not have noticed it. And then there's a part where all the wookie dialogue you can't understand, but there's clearly one part where itchy and Lumpy are having exchange where Lumpy, you can make it out, goes, I love you. Yeah, I noticed that it was but it's covered up. But someone was like, we have to have at least one exchange where you sort of know what they're saying. Sure. Or they were like, I think she said, I love you. Should we have them redo it? And the director is like, no, I want to go and check. There's one other thing that I figured out from watching this. What's that? It's not readily apparent the whole thing is made all the more odd and that there's situation after situation after situation where we, as normal audiences, were trained to expect a laugh track, but there's not a laugh track. Had there been a laugh track yeah. It might have been less bizarre, but the fact that it's missing just makes your it agitates the mind. So it's this whole additional element that it is weird. I never thought about it. There's just weird moments of silence all throughout it. Yeah. Like when Art Carney's doing his thing. Yes. Telling jokes. Yeah. Okay. I agree with you, Chuck. Don't take things too seriously. I think that's the great lesson in this. Yeah, it's a lesson of life day. It is. And in 2007, Rift tracks the Great Mystery Science Theater 3000. Guys, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy provided audio commentary for the full version of the special. So try and go grab that if you can, as well. Oh, you can. It's on their site because it's great. I think it's, like, $8. Those guys are awesome. I think Corbett listens to us. So hey, Corbett, you got anything else? No, I think we did this. There's some good stuff. Go read the Vanity Fair article. Han Solo Comedy Hour. There's a book called How Star Wars Conquered the Universe that has a very interesting chapter about this. That's where we found it asserted that George Lucas never said that he would match this thing with a sledgehammer. Right. And there's also an entire website dedicated to it. Starwarsholidayspecial.com. Yeah. And if you want to know more about the Star Wars Holiday special, we have a ton of Star Wars stuff on how stuff works, by the way. Yeah. We have cool, sort of fun articles about the Death Star and Lightsabers videos with Holly Fry from stuff you missed in history class. Yeah, she knows her stuff. She does. So you can just type Star Wars in the search bar@howstepworks.com and it'll bring up some cool stuff for you. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. Just finished listening to the Voyage manuscript podcast. Found it super interesting, especially the theories on its definition or origin. I know Josh mentioned Chuck theory of it being drug induced is somewhat surprising, or even unlikely, given a language in the manuscript follows linguistic laws only founded in the past 100 years. But if you think about it, it's tough to stray away from familiar structures, especially for something like language. I think back to when I was younger and friends invented their own languages, or even in writing a song or poetry. Creativity can sometimes be limited by what we know, so just thought I'd contribute that to the conversation. Nice. Thanks. Big thanks for all you guys do. I found the podcast after moving to San Diego in the last few years for some noise around my apartment. So basically, we were blocking out noise. We do that, which I love, and then as a way to get through traffic on my commute home from work, you guys are far more interesting and enjoyable than television and YouTube videos. Sure, I've listened to hundreds and will continue to listen to hundreds more. Keep on keeping on. That is from Amy J Muffet. Thanks a lot, amy in San Diego doesn't mean like Place of the Whales in German or something like that. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyouchenko, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetopworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyoushaneo.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 podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
How easy is it to steal a nuclear bomb? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-easy-is-it-to-steal-a-nuclear-bomb | Nuclear weapons are extremely well guarded, so stealing one would be quite tricky. Join Josh and Chuck as they discuss nabbing nuclear weapons, and some surprising facts about nuclear accidents, in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Nuclear weapons are extremely well guarded, so stealing one would be quite tricky. Join Josh and Chuck as they discuss nabbing nuclear weapons, and some surprising facts about nuclear accidents, in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:11:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=15, tm_min=11, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=237, tm_isdst=0) | 25189655 | 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 housetepworks.com. Everybody loves Altoids. Little mints that come in tens. Well, once the mints are gone, you can do some really neat things with the leftover tens. People have made MP3 players, cameras, even stoves. Check out Houseoperks.com Tennovators to find out more. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Sitting across from me is the always likable Charles W Chuck Bryant. How are you? Not so. Oh, it's true, Chuck. Everybody likes you. You're the most affable fellow I know. I used to think so. You are, believe me. Thanks, man. Yeah. Chuck's a little down today. So we're going to talk about stealing nuclear bombs. Yeah, it'll perk me up. It'll brighten your day, won't it? Of course, Chuck. Of course. You've seen the 1985 Robert Zemeckis classic Back to the Future? I knew you were going to bring that up. Well, you know me pretty well. I even wrote down Back to the Future in here somewhere. We're in sync, my friend. Yes, arguably that was sometimes. That was Thomas F. Wilson's greatest role. Who was that? The guy who played BIFF only role. No, actually, I was looking at him on Internet movie database. This guy has been in a lot of stuff. Really? Well, he's Beth. He was also in Action Jackson. He's BIFF. Did he play BIFF? He had a cameo with BIFF. It's like Frank Oz and the Blues Brothers. Right. Well, if you remember, as I'm sure you do, since you wrote down Back to the Future on your notes, there is a kind of a subplot going on with Dock and he's dealings with Middle Eastern terrorists. I didn't remember that. I thought this was a podcast on Gigawatts. Get it? Yeah. Okay, well, then you do remember that Doc, he was selling some plutonium to these terrorists. Right. Or they wanted plutonium from him. Right. And the reason, of course, that they wanted plutonium he kept it for the DeLorean, by the way. Of course. Okay, but the reason they wanted plutonium is because ostensibly they were going to manufacture a nuclear weapon. Right? And that is not outside the realm of possibilities. Scarily enough. It's not. Chuck. Yes. There was another movie, too. They're back to the future, too. Yes. No, 1086 was a movie called The Manhattan Project where a teenager steals enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb for his science project. I remember that. John Lithgow. Yes. Bad movie. I haven't seen it though. It wasn't bad, if I remember correctly. Well, everyone, as you would say, that was right in my wheelhouse. I was ten at the time and thinking of making my own nuclear weapons. Right. It's the same time as war Games, which we'll get to in a minute. Oh, we will, yes. Right. I see on the agenda that you have war Games written down as well. This one is rife with movie and TV references. So, Chuck, let's talk about stealing a nuclear weapon. Okay. How easy is it? Well, first of all, we should go and say it's probably impossible to steal a nuclear warhead. Okay. I'm not going to go along with that. Really? Yeah, it'd be really difficult. It would not be difficult. Let's say you're Iran. Okay? And it's and you're in contact with a bunch of KGB officers or maybe some Soviet military generals. Okay? The coup just happened. There's no longer USSR. Maybe you're friends with somebody in Kazakhstan. Right. All of these people had access to strategic and tactical nuclear arms. Actually, there was a huge question over what was going to happen with the former Soviet Union's 270 tactical and strategic nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union dissolved. What happened to them? Actually, there was a really good effort that was made by the former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan and Ukraine and all of these groups that actually were already in fighting with Russia and the Russian government to move all of these nukes into Russia. Okay. And I think they did it with pretty amazing speed. There were UN resolutions, there were talks between the US. And Russia and the former Soviet republics, and everybody got their nukes back into Russian borders in Russian control. Now, see that I read a Reuters article when I was researching this, and that is one of the scenarios they pose as one way it could happen is during transport. That's when they're probably most vulnerable. Yeah, you would think so, wouldn't you? Yeah, but let's say you're in Iranian official, you got the money, you got the means, and not to pick on Iran here. Maybe we should go with Jamaica. Sure. I don't want to tick off anyone in Iran. Right. But let's say you're a Jamaican official, you got tons of cash and you want a nuke. There's a huge coup going on. It's the dissolution of a former superpower, and there's 27,000 nukes out there. If you got the money to purchase one and the means of getting it out of the country and back to Jamaica, my friend, you have a nuke. Yeah, I guess I was thinking in terms of these days, it's a lot more difficult than it would have been in 1991. How so? Well, I think security has been tightened down somewhat. You think? Since 1991? Yeah. You're about to shoot me down, aren't you? No, I'm not. From what I could tell from reading up on this is that it's more likely that someone could steal the components of a nuclear weapon and assemble it themselves. Sure. Rather than load 30 foot bomb on the back of their truck and drive it through borders. Right. Chuck which makes people with the information in their heads of how to assemble a nuclear bomb from all these various parts, or more to the point, what parts you'd need to make a nuclear bomb incredibly valuable. Absolutely. Have you heard of AQ Khan? I have, but I know you're the man, the con man. Nice one. Well, Khan actually is the father of Pakistani nuclear proliferation right. Which is a country's program that we're pretty worried about. Well, yeah, they have the bomb. India has the bomb. They do. He also was under house arrest for five years, from 2004 until February 2009, because he admitted to being involved in nuclear, illegal nuclear proliferation. I can't say that in other countries, like Libya, Iran, he was basically selling his knowledge to the highest bidder for their own nuclear program. It doesn't surprise me. So, I mean, it may be hard to steal, actually, it's incredibly hard to put together a nuclear bomb. It's very hard to steal one. But if you really look at it using maybe AKAM's razor or something like that, it would actually probably be the easiest thing to do would be to just go in and steal a nuclear bomb rather than stealing the parts. Right. What's the easiest part to steal when you want to assemble a nuclear bomb? Well, the easiest part would be the explosive mechanism, the TNT, which you need a lot of enriched uranium doesn't do much on its own. You need to explode it. Sure. As they say. And that would be the easiest part. You'd have to build a casing for it, which wouldn't be super easy, but it's at least something you can manufacture yourself. And the hardest thing would probably be to get the enriched super enriched. Highly enriched uranium. Highly enriched uranium or plutonium, if you could find docks. Yeah, that would be tough. Do you know why you would want plutonium or highly enriched uranium? What kind of bomb or why? I would say to go back to the future or to build a bomb. Yes. Specifically a fission bomb. Okay. Now, what's the difference? I know you know the difference in fission and fusion. Do you know? I know that. Well, I'm a smart guy because I don't know and I hope one of us does. I do. Okay. Would you like to know? Yes. Okay. So a fission bomb is where you're taking a really heavy, dense material. The nuclei are heavy. Right. The atomic weight is heavy. Got you. And what you're doing is you're stripping the nuclei of neutrons. Okay, I'm with you. Which in turn releases more neutrons. And so on and so on. Right. Okay. So you have a chain reaction, and once it's highly sustained, it's called super critical mass. Right. You've reached super critical mass because neutron is knocking neutrons from nuclei and so on and so on and so on. And it's happening really quickly, and it raises a huge amount of energy. Now, going back at that point no. And like you were saying, you need TNT to start this chain reaction, a lot of it. And with the fusion bomb, you're actually doing the opposite. You take a very light substance, like hydrogen, and you take a tremendous amount of heat from an explosion of TNT. Right. And you smash the stuff together, and that creates another very big explosion. So which one is more likely scenario for stealing one? I would imagine a fission bomb, because it's the easiest to make. Okay. But the problem is getting highly enriched uranium or plutonium is very difficult. Exactly. Although you can find a lot of it in Russia and the US. Right? Yeah. There's a lot of it that's unaccounted for, which is kind of scary or left over. Did you read that thing about Robert Gates from 2008? No. He basically came out and accused Moscow of not knowing where a lot of their plutonium and highly enriched uranium was. Well, I could see that, because when the Soviet Union dissolved, there was a lot of chaos and disorganization going on and a lot of this excess nuclear material floating around. Right. So there's no way they could account for all of it. Well, he was saying that we have no problem with the tactical nukes or the strategic nukes. Right. You want to know the difference between those two? Sure. Okay. I'm impressed. A strategic nuke. This is right up my alley. Sure. A strategic nuke is, say, like a long range intercontinental ballistic missile, right? Right. And a tactical nuke would be maybe attached to a missile on a bomber. And the real distinction, I read someone put it was a strategic nuke is meant to prevent war. A tactical nuke is meant to end a war or win a war. Right. So you have mutual assurance, destruction. Those are strategic nukes. If somebody goes in and drops a bomb on Hiroshima, that would be a tactical nuclear. Right. Look at you. You're a regular Phillip Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer, by the way, for those of you who are paying attention, was the father of the atom bomb, not Philip. He was the director of the Manhattan Project. Right. Philip was his brother, who was, from what I understand, didn't do much with his life. No. Philip was played by John Lithgow. Okay, that's good. 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. You want to talk about security a little bit? I do. The US says whenever there's a large arsenal of weapons, they have barriers, guards, surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and of course, background checks. Seem like enough to you? No, because that Reuters article I read was talking about. The other scenario I talked about, besides being hijacked in transport was that potentially a Taliban or al Qaeda member could gain employment at a nuclear facility despite background checks. Sure. Well, very few of them have, like, member of Taliban in 2002 to present. And you wouldn't think that someone could get in there, but you also wouldn't think that someone could take lessons on how to fly a plane here in the United States and fly them into buildings. That didn't seem likely either. Yeah. So it is likely or not likely, but possible? It is possible. Agreed. And there's also another real threat that's probably the most prominent, and I guess we should probably say here, maybe a little too late. We don't mean to stir up any paranoia among anybody. It's just an interesting question, right? Yes, it is. We meant to stir up paranoia about fluoride, but not this one. Right. Probably the most realistic threat would be a dirty bomb, right? Yes. Which is made from what they call nuclear junk, which is not highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Correct. It's a lesser quality. No, I think it's a nuclear bomb lacking a device to properly detonate it. Is that what it is? So you don't have the material needed or the energy needed to create, like a super critical mass. Right. But let's say you blew it up with a bunch of TNT that was less than critical or super critical. You're still spreading radioactivity. Okay, I didn't know if you're talking about depleted uranium. Did you hear about the Russian guy that was caught? Who? The guy who poisoned Lukeo or no, this is in 2002, and this is one of those deals where I couldn't find a lot following up. In 2002, a Russian man was busted smuggling 27 tons of enriched uranium at a Siberian border checkpoint. Holy cow. I did a little follow up, and they said at first, oh, no, this was just a regular shipment because we depleted uranium to Kazakhstan so it can be made into nuclear fuel to be sent back to Russia. That's all it was. And then they came out with a second statement that said, oh, I'm sorry, it wasn't enriched. It was actually depleted uranium. And so it wasn't really a big deal. And I couldn't find anything else after that. 27 tons, though. That's scary. Well, this proves there's a black market for it. Oh, definitely. You know we're using depleted uranium as tank piercing bullets or artillery, right? Oh, really? And apparently, there's a real growing concern among Iraq veterans and Afghanistan veterans that they're around us and handling this ammunition. Like, what's going to happen? Am I radioactive? And we're going to be able to have kids. It's probably going to be the next Agent Oranges. Depleted uranium shells. Wow. Yeah. But apparently they go right through a tank. Well, I would imagine so, yeah. You want to talk about Los Alamos? Sure, go ahead. You go ahead. November 2006. Los Alamos National Laboratory. There was a security breach, and officials were worried that an employee passed information concerning special access controls that would detonate a bomb. So it wasn't a whole device, but important, valuable information secrets were being sold. Yeah. Using Pals, right? Yes. Okay. So, pal, I checked out there. It can be. What John Fuller, who wrote this fine article mentions is that it takes two people to enter a code at the same time. War games. Exactly. Go ahead. Well, what's that called? It's called permissive action, Link. Yes. Okay. And if you remember the very first scene of the movie War Games, a young Michael Madsen was actually one of the security guards. You're going to bark all day long, doggy. That's excellent. Wow. Yeah. A young Michael Madsen was one of the two security personnel in the silo that was supposed to turn the key at the same time. So it's a two man operation. One person cannot set off the bomb. So it's a pretty good measure. Well, that's one that's one type of Pal. There's also quantum encryption to create all sorts of different codes. Basically, if you can't just press a button, any barrier between you and pressing that button, any step you have to take to launch a nuclear weapon is a Permissive Action Link. Okay. So when you hear the fingers on the button, that's really two fingers on two buttons. And it took very least several steps to get to that point. Thankfully, there's another way you can get a bomb. And I realized chuck, I never finished a sentence earlier. I went off on a tangent about the difference between technical and strategic. I'm so smart. Right. What Gates was talking about when he said that he was accusing Moscow of not knowing where all their stuff was, there's a whole bunch of nuclear mines, nuclear artillery shells, basically nuclear junk that he suspects moscow has no idea where it is. That's the stuff that would likely make its way into a dirty bomb. Right. Which is why it's a bigger threat. I could see that for sure. I'm glad I got that off my chest. We were talking about Pakistan earlier. One US. Official said that if they can smuggle out the amount of heroin that they smuggle out, then they could smuggle out nuclear materials. Sure. Pretty much. Although I suspect that there is a tacit approval of heroin smuggling in Afghanistan as far as the US. Goes. Yeah, I've read articles on it. US. Generals are just like, we're not even paying attention to that. That has nothing to do with what we're here for. Right. I could see the DEA's over there, like, pulling out their hair, right? Yeah. Thanks a lot. Sure. Well, one thing I was going to mention, too, is if this weren't a legitimate concern, then there probably wouldn't be an official name for this by the US. The Navy. Right. Yeah. The Navy calls it a broken Arrow, which is from the well, not from the john Woohoo. John Woo, I think. Got it from the Navy. Got you. But that is the name for the seizure, theft, loss, or loss of a nuclear weapon or component. So component is kind of the key component. Yeah. Or if you steal the whole thing. If Jamaica stole one or bought one, that would be bad. Right. I love your idea here. I want to see this like a Jamaican guy on a flat bed with a nuclear bomb on the back of it. So, Chuck, there's another way you could get a nuclear weapon if you wanted to. Let's hear it. You could travel to Tibby Island, Georgia. Yes. There is a 51 year old nuclear bomb. Thermonuclear weapon somewhere off the coast of Taibby and not too far off of it. They triggered right off of the coast. They have no idea where it is. Yeah. So close that they can't find it. Yeah. Distressing. You know what else is distressing? The Department of Defense recognizes that at least one serious nuclear accident has occurred every single year since the atomic age began. Distressing. I don't know what's more unsettling that once happened every year. They qualified it with at least right for one or more. Yeah. Should we talk about some of these accidents? Yeah, totally. Reported accident. Yeah, there's been a bunch of them. They have this one's good. In 1958, a B 47 bomber flying over Mars Bluff, South Carolina, accidentally dropped an atomic bomb which left a crater 75ft wide and 35ft deep. We've talked about that one. That was the one that they abandoned searching for that nuke off the coast of Savannah to go deal with. Is that what happened? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So they were looking for this nuke for about a month, couldn't find it. And then one goes off or the TNT went off. Bigger problem. Yeah. And they all evacuated over to South Carolina. Yeah, that's a good one. You got another one for me? Yeah, this one is kind of unsettling. In 1965, some guys were basically, I guess, docking an airplane that had nuclear weapons aboard on the USS Taekwonderoga. I guess they hit a wave and the airplane and its nukes rolled off into the sea of Japan. Transport, dude. 16,000ft of ocean. Luckily, it seems like all the accidents and security threats deal with transport. Yeah. What about the transfer from a submarine onto the USS holland? Yeah, go ahead. Well, that's pretty much it. Except for while they were moving the nuke from the submarine to USS holland, it started to fall 17ft and somebody very quickly pulled the emergency brake and it stopped right above the deck. That was close. A handbrake? Yes. I'd like to see that. Yes. Does the guy literally like, yank it up? Yeah. And I'll bet he was treated to around that night. Yeah, I bet more than one. There's a UN agency that is entrusted with preempting this kind of thing. Illegal proliferation. And they said in 2007, they said that the theft and loss of nuclear and the radioactive materials remains a persistent problem. Is that the IAEA? Yeah. So everyone is on record basically saying this happens all the time. There are hundreds of cases in Russia of people stealing or trying to steal this stuff. 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. What was it J. Phillip oppenheimer said when he saw the first nuclear bomb explode? I am become death, destroy of world. Story of worlds. Talk about Pandora's box fan. No kidding. I've got some more stats if you're interested. We need to wrap this puppy up. No, that's okay. There were 150 incidents of such action of loss or theft in 2006 alone. Josh, the majority of these involve sealed radioactive sources and in 73% of these cases, the lost or stolen materials have not been recovered. That's fantastic. Basically what you're saying here is that there is a lot of unaccounted for nuclear material on the world market, right? Well, there's no international treaty for this, I found out. Yeah, there's the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material Treaty of 1980, but it's all for domestic use, storage and transport. There's no international work going on here. Well, the problem is in the post 911 world as well, Chuck. I mean, we're not fighting people who honor treaties. Like we're still looking at nuclear non proliferation through the paradigm of the Cold War, which is long over. It used to be. We had, like I said earlier, mutual assured destruction where the USSR and the US had so many nukes that they could wipe out the world within seconds of one another launching and it kept anybody from doing anything. How about a nice game of tic TAC toe? Exactly. That doesn't exist anymore. There's no polarization and we have to rethink this, especially if there's no accountability or not enough accountability. It's almost less safe now than during the arms race. Yeah. And how do you get something, how do you take something out of existence when it's already been created? I don't know. Can it happen? I don't think it can happen. I think it could happen, but you'd have to be really dedicated and you would also have to be pretty cold blooded because guys like AQ Khan would have to get shot in the back of the head. Yeah, that's true. And not just a c.com, but all of our guys too. Obviously, anybody who knows how to make a nuclear bomb would have to be executed. Right. Wow. So thanks for joining us. If you want to know more about nuclear anything, we got a bunch of it on the site. That's how stuff works.com. We have a handy search bar for your convenience so you don't have to troll from channel to channel, page by page. And since I said that and Jerry's eyes are crossed because she's so bored, I think that means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm just going to call this an Erie, Pennsylvania email. Get it? This is from Sarah. She's a student there at Collegiate High School. I guess. Collegiate Academy and our stupid people. Happier podcast. You talked a lot about the subjectiveness of happiness as well as all the references you made to your Superstuff guide to the economy, now on sale in itunes. It reminded me of a project my AP Macroeconomics class conducted at the end of last year. Most nations measured their economic success and increments of GDP and the like, but the nation of Bhutan created a similar scale called Gross National Happiness. I've written on that. Really? Yes. Okay, I believe you. Basically it's an extensive survey that they did and she and her classmates decided for a project to do the same thing at her high school, find out what the happiness scale was at Collegiate Cabin. So she wrote in and told me this, and I was like, that's cool. I was like, but you didn't tell me any of the results or anything, so how about it? So she emailed me back and said, all right, here we go. Twelve statements in four categories is what they were rating, as well as male and female, and grade level. To define the Gross Collegiate Happiness Scale, each was rated on a scale of zero to five, with one being the least agreeable to our statement, I guess zero. I predicted that we would have achieved an overall happiness index of about 25, but surprisingly, we scored significantly higher, and our happiness scale was a 3.58 out of five, which is pretty good on an economic scale, and including outliers is pretty great. She says the most agreeable statement and positive quality that made students feel happy was a statement I feel accepted at Collegiate Academy, which received an average of 4.29, and the principal was satisfied with it, although you could tell she wanted a perfect 5.0. She obviously hasn't studied economics or statistics recently, so that was from Sarah in Erie, Pennsylvania. That is why Sarah is headed to Yale this fall. Yes. Sarah is a bright student and sounds like her classmates are pretty happy there at Collegiate Academy. Yeah, it's good for them. Yeah, gross National Happiness is pretty cool. Yeah. Bhutan is very serious about it. The king abdicated his throne to establish a democracy because they determined that democracy made for happier people. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Sarah. Well, if you're Yale bound, like Sarah, or don't know where you're headed yet, you can send us an email like us, detailing anything you like. Do we have anything we want to ask for, Chuck? No, we've been getting good feedback lately. Thanks for that. So if you wanted to send us an email, I guess, is what we're trying to say, right? You can send that to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housestepworks.com. Want more house stuffworks? Check out our blog on the housetofworks.com homepage. Hey, if you're a fan of Altoids, the Curiously Strong Mints, you probably have a lot of empty tens laying around. You can do some pretty cool stuff with them. You can make survival kits, flash drives, even robots. Check out Altoids on Facebook to find out more. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school is out, the sun shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing 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." | ||
3a349768-361f-11ea-91d6-87b1bc6d2f74 | Short Stuff: The Return of Bill Gates! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-return-of-bill-gates | Our old pal Bill Gates is back for a very special short stuff where we talk all about Covid vaccines and therapeutics. | Our old pal Bill Gates is back for a very special short stuff where we talk all about Covid vaccines and therapeutics. | Wed, 12 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=225, tm_isdst=0) | 28824191 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Bill Gates. No time to explain. This is Short Stuff. Let's get to it, guys. Thanks for coming back and joining us, Bill, to talk about COVID and vaccines and therapeutics. And we've got a short window here, so let's dive right in. And I guess my first question is let's level set and find out where we are with vaccines and how it all works with multiple vaccines being worked on and how that kind of goes in the end. Well, there's fortunately a lot of different vaccine constructs using most of the approaches that we know. And as we get these out in larger human studies and eventually have a human Emergency youth authorization, we'll start to understand for the various candidates how much they prevent disease transmission, how much they prevent pop when you get sick, whether they work in the elderly and what type of duration they have. And so there will be quite a range on those parameters for these vaccines eventually. We want one that's both very good at transmission blocking and preventing sickness and aspiration and is cheap so that we get out to a large part of the entire global population and bring the pandemic to an end. One of the things that you brought up, though, is that we want all these different factors that make basically like a perfect vaccine. But I read one of your posts on your Gates Notes blogs, and you said that's probably not going to happen right out of the gate. Is there a benefit from having multiple vaccines kind of working in conjunction, or is it the best route to just kind of keep going after that magic perfect vaccine that works as close to perfect as we can get? Well, particularly for the developing countries, we won't be able to afford to go out a whole lot of times. And so the US. Has funded a lot of the R and D. Our foundation and a group we're part of called Sepi has also funded R and D, but well, less than what the US. Itself has done, and that's got a really good pipeline. The Astrosenica probably will come out first. Then Johnson. And Johnson, then Nova Vaxnopi. Those are the four that are most promising because they're clearly low cost, moderna, and pfizer in that same time frame, but probably pretty expensive and may only end up being used in rich countries. So it's a question of affordability, not necessarily efficacy. Yeah, well, up to six. The likelihood that they all work without side effects is pretty low. Now, the phase one studies, that's pretty small numbers, and you're not going out to find sick people, but there you can see what the antibody response looks like. And if you use some very advanced tools, you can look at the other side of the immune system, the T cell side, and try and gauge what type of responses you're getting there. And I have to say that all these vaccines look pretty good. The Nova vaccine, which just came out this week, has the best numbers. But this kind of respiratory disease protecting your lungs is easier than many other vaccination tasks like malaria or HIV or TV. I mean, I hate to keep harping on the multiple vaccine thing, but are we looking at a situation in six, eight months to a year where families are going to have to research which one works best? Or is it sort of regional availability or monetary availability? How will that work? Well, certainly in the United States, the government will have a clear opinion about the first one it's rolling out. And if that first vaccine adds enough transmission blocking, then what you have is you have whatever previous protection we get from other coronavirus family viruses and the immunity we get from the natural infection for this coronal virus plus whoever we vaccinate. And so between those three, you can get up to herd immunity where the total number of cases is very small. Pretty quickly. Probably adding 2020 5% of the US population to the vaccinated would do that. And so that's 70 million people to be vaccinated. And almost all these vaccines, unfortunately going to require two doses. So that's 140,000,000 doses. The various efforts are building their factories in parallel, at least with the scale for the United States. We're trying to make sure factories get built for the entire world, which is the US is only 5% of the world's population, so that's a 20 times harder problem. And the rest of the world is not as rich of getting enough money is very difficult. The US is one of the countries where you could decide to go with the first generation vaccine and then decide that its efficacy was limited enough that you would, four months later, say no. Now you also need to go and get this vaccine. After all the economic damage we're trying to put an end to is trillions and trillions. And making these vaccines and deploying them, assuming there's no side effects, that's just billions. So it's highly leveraged investment. You kind of mentioned that we also need to be focusing on other parts of the world too low and middle income countries who can't necessarily afford to throw billions of dollars at this problem. How do we help other countries and other human beings that just don't happen to live in the United States or Canada, the UK or Australia? How do we help them? Is it just a matter of direct aid? Is it a matter of sharing research? Is it a matter of just pumping out a bunch of doses and shipping them over there? Or is it a thing where, if we in the United States pay a bunch of money for a vaccine that's going to make it that much more likely for the pharma companies to sell it for low or no cost to other countries. What's the economics of that? Yeah, typically the vaccine companies for the poorest countries, developing countries that a group called Gabi that we support and US. Government and other government support, it does the buying for these poor countries. The vaccine manufacturers agree that they're not getting any profit nor they getting any recovery for their fixed costs, their RNA and trial type cost. They're just getting close to that marginal cost. And that makes sense because they're not giving up something they would get otherwise. And so all these manufacturers will have tiered pricing. The price to the rich countries, middle income countries and the poorest countries will be different. Some of the companies agreed to make no profit. So when they price to the rich and the middle income, they'll just recover their fixed costs. And the poor countries, it's just that marginal cost. A number of these constructs look like they'll be around $2 per dose, perhaps even less. Yeah, many of these constructs are very productive, including the adenovirus, which is AstraZeneca J and J, and the subunit protein, which includes Novivax. And the Sanofi approaches the RNA platform, which you can think I'm kind of leaving that out in the long run. We're very enthusiastic about that because the speed of development and having generic factories, even when you don't know which pathogen you're going after, will work very well for that. So we've been funding that for about a decade. Unfortunately, in terms of scaling up the manufacturing and a portion of it called the Lipid, the costs are still higher than these other approaches. So for the big world, I doubt those vaccines, which includes Moderna and Pfizer bioenetic, I doubt they'll play much of a role. And what you're talking about just now, you're talking about different types of vaccines that are being tested. So there's an RNA vaccine that Modern is working on that a vaccine has never been produced using RNA, right? That's right. This would be the first one. Can you just talk a little bit about how an RNA vaccine differs from, say, an adenovirus vaccine or even a flu vaccine? Well, RNA is the name of these molecules that are like the software code that tell yourselves what proteins to manufacture. The software idea here is that instead of actually sending the particles for the immune system to recognize and get ready to attack, you actually send some lines of instructions, the RNA that tell your own cells to make that protein. And then once they make it, then the immune system sees that. And so the amount of RNA you need to send could be way smaller because the instructions are smaller than the actual proteins themselves. Now, we still have to package up the RNA to get it inside the cells and that creates some costs. That's the so called lipid. But the basic idea is really brilliant and in the future of vaccines this will be a critical way to bank vaccines because the speed and the cost will get figured out and you'll just have these general factories, whether it's for malaria or cancer vaccines. And so it's great. Mederna and BioEntech CureVac, these are companies that were founded based on using that particular approach. Well, let's take a quick break, everybody, and we will be right back with Bill Gates. 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. How closely and I think the answer I want to hear is that we've never seen a response like this as far as sharing of research. But how closely is the international research community working together? And have we seen anything like this? No, it's quite novel. And what we're going to have is the company who invents a vaccine is going to allow other companies to use their factories to do the manufacturer. So we scale up very quickly to this billions of doses, and that's never been done before. And so our foundation, because we have a lot of that expertise, people who spent their careers at these private sector companies, we're able to broker through our relationships with the companies and the governments, how that works. So, for example, two of the companies in India have big capacity, but they're unlikely to invent one of these vaccines. But serum and BioE are these two companies. And so we're giving money to them and making sure the licensing and cooperation as such that they can latch onto whichever of the other companies work looks promising and be there to make a lot of the volume. So, yes, I'm very pleased with the cooperation. We didn't practice for this the way we should have, either the governments or the private sector. But my days are mostly those conversations which everybody has a good attitude. Very few people are being greedy about this. Most have been willing to do things in a very novel, high speed way. Now just follow up on that. It seems to me, as an optimist, that that could present a new way forward for humanity, for things to work together are on things that aren't necessarily coba. 19 Related is that naive and foolish, or could this be a good opportunity for something like that? Well, it's a little bit nice, and that the economic imperative of a coronavirus. A vaccine is a stronger market signal than you've ever seen for any disease. It's costing economies trillions of dollars. The US. Alone has put out already 3 trillion in relief money, and they're talking about additional trillions. And so the net gain from bringing this epidemic to an end in economic terms is very clear. Whereas a lot of the diseases we need vaccines for are just in poor countries, are mostly in poor countries, where the rich countries like tuberculosis or malaria is basically not seen in any rich country. So there the economic imperative isn't great. And that's where our foundation for HIV, we in the US. Governments are the big funders for malaria. We're the big funder. There is no market signal. And in a way, it's terrible that this disease hit the rich world. But whatever somebody in the rich world gets sick, well, then resources are put into play in a way that is just incredible. I feel like I should probably preface this, but there are some people you may not be aware of this there are some people who are wary of vaccines, and there's a possibility that some people might feel wariness toward a COVID vaccine in particular because everything is being stepped up as quickly as possible. And one of the things that I've run into is this idea that it might not even work, that sometimes you go in for a flu vaccine and you still get the flu that year. Can you kind of talk about how that differs and how it would be more effective than, say, like your average flu vaccine, how the two are different? Yeah, there's two problems with the flu vaccine. One is that there are multiple varieties of flu that circulate. And as you get into flu season, we try by going to China, where most flu originate, to sample what's there and make a two or three components seasonal flu vaccine. But we often miss the strain that is most prevalent during the season. And the way those flu vaccines are made, they're not very effective in elderly people. And that's really bad because the flu mostly kills old people, very similar in the age profile to Cobid. And so here we are in the trials for this vaccine, making sure it works well in old people, because otherwise the sickness protection thing is almost useless. But flu is very difficult. It's constantly emerging in new forms and reassorting this disease. There's one target. The generic variation is very minor. So the vaccine will be able to target every coronavirus that we've seen. And once we get rid of it, it won't be crossing over into humans on a regular basis. We could go a long time before we would ever see it again and then we'll have surveillance and catch it when it's small numbers. Now, it's important to talk about vaccines. I think that's the sort of carrot dangling in front of the world. But what about therapeutics? I know that's something that we don't hear enough of, probably in the news. Where are we with therapeutics and where can we go with therapeutics? Well, the doctors are way better at treating COVID patients now than at the start. They're not as overloaded. They realize that you don't use the ventilator nearly as much because it has bad side effects. They use oxygen earlier, they use the prone position. The two drugs that are being used, remdessavier, which is an antiviral, and Dexamethason, which was proven out in a trial we funded in the UK, is an immune modulator. There are two other anterivirals that are actually as promising as Ram Dassavier and actually could be used orally, which is much easier. There's monoclonal antibodies where dozens of companies are working on that. But Regeneran, Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca have the three that are leading the way there. And by the time we get more antivirals molecular antibodies and some improved immune modulators, we could cut the death rate by 80% to 90%. And testing therapeutics is easier because you just take a few hundred sick people and if you're going to have substantial results, a hundred get the intervention 100. Don't you'll see significant variance between those? And so, yes, the death rate will come down quite a bit well, before we get the vaccine out in the large numbers to stop dropping the case numbers. That's great. Bill, you kind of referenced a point in time that is on everyone's mind, but I think seems kind of amorphous, which is the point where we have viable vaccine and good treatments. What is the world with coronavirus look like after that? Does it just, like, disappeared? Is it hit a reservoir? Does it come back seasonally? What is it going to look like? And then how far off are we from that goal of reaching that world if we get this cheap vaccine? And it's not only safe, but everybody knows that it's safe, so they're willing in large numbers to take the vaccine. And if we get the generosity that the rich countries are, along with our foundation, are funding the vaccine so it's available even in the developing countries, we can truly bring this thing to an end where it won't be coming back. You'll get rid of all the pockets the disease are in, you'll be willing to go to big public events and then we'll monitor to see if something similar is crossing over and catch that very quickly. We might not hang around with bats quite as much as we do now in these live markets where this crossover almost certainly took place. But I'm spending a lot of time getting the US to provide money to help buy the vaccine for other countries. Historically, the US. Has been super generous. We drove smallpox eradication. We fund the polio effort that's near to completion on HIV and malaria. We've been super generous here. The leadership has been distracted and not wanting to talk about the epidemic, so we haven't gotten the money yet. But I'm optimistic that will get solved by the Congress because it's hitting both people. It's hitting both the bleeding hearts who care about human lives, and it's hitting both the hard cases who care about the bottom line. It has something for everybody. The humanitarian argument, the strategic argument of not creating a vacuum for China and others, and the selfish argument of, hey, we don't want it coming back again and again. Countries like Australia or South Korea that did a competent job, even they have found it hard that everybody who's coming into the country potentially can start up a chain of infection again. So they're doing great, but they have to keep fighting and fighting and doing local shutdowns, whereas if the rest of the world had done what they've done, they could go and have their economy in a normal state. Yeah. You know, you mention the live markets and the crossover and sort of the problems with that. What does that future look like and what can we do about it as Americans? Are we working with China? Are they willing to close these things down? How is all that going to work? Yeah, a lot of species and baths are there south of, uhan and the cross protection from related conoviruses may explain why Vietnam, although they've certainly done a good job, they just had their first death coronaviruses do come out. And if you're looking with modern tools, you'll see it when the numbers are very small. So making sure the exposures to bats are reduced and that the surveillance is very strong. And then once you see meaningful spread, then kicking up a sort of what I call mega testing diagnostic capability, that is all very doable. And so we won't suffer from a coronavirus being widespread like this again. We will really have our act together for pretty modest level of resources. Chuck, I have one last question. Do you have any more? I got one more, but you go first. Okay. And I'm presuming here I hope I'm not overly presuming that it's okay for me to call you Bill. Sure. At this point. Okay. I probably should have verified that before, but I think people are there's, like, an inherent suspicion or suspiciousness that I think people can kind of lean towards when they encounter a mind bogglingly wealthy person who wants to help eradicate disease around the world and uses their money for that. And so what is it that interested you that kind of took you from pioneering computers to pioneering eradicating disease around the world. What was that? Was that Melinda's influence? Was that something that you've always been interested in? What's the deal? Well, like your listeners, I'm curious to understand things. As I was starting to wind down and spend a little bit less time on my Microsoft work, I was thinking, okay, how can I give this wealth back to society? And I was learning about what kills children. And I was stunned that there were diseases that we had solutions for, we had vaccines for, but millions would die of those diseases because they weren't affordable to the poor countries, even though the cost of manufacturing was very low. And so I saw that Melinda and I could focus on global health and get the death rate down, which amazingly and counterintuitively reduces population growth because parents, when they know their kids are likely to survive, have less children. And so that quest, which involved creating this Gobi organization to help buy the vaccines, overall, the under five death rate has gone from 10% now down to about 5% globally. Wow, that's mind blowing. It was over 10 million children here, now less than 5 million a year. And we have a clear path with a few new vaccines to get down to two and a half million. And even rich countries are close to 1%. So you're getting pretty close to the kind of equity that any child born anywhere, their life is treated as having value. Now on this journey, I've gotten to learn about the immune system and meet great scientists. And so I love the work. It gives purpose to how we take the Microsoft money and get it back out to the world because we don't need it for our consumption. And so this work in partnership with Melinda has been a great joy to me. So I guess in finishing up, I mean, you've been pretty busy being Bill Gates superhero during this time. I'm curious, though, about you've been locked down like the rest of us. What is Bill Gates human being been doing? Have you had any fun? What do you been up to? Well, in a way, I don't know what the kids think, but we've got more time with our kids than we would have expected, including one that's at medical school, one that's at University of Chicago in college, and so lots of family game nights. I'm using the team software for Microsoft and Zoom and some of the others. And so I'm giving a lot of feedback to the Microsoft team that now this has become so mainstream, let's make it easy to take notes and review the slides and search through a previous meeting to see what was done. So the rate of innovation on the software will be up quite a bit. It's been simple for me to meet with leaders because they don't expect to show that you're serious, that you have to fly all the way there and even for these African leaders. They're the most stuck. They have to fly to the US. And fly to Europe so they're able to stay in their countries and get more of their work done. So how once it's all over, we realize, wow, some of those trips or time in the office wasn't necessary. That is pretty fascinating. That it's really accelerated rethinking office work and business travel, and we really can save a lot of the overhead from those things, but I've gotten to read more than normal. Less jet lagged than normal. Any particular books that you've enjoyed most? I was just reading zika. Manuel has one about which is the best health system in the world that does a good job of talking about the strengths and weaknesses, where the US. Has a lot of weaknesses but has a big chance to get better. Well, we're working on a Stuff You Should Know board game, Bill, so we'll make sure the Gates family gets one. Fantastic. I'd love that. Maybe even signed. All right, Chuck, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Thanks a lot, sir. It's great talking to you again. Yeah, thank you, Bill. Wait, bill, do you have anything else? No. Oh, good. Thanks for feeding people's curiosity. You guys do a great job. Hey, well, thank you for saving the world. You're doing a great job, too. Well, since we just made Bill Gates laugh, that's it for short stuff, everybody. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartradios how Stuff Works. More podcast. My heart radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
434b3c9a-53a3-11e8-bdec-074c466dc688 | Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Feminist Physician | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/dr-elizabeth-blackwell-feminist-physician | Becoming the first licensed woman physician in America was tough, convincing male surgeons to wash their hands between patients was even tougher. Today Josh and Chuck pay tribute to a genuine pioneer in medicine and society. | Becoming the first licensed woman physician in America was tough, convincing male surgeons to wash their hands between patients was even tougher. Today Josh and Chuck pay tribute to a genuine pioneer in medicine and society. | Thu, 09 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=100, tm_isdst=0) | 46731275 | 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, charles Chuck, Wayne, Twain, Bryant and the there's Jerry. Jerome Rowland, the Rizzy. And I'm just Josh. Like just Jack. Was just Jack. Wow. Okay. That's a heck of an intro. Thank you. Let's do a little jazz hands there. Just call me Twain from now on. Swing. It's not awkward to pronounce. It's really close to schwing. Remember that? Schwing. Oh, man, I totally forgot about it until just now. Schwing. Chuck Schwing. Schwing. That's how you have to say it. Yeah, you can say it anyway. Like schwing. Yeah. Well, what I really love is that we're talking about America's first woman physician, an amazing woman named Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, who had an amazing family. And her story is incredible. And we're saying swing. Swing at the beginning. Right. Especially considering that she was a rather puritanical person in a lot of senses. She would probably not have been down with the same swing. No, because you know what? She and her family were Quakers. And I know some Quakers. And have known some Quakers. They hate swing. They do. But you know what they love? What? Being awesome. Yeah. No, I mean, for sure. I get the impression that her entire family is a pretty good example of a Quaker family. Every Quaker I've known has just had it all figured out. It seems like they're like the Buddhists of the west. Yeah, pretty much. I think they also go by the Society of Friends, which says a lot, too. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. And then, if you remember correctly, Charles, our pacifist episode focus heavily on the Quakers because they're big time pacifists, too. So Elizabeth Blackwell, just by virtue of having been a Quaker, was a pretty interesting, upstanding, upright person with a good head on her shoulders. But she also, individually, personally, was a very amazing person. And not just the fact that she was the first licensed woman physician in America, but to get there, she really had to blaze her own path and put up with a lot of BS, you might put it. So much so that even in her autobiography, which was published in 1895, when she was in her seventy s, I think she called it, pioneering work. And there's really no better way to put it. She was absolutely a pioneer in not just getting herself established as a woman physician in America, but in making it so that there could be more women physician in America. Physicians and more and more, much more. So let's start with, oh, I don't know, February 3, 1821. What's significant about that date? She was born as a little baby near Bristol, England. She was the third of nine children. Her mom was Hannah Lane, who came from a family of merchants who had some dough. And her pops was Samuel Blackwell. He was a sugar refiner and also prosperous. And like we said, they were Quakers, which means that they were very cool. This was 1821. They were not down with slavery. They were activists against slavery. They were abolitionists. They supported women's suffrage. Her brother Henry married Lucy Stone, who was a very famous women's rights activist. Her little sister Emily followed in her footsteps in medicine. Her sister in law, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, first female ordained minister in the Protestant denomination. Yeah, they were way ahead of their time. Yeah. And you can trace both of our parents seem to be pretty cool. And you can trace the roots of their sensibilities back to their parents. Like Samuel was a dissenter. He was a Quaker, which is, I guess, a form of Protestantism, but he didn't recognize the sole religious authority of, say, like, the Church of England or anything like that. And so as a result, his children could not go to public school. And he said, Fine, I've got some money. I'm a prosperous sugar merchant. I'm going to hire the best tutors I can find. And not only that, I'm going to defy the conventions of England and have these tutors teach my daughters the same stuff that they're going to teach my sons, which is unheard of, but that really formed the basis for especially Elizabeth's progression and education that she came to expect to be taught just like she was a boy because of how she was raised. Yeah. And by all accounts, her parents are both pretty great. Her dad was a very caring individual. He thought that all kids of any gender should reach their full potential. Sure. He didn't physically punish his kids, which was weird at the time. People are like, Why aren't you hitting your kids? Yeah. And he said, I don't believe in it. I've got a switch right here you can borrow. Really? Well, not have a switch. That's what the deal is. He doesn't have a switch or a paddle. He's a switch list. Let's get him a switch. So they would have sort of like a demerit system in their house. And if you add it up to too many demerits, you would have to do something like eat by yourself in the attic or something. That sounds horrific. Also like sticking a kid in the closet. But I think it was just a room removed from the family dinner. Yeah, it was just you have to go away from the family. We can't even bear to look at you. You make us want to puke. That's right. But everything changed when he lost his sugar refinery in a fire and said, you know what? Let's pack our bags and let's move to New York City. New York City. That's right. New York City. Do you remember back in, I don't know, like around 2007? Eight. I feel like it was right when we both started working around how stuff works, that a sugar refinery in Savannah blew up yeah, I remember that. I wrote an article about that. It's like that sugar dust is volatile. It can catch fire. And I'm wondering if that's what happened to his sugar refinery. I bet you. Okay. So they moved to New York. They lived in New York and in Jersey for six years, as you do. Yeah. And one of the cool things that I liked about him, he was a little paradoxical. So he was a sugar refiner. He made his money off of sugar refining. But the sugar industry was based almost entirely on slave labor around the world. That's how sugarcane was grown. He didn't use slaves, I can tell you that. But he still made his money in an industry that was heavy on slavery. And in fact, his children were such staunch abolitionists, even as young children, they refuse to eat sugar because they knew that slaves had a hand in producing it. Yeah, they wouldn't even eat it as kids. Little kids wouldn't eat sugar because of the slavery involved. But he still made his money off of that. But when he got to America, one of the first things he tried was to introduce sugar beets, which don't require slave labor. There's much less labor intensive process of extracting sugar from sugar beets. And this is really revolutionary at the time. They think they first isolated sugar from beets in 1800, like, 30 years before, and they had been introduced to America just like, two years before he took this up. So he was on the cutting edge of sugar beet production, but it didn't actually work out very well. No. His original sugar refinery went south in 1837. So he said, Let me move to Cincinnati, and I'll get in on the sugar beet thing. But just a few weeks after they got to Cincinnati, in August of 1838, he died of a fever. And because he had lost that sugar refinery and didn't have the next sugar beet operation up and going, they didn't have a lot of dough. His family was left without a lot of money. Yeah, that's got to be really tough to go from wealthy to not in just one fell swoop. But that's kind of what happened with Elizabeth's family. And a few years later, she resolved when she was 21 that she would not be dependent on any man, that she was going to be self sufficient, and she was never going to marry. And she wanted to make her own way. And, I mean, it's pretty tough not to trace that line directly back to the state that her father left his family and his own doing or his own fault. But that was just the conventions of the time. And so for a woman to resolve that she would make her own way in life was very unconventional. But if Elizabeth Black was anything, she was very unconventional. That's right. So she and her mom and a couple of her sisters were teachers for a little while, and eventually, and this is kind of jumping ahead a bit, but she did adopt a girl, a seven year old Irish immigrant orphan that she named Kitty. Her name was Catherine Barry and went by Kitty, and she was with her for the duration of her life, but she never got married. And she decided to become a doctor when she had a really close friend who was dying, said, you know what? I think that I might have lived if I might have had a woman as a doctor, because they're more compassionate and I might have gotten better treatment. And Elizabeth Blackwell was like, Whoa, that really speaks to me. Yeah. They think that the woman was probably dying of uterine cancer, and she thinks that she would have disclosed more of her condition, possibly sooner, and at the very least, she would have been more comfortable in her dying days being treated by a woman rather than poked and prodded by some man right. Who seemed to be less compassionate than she believed a woman would be. The thing about Elizabeth Blackwell is, first of all, she was struck by this, and she was so struck by it that it moved her to want to become a doctor. But not only that, she had to overcome a natural, deep seated aversion to the idea of the body or anatomy or medicine. Like, she was not at all interested in this to begin with, and in fact, she had an aversion to it. But she was so moved by that woman and her experience that she resolved to overcome her disgust in her aversion at bodily functions and anatomy and become a doctor herself. That's a really key detail. It is a huge leak. That's enormous. Not only she just wasn't a kid who wanted to be a doctor. Right. I love the site of blood and internal organs, so this kind of fits anyway. Yes. She had to overcome an aversion to it on top of overcoming the aversion that society had against a woman becoming a doctor. Because at the time, it was considered that a woman couldn't know enough about the human body to be a physician and still be considered a morally upright woman, that her morals were at risk of being corrupted just by knowing everything there is to know about the human body. Yeah. I mean, let's be honest. They would have to see a male penis as part of their training. Sure. A PP. Oh, man, we're such children. We are. So she said, all right, I'm going to do this. I'm going to get over this. I'm going to be a doctor. How do I do this? I'll just go to medical school. Medical school said, no, women can't go to medical school. Right. There are a few ladies around the country that are unlicensed physicians that work as apprentices and learn their trade, but you're not going to go this traditional route and medical school at the time was just weird anyway, which we'll get into a little bit later. But we also got into it in our grave robbing episode, similar to that time. Around that time. It was crazy. I don't think doctors were as respected back then, even. No, because they were the ones who were cutting open bodies and just kind of figuring stuff out as they went along. And if you went to a doctor, there was like an 80% chance you were walking out one limb short. Yeah. So while she was a teacher, she boarded with families, and she did a lot of this stuff in the south, which we'll get to as well. But two Southern physicians mentored her. She still could not get into medical school. Of course, she had some physician friends who were Quakers. She asked them about it. They said, that's a great idea, but no, it costs too much. You're never going to be able to get in. What you should do is disguise yourself as a man and go to France. And she was like, not a bad idea. If that's the best advice somebody's giving you, you need to rethink the people who you take advice from. It sounds like she was game, though. But she decided to save money instead and apply to medical school in the United States in today dollars. I did the old inflation calculator. Three back then would be about $85,000 today. Yeah, so that's a lot of money. And she between, I think, for a period of two or three years, went south and taught school and slave states, which was very hard for her to do in order to save money for medical school. She didn't know what she could get into anyway. Right, exactly. And the first place she taught in Kentucky, she only lasted a year. She just found the social climate so intolerable, she couldn't put up with it. And I don't know how she was able to better in north and South Carolina, but, yeah, probably she managed in two years to raise 83 grand from teaching, I guess, rich kids in north and South Carolina. But she also, while she was there, she's like, Well, I want to teach the slave kids, too. I'll do a pro bono. And they said, well, it's against the law for you to teach slave kids. And they said, but you can teach them Sunday school. She said, Fine, I'll do that. And there was a great quote that came from her in a letter to her family in 1845. I'm not sure what state she was in, maybe even Kentucky, but she said, I assure you, I felt a little odd sitting down before those degraded little beings, not saying they were naturally degraded, that they had been degraded by other people, I believe, to teach them a religion which the owners profess to follow whilst violating its very first principles. It says it all, doesn't it? It really does. She was like, you know, these people profess to be Christians, but do not treat other people like Christians. That's just such a Quaker thing to do. That is a very Quaker thing to do. You want to take a little break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We're going to take a break, everybody, and we'll be back to tell you more about Elizabeth Blackwell's progress toward med school. So, Chuck, like you said, she was mentored by a couple of doctors who she stayed with while she was teaching in north and South Carolina, one of whom was actually a professor of medicine. So he had all the books. He was very encouraging to her. He taught her everything he could. And that was, like you said, a way that a woman could become a physician, but an unlicensed physician, certainly not one that was in any way established as an actual legitimate physician. And that was ultimately her goal. Yeah, like, she continued to get sort of tutored by different people in the south that she knew who are physicians. And it was great that these men encouraged her and tutored her, said, Here, use my books. But again, like you said, she wanted to do the real deal and forge a path and not just kind of go the backdoor route. So she applied to all the medical schools in New York and Philly. She applied to twelve more in the Northeast. She was rejected by all of them. And on the 30th application to Geneva Medical College in western New York in 1847, she was accepted. And I raised my voice because she got accepted, because it was a joke that well, everyone thought it was a practical joke. The professor there, the dean of the medical school, basically said, hey, let's take a vote here. We'll have all the men here that go here vote on whether or not a woman can come to school here. And if every single person says yes, she can come here. And if one person says no, she won't. They all thought it was a prank from, I guess, the neighboring rival medical school in West Geneva. Yes, they said, sure, let her in. And it wasn't a joke. And they did let her in. They did. And apparently they were all very surprised. This almost sounds like an urban legend, but from what I saw, this is across the board what happened, that they thought it was a practical joke, and it turned out to be real, and that is how she ended up going to medical school. Unbelievable. So when she showed up, she was taking this quite seriously. She was 26 already. She spent some time living around, seeing the country. She was 26. Like, that says a lot about a person over, say, like 20 or 19 or something like that. When she showed up, not only was she a little more mature, probably, than some of her contemporaries, she also was well aware of the convention, she was breaking of the challenges and the obstacles that laid ahead of her. And there's a pretty good report, like the fact that she showed up at medical school, made the papers, and in fact, the Boston medical journal even wrote up something about her, the fact that she was there taking medical classes. The Boston Medical journal said that she comes into the class with great composure, takes off her bonnet and puts it under the seat, exposing a fine phrenology. Are you kidding me? Talking about the shape of her head? Yeah. This is the Boston medical Journal at the time. Hopefully the BMJ has officially stopped using phrenology in any way, shape or form, but we'll have to get a subscription and find out. So we talked earlier about the fact that medical school at the time was really different. It sounds like Animal House or something. It was very raucous. Apparently, when they were lecturers, you would make crude jokes out loud no matter what you're talking about. It sounds like a bunch of children taking sex ed or something like the 6th grade. But apparently Blackwell's effect on the whole, like every class she went into was everyone took it a lot more seriously because she was there. Yeah, because, again, if you were a man, you acted far differently around a woman at the time where you were just much more genteel. It was just a social convention, and so you had to bite your tongue in medical school. If Elizabeth Blackwell was in your class, or you just did, that was just kind of the effect that she had on class, just by being a woman. But even beyond that, there was this whole view that these guys were somehow contributing to this woman's moral corruption by even being in the same class with her, let alone being the instructor teaching her. One of the things she ran into in med school was she would sometimes be asked to go step outside because this particular lecture is a little rough. And Elizabeth Blackwell did not truck to that at all. It was very adamant that, remember, she was educated like a boy by the tutors her father hired. She had a full expectation to be left out of absolutely nothing at med school. She was to be a full physician, and so she was to learn everything that any physician would learn. And eventually, over time, she kind of overcame this genteel opposition to her presence by her professors and male classmates. Yeah. And I think in no small part due to her serious take on her fastidiousness in her the fact that in the end, she graduated first in her class. Yeah, this is a lot. She was the best student in 1849. She graduated first, ultimately earned the respect of her fellow students. Not to say that it was a cakewalk. There were still plenty of jerks there, and a lot of them had animosity toward her. Remember, cakewalker's racist. Is it really? Yeah. I remember we did a show on what was it? I can't remember the words that have different different origins than you would think. Or different meanings than you would think. Do you remember? Yeah, I think I do remember that. I'm sorry, everybody. I'm sorry for interrupting you. That's okay. So it was no pie walk. Good save, Chuck. Still plenty of jerks. There were some in there that would laugh at her, some in there that would support her, some men that would jeer at her, some in that would help her out. But like I said, in the end, she got that degree first in her class, apparently. And I don't know if this is the movie version, but the medical school's dean bowed to her when she accepted her diploma and everyone busted out in applause. Yeah, that's what a newspaper account said from the correspondent who was there. And they also added and brother pluto became senator blue target. Very nice. That wrapped everything up. Do you think that movie ages well? We're talking about Animal House again, I haven't seen it. I should say sorry in a while. I'm not sure. Okay, I have seen it plenty of times, but I haven't seen it. I'm sure it doesn't. It can't I don't know, man. I think it's kind of timeless. However, I've heard certain people that I won't name say it doesn't age well. Noel? Yeah, Noel doesn't think there's a raft of comedies from that era that just are not funny. Now, wait, not funny or politically? No, not funny. Oh, got you. Yes, it doesn't age well. As in, like, why do people think this is a comedy classic? It's not even that good. Got you. Okay. Yeah, I'll have to watch it again. I haven't seen it in a while. I don't know, man. I think it's kind of timeless in its comedy. Okay. I'm sure there are parts that don't age well in every other respect. Like any comedy made before, like, four years ago? Sure. No, like the last five minutes. I thought that's what you were talking about. No, it's entirely possible because I've seen some comedies where I'm like, this is not at all funny. Like Spies Like US. Give me a break. Not good. No, I haven't seen it in a long time. It's not good. So now I'm afraid to watch some of those oldies. You hate Chevy Chase, though. I do. My dad taught me well. But if you want to continue to cherish any movie that you used to love, I would not risk it. No, we'll see. Unless it's Ghostbusters. That definitely holds up, friend. Yeah, that new one looks good, too. What is the new one? The sequel, sort of. So it's technically Ghostbusters Three. Yeah. Or four. Wait, was there a third or was just the first two? Yeah, the first two, and then the third one had, like, I think Kate McKinnon different universe, didn't it? Yeah, that was just a reboot, which was great, I thought. But this new one is a sequel many years later, and I think it's one of their grandkids stuff starts happening. It looks good. Paul Rudd's in it. Okay. And what's his name's? Reitman's Kid is directing it. Oh, he's great. Jason? Yeah, it's a Jason Reitman jam. That's good stuff. He might be a little too high brow for a ghostbusters, man. I don't know, man. Well, hey, I can tell you, you know who's spinning in her grave right now? About a thousand RPMs. Who? Elizabeth Blackwell. I know. I'm so sorry, Dr. Blackwell. Should we take a break? I don't know. Who knows anymore, right? Let's take a break and we'll stop talking about dumb old movies right after this. All right? So, Chuck, I think where we officially left off cattle chuck, elizabeth Blackwell received her diploma, right. The dean of the medical school stood up and bowed, and the auditorium broke out into applause, which is pretty awesome, apparently. Although she won over her classmates, there were still, like, a lot of women actually of the time who are not very happy with what she done. But she said nuts to you guys. That's right. I'm going to move to Paris and London, and I'm going to pursue my practice there to start. That's right. Which is a great idea. And when she got there, they said, wow, you're a real deal doctor, and you have a medical degree here. Be a midwife. Yeah, a woman. Sacramento. Yeah. She was led into midwifery and nursing, but she's really sort of trying to be revolutionary here, because all she sees are these men walking around, not washing their hands at all. And she's like, you know, what is probably super important is personal hygiene and preventative care. And they're like, what's that? Well, they literally were, what's that? Because this was early 1850s, and remember our great stink episode? Oh, man, that was so good. So they were still operating under the Miasma theory that it was, like, bad vapors and smells that made you sick crazy. So her idea that it was like hand washing was part of this preventative medicine was really ahead of its time. And so in addition to being a woman who they were just discrediting out of hand anyway, just for being a woman, they were also saying, like, you're talking kooky stuff. Everybody knows it smells that make you sick. Your nut job go over there and deliver a baby. And she's like, But I haven't washed my hands. We just told you. It doesn't matter. Babies are dirty. As long as your hands don't stink, it's fine. Yes. We should also mention it's right about here, where she lost sight in her left eye from an accident that I can barely even talk about. Oh, I want to. Can I? Please? So she contracted purulent ophthalmia, which is an infection of the eye and her eye became infected because she was tending to an infant who I guess had some sort of wound that was infected and pus squirted in her left eye from the infection and infected her left eye to such a terrible degree that she became blind in her left eye. Yes. That is sad. But really sad because she was not able to become a surgeon, which is what she really wanted to do. It's also said that there was a baby with an infection. Well, sure. A pussy infection. Let's forget about that baby. Sure. That baby grew up to be Roy Cone. That's really good. She moved to the UK, then from Paris, and this is where she hooked up with a little buddy named Florence Nightingale. Yeah. Who deserves their own episode, too. Sure. Totally. They became good friends. They were like, you like to wash your hands. I do, too. Isn't it awesome? Let's go do it together. That's kind of the long and short of it. They sat around saying ABCs or I don't want no scrubs, washed their hands. And they were both like, why are none of these men doctors ever washing their hands? And they were both like, Because they're dummies. Yeah. Just give them a few years in germ theory will be developed. And then they'll listen to Louie past year. Yeah, exactly. But I think that's pretty awesome. It's almost like, I don't know, Einstein and somebody else meeting. It's cool to know that these two legendary figures met and were friends at one point in time. Oh, totally. It's almost like a movie. You know what I'm saying? This totally should be a movie. I'm surprised it's not yet agreed. Maybe Jason Reidman could direct it. That's right. Paul Rudd. No. Who's the guy that wolverine. Hugh Jackman. Yeah. Maybe Hugh Jackman can be in it. He would play Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. That's right. And Jared from Subway can play the puss baby. Yeah. Everything would come full circle and the universe would collapse in on it, and then the sharknado would kill them all. So she is pals with Florence Nightingale. She decides. You know what? I'm going to go back to New York. It's 1851, and I really want to get a practice going there. She got back and of course, discrimination against women and the doctoring industry was still there. So she didn't have a lot of opportunity, she didn't have a lot of patience. She didn't have a lot of other doctors that she could even exchange ideas with. And so she started applying for jobs instead of starting her own practice at the women's department in a big city. Dispensary. But she was not hired. No. And I had to look up a Dispensary. Is it like a charity or public clinic? So this woman's ambition, the first woman doctor in the United States now, her ambition was to help the poor. That was what she wanted to do. Her missions in life were. To help the poor, help women retain their chastity and purity in the hopes of having a good moral impact on the world around them, and then to make it so that more women could become doctors. That's right. She was like a tireless fighter and champion of all of these things. That's right. And so, in typical Elizabeth Blackwell fashion, when she was turned down for a job at a dispensary, she just opened her own dispensary. That's right. In a little single rented room. She saw patients a few afternoons each week. It was incorporated in 1854 where they moved to a small house. They're on the lower east side east Village area of Thompkins Square. Her sister we mentioned that she followed, I believe at the very beginning, that she followed in her sister's footsteps. By this point, she was Dr. Emily Blackwell. She got her degree at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and she joined her in 1856 with another doctor, dr. Marie Zac Zuska. Wow. That's the Dr. Seuss pronunciation. That's a tough one, I would say zach. Okay, Zachshareska. All right. And they all opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children on Bleaker Street there in the West Village. Yes. And now you can go left out of the doorway and hit a Swatch store. I knew you were going to say that and go get a sandwich at Le Pan quotanian. I saw this watch joke coming because I did the old Google Earth, too, and I was like, I guarantee you that poked out to Josh. But what's crazy so 64, at least as far as the Google company is concerned, 64 Blaker Street doesn't exist anymore. But that means that it was subsumed by either the Kit clothing or the Swatch store. Somebody took over this. But there's a I think the Swatch store did in 1858. Yeah, they were all on chains. Right. But there's a physical structure that's still there. That was the first women run infirmary or clinic, I should say, in New York, and what became one of the first women's medical schools amazing. In the country. Not the first, but one of the first. And there's no plaque. There's no sign. There's no nothing, really. But the building is not that I could see, but the building is still there. You can still visit the spot where poor people went and Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell treated them. Wow. Yeah. With one eye. Yeah, let's not forget that site in one eye, I should say. So she starts going she's like, I want to do this in England, too, my home country. I'm going to go back and forth. I'm going to try and raise some money to do the same thing over there. At the same time, she's also taking on and it's amazing what you can do when you don't get married and have to be subservient to a man. Right. Like, she was living single, so she had nothing but time. She had this adopted daughter, but I imagine that she grew, she helped her mom out with this stuff. Yeah. And in their off time they would watch Living Single together. So she was getting on other social reform movements, all kinds of things to do with women's rights, family planning, even way back then, hygiene always. Did we mention eugenics and how deep she got in that? Do we even know? I looked and I could not see. Cause you would think there would be people that would say like, oh, Elizabeth Blackwell, listen to this eugenic stuff she's into. I saw basically one of those things where this list was repeated basically in the same order across the internet. That means once I had it no idea how much she was into eugenics, but I do know I did get an impression of her as far as women's rights were concerned. She was a feminist through and through. Oh, sure, absolutely a feminist. But she was also a moralist and approved died in the Wool Prude. And so she was really concerned with the moral purity yeah, I guess the moral purity of women. Because her whole thing was if a woman has basically had sex out of wedlock, she has corrupted her morals. She's traded in her morals and now she's going to be interested in men. She's going to think about other men rather than her husband. She's not going to be able to focus on her home. And so the home will start to come apart because this woman had sex out of wedlock before she got married or whatever. And so that's one home broken. And if more and more women do this, then all of a sudden the whole country's morals are corrupt and there's nothing but crime and drinking and all sorts of horrible things that come out of it. And she definitely identified men as an aggressor in this, that it was definitely men who came along and persuaded girls to have sex out of wedlock because these girls were not too naive to know the ramifications and consequences. So she tried to in books and pamphlets and lectures and all this, warn mothers to warn their daughters away from men like this, and also teach them about the consequences of having premarital sex. And also basically identifying as men as the aggressors, the wolves in the situation. So she was super into that. And she was very widely and well received because her line of thinking was very in line with Victorian super rigid morals. But at the same time, it's difficult to reconcile with just straight ahead feminism of the type that we're used to today. But there's really no one who could discredit her as a feminist. No, I mean feminist in a Victorian way. Exactly. It was a time where you couldn't be like girl, own your sexuality and you asked the man to marry you. That just didn't happen at all. This was the opposite of that. What she was telling me she was also what would be known today as a feminist for life, staunch antiabortion feminist, as a matter of fact. If you read her diary in a certain way, you can make the case that one of the reasons she became a doctor is because she read an article about a woman who was an abortionist at the time who was termed a female physician, which I guess was code for women abortionist interesting back then. And she was so appalled by this that she wanted to reform the term female physician to mean an actual, like, just a woman doctor, a general doctor. And that's one of the things that drove her, too. So, yeah, she was a very complicated character. She reminds us right. But I think she reminds us that over time, when you become a legend, a legend grows up around you, and the different edges get smoothed over or overlooked or whatever, and people are complicated and complex, and that's the way that it should be, and they should be understood as such. But none of that undermines her, depending on your way of thinking. I don't think anything undermines that she did or thought undermines the work that she did and the good that she did. Of course not. And I think maybe people should try to remember what it might be like to be a trailblazing feminist in the 1840s through 80s. Yeah. So the Civil War, that was very nicely said. Good job. I hope so. Oh, God, I hope so. Civil War rolls around. She and her sisters trained nurses for the union, for their hospitals. She said. You know what? What we really need is a medical school for women. And so she continued to try and get support from Britain. She finally raised enough backing in America to add that medical school to her women's hospital in New York in 1868. This was this one you were talking about. The New York Infirmary was finally established with 15 students, nine faculty, and she was the professor of hygiene. And her sister Emily was taught obstetrics and diseases of women. Yes. She handled all the surgery, too, at the clinic. Oh, Emily did, yeah, because her sister couldn't. Right. So think about this. She established not just this clinic, this dispensary, but also a college to teach women doctors. Right. And not only did she do that in New York, she did it in London, too, after she had managed to establish this, she said, okay, Emily, you got this. I'm moving back to England, and I'm going to do this over here. Yeah. And what it did was it provided about a 32 year stop gap until 1899, when medical schools, Cornell University, finally began accepting women into their program. So for 32 years, she was running the show, and she was providing that almost a service, but it kind of is, in a way, until mainstream medical schools began catching on. Yeah. For sure. And the fact that she was establishing this college like that, this was one of her big dreams and focuses and drives just kind of goes to underscore the fact that she was trying to make it so that more women could become doctors. It's just easy to overlook when you're like, oh, well, she went and became a doctor herself and then she did doctoring. She also simultaneously was trying to expand access to medical training for women as well, to become a licensed physician. And she did in a big way in 1869 when she was in her late forties. This is when she established the London practice. She had passed on the New York Medical College to her sister at that point and founded the National Health Society in 1871 and was one of the first champions of prevention is better than cure, which is very obviously important thing today in all of medicine. But at the time it was kind of a revolutionary kind of way to go about things. They were all about cures and she was one of the first people standing up and be like, hey, let's not get to the point where we need to cure by preventing things with hand washing and lifestyle and hygiene. Yes. Wash your hands. Yeah. What's your problem? In 1870, she finally set up a private practice in London and in 1874, along with physicians Sophia Jacks Blake and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson established that London School of Medicine for Women. Yeah. So again, she did this in New York, she also did it in London. She agitated for legislation to be passed in 1876 to allow women to get medical degrees. She was the first woman added to the medical register in England. So she did this in two continents. She opened up the door for women to become doctors on two different continents at about the same time and ultimately she had to stop practicing, she had to stop seeing patients because she had something called biliary colic, which is where a gallstone blocks the bile duct, which is not good for you. And apparently it's a very painful condition and especially back then, before they could do a lot with it or they break it up with lasers or something. Sure. It could knock you out of your career and it did for decades. I think she had billiarry colic 20 or 30 years before she died. Yeah. She basically didn't practice for the last 20 years and very sadly, in the ripe old age of 86, which is great, she had an accident, she fell down a flight of stairs and was mentally and physically disabled after that, lived a few more years after that and then eventually died of stroke in 1910. Yes. That was a great lady. Yeah. There's a statistic here in 1881. So she'd moved to the UK permanently in 1869. In 1881, there were only 25 registered women doctors in England and Wales, but 30 years later, it was up to 495. There you have it. Now, I would guess that there's at least double that. Probably more. Probably so. So hats off to Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell. Way to go. My bonnet is off and under my seat. Oh, that's a fine phonology. You've just exposed their charge. Thank you. If you want to know more about doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, there's a lot of good stuff on the Internet, including a site that we used, among others famousscientists.org. Check them out. And scientist is plural. I just have a thick tongue, so sometimes it's tough to add that extra access. And since I said I have a thick tongue, it's time for listener mail. This is from Isaac. Hey, guys. I am on day two of six weeks of staying home in quarantine. I live in Seattle, Washington, which was the place where the first North American coronavirus case was. There have been rumors at my school I'm in the 7th grade that would close for cleaning. But six weeks is nearly all of third quarter. Yeah, I've got a long stretch of time ahead of me, and I've spent most of that time playing video games. Great. Reading. Great. And listening to stuff you should know. Nice. It's a nice three pronged approach. Little fun, little knowledge, and little goofy knowledge. Sure. I listened to nearly ten episodes today alone. There will be plenty more rushing through my ear holes. So I wanted to say thank you for helping me through a worrisome time. I loved the Seattle show. That is from Isaac. Buddy. Glad we're there for you. Hang in there. Be safe. Wash your hands. And the fact that you use the word earholes means that you're the coolest kid I know. Yes, you're pretty cool. I think we appreciate that. I wonder what video game is playing Chuck? I don't know. I just finished Red Dead Redemption, and now I'm onto a new one. I've been gaming a bit lately. I heard that Red Dead Redemption is, like, one of the most amazing games ever, but it's just so good and highbrow. Like a Jason Reitman film that it's boring. Unlike adjacent Reitman film. Have you heard that? Well, I played part two. I did not get the first one, although I might get it. I think it was part two that I'm talking about. I enjoyed it. Okay, good. I'm glad to hear that, because I like to think that things that are well done aren't boring. Yeah, I had to learn to shoot animals, which was not fun, but hunting is a part of it. Really? Yes. I never shot a bunny, though. Maybe you had to put them out of the misery or something because they were rabid. Oh, that too. If you crash your horse, you might have to do the right thing. You know what I mean? Is that right? You have to strangle it. Yeah, it's very sad because you get very attached to these horses. I'll bet. Do you name them? Yeah. You name them like you actually name them for fun or like they come with names or the game makes you name your horse when you go to a stable. You can upgrade your horse in a lot of ways with the saddles and stuff. And then you can also name your horse when you go to a stable and type it in, and then your horse name is up there. Did you name any Josh? I did not. I feel bad now. I had three or four horses and I named them all variations of my wife and daughter's names. But that's fine. You'll be next. I appreciate that. But you'll be like, oh, yeah, Josh turned lame. I guess I have to put him out of his misery. Yeah, Josh can remember by a train. Let me know how Josh turns out, okay? In video games. I will. Okay. And Isaac, thanks again for writing in. And like Chuck said, stay safe, stay smart, and wash your hands. And don't panic. It doesn't sound like you are. If you're like Isaac and you're hanging out listening to Stuff You Should Know, we want to hear from you. You can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
How Ice Cream Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ice-cream-works | We all scream for ice cream, sure, but did you know we're all technically screaming about a colloidal foam? Prepare for deep cravings that will surely emerge as you learn the history of ice cream, how to make it yourself and lots more. | We all scream for ice cream, sure, but did you know we're all technically screaming about a colloidal foam? Prepare for deep cravings that will surely emerge as you learn the history of ice cream, how to make it yourself and lots more. | Thu, 05 Feb 2015 15:33:50 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=15, tm_min=33, tm_sec=50, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=36, tm_isdst=0) | 40854403 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global energy company with customers in different places on different systems? So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now data is available anywhere, securely. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl that 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. Amazonandtalopetscom welcome to Stuff You Should Know From Housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. So this is stuff you should know. The Dreaming of Summer in the middle of Winter edition. Oh, my friend ice cream is a year round treat for me. Yeah, sure. I know. I had some last night. Oh, yeah? What do you have? We're going to Buzz market a lot. Probably Rocky Road and Vividly Vanilla. What brand was a heavier Light? It was Light. Yeah. After reading this, I was like, man, this is very light. A lot of air in there. I taught myself to juggle with them. Well, that's exciting. That was a cross reference. Yeah. I've been in Jerry's guy. Well, yeah, it's great stuff. Yeah. Can't have too much of it, though, because I got the lactose issues. Really? Yeah. And ice cream is your favorite treat? Yeah, it's pretty sad. That's self hate. Yeah. Ice cream followed by a large glass of milk. Right. Then you just inject a bunch of Casons directly into your neck. Yeah. It's not like I don't have lactose issues such that any kind of milk product, really. It's just if I overdose on it, like if I have a bunch of, like, pizza and ice cream or something, what do they call it? Like mildly sensitive, maybe mildly intolerant. Yeah. I get the poopy butt. Like you're cool with, like, lactose at work, but you don't want lactose marrying your kid. You're that kind of intolerant to lactose. Right, exactly. I just don't want to live in next door to me. I can do a pint of ice cream, though. Is it the half pint? The Ben and Jerry's little one. I think it's a pint. Is a pint, yes. Not the little baby one that's just like a fistful. Yes. Right? I think it's a pint is what they sell. Yeah. I can do a pint of, like, the Chubby Hubby. That's my old favorite. That's a good one. But basically any Ben and Jerry's is good. I'm not a big fan of cherries and stuff. Me neither. But other than that, I'm, like, pretty cool with all ice cream. And I used to not like, bananas and things, but now I'm like, I'm cool with bananas. Yeah, like bananas and ice cream I would never have eaten before, and now I will. I'm pretty picky with my ice cream flavors. I'm trying to think of what I really don't like. And nothing's coming to mind except for stuff with cherry in it. Yeah, I don't like mint crazy. I don't like coconut crazy. My favorite is the Chubby hubby. And then they have the limited runs. Yeah, they have one out now called Candy Bar Pie. Candy bar Pie? Like, what kind of candy bar is it modeled after, Donculus? I don't know. It's got nougat in it. It doesn't taste like a specific candy bar, though. It's not like they're trying to be like a snicker's ice cream sneakily. It just tastes just delicious. Nice. I like butterfinger and ice cream. Yeah. What about places to get ice cream? Jenny's is delicious. Where is that? They have it here on the west side over by Star Provision. Okay. And they got a new one in Crock Street Market. There's a place in old town Alexandria outside of DC. Called Pops. It's like an old timey ice cream parlor. Awesome. I think I went in there actually last summer. Awesome. But did they have, like, candy and all that stuff, or is it just an ice cream? It's pretty much just ice cream. Okay. There's like a couple of long cases. They've got the old turn of the last century, like, furniture and everything in the striped wallpaper. Sure. Like they're doing it right. But then their ice cream stands behind it, too. It's good. And then, of course, Friendlies yeah, friendlies has the Reese's piece of Sundae, which is probably the greatest ice cream treat ever created in the history of humanity. Yeah. Growing up in Atlanta, they had something called Ferals, which was I remember Ferals. Do they have those? They have that in Ohio, too. And on your birthday, they come out with that big drum. Oh, yeah. Scare me to death. I went under the table a couple of times. Old school ice cream parlor. Scaring the bejesus out of children everywhere. Now. They had a lot of candy selection, too. Yeah, man, let's just talk about let's just not even do this. Let's just talk about ice cream. We love this flavor. I like this flavor. Everyone is starving right now for it, though. I guarantee it with that intro. I have one more, though. Have you ever been to the Plaza Fiesta, I think, is what it's called, over on Beford Highway. Yeah. Okay. They have a gelato place there that had tuna flavored gelato, raw tuna flavored gelato. And by God, it tasted exactly like raw tuna flavor. That's what you're going to say. It was good. It wasn't bad. Really? Yeah. If you eat, like, sashimi or something like that. I love sashimi. You would appreciate this. It's not something you're like, oh, man, I've got to get some tuna flavored gelato. But it's not like one bite and you spit it out. Yeah. You're just like, this is really odd. Interesting. Unusually tasty. I have to try that. Yeah. My other thing I like lately is a little heat in the ice cream. Like, some of them have a little cayenne in the chocolate. Oh, yeah. With cinnamon or something. Yeah, that and some salted caramel. I am so over salted caramel or bacon and sweetness. I'm just so sick of that combination. Really? Yeah. It's all basically a ripoff of Wendy's fries and a frosty dip together. That's good, too. That's fine. That's the original. That one, like, the original solution. No improvement. Yeah. All right, well, I'm celebrating now. I am as well. Let's get through this, and we can go get some ice cream. Okay. Yeah. You're buying. Okay. So the history of ice cream. Chuck, how long could possibly have been around? Where did you find this, by the way? We need to give a good shout. Was that? The Dairy Association? Yes. Yes. I think the International Dairy Association. The big guy, not the Regional Dairy Association. They came up with this history of ice cream or frozen dairy treats is a better way to put it, because ice cream is the lion's share of frozen dairy treats, but technically, it falls under the umbrella of frozen dairy treats, along with things like sherbet and gelato and frozen yogurt. Right. They're ice cream sandwiches. Yeah. Novelties. Exactly. Those are good, too. Well, my friend, it goes back, they say, as far as second century BC. But they can't pinpoint, like a definite person or place for sure. They just know that it started popping up in history. Like with Alexander the Great. He had flavored ice and snow with honey and nectar. Yes. Snow cone. Yeah. That makes sense. That would be the origin of ice cream. It makes me laugh in this thing. They said that Nero and Claudia Caesar would frequently send runners to the mountains for snow. That just seems like a very romantic emperor thing to do. Something cold and sweet. Go in like, 3 hours later, they'd come back half dead. Here is your ice snow cone. Exactly. But they would flavor those with fruits and juices. And that was sort of another part of the beginning of ice cream. Apparently. All this is going on in a vacuum, too, like over in Asia. In different places. Yeah, in the Mideast and Asia, wherever they had mountains in these areas, and they could get snow and ice because Marco Polo and I think the 13th century came back to Italy and said, check this idea out. Frozen fruit treats. And that was basically the origin of ice cream in the west. Yes. In England, they were big on what they called cream ice. Yeah. Because England, they got to say it's slightly funny. Or they would probably call it proper. Right. There's an e at the end of cream, is there? No, but there would be Catherine de Medici, who we mentioned in the episode. Nostradamus. Nostradamus episode. That's right. She was big on it. She was the wife of Henry II. And back then, though, it was in the 1500 and the 16th century, it was only, like, for royalty, because ice was they didn't have freezers and they didn't have ice machines. You needed a guy to go run up to the mountain and bring it down. Yeah. It was a big deal to have ice. Unless, of course, it was winter, in which case you were like, oh, yeah, I can have a frozen treat. But if it was summer and you were enjoying a frozen dairy treat and the runner you're rich. Yeah. You're super rich. So apparently, by about the 17th century, there was at least one cafe in Paris I think it was the first cafe in Paris that started selling ice cream to the public in 1660. Nice. They basically made it egalitarian. And from that point on, ice cream was a definite luxury item, but you didn't have to be royalty to obtain it. Yeah. That's a good way of saying it. Yeah. In the United States, the first time they found it in print was in a letter in 1744 by a guest of the governor of Maryland, william Bladen. Or Bladen. And there was an ad in 1777, may 12, the New York Gazette for ice cream. So it was for sure for sale to the people back then by that time. Yeah. George Washington had a recipe. Thomas Jefferson had a recipe. Dolly Madison used to like to serve it at the White House. George Washington ate a lot of it. Right. Didn't they say $200 for one summer? Yeah. And I failed to go to the Westgate currency converter. I imagine that's a lot of money. Yes, but he had guests, and he may have shared it with his oh, I would hope so staff. You never know, especially if it's like, $50,000 worth of ice cream. That would be can't eat that in one summer, even if you're Joey Chestnut, world record holder for the most ice cream. Is he? Yeah. How much did he eat, do you know? 1.8 gallons in six minutes. 1.8 gallons in six minutes. That doesn't seem like that much. Oh, that's a lot. Yes. That's pretty speedy. Yeah, it is. But, hey, that's why he's Joey Chestnut. Plus, don't forget the brain freeze. Oh, yeah, man. Do you have a thing on that brain freeze? No, I've done a don't be dumb on it, though, before. Do you remember what it is? Like, what is brain freeze? Yeah. Oh, what is brain freeze? Yeah. There's a blood vessel that runs from your brain into the roof of your mouth that becomes constricted, which changes the volume of your brain, which gives you a headache. Got you. Which is why, if you place your tongue against the roof of your mouth while you have brain freeze, it warms up that blood vessel, allowing it to relax again. Or just light a match and hold that under your roof of your that's another way to go. Yeah. You'll concentrate on that pain instead of the brain freeze. Interesting. I don't get brain freeze because I think as an adult, you know how not to wolf it down like that. I've gotten it accidentally, though, as an adult, from time to time. Really? Yeah. No good. No, it's terrible. It's as terrible as an adult as it is when you're a child. It's probably worse as an adult. It's just debilitating. Yeah. It's so painful. So, like you said, until around 1800, it was mostly for the upper class, but then, like everything else in industry in America, around that time, manufacturing became more widespread and cheaper, and all of a sudden you had warehouses that were big freezers and you had shipping. You could ship things cold and frozen. Right. So you had, like, the manufacturing aspect in place. Yeah. Homogenizer machines, electric power, mechanical refrigeration, basically. But even still, you have the manufacturing in place. The distribution, though, is still limited to, say, like, a store, somebody who could make money by investing in some freezer cases and then selling it to the public. It wasn't until ice boxes became widespread in America that the ice cream industry really blew up, because then you could sell to the guy down at Pops. You could also sell to Pops next to a neighbor who took it home that's right. To keep in his freezer. And thank God that happened. Yeah. And actually, as far as making ice cream, the hand crank ice cream maker that use, like, rock salt and all that stuff sure. That was invented by a woman named Nancy Johnson in the 1850s, I think. Yeah. And she patented it, and apparently everybody ripped her off. She sold the patent for, like, $200, and the guy who bought it from her turned around and made a fortune off of it. But I guess he ultimately got ripped off by a bunch of copycats. But that same thing is still in use today. Like, you can go buy the Johnson crank yeah. The Johnson crank ice cream maker. And make your own ice cream the 1850 way. Well, you mentioned take home ice cream being a big deal as far as it's spreading. I do have a little modern stat, at least from a few years ago, that is still the biggest part of the market. 67% of the overall market is take home ice cream. I saw that. 87% of Americans have ice cream in the freezer right now. Yeah, I don't I can't it doesn't stick around. No. If you're going to get a pint, you might as well just plow through it and be done with it and then get some a few weeks later. You're not a quitter. No. And I can't just keep, like, a gallon of ice cream in the house. That's a bad move. It's a bad move for me. Yeah, it's a bad move for everybody. I know some people have willpower. Yeah, I guess you're right. You're one of them. I don't keep a gallon of ice cream in my house. Yes, but you got willpower to a large degree, I think. Yeah. Well, you're the guy who quit smoking by just saying, I'm not going to smoke anymore. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I guess I do have a degree of willpower, but I do not. So we're now in the 19th century, in late 1900, and the professional soda jerk at soda fountain shops pops up and they make things called, like, root beer floats and Coke floats and soda floats. Right. Which I haven't had one in a long time. I used to love root beer floats, but I don't know why. It's not something I see very much anymore. Well, I go to the trouble of putting it together. Yourself. Yeah. You don't see floods very often anymore. I'm sure there are some places that sell them, but they were good, though. Oh, yeah, man. Root beer and ice cream is a winning combination. Yeah. I mean, I haven't had one since I was a kid. Probably Coke works, too. Coke floats good, too. Root beer floats are the thing, though. I think you're right. And then this was, for me, the fact of the show. I did not know about this religious criticism back then. They didn't like you eating things that were so rich and like a gluttonous, I guess, if it was sinful. Yeah. On Sundays, that is. And so in response, they took out the carbonated water or the root beer or whatever and made a Sunday. And that's why I called it a Sunday originally, but apparently they were like, Are you mocking us? And the soda jerks union said no, and they changed the spelling from Sunday to S-U-N-D-A-E. Because they were mocking them. Right. Yes. And they were like, this is their act of retribution, changing the spelling of Sunday. And the other cool thing, too, was during World War II, apparently, the armed forces were all trying to outstep one another in providing ice cream to the troops in new and exciting ways, because it was such a morale booster, of course, to get ice cream when you're at war. A little taste of home. And I think that was it. The Navy that had the ship. Yeah. The world's first floating ice cream parlor. That's awesome. In the Western Pacific. Well, even before that, in World War, ice cream was deemed an essential food, and so ice cream manufacturers got rations of sugar so they could keep making ice cream during the war, even though everything else is being rationed. Yeah. And that points out that during the Depression, everything kind of slowed down. That was a nonessential, including ice cream, but it never went away. And through the years, it's pretty much gained in popularity. I think in the 70s is when you started to see a little more health conscious efforts, like the frozen yogurts and the, like froyo. Froyo. Right. Emily loves the froyo. It's good stuff, like the new stuff that's really, like, from the Greek yogurt. That's tangy changes everything. Not like, I think this can't be yogurt. Growing up, was that even yogurt? That was just like soft serve ice cream, wasn't it? Is it this campaign? I thought it was the country's best yogurt. TCBY. We heard it was. This can't be yogurt. Maybe it was different. I wonder. It had to be the same. Yeah. TCB Y-O-T CBY was great. I don't know what it was. I think it's still around. It had to be yogurt, because they couldn't call it that. But it wasn't. Definitely not the tangy stuff that you seem like a pink berry and stuff like that. So good. Yeah. I'm not the hugest fan. I love that stuff. Each bite is just like it's just a trip through a flowery meadow. Every bite? Really? Yes. Do you get the vanilla and add your stuff to it? I get the regular, like, the I guess, plane version. Yes. And then you throw in a little mango, some blueberries. Oh, look at you. The white yogurt chips on top. That's a good combination. Or if you want to go a different route, there's like a chocolate crunch and maybe some other kind of chocolatey delicious treat. So bad. All right, well, we'll get to the science of ice cream, which is decidedly less yummy sounding right after these messages. So, buddy, you said that all of that stuff is frozen dairy treats, right, but not necessarily ice cream, because there's a definition, correct? Yes. So ice cream is a colloid, right? Yeah. Which is an unusual and complex substance. And actually, quicksand is a colloid. It's a colloidal gel. Yes, technically, I remember that. But ice cream is a colloid, and a colloid is a substance where you have things that don't normally mix that are mixed together. Right. And in this case, you have fat and sugar and milk mixed together with a little bit of air thrown in. And what you need to create a colloid is something called an emulsifier. That's the bonding agent that holds everything together, these things that don't normally mix. And in the earliest cases, egg yolks were the emulsifier that held everything together. And of course, if you're making ice cream at home, you can still use egg yolks as an emulsifier. It's an easy go to thing. But if you're manufacturing it on a large scale, you're probably using something like xanthing gum or something else to emulsify and stabilize the whole thing to hold it together. But yes, ice cream specifically is a colloid that has undergone a very specific manufacturing process, and if you take or add different ingredients or different steps in the process, then you have something different, like frozen yogurt or saucer of ice cream or sherbet. Yeah, because frozen yogurt isn't just yogurt that they freeze, which I never knew. It's actually during the ice cream making process they'll put in the yogurt cultures to make it frozen yogurt. Yeah. You don't start with yogurt, you make yogurt. Yeah. I didn't know that either. Pretty cool. Agreed. Which is why every time I just throw the yogurt in the freezer, it doesn't taste anything like really cold yogurt. The USDA actually has an ingredient standard for it to be labeled ice cream, which has to be at least 10% milk fat and a minimum of 6% non fat milk solids, and a gallon has to weigh \u00a34.5. I think that's neat. Yeah, sure, because I can't get it to act together in anything, but it can define ice cream. Yeah, and the reason they have the minimum poundage is because, as we mentioned earlier, lighter ice cream is generally cheaper because it means there's just more air whipped in there. And that's why Ben and Jerry's pine is like a brick in your stomach. Yeah. And the Grabster, who wrote this? Points out that's usually a general rule of thumb, that the heavier the ice cream, the higher quality it is. But he points out, to be fair, you need to compare, like, types. Sure. Like you can't compare something that's loaded down with, like, brownies and snickers with a plain vanilla, because the brownies and snickers are going to add weight and throw off your judgment. That's right. In more ways than one. So milk fat. There is a range of milk fat you can use. Premium ice creams max out at about 16% at the most, but generally they're about 14%. And ice cream in general is a minimum of about 10%. And butterfly, which is another name for it, delicious, sounds so great. Both of them sound great. Butterfat makes it taste good and makes it creamier and richer. But it's interesting that they found that 16% is about as high as you want to go, though it's not like, oh, just make it 50%. Could be even better. You just vomit after every bite. Well, you would. And people, they point out, ed points out people wouldn't eat as much. Right. Because it is so rich and it is so calorie rich as well. And so they found that perfect combination of enough to make you plow through that pint and want to get another one the next night. Yeah, about 14% to 16%. Yeah. That sounds pretty good when you're talking butterfat. 10% for the cheap stuff that Ned Flanders would eat. Yeah, totally. So, like I said, ice cream is a colloid, and it's created by adding egg yolk to milk, fat and sugar. And I think that's a custard, if you use the egg yolk right, I think you use more egg yolk. Yeah. 1.4%, at least something like that. Higher than that. Yeah. Frozen custard is at least 1.4% egg yolk solids. Okay. That's even worse for you. Right. So that's just like well, not necessarily. No. Cholesterol wise, sure. But the ice cream itself is specifically just this combination of different types of ingredients with other agents that hold the whole thing together, that's put through this process. Right. So when you have your sugar, when you have your cream, your milk, and you have your eggs, or whatever you're going to use as stabilizer emulsifier sure. You put the whole thing together. And what you have right there is an ice cream mix. Yeah. And no matter whether you're making it at home or if you just bought a factory or inherited it from your rich uncle who just died and left it to you, then you're going to be following pretty much the same process using virtually the same ingredients. Yeah. I've got an ice cream machine, which when I looked at the process of making ice cream, it's pretty much what goes on in this little thing. Right. Like, you freeze the canister, which I found out the hard way. That's how you do it. Right. Because I was like, man, it's not getting solid. Oh, no way. You did it without freezing the gas? Yes. I had no idea. Like, you just use it at room temperature. At room temperature. How long did you try that for? It's fun for quite a while before I realized what was going on. We luckily figured that out from the get go. Made some pretty killer lemon gelato once. Yeah. So you freeze the thing, and then the canister actually spins and they have like, a blade in there that disrupts it introduces the air bubbles, which is key to making ice cream nice and rich and creamy. And it also acts as a scraper to keep ice from forming, which is exactly what happens in big factories. It's pretty much the same process. Right. Or if you're using the hand crank thing what you just said the Johnson crank, right? Yeah. What you just said listed off all of the necessary components to making ice cream. You've got something that's cooling it, whether that little drum that you put in the freezer or you have ammonia filled tubes that are freezing a tube that your mix is in. So you've got that, right? Yeah. And the ammonia tubes, we should point out there's no ammonia. It's just making the tube cold. Right. The ammonia is not being introduced into the ice cream. Not at all. Yeah. The tube is up against the tube that the ice cream is in. That's right. Or if you are making it at home using a Johnson crank, you're going to use rock salt, right? That's right. So I didn't understand what the point of using rock salt was, so I looked into it. Yeah. We covered it a little bit within the salt episode, but not like super in depth. Okay. So basically the reason that you would add rock salt to ice is because if you just use ice, the freezing point of ice is 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. It takes more than that or more degrees than that. Let me put it a different way. Milk freezes at a lower temperature than ice. Yes. Right. So when you add salt, you actually lower the freezing point of that ice. Okay. Because when you're using ice, it's a fresh water mixture. Saltwater ice has a lower freezing temperature. So you're melting it, and it's melting and refreezing. And as the ice melts, the way that it's melting is by drawing heat from something else. In this case, your ice cream mixture. Right, right. So when you add salt, it has to draw more heat to melt because it has a lower freezing point, freezing temperature. So that's why you add salt. It actually lowers the freezing point, which allows you to cool your ice cream faster. Right. So it lowers the freezing point. Milk has a lower freezing point, and it draws the heat out more quickly. So those ice crystals don't form on the side. Just that simple little thing is the magic that makes it happen. Yeah. We had an electric ice cream maker growing up that was the same as the Johnson crank version, but you just plug it in. Not like the new one that I have today, which is much different. Right. Which you definitely plug in. Yeah, definitely plug in. And you've got to freeze that thing, apparently. So funny. But my church one of my favorite memories growing up is my church would have ice cream socials where everybody would bring their own homemade ice creams and there would just be a table with like 30 of those steel containers. The people just take it right out of the old rock salt bin and just set it on the table and you would just go berserk as a child. We had a Johnson crank. Yeah. Growing up. And you probably had to do it, right? Because the parents are always like that's the fun part. I'm sure I did. I don't really remember. I just remember the wooden bucket thing with the crank on top. That's what I remember. And like a bag of rock salt. That's right, man. That we also use for the driveway, too. Oh, sure. Yeah. Of course we did in Atlanta. But I remember when I saw that rock salt come out, it was a special evening at the Bryan house. Yeah. So I mentioned the little paddle. It's called the dasher, which is the blade inside the tube. And this is if you're in an ice cream factory. And like we said, it whips it up, introducing those air bubbles. And that's what gives it the structure. And like I said, also prevents the larger ice crystals from forming. Because you don't want that. No, you want a cold, but you don't want ice. And we should say by this time you've got your ice cream mixture, but you've already added whatever flavor you're going to add. Right. But if you're adding chunks of stuff, which you should, you're not doing that quite. Yet? No. So you're freezing it. What you've just created is a frozen ice cream mixture. It's not technically USDA standard ice cream yet. If you stopped right here, and even if you added the snickers or the brownies or whatever or both, what? You would have a soft serve ice cream. Yes. The ice cream still has another step to go through to become regular old ice cream. And that's the hardening process. Yeah, the hard freeze. And that's basically all it is. You take that soft serve and you have to get it down super low, at least to zero degrees fahrenheit. But when you're in an ice cream factory, you're going to pump it down even lower, because you're going to be shipping it and packaging it, and that you want it to stay nice and hard throughout that whole process. Yeah, that's how you do it. That's pretty much it. That's pretty much making ice cream. It's a great thing that everyone should try making ice cream. Sure. Yeah. Well, actually, that's funny that you say that, because whether you have a hand crank or one of those awesome electric ones that you have to freeze the drum ahead of time, you can also just make it at home with basically nothing, just using a couple of baggies, like a bigger baggie, a smaller baggy, and make a little rock salt mixture. Well, I won't go through the whole recipe, but if you go to how stuff works and look up how ice cream works, there is a recipe for five minute ice cream that makes us a little bit using nothing but plastic bags and the ice cream ingredients. Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned that it's pasteurized along the way, too. It's an important step. Pasteurization keeps you from getting salmonella. Yes. And if you're making your own mix at home, you can even do that yourself with a double boiler. So we'll talk a little bit about just how much everybody loves ice cream right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. All right, buddy, we will finish this out with some stats and the like. But first we should talk about overrun, because that's an important part of ice cream, because when you're making ice cream, there's going to be an increase in volume as you go, because you're whipping all that air into it. And that increase is called overrun. Right. And it's indicated by a percentage. Yeah. So if the volume goes from one gallon of ice cream mixture to a completed one and a half gallons of ice cream, it's a 50% overrun. Which is good. But what the pros shoot for? Like, our friends at Blue Bell with great commercials. Yeah. They do make fantastic ice cream. Yes, it is really good. So if you are a professional ice creamier, you might have as much as 100% overrun. But the premium ice creams are more dense, so they have less overrun. Right. Which is why they're heavier. Yes. But you can also get into a situation where your ice cream is dense because you're not using much stabilizer emulsifier. So that's not good. No. Because it makes your ice cream chewy. No. So just really dense ice cream is not necessarily the best thing. Right. You want a mixture between the two of somewhat dense, but not totally dense, but not super light ice cream. There's a balance that you want to achieve. Yeah. Because the air, like we said, is what gives it the structure that you appreciate. And it's familiar. Right. You get some chewy ice cream, it's no good. No. And, Chuck, we were remiss in not mentioning ice cream cones. Yeah. I'm not a cone guy. Are you? Yes. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. So when you go to, like, you go out, you get it in the cone every time? No, just sometimes, yes. Do you get the waffle cone? If I get a cone, I like it all, except I don't know what they call the non sugar cone. The cheap styrofoam. Yeah, that's definitely the lowest on my list, but that one's fine. But, yes, I guess it does go waffle sugar, cheap cone. Okay. As far as order of preference goes. Right, sure. But no waffle cone. Obviously. That just adds to the whole thing smelling like fresh made waffle cones being made while you're ordering ice cream. Really? I always get the cup. I almost always do. Just for, like just to be healthier while I'm eating ice cream. Well, no, but I mean, that's a decision. Yeah, for sure. But it is preferable in a waffle cone. I think they're delicious. I might start getting a cone every now and then. So there's an origin story to the waffle cone, and a lot of people place it at the World Fair in St. Louis. That's right. And that is probably not where ice cream cones were invented, but that is where they were popularized. Yeah. I mean, if you're at a World's Fair, there's going to be some waffling going on. Waffle making. There definitely was some waffles being made, but there was also some ice cream being served. That's documented that's. Right. And the story goes that the ice cream makers ran out of plates or bowls or whatever they usually use, and they turn to the waffle makers who said, hey, we can help you out for a fee. Let's turn these things into some sort of cone. And bam, that's what happened. But it turns out that the person who actually invented the ice cream cone was an Italian immigrant to America named Italy. Go ahead. You mean italo Mahiaani. Right? Yeah. And he also invented the ice cream. A yusukerima. I think he was the first one to coin that term. He was into ice cream big time. Yes. But he actually filed a patent for the cone making machine a full year ahead of the fair. Yeah. So he generally gets credited with the invention of the ice cream cone. Although just because you patent the machine doesn't necessarily mean that you are the first person who thought of the cone. No, supposedly there's French cookbooks that date back to the 1840s that have recipes for ice cream cones. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, and we also didn't mention Jacob Fusel. We probably need to mention that guy because he was the first he opened the first wholesale manufacturing operation in the United States in Baltimore, and some of the greatest success stories in business sort of got into it by accident because he was just a dairy guy right. Who had too much cream and was like, well, I guess I can try this ice cream thing out. And before you know it, he was selling more ice cream than he was anything else. Yes. Good for him. Good for us. Good for that's true. Good for all of us. So if you want to become like a Jacob Fusel type, you can actually go, depending on where you are in the country, to your local major university. And they may or may not, depending on the size of their dairy program, offer, like a real ice cream course. Yeah. Penn State is known for one, correct? Yeah. Wisconsin has one, of course. Actually, Penn State graduated ben and Jerry back in 1077. Really? Yeah. In ice creamery? Yes. I thought you're going to say, like no, they were architects. No. One of them tried to get into med school. He graduated and couldn't afford med school. The other one just dropped out of college. But both of them went together to Penn State's ice cream course and graduated. Well, I went to their website to look at some of their facts, and I think they said they started their initial business with like $4,000. I said, Twelve grand? Yeah. Well, either way, that's cheap. It is. I do have some other stats, though. Lay them on us, Chuck. Yeah. It's been a while since we've had a stat run. The majority of US ice cream and frozen dessert manufacturers have been in business for more than 50 years, and many are still family owned, which is why you see, like, the Blue Bells and stuff like that. There's not a lot of upstarts. Like extreme ice cream. Right. Made with Mountain Dew code Red. Oh, God. US dairy. Approximates this is a few years ago, 20 quarts per capita. What? The US seats every year no. Produced. Oh, wow. Yeah, they produced 20 quarts per capita. What's interesting, though, is the United States isn't the leader in ice cream consumption. Did you know that? Who is? New Zealand. No way. Yeah. New Zealand, per capita, I guess. Obviously. Yeah. So the average New Zealander eats seven and a half gallons of ice cream a year. Wow. Americans eat five and a half gallons? Yeah. Apparently, Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America all import ice cream as well, to a large degree. And the most popular flavor is still vanilla, which I had to explain to Emily was a real flavor. She thinks it's an absence of all flavors. Like white light. Yeah. It's like no, vanilla is a thing. Yeah. And some people love it. Vanilla is still good. She thinks it's a waste of calories to eat anything that's just plain vanilla. There are really good vanillas out there that you're just like, this is all that's needed. Oh, yeah, I agree. Like super creamy. Like vanilla bean. Yummy. And then chocolate chip mint and cookies and cream followed as the next most popular. I'm surprised plain chocolate is not on the list. I saw a grubhub survey they did most popular ice cream flavors by flavor ordered. And vanilla is number one. Wow. Surprise. But green tea was number two. And I was thinking about it, and it's probably because, like, at a Japanese restaurant, you don't really have any other options besides green tea. Yeah, I've never had the green tea ice cream. Is it good? Oh, my God, yeah. Really? Yeah. Dude. I don't eat dessert in restaurants. It's so good. Yes. I'm going to have to start eating. If you go to a good Japanese restaurant, they bring it out whether you ask for it or not, part of the meal, and it'll be like, green tea or red bean is another one, too. That's a pretty good ice cream, but green tea definitely has it destroyed. That sounds delicious. Yes, it is. I'm hungry. Yeah. So if you want to know more about ice cream and to get this awesome, really easy five minute ice cream recipe, go to howsteporks.com and type ice cream in the search bar. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this first of two scientific method emails. You're going to hear one here and then one of the next one. Awesome, because these are great. I was super proud of that one. And we got a lot of kudos from scientists, which is always nice. Hey, guys. My name is Danny. I'm 23 and recently graduated with a degree in astronomy and physics. Now I work at an aerospace company in La on a space mission concept called the Starshade. Where do you go, Danny? I know the Starshade is a really awesome piece of tech that allows will allow us to image planets around other stars and ultimately search for life outside of our solar system. I'm writing because I was just listening to the podcast on the scientific method, and as someone whose job regularly involves the scientific method, I want to express my appreciation for you guys recording such a great discussion on the subject. It's extremely important to give the public the opportunity to learn about science, think that your podcast is a great vehicle by which this is achieved. So thanks. I remember once in the show, you guys let it slip that you get a few hundred emails a week. So statistically speaking, I'm twice as likely to become a millionaire than to get my email read on the show. I saw that and I felt like he was beating us. He totally was, and it worked. But in the case that some miracle happens and you do read it, I'd love if you could plug the Astrophysics blog. My friends and I have. It's called Astrophysics Unleashed and can be found online at Astrophysics Unleashed tumblr.com. And it's a place where we seek to expose the beauty hidden within astronomy and modern science. It's a great place for the inquiring mind to find food for thought or to ask questions. So that is from Danny, and he said, I wanted to shout out to Jerry, J-E-R-I but I was afraid I spell her name wrong. Hopefully that is right. Tell her that. I have no idea what she's like at all, but I'd be willing to bet that she's really cool. That is nice, man. Usually people have a better chance of getting struck by lightning and spelling Jerry's name correctly, but he nailed it well. And here's a spoiler. The other scientists said the exact same thing about spelling her name wrong and he spelled it right. Wow. How about that, man? Scientists are smart. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us usually. Sure. SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athousofworks.com and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.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. 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d637eb26-3b0d-11eb-aa42-d344f5bf5498 | How Housing Discrimination Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-housing-discrimination-works | Owning a home in the US is a way to pass wealth down from one generation to the next and lift families into a comfortable life down the road. But there have been barriers to buying homes that Black Americans have faced from the time of slavery to today. | Owning a home in the US is a way to pass wealth down from one generation to the next and lift families into a comfortable life down the road. But there have been barriers to buying homes that Black Americans have faced from the time of slavery to today. | Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=42, tm_isdst=0) | 52112488 | 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.com SYSK and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain 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 iHeartRadio. Hey, 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. The man oh, man edition. Do you know what I love about this topic is that it's not just a bunch of ranting about how we think things are and how people think things are. It's, like so studied and statistic heavy that you can talk about how things are and then say, and here's the proof. Exactly. Here's a lot of data to back it up. It's really great. I love it when they dovetail like this. Yeah. I get the impression, though, that when you're talking about the studying race, and especially in America, you have to back it up with data. People are like, oh, yeah, I don't know about that. But I want to give a shout out to actually two scholars, both sociologists of race. Professor Vilna Bashi Treetler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of Brown University. Both are experts on this stuff, and they helped me out big time with this and some other research on racism have done. And Dr. Bashi Treetler said, hey, make sure you mention this hashtag we have going called site hashtag sorry. And I'm making the hashtag symbol, like Justin Timberlake hashtag site black women. C-I-T-E black women. And that leads you to all sorts of good, often overlooked research by black scholars who are women that don't always get a lot of credit. So I'm glad you told me about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So that was a stutter when you said, So sociologist, you didn't mean they were just mediocre sociologists? No, I was not so sociologist. I can see how that would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil Collins saying, sociologist sociosudios. Yeah, well, that's the last joke we're going to tell? Yeah, probably. I was warned by Dr. Bashi Treetler not to do our usual stick when we're talking about race stuff. And I was like, well, we can handle ourselves. She said, I listen to your stuff. I listened to the brazepisode. Just trust me on this. All right, so then that means the housing discrimination episode officially starts now. That's right. So that's what we're talking about, dude housing discrimination. And in the United States, there is a very long history of housing discrimination. And you might say, like, well, that really sucks. That sucks that people have trouble buying a home, or maybe they get less favorable terms on their loans just because of their race. And that does suck. That's absolutely true. But it's even worse than that, because in the United States, one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally over the course of generations within a single family is through a house. Yes. Sometimes people don't have a ton of money to invest in the stock market. Some people think the stock market is not something to trust. But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in this country, say, for a few moments in history, is real estate. And the idea that if you scrap up and save enough money for a down payment for a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a bit more years later. And you can sell it and use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the stock market or to pass down to your kids so they can then get in the housing market sooner than they might have. And then it just becomes a cycle where it just builds wealth. Yeah. Like, the average family in America has most of their net worth tied up in their house, and then when it comes time to sell it and the house is paid off, that's a lot of money. And then, yeah, when you kick the bucket, your kids get that money, and maybe they get a better house, and it just keeps growing and growing. So if you put up barriers to housing, you're actually putting up barriers to passing along intergenerational wealth and as a big problem in America still today. I saw a study from, I think, Brookings that found that median yeah. 2020. Brookings study said that the median net worth of a white family in America is $171,000. The median net worth of a black family in America is $17,150, about a 10th of what the median is for white people. And that is largely because of housing discrimination and the history of housing discrimination in this country. Yeah. And as far as history goes, it started with literal racist laws where they said, if you're a black person or a black family, you cannot live here. That went on for a while, and then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim Crow separate but equal era, where they said, you know what? We'll say things are better, but it's really the same effect in the end. And then they got rid of those laws and said, all right, now we've really passed a meaningful legislation, and now we can just racially discriminate on the down low in very creative ways. Yeah, that's basically the pattern that it's followed. And what kind of stuck out to me. Chuck. Is that before about 1900. Before the rise of industrialization to a really legitimate degree in the United States. There wasn't not nearly as much segregation as we saw starting around 1900. Especially in the north. Because if you had a trade or a craft in the north and you're an African American. There's a really good chance that you are going to be serving white people as well as black people. Right. And because you usually were very closely, your home was tied close to your shop, you often lived above it. If you were like a cobbler or something like that, you may live next door to a white baker or something like that. So there wasn't a lot of segregation until industrialization came along. And there was a big call for labor, which drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of black Americans out of the south, up to the north. And all of a sudden, all of those people who were living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people, I should say, had a problem with this influx of black migration from the south to the north. And they responded with a lot of really disgusting violence. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about some of these race incidents and race riots and almost race wars, really, here and there on the show, and they're always hard to talk about. But that was just sort of the reality of things at the time. In the 1930s, the New Deal comes along, and this is when legislation starts to kind of kick in, when the government stepped in and said, you know what, we think we should make it easier for people to own homes. We really want to boost home ownership because that's a boon for the economy of the country. And we're going to create the Homeowners Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages. But we need some criteria here to sort of establish a uniform way of, like, how to dole out this assistance. And they reckoned, let's look at every population of 40,000 or more, and let's create a color coded map that's based on riskiness of these loans. And they said they talked to real estate brokers, they talked to bankers, and they said, Help us out. Help us draw these boundaries. And they came up with a 1234 color graded system, right? Yeah, that's right. Because, again, this is like long before credit scores were developed. So you couldn't really look at if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan, you couldn't be like, well, your credit score is this, so I'm not going to when did that start? I don't know. We should do an episode on if we haven't already. I don't think we're sure, but yeah. So the four color codes they had were also delineated by grades grade A-B-C and D. Grade A was the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. There were lots of professionals living in there. Grade B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogenous, if not totally homogeneous. And they were considered still desirable. And then it started to get into the lower grades, grade C and D. And C was, I think, colored yellow on the map. Right? Yeah. The first two were green and blue. And then grade C was rated as declining and colored yellow. And that sort of in fact, I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade population in the document, which you don't have to be a genius to figure out what they were saying there. It means people of color were moving in and then finally you end up with the color red, grade D, which is least desirable. Very densely populated areas, almost always communities of color. Right. So the HOLC created these maps, and then along came the Federal Housing Authority and they said, well, we need similar maps because we're not here to help stem the tide of foreclosures. We're actually here to generate new home ownership among Americans. But we still have the same issue. We got to figure out who's creditworthy and who's not. So we're going to base it on where the people live. And they basically made identical maps to the HOLC maps. They probably use them. Right. There's a lot of debate. I don't think anyone has found the smoking gun yet. But if you take an HOLC map in an FHA map and you put them over one another, they're basically the same thing. And it's up for the debate still. But the upshot was that because of these maps, if you lived in one of these red and often yellow communities, they wouldn't lend to you for a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to say, remodel your home. And they also wouldn't assist you with refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you are subject to foreclosure. And if you were in a red or yellow community, you were probably black or a person of color or some other ethnic minority. And that means that they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that generated a tremendous amount of prosperity immediately after the New Deal in World War II, as we'll see. So African Americans were left out of are on the fringes of the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get to shout out Francis Perkins again, which is fun to now that we know so much about her, to continually shout her out. But she did a lot of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people in the New Deal, I guess. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the FHA imposed these rules through the New Deal. Their maps were just like the HOLC and the process of excluding these groups because they were colored. Red was called redlining. Is that where that whole term comes from? That's exactly where it comes from. So now today, anytime you're discriminated against, whether it's buying insurance or anything like that based on your race or say, your community, it's called redlining now, but that's where it grew out of, those HOLC maps and FHA maps. And I mean, they would use terms and like their handbooks that, like, these communities had, quote, undesirable racial or nationality groups in them, so you couldn't lend them any money or whatever. This is still, like a really big problem today. Yeah. I mean, back then, basically still today, in many cases, that leaves you with a couple of options. As a person of color, you can rent forever. Oftentimes back then and still now from a white landlord who doesn't live anywhere near that community. Not always, but usually. Or just pay for the home in cash, which is a stretch for anybody. It's tough to do unless you're wealthy. And I have to say there were blackowned banks, but there was nine blackowned banks in the entire United States in the 30s. So that is a place where you could turn to if you're lucky enough to have one in your area. But that was not a solution to the general population for black American. Yeah. And like you said, it also affected their ability to get second mortgages, to do home improvements, or to expand on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that means that the properties are going to deteriorate and decline over the years and it's part of that systemic racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because still today, eventually, over time, people from the outside looking in say, look, black people can't even take care of their communities. Look at how their houses are just as a result of this. That is definitely the definition of systemic racism, for sure. And by the way, into the structures, if you hear dogs barking, my dogs are upstairs and they're just very excited about this topic. Yeah, exactly. I don't know what's going on there, but they're not going to shut up. So I say we press on. We'll press on. Should we take a break then? Press on. We're going to press on like some lee nails right after a break. How about that? All right, sounds good. 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. 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For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table, because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. All right, we're back. And look, these things look amazing on me. Yeah, they're very nice. There's a little bit of cuticle showing. I didn't put them right up against it, but still, it's passable. Well, I think if you paint them just right, that's not so noticeable. Fill in. That's what I need. I need to get some fill ins. So back to the topic at hand. That's right, joking is over. So here's the deal. There's, like you said, a lot of debate of whether or not or I don't think we said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use these maps, because these were government maps from government programs. It's not like they said, here, banks have these and use these. But if you look at the statistics, it seems like they probably got their hands on some of these maps. It does. And also, don't forget, the government figured out how to draw these maps for every city. Over 40,000 people from the lenders, from the bank. Yeah, so they knew this anyway. But now the government has basically said it is okay to do this. So, yeah, if you look at the outcome of these red line maps, it's really hard to say, no, this didn't happen. This definitely didn't make it out of government hands. There's a lot of great stats here. Just great. Let's trade off. Between 1934 and 1962, over 98% of all the federally backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went to white buyers. 98% between 1934 and 1962. That's right. Because of this, black ownership since then and continuing today is lag behind white homeownership in America. In 2017, just a few short years ago, 44% of black Americans own their homes versus 73% of white Americans. And then the other problem with redlining a community is you basically put a box on it. It's cursed because that means that those houses are not going to get any kind of attention, and so they're going to continue to deteriorate. And if you live in this community, as far as a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk. Right? Yeah. And so still today, 75% of the neighborhoods that were originally redlined in those maps are redlined low income communities today. That's pretty surprising. And I also saw that 1996 study found that homes in redline neighborhoods in 1996 were still worth less than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah, and here's the one I marked these as stats with an exclamation point because that's how excited I get. Right. But the ones that I'm really floored by, I don't even write anything except for three exclamation points. I've got three exclamation points by that 98% of federally backed mortgages for sure. That is definitely one. Here's mine, if you might say. Well, what about variables, man and education level and income level and stuff like that. You got to factor all that in. That's a whole other side conversation as far as systemic racism and being able to go to good schools and afford a good education and get a good job and all that. So just park that to the side. But if you control for all those variables, college educated black Americans are still less likely to own their home than white Americans without a high school diploma. Yes. That's what really gets you. They're like, well, let us just control for all these factors. And the only variable that remains is the race of the people applying for a loan or owning a home. And it's still the case that's when it's like, well, this is indisputable, actually. Yeah, and you can put a price on this. Redfin did a study just last year in 2020 that black American families missed out on the opportunity to accumulate an average of $212,000 of what we were talking about that intergenerational wealth per household over the last 40 years. Just over the last 40 years. I mean, we're talking about stuff that started back in the days of slavery, but really started to take off in the 1930s with the New Deal. And this is just since 1980, they've lost out on that amount of money per household. That's nuts. And still today, Chuck, here's another one that gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own a home in a red line neighborhood than a white American is. So this is still an issue today. So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount of discrimination, I guess, is all you can say, and then all of the horrible effects that come out of that level of discrimination. But they weren't the only things that set it off. The GI. Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on, hold my beer. I want to mess things up, too. What does hold my beer mean? It means that there's some dude just kind of sitting there with, like, his shirt just barely covering his gut, drinking a beer, watching somebody do something stupid, and he says, Hold my beer, and then he does something even more stupid. That's what it meant. But I'm an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut. I wasn't quite sure. You should spend more time on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don't drink much beer anymore, though, although I do love it. What's your favorite? I mean, I love tropical here out of Athens, Georgia. Creature comfort. I still never had one. Well, you should come over. I have a kegirator now on my deck. Oh, my God. I'm serving it up, but I don't know why I got it. I got it for friends because I don't drink a ton of beer. And then the pandemic happened, and now I've just got a half cup of beer sitting. I got to finish it. All right, so, yeah, the GI. Bill. In theory. The GI. Bill is a great thing and it has done a lot of good, but in this case, it did block access to home ownership among black Americans because they would come home from World War II. The GI. Bill is passed. Banks are handing out mortgages to veterans, and they were actually allowed to discriminate based on race. Yeah, it's shocking. Yeah. Well, whenever you see that kind of thing, you're like, this doesn't jive with what I understand. Just look to the Dixiecrats, the segregationists of the south, who were very powerful voting bloc during the Jim Crow era, and they were like to appease them and get them to vote for something like a New Deal program or to not do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay, well, we'll make sure that blacks are excluded from this, that black Americans won't have access to this amazing program. And they'd be like, okay, cool, let's do it. That's where a lot of that came from. And, I mean, it's easy to blame the Dixiecrats, but you can also be like, well, how hard did you try to go around the Dixiecrats, too? It was allowed to happen. Yeah, by everybody. Despite Francis Perkins best efforts, yeah. Here's the stat. For instance, in Mississippi in 1947, they do out more than 3000 VA backed home loans that year, and two of them were to black veterans. Pretty startling. I don't even know the percentage on that. 99.98. Yeah, there's got to be a repeating something in there somewhere. And this is a big deal because when world war II ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was a lot of the supplies that would have gone to home construction during the war went to the war effort. So the FHA said, you know what, we need a housing boom here. We're going to guarantee construction loans to you, like big construction companies out there. And that's when the suburbs popped up for the first time and that changed everything forever. Yeah, I mean, the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate program created by the federal government to basically get more people buying houses to start that intergenerational wealth and to create a middle class or to expand the middle class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially through just like when the FHA came along and said, hey, we're going to back these people's loans as long as they're not in a redline neighborhood that says to the lenders, well then that means even if this person defaults, the government will buy the loan for me. I'm going to get paid back no matter what. They did the same thing to these construction companies, too, which created this huge housing boom. But there's a caveat to it. Just like with the VA loans that said you can discriminate based on race for loans, even though this is really important, Chuck. Even though the government, the VA would back the loan of a black veteran, just like they would back the loan of a white veteran and you would be repaid no matter what, you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The FHA supposedly with the birth of the suburbs said, we're going to guarantee your construction loan so you can build suburbs but you can't sell to black Americans. That's another one that I don't think there's a smoking gun that I saw. Right. So I don't know if that means get the word out. Like you can't sell the black people or else we're not going to back these loans. Or if it was stated policy that I haven't been able to turn up. But it's pretty well understood that the FHA discriminated against black people basically moving to the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well, yeah, and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods. There were clauses that said you cannot resell your home if you go to move, you can't sell it to a black family. Hey, dude, if you want to be startled, go search that on google images. There's like pictures of these clauses and deeds that say you can't sell to anybody who's not white or even specifically, you can't sell anybody who's black. It's really jarring. Yeah. It was sort of expressly understood that the suburbs were being created for a reason and that's to get white people out of the city to a place where they could live among themselves. And it's something that's still going on. During the most recent presidential election campaign, donald Trump started preying on these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban Housewives of America biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood. And these are literal quotes. And it's just he's trying to garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But we'll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump has a long history in his family with he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end result of all this is white people call it white flight. They left the cities, moved to the suburbs, people that were in the city still these AfricanAmerican families in these yellow and redline communities were sort of stuck there. So the government steps in to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated. There were black people and white people. But then even the lower income white people fled for the suburbs. Yeah. Because wages rose. Yeah. And they left cities and urban communities almost entirely black. Yeah. So proportionately speaking, there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities. I'm sure it was different on a city to city basis. As a matter of fact. I know it was not. You can't put a whole blanket of history over every square inch of the United States. So different cities have different experiences. But proportionately speaking, like, people have always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall. But then if you look at the percentage of black people, say, in a city in 1990, I think is when it peaks for Atlanta in particular, that's like, say, 50% black or something, that's a way larger proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living in the city than, say, in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck, when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind of all comes home. Yeah. And they're living in the suburbs. They decide we still need to go into the city sometimes, so we need interstates to get us there because we like going to concerts occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play. That's right. And so they built these interstates. They kind of barreled through black neighborhoods, built them there. They often became a dividing line. And these communities were set up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup, they had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that they built lower access to basic utilities, and they were just in no position to succeed, basically. No. And I'm trying to remember what episode we talked about pruitt IGO housing project in St. Louis. I think it was the environmental. Psychology episode, if I'm not mistaken. But that was a really good example of this, of how people pointed to that, people from the outside and were like, look, black people can't take care of anything. Look at this degraded state that this housing project is in. And it's like you said, they were set up to fail through, like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, just a lack of basically everything. And that kind of seems to keep perpetuating these biases. For example, and this is a big one that we'll talk about later, that white people think if black people move into an area, their housing values are going to go down because of stuff like that. Yeah, that's sort of I guess you could call it the dog whistle that everyone leans on. They're like, hey, we don't mind. We're not bigoted at all. We just want to keep our housing values up. That's right. So that one and then the myth that black people are just inherently uncredit worthy or not credit worthy, are the two things that seem to be used the most, is cover for, like you said, post civil rights error segregation in the United States. The dog whistle, like you said. Yes. And now is when we can talk a little bit about gentrification, because the way housing has worked in this country is really fascinating and really gross in a lot of ways, but just interesting to look at from a bird's eye point of view. The way people move around and what eventually happened with the cities is that call them what you want, yuppies or dinks. There's a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people. They're like, hey, I want to move into the city. I want to be closer to the concerts. Although this is going to be controversial. I'm going to get a lot of credit for this, but one of the most annoying trends of the last 15 years is building all these concert venues out in the suburbs. Oh, yeah, it's so annoying. And I know they want their concert venues out there so they don't have to come into the city. But I hate it when one of my bands plays 30 miles out into the suburbs. I won't go. Yeah, it is kind of a pain. Although we did go out. It's a huge pain. We saw Motley Crue thanks to Nita Strauss. Now, that's true. So that was worth the trip because it was Miley Crew and Alice Cooper. I just think I don't know, I think all sports stadiums and all concerts should be in the city. I'm with you. That's definitely traditional. Go into the city for a big day out when they start moving museums way out in the Exurbs, and I'm done. But the same thing, you could make the same case when they built the highways and everything, they just kind of built them through black communities. That's what they did with the stadiums. And all that as well, too. Well, no, that's true. Think about Braves. They just plunked Brave stadium. Ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville, which is a historically black community, and said, everybody move aside and don't harass all the white people who come down to see the game on game day. I love sports, but we should do such a problematic side to pro sports. From that to these billionaire owners using city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium is just, like, ten years old or whatever. Yeah, that is definitely problematic. It's crazy. What a crazy amount of waste that produces alone. Just that alone. Yeah. All right, so where was I? White dinks are moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they want good Thai food, and these neighborhoods become a little more attractive the more white people move in to other white people to move in. And they start moving in and increasing numbers, and the houses are generally renovated or improved over time, or sometimes they might bulldoze a pretty decent house with good bones just to build the biggest house possible on their postage stamp of a lot. It's crazy how close they build these mammoth houses together. I'm sure it happens everywhere. Atlanta has got a real problem with it. But what happens is home values are going to increase. That's going to raise taxes on the other homes around them. A lot of times those other homes are owned by longtime lower income residents. Most times people of color. It becomes unsustainable. We have a great, great program here in my neighborhood in East Lake called Neighbor in need. That is emily and I have four main charities that we work with and give to every year, and Neighbor in need is one of them because we like to stay really locally focused, but Neighbor in need basically addresses this head on, and they raise a lot of money, and they use that money to take care of these people. If they hear about a neighbor that's, like, in need, like an older African American couple who's been here for 40 years, they're having to pay way too much in property taxes, so they can't afford a roof on their house. They'll go put a roof on their house, or they'll pay their power bill. That's great. Whatever. I mean, it's a really great grassroots organization. So very happy to be working with them and trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah, that's neat because it also draws the community together to help the longest term residents of that community rather than that whole everybody's on their own kind of thing, which I'm sure most people who move into a community that is gentrifying probably would want to do. They just don't know how to do it, or they don't know how to contact anybody. People don't just usually go over to their neighbors house and knock on the door and introduce themselves anymore. So that's cool. Yeah. And sometimes they are able to sell their house for a pretty good the housing value does increase, so they're able to get more money than they might have before, which can be a nice windfall. But I've also seen firsthand literally with my neighbors, the sort of predatory home builders that come in there, and while they think it's probably decent money compared to what they thought they could get, it's still lower than what they would offer a white family, even if they were treated fairly. And they walked away with a big windfall from the sale and had a lot of money to retire on, that community was still fractured. I know the people who are having to move and their neighbors who already had to move may have lived there for generations or even just their whole lives, and they formed a community, and it's not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together. They all go to different communities, often toward the end of their life, and it leads to alienation isolation. That's a real problem, even if they are being paid well for the houses they're being bought out of because they don't necessarily want to move, but they just can't afford the taxes anymore. Right. So that's a big issue with gentrification. It's tough to get around. It sounds like that neighborhood group that you're talking about what's the name again? Neighbor in need, that they've figured out a way around it. Do you know what there needs to be? Dude, and this is Chuck 20, 22. 22 stuff. Okay. I think if you live in a house long enough, you shouldn't have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah, I think there are I mean, have to be a lot. Maybe it's like 20 years or something, but that would solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason why some elderly African American couple that's been in a home for 40 years need to be paying taxes at all on the house, much less jacked up rate. Right, yeah, no, I think that's totally true. If it's not law, there's a proposal in Georgia to do that once you're 65 or something like that. Maybe. I mean, I'm mad about property tax anyway, just because we pay so much in taxes. Then you finally scrape up enough to buy a place that you own, and the government's been like, well, you're going to have to pay tax on that too. Right? I know it seems unfair. Also, you shouldn't have to pay full price for coffee anywhere once you reach 65 or older. Agreed. Especially after 03:00. P.m.. All right, well, should we take a break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which solved everything? They totally did it's all great now. All right, we'll be right back up to this. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy. Which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. 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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 Cityadvantage. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call an IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. All right. Spoiler. We ruined things. They passed the Fair Housing Act and racism has been solved in America. That's right. And we talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, and it's a good thing they passed it. It did ban discrimination and housing practices officially, but it just led to a little trickier way to get around stuff by doing it on the down low. Yeah. In a lot of cases, if you're studying systemic racist in the United States, the passing of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and some other legislation really changed things in that no longer was the government in the business of enforcing discrimination and segregation. And also now you have recourse in the courts if you were discriminated against. But it didn't just erase racism in the United States. That task of enforcing basically white supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff that comes along with it fell to lesser institutions and everyday people who carry it out. And when you're talking about something like housing discrimination, the people who now are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in the United States are people like lenders and real estate agents and even people who are deciding where to buy a house. Everyday. Americans buying the house often make choices that they don't necessarily think are racist, and they probably don't think that they're racist, but their housing choices often reflect inadvertent or otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah. And this next bit, we're sort of busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have very good friends that are real estate agents. They're great people for the most part. We don't mean to just paint everything with a big broad brush. No. But the industry does have a history of it, for sure. Yes, we have to talk about it. So there was one in the 80s, there was one practice called blockbusting. My God, not having anything to do with video stores. I know it was the 80s, but literally busting up a block when a real estate agent would work or sort of act as a speculator and say either, hey, you know what, there are some black families that are moving into the area you may want to think about selling just to protect your home values before they fall. Or they might sell to a black family and introduce them to the area so they could then turn around, buy these houses from the white residents and then sell them to the black residents or hopefully black residents, but at a big mark up. Yeah, which has insult to injury. Like they created basically white flight from an area just from the rumor of black people moving in, and then they move black people in and sell to them at wildly inflated rates, which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck of one of these real estate agents that was doing blockbusting. They would have a black dad with a stroller walk around the neighborhood like he had moved in and was thinking of moving in or whatever. And apparently just that was enough to get people to start to sell. And again, you're like, this is terrible that real estate agents are doing it, but the fact that it was effective really says a lot about everyday white homeowners, too. And also, again, it doesn't mean that these white homeowners hate black people. They were worried about their property values because it's such an embedded myth in America that when a black family moves into a neighborhood, they're so bad at taking care of their house and their home values that it's going to drag the home values down throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to get out before that happened again. That's the definition of systemic racism. Yes. And this has been busted up to a large degree, officially. But up until 1950, the official policy of the National Association of Real Estate Boards said a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy up until 1950. And then there was a study in 2006 by the National Fair Housing Alliance that said and this is something else called steering, which is not blockbusting, but it's like, hey, we want to show you houses over here in this neighborhood because we think it's a better fit for you. And here are the financial instruments available to get mortgages for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black people historically have not given the full picture. They're maybe not shown white neighborhoods. And the study found that steering occurred 87% of the time when researchers posed as buyers and were shown homes. Like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah. And steering occurs if you're a black home buyer. You're not just going to be showing a black neighborhood. If you're a white home buyer, they're probably not going to take you to black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering, this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the United States. Yeah. There was another study by Brookings. They found that black owned homes are undervalued by an average of $48,000. And this is one that's controlled by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything re exclamation points. Yeah. It's 48 grand, literally. Because it is a home owned by a black individual. Yes. When they control for amenities where the home is the size of the house, everything else about the house, if you compare apples to apples, and it's the same house owned by a white person, and the other house that's exactly the same owned by a black person, the black person's house is going to be $48,000 less in value just because it's owned by a black person. And that's just basically that whole idea of that black people drag home values down, becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. And those same home values are all of that undervaluing. That same, Brooking study found, amounts to a loss of about $156,000,000,000. For black Americans. Yeah. For wealth they were not able to achieve. Right. And we talked a lot about the Great Recession and the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going on. And shortly thereafter, black Americans back then were likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees, they had higher interest rates. They also had mechanisms built in if you were a black loan owner that made it easier for the lender to seize their collateral, which usually meant their house. Yeah, sure. And so it makes sense that if you are taking a greater risk lending to somebody as the bank, you should be able to get more money for it. Right. But the problem is subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or black homebuyers at way higher rates than they were to white home buyers. And that's a problem in and of itself if the rates are less favorable and it's easier for the bank to repossess the house. But especially it proved to be a big problem during the mortgage crisis when that bubble bursts. Because if you are a low income black American, you are probably denied a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably got a subprime mortgage compared to, say, a white buyer with the same criteria that you had to offer. So that meant that when those foreclosures happened, because the bubble burst, black Americans, especially wealthier black Americans, were disproportionately impacted so that the subprime mortgage debacle erased way more black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah. I have my last three exclamation point stat. During the subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black and Latino families because we've mentioned people of color a few times, is not just solely African American families affected in this study found that black and Latino families making $200,000 a year or more were still more likely to receive a subprime loan than white families making less than $30,000 a year. Isn't it nuts? And 6.2% of white people with a credit score of 660 or higher received a subprime mortgage compared to 21.4% of black borrowers with that same credit score. Yes. So, Chuck, there's a big problem with all this. And it's kind of like you said at the beginning. Like when you're talking about race and especially discrimination by race, people tend to be like especially white people tend to be like, oh, I don't know about that. I mean, there's a lot of other factors involved, like it could be anything. So you really have to kind of prove that this is a thing. And ever since the federal government got out of discriminating on paper, it's gotten a lot harder to track. So back in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, they have an Office of Research and Policy. They came up with the way of testing this to control for as many variables as possible and just see if it's just race that is being discriminated against. And it's called paired testing. It's actually pretty clever from what I understand. Yeah. That's when you get two equally qualified candidates to apply for a home loan or to go to a real estate agent and look at apartments or houses or whatever they are trained to basically be as identical as they can be to one another to respond to the questions in the same way. Have the same credit history. Same job status. Same income level. And basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for their skin color. They're not working together, so they don't even know, like, there's no bias there even because they're not paired together. Right. They're not like, oh, they got you. I'm going to try this with them. They don't meet one another. They don't interact with one another. They're just doing their thing and they're just trained to do it exactly the same way. The only distinction between them is their race. Right? And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank, study this, and they came up with kind of four big points from this paired testing exercise, which is they found about discrimination and housing vouchers that are intended to let low income renters choose from a bigger pool of rental housing than the Realtors even showed. There were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities, like I kind of mentioned earlier, just a smaller, like, no, we'll just look here. Yeah. The racial steering usually results in fewer places being shown. They were steered again to primarily neighborhoods of their own ethnicity and then given less information overall, like I mentioned about mortgage products, different kinds of loans, different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not given that information at all. Right. So they also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that it's not just even people of color, it's not just black Americans, but it's people of color in general. But it's not even just down to racial discrimination. There's also a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled. They actually sometimes fare worse than minorities when it comes to housing discrimination. Paired testing has turned that up as well. So the upshot of all this is that it's still a problem and there is like some silver lining to it. I think that same think tank, the Urban Institute, also turned up that there's been a general decline overall. It's not huge, but it's noteworthy. It's remarkable of preference and favoritism toward white buyers over buyers of minority buyers by about 5% between 1989 and 2000, it went from about 26% to 21%. And there does seem to be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, in the United States. So that's the good news is that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad news is that America is still racist. Like, we still have a long way to go, as the study put the study's findings confirm a hard truth that America's long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. And so there's still a long way to go. And I think it's really important for everybody to realize that there's a long history of discriminating against people of color, but also very specifically black Americans. And that it's still going on today. And even though it's in a slightly lesser form, it's very important, if it's going on at all, that we erase it. That's right. Agreed. You got anything else? Got nothing else. All right, Chuck. Well, then that's housing discrimination. And since I said, all right, Chuck, it's time for listener mail. Well, instead of reading a specific listener mail, and because this episode is a little heavy, we thought we'd have a little fun. We got maybe more emails than we have for any other episode in our history, literally about neko wafers, a lot of support for the necco from people, and a lot of condemnation for yuck and yums without even having tried them. You were all correct. We honor you all. And Josh got some. Send them to me. We're going to try some neck up wipers on the air. Listen, got the right there. I just realized, I think I made a grave mistake by not having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized this as well. Do you have a pipeline to tap into? I think we should eat the same color. Oh, really? Okay. All right. So we can kind of go nose to nose. Okay, so I've never opened one of these before. Okay, exactly. Everybody was right about yucking people's. Yums in general, but also because we hadn't tried them, so that's why we're doing this. I mean, they're just falling apart when I opened the package. So the strike one. They smell terrible. I've got a mess on my table. What color are we going to do? I mean, it's hard to tell. This looks sort of like a very pale yellow. That's the only hole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don't even have that. I got white. I've got orange. Maybe it is white. Okay, I'll call it white. Wait, I might have a paleo one. I do. Okay. To the people with mesophonia, but here we go. Oh, my God. It's like a flatter, bigger candy. Heart. The conversation heart. It's not bad. Okay. Very hard. The crunch is, I think, what probably gets people. I mean, the taste isn't bad, but it's not great. No, they're not great, but I mean, who's crazy for conversation hearts? Sickos and weirdos, you know? Same goes for NECA. Well, what's the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat necka wafers after this? I will tell you what I will probably eat the rest of the year. I like sugar. I like crunch. As a matter of fact, I'm going to do one of the gray ones real quick. What about you? No, this is not up my alley. But I am going to try one of those chocolates, because those were, I think, recommended. Steer clear. The dark gray ones, the licorice ones, they're awful. Oh, no, this is slightly different. Yeah, I get a little hinge of cocoa. I've come around a little bit to the licorice ones at the end. Wow. I'm turning into a necklace. Weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren't bad. What about pink? Try pink. This is winter green. I think people are so disgusted right now. Yeah, this is all right. We're literally the last two people listening to this man. I think we should wrap this up. Okay, well, if you want to tell us that we shouldn't yuck everybody down, especially about something we haven't tried, we need to hear that whenever we do that. It's totally true and totally right. Thank you, everybody who wrote him. You can get in touch with us at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you Should Know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple. Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime with epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For Digestive Health, find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | |
4a1ecb0a-6a25-11ea-b426-eb5bf8136494 | SYSK Distraction Playlist: How Terraforming Will Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-distraction-playlist-how-terraforming-will-wo | A lot of great thinkers are warning that if humans are to survive as a species we are going to have to find another planet to live on. Terraforming, or engineering a planet to maintain all of the ingredients to sustain life, seems to be the answer. | A lot of great thinkers are warning that if humans are to survive as a species we are going to have to find another planet to live on. Terraforming, or engineering a planet to maintain all of the ingredients to sustain life, seems to be the answer. | Fri, 20 Mar 2020 12:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=80, tm_isdst=0) | 38079193 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuckworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. Chandler's over. Chuck Scholar in the window. Things all weird. I'm hot and you're cold. Yeah, I'm cold. One of us is Mars, and one of us is Venus. Is that a book? Chuckles from Mars. Justin Bing in the podcast co host segment of Barnes and Noble. Are those still around? Yeah, they got, like, three books in three stores. That one Click and Clack, by the way. R-I-P legend. Yeah, man, that was a sad one. Was he click or click? I always got that confused. It was Tom, right? I want to say click, but it was Tom who died and his younger brother Ray still around. Yeah. Very sad. Yeah. That's a great show, man. Yes. My house off the NPR for immediately lowering the flag and making a big deal out of it. I mean, it's cool. Yes. He certainly taught us a thing or two. They did about just everything we know. Kind of being natural, goose leaving in everything. Exactly. So hats off to you, sir. So Chuck moving along to Terraforming? Yes. Did you know that a recent study found that even if we instituted a global one child policy like China, but global sure. By 2100, which is less than 100 years away now it's like 85 years away. That's not that far. No. We'd be able to keep the population at about current levels. A lot of people would say the current level is too much as it is. But if we didn't do anything and continued on this pace of growth, we'd hit about 12 billion people by 2100. That is a ton of people. A lot of folks. There's a lot of stretch on resources for agriculture, for fuel, energy, all that kind of stuff. And it caused a lot of people numbers like this, studies like this. It's caused a lot of people to say, how are we going to support all of these people? Yes. Did you know a lot of people poopoo that notion? Yeah, you told me that. I had no idea. When I did that little video on Overpopulation, a lot of people are like, this is not a problem. This is a conspiracy. Right. There's a definite division between camps. There's the gloom and doom camp who say, like, we're screwed. Sure. And then there's the other camp who says, we'll always technologically advance our way out of trouble like this. Right? Sure. Is that what you're saying? I don't know what the point was. I think there's a camp that says overpopulation is not an issue like people say it is. Well, I think redistributed people, it's possible that that could alleviate overpopulation if it is a thing. But I think most people I can't even say that some people would say that agriculture has what's called a carrying capacity. And we've talked about malthus before and that we are possibly stretching it right now. Sure. So a lot of people, the ones who do believe in the overpopulation problem are starting to look to the stars and saying, hey man, let's figure out how to exploit other planets too, so the human race can survive. Isn't that what Interstellar is about? That new movie? Yeah, and it was totally I didn't think like, oh, Interstellar, this'll be timely. Like the two just happened to coincide. Is it about Terraforming or is it just like, hey, go find a place that's hospitable? Well, according to what Michael Cain says in the preview, it's about just going to find a hospitable planet, which is a search that is currently underway and has been for a while through NASA's Kepler Observatory. They've been looking for exoplanets, and supposedly right now there are one. 8000 hundred and 54 confirmed exoplanets, 4173 unconfirmed, and all of them are between ten light years and 25,000 light years from Earth. Pretty far. It is right now, it's prohibitively far, but there are planets out there that exist in what's called the Goldilock Zone, which is they orbit a star, and they're just far enough away from the star that they're not going to burn to a crisp, but they're not so far away that you're going to freeze to death. Hence the Goldilock Zone. Not too hot, not too cold. Oh, got you. You got it. That's so cute. So that's one thing we could do. We could go find a planet that's like ready made for us to live on. Yeah, I doubt that exists, though. Yeah, and plus, even if we did find it, like I said, the closest exoplanet that we know of, I think is about ten light years away. That means it would take a photon, which travels at the speed of light, ten years to get there. We can't travel anywhere near the speed of light, so it might as well not exist. We're not photons. No, we're not. So alternately, a lot of people are proposing to take a planet or a moon or asteroid or something and turn it into something habitable for us. And that's Terraforming. Yeah. Find a nice little fixer upper planet, go in there and flip it and move humanity there to ruin it. Maybe have a meltdown in front of the cameras, make a couple of stupid things. Cliffhangers sure. Boom, you've got yourself a series. That's right, Terraforming. We did a short video about this once about 100 years ago where we explained it in 60 seconds. We should just try that again. No, just press play and sit back. We also did one about lunar building a lunar base. Yeah, sure. I almost did a lunar base on the moon, but that's redundant. Yeah, and that's another idea as well. We could just build lunar bases and stuff. I think Russia is doing that, right. They announced in May or June they want to build a habitable base up there. Right. They plan to spend several hundred million dollars and put it on the moon and just start mining the moon. They want to get a jump on the rest of humanity and it's pretty smart. But building a lunar base or building a base anywhere, a floating city on Venus or anything like that, that's not terraforming, that's building a base somewhere or a floating city somewhere. Yeah. We're talking about changing the atmosphere of a planet and more. Yeah. Which requires a substantial amount of energy, a lot of foresight, and a tremendous amount of patience. And money. Yeah, and money. But I mean, if you take money and the amount of time I would say the amount of time is more depressing than the amount of money you're going to have to sink into it. Because what we're talking about is stuff that's not going to take place until millennia have passed. Yeah. There's all sorts of ranges of how long it might take to TerraForm a planet from 1000 years to 20,000 years. Right. I saw 40000 for Mars. For us to be able to go to Mars and take off a helmet and be like michio Kaku has a very cheap idea. Have you ever seen his little short videos? No. He explains it in 60 seconds. What's his idea? He's like, there's lots of CO2 under the surface and all we have to do is heat that up a little bit and jumpstart the process. And then it creates a what do you call, the catalytic effect and it just sort of sustains itself. Well, let's talk about jumpstart. Yeah. So that's called what he's talking about is called the standard paradigm that Mars has enough CO2 on the planet that if, like he says, you can just melt it, it will create an atmosphere that traps heat. We have a problem with CO2 on this planet for another reason. People say we need to go find another planet and create a greenhouse effect. And that will trap heat, which will melt more CO2 and more and more, and it will just create this cycle. Do they are what we don't want to do here exactly? Jumpstart it. Let's talk about Mars, man. You got some time to wrap about Mars and why mars is frequently pointed to as an ideal locale for terraforming. Yeah, if you listen to our April episode on Mars, then you know a lot about Mars, but we're going to recap some of it. Mars is a very cold, dry, dusty place now, but it used to be wet and warm and a lot more like Earth than a lot of surrounding planets. So I think if we can just get it back to that state, then we've got a good start. Probably the key to Mars, more than anything else that makes it the, likeliest, candidate for terraforming is that the Martian day is 23.7 hours. I think it's almost exactly like Earth's. Day. Right. Oh, is it getting shorter? No, 24.7 hours. I'm sorry? 24 hours and 37 minutes something. Yes. .7 is 37 minutes, isn't it? Sure. I just wanted to give it a relatable. It's very close to the earth day, and that indicates that it spins. So if Mars is already spinning, it has a huge leg up over the competition in the terraforming contest. Yes. So many years ago, mars was wet, there was volcanic activity, and it was getting bombarded by asteroids. That's right. That did two things, Chuck, two huge things for Mars. One, these asteroids were bringing in gases or compounds that Mars needed to have an atmosphere. Right. It was supplying the planet with it. And then the volcanic activity was taking these compounds and elements that were locked into rock and stuff like that and recycling them back into the atmosphere. Which is sustaining the atmosphere. Right. Yeah. Which was great as long as that was going on. But once those volcanoes stopped and it was lousy with volcanoes, once they stopped doing their recycling gig, it basically absorbed all that stuff and locked it in the planet. Yes. The same thing would happen here, apparently, like if we didn't have volcanic activity. What volcanoes do, one of the things they perform is atmospheric recycling, which is taking this stuff that you normally have in the atmosphere that's been absorbed by the soil or by rock and boiling it, melting the rock and spewing it out as a gas back in the atmosphere. And like you said, when mars stopped doing that, the recycling process stopped and all of a sudden you just had a static atmosphere that slowly was stripped away. That's right. Another part of the problem was mars cooled at the core, and that means it lost its magnetic field, so the upper atmosphere was not being held in place any longer by the magnetosphere. So the solar winds were just stripping it away. And all of a sudden, mars had this very thin atmosphere. They couldn't trap heat any longer, and the whole planet, like you said, got really dry and really cold as we know it today. That's right. And completely uninhabitable. A couple of other things Mars doesn't have going for it is it's not very close. It's like six months away to get there. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I think it's like a six month trip to get to Mars. And that's a long way to go if you want to make regular trips. It's cost prohibitive. Yes. But compared to the moon, which you can get to, like lickety split, that's like a weekender, six months. It's pretty distant. Sure. But the fact again. The fact that Mars has this history of being able to hold an atmosphere and surface water. Two huge factors in a habitable planet. And the fact that there's stuff that's necessary for life. Like CO2 and things like that. Trapped on the planet already in a frozen form. Really just kind of as a bright. Flashing neon sign to people saying. Hey. Man. Come TerraForm me. That's right. We'll talk about some of the steps that you have to take to TerraForm a planet like Mars right after this. Okay, so Mars is a good, nice old house that has good bones. Oh, yeah. It's a great analogy. And we want to restore it to its former moist, wet glory, which sounds really gross. Some people can't even hear the word moist. Yeah, I don't mind it. So Machio Kaku has the right idea. There are polar ice caps on Mars which have a lot of Co, too. And if you jump start those and start to melt them, let's say with solar reflective mirrors, bounce that sun over there that way, that might be a good way to get things started. Right. And it's not going to take too terribly much energy to melt that sequestered CO2 because carbon dioxide, basically what those polar ice caps are, is dry ice. Like Mars has dry ice all over it. That's from the atmosphere that was frozen, right? That's right. And dry ice sublimates at negative 109 degree. Right. So if you can just direct some mirrors at it and just raise it to that temperature, that CO2 is going to go from ice and vaporize into gas and it's going to float up and hang in that thin atmosphere. And like we said, once you have that CO2 in that thin atmosphere, you've just started this chain reaction that's going to create a cycle where the planet gets warmer and warmer and the more and more CO2 sublimates and joins the atmosphere and you have a runaway greenhouse effect. Apparently, at the peak, the calculations of the amount of CO2 on Mars says that you would have a surface temperature of about 158 degree. That's great. Yeah, it's a little hot, but that means water can be sustained. That means that with that atmosphere the air pressure will be increased because right now the air pressure on Mars is pretty low, too. I think it's about 1% of sea level here on Earth. Yes. Which is another challenge. Yeah. Well, maybe once it's that hot, we can introduce hyperthermophiles because I know we'll get to Venus. But that's one of the ideas for Venus. And the idea is you can't just plop humans down immediately. What you're going to have to start with is some basic form of life, some kind of bacteria perhaps, that just starts doing its thing and chowing down on CO2 and making oxygen. And pretty soon, like many thousands of years later, humans might be able to live there. Right. That's almost like the intermediate steps. The first step is to get an atmosphere back on Mars. And to get an atmosphere back on Mars, you take Michio Coco's mirrors and melt the polarized cap. It's nice to say his name sometimes. And you melt the polar ice caps of dry ice and you create this atmosphere and you allow water to melt onto the surface. And then you add something like I think the likeliest, candidate is cyanobacteria, which is incorrectly referred to as blue green algae. Who says that? Who says what? Blue green algae. That's the other term for it. Oh, really? But it's not an algae. It's like a protozoan, I think, or something. It's a prokaryote, not a eukaryote like algae. Got you. Man, I feel nerdy right now. It's the oldest fossil on Earth. I mean, that's kind of where it all began, right? That's what gave Earth its oxygen. So we're saying, hey, why not try the same thing on Mars? You got a bunch of CO2 on Mars, a runaway greenhouse effect. Well, it just so happens that cionobacteria eats CO2, and not only does it eat CO2, it converts that stuff into oxygen as a waste product. So all of a sudden you have something, a living organism on Mars that's converting the atmosphere into something breathable for us humans here on Earth. The problem is you have to have water present for cyanobacteria to live, but you're going to have that water because you've melted the ice caps. You've melted the ice caps to get the CO2 released, which is like negative 109, you need to raise the temperature to at least 32 deg to start melting the water, which requires even more energy, where you can get it that well. You're not going to introduce any sound of bacteria until you have that water. Like, that's the first goal. You can't have life without water. Exactly. But once you do get the water going, which, again, you could use orbital mirrors, but you just have to concentrate them a little more to reflect more energy into a tighter spot. Sure. You got the cyanobacteria chomping away the CO2, it's producing oxygen. Some conservative estimates that I've seen are once you have the oceans or the surface water on Mars, which staggeringly to me, we could do in a couple of hundred years, supposedly. Yeah. That's nuts, man. Think about that. Like, Mars could be turned from a desert into a place with service water in a couple of hundred years. Yeah. That's not that far away. But after that, it would take about 40,000 years for enough oxygen to be introduced in the atmosphere for a human to possibly walk around on Mars. Yeah. This is why it's so, like, far fetched to me. Well, it's science fiction. It is far fetched. But if you take a long view of humanity and say, yeah, I mean, there's no reason, what does it mean in the extinction episode? How long does the average species last? Wasn't it like 10 million years? I don't know. Well, say it is even 1 million years, that means humans will be around, supposedly. I'd be surprised. It well beyond 40,000 years. So we need to be thinking in these terms because there's no way Earth is going to last another 40,000 years for us unless we just radically reengineer ourselves. Yeah. I never thought of myself as a doom and gloomber, but I must be, because I don't know if humans will be around in 40,000 years. I guess we'll see. Yeah. All right. We won't see. But I mean, technically, it should only take an existential catastrophe to get rid of humans. We shouldn't just necessarily die off as a species. It should take something like a physics experiment gone awry, or a nuclear war or biochemical attack, something like that. Yeah. Man will do it. Yes. It would be a self injury, probably. Yeah. Suicide, I guess. Well, not suicide, murder. Murder. Humanity. Yeah. So then there's two other things, and there's a guy named Martin Fogg who wrote a book called Terraforming Engineering Planetary Environments, and he basically laid out what you have to do to get Mars going. And again, Mars is the easiest one to do because it has that planetary rotation already. Yeah, but additionally, there's two other things you have to handle. One is the atmospheric pressure. So apparently, even at best, Mars would be a lot like existing on a mountaintop here on Earth. Like, the air would be thin. You'd be like living on the top of Mount Everest. You'd have to bring your own oxygen. You would. But maybe Tibetans and Ethiopian highlanders would make a great early inhabitants of a TerraForm Mars, because they're already used to that kind of thing. Sure, exactly. The other thing is you need nitrogen. Nitrogen is vital to life and the atmosphere. And there's not much nitrogen on Mars. No. So they're saying, well, then all you have to do is start directing comets. Ammonia based ice deroids, I think is what they call them. Yeah, because I don't know if everyone knows this. Comets are, I think, one of the articles, like the giant snowballs. And if you sent a comet and exploded it before it hit the planet, in theory would send ice everywhere, which would be pretty cool. But you need a lot of comments. You would. It's not just like one comment and you're done. No one and done doesn't apply to there for me. And we have to figure out a steer these comments that way, which apparently is not I mean, using astrophysics, I guess it's not out of the realm of possibility to steer a comet and then hit it with a nuclear device to blow it up so that it explodes into shards and then rains down on Mars. A lot of things could go wrong, though. Yeah. It's fraught with complications, hearing comments, but it is a viable way to introduce nitrogen to Mars, and it should ideally stick around, especially once you have an atmosphere. Yeah. So that's Mars. It's probably the way we're going to go. Keep an eye out, because in a couple of centuries, there'll probably be some seas on Mars. Yes. And I think that guy that you mentioned, too, says, even if we do manage to do this, it's going to be a constant process of reintroducing these elements, these volatile elements, to keep that atmosphere going. I don't know if Michio Kaku was right, if it would ever self sustain. Well, it could if you do that. Standard paradigm of creating a runaway greenhouse effect. Yeah. What Martin Fog is saying is, why would you want to do that? Because then you have a greenhouse effect that you have to deal with. I was wondering yeah. Then you have to rein that in. Exactly. He takes a longer view of just slowly introducing stuff again and again to create this Martian atmosphere over a longer period, but in a more granular way. Right. Like more directed than just creating a runaway greenhouse effect. That makes more sense, a little more focused. Right. Yeah. So we'll talk about some of Mars'rivals for the Terraforming game right after this. So I guess I'm Venus, since I'm always hot, because Venus is a very hot place. It's very unlike Mars, but some people say Venus has a few things going for it. Mainly it's super close. Closest planet to us. We have similar almost well, not identical, but very similar size and mass and a very thick atmosphere, just like Earth does. So there's a lot of similarities there, but you're sort of working in the opposite direction of Mars as you got to cool Venus down. Yeah, a lot. And there's lots of wacky ideas on how to do that, one of which is, what would you do if you were hot? Put up a big shade. Yeah. Like one of those little umbrellas and a tiki drink. Yeah. Just a giant one. Yes. Basically, the idea is to block all sunlight from Venus and cool it. And apparently, in about 100 years, Venus's atmosphere, which is pretty substantial, like you said, and almost all CO2 would freeze and fall to the surface. Well, there's also a lot of sulfuric acid. There is, yeah. But this atmosphere would freeze and create a surface layer just like on Mars, like how the CO2 is locked in the polar ice caps. It'd be doing the same thing with Venus. Then you'd have to go in and deal with this frozen atmosphere, which is kind of a thing, but you could use it to your advantage, Chuck, because the leg up, like I said, that Mars has over Venus is that the Martian day is about 24 hours long, right? Yeah. Well, the Venusian day is about 160 days long, which means it rotates way too slowly for us to be habitable for us. So if you take this atmosphere and you freeze it and you create this frozen hulk of a planet, you can actually make it spin faster if you can blow the atmosphere off into space in a directed manner. Yeah. And actually, intro correction, it's 116 days is the length of their day. Got you. 116 earth days, right? Yeah. There you go. But I think anything over 100, you just call a big problem. Yeah. It's too long. Yeah. So if you can figure out how to blow the atmosphere, the now frozen atmosphere, off of Venus in the direction that it's already rotating, you could conceivably speed up the rotation of Venus. Yeah. One of the other problems with Venus is there's no water. And as everyone knows, like we said, you need water for life. But then we come back to our comet idea of driving these comics and exploding them and creating water that way. And then the hyperthermiles, which I mentioned thermophiles that I mentioned earlier, are these organisms that can thrive in really hot temperatures, and we're talking really hot. I think the surface temperature of Venus is something like 800 degrees Fahrenheit, 872, which is 467 degrees Celsius. Yes. The problem is we haven't found anything on Earth any hypothermophiles that can handle that kind of temperature and pressure yet. But they think they exist. Yeah. Did you mention the pressure of the atmosphere on Venus? It's 200 times the pressure at sea level here on Earth. It's a problem as well. But if you could find a hyperthermafile that could sustain that and eight sulfur, because I think some of them are bi thermal vents underwater. Yeah, we know they eat sulfur. We just haven't found any that can sustain that kind of heat and pressure yet. It's only one way to find out, and that's to launch them toward Venus and see what happens. Basically infect the planet, is what you're talking about. Yeah. So the problem with all of this is to freeze Venus, it's going to require a lot of energy to reflect all the light from the surface. Put the frozen atmosphere out in this space is going to require even more. Basically, it would require the amount of energy that the sun puts out in an entire year. That's crazy. It is crazy. It is crazy now, but have you ever heard of the Kardashian scale? Sure. So then there's type one, type two, and type three civilizations. And a type one civilization uses all of the available energy from the star. So, like, all of this energy that hits the Earth normally from the sun, if you could harness all that, you'd be a type one civilization. We're not even there yet. Type two civilization could harness all of the energy that's created at the star, not just the stuff that makes it to your planet. Right. And if you could harness that, if you're a type two civilization, you could be doing this kind of terraforming, no problem. No sweat, man. But, I mean, if you think about it, if you have a couple of leaps forward in understanding, a couple of geniuses are born and live and advanced human understanding over the course of a few generations, you could conceivably hit something like that in 100 years. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that we could be doing stuff like this 200 years from now. Yeah. Venus. Another idea they have, instead of these huge, giant shade sales, would be to have a big floating, pressurized geodesic sphere city that people basically would use the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is okay above the sulfuric acid, that is, but that would provide shade. And then eventually it would cool the planet down enough. Right. Just by creating a shadow. They'd be simultaneously sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere and breaking it down into carbon and oxygen as well, supposedly. So it'd be doing, like, two things at once. Not a bad idea. Yeah, not at all. Sounds efficient. Little more efficient. And apparently if you pressurized, like, an indoor city or something like that, a floating city, and put it into Venus's atmosphere, it would naturally float in the atmosphere. It would stay put. Yeah. I think that was the same for the solar mirror. Wouldn't have to be attached to anything either off of Mars. Yes. I think it would just be held in place by gravity and what. Solar bubblegum. Bubblegum, yeah. And then, of course, Chuck, there is the Moon. Boo. Seems pretty unlikely. The one thing that the moon has going for it is its proximity, basically. Yeah, basically, it's like the Moon is close, it's small, so you're not going to have to spend a lot of money getting there. And it's because it's small, you're not going to spend a ton of money fixing it up. It's the budget terraforming idea. I guess the Russians are already be living there at this point. I don't know if the moon is very viable, though. Well, you'd have to, again, bombard it with something to get it to spin faster, because right now it's days. 28 Earth days. Right, yeah. They said like 100 comments at least about the size of Haley's comet. Yeah. To get it just spinning faster and perhaps knock it off its axis a bit and give it seasons, which would be nice, like we have here on Earth. My money is on Mars. It's got everything you need except for nitrogen and that you can just deliver however you like. I kind of like the shell idea that you sent along Ken Roy. He's an engineer who basically says, why don't we just encase a small planet in a huge shell made of kevlar and steel and dirt and just create, like, a huge geodesic dome around a planet? I guess the question is, where are you going to get all that dirt? I don't know. Because that's an essential ingredient. If you sit in dirt, then you create an atmosphere between the shell and the dirt. Yeah. Where is all that dirt coming from? Adobe. Adobe sphere. I don't know. I think that's a pretty neat idea. I do, too. It'd be all artificial. You have to have artificial light because you're inside a dome. Right. And apparently. You would have like airlocks and stuff to account for the vacuum. I don't know about that, though. He was saying the atmosphere would be just thin enough for gravity would be just light enough so that humans could fly around. I swear to God. He added that. No, I saw that. He's like just to sweeten the pod a little more. Yeah, to make it that much more cool, you'll be able to fly. So anyway, we'll eventually ruin this planet and need something. Hopefully we'll have had the foresight to started terraforming in time. Yes. They're already working on it. Are they? Well, people are talking about it, proposing ideas, theoretical ideas. I don't think they're like building. They should be the asteroid slinger. They should have started in the 19th century. They're building a comet sling in Texas as we speak. If you want to know more about terraforming, you can type that word in the search bar. Howstephos.com? And since I said search bar, it's time for Chuck a very special edition thanksgiving edition of that's right. We are here to say thanks because it's around Thanksgiving, my friend. It is Thanksgiving. Oh, is it Thanksgiving Day? Yes, of course it is Thursday. Unless you're in Canada, and in which case, happy late belated Thanksgiving. Yes, because they do theirs in like October. Weirdos. I think so, too. So who do we have to thank? Yeah, for those of you who have never heard this segment, we have listeners that send us gifts from time to time and it is always very much appreciated and very nice. So here they are. Yeah, I'm going to start with the second page, if you want to start with the first page. Sure. You go ahead, Chuck. Anthony Savino sent us from his Etsy shop swiss Chisel, a laptop and business card holders made out of old wine barrel staves. Yeah, those are nice. And he makes all kinds of stuff out of these things. So check out his store, which is Swiss Chisel. Yes. And Matt Perky from Evolveworkforcecom. Send us some mugs. Matt's aim is to refine drug testing for states where marijuana is legal so we can get an idea of what your intoxication is immediately after something. Like an accident or whatever. Yes, I was wondering about that. Well, legalizing, like if your job if you have to get drug tested, this guy's on it. Interesting. Evolve workforce.com. Is that where the mug came from? Yes. Okay, I thought that was a hint. New York. New York. The bands. And it's a promo CD, which is terrific. So we always like getting music from our musician friends. So thanks for that. Yes. Mike Dodeck from theclickypostcom C-L-I-C-K-Y-P-O-S-T sent us cube pen holders of his own making. He also sent us some awesome Pilot metropolitan fountain pens and Rodia dot pads. Mike is a pen person and he wanted to share his passion with us. So thank you very much, Mike. All right, we have an anonymous gift. Someone sent us a postcard from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glenco, Georgia, along with the Junior Federal Agent badges for all three of us and have mine in my wallet. You really do, don't you? I do. Huge thank you to Chloe, the candy maker, who is also a ghost tour guide, who sent us tons of amazing candy from Mackinaw Island, Michigan, where I used to go sometimes as a child. So I was very happy to get this. And we want to say good luck and safe travels to you and your sister on your world tour. Chloe, be safe. Big thanks to Annie from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Sent us a MegaCARE package for real of Australian treats. Tim Tams. I think you love those things, right? Man, I went crazy for this. And Carmelo kids were pretty good as well. Violet crumbles picnic Boost hero. There was some weird stuff in there, but they were all good, man. Ozzy, I got some crazy candies thanks to Andrew Parr for an entire puzzle dedicated to Stuff you should know in the World of Puzzles, winter 2014 issue. It was awesome. Oh, boy. This is one of my favorites. Rob HenryAN from send us those awesome stuff you should know bookends made from industrial fasteners and they are super cool. They're really heavy and they're awesome. And you can get information at mooremetalwelding@gmail.com or moreMetal etsy.com. It's, like, quality stuff. Yeah, it is. Kevinpaloquin from Kevinpoloquin.com. That's Kevinpeloquin and Raddad TS. I think those are both of his sites. He gave us an amazing illustration of Steve Zizu from The Life of Aquatic Looking Pensively toward the horizon, which I have up in my cubicle. Oh, I wonder where that was from. That's from Kevin, Paulo, Quinn, Lauren and Megan. From Chopsticks for salamanders. They've got a pretty cool cause. They sent a stainless steel reusable chopsticks. And this is a big deal because chopsticks are honestly kind of a problem. They sell these to help prevent destruction of forests from those little cheapy wooden ones. And they're the same forests where they get the wood for these things where salamanders live. And so every year, 60 billion pairs of chopsticks are thrown away, and a lot of salamanders are having their forests and habitats destroyed because of your sushi addictions. Which I have as well. Yes. So get some of these. You can learn more@chopsticksforsalamanders.org. Nice. We got a postcard it's been a while since we did this. We got a postcard from announcing the birth of one of our newer fans, clyde Avery Thomas, who was born at 150 08:00 A.m. On January 16, 2014 in Traverse City, Michigan. I thought you said it's, like, six by now. He probably is, but he most likely came out a little frostbitten because it's cold up there. But congratulations to Andrew and Janelle Thomas on the birth of your son. Yeah. And happy first birthday pretty soon. Pretty soon. Mike and Cassidy Lord from Athens, Georgia, sent us a postcard from Cambodia while in Borneo. I know. Wrapped your mind around that. Interesting. Sarah Austin gave us a very chic and rugged handmade leather card holder wallets, which are pretty awesome. Very nice. Rachel Crandall for the line drawing of stuff you should know, written in galaxy and in it's the language, apparently that Time Lords and Doctor Who of the Time Lords. Right. So I'm not a Doctor Who fan, but I appreciated the gift. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Julie from Austin, Texas sent us a postcard from the Shed Aquarium in beautiful Chicago, Illinois. Thank you, Julie. Oh, boy. Louis Olsen. This is my favorite gift I've gotten. Very simple but awesome. The mini quilts. Yeah. It's basically a little tiny not a tiny, it's a small place mat that you use in place of a coaster. Right. It's mud rugs, bigger than a coaster, smaller than a placement. Yeah. A little rectangular thing. And I often at dinner we'll have like maybe a beer, maybe a glass of water, maybe a cup of coffee, shot of whiskey. And I put everything down on my little mug rug and if anything spills, it soaks it up. It's better than a coaster and it doesn't stick like a coaster. It's going to revolutionize the coaster industry. I love them. So thank you, Lois Olsen, for that. Thank you to Brett Arnold, who won our horror fiction contest. If you'll remember, he sent us a copy of his book Avalon, and you can get Avalon on Amazon.com. And then lastly, for this one, we want to thank Joe and Linda Hecht for sending us tons of stuff, including customized stuff you should know, mugs with hints to podcast, topics that they'd like to hear stuff about. They put them on a mug and have them made and send them to us. Yeah, cool mugs. They send us copy of the DVD american Amazon. They give us $10 to watch it. They're the best. They are very great people. So thank you to everybody. And we still have more people to thank left eventually. Yeah, this is part one, right? But we are grateful for each and every one of you and all of your listeners out there. Whether you send us stuff or not, we're thankful to all of you and we hope you're having a wonderful holiday no matter where you are in the world. Agreed. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, though. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where True crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app a day." | |
How Autopsies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-autopsies-work | In the 400th episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck take a trip through the morgue and look over the shoulders of the often controversial coroners and medical examiners that open cadavers to determine how someone died. | In the 400th episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck take a trip through the morgue and look over the shoulders of the often controversial coroners and medical examiners that open cadavers to determine how someone died. | Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:42:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=16, tm_min=42, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=47, tm_isdst=0) | 47408914 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure. But all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. 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It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. I would say, hey, welcome to the podcast, but I'm not going to yet because this is an add on to what you're about to hear. Right, Chuck? Let's be quiet because we don't want our normal cells to hear us. Oh, got you. I wonder why you were talking about that. Do you understand now? Yes, Chuck. Do you know what this is? Do you know why we're doing this? I do. What is it? It is pretty freaking exciting. What? Josh, we are about to release in just a few seconds show number 40. Zero. There should be some sort of paint there. I hope there was this now. I think so. Our 400 episode of Stuff You Should Know. That's a big deal. Dude. I can't even like when people ask the requisite a, what's your favorite show? It just melts my brain. Now I can't even think of it. I know. I used to have stock answers and now there's so many I look through and I don't even remember some of them. Like what we did that we talked about that I'm with you. Crazy. Well, let's hope we can do another four shows. Exactly. Here's 200 more. Congratulations, buddy. Right back. And Jerry. Thank you. You've been here since day one. Aside from a few guest episodes where you're lazy Jerry, congratulations to you. Pretty much been Jerry the whole time. Yeah. What would it be without the three of us? It would be crude. Well, thank you, dear listener, for listening to all 490 some of you out there have because we would not be around if you never listened in the first place. We would have done four shows. Yeah. Those of you who've listened to one or two or just discovered us or whatever, this is your first one. Welcome to the Dollhouse. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W, chuck Bryant. And that makes the stuff You Should Know dead and rotting. I just made you shudder before we pressed record. I know. It was an actual no. I thought you did that. Well, yeah, but I was doing it in response to your face. You made that face, but you didn't make that noise. Were you doing it on my behalf? Exactly. Oh, thank you so much. I feel so cared for. So, Tuckers yes. This is a little kind of a podcast. This has got to complete our suite on death. You would think so, but it doesn't. No. We still have how dying works left. We still have what it's like to be dead. We got a lot of stuff we haven't even touched, like what happens to the nails after that. It's true. So we're getting closer, though. We're creating a larger body of work. Yes. And this is going to be a big one you predicted, I think. I agree with you. It's just long. It's detailed, too. Yes. It was based in part on an interview with a Fulton County deputy medical examiner who knows what he's talking about. Hey, if you're in Fulton County, you're going to be investigating a lot of foul play. Yeah. Atlanta and Detroit used to go back and forth for the murder capital of the US. They used to shoot out for more. Exactly. And then bullets would fall somewhere in the middle. Yeah. DC. Is up there, too, I think. Yeah, DC. Is up there. I think Atlanta's out of the running the last several years. Oh, that's sad. I know. We lost its place. We just don't murder like we used to. No, but I mean, the numbers all pale in comparison to, like, Juarez. Sure. That's a big number. How about 15 times that? Yes. So, Chuck, have you ever seen an autopsy? Like a real deal film of one? No. I saw that alien Autopsy, but that was quite fake. Have you not seen Faces of Death, the original? No, I never saw that. There's an autopsy in there, and I can't remember if we talked about it during the exploitation films episode, but part of Faces of Death was real and some was staged and fake. Right. But the autopsy is definitely real. Wow. And you can tell after reading this, it's like oh, yeah. They do pull the skin flat from the top of the scalp down over the face and under the chest. I felt really bad for the human face reading this. It's kind of pliable. Yeah, well and it's always got some flap of skin folded over it. Yeah. We don't want to look at that. So let's just fold the chest over it. Exactly. Or the what is this? What's that called? The scalp. Scalp, yes. The skulls under the scalp. No, I knew that. Why do people do autopsies, Chuck? It's not just so ghouls can be paid to do their thing. No, there's actual reasons for an autopsy, which, by the way, it doesn't say it's in the article, but autopsy is Greek, based on the Greek autopsia, which means to see for one's own eyes. Yeah. So they want to see for oneself how somebody died. Yes. The manner of death and time of death, which we'll get into. Yeah. But I think there are five certain types of death. 12345. Six that they require an autopsy if you die by injury, delayed complication of injury, poisoning, infectious complications, foul play, or if you die with no attending physicians. So those are the reasons that they were requesting on top of the right. And if the cops come out or somebody, the funeral home comes out and says, this guy may have been poisoned or he's injured and he died, we need to call the coroner, the medical examiner, they're going to perform an autopsy. And there's a couple of types of autopsies. There are two, really, and the one where the cops are involved, where the medical examination is carried out on behalf of law enforcement, that's a medical examination of forensic autopsy, aka the sexiest of all autopsies, because that's what you're going to see in movies and on TV quite often. Right. Unless it's like contagion or something. Right, exactly. So in a movie like Contagion, any autopsy you performed is going to be a clinical autopsy, which is usually performed by doctors who are trying to figure out what the heck happened, what went wrong in the treatment, how a disease took its course. And they're basically documenting maybe an interesting case through autopsy for the medical literature and for well, in the case of a contagion, even though I haven't seen it, for the good of humanity, the immediate good of humanity. There's some fast spreading disease or something, or there's faulty cribs. Autopsies were instrumental in finding, getting to the bottom of product recalls, like faulty cribs that are killing kids. I didn't think about that. Yeah, that's one of the benefits of autopsies. Yeah. Makes total sense. So those are the two kinds of autopsies you get, forensic and clinical. And basically, we're going to be talking mainly about law enforcement autopsy. So when we say autopsy, for the rest of the podcast, we're pretty much talking about a forensic autopsy, one that's trying to figure out if somebody died naturally. Accidentally, or someone's hand. Yeah. Foul play at their own hand, suicide or undetermined. Those are the five legally defined manners of death. I didn't see very sleepy on here. I thought, those are six that would be naturally where they go to cut into you and you're like, oh, you wake up and they're like, oh, he's not dead. Right. Well, there's no manner of death, then. Yes, that's true. That's going to be done by a forensic pathologist most often, or a medical examiner or a coroner. And we'll get into that toward the end. Right. Yeah. About the difference. Yeah. Well, ideally, it's going to be carried out by a forensic pathologist, which is somebody who's trained to perform autopsies looking for a mode of death. Right. Quite often a doctor. But not always. Almost always, yeah. To be a forensic pathologist, you have to be a doctor. Oh, really? You should be there. Yeah. All right. Yeah. To be a medical examiner, you have to be a doctor. You don't have to be a forensic pathologist to be a medical examiner. Well, and you ideally should be accredited, but that's not always the case either. So let's say you're a forensic pathologist or coroner. You're going to try to assign one of these manners of death to a dead person. Yeah. Like Quincy. Yeah, exactly. And what you're going to do is you're going to take not just the findings from your autopsy, but you're going to put them in a context with, say, a police report or something. Right. Yeah. But you're not cops. TV, as usual, overstates it as far as how involved the medical examiner is, like, as far as being on the scene and collecting DNA and all that stuff, it's not usually the case. Mr what's his name doctor Kaisel or Keesel. Let's go with the k. Yeah. So you take all this stuff, for example, Robert Valdez, who wrote this article. There's head trauma on a dead man or a dead woman. Sure doesn't quite make sense. Is it a homicide? Is probably not a suicide, but is it accidental? We know it's definitely injury, right? Yes. Which is why somebody called the coroner, the medical examiner in the first place. But exactly. Whether it was at someone else's hand or accidental is still up for debate. Well, you take that head trauma, those head wounds, and you put them together with the police report that said that there was an iced over ladder laying beside the dead body when it was found. It was probably an accident. Right. The coroner of the medical examiner is going to say, Scott's, it was probably just slipping off the ladder. Yeah. Like the gutters are half cleaned out. Right. He has, like, a big hunk of leaves in his hand. Right. And he didn't write someone's name in blood on the sidewalk beside him. It was Josh. Exactly. And then if you have that old yarn about a gunshot wound to the head, is it a homicide? Well, I don't know. Is there burn pattern really close by? Is there gunshot residue on the hand, the dominant hand of the victim? That's ultra. It's probably a suicide. Yeah. And as we'll point out here in a minute, one of the steps, which I didn't even realize this, you always see them zipping them up in the body bag. But they actually bagged the hands yeah. In a suspected homicide. Yeah. Because you bagged the hands because you want to just make sure that you can check under the fingernails to make sure that there's not, like, skin cells from the guy who attacked you under your fingernails. People get real grabby when they're being murdered. I know. So grabby. Apparently. I didn't realize this, but Dr. Kezel we went with Keesel, right? Yeah. He pointed out that he gave an example of how it's not really that clear cut right. With the gunshot wound. Yeah, it was interesting. So say I shot you in the head. That would be very sad. 30 years ago. And you survived, but you developed a seizure disorder, so you're fine, but you have seizures. Okay. 30 years later today, you keel over dead from your seizure disorder. Right. That death would be ruled a homicide because you developed the seizure disorder as a result of a gunshot wound, which is an unnatural event that I inflicted on you. So even though Emily can't come after me and be like, I'm going to sue you, she could be like, I'm going to kill you. She couldn't sue me because apparently the courts don't allow that after 30 years of survival. Sure. But the coroner or the medical examiner would rule it a homicide. Yeah. Like he points out, it's not their call to say, like, you got to go after and prosecute this dude, or Emily can sue you, or she can bring you flowers and candy. They're just saying this is how it died, how it went. Exactly. Supposedly, in an ideal vacuum world, we should say that's. Right. So you were talking about the difference between medical examiners and corners. You want to give up the yeah. From what I understand, and especially by reading that article that you sent, coroners are sort of more part time, although they can do it full time, but a lot of times it's in these underfunded counties, in counties where they don't have a lot of crime, there will be a coroner, because there's only what did that article say? Like four to 500 professional medical examiners, forensic pathologists in the United States? Yeah. That's crazy. There's plenty of medical examiners, but they're not forensic pathologists, which in this case is, like, the most highly qualified person in that field. Right. So that's the main difference. It all depends on the county where you live. There's different laws as far as what they require, but if you're not in a big city, you may not have the resources or the equipment, or you may be so far out of town that it's hard to get people there. So you might just have a coroner driving up. That is also your contractor for your house. Yes. The case, where was that? Was that in Louisiana or Texas? It was in Washington. Washington? Yeah. There's 1600 counties in the US. And there's, like 3400 counties total and 1600 of them use the coroner system. Right. And medical examiners and appointed physician. County coroner is an elected official who in most cases just has to have a high school degree to be qualified for the position. Sometimes it's the sheriff. So in that one county, it was the local county prosecutor is also the coroner. Yeah. You're not supposed to do that because you want an impartial person ruling on the manner of death, especially, say, if it's a police death, the police killed somebody, you don't want the sheriff judging whether or not his deputies were to blame. It's like suicide to me. Exactly. Well, that was a pretty good example in New Orleans. The coroner there, he's been coroner for like 35 years. Oh, really? He's very, very cozy with law enforcement, and he's been accused of it many times. And there was a guy who stole one cop's gun and shot another cop to death and started to get away and was finally caught. And when he was caught and brought in, finally, he died, supposedly after being given Iodine for X rays. But really he died because he was beaten to death. He had like, a bruised testicle and all these cracked ribs. And the corner still to this day refuses to rule it a homicide. It's like a movie plot. Yeah. All of a sudden Richard Gear gets called in to investigate and things get sexy. Exactly. Yeah. Because of course, the cop is Angelina Jolie. Is that how it goes down? Yeah, all \u00a380 of her. She's one tough cop. So there are problems with the coroner thing. And you read that article, too, from PBS Frontline. That was awesome, by the way. People should read that. Yeah, I can't remember what it was called. I got it right here. Okay, good. It is called the real CSI. How America's Patchwork system of death investigations puts the living at risk. It's a very eye opening article where basically they say that the members of this field quite literally bury their mistakes. There's some really bad people who are really bad at their jobs out there doing it. But the problem is, if you have a coroner who doesn't know what he's looking at and rule something a homicide, then there's somebody who's going to be put on trial eventually. Well, exactly. Right or wrong, if you have medical examiners who don't know what they're doing or do a terrible job. One guy in Tennessee was accused of his dog eating some human remains because it was allowed to roam free in the examination room. Wow. You can't do that. Another guy supposedly, allegedly was drunk while he was doing like, thousands of these things. Wow. That's probably the only way he could get through it, because he wasn't a real forensic pathologist. Right. But there's this huge battle going on between how qualified you have to be. Is the medical establishment trying to take over this lucrative field? Well, it's not so lucrative, because that's one reason it said in the article that there's a shortage is because they get paid, on average, less than a doctor would. So if you're going to go through medical school, plus I think an extra year of training for this, you get paid less money. And the one guy pointed out, it's like, you really do this because of love for your fellow man. Yes. That was the guy who refused to rule the homicide. Yeah. I don't know what that means then. But also, I'll bet their malpractice insurance is, like, next to nothing compared to regular physician. Yeah. Well, because you're using well, we'll get to that. So the coroner also is responsible for identifying a body, notifying the next of candy that's Billy collecting and returning any personal belongings that's found on the body, which I'm sure in rural counties that there's probably been more than one wallet go missing during that process. Maybe not calling out coroner never trusted farmers, have you? No. And then signing the death certificate. Right. And this kind of goes along with the origin of coroner, which is derived from the old English crowner. Yeah. I think Richard Lionheart was when it first really came into effect, because I guess he wanted the money of dead people. So he would send out his crowner to gather it up. Right. He's like a Democrat, and they would say, well, he died of a wound from a sword. And then take his gold trinkets. Yes. And return it to Richard. Yeah, exactly. And then apparently, over time, they were like, well, while you're out there, why don't you just start taking vital records and let's make you like, an official guy? And that's how the crowner became the coroner. That's right. And Dr. Diesel even knew that, Dr. Keesel, because he's the one in the article that even pointed that out. And I thought, well, that's good. He knows about the history of his profession. He seemed like a pretty sharp guy. I imagine so, Chuck, we've been beating around the bush quite long enough. Do you feel like it's time for people to put down their lunches and us to go through the autopsy procedure? Yes. Step by step. Yes. I think that's a great idea. Step one, as I have it, is a body bag or an evidence sheet. Got to use a new brand new body bag and a brand new evidence sheet. Don't want to reuse those. No, I didn't think that was worth pointing out, but I didn't either. Bring myself the highlighter. I know. He was thorough, though. So you definitely want to use new ones because you don't want, obviously, any contamination. Right. The body is moved by a dinner make, about 37 grand a year. I'll look that up. Is that right? On average attendance, if you're a mortgage indeed. Or a dean of and that is adiener. And they will take the body in the bag or sheet to the examination suite, and it stays in the bag for a little while at first, at least. Isn't that right? I didn't run across that. Yeah. Because you can unseal the bag, but you have to take note of the clothing. Oh, yeah, sorry. They just put the body in a good day or two. Well, they do put it in the fridge if there is some delay, like if the bodies are stacked up or something. Or I would imagine to let rigor stop. Sure. Right. To cease rigor. Exactly. Very good, Chuck. But you leave it in the bag at first. You want to take note of the clothing after unzipping it. And the position of the clothing is very important, because if the guy had, let's say, his turtleneck pulled up over his nose, he might have died by some stinky chemical in the air. You paint a heck of a picture, I imagine the Frenchman with a little mustache. You want to begin with? This is the external examination is obviously what comes first. You don't want to go cutting into the body. You want to look at hair samples, fingernails, gunshot residue, fibers, paint chips, anything on the body hairs that is worth noting. Right. And the bag itself or the evidence sheet is kept as evidence as well, because stuff might have stuck to it. Sure. That's gross. Yeah, it is kind of gross, but it happens. You also want to keep the body in the bag to X ray as well. Yeah. X ray or Cat scan. The body in the bag. I didn't think about that. No, but it's true. I mean, things get lost in the bag. You want to make sure they're there. True. You won't be able to see through the human being, find maybe a bullet or something that's missing. It's in the bag. It says in here sometimes they'll use UV radiation, special technique to basically make secretions glow in the dark or become fluorescent. Like, hey, this guy's got some sort of spoon on his turtleneck as well, and it's glowing now. And I see that. Right. Well, you'd have to use the correct reagent to make sputum glow under a blacklight, but I'm sure it's out there. You can get Spencer gifts. So after you've made this initial external examination, it's time to get the body nude out of the body bag. That's right. You want to weigh it, yet you don't clean the body up to no, not yet. It's very important. You got to leave it as is. So you make your first examination with the body fully closed, make a second examination with the body undressed but still bloody. Right. And then after that, you clean the body up and make a third external examination. Well, the dinner will clean the body up while you go have coffee, insert the Internet like Rusty Eugene. Exactly. Clean that body up. And then finally, after that, the cleaned, naked body is placed on the autopsy table. Yes. Everybody has seen one of these. It's a big stainless steel table with raised sides, and it's slanted toward the middle with why would it be slanted and stuff? Well, there's a lot of blood and fluid that come out when you cut into a body. They probably figured that out after prototype one that was dead level and stuff oozed out everywhere. Convex exactly. To allow for drainage. So, yeah, you have the body prepared. Also. I forgot. I'm sorry. You want to know the characteristics of the body? Race, height, tricks, scars, tattoos, all that kind of stuff. Color, age, and all the time they're looking for things like wounds, modes of injury, anything that could kind of give them an idea of what this person died from. Yeah. And then the body is on the examination table. Check. And it's time for while it's time for the internal exam. Well, yeah, it's time for something called the body block, which I tried to get a picture of this, but I could not find one. I imagine it's just a I guarantee it's a yoga block. Do you think? I'm sure. Maybe wider, but it's the exact same thing. So they put this body block under the back. At first, the body's face up, and that will protrude the chest and have the arms kind of fall down. So your chest is sticking out, which makes it much easier to get into. Yeah. Your chest is raised up. Yes. Okay. So, Doctor Bryant, would you like to make the first decision? Sure, Josh. I'm going to take that scalpel or that kitchen knife, but probably a scalpel initially, although they use all sorts of stuff. We'll find out. And I will make a large and deep Y shaped incision from shoulder to shoulder, meet at the breastbone and then down to the pubic bone. So you got a big Y on your chest. You fold that front flap up over the face, and I guess the other one just fold over to the side. Well, I mean, it's not that easy. You have to kind of pull it back and dissect with the scalpel, the connective tissue as you pull back. But then yes, that V shaped chest flap goes back over the face. Yes. And then what the next step? Right now you've got the ribcage and neck muscles all exposed. Also, probably you've pulled open the stomach flaps, too. Yeah, I figured those are just off to the side. Yeah, where else are they going to go? The organs are exposed at this point. You're going to make a series of cuts. You are going to detach. Your goal here is to get the organs out in a big unit. Wait, you didn't take the ribcage off yet. Oh, I didn't. I'm sorry. You're going to cut the ribcage off using everything from pruning shears that you would use in your backyard. Special ribcage cutters. Yeah. What are those called? Rib cutters. Rib cutters. Of course they are. Yeah. Okay. Now the ribs gone. Your organs are exposed. You're going to make cuts that detach the larynx, esophagus arteries and ligaments. Then you're going to detach it from the spinal cord. Then you're going to detach everything from the bladder and the rectum. Right. And then after that, your whole organ set is able to be lifted out as one whole unit. Yeah. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So now it's kind of time to get busy on the origins. You want to take slices of them. Want to weigh them first, though. Oh, yeah. You want to weigh you want to know their appearance, character, color. Yeah, they're funny. And then you're going to take some slices thin enough to be viewed under a microscope, right? Yeah. Because that's part of this, too. It's not all fun and games. Like you have to look into the microscopes and stuff like that. Sure. And then also the star probably is the stomach. You're going to cut the stomach open and examine the gastric contents because that will tell you something about the time of death, as we'll see, or cause of death, maybe. Possibly there's a small watch in your stomach, right. Maybe you swallowed it and choked or something like that. Yeah. You never know, right. And also they're probably going to examine the heart for cardiac bands. They're going to bisect major arteries to see if there's any kind of blockage. Maybe it was a heart attack. Maybe there's some sort of poison. Who knows? They're basically just going to go through all of your internal organs one by one. So you've got the chest cavity cut open, but the heads just sitting there like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do now? Well, he's got a flap of face over the skin. A flap of skin over the face. What did I say? A flap of face over the skin. You're all turned around. I am. So the body would say, hey, what's up with my brain? And then the examiner will say, Hold tight, I'm getting right to that, sir. Right. And then you're going to use that scalpel to make incisions from behind one ear across the forehead to the other ear all the way around. Like a cantaloupe, let's say, or let's say grapefruit. That's what you typically split into. Okay. And you divide that cut as well. So you have two separate flaps, one going over the face again. Yeah. And then fold that rear flap back over the neck. And then you've got an exposed skull. Right. And they use a special kind of saw called the striker saw, which is capable of cutting through the skull but doesn't pierce the brain. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Is that what they use when they take casts off? Probably, because isn't that the same deal will cut through your cast but not through your skin? I would imagine. It looks like. This. Have you ever had a cast? I haven't, but yeah, I bet you that may not be the exact same thing, though. Well, at any rate, they use that and then they use a clawed hammer. Not the kind that you think it's a hammer. Or at the bottom of the handle, there's a claw. They use that to pry the cap of the skull off. Right. Once you get the skull cap off, if you look inside of it, you're going to see that the dura, which connects the brain to the skull, and by the way, which shrinks when you have a hangover yeah. Is stuck to the inside of the skull cap. Right. So if it shrunken, they could determine if he was hungover when he died. They could. They'll also cut away the tentorium, which connects the cerebellum and occipital lobes. Right. Yes. And all of a sudden, voila, you have an exposed brain where once you detach it from the spinal cord, you are absolutely ready for it to just be lifted right out of the skull. And again, this whole time, you're taking notes on your little voice recorder or you're telling Rusty the dinner to write that down. Right. And so it's not just taking all this stuff out, Willynilly. You're observing, noting anything you see. Yeah. And then what do you do? You're done. It's been 4 hours. You did a really detailed examination inside and out. And you have this body that's just all kinds of messed up now. But the family is like, we've got a funeral tomorrow. We can't do this. Sure. We shouldn't even be here seeing this. Put Uncle Ted back together and the coroner or the medical examiner will say, just chill out. We have procedures for this. So the internal organs either go back into the chest cavity or the abdomen. Yeah. Why would they do that? Religious purposes. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. Think about that. Or more typically, they're incinerated. Or in the case of really horrible medical examiners, they're fed to their dogs. Right? Yeah. Or the bodily fluids are pumped back into the body because their draining system is clogged up in Massachusetts state medical examiner's office. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it is. The chest flaps are closed and sewn back together. The skull caps place back on and then held in place by sewing the scalp back. And any decent coroner should make their incisions along the hairline, or at least well enough, precise enough that it should be discreet once sewn back together. Yeah. And you're doing this with a haggadorn needle, which is apparently when you're sewing human skin, you can't just use an ordinary sewing needle and you got to go jame Gum style and get this beefy skin needle. What? Nice. This is great. All over the place. Thank you. So, like I said, it takes 4 hours by Dr. Keithel's estimate. I love that he said that includes paperwork. Yeah. Well, I mean, like the initial examination and writing it up and all that. He said for a homicide it could take four to 6 hours. And what's behind, I guess probably the lengthier ones are examining the wounds because you can't just say, well, here are the bullet holes. So this guy died from being shot. What do you want from me? Shut up. I'm a coroner. Today you have to trace the path of each bullet hole and show where it went from entrance to Exeter, from entrance to where it stopped. Yes. And in the case of any sort of police action, and especially if there's any sort of a shootout with like three or four guys and like ten cops and people end up dead all over the place, it's a bad day for a corner. It's a bad day for a corner because you got to determine he said Keysell said that. What they want to know very specifically, especially in the case of police shootings, is this bullet and this guy's shoulder, whose gun did it come from? And this other bullet in his chest, whose bullet did that come from? And see that guy, he's got five different kinds of bullets from these twelve cops and we need to know where each of them came from. It gets really convoluted. Right. And same with blunt force trauma. He has to determine not just like, well, something really heavy killed this person. Has to be this thing is probably what killed this person. Right. Because say that the police find a bloody hammer at the scene, but the medical examiner says it was a hockey stick likely that killed this person. That's not going to help in the prosecution or vice versa. You don't want somebody who has their prints on a hammer that the cops are trying to use against them to be used wrongly when it was actually that hockey stick that killed that person. True. That poor person. And while you can get some schooling for this stuff, I think it's a year extra. A lot of it is just experience seeing the stuff, like, hey, I've seen that before. That's definitely a hockey stick. Yeah. You can go from Rusty the Deener to Rusty the medical examiner well, Rusty the coroner, sure. Or Rusty the medical examiner without having to go to med school like the head of the Washington DC Me's office is not a physician. That's crazy. He's not a forensic pathologist. I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like I'm disrespecting coroners. I'm sure a lot of them do great work. So I hope it doesn't sound like we're slagging corners. It's a whole hornet's nest, man. It is. It's a big thing going on right now. So if the cops or the police department is doing some kind of investigation, you can get a private autopsy if Uncle Ted dies seemingly naturally. But we just want to know what killed him. Was it his artery blockage or was it his awful liver because he was a raging alcoholic. Like, we just want to know you can hire it out. And who wrote this? Was it The Grabster? No. Robert Valdez. Valdez says 1500 to 3200. I saw 35 and up. Yeah, me too. So it's been a little change on that. You are. And it's especially frustrating if you're doing a secondary, I bet, basically getting a second opinion via autopsy because you don't think the first one worked. How do you do that? Like, everything's already been prodded and yeah, it's going to be incomplete, but apparently there's this guy in New Orleans under the main coroner whose work is routinely followed up by second autopsies. Really? And apparently his are easier because the secondary medical examiners say he just like half autopsies. Some people surprising cage and corner, right? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, Josh, we mentioned a couple of tools, like the Hagadorn needle and the bonesaw. They use something called interatome. I looked these up. Their scissors used to open intestines. One side of the scissor is longer than the other and it has a little hook type thing on that end. Yeah, it looked baffling to me, but apparently that's what you need. Okay. You talked about the hammer with the hook and the rib cutter scalpel. Obviously, regular old scissors got to have a skull chisel if you want to pry that skull open. Or that hammer with the hook. Hammer with the hook force to pick up the heavier organs and keys. And goes on to elaborate a little bit and say, you know what? You put the words medical examiner knife in front of it and you're going to be paying triple, buddy. Here's a little hit from your Uncle Keasel. You go to the hardware store and you get yourself a hexaw or some pruning shears. Pruning shears. Or you go to the restaurant supply store and get a nice cheap chef's knife and you're good to go. Yeah. Because again, they don't really have to worry about the person coming out of the procedure on the other end alive still is the big challenge for physicians. And not to say they do a hack job, but they don't have to worry about the precision, obviously, of a surgeon. Right. So there's a lot of guessing involved in this. Like, if you think about it, the ladder with ice next to the frozen body with head trauma. It's a suggestion that that's how that guy died. Or the melted puddle with the old riddle. Yeah, that's a great one. These are all guesses, ultimately, as Dr. Kezel puts it, like you have to have somebody videotaped dying next to an atomic clock to ever establish a certain time of death. And even as our understanding of death as a process rather than as a moment increases, even that wouldn't necessarily give you anything. So basically they're trying to make an educated guess at the manner of death, but also the time of death is a big one. And we mentioned gastric contents, stomach contents. Why would those be important? Well, because if there's a cheeseburger that still looks like a cheeseburger, then that means you died within the amount of time it takes for that cheeseburger to become kym. Kyme. Nice. It's still bolus. But let's say that you found also in that person's apartment receipt from McDonald's that had the Timestamp on there. Put that together, you're going to get an even clearer time of death. And they work under something called the Time of Death Certainty Principle, which is the laughing stock of principles. Go ahead. Well, it's about as simple as it gets. If you know for sure when the person was last known to be alive, say he was in the bar at 945 and he left. I saw him, he loaded. And then you know for sure when he was found dead. And I found him at 1030. Frozen. Well, maybe not frozen yet, but in the back alley. He's dead as a stump. Then you know for sure that he died sometime between 945 and 1030. Yes. And then they try to narrow it down from there. That's the time of death. Certainty. Principle. It really makes sense. Yeah. And we've talked before about rigor mortise. We made an excellent podcast on rigor mortis. We've talked about lividity from the Body Farm podcast. The vitrious humor corny is getting cloudy. That happens after death. And then again the gastric contents. Bot, flies, all that stuff. Full bladder, bottle flies. Not bot flies. Full bladder. I never really thought about that. That makes sense. So, yeah, if you have, like, a full bladder of urine or a lot of poop near your rectum ready to come out, then I don't know what that tells you besides stand back. They didn't be your poop before they died. Right. But I'm sure it could help in an investigation. And then also they'll use some kind of non scientific ones, like if somebody's possibly been dead for a few days, what day is their TV Guide sitting next to them open to you? That makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. Is it on NBC? Did they have 30 Rock highlighted in their TV Guide? Quite possibly. They died laughing. So what have we got? Well, we should mention that a lot of those variables that happen to the body, they can change according to how hot or cold it is and what other chemicals you might have had in your bloodstream. So it's not super formaldehyde that's going to delay the onset of these things? It will. You got anything else? Well, I guess we could follow up a little bit more on that article. Apparently just the system in the United States is sort of a big mess right now as a whole. And you told a couple of the stories, but Tim Brown, a construction manager in Marlborough County, South Carolina, it's a $14,000 part time job to be the county coroner. Right. And I'm sure he does a fine job and hopefully there's not a lot of malfeasance going on there where he's not investigating, like, these big homicides. Right. Well, the problem is, if he is investigating a homicide, the state will generally provide a medical examiner to carry out an autopsy. They're not going to be like, well, you're the coroner. Sorry, here's a scalpel. They'll say you can send this body to the state medical examiner and they'll give you an idea of what you're looking at. But it's also up to the coroner to decide whether or not an autopsy should be performed. Oh, it is? Yeah. Okay. The cops can't call for it. I'm sure other people can, but I think ultimately it's the coroner who is able to decide a rule on that. Right. And we did mentioned that not all doctors have even passed the test. I think NPR found that 105 throughout the country have not passed the exam, and some aren't going to retake it. They're just like, well, I failed it. I'm still totally employed. It's affecting my career. Bagel. Bagel. Yeah. Another part of the problem also is there's like four to 500 officially qualified medical examiners who are forensic pathologists, and it's about half of what's needed by estimates for the US. Right. So they're underfunded, overworked, overworked. The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends no more than 250 autopsies per medical examiner per year. And I mean, that's easily exceeded by a lot of people these days. In Oklahoma stopped performing autopsies on anybody over 40 and anyone suspected of it being a suicide. Massachusetts seemed like a big mess. I think they said they had lost five bodies. They incinerated one before the autopsy even took place. Yeah. Was that the state where they got the two people mixed up? No, that was a death in a fire. That was a different one. Got you. And then there was one case where they pulled a body out of a lake and well, he drowned and they did not. Bullet wounds in his neck. Yeah. In suburban Detroit. Yeah. Sounds like a gross point in there. I don't know. I'm just guessing. So yeah, I got nothing else. I don't either. I think it's a noble profession to get into if you got the stomach for it. Yeah. And you don't like your patience talking smack back to you. You don't like that to spend a lot of magazine subscriptions, don't have to worry about your bedside manner. What else? Your dog is free to come in and out, apparently. I guess so. That's just so crazy right now. This one was surprising to me. Like, remember when we did the bail system? Yeah, that was surprising. It just seems like this innocuous normal thing, and then all of a sudden you start looking into it. You're like, whoa, there's a lot of problems with this system. So there you go. Great. If you want to know more about autopsies, including a lot of photos of dead bodies with sheets draped over them. You can find that by typing autopsies, A-U-T-O-P-S-I-E-S in the search bar athouseafworks.com which means it's time for listener mail. Hold on, Josh. Before listening to mail, we want to announce our south by Southwest goings on this year. We will be broadcasting this year live from 330 to 430 on Sunday, March 11, and don't know the location yet. I'm hoping it's the Driscoll Hotel again. Yeah, that was nice, personally. And if you're a badge holder, please come out and see his podcast live. It will be a lot of fun. And if you're not in town and you can't make it, we will release the live podcast. So you'll get to join in the fun posting. Yeah, like if you never leave the state of Kansas. Monday, the following day, March 12, we're going to be throwing a party. And we're not quite firm on the details yet, but there will be likely some live music and some live comedy and us and some other very and when I say very special treats, you're really going to want to be there for this one. Yeah. It's going to be a good party. It is not like you're thinking, though. I mean, like Texas means it's going to be a good party. There's no wink nudge for you, college. Not like an Eyes Wide Shut kind of thing. Nothing like that. It's going to be a nice, wholesome fun party. Exactly. Plus beer. Yes. We'll be counteracted by dropping the clothes pin in the Milk Bottle games. That's right. Okay, well, drunk now. Listener mail. A listener mail. Josh this is from Austin and I'm going to call this healthcare. And you helped me through my healthcare, guys. Really appreciate the show. Went through a pretty rough healthcare recently. And this is how I came to listen to your show. I had some lymph swelling along with other health issues, and my doctor says we should test for the worst of the worst. It took a couple of weeks for these tests to get turned around and it was pretty much the longest time of my life to me. All signs pointed to cancer. Couldn't believe it. Sitting across from a doctor I didn't know, telling me, we may need to look into a possible death sentence. And then my wife is at home losing both of her grandparents. It's Christmas time and her parents are stuck in two different hospitals and had to cancel plans for business, all the while feuding with blood relatives who were taking advantage of the financials of their dying parents. Here I was, a new father of a spectacular baby, an incredible wife, overwhelmed with her own terrible issues. And I think I could soon be having to tell her I could be terminally ill having a new baby. She would often go to bed early and I would be left to try and sleep with my own frightening imagination of what was going on in my body. I started listening to your podcast to take my mind off of everything, and it was really the most calming distraction I could ever have wished for. Laughing, wondering, learning, and enjoying all of it until I would fall asleep. Long story short, I got my scans back. My lymphatic system was normal, but my immune system was hyperactive, causing symptoms of no swelling, pain and fatigue, weight loss. Great news compared to the mindset that I had of the worst thing imaginable. So he's okay? Yeah. Very lucky. But still, I look forward to laying down early with my wife. And now the two of us listen to you guys before we go to bed to help clear her mind and her tough time. Wow. I can't believe we can do that. Crazy. It is crazy. I'm sure they fall asleep six to eight minutes later, right? Tops. So that's from Austin. And Austin, we are very glad to hear about your diagnosis, my friend. Yeah. Way to go, Austin. That was great. Thank you. Thanks, Austin. I already did thank me. I did. Did you think Jerry? Thank you, Jerry. All right. Thank you to everybody for listening to this one. If you have an interesting story of how Stuff you should Know puts you to sleep or anything weird that it's done for you, we want to hear it. We like that kind of thing. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook at facebook. Comsteffyshno. And you can send us a good old fashioned email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The housetoporks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Posted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-02-03-sysk-lion-taming.mp3 | SYSK Selects: How Lion Taming Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-lion-taming-works | Bossing a lion around in front of a crowd at a circus has been an attraction for 200 years, but exactly how lion tamers get their captive wild animals to comply has evolved over time. Take a peek in the jaws of this odd profession with Josh and Chuck. | Bossing a lion around in front of a crowd at a circus has been an attraction for 200 years, but exactly how lion tamers get their captive wild animals to comply has evolved over time. Take a peek in the jaws of this odd profession with Josh and Chuck. | Sat, 03 Feb 2018 13:00:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=34, tm_isdst=0) | 27195437 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects, I chose lion taming. This one came from our Summer of Sam, chosen by Sam T. Garden, who went on to become Sam the Intern, who will probably go on to become Sam the House of Works employee at some point. And I want you to take particular note of the segment where we talk about how the Simpsons are known to predict the future. It's an excellent example of how connected our episodes are across the years, or it's an example of us later unwittingly rehashing info we've already covered. At any rate, it's a good episode about an interesting topic, so I hope you enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. This is stuff you should know. Yeah. This, Josh, is another episode of the Summer of Sam. Oh, this kid is good. Yeah. Our friend Sam Tea Garden is programming our show here and there. Hey, Sam. And Samson and Hawaiian Taming works, which is also written by Debbie Ranka, my buddy. Yeah. From New Jersey. Roller Derby Debbie. I don't call her that. No, you don't. I call her Deb. She's an old friend. That's a call. Derby Debbie. You did it probably the first time. Yeah. Roller Derby Debbie. That would just get difficult. Sure. Yeah. Well, right on. This one's just going to be great then, because there's a good article, too. That's right. And you can read Debbie's. Awesomelog@freakgirl.com. That's quite a plug. And then where are we at with Sam? So Sam has now selected how lion taming works. What was the first one? I can't remember. It was a couple of weeks ago. He's done two man, it was awesome. But we actually recorded a couple that he had not heard yet that he also had on his list. Oh, good. Just by chance, are we going to attribute those to him? No, just the ones that we saw afterward. But anyway, thanks, Am. This is a good one. Well put, Chuck. Thank you. Well, let's see. I have a bit of an intro. Have you ever heard the idea that the Simpsons have a tendency to predict the future? No. Okay, well, let me enlighten you. There was an episode called Homer, H-O-M-R season twelve, episode nine. Excellent episode. It's where Homer basically, they find out that Homer is a crayons stuck in his brain. A what? A crayon. A crayon from childhood. And they remove it and his IQ just immediately doubles. Classic. In 2007, years after Homer, a German lady aged 59 was going to get surgery to cure her chronic headaches. They found a pencil that was stuck up there from childhood. That she stuck up there? Yeah. Wow. When she was a kid and apparently forgot, they removed the pencil. She's fine. People are wacky. Yeah, but isn't that weird? Yeah, sure. Okay, here's another one. Let me see what you think about this. Homer in the treehouse of horror. 19. I definitely didn't see that one. Really? I quit watching it after a certain season. 20 okay. He goes to vote for obama on election day, and it's a take off of diebold, the voting machines that had so many problems. Yeah. He goes to vote for obama, and instead it starts voting a bunch of times for McCain. Okay, so I guess that year a woman from west virginia said that she checked the box next to obama and it just automatically switched over to McCain. Really? This is after this thing came out. Okay. Which would mean it's predicting probably most chilling comes from springfield with the s spelled as the dollar sign. The subtitle is or how I learned to stop worrying and love legalized gambling. Season five, episode ten, springfield gets a casino. Mr. Burns casino. Great one. And in it are two characters who are obviously based on siegfried and roy, and they're with their white tiger, anastasia. She loves the city. Anastasia flashes back to when she was caught in the wild by siegfried and roy. We shot her with a tranquilizer gun and spits out her little bubble pipe and her little beanie and attacks one of them. Yeah. This is a full ten years before the attack of roy horn in 2003 during a show at the mirage in las vegas where one of their white tigers attacked him. Monte corps attacked roy. That's right. And basically just ended their career right then. Yeah, I think on that one. Like, if you're going to write a simpsons episode aping sick green. Right. What else are they going to do? You're going to have the lion eat them or the tiger? I'm sorry, you raised an excellent point here, john, but it's still remarkable. It is, but you raised a very good point. And the point is, I think everybody who sees someone interacting with the tamest wild animal you could possibly imagine still will not be surprised if that animal kills the person. Yes. Because as jack hannah put it very appropriately, I think, and jack hannah, he was the original steve irwin, right, yeah, sure. He said, you can train a wild animal, but you can never tame a wild animal. And that's a really big important point in the world of, I guess, lion taming. Yeah. And another famous lion trainer tamer, we're going to probably interchange those words said you can't tame a lion, because if you did, there would be no act of the act. And part of the thrill of this for people is the fact that these are wild beasts. And if it was just if it was a penguin, it wouldn't be very exciting. No, it wouldn't. Although I'd like to see that. A train penguin. Oh, yeah. Putting your mouth ahead in its mouth and cracking the lip. That'd be fun. Yeah, it would be. It would be really mind blowing if the penguin was dressed like a lion tamer and you were treating it like a lion. Okay. I've got another lion tamer quote for you then, smart guy. All right, Gonter. Gebble Williams. Yeah. He was the one I saw growing up. Okay. At the Wrinkling Brothers. He said, a wild animal is like a loaded gun. It can go off at any time. So let's end the intro with that. Okay. Let's talk about line. Tammy. You brought up a really good point, Chuck. If you are in this world these days, it's not lion tamer, it's lion trainer. Or wild animal trainer. Yes. Because none of these people think that they have a tame animal on their hands. No, it's sort of the hubris of some of these early jerks that we'll talk about right now. 1819 was kind of when it all got going. Yeah. Frenchman named Ari Martin. Yeah. He's our French listener. He was a retired horse trainer, and he thought, you know what? I'm going to try and work with a tiger, which is very different than what anyone's ever seen before. And he had a method where he worked himself into the cage, little by little, like, just my presence. Then I'll stick an arm in, then I'll stick my head in. Take a couple of scratches. Yeah. Here and there. And then eventually he found himself earning the trust of the big cats over time, and he would find himself completely in the cage. So he was the first dude, period, I think first American. He was the first known what you would call lion tamer. Yeah. First American was a guy named Isaac Van Ambrook, and he was around in 1833, and he was what I meant when I said jerks, because he would apparently beat these cats with crowbars and use very violent tactics. Yeah. And he had a pretty good excuse for it or justification, didn't he? Is it sarcasm? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He was a biblical guy, and he would actually act out biblical scenes with these animals. And his big defense was Genesis 126. And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over everything creeping that creepeth upon the Earth. Creep. And I just like the Bible saying creepeth. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And it just kind of goes on. It's like, really one big run on sentence, and you can't help but wonder if Van Amberg would say the whole thing, or he'd just be like, just regenerate. 126. Yeah. His finishing move was sort of insult to injury after he would do all this stuff. And of course, he's not beating them with a crowbar in front of people, but apparently that's how he trained them to begin with, out of fear and injury. And he would finish his shows by making the lines. Lick his boots. Oh, man. What? Sure. I know. After all that, after suffering at his hands. You know what would be awesome would be to see the steamman of the prairie beat the tar out of Anna Berg. Yeah. You can reference our exoskeleton cast for that one, right? Yeah. All right. Have you seen fast, cheap and out of control. No. Is that about robots? You got to see that. It's Aaron Morris documentary, and it was about a topier gardener, a robot scientist, and a lion tamer and how all these things sort of intertwined. There was one more, a mole rat specialist, and in the movie, Dave Hoover was the lion tamer. And Errol Morris also worked in because Hoover was a huge fan of Clyde Beatty. And Errol Morris worked in this old black and white footage. And Clyde Beatty was almost the fifth character of that documentary. Oh, yeah. It's really great. Okay. I have a really good wild animal tamer documentary. All right, let's hear it. Yummy introduced me to this one. It's called Cat Dancers. Have you heard of it? No. Oh, my gosh. It's so heartbreaking. It's ridiculous, really. It's about this group of people who have their own thing going on and love one another and love their big cats and then just things keep going wrong. Oh, really? It's a really great documentary. It's one of the best I've ever seen in my entire life. Well, this one out there, too, is one of my favorites. Okay, go ahead. No. Fast, cheap and out of control. Oh, okay. Well, it's both on the table. It's crazy, though, that this podcast features two of our favorite documentaries. Yeah. Fast, cheap and out of control. And cat dancers. Look for a quick question on that one. And you can get those on Netflix. So, Clyde Baiti, who was Dave Hoover's hero, was around in the 1920s. He used a pistol and a whip yeah. To keep things in line. And I think the pistol was like a sound scare, less than like a threatening thing. Right. You go through a lot of lions shooting him in the chest. That's right. It gets expensive. But he was performing at the peak of this lion tamer. You think of an old timey lion tamer, the peak of the appreciation from the public. Sure. Because a lot of these guys, they shaped the public expectations, but they were also responding to them. And the public has had a role in shaping how lion tamers lion trainers interact with their cats. And Baby was kind of the last of the pistol shooting, whip cracking chair guys. The old guy. Yeah. Hoover actually explains the chair. And Debbie's right on the money. If you've ever wondered why they point a chair at a lion, it's because apparently these big cats have a one track mind or they're single minded. And so the four points of the chair legs confuse it. Yeah. And that's what hoover said, so I believe it. Well, that's awesome. Yeah. So you've got Henry Martine, who starts everything out very gently using trust. Yeah. And basically just exposing himself to these large cats. He did Tress Falls. Right. And the cat would catch him. And then you have Van Amberg coming along, isaac Van Amberg basically just beating the tar out of these things and using a very different method. Fear and Clydebatty kind of carries that torch. And then after Baiti, things change. And you have modern lion trainers like Sigfried and Roy Gunther. Gabel Williams. Is that how you say his name? Yeah. You're the German speaker. Gunther Gebble Williams. Williams. He just made my eye bleed. Yeah. Like I said, he was the one that was very big in the when I was growing up. Right. And apparently he was in an American Express commercial oh, yeah. With a leopard hanging over him. The Don't Leave them without it days, probably, I would imagine. Yeah. Then you have this kind of transition to the modern lion trainer, which was actually a circle back to the beginning, a little more genteel. Well, not just that. It's like using trust, not using beatings, and basically just spending time with your animal to let it get to know you. Yeah. And the whip they use even if you see a whip these days, they're not whipping the animal. The whip is just sort of like, hey, this is my space. This is your space. Yeah. My space is over. Exactly. So let's talk about the psychology of all this stuff. Yeah. Animal psychology and people psychology, because it's really not that much different. BF. Skinner is a person psychologist, a very famous one. Yeah. He created a Skinner box. That's right. And he has children in it. Oh, is that what's his face? I don't know. I thought you're talking about the kid that was kept in isolation. Arthur oh, baby. Albert no, that's totally different. Okay. That was Fear Extinction that they were studying. Got you. This is conditioning that Skinner was all about. So offering conditioning is what we're talking about. And that's basically connecting a behavior with a signal and giving the animal a reward. Yeah. It's like it's pretty much a one, two, three cycle. Yeah. It's basically saying, like, you did something that even remotely close to what I want you to do. So here's some food. And now you have the animals attention. Like, oh, where did that come from? Right now you kind of shape that behavior where it's like, come on, let's try turning to the right. And then if they move to the right, they get a little bit of food, and maybe if they turn all the way to the right, they get a bunch of food. And then you have, say, you're leading them with a stick. Yeah. So eventually you remove the stick and replace it with something like a snap or a clap or hey. Oh, yes. You hear a lot of that and all of a sudden you have an animal that can turn in a circle when you do what you just did. That's right. And that's called classical conditioning. Well, it starts with operate and moves into classical conditioning. Operant, then capturing, then shaping. Then classical conditioning. And capturing and shaping are part of opera. Exactly. Should we talk about Christian the line? I guess I don't see how we can. It is real, people. If you've seen this on the YouTube, it is not made up. Are you sure? Oh, yeah. You realize what you're saying here, man? Dude, it's as real as, like, anything in history that happened. Okay. I've seen the documentary about it, and I don't think it was Christopher guess who directed it. I can't remember the name of it. Christian the lion, something like that. You've seen it on YouTube. In 1969, late 60s, couple of Aussies, John Rindell and Ace Bork bought a lion from a department store in London. Herods. Didn't know they sold lions back then. Herods does. Really? Yeah. It was sort of the head of London at the time. It was like the swinging Sixty s. And these dudes were known for having this lion and throwing parties and stuff. It was, like, pretty cool. And the lion got bigger, of course, and they had to release it to the wild with the help of the Born Free people. And then there's, of course, the famous video where they went to visit this lion. Like, was it years later? It was I'm not sure when they released him, but it was quite a while later. And it was a few years. The line jumps up and hugs the guys. It was amazing. It was pretty amazing. Yeah. Are you sure it's real? I'm as sure that that's real as you're real. Otherwise the biggest hoax has been pulled over the world. I don't know about that. I think the Howard Hughes biography is top. Christian that was pretty good. But as Debbie points out, for every Christian the lion, there's a secret. And Roy. Yes. Which we already kind of covered, but I think we should go a little more into it. Yeah, there's some different theories out there. So in 2003, Androy were doing their thing and apparently they had, like, I think, 3000 of these performances under their belts already. Yeah. They were working with Manticore or Montecor sorry. Who is one of their tigers, who they'd raised from a cub. And he was now seven years old. So they knew this tiger intimately, like they were its parents, for all intents and purposes. Yeah. And that's one of the keys, too, with line taming, is that you raise them from a cub. They're not going out and getting these tigers from the savannah that are grown and then taming them. So the Simpsons were wrong in that respect. Sure. During this performance, something happened. Montecor grabbed Roy by his windpipe and dragged him off stage. Roy, by the way, is now partially paralyzed and has a crushed trachea because of this. But from the outset, from the moment he regained consciousness, roy said, do not destroy Montecore. It was like something happened. He wasn't trying to hurt me. He was trying to protect me. And he was just dragging me away from whatever it was. Roy suggested that possibly he had a stroke and that freaked out the tiger. Tiger picked up on it. It's also been theorized that a woman this is almost like the lone gunman theory, actually. This is the one I believe a woman with a beehive hairdo sitting toward the front row or possibly in the front row was distracted and confused. The tiger, which I guess maybe the tiger was trying to get Roy away from the beehive. Well, what happened, the accounts I read is that this tiger became transfixed on this lady and, like, started walking toward the lady. And so Roy jumped in between them and the tiger grabbed a hold of his wrist at this point and Roy bopped him on the nose with a microphone, was going, Release, release. And he released him and he fell backwards at that point. And I think that's when the tiger keep on saying lying. That's when he thought that Roy was in trouble because it was a big brouhaha. All of a sudden, with him falling over, people rushed out there in the confusion. They think that he grabbed him like you would grab a baby kitten around the neck to pull it off stage. Yeah, so I believe that that's sensible. But he didn't let go. Like, they sprayed him with his fire extinguisher and they beat him with a fire extinguisher until he let go and cut his what do you call it? The windpipe? Yes. No, but the bleeder the jugular. The jugular, yeah. Well, Roy is still alive. He survived. And they actually had a final performance in 2009, six years later. With Montecor. With Montecor, yeah, because he's still alive. And he was at the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. I've been there. It's pretty awesome. Where is this? It's in Vegas. I can't remember what hotel it's at. Well, the Mirage is where they performed, but I feel like it may be at the Mirage. Right. I can't remember. It's also possible it was at another place. But anyway, they have, like, their lions and couple of tigers. They have a bunch of stuff. And it's sad because it's a small zoo, but I'm sure these animals are treated better than the average animal added zoo. Yeah, but I mean, they're in these enclosed habitats. Well, they get investigated just like modern circuses do. I think they're routine checks. By which government agency is it? Do you remember the USDA? The USDA does that. They do circuses, zoos, that kind of thing. Okay. The thing is, if you're an animal welfare group, you probably don't think the USDA is doing enough. And even if they are following the letter of the law, you probably think the letter of the law isn't strong enough. And supposedly every single major circus in the United States has been cited for violating the Animal Welfare Act. So I think the whole concept behind lion taming and lying training is fascinating for most people. But then you take another step further and you're like, these are wild animals in captivity. What are you doing? Yes. Why is your head in its mouth? Exactly. And I'm glad you brought that up, because then in the introduction, there's a pretty good description of what a lion can do. What can lie. A lion's mouth can open up wider than your head is tall, a foot 30 CM. It's also capable of crushing a bull spine. I love that reference. That just sounds tough. It is a tough spine of a bull. Yeah. And the claws are about three inches long. Pretty serious stuff. So, I mean, yeah, this is very serious stuff if you're a lion trainer. But at the same time, it's like, how do you justify having this act? What's the act for? What's it doing? Is it protecting? Is it conserving? Is it raising awareness? I think people are demanding more explanation than they did in, say, the time of Clyde Beatty. Well, yeah, because back then it was fun to poke and prod things that you thought were unusual and exotic, and there wasn't a lot of respect for it. Like, the initial circuses before there were these acts were I think they had horse acts, but it was mainly like, look at these animals in cages that you've never seen before. Exactly. And look, there's a pygmy. Yeah. Bearded lady. Right. And that guy. Thanks. And I think Isaac Van Jerk was the first guy to put his head in the mouth, too, right? He was, yeah. Unfortunately, the line didn't finish that job. We have a whole suite of circus art stuff. Really? Human cannonball. Oh, yeah. We have several others. Circus arts. Yeah, that's what it's called. If you even look on the channel, it's entertainment. Houseofirst Comart. Wow. It has a sub channel. Circus art. Sub channel at House of Works, because that's the kind of site it is. And if you go to that sub channel, you don't even need to do that. You can go to the search bar on the homepage@householdforks.com and type in lion taming and it'll bring up this article. Yeah, I know we talked about something else because I mentioned that I go to the Big Apple Circus when it comes to town. I remember talking about that. And that's the one where they have, like, a horse they saw the equestrian show and, like, dogs jumping through hoops. But other than that, it's like clowns and jugglers and the Cirque du Soleil feats of strength. No animals, no big cats. People on the run from the law. Yeah. It's not like the Gaudy Ringling Brothers now. Good. I haven't seen a circus in it. I can't even tell you how long. You. And you should check out the Big Apple circus. Oh, yeah. It's neat. All right, we'll check it out. It's, like, very small and intimate. It feels like what you might expect a circus 100 years ago to be like. Will you send me an email when it's coming? I will. Okay. I said search bar, by the way. All right, so that means listener mail. Yeah. This is from we helped someone kick heroin. Did you read this? Awesome. Hey, guys have been meaning to write you for a very long time. I've been listening to you pretty much since day one, learning and loving every step of the way. However, it was almost a year ago I chose to check myself into drug treatment. See, I am a marine. Female Marine. No longer active duty. But when I was injured, I was given a lot of painkillers and ended up getting addicted to those. And that eventually led to me getting strung out on heroin for years. What does this have to do with you? Well, heroin detox is one of the worst things you can imagine. We were not allowed to listen to music or watch TV or pretty much do anything but classes and groups. I agree that it helped me being in a media blackout, but I did beg the staff to let me listen to you guys. To my amazement, my doctor was a fan of yours and approved it. Awesome. So, while I was going through the worst of it, you were both there with me. I will spare you the details. So, August 15 is not a lady. I think we've both seen the Seinfeld where Elaine is dating the guy who's kicking heroin. Did she date a guy kicking heroin? Yes. I don't remember. I don't think I remember that. Let me just check that one up. Sorry. Go ahead. So now, August 15 is not only my birthday, I'm 29 this year, but also my first birthday off drugs. Oh, congratulations. I want to thank you for what you've done for me, and I'm going to go back and listen to them all again. I know it is a lot to ask, but a shout out would make my day. Dude. And Elaine Turley. Elaine? Don't tell me that's a coincidence. Well, it's a spelled an a elaine. Okay. She says simplify for Milan. Turley. That's awesome. And then she says PS. Marines are the few in the proud. Female Marines are the fewer and the prouder. Nice. So way to go, man. Yeah. Congratulations, lady. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. You kicked heroin with us. That's amazing. Yeah. Can you think about that? Wow, man. That was a mind blower. Chuck pretty good one. If you have a mind blowing story that relates to us, even if it doesn't, that's cool. But if it does, wow. That's even better. You can tweet to us at syskrodcast. It's our Twitter handle. Facebook.com Stuffycheatknow is where we dwell on Facebook. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.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 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." | |
3fdbc944-5461-11e8-b6d0-d7e069ef93a5 | Selects: How Landslides Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-landslides-work | Landslides are a form of mass movement of the Earth, and with the amount of death and destruction they wreak on the people and towns they cover, their toll can be massive. Learn all about landslides with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Landslides are a form of mass movement of the Earth, and with the amount of death and destruction they wreak on the people and towns they cover, their toll can be massive. Learn all about landslides with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Sat, 07 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=219, tm_isdst=0) | 31879498 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone. Do you know the song? Landslide song by Stevie Nicks. Well, this is not that. This is a podcast about real landslides and how they work. And it's my pick for the Saturday select. It was a good episode, and it was from March 27, 2014. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck bryan is with me, as always. Hello, sir. Hello. How are you? I'm good. We got Jerry in the house. Oh, yeah. This one probably won't be our funniest podcast. And I have to say that I suggested Landslides without knowing about that. Landslide. No, I swear. No, I promise you. I sent this to you on Monday and then saw, like, a few hours later. Wow. And I was like, oh, boy. I was on vacation, so I didn't hear about it. So it's super relevant. Yeah, it is apparently unintentionally relevant. Like our Black Boxes episode. Yeah. It's been happening weirdly. Yeah. If you have been not paying attention to the news at all lately, then you may not know, but there was a massive landslide in Washington as of last count. I think the death tolls are, like, 24, which is an astoundingly high number for a landslide, at least in the United States, because something like 25 to 35 people die in the US a year from landslides. This one was one single enormous landslide. And if you haven't seen the pictures, to get an idea of just how large it was, you should go online immediately and check it out, because it was nuts what happened there. Yeah, it's about an hour north of Seattle, and I know we have a lot of fans in Seattle, so we're obviously thinking about everyone there, but there's still 170 plus people missing, and it looks like it will be easily the deadliest landslide in US. History by the time this is all said and done. It seems like it, but I'm clearly hoping there's more survivors. But it's just a scary man. Oh, yeah. To think about being trapped like that and possibly still alive. It's just like the whole thing is upsetting. Yeah. Because if you were inside a structure, it's not covered with mud, there's a chance that you're not buried. The structure around you is buried. Right. So yeah, it's pretty awful stuff to me. What's even more awful, and I read an article where an unnamed resident was saying, like, yeah, we're not mad at the authorities, but yeah, apparently they didn't heed a lot of warnings. Oh, really? The area that was covered in landslide was known since the 60s. In the area is Slide Hill. The area itself is called the Steelhead Landslide. So imagine if the street you live on is not in East Lake, right, but in Steelhead Landslide. Landslide is in the name of the area that you live. So it wasn't, like, the biggest surprise. No. And there was a 1999 report by the US. Army Corps of Engineers that predicted the potential for a large catastrophic failure right there where it happened. And that's exactly what happened. The landslide happened. It covered about a square mile, and it's like 15ft deep right now. Well, you can't tell people where to live, though. No, you definitely can't. I'm not saying they shouldn't have worn, but people still live in flood zones, and people still build their houses on the sides of a hill in Malibu. Yeah, I guess if you're warned and you are willing to take that risk and you want to, then sure. Yeah. I don't disagree with that, but I don't know if everybody was as aware of potential, but apparently there was a landslide in the area as recent as 2006. Really? Yeah. So apparently this was the big one, and it was coming a long time and set off by water in this case. Right. Yeah. There was word that possibly it was an earthquake, but they think there was a lot of rain that came before then. Well, let's get down to explaining what happened exactly. The landslide there is actually technically a mudslide and mudslides landslides. A bunch of other ones, they all fall under something called mass movements. Yeah. And that is the umbrella term. And that basically means gravity is at work moving something down a slope, some kind of sediment. It can be a landslide, which is obviously devastating, or it can be super slow over centuries. And we'll get into all that in a minute. Well, we'll get into all the triggers, too, but I guess we should talk about their categorized, depending on how fast it's moving, what kind of materials are being moved. In every case, though, you're talking about soil moving off of bedrock, the friction being overcome by gravity. That's exactly what a landslide is. It's like super fast erosion. Yeah. On any slope, you have soil over rock, and it's being held in place by friction. It's kind of scary to think about. It really is. You know, it's true, but then when you read it, it's like, wow. Yeah. If you've ever dug a hole in the ground, it's not easy. It's not like silt or something like that. It's like ground. It's hard ground, but that stuff is not fused to the bedrock beneath. There's a friction that's holding it in place, and that can fail. And that's what a landslide is, exactly. Like you said, gravity overcomes friction. Yeah. And it can on some very large scales. It can on small scales. And then, like you said, depending on the type of movement, how it moves, what's moved, you have different categories of mass movements. Landslides are just one of them. Or a slide is one category. There's slides, creeps, slumps, and flows. Yeah. Creeps are obviously super slow. It can be months, years, it can be centuries of creep. And that is when the sediment, when the friction is not working, but it's not completely destroyed. So there's still some friction. It's just moving super slow. And that's usually as a result of a lot of freezing and thawing going on to change the composition of the soil. Yeah. When a freeze comes through, the sediment in the soil is pushed upwards as it freezes, and when it thaws, it falls back downward. So what you have, if you look at it on a geological time scale, is basically an undulation up and down of the soil that is moving downward on a slope, like millimeters at a time. Right. And then the telltale signs, though, you can see that creep is happening because telephone poles will be kind of a skewed trees or something like that. Yeah. That means that you're standing on or looking at a slumping slope. Yeah. And you won't see it happening. No. But I do see a pretty awesome gift. I can't remember where was it? Time lapse. Yeah, it's a time lapse gift. And it wasn't over the course of a year. It was over the course of several days in San Bernardino or whatever. But it's just like there it goes. It makes you feel unstable. Yeah. Like the earth beneath your feet. Yeah. Well, I mean, the earth is a constantly evolving mass. Soil is being moved from here to there, and there's all sorts of different agents of change, and it moves in different ways. It can creep. I think I said a slumping slope. That's not true. That was a creeping slope. Yes. A slump is when you have a big chunk that breaks off as a single whole chunk and just moves. That's a slump. Yeah. And that can be the actual thing can be called a slump, too. It can have a couple of meanings there for that word. Like the big piece can be called a slump. Right. Or the movement is the slump. If they're not sliding like they used to, they're going to slump. Yeah, true. And that is when, basically, the base can't support this big chunk on top of it. And again, it's usually due to moisture. And water is the general cause for slumps as well. Yeah. Water like the primary all time leading, winningest cause of mass movements, because either in a slump of good analogy or a good example is if you're at the beach and you just see, like, a whole chunk of wet sand off of another hunk of wet sand, you just witnessed the slump. And actually, water can create stability for sandy loamy or clay soil. Yeah. Like you build a sand castle, you want the sandwich. Exactly. Up to a point. When you add too much, water becomes saturated, and then you have a slump, or you have a slider, a flow, and then with other types of mass movement, that water can get underneath and interrupt the friction between the soil and the bedrock. And that's when you have some sort of movement as well. So that's creep and that's slump. And then finally we have flow, which is just basically a soupy mix of water and rock and soil and other materials. Those are usually the deadliest because they spread further. That's like a mud flower and avalanche. They get everywhere. They'll enter into everything. It's not just like a bunch of dirt. It's like a fast moving river of mud and debris. And I misspoke earlier that's in Oso, Washington, that's what that was. It was the mud flow that started it that came down and covered everything. Got you. Which actually hampered rescue operations because apparently it's just like quicksand right now. Right? In man. Yeah. So in the case of well, in the case of anything other than a creeper slump, if you're talking about a quick landslide, it happens just like in a snap. It's going and picking up speed, but it is the result of years and years of slow, steady erosion, basically. It's not something that just happens out or it can be triggered. We'll talk about like earthquakes and stuff like that. Right. But in general, it's the weathering down of objects. And I guess the difference we should describe between weathering and erosion is erosion is transporting the weathered material, and weathering is the actual wearing down of that material. Right. So they're different. Yeah. So if you have a rock that's a nice big solid piece, millions of years later, it's been weathered into a bunch of soil. And then as it's lost its composition, it can move more easily. And when it moves, it's being eroded. So erosion is the process of movement. The weathering is everything that leads up to the ability for it to be moved. Yeah. And weathering is important because your weathered landscape is going to be much more likely to landslide. That's why you'll see them in more extreme environments where you get like tons of rain or like a lot of snow, maybe. Heat, cold water and oxygen. Those are all things that impact weathering or cause weathering. And there are two types of weathering. There's mechanical weathering and there's chemical weathering. And mechanical weathering is basically the material is broken down, but it retains the same chemical composition. Like the rock, right? Yeah. It's still the rock, but it was broken down into smaller pieces of itself, say by wind or something like that, or water lapping against it. Now, if you had those pieces of rock that were in water that ultimately over the course of years dissolved it, it would be in solution and it would no longer chemically resemble itself. That's chemical weathering. Right. So like, if you pour acid on your hand, it's going to reconstitute into something else on the other end. The hole that burns through it, the stuff that ends up on the table is not really the same thing as your hand. You just chemically weathered your hand. Oh, wow. That's a pretty extreme example. And then you talked about the constant state of movement on the Earth that's going on at all times, and that's basically, if you're going to have erosion, you're going to have a deposit somewhere. And it's just a constant cycle on the Earth of weathering carried away by erosion and being put somewhere else. Right. In cases of landslides, the bottom of hills. Yeah. When we toured Guatemala, jerry and I and or I should say me, we were at the site of a landslide that had happened. I will never forget. Yeah. And you could still see in the sort of jungle like forest, the swath that had been cut through years earlier, because all the stuff on either side was old growth. And then the stuff through the landslide flow, it was much younger, shorter, like a different kind of green as well. And they pointed out that we were like, 12ft higher than basically standing on the the old village. They were unable to recover about 250 people. Yes. It was really upsetting. Yes. And remember, their children were running around, all these orphan children. They belong to the remaining village now. It was really something else. Well, yeah. And just when they said, you're like, 12ft higher than just the whole land raised up because of this mudslide, it was one of those ones that you kind of chewed on for a little while before you finally understood the full gravity of it, even though while I was standing there, I was like, oh, this is nuts. And the more I thought about it, the nuttier account. So the sediment we talked about the deposition at the bottom of the hill. The sediment is known as talus. Right. That's the official word for it when it's from a landslide. Yeah, that's what's being carried down. And with erosion, there are five different things that can act on it, which are water, which we've covered in wind, and then gravity, of course, which we mentioned, and then waves and glaciers, too. And technically, gravity is a part of all of them, right? Yeah, that's true. A part of all mass movement. But those five agents of erosion, there are different things that can trigger a landslide or a mass movement. And really, if you think about it all, a mass movement is like a landslide. It's just erosion at high speed. Sudden and high speed. Erosion is basically what that is. Rather than taking millions of years to move from here to there through wind or waves or whatever, it just happens in a moment, and it happens on mass. All right, so we mentioned triggers. The land side always has to have a trigger. There has to be something to actually set it off. Even though it may be years and years in the making, something finally pushes that button to make it happen. It forces gravity to overcome friction. That's right. One of the things that we mentioned already in the case of Washington was water. And that is probably the most common heavy rainfall I know in California. In Los Angeles, when you see houses slipping off the hill in Malibu is because they don't get a lot of rain. And when they do, things like that happen. Yeah. And it's either water saturating the ground and just making it so heavy that it flows downward or it gets down in between the soil and the bedrock and just causes the whole thing that undermines everything. Either way, water equals a lot of movement. Earthquakes that can definitely trigger a landslide. We've covered earthquakes. You should go listen to that show if you haven't. It's a good one, but you've got the vibrating of the earth's crust and that is going to disrupt that friction pretty easily. Yes. Another big one is wildfires, which you would think, well, how would a wildfire trigger that? I'll tell you how. The roots of vegetation can lock soil into basically a totally solid cemented state. And as long as you have thick vegetation on a slope, it's going to be fairly stable when a fire comes through, burns out all the vegetation and often burns the roots as well, leaving not only less stable soil, but actual pockets in that soil too. So now it's kind of pebbled, which makes it a lot more vulnerable to landslides after a wildfire. Yeah, I'm just guessing here, but I would guess a landslide could happen even long after wildfire. If those routes die away, it would just become even less stable. And then volcanoes. Volcanic action is a big cause. And there are a couple of different kinds of flows that can contribute to a landslide from a volcano. One is called a pyroclastic flow and that is after your dome has collapsed or during an eruption. And these are super high speed. They've clocked them at 450 miles an hour, 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. Lava flowing at you at 450 miles an hour. I can't even imagine that. You imagine like 724 km/hour. That's easier. Well, there you go then you just imagine 450 miles an hour. Yeah, but I mean, I don't even know what that looks like. Instant death. Yeah, exactly. And then there's something called a lahar, which is an Indonesian word. And this doesn't have to be during interruption, but it can be. And it is set off by water as well. It's almost always near something called a strato volcano, which are like super steep cones and a lot of times there's either a crater lake or it's snow capped up top and so that's the water agents. A lot of times it's the snow and it sort of looks like wet concrete flowing downhill. Yeah. And it may or may not be set off during an actual volcanic eruption. It can happen anytime. Yeah, and it's much slower, 20 to 40 miles an hour. But still, if you're in a golf cart, you're dead. Yeah, that's a good point. And while it's not fast, it has a lot more rock. So it is one of the deadliest alajar is I think because of just the sheer, like you can carry like a big boulder in the middle of that wet concrete. Plus the volcano. Also it's not very stable because the composition of it is usually pretty loose, rocky soil. Yeah. So yeah, if you add water, it immediately turns to slurry and when they erupt, they tend to shake the ground a little bit, which is what happened in the largest recorded landslide in Mount St. Helens. Everybody knows the eruption, but there was actually an attendant landslide that is on YouTube you can check out. As a matter of fact, we're putting a post up of just amazing landslide footage that you can check out on our website. Go to stuff you shoulde Noah.com, and check out that post. There's just some crazy stuff that people just happened to be filming and all of a sudden the earth changes right before your eyes. Yeah. And one of them is this Mount St. Helens eruption where just the whole mountain is basically just melting in front of you. I remember that one. Do you? Oh yeah. I was only four. Yes, I was nine, so it was on my radar. Oh yeah, absolutely. That one traveled at speeds of 150 miles an hour. And again, Washington State, not getting a break, destroyed 27 bridges, about 200 homes, miles and miles of road, and covered 23 sq mi with debris. Yeah, that was Mount St. Helens. Well, you know, just a landslide. Another frequent hazard associated with landslides is think about it. When all of this earth is coming down, it's coming downwards into a lower space, which is very frequently a valley, which is very frequently a river valley, which means that the river is damned now, so it's flooding behind it. Yeah. Right. So you have a flood hazard immediately and then if that river or if that damn breaks, then you have another flood hazard downriver all of a sudden too, which is something that's going on in Washington right now. Yeah, the same thing happened, and I think it's the most expensive landslide in US history. In Thistle, Utah in 1984, the same thing happened there. It damned up the Spanish Fork River and caused like much more problems just because of the flooding. Yeah. And that was 200 million dollar fix in 1980. $4. That was even when Reagan was in office. So it's not too much different from the $2,013 the submarine landslide we should probably talk about that is in the ocean. You can have an earthquake under the ocean, triggering a landslide underwater, which will trigger a tsunami. Yeah, it can. A one two, three punch, basically, of natural disasters happening. Yeah. All in concert. I don't know if this really technically counts, but seeing that little bit triggered a memory of the Lake Penure disaster in Louisiana in 1980. Texco is drilling in Lake Penure. And apparently they didn't consult the map closely enough, and they were using a 14 inch diameter drill, and they drilled into the lake bottom, which was on top of a salt mine, and they drilled into an operational salt mine. And the lake got sucked into the hole in a giant whirlpool that took about, like, 30 to 50 of the surrounding acreage around the lake, into the lake with it. Holy cow. Eleven barges were sucked in. The flow of water reversed, so it went from freshwater to salt water. It sucked the Gulf into it for a second, man. And then a couple of days later, after they were, like, 400 foot geysers, as these shafts were filling with water and the air was being displaced. Wow. And a couple of days later, after the water pressure stabilized, like, nine of the barges popped back up and went back to floating after being sucked down into this diamond mine. That's crazy. And apparently there's footage of it. It's awesome. It's like, just the most amazing thing. I guess more amazing than that is no one died. Wow. There was one guy on the lake who was operating the drill. He got off, and then there was a guy fishing on the lake, and he zoomed his boat to shore and made it, like, island far enough that he made it, but I think three dogs died. Lake Penur. P-E-I-G-N-E-U-R. Disaster. Check it out. I was all excited. And then the three dogs, man, that's crazy. There had to be some sort of erosion going on there. Technically, it was submarine erosion. The most deadly landslide in the history of the world was in China, December of 1920. It was triggered by an earthquake, and as many as 200,000 people died in that one. Holy cow. And some of that was from the earthquake. But they said the landslide was responsible for most of the deaths. Yes. As I said in the US. It's like 25 to 35 deaths a year. Worldwide, it's more like 4000. And then on years where there's terrible earthquakes, it'll go up into the tens of thousands. And then there was a mudslide in 1999 in Vargas state of Venezuela that killed, like, 30,000 people. Just covered a bunch of towns, like, all at once. It was a mudslide or mud flow, I guess. Well, one thing I thought was interesting was that and I think Jennifer points us out early in the article, that while in the States, we don't see a lot of deaths from landslides each year, they're the most expensive natural disaster over, I think, tornadoes, earthquakes combined in this country. And if you will consult your homeowner's insurance, you will almost definitely find that landslides are not covered. Yeah. Nope. Well, I guess we should get to that point then. That is it us? Is it humans that are causing these things? Yes. Always. Not always. No animals can cause it like a goat can cause a landslide if it really is unsure footed. Yeah, but goats don't blast mountain tops with dynamite. That's one. Yeah. They don't DeForest. Yeah. Deforestation is a big problem. Road building through the mountains. Yeah. Because think about it, when you have a mountain and you cut a road through it, all of a sudden, what was once a relatively gentle slope are now two steep slopes on either side just aiming right at the road. Oh, yeah. And I think everyone's probably driven on mountain roads where they either have chain link fencing on the side of it, which is scary enough, or I guess it's even scarier when they don't have fencing, but they have signs that say, watch out for falling rocks. Yeah. Good luck, pal. Yeah. There are things that people are doing, though, when they do build roads, they sometimes will put in drainage pipes to carry away water, which helps impermeable membranes. Like plastic sheeting. Yeah. So it can't trickle down. Yeah. Retaining walls and reforestation. So if you're going to clear cut an area, if you're going to harvest timber, maybe go back in there and try and reforest. Plant something. Yes. A number of restructures. Really? Sure. I can't believe that that's not a law that if you take X number of trees down, you have to plant X number of trees, and the number you plant should be more than the number you took. Is that not a law? I'm quite sure it's not. We can't even get black box recorders ejected for an extra, like, $50 a plane, remember? I remember. There's no law for that. Hey, but here in Georgia, we just passed a law where you can bring guns into churches and bars. Oh, I thought you were going to say, I'm actually rejoicing for another law. I don't know if it was signed in the law or if the house passed it and it's on its way. It is now a crime to drive slow in the fast lane, or it will soon be when they pass this law. Give me some parameters. Do you know? Call the slowpoke bill. Okay. And if you are impeding the flow of traffic, not even if you're going under 55 or under 45. Right. They're so aware that Georgia drives fast that they say if you're impeding the flow of traffic, even if other people are breaking the law and you're going the speed limit, you are breaking the law by being a slow poke in the fast lane, which is the most glorious law any city or state has ever come up with. State's. Right. If you go to Europe, the left lane is just for passing. Like, you shouldn't even be traveling in the left lane, right? It's supposed to be you go around someone, right? And then you stay out of it. It's supposed to be that way here, too, boy. It ain't. No, but if you got the chops. You can travel in the fast lane as long as you're not holding people up. The ones that are really like, you need to go to jail are ones that just knowingly are like, I'm driving the speed limit. Right? You don't own the road. It's like, well, there's ten people behind you that you're holding up. So you're the one who goes to jail. Now in Georgia, that's going to be tough to enforce. Totally subjective. It's totally up to the cop to enforce or not. But yeah, it's still I just think it's a grand gesture. Agreed. Slowpokes. Okay, so if you want to learn more about Landslides, you can type that word into the search bar at House Toforce.com. You should also check out Geology.com. They have a really great page with lots of different sub pages on Landslides. Yeah. And if you're in that area and have been impacted, we would love to hear from you. For sure. And we're thinking about you guys, obviously. I think did we say search bar at any point? Yes. Well, then that means it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this possibly the Unabomber is riding us. Hey, guys, I want to send out a note from the Great North. I've been listening since my buddy Adam played me the Lego podcast a few years ago, and since then I've been a fairly regular listener, but never more so than over the past few months because last spring I moved from Minneapolis to Juneau, Alaska, for job gardening at a public arboretum. Sounds like a lovely job, by the way. I live in a little shack in the woods near my work, about 25 miles out of town, about a half a mile from my nearest neighbor, almost free of rent, close proximity to work and uniqueness of the situation is what drew me to it. I have no Internet. I have no cell phone service. So every time I head into town, I stopped by the library or coffee shop and download more of your podcasts. New stuff and oldies but goodies that are still new to me. I have gotten into the habit of listening to you guys most evenings while making or eating dinner. I know some people in our town, but in the interest of using less gasoline and sparing my more or less meager bank account, I spend the majority of my nights out here alone. Whenever I do go into town or one of my friends make their way out here, I tell them about whatever I've learned from you guys. Listening to you banter and learning a lot of interesting new things has definitely helped me keep my firm grip on my sanity. Winter is basically wrapping up here. It was long and harsh. We had 96 inches of snow in December alone. Can you hear me losing your mind? I'm really looking forward to spring and summer when Alaska comes to life with tourists. Seasonal workers and long, sunny days. But I will still find time to listen to your good stuff, so keep it rolling. I am happy I decided to live out here this past winter. It's a beautiful spot and a good adventure, but would have been a lot more difficult without the company of you guys. You rule. We do rule. And that is from Will and will. That sounds like my kind of life, buddy. I'd love to do that. That is uni bombersque. I could sans the bombing. I could be the unabomber. Well, I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, Will. Thank you for letting us know that we're helping you out out there. If you want to let us know that we're helping you out, whether you live alone or are part of a brady bunch or something like that, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web. Stuffyhonow.com. Stuffyhearto is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app, ApplePodcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
45591216-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-eba281851bf5 | Short Stuff: War of Jenkins' Ear | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-war-of-jenkins-ear | In the 18th century, Spain and England fought each other in the colonies of Georgia and Florida, a war kicked off by an English sea captain who was mad his ear had been perhaps unfairly lopped off. | In the 18th century, Spain and England fought each other in the colonies of Georgia and Florida, a war kicked off by an English sea captain who was mad his ear had been perhaps unfairly lopped off. | Wed, 13 Feb 2019 21:02:28 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=21, tm_min=2, tm_sec=28, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=44, tm_isdst=0) | 12186134 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And this is short stuff. So let's get to it. We're talking about a war started by an ear. Go, my favorite thing is how you try to keep us so on track and now I try to throw us off. You really do. And you're doing it now and it's been sweat. I love it. Alright. The War of Jenkins Ear, which there's a lot of misnomers in this war because first of all, the War of Jenkins Year was not called that until 110 years later. Is that right? Yeah. An essayist. What's his name? Thomas Carlisle dubbed it The War of Jenkins Ear. 110 years later and what it really was, was just a part of a larger war. The war of Austrian secession. Yes. Succession. Right. There was a question about who was going to take over the throne. Yeah, but I don't want to poopoo it. Let's just go back and tell the story because it is pretty good. It is. It's a good story. That whole succeeding to the throne thing, that was a big deal in Europe in the 18th century, long before the 18th century too. But by this time Europe had basically formed a really intertwined set of economies and set of governments, so that if you were say, like a prince in Spain, you may end up running the show as the King of Austria at some point because your father married an Austrian princess and you have Austrian blood and there's no clear air to the throne. And so you are being called upon in Spain is like, yes, I'm so glad we have somebody over there in Austria because now Austria is going to do right by us. And when that didn't happen and whether alliance is broken and when there was a conflict over who had the rightful claim on a throne, when it came up for grabs, that's when wars broke out. So you got like Spain, Austria, France, England, all of them are alternately forming alliances, warring with each other and taking the throne from one another, taking a seat on one another's throne, which usually brought those two countries together. And that's what happened in this case too that kicked all of this off. Yeah, this happened in Spain with King Charles II dying, no clear air. So obviously all of europe basically, is like, oh, I want to be the King of Spain, right. Or someone from our country, because that will really help us out. Yeah. So France and Austria got involved and both says, hey, we have a claim to the Spanish throne. And France and Spain, basically, they all started plotting, all these countries started plotting with one another. And the Emperor of Austria and the King of France, I think, while Charles II was still alive, divided up Spanish territory of Italy between them. Charles got upset, willed his throne to a French prince, and then France was like, Wait a minute, Austria, did we really have a deal? Right? Because I don't remember that. All I know is that we're next in line in Spain. Austria got mad. That started the War of Spanish Succession. Right. And that is important to this, not because it was the War of Jenkins ear, but it just sort of set the stage in that spain and England, even though France and Austria were fighting, they were sort of involved on the fringe and just ticked each other off, basically. Right, exactly. So there's already hostilities and this is not helping things in the colonies, especially in Georgia and Florida, where France and Spain, who were hostile to one another as a result of this War of Spanish Succession, were butted up right against one another. And there was a lot of border skirmishes. I think by the time 1739 rolled around and the hostilities really came to a head. Georgia had only been formed as an English colony, like, six years before, so it was really tentative and tenuous. And the Spanish really had a respectable navy that could take out a coastal town if it wanted to. And so Georgia was in a really vulnerable position. So one of the things from that War of Spanish Succession that it addressed the Treaty of Utrecht, that came out of it, said, okay, Spain, you in England. We haven't forgotten about you guys. We need to make trade amongst you much more smooth and legal, and maybe that'll keep some of the skirmishes from happening. And so the English were allowed for, I think, the first time, to actually trade with Spain from Georgia to Florida, which seems like it would be a good move, but it ultimately led to disaster. Yeah. And there were a lot of things at stake here, but we shouldn't whitewash this and leave out that what England was really doing here and all the battling was trying to improve their trade capabilities in the Caribbean, not just with stuff, but with human beings and slaves. Oh, yeah, true. So it was very ugly what was going on. And the Treaty of Utrecht, they set all these guidelines. England had all these ambitions in that area. And Spain, though, says, all right, you know what, though? We're going to act as the, I guess, sort of the Coast Guard and the cops of the high seas. And if we think that you're smuggling something you shouldn't be smuggling, we're going to board your ship. And maybe we should take a break here and finish the story right after this. A summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah, whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music. That's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah, from the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, hosts Selena Erkhart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. 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. Okay, Chuck, the Spanish Navy is acting as the Coast Guard because technically the English traders are allowed into trade, but they're supposed to be like their cargo is supposed to pay taxes, tariffs, duties, all this stuff. The problem is that the English were rampant smugglers, and it was way easier to say, like, oh, hey, you in Florida. You need scissors and yarn and I want some of your silver. So I'm just going to sneak some of those things past the Spanish Coast Guard in the hopes that they won't find it, and then we can trade. And that's what the Spaniards called contraband. And so the Spanish was well aware that this is going on, so they would board ships routinely and search them and on, I believe, April 9, 1731, they happened to board a ship in particular called the Rebecca that was captained by a guy named Robert Jenkins. Yes. And this was one of those Spanish patrol boats. It was called Isabella. And they said, we're coming aboard and we're going to check out what you got here. There was a bit of a while. They found them out they were smuggling things that they shouldn't have had after they inspected the manifest in the cargo. And there was a punishment levied. One Juan de Leon Fandino, who was the Spanish captain, tried to send a message straight to the king and said, with his sword do you like that? He said, with his sword off with your ear. And cut off Captain Jenkins ear. And Captain Jenkins ostensibly picked it up, put it in his pocket and later pickled it. He did pickle it, and he carried it around with him for, like, seven years. And finally one day, I don't know how, but he managed to get into the House of Commons and said, look at this. Look at what the Spanish captain did to my ear, just for trying to be like a respectable businessman, smuggling a little contraband into Florida. And he said that if the King of England were here and in violation of law, he would have done it to the King of England, too. And Parliament said, that is it. We are declaring war on Spain. Georgia, go get them. Yeah. He was actually called in to testify. Okay. He was an important witness, I guess, to the activities down there. Maybe that's why they called him in. The one bad part about that story is supposedly there is no evidence that he actually presented his ear. And people think that it may have just been sort of gussied up through history and telling of this tale. But he did testify. We know that. But it certainly makes for a great story that he actually held his ear up and said, look at this pickled ear. I'm hoping that at the very least, they inspected to make sure he was missing an ear. Yeah. That would be a dead giveaway. It would be. Obviously, I think we should say no one ever started a war over somebody's ear being lopped off. No, that just became shorthand. Again, the tensions between England and Spain and the tensions between their colonial presence was already simmering. There had been a lot of overland skirmishes between Georgia and Florida, and this is pointed to historically as the thing that the straw that broke the camel's back, I guess. Yeah. And the sort of the anti climax of this story is the War of Jenkins ear was not much of a war, like we said, it was sort of part of smaller wars that they just gave a name to 110 years later. But there wasn't much that got accomplished during the War of Jenkins years. Over that few years that they had these battles. Well, a couple of things did come out of it. One. There was something called the Battle of bloody Marsh. So you're thinking like, oh, man, a lot of people died. Now. It was called bloody Marsh already. That just happened to be where the battle was staged on St. Simon's island in Georgia. But in that battle, like, 5000 Spanish troops sailed to Georgia and landed and came into Georgia and were repelled by the Georgian colonial defense people. The Georgia defensive line. Exactly. They pushed them back. Pushed them back, way back. Right. And that was huge for them because up to this point, remember, the Spanish were inconceivably powerful and Georgia said, oh, wait, we actually can defeat them. So that was one big thing. And then it also solidified Georgia's position safely as an English colony. That it was like, hey, man, we're here to stay. You stay down in Florida, we'll stay up here in Georgia. We're an English colony. You're a Spanish colony. Don't mess with us anymore. So those two things did kind of come out of it, actually. Yeah. And Oglethorpe, he mounted his own campaign to invade St. Augustine and did okay there but eventually retreated and even left his armaments and weapons and stuff. So there were some major battles. But I think in the end, the War of Jenkins Ear is just sort of a bit of a historical footnote in a lot of ways. Yes. Historically, it got absorbed in the larger King George's War which was a part of the War of Austrian Succession, I think. Right, exactly. So there was a war within a war within a war. It was like Inception in Colonial America. And Ellen Page will be here in just a minute to fully explain it over and over. Right. Thank you for listening to our attempt at explaining the War of Jenkins Ear. We'll see you next time on Short Stuff." | |
How Hot Wheels Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-hot-wheels-work | If you're an American who had a childhood, you probably have some nostalgia for Hot Wheels. Get your engines revved for this trip down memory lane as we discuss these fun and iconic toys. | If you're an American who had a childhood, you probably have some nostalgia for Hot Wheels. Get your engines revved for this trip down memory lane as we discuss these fun and iconic toys. | Thu, 29 Jan 2015 14:53:59 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=14, tm_min=53, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=29, tm_isdst=0) | 39410772 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. You know, that just sounded like what? Like that's what happens. Like you're are having a nightmare and you me wakes you up in the middle of night and you just go, hey, welcome to podcast. And then she slats you across the face real hard. It's true. Yeah, that is what that sounded like. It's pretty accurate. I don't know what got into me. You were just super charged about this topic. That's terrible. Supercharged. I don't get it. It's like a supercharged engine. I didn't even think about that. Oh, good. That makes me feel a little better. Yeah. You know, Jerry, by the way, before, when I told her what we were doing, oh, my gosh, that was my favorite toy when I was a kid. Nice. Hot Wheels are pretty great. Yeah, I had quite a collection. And I don't know where they are today. Oh, really? They're missing, huh? Yeah, I don't know if they were thrown out or if my brother has them or they're in my mom's attic or what, because I'm kind of curious if I have any value. You need to find them. Apparently, as far as Hot Wheels collectors go, they could be in mint condition all the way down to beater condition. Oh, is that how they rank them? Yeah, mine would be beaters because I played with them like crazy. That's good. I mean, that's what they're for. Sure. And there's value for a beater, too. Like, some people apparently harvest them for parts to rebuild a new Frankenstein model. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty neat. There's a lot of stuff you could do with them. Yeah. And we should thank the fifth grader who wrote this article, too. Sad face. I complained about that out loud to Holly. I was like, this article actually says sad face, like, as a sentence. Yeah, I know. Had issues. I'm glad you said something. Yeah. What if it was a fifth grader? Your feelings are all hurt. I think your feelings are hurt either way now. Sad face. So we're talking about Hot Wheels today. I had a couple. My favorite toy was GI. Joe, but I appreciate it. Hot Wheels. Yeah, I had GI. Joe, too. We studied GI. Joe episode some time. I had the older ones, though. You probably the huge ones. Yeah. Now I have the real ones. That's fighting words, man. The ones that I had were so awesome. There was a huge, fast collection of all of them. Cobra didn't exist when you were collecting GI. Joe. No, but how could you say, like, oh, that one that's ten inches tall and has real clothes and fuzzy hair and the kung fu grip is inferior to this little plastic thing. I think you just said it all fuzzy hair. Says it right there. I don't really mean that, Chuck. I don't have a dog in that fight. Like, if you like the big GI. Joe, that's cool. I got no problem. Yes. As a quick side note, I have to tell this story. Okay. You know how you used to do book reports and you have to have a visual aid? Yeah. I might have told this before. If I do, I apologize for that. I don't recognize it. I did a report on Franco Harris Elementary School because he was a football player. Yeah. I don't know why I did franco Harris. Yeah. But I got my mom to make me a little Pittsburgh Steelers uniform for my GI. Joe because he looked like Franco Harris. Nice. Yeah. And that was my visual late. Do you still have it? No, of course not. We had the GI. Joe's, but I think the Steeler's uniform has gone by. That's sad. Yeah. I'm sure your mum put a lot of work into that. Now I feel guilty. So, Chuck, I have a question for you. Yes. Did you know that the number one vehicle manufacturer on the planet is in fact, Hot Wheels? I did it's astounding until you stop and think about it. Sure. Like, apparently since 1968, when Hot Wheels were first introduced, more than 4 billion Hot Wheels have been produced. That's more than the big four Detroit automakers combined. You're like, wow. And then you think, oh, yeah, it costs a minute fraction of the cost here to build a Hot Wheels, and it does a normal car. Plus, also, it's not like you're going to go, I want this Buick Cutlass Supreme in every color. It comes in right? With the Hot Wheels. You can do that. Yeah. The Lego status, they're the biggest manufacturer of tires. Yeah. I wonder, though, do these not count as tires because they're plastic to count as wheels? I don't know, man. Because 4 billion times four, that's 16 billion tires. That's a really great question. I might have to challenge Lego or maybe just look up how many tires they manufacture. Old. Kurt Christensen is not going to be happy about this. Who was that? The founder of Lego, remember? Old. Oh, that's right. I thought you were saying old. No, old. Let's talk about the history of this stuff, huh? Okay. So Hot Wheels, like I said, have been around since 1968, and anybody who's heard the Barbie trademark podcast will recognize the name Elliot Handler. That's Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie trademark's husband. Sure. And Elliot apparently saw a real chance to muscle in on an already extant market by a company called Taiko that had a line of miniature metal cars. Diecast cars is what they're called. Matchbox cars. That's right. By the time Hot Wheels came around, matchbox was already there and had established a market. And Mikel said, let's get in on that. Yeah. And the rumor is that he saw his grandchildren playing with them and said, they kind of stink. I can make these better and cooler. Right. And as the story goes, he had a designer, which we'll talk about in a second, called Harry Bradley. Sure. And he had a hot rod. And Elliott was in the parking lot one day and said, man, those are some hot wheels you got there. And apparently, if you go look at the old original commercials for Hot Wheels did they say that? Well, that's how they pronounce it hot Wheels. Oh, it's a Hot Wheels. Yeah. The emphasis is on the hot it sounds awkward. They're like, race your hot Wheels. But it makes sense to them. You can race them. Just go buy some hot wheels. That's how they say it. Collect all your hot wheels. Yes, but that makes more sense in the context of a sentence. It does. And having been raised right post the in fact, hot Wheels is wrong. Yeah, hot Wheels. Because wheels now, I'm trying to picture the guy in the parking lot saying, those are some hot wheels you got on there. You'd say hot wheels you got there. Yeah. Oh, boy. We can sure waste some time. We sure can. But like you said, when the first line came out of 16 Hot Wheels, they were sold initially for piece. Yeah. And like you said, the guy whose car originally inspired the name Hot Wheels was Harry Bradley, and he was the designer of that 1st 16 cars. They were also called California Customs miniatures was that first original 16 group of hot wheels that were released in 1968. And Harry Bradley designed them all, including, apparently, he got his hands on the first one. By the way that came out was a Chevy Camaro. Of course, the second one that came out was the Chevy Corvette, of course. And apparently the Chevy Corvette came out before the actual Corvette came out. Yeah, the 69 Corvette. That is. So Harry Bradley was an old hand in not just miniature car design, but car design in general. He was an old GM designer, and I guess he had connections still at GM and probably under the table in a possibly illegal way. Got his hands on the blueprints for the Corvette that hadn't been released yet. And Hot Wheels beat GM to the punch in releasing the Corvette. Yeah. 69. Thank you. That's all right. As the lore goes, he supposedly knew that the cafeteria door was unlocked, so he snuck in through the cafeteria door. But that's called industrial espionage. Yeah, that sounds like a story, like, just lore. Okay, but maybe so maybe he committed industrial espionage. Yes. So, like you said, those were the two of the first 16 in that original line up, that original collection, which, if you have any of those yeah. You're doing okay. Yeah. You got some money that you're sitting on? Because, I mean, like, they went all out on that original line. Oh, yeah. Like, there are bushings to the suspension. Yes. I mean the chassis. It had suspension like shocks. You can press them down and it would bounce back. I had some of those. I don't think they were from 68. But when did they quit making those? It said up until 77 was when they stopped making the oh, no, 70 is when the suspension got an overhaul. Okay. So for the first couple of years, they were really putting a lot into these things. The tires were redline, racing slicks. Yeah. And the whole reason they went to so much trouble is because they really wanted to destroy their competitor, Matchbox. And one of the ways they did that was by making these things far more functional than the Matchboxes were. The Matchbox cars were so they really could race. And if you put a Matchbox car up against a comparable Hot Wheels, say, the same model car, the Hot Wheels will destroy it every time. In the head to head race, as we saw on the Internet. A guy did that, of course. He took two Volkswagens and two out of eight, I think, and one Matchbox and one Hot Wheel. And he said they won by at least a car link every time he tried. Right. And this was no loop D loop or anything. It's just the straight race. Right. They painted them originally in Spectra Flame, which was very shiny and sparkly and expensive. And I don't think we said that all Hot Wheels are built at 164 scale. Yes, that's a big point, but not necessarily all Matchbox cars. They kind of vary here and there. Right. But like you said, that Spectra Flame and the red line tires didn't only last until 77, and the suspension only lasted till 1970. And sadly, a lot of that had to do with the fact that they moved them from Hawthorne, California, to Hong Kong. And like any product, you're like, hey, you can make it for half as much if you make it in China. So let's move. Let's ship the operations overseas. Well, not only that, it's the Spectrum Flame pain is pretty expensive. It's awesome. It looks great, but it's pretty expensive. So with any collector's item, as they started to downgrade the components and the parts and the manufacturing and ultimately the final product, all that did was make the original stuff all the more valuable today. Yeah. Fewer and fewer of them as the years go on. Proportionately speaking. Yeah. They had actual axles. It was like a real they were designed by car designers, and they were made, apparently, to reach 200 scale miles per hour. Yeah, that's pretty cool that's way. Cool. Yeah. Remember, like, in the Cockroach episode, we talked about how they're the fastest animal on the planet, relatively speaking. Pretty neat stuff. Yeah. So, Chuck, right out of the gate, mattel had a hit on his hands. Yes. They released them in 1968. By 1970, Hot Wheels was a Saturday morning cartoon in the vein of like Dune Buggy and Scooby Doo and all those guys. Hannah. Barbara. Dune buggy or speed buggy? Speed Buggy, yeah. Remember Speed Buggy? Yeah. It was like a dune buggy that could talk, and it was basically Wonderbug. No, it's Speed Buggy. Okay. Because there's under bug too. If you took Shaggy and put some racing goggles on them and then turn ScoobyDoo into a Doom Buggy. Yeah, that's Speed Buggy. Oh, is that a cartoon? Yeah. Solving mysteries and stuff like that. Yeah. Wonder Bug was I think that was live action. Oh, this is a cartoon. Sydn marty Croft this is exactly like Scooby Doo by the people who did Scooby Doo using the same people who did the voices for Scooby Doo. It just vaguely changed the characters. The Hot Wheels was virtually the same thing, except it was about racing clubs or the bad guys and the good guys. Do you know what this proves? What? The Doom Buggy was a very popular thing. Remember seeing those on the road? I used to see them all the time. Not all the time, but in the was a common thing. Yeah. You don't see them anymore. Very rarely. No Gremlins. No. You go. No wonder bugs. You know, I like gremlins. Do you? They're okay. For me, though. The coutigra of car design is the AMC Pacer. Yeah. It's like the Form Mica kitchen of cars. It's beautiful in all the weirdest ways. So much window. That would be my sought after Hot Wheels. If I had a Hot Wheels that if I just could have one Hot Wheel, I don't know if that would be I'd be happy with that one. Now, do they have that as a Hot Wheel? Oh, yeah. Okay. And if you look up AMC Gremlin Hot Wheels yeah, they went to town on those. They had some with the intakes sticking out of the hood and just all sorts of awesome different variations like IndyCar Gremlins and stuff like that. And that raises a pretty good point. Hot Wheels has always been about the racing design. Like, they've designed them to look like racing cars, but they've also manufactured them to actually be able to win a race, like we talked about with Matchbox. Yeah. And one of the differences that is one of the main differences between the Matchbox and the Hot Wheel, as they were just much more interested in being sportier. Like, you could get a Matchbox like a delivery truck. Right. But the Matchboxes looked more real. They all were about looking realistic and not necessarily performance. And, hey, if you want a bread truck, you can get a bread truck. Right, exactly. But you can't get a bread truck. Hot Wheel. Right. We'll talk more about all of this jam right after this. You want to go and talk about some of the other differences between Matchbox and Hot Wheel? Yeah, sure. Since we're at it, Matchbox or I'm sorry, hot Wheel is the one that is more likely to have branded versions. Oh, man. And do they ever like the Ghostbusters Ectomobile, right. Or even more than that, they have a deal with MINEM Mars for 2015. They have, like, a Twix trucks and a skittles van and all this stuff. They have licensing with DC and Marvel this year. Faster than the Furious. I know. They had a line. Yeah. So they're really big time in the branded. And a lot of times they'll have, like a store will just have exclusives access to an exclusive line of skittles cars or something like that. But you can only get it KB Toys. Yeah. I think they have a NASCAR deal, too, if I'm not mistaken. I would not be surprised. And the Hot Wheels usually have a little bit longer axle and wider wheels because it's just cooler if that wheel sticks out from the body a little bit. Well, plus, also, supposedly and we'll talk about this a little more, when you shrink a car down to scale, it looks a little weird. Yeah. You might as well go ahead and bring that up. Okay. It looks weird. You can't just shrink it and have it in the same proportion and have it look normal. Right. As far as shrinking a car down by scale, it will be in the exact same proportion, but it's just off a little bit. So what they do to make a Hot Wheels raceable is they expand the wheel well a little more. They break it out a little bit, which is why the wheel stick out some on a Hot Wheels but not on a matchbox. That's right. Because matchboxes are all about realism. To heck with how it looks, as long as it's real. One of my favorite ones and I had one of these that they mention this article was the Red Baron. The person who wrote this said it was an inexplicable and inexplicably cool helmet over the cockpit. I don't know about inexplicable. It was just the roof of the car was a helmet. Right. But I looked it up again today, and I was like, oh, yeah, I had that thing. But it wasn't a Nazi helmet per se, but it was that shape of the helmet. Like, the US. Soldiers have that shape now where it's cut lower around the ears instead of just a straight like the World War II helmet. Right. But the Nazis use those first because it's a better design for war. And it also had a black Iron cross on the side of it. Well, hence the Red Baron. Right. Yeah. But it's easy now as an adult to look and say, that looks like a little Nazi hot rod. Yeah, but the Red Baron was World War I. He was pre Nazi Germany. Yes. And it was also, I think, at the time, just looks like the biker gang sure would wear, like, those helmet with the Iron Cross. Yes. And all of it was Southern California hot rod culture is what gave rise to Hot Wheels. So it makes sense. Yeah. I don't think there was any. So, like I said, right out of the gate, hot Wheels was a hit. They had a cartoon within a year or so of the first 16 being released. Sure. The second release, they had, I think, 22 new cars. Yes. 33 total. And then the third year, they released 33 after that. Right, yeah. I'm sorry. 33 by 1970. So they did 1624, and then 33. And all of them came in, like, different colors. Right. So, like I said, if you had one, that didn't mean you had them all. You wanted to collect them all. So kids were going crazy for it. And another way that Mattel very wisely targeted children was to get in with fast food. In 1970, the first Hot Wheels came out as a toy at Jackintheboxes. Oh, really? Yeah. The big one, though, the one that put them over the top was in when kids who were lucky enough to be taken to McDonald's for dinner, happy meal, to get a Hot Wheel, which is what they called it at the time, could get one of 14 Hot Wheels in 1983. And they had some cool ones. They had a Chevy Citation. Did they really? Yeah, they had one that was one of my favorites, actually. It was a Toyota mini truck, which is like a station wagon camper. And it even said, painted on the side, goodtime camper that you could get in your Happy Meal, which, if I could have one Hot Wheel, it would probably be that. You know what they were doing now that I look back through my adult eyes, like snorting pot? No, they were giving you a bunch of crappy ones because you wanted to keep coming back to get the cool one. Yeah, probably. You're like, I got a citation. I'm like, Can I go back because I want to get the hot rod? Right. That's exactly what they were doing. Sure. Man, I feel so manipulated. What did you think they were doing with Happy Meals? Well, I mean, I know it's all manipulation to get you to try and own all of them. Right. But they should have been all cool ones. But you can't do that because the regular kid might be like, no, I got the cool one. I'm fine. But if you get the citation, you feel dipped off, and you really want to go back and get one of the hot rides. Yeah. My eyes are wide open, my friend. Well, that's why our friends down under in Australia have outlawed marketing directly to children, which I think is a fantastic market. Oh, really? Yeah. It's so unfair to market directly to children. It's just almost literally like taking candy from a baby. Right. Like, kids aren't sophisticated enough to psychologically defend themselves from being bombarded by adults to say, go tell your parents to buy you this. You can't function correctly without this Trapper Keeper, so go get it. The Trapper Keeper? Yeah. Did they make a law? Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's a big one. Very progressive law, which I think all countries should adopt. Well, in 1983 I agree wholeheartedly, by the way. In 1983 is when that Happy Meal thing happened. And also the same year they moved from Hong Kong to Malaysia, and it said that's when they added their economy cards. So that must have coincided with the citation. Yeah, the citation, man. One of the most disappointing happy militarys you could possibly get. Yeah, because it reminded you of your dad who drove a citation. Right. He was always mad. Dear so, Chuckers. Yes. Not a lot happened. Hot Wheels just kept going on, expanding more and more and more. I think they had another Happy Meals joint in 91 or something like that. And in 1995, they said, we need to do something big. And they did. They released something called Treasure Hunt Series, which is a purposefully limited release series of cars. I think they did twelve models at 10,000 each originally, and hence the name Treasure Hunt. They were hard to find. Yeah. And one of the cooler ones for me was the old Mobile 442. Yeah. The thing is neat, a dude at my church had a 442, and it was just awesome, man. He had, like, the only muscle car in the youth group two years ago, my brother. I was talking about this dude, Jason Singleton. I was like, Whatever happened to him? He's like, oh, he still lives in so and so. And he went, and you know what, dude? I went, no, he still got it. Oh, yeah. Why would you get rid of it? He still has the car. I went to his Facebook page, and it is, like, the center of his life. I'm sure it's his baby. I mean, he's had that thing since, like, 1986, and it's juiced up, and he's just scared the daylights out of me and that thing. But it was also exhilarating to be riding with him. And, like, 200ft of drag. He would lay, like, power breaking, and he would get, like, four sets of tires a year. Right. He'd be in the passenger seat going, Save me, Jeez. Yeah, I was very scared because I didn't flirt with the wild side back then. The old Mobile 442 is as close as you got. Yes, it was exhilarating. So that was 1995. This Treasure Hunting kind of went it didn't go exactly as planned. Mattel is like, oh, we could make even more money if we put these into wider release. So the original 10,000 releases were redone again and again and again. So treasure hunt kind of became commonplace. Sure. But it was a good idea. And it tapped into this whole idea of collecting. Like, Mattel is like, we know you're out there, and we're going to design these just for you. And we'll talk more about collectors, but just to kind of button up the history of Hot Wheels. It all came full circle in 1996 when Mattel bought Taiko, and hence, Hot Wheels bought Matchbox. So they're all owned by Mattel at this point. Yes. All right. We'll get to the design and collecting right after this. Back then, if you wanted to do a smaller version of a larger car and scale it down, you didn't have computer aided design and stuff. Sometimes you might have had a blueprint, which helped, but sometimes you just had to get out there in the parking lot with the tape measure and just take some measurements and then be good at math. Right. Basically. And like we said, Harry Bradley, who's the daddy of the Hot Wheels designs, he's the guy who did the first 16. He was a GM designer originally in his footsteps, followed Howard Reese, and then after that, Larry Wood. And those are some of the legendary hot Wheels designers. That's the Mount Rushmore of Hot Wheels. Pretty much, yeah. And they would just literally go out and measure these things. And that was one way that hot Wheels were born. Another way was that and this definitely differentiates hot Wheels from Matchbox is that there are hot Wheels that only exist in the hot Wheels world. Yeah. They are called the fantasy cars. They're just the designers imagination come to life. Right. Whereas Matchbox only, I believe, has bread trucks. Exactly. Well, they only have cars that are based on real cars. Right, right. Hot Wheels has a whole fantasy line. It's interesting that they're owned by the same company still, and they just have kept that distinction. Like, some people are Matchbox kids and some kids are Hot Wheels kids. I had both. I think I had a bread truck. Is that why you keep going to the bread truck? Well, no, I didn't have a bread truck, but I do remember having a couple of weird utility type vehicles that I don't remember. They were probably gifts or stocking suffers or something. I don't think I sought it out. I was always into Tonka trucks. I thought tonka was great. They were obviously much bigger, but those were, like, construction vehicles, like dump trucks and stuff like that. And still today, that Volvo dump truck, the giant one with the huge wheels, I think is one of the coolest vehicles ever created. I think I had one of those when I was a kid. I didn't have a lot of Tonka stuff. One of my favorite hot Wheels, though, was the little red express truck. I don't remember that. If you saw it, it might ring a bell. I can't remember what kind of truck it was. I think it was a Dodge, but it was just a cool red step side pickup truck. And it had the two vertical mufflers on each side that went up above the truck. I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah, it's really cool. And if you go to the Peterson Automotive Museum in La. Oh, yeah, they have a really cool exhibit there that I haven't been to in person, but I was looking at it online, permanent exhibit where they have the real life versions of the Hot Wheel cars, and they have a little red express truck, a full sized one. And I saw it and I was like, whoa, did you just die from nostalgia? Might have teared up a little bit at the desk, but they have the gussied up Corvettes with the big chrome engines coming out of the hood. Do they have the 442? I don't know if they have the 442, but I'm willing. Your friend dies, but it's in his will. They'll go straight to the museum. Yeah. I'm going to go to this thing, though, at some point. I don't know on this next La. Trip or not, but it's right there near the La Brea Tarpitz, I think. Oh, yeah. So I want to go check it out in there. Yeah, it's neat. It is neat. But back to the design. These days you're not going to need a tape measure and stuff like that. You're going to Photoshop designs, and you're going to even get a 3D printer to your prototype. That had to have helped them tremendously, because if you're designing real life cars and you have a 3D printer, that's pretty handy, but with Hot Wheels, you can print out pretty much exactly what it's going to look like. Sure. And once they have the prototype done, they'll make a mold out of it and then inject it with molten metal under tremendous pressure. And that's why it's called diecast. You create a die that you cast all of the ensuing ones from. Yeah, and I think they're made with less metal than they used to be. But they still have metal components. Right. I haven't seen a new one in a while. I haven't either, but I'm almost positive they do. And apparently they're still about one dollars. Oh, really? Yes. I was on the Hot Wheels collectors site today, and they kept making reference to about one dollars. So just what's called the mainline, the ones that they make on mass the citation. Exactly. I'll bet if you got your hands on that 1983 citation, it'd be worth a few bucks. You're right. But they kept referring to the mainline stuff, about one dollars. Well, they just kept making their manufacturing cheaper and cheaper. So they've maintained that cost, I guess. Yeah. So as far as collecting goes, the most valuable, and that is not this crazy one made out of diamonds for the 40th anniversary, which we'll talk about in a minute. But the most valuable regular Hot Wheel is the 68 Beach Bomb, which was a VW bus in hot pink that had real surfboards sticking out of the back of it. Yeah. Originally they only. Released, I think 25 of them like that. There are a couple of problems. It was difficult to manufacture them with the surfboard sticking out of the back, even though it was more realistic. Sure. And it also was terrible on like a loop d loop track because I guess the surfboards would either weigh them down or it would get stuck. So they only made just a few of these things. The Beach Bomb that was the highest selling Hot Wheels ever was a pink one. They made even fewer of those because apparently a lot of boys were like, I'm not playing with some pink van, even if it does have cool surfboards sticking out of the back. So the thing sold for like, I think 70 something, $75,000 in $2,000. And it has since sold again in 2011, I saw in La magazine for like $125,000. Yeah, it's a lot of money for a tiny little car. Yeah, it is. And that's the highest one ever, apparently by a long shot, too. Yeah. I've seen others that were worth, like, ten grand and stuff. Like, I think one of those 442 originals is like ten grand. Yes. I guess, like 1970 Mongoose or Cobra are worth about ten grand these days. And a lot of them, just like with any collector's item you'll see, if there was just a few of them made, obviously they're going to be worth a lot more if there is something that where they adjusted the design. Like, for example, the Python was originally called the Cheetah. And then they found out that a real life executive with real life lawyers at GM own the name Cheetah because apparently GM executives just own names for cars that could potentially be used, like every fast animal name. Right, exactly. So they changed it to the Python, but that was after they'd started manufacturing the Cheetah. So there's some out there that say Cheetah stamped on the bottom, and if you have one of those, it's worth ten grand. Yeah. It's funny to think about. It's the same with Star Wars. Like, sometimes the mistake ones are the ones that are super valuable because there was some recall. But you want that one because the Boba Fett's rocket really shot out before kids started choking on them. Right. Or catching on fire. Yeah. And that's the one you want. But as you said, it's all about scarcity and supply and demand. Dude, this whole thing has reminded me of a really great gallery I put together about hilarious knockoff toy. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Go to stuffyheadnow.com and look that up. It's pretty awesome. There's some really strange interpretations of beloved toys, including Star Wars toys, that people who make counterfeit toys come up with to try to skirt trademark law, maybe, or something. Or else they just fully don't understand the toy and what it's allure is, so they just make it in this weird interpretation. It's pretty hilarious stuff. Yeah. It's a good one. We'll post that again. Okay. And then I did mention the diamond studded one. I always think these things are just ridiculous, but to take any of the diamond studded bras was worth I just always think it's kind of dumb. But they did make a 40th anniversary in addition I'm sorry, in 2008 with 2700 little diamonds and rubies for tail lights and black diamonds for the tires and all that stuff. 18 here at White Gold Body. But it's worth cost $140,000 to put together. I'm sure it's gaudy. It's a gaudy hot Wheels. Yeah, the car is cool. It looks like Mad Max's car. Oh, you get is that a picture of it? Yeah. I don't think I saw that. Can you identify that car? What is that? Looks familiar. It does look familiar to me. It's sort of like a DeLorean, but I don't think it is. I don't think so either. No, man, that new mad Max looks good, though. Are they remaking Mad Max? Well, there's a new Reboot, I guess, is what they call it these days. Cool. Who is that? What's his face that played Bain? Oh, yeah, Tom. No, it's it looks it's the same director. Tom Hardy. Yeah, Tom Hardy. But it's the same director from all the Mad Max series. Oh, really? Yeah. And it's supposed to be just like one long, intense chase battle. Yeah. Sounds a lot like a Mad Max movie. Have you ever seen Vanishing Point? I think so. What is that? It was like man, I can't remember the car, but the car was basically the star. It was one long car chase from, I think, Colorado to California. Yeah, I remember that. That's a good one. From the 70s. Yeah. Two lane blacktop. I haven't seen that one. Yeah, that's a good one. That one weirdly. Had James Taylor in it when he was young and on drugs and cool. Were they apologizing to France? No. I don't know what the deal was. Did you hear about that? No. So that whole Charlie hebdo solidarity. March the US. Sent, like, I think the assistant deputy in charge of the USDA or something like that. So to apologize, John Kerry had James Taylor go to France to perform. You've got a French shut up. For the French government. Yeah. Just talk about that. Embarrassing. I know, isn't it? Send guns and roses or something. At least send Guns and Roses from 19 would be guns and Roses, man. One more thing about collecting. If you wanted to be the coolest collector of Hot Wheels on the planet, you would have to build a time machine and go back to 1987 to my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, which is where the first ever Hot Wheels convention collectors convention was held. I really wish I would have gone to that because I was there at the time. What year was it? 87. Oh, yeah. I can't believe we sent James Taylor. I'm still just like I can't focus on anything. Well, if you want to know more about James Taylor or Hot Wheels or just about anything there is in the universe, you can type it into the search bar@housetoforks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this minimum wage argument. Not argument, proposal. All right, listen to how homelessness works from quite a few years ago. And you guys commented that part of the problem was that low minimum wage in comparison, the cost of renting a two bedroom apartment, you'd have to work something like 87 hours per week to afford it, with the implication we need to raise minimum wage. After hearing this, a clear solution occurred to me. I think disagreements on raising minimum wage as a result of simple misunderstanding. On the raise side, people believe this wage should be set at a level that would allow someone to raise a few children and live a modest but reasonably comfortable level, or at least a safe level. On the don't raise it side, people believe minimum wage is just a starting point for working, like for teenagers at their summer job or after school. This I believe workers should, were never intended to and should not expect to be able to support a family that pays minimum wage. So here's my solution. Since we're a democracy here, let's just decide what it is supposed to accomplish and then set it at the appropriate level to do that. If we decide as a nation that someone should be able to raise a family, rent a two bedroom apartment while earning a wage, minimum wage, let's just figure out what that would cost and set the wage there, figuring rent, clothing, food, utilities, transportation, et cetera. Let's say it's 27 grand per year, then set it at that rate. On the other hand, if we as a nation decide that minimum wage is just a starting point and not meant to support a family, it's intended for people with no work history or experience and low to no marketable skills, and we need to set minimum wage at a relatively low level and let the market, the free market will ultimately determine the wage for entry level workers. And workers historically have been able to increase compensation by gaining skills and good work history. With this settled, any argument about setting minimum wage at a living wage would be mistaken because we all just decided that people are not meant to live on minimum wage and certainly not meant to support a family. That is from Joe Pro Hoska in Reno, Nevada. And interesting, I look forward to seeing the rebuttal email. Yeah, love that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's a great proposal. I think that is what it's based on. Sure. But as far as I know, the cost of living calculations are really out of date and take a lot of stuff into account that doesn't really apply any longer. Plus, regardless of what you think it should or should not be, the fact is, adults with two kids are still going to be working these jobs. It's not just going to be teenagers looking to advance, but it would be nice to put that issue to bed, to say, like, this is what we're trying to achieve, or this is not what we're trying to achieve, right? At the very least to get everybody talking. Yeah, because should some teenager, this first job, make like $14 an hour? I don't know. I don't know if that's sending the right message either. I don't know. We'll leave it up to you guys, our dear listeners. When I started working, it was like $3 an hour or something. It was ridiculously low. That is ridiculously low. Yeah. If you want to let us know how you feel about Joe's proposal was it Joe? I believe it was Joe. Renojo. Renojo. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S kpodcast. You can post it on Facebook. Comstuffynow. You can put it in an email at stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. And just for kicks, you can hang around our home on the web stuffyouknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit householdworks.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 hare stylist 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." | ||
c4a5fa74-5460-11e8-b38c-ab041416daea | SYSK Selects: How White-collar Crime Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-white-collar-crime-works | White-collar crime often involves fraud and other nonviolent acts. For most people, the term "white-collar crime" conjures up images of CEOs conniving their way to fortune. But what is it, really? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break down the facts in this classic episode. | White-collar crime often involves fraud and other nonviolent acts. For most people, the term "white-collar crime" conjures up images of CEOs conniving their way to fortune. But what is it, really? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break down the facts in this classic episode. | Sat, 19 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=263, tm_isdst=0) | 43265556 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh, your old pal. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen one of those overlooked gems from way back in July of 2012, eight years ago. Can you believe that? It's how whitecollar cross crime works. So sit back, relax, and learn about how the other half commits crime. 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 Siffan on his lacroix mineral water. Yeah, it's delicious. And this isn't even sponsored by the Quoir. We've done this like two or three times. Yeah, I agree. Lacroix, call us. And since you put the two of us a couple of microphones in an ice cold can of refreshing La Cua mineral water together, you have something called Stuff You Should Know. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. I'm looking to see who makes this, actually. Oh, no, I thought I was going to say, like, Coca Cola and small letter. Is it Lacroix? No, it's Sundance Beverage Company. Oh, yeah. They're huge. From Minnesota. I think that's perfect. That is a perfect sponsor for Stuff You Should Know, a little guy that's producing a great product. Agreed. Lacroix. So, Chuck yes. I've got an intro today. Awesome. I missed these. Stop criticizing me. No, I mean, so very recently, a trio of Brits economists, British economists, bonedry. They're like walking saltine. They're very exciting. But anyway, these guys did something pretty cool. They studied bank robberies, and their study was published in a journal called Significance. It's actually kind of a cool journal. It takes statistics and applies to real world stuff. So it's an interesting statistics journal, if there is such a thing. And if there is, this is it. And what these guys found was that bank robbery is actually a really terrible way to make a living. Yes, I would agree with that. Morally, economically, it's a terrible way to make a living, too. Sure. The payoff is no good, right? Yes. They looked at a lot of variables, like the number of people involved, and they found that the bigger the gang, the more the bigger the hall, I guess. But it also meant that's one extra mouth to divide up amongst, unless you're like one of those bankrupt. It just kills everybody afterwards. You don't want to get in bed with one of those guys like Ben Affleck or like In Heat, when there are a lot of killing afterward and Heat. Yeah. And in the town. Ben Affleck's recent heist movie. Yeah. A lot of killing going on. I was going to let that one walk by, but you brought it up twice. I enjoyed it. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, so, anyway, there's a lot of variables involved, but what they found is no matter what in the UK, you can make off with about 31 grand. That's not bad. Per. Yes. And on average, that's what the take was. So in the UK. It's not so bad, but at the same time, 31 grand. What are you going to do with that? Yeah, if you want to live the high life, you got to rob, like, four or five banks a year easy. Right, okay. Or if you're in the US. You have to rob a lot more than that. So the UK suffers about 106 bank robbers a year. In the US. There's 12,000. Wow. And of those 12,000, the average take is, like, four grand. They only have how many a year? England, 106. God, that's amazing. They have really stiff gun laws, and I think that probably deterred bank robbery, because you kind of have to have a gun or a note in your pocket and it says something. Well, these guys figured out that the presence of a firearm increased your take. Okay. But anyway, so $4,300. Yeah. That's not much at all. No. And about a third of bank robberies, I guess, in both countries yield nothing. Zero. Zero. Wow. So it's a lot of hard work, a lot of risk for very little gain. The real money is in white collar crime. Oh, yes. You want to make some cash quick? Maybe one good heist. It's going to set you up for the rest of your life. And even if you're caught, even if you're caught, the chances are you will have a mild, if any, penalty levied against you. White collar is the way to go. Yeah. We're talking guys who tell people that they are financial investors and get friends and family and parents of the Little League that they coach to give them 900 grand. There's other guys who just have little penny stock companies that pump up their stock prospects, called stock touting and dump all of their shares. Sure. That's investor fraud. They make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. It's where the real money is. And historically speaking, it has really low risk even if you're caught. All right, so we're endorsing white collar crime. We're not endorsing it. I was being facetious. Okay. I thought you meant up with white collar crime in 2012. No, as a matter of fact, it's going down. The times are definitely changing. There's a big struggle going on right now as to figuring out just the right amount of punishment with white collar crime, because there's a lot of factors involved. It's a lot different from blue collar crime eg. Stealing a car, robbing a bank. There's a lot of differences that differentiate it that separate the two. And one of those now is the sentencing form is probably stiffer, which is a total reversal from how it used to be before. And they've also closed a lot of the Club Feds down that got so much press. Yes. Well, they've changed them. They're still there. They just are changed. A lot of them are shut down, like, period. Oh, really? Yeah, just to ship them to real federal penitentiaries. Penitentiaries. Penitentiaries. That reminded me of a word that we'll definitely be hearing at some point in this podcast. It's a ponzi. Oh, yeah. Because that's definitely white collar. Part of the problem with white collar crime, Josh, as you know from reading this, is that it's hard to come up with an exact definition of what constitutes it. So that's why they have a hard time getting great statistics on punishment and fines, levied, and how many they're catching. But I'm going to go with nonviolent crime. That typically involves and you have to say things like typically, because it's kind of all over the map. Right. Typically involves deceit and fraud given by a perpetrator because of their occupation. Yes. And for that reason, a lot of times it's called occupational crime. Yeah. And if you look at it through that view, which is a very broad view of white collar crime, it's not just the execs in the $3000 suits who are perpetrating this. It's the guy who's stealing pencils from work. Yeah. Or nonviolent deceitful, especially if somebody asked him if he did it, and he says no, and it's because you're granted this opportunity through your occupation. Actually, I would call it petty theft. But I'm saying, like, in a very broad definition of white collar crime, that definitely counts. But for the most part, when you think of white collar, you think about the CEOs, you think about investor fraud, embezzlement, that kind of stuff. Exactly. Feds have been after in the United States and earnest since 1974, as far as a dedicated division. Yeah. The FBI. Yeah, and that's because of Nixon, I read. And then, despite that, about $300 billion a year, and that's a pretty rough estimate. It's a 2010 estimate. 2010, yeah. So let's talk about a few ways you can commit white collar crime. Yeah. Because that definition you gave was beautiful. It's pretty good. And there are some that, just like I said, investment fraud or embezzlement or just prototypical white collar crime. Insider trading is one that's a big one, which falls under securities fraud, right? Yeah. I mean, it's a type of securities fraud. So basically, insider trading. I swear we've done something on this. I don't think so. It must have been in our Fanny and Freddie presentation, then. We studied a lot of this stuff. Did we? Yeah, and I thought we'd done a podcast, and I guess not. But insider trading is essentially like, let's say that you and I find out that Discovery had an awesome quarter, and so we go and buy a bunch of Discovery stock for nothing, and then it just shoots through the roof after the stock price comes up. That's inside of trading. Sure. That's using private knowledge about a publicly traded company for your own gain. That's a nono to other people. That would count as well. And then as Martha Stewart. Yeah. If they took part, then they would be insider traders as well. Exactly. And it works the opposite way as well. Like if you find out there's a lot of terrible information that's going to make your stock drop, that's when you sell before that information becomes public, you're in trouble, big trouble. Securities fraud, which insider trading is kind of like that. But it is also manipulating cooking the books, you've heard that term of your own company to maybe undervalue a stock before it goes public or I mean there's all different variations, but it basically involves manipulating numbers in a dishonest way. Right. That pump and dump scheme. Yeah. Where it's stock touting that's all securities fraud. And then there's antitrust violations. Or another good one. This has been kind of big lately. So Google is supposedly hogging the YouTube metadata, which is preventing Microsoft from making a decent app for it. Oh, really? Yeah. And Google's like, well, it's proprietary or whatever. And Microsoft is like, no, you got to kind of have to share that. They're alleging an antitrust violation. Companies kind of police one another with that. Sure. And then also price fixing is a big one, which is like the opposite of companies policing one another. It's collusion between companies and like Apple and book publishers fixing the prices of ebooks allegedly has been going on. Oh, really? Yeah, man, it's going all over the place. It's a dirty, dirty world. Bribery one of the oldest tricks in the book. Obviously that involves some sort of a payoff or a kickback in exchange for whatever information. I get the bid, my company gets your bid for this government job and I get a little kickback. Or I give you a little kickback. Rather any kind of maybe favorable decision that can influence your company. Yeah. Little grease in the palm going on. So here's three high quality frozen steaks. Please consider it. And you say consider. Granted. And within each of these stakes is a $1 million bill that doesn't even exist. What? Frozen steaks with money in them. A million dollar bill. Okay, we know about frozen deutsch marks. Somebody sent us a dollar, by the way. I want the dollar. I'll give you $0.50. All right, well, I guess it's 33 and a third. We got to give Jerry your cut. Don't go there. We'll talk about it later. Embezzlement. Yeah, Office Space. Everyone seen the movie? Office space. Sure. A little program. They had to like shave a cent or something off of a transaction. That's embezzlement. They were given the opportunity through trust with books, with accounting. They basically had access to the money and skim some off the top. That's embellishing up. You're in the wrong guys. Money laundering, which we have done a podcast on. Yeah. Policy schemes on tax evasion. Huge. So basically these are all the stars. There's also other ones like espionage, industrial espionage, corporate espionage. Yeah. Selling secrets. White collar. Sure. Remember the lady who tried to sell Pepsi's secret to coke? Yeah. That was pretty heck neat. No coke secret to Pepsi right here. She wasn't. They went and called the cops. She didn't do a real good job. I bet she was surprised. Environmental law violations, like dumping toxic waste. Yeah. Covering that up like Aaron Brokovich style. Yeah. One of the things they point out in here, which is when it comes to things like your little office space scheme, that you just touted a lot of times it's difficult to imagine victims like in office space. They think, no one's going to miss a penny. It's a huge company. Right. So you commit these crimes without realizing that someone has hurt somewhere down the line. If you dump your stock, your company stock that you know is about to tank, and I'm not saying it's understandable, but if you've worked your whole career investing in this company with your 401, it's about to tank. You're like, man, I need to sell this or else I'm done for my family's. Done for? Yeah. You don't think about the people buying the stock. They're the victims. No, it's absolutely true. And, I mean, you are pawning your problem off on somebody else. But I think you paint a really excellent scenario. You can, in some cases, feel bad for the white collar criminal, especially if it's just some average Joe who's worried about his 401K. Yeah. Or in the case of Enron, you don't feel bad for the upper dudes. You feel bad for everyone in that company that got defrauded. Right. But they were strictly victims. They didn't turn around and try to dump their stocks. But that's a very visible case of screwing over your own employees. But you make a good point. Like, even if the criminal is sympathetic, there still is a victim. Even if it's just some amorphous trader they'll never meet. Even if the victim is some, like, hedge fund manager, it's really tough. There's, like a really weird spectrum here. I don't know if it's a bell curve or, like the UV spectrum, who knows? But there's sympathies, like, placed in different spots. Sympathies and antipathies placed along, depending on who did what and what they gained from it and what their motives were. Agreed. Because you got to also have credit card fraud and computer and mail fraud and counterfeiting and things like that. Like the Nigerian email scams that's white collar, and they're in the same boat as, like, Ken Lay and Jeff Skillings. Ren Ron. Exactly. Same scummy crooks. Or let's say you commit a little credit card fraud or bankruptcy fraud, and you're just like, this would be an easy way to get out of my debts. Or I just say someone stole my credit card. It's very easy there to not envision a victim because it's Chase Manhattan Bank, and, like, they're going to notice. But what happens is they raise the rates on you and me, and all of a sudden, everyone across the board is paying more money for stuff. Yes, that is true. That is very true. And everybody's probably I think, a good companion piece that occurred to me is to go listen to our why do corporations have the same rights as you? One of the fundamental flaws of corporate policy is that you serve your shareholders first. Right. You need to adhere to the law, but really, ultimately, anything you can do to serve your shareholders is your mandate as a corporate governor. Right. That includes keeping the profit margin as high as possible. Yeah. Which you're not going to go to your shareholders and be like, hey, we're making enough money. We took kind of a hit, but we're still making a ton of profit, so we'll just take a little hit this year. No, we took a hit, so we're going to fire people. However you reconcile that, I mean, that's your own personal beliefs, like what you feel about that. But that is reality as far as business goes. Right. There's fraud. There are adjustments to the fraud, absorbing the fraud, and it's the corporation trying to get as lean as possible. Yes. They're not going to take the hit for that. They're not going to say, oh, well, a bunch of people defaulted on their credit cards this year. I guess we'll just have a bad year. No. And I know in reality, that's how it works, but I just find it disingenuous to be like, well, everybody suffers and people lose their jobs because of fraud. There's a point b in there that has to be held accountable to some degree. Well, which is your own frigging ethical code of conduct. And like, how about not doing that because it's the wrong thing to do? No, but I'm saying that there's an institution that's absorbing the hit and then turn around firing this poor guy. Yeah, exactly. It's tough because I came across a word when they were describing white collar crime, giving a definition of it, and they said victims diffuse. Yes. You don't meet the person, the victim passes along the hit to other people. It's nebulous. Yeah. And even if they're raising rates by, like, a quarter of a percentage point, or you're paying an extra $2 as a consumer a year, it's still not right. Yeah. 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Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So where did this come from? Josh? It sounds like it came from a cold wool delivery boy. I want to know more about this. Was this dude just cold or did you really steal a lot of wool? No. So you're talking about the carrier's case? The carrier's case of 1473. Ish it's the first white collar trial? Yes. And it resulted in the first white collar law in 15th century England. And this wool transporter was given a bunch of wool and said, hey, take this wool to this person. And it was his job. Yeah. So he decided to instead just keep the wool for himself, for his own use. Okay, so you looked into this more? Yeah, I thought he might have been cold on his journey and said, I'm going to keep some of this wool now. He kept some of the wool? I think he kept all of it, but somebody gave it to him. He's like, thanks, chump. After all, he was. But the key is, and this is something that has woven into the history of white collar crime, what he did was not illegal at the time. Right. The law that was enacted as a result of the carrier's case was they were saying, okay, this isn't illegal, but obviously there's a huge problem with this, so we're going to create a law that outlaws this act so people can't do it anymore. Good point. And basically that's what happened. That's kind of what happens with every law, I guess. Someone commits at first and then someone says, hey, maybe we shouldn't do that. Yeah, I guess. But in this case, especially like the industrial revolution in the west, obviously you started getting these larger corporations and all of a sudden things like monopolies and price fixing and employee safety and all these things come into effect for the first time. So that's sort of when it was really born and when they started saying, hey, we need to look at something called antitrust. Yeah, again, like monopolies were not illegal, but when a company bought up all of its competitors and said, oh, suddenly the price for your groceries, like, through the roof. Right. Where else are you going to go? It wasn't illegal, but the people of the world started screaming and governments finally responded. It was really the US. That first had the real first solid response in the Sherman Antitrust act in like, the 1870s, maybe, I think. Yeah, 1890. Name for Senator John Sherman. Ohio republican dude. Yeah. Chairman of the Senate senate Finance Committee. Which I didn't know they even had way back then. I didn't either, but I mean, it seems like a basic committee there. So this is interesting in that it was voted on. It won by vote of in the Senate, 51 to one, in the House by 242 to zero. Wow. So there was one dude that didn't vote for it. And then I think 25 years later when they came up with the Clayton Antitrust Act to really put some punch into the Sherman Act, it was 277 to 74 and 46 to 16. So in that 24 years, it sounds like maybe things got slightly corrupt here and there. Well, it wasn't that it was that maybe it was, but there was also some real problems with the strengthening. It was really vague. It basically said, like, from here forth, all anti competitive corporate measures are illegal. Right. And then it left it to the courts to decide what was what, and the courts weren't really in the mood to enforce it, so it went largely unenforced. Although American Tobacco Company and Standard Oil, like two of the biggest companies in the country, were dissolved under the Sherman action. Yeah. Standard Oil. Big time. Imagine going to a company now and saying, like, hey, Apple, it's too big. So we're going to dissolve you into 31 companies. We have all these federal regulators here and they're going to come in and look at everything and then dissolve you into different companies. Sorry. That's what they did. Yeah. Okay. Even still, it didn't have enough teeth. So they came up with the Clayton Antitrust Act, and then that one really spelled things out like, you couldn't do price discrimination anymore. Right. Which if you were black in America during the Jim Crow era, price discrimination was mind boggling. Oh, yeah. You walk into a store if you're allowed in there to begin with, and they'll just make up whatever price they want. Yeah. I'm reading this Consumerism in America book and it's at this point now, is really just this blemish on American history. Slavery wasn't bad enough to have slavery light through the Jim Crow era. It's just disgusting. Exactly. Okay, so there is no price discrimination, allegedly. Corporate mergers were outlawed in the Clayton yeah act. And then interlocking boards where you had like competitive companies, but the same people on the board of each. Right. You can't have that. And then also exclusive contracts where it's like, hey, Home Depot, you can sell our weed whackers, but you can't sell anybody else's. Contracts are out. Right. Hey, Home Depot. They do stuff like that now, though, right? Maybe not exclusively, but they carry they do now. Limited number of brands, corporate mergers, interlocking boards, exclusive contracts, all that stuff went away. They all got chipped away. Okay. This act is like, not in force anymore, basically. Well, that's one thing that bugs me about actually the big box. Hardware stores, grocery shopping. You only have access to who they have partnered with. Right. Whether it's your potato chip that you want or your weed whacker that you want. It's true. And most of the big box stores also have exclusive contracts. The other way. It's like, yeah, we'll sell your weed whacker, but you can't sell it. No one else can. Right. So it's like a real gamble, I understand, to sign on to one of these giant corporations. Well, that's in the Walmart effect. That was one of the things. I think they used like a tent company or awning company, and this mom and pop awning company all of a sudden gets a Walmart contract and they're like, sweet, they answered all our prayers. They ordered like 30,000 of these. They ordered 30,000. They open up like three new buildings, hire all these employees, and then the next year they come back and say, we want 30,000 more, but we're going to pay you about 60% less. And you've already bought the buildings and you've invested in the materials and the people and all of a sudden you're screwed. One thing that I've long thought, and I'm going to totally take flack for this, but I still think it's worth saying, like, you hear, like, well, that's just business. Yeah. I feel that any institution where, like, morally reprehensible acts can just be offhandedly dismissed as a matter of course of that institution is inherently flawed. There's an inherent problem with it. That's not okay, agreed. Like we don't just go, well, that's just murder. Right? Well, that's just stealing. Welcome to Earth, human. We have moral and legal guidelines that we follow and business and corporations have so long stood outside of these things that it always bugs me when it's just like, what are you going to do? Yes. I don't like that. So sorry. I'm off my soapbox. No, I agree completely. I'm off of my Thai brand soapbox. Well said. So things are kicking along here in the industrial west. Corporations are getting larger and all of a sudden these crimes start happening and something called a muckraker in the 19th and early 20th century comes about. And I didn't realize a muck breaker was exclusively a journalist. Yes, it's for an investigative journalist. I thought it would was anyone raking muck? No, but it's specifically a journalist who basically early on said, you know what, there's bad stuff going on, see, and I'm going to expose you right. In Sinclair was one. Oh, really? And he wrote, The Jungle changed, of course. I mean, the FDA basically came about because of that investigation that he conducted. Well, muck rakers raked a lot of muck and caused a lot of problems in these companies. And one of the things that came about because of the muck raking were things like the Clayton Act. That's exactly right. Exposing all the stuff. Exactly. And things like the FDA, federal regulations, consumer protections. The muckrakers basically stirred up public sentiment like, hey, don't be idiots. Like, this stuff is going on. Right. And a lot of people said, well, it's not illegal. And then, unfortunately, there are guys like EA Ross, who is a criminologist and a sociologist, and he started really kind of looking into this and said, hey, man, these people might not be criminal, but let's call them criminal OIDs. Like, that is the coin, the term for people who, especially in business, carried out these terrible acts that weren't illegal. He argued that even though it's not illegal, they're causing ill, and these people are still responsible for him. So make a law that outlaws it. Dummies. Yeah. And he inspired a guy named Eh sutherland. Okay. He came before Sutherland. Yeah. Got you. Ross was working at the time of the Muckrakers, and then Sutherland came about 20 years later. Yeah. Sutherland coined the term actually white collar crime in 1939. And he was a criminologist and sociologist, and he had a broader definition that basically it was the high society and not the lower class at all committing these crimes. Right. Which nowadays you can't really say that because anyone can get a stock tip and commit. It happens all the time across all spectrums of the class system. But Sutherland's point was and he wrote a book called White Collar Crime. Yeah. His point was that there is a huge bias in the United States where law enforcement and the courts leaned heavily on the working class crimes sure. And just basically ignored the crimes of the upper class and said, this is not okay. Like, if a guy is going to steal $1,000 from a cash register with no gun or anything like that right. Like, there are other factors, but let's just say a guy steals $1,000 from a cash register and he's poor, and a guy steals $1,000 from an investor and he's rich, they should be treated equally, and they're not. And that's what Sutherland's point was. And he was the first dude to really bring this to light, wasn't he? Yeah. Well, Ross kind of started, too, but Sutherland was very well received. It was well received in certain corners, but there are also certain flaws pointed out by people over the years. One of the things mentioned in the article said he failed to distinguish illegal crime from mere deviant behavior. Right. Apparently, his whole premise was, like, you're into donkeys. You're a white collar criminal. Exactly. And the other thing I mentioned, too, was that he pretty much said it was anyone like any upper class nonviolent crime. Right. And that's definitely evolved. And I think fairly sure. I think you can be working class, you can be business class. That's a big part of white collar crimes definition, is that your opportunity arises because of the trust that's granted to you through your occupation. Yes. Even if you're a lower level employee, you still may have access. Like the lady who wanted to sell the coke secret. She wasn't like a CEO. No. She was an admin, I believe. 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Just go to Stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So there's one thing that, like you said, they like to shoot a hole in Sutherland's theory, or they say his definition is too broad because he did include behavior that's not illegal. But it's a very legitimate point to say. You kind of have to, because if not, then we wouldn't have had the Sherman Antitrust Act, we wouldn't have had the Clayton Act, we wouldn't have had the FDA, all of these things. That the Carrier's case. He would have gotten off scot free. And what he did was not illegal. So it has to evolve over time. Agreed. Okay. And it has. Agreed. So let's talk about, I guess, the impacts of today's modern white collar crime. I was like, man, that was suspenseful all of a sudden. Thanks. Yes. We've talked about a few of these, about seemingly not having a victim. But what happens is you rip off a huge corporation, they'll raise the prices. There's another ripple effect. You talked about cutting jobs to meet the needs of the investors. If it's a publicly traded company, right. When there's stock fraud committed, insider scandals like Enron are going to ripple out oh, my God. Throughout the stock market. Basically cause people to be unsure and have no faith in the stock market. All of a sudden. Yeah. That's dangerous. Yeah. Think about all the people who just lost everything. I know. Oh, my God. Yeah. I get just as angry, if not more angry at something like that than something like heinous crime. Yes. I'd say equal. They're both scumbags. Okay, so you said, like, in 74, the FBI first started that's when they created this white collar crime division. Yeah. So apparently, like yes. And it was a response, like the university of Michigan survey that they conducted between 1958 I think, and 1973, they found that people who said that they trust the federal government went from 73% to 37%, and then apparently the time between 1958 and 1973. Wow. Yeah. It flip flopped. Yeah, I could see that over that time period, the 60s. Yeah. One of the big ones was just like fraud and corruption at high levels. And so the FBI created this white collar crime thing. One of the other things that differentiates white collar crime from regular working class crime is the police ability to police it. Right. You walk into a room and there's some guy weighing out cocaine. He's a criminal. Yes. You walk into a room and there's some guy on a computer doing a pump and dump scheme. Who knows? The average cop isn't equipped to detect this kind of crime. Right. And as a matter of fact, even very well trained cops aren't typically equipped to detect this kind of crime. One of the hallmarks of white collar crime is that it's very difficult to prove, it's very difficult to uncover, and it's also difficult to prosecute. Yeah. And there's no smoking gun. There's no paper trail, or there may be a paper trail, but it's probably electronified. Sure. So it's a little harder to follow. You got to really have people that know what they're doing, and that's why the FBI created that division. And I guess they're doing a good job, but it's kind of hard. Well, the justice department has been going after white collar crime lately under Obama pretty hard here or there. And then the Sarbanes Oxley act definitely stepped things up. She sounds like too much. Yeah. I mean, I've had to comply with this at various when I worked in the Phil business, production companies had to jump through way more hoops with paperwork because of Sarvanes Oxley. Yes. Do you want to tell them? Well, it was in 2002, and it was to improve corporate governance, which is basically accountability between corporations and stakeholders. What it amounted to was a lot more paperwork, essentially a lot more proving of numbers and showing numbers and jumping through hoops. It was a direct reaction of the fallout of Enron from the fallout of Enron and Tyco and all the other companies around that time. But one of the other things that did checkers was it quadrupled sentences in a lot of cases for white collar crime. So now you have guys like Bernie Madoff getting 150 years. There's a guy named Sholem Weiss who was involved in the breakup of some insurance company. He got 845 years. Wow. He gets out in 27, 54. I don't think he's going to see that. I don't either. But I mean, a guy named Rich Harkness got 100 years for a $39 million Ponzi scheme. And all of this is like post Sarbanes Oxalate, except shown Weiss, which is really saying something, still got that kind of sentence. Now sentences are like quadruple, and it's like well, wait a minute. Maybe this is a little too much like just retribution on the rich. It is. And that's kind of, I think, why a lot of people are having a hard time feeling bad for ridiculously wealthy people who were hucksters and frauds or people who built people out of their retirement accounts. It's tough to feel sorry for them, but legally speaking, it's like, well, wait a minute. You were worried about the guy who stole $1,000 out of a till being treated differently from the guy who stole $1,000 from an investor. Now it's flip flop. How is that any better? Exactly. One of the arguments for these kind of things is that these people are traditionally and historically have been treated differently because they look like the judges that are sentencing them. Yeah. And so judges historically really have taken it easy on them. Let's go ahead and just call them white dudes. Okay. But they also have been you can make the case that they are usually first time offenders. They're usually family people. That's something that the judges put out there. Well, this is a family man. He's not much of a flight risk. He's probably never going to do this again. Yes, he's a danger to society. Yes, he didn't use a weapon, which is a huge differentiation. And so sentences have typically been light, but you can also kind of say, well, it feels like we haven't quite felt it out. We've traditionally ignored white collar crime. Now we're really sticking it to them. Well, it's that whole argument with prison. Is it like punishment for a crime done, or is it rehabilitating a person who has a problem with crime? Well, with an 845 year sentence, it's making an example out of that person. Sure. Because since you can't police it, another way to prevent it is to send a message through the courts. Like, you do this, man, you're going to prison for a long time. Yeah. I don't know if that's such a deterrent, though, for some of these people. I don't know. Think about it. 20 years in a federal paying you say Club Fed is not around any longer. Yeah, true. And, I mean, this is like 20 actual years. Some guy named Thomas Petters recently got 50 years, and he will spend 40 years in jail, and he's 52, and he will probably die in prison. Now, that's a big deal to somebody who's like, maybe I shouldn't do this insider trade. Maybe I should let this 50 grand just walk by because it's not really worth it. Well, something like that. I'm talking about the ones who are getting rich by the tens of millions of dollars. What I want to see is that these people don't get out of prison and still have all those millions of dollars, like, hidden in different foreign accounts and offshore islands. The financial part is what really bugs me. I didn't get a chance to I meant to look up and see if any of the enron victims and employees were ever repaid or if they were just sol. I am under the distinct impression they were sol. Really? Because the company was in such bad shape that even dissolving, it's just like putting assets up. No, I think some people did get some money, but I don't think it was anything approaching what they lost. Well, if whoever commits these crimes gets out of jail and they have two pennies to rub together, then those two pennies more than they should have, I think. Well, that's the thing. So the government started prosecuting under the Rico Act, which is the same thing they bust up mafia organizations with, and they've been fighting white collar crime with that. And one of the things about the Rico Act is it allows states and individuals who are harmed to sue for up to three times the damages. Yes, but even then all they have to do is say, yeah, I don't have that money. You kidding me? It's true. You can't pay it. No, it's true. Like in the Maidoff case, the guy who was assigned to basically get money back for investors has gotten, I don't remember how much made off fleece, but let's say it was 8 billion. The guys managed to get like 6 billion back. Oh, really? Yeah, he's done a really good job of getting the money back. And that's an example. That's not a figure, but it's something pretty significant. You're still going to get an email that wasn't 8 billion. I'm looking forward to the ones that hey, man, we don't listen to you for free to hear your opinion about class. All right, let's move on to other countries. Things are different all over the world. Obviously, when it comes to big business and business dealings, western Europe has followed right behind the US most wholeheartedly with laws to prevent corruption. Eastern Europe is coming on board a little slower, but then you go into other countries like in Western Africa, and it may be customary to Greece palms to get a deal going. Or in India where apparently if you're a truck driver, you're going to have to bribe people to keep your rig on the road. And that's just how it is there. Right. And not only is it customary, it's frequently legal. Yeah. Russia bribes all over the place. So you want to land contract, you might have to bribe somebody. So if you're a multinational corporation, it's tough to do. It's headquartered in America. Yeah, you have like a real problem facing you, especially, like I said, the Justice Department under Obama has been prosecuting white collar crimes and going big time after people under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which says if you're an American company, you can't engage in bribes even if it's legal in that country. Well, good. Yeah, but what's the point? Like, why hamstring American business abroad? Yeah, exactly. And to help us out. Actually, there has been a unified committee called the company I'm sorry, committee called Transparency International. And they are out to get rid of corruption and to unify business ethics all over the world. Right. And that's the reason that you hamstring American business is basically saying, hey, we can take the hit in the hopes of pressing the rest of the world into the same clean up, direct competitive laws we have here in the States that work very well. So good luck to them. Yeah, that's it, man. I got nothing else. No, we should play this one out with talking heads. Big business. Okay, agreed. Okay, so, Chuck, let's see if people want to learn more about white collar crime, I would strongly advise them to go read this article by Jane McGrath. And there's a Simpsons reference in it. It's the way to go, Jane. You can type in white collar crime in the search bar. Howstep works.com? Which friendo brings up listener mail? That's right, Josh. I'm going to call this hot off the presses. Good, cause I'm going to suck for that stuff. Okay, Chuck and Josh and Jerry, I want to say thank you for all the hours of listening. My brother Chase and I've been listeners nearly as long as he has been making them. There was even one New Year's Day where all we would do is listen to your Hangover podcast on repeat. I don't know if that's good for Hangover. Yes, it's funny and informative and I always feel like calling my brother after listening to the latest episode I'm writing you because it's recently his birthday. He's the best brother in the world and downright awesome human being. It would mean a lot to me if you could tell the stuff. You should know, listeners, about his latest project. When his friend Jim survived cancer, he told Chase that he gained strength from the music he loved. Over two years, 200 and 2600 tracks. 202,600 tracks? That's a weird way to put it. What would that be? 202,600? Would that be wait, how many? 202,600? Yes, that would be 2800. Would it? Or 2200. No, 2600 plus 200 is 2800. Nearly 200 artists. This person is insane. No, she's not. Over two years, 200 and 2600 tracks, nearly 200 artists from other countries all over the world have allowed them to share that message. They are releasing their second compilation disk. Electronic saviors colon industrial music to cure cancer. So these artists compilations are putting together got you. Apparently 200 and 2600 tracks. They're a registered US charity and all proceeds go to Cancer Research. And if you're into electronic music and if you want to support cancer research, you can go to www.electronicsaviers.com. And that is something Chase has got going. And his sister Laura Dudley is a big fan of her bro. He sounds like the swell guy. Nice. I'm all for it. That is good therapy. Good answer. We had to promote a good cause, Chucker. We tried to do that. You did good. Yes, we always want to hear about good causes. So you can get in touch with us. Let us know about yours. We'll try our best to let everybody else know about it, especially if people can support it. Agreed. Let's see. Also, enjoy a little talking Head big Business from the live album Stop Making Sense release. We're sure it's up on itunes, Amazon and elsewhere. You can get in touch with us at syskpodcast. On Twitter, you can go to Facebook.com Stuffysheanow, and you can send us a regular old email to stuffpodcast@howstuffarks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyshow.com. Stuffyheanow is a production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
Your limb is torn off - now what? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/your-limb-is-torn-off-now-what | Were you to be the unfortunate victim of a limb removal of any sort, you could take hope. Here in the 21st century, doctors have gotten pretty handy at reattaching arms and legs, replacing thumbs with toes, rebuilding breasts, all to great success thanks | Were you to be the unfortunate victim of a limb removal of any sort, you could take hope. Here in the 21st century, doctors have gotten pretty handy at reattaching arms and legs, replacing thumbs with toes, rebuilding breasts, all to great success thanks | Tue, 07 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=7, tm_isdst=0) | 33005903 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you Should Know from House to Forks. Calm. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know because Jerry's over there too. How are you doing, buddy? Besides sick? I'm not sick. I've got a little bit of a bug, but never admit when you're sick. Do you think that's the first step in being sick is saying I'm sick? I definitely believe in psychosomatic effects. The mind has an impact on the body. Well, if you can be a hypochondriac, surely you can do the opposite, right? Yeah. You can will yourself in and not being sick. Anyway, people, the show must go on, and I just want to point out how dedicated my partner here is to his craft. Right. Well, I also want to say, I want to promise that it's not going to be like the great six week illness of no, you don't get sick. That was back in the old days, the unhealthy days. I smoked and everything. Yes. Your body didn't know how to heal. Right. It was enjoying nicotine. Now I'm just like, I'm not getting sick. I said it to myself last night, and here I am, better than you ever. Josh 2.0. Thank you. All right, let's do this. Okay. Are you ready? Yeah. I got a story for you. I bet I know it. I'll bet you do, too. Eddie Knowles. Yeah. You saw. His name is Everett. NOLs, Jr. But everybody calls him Eddie. Two DS and A. Why? I find that unhallow. Yeah. And I didn't know Eddie could be short for Everett. Never heard that. I don't think it is. I think he just didn't like his name. Okay. Because it seems like you should call him Evie. Yeah, evie. Evie, though. He's a little guy. Tiny. Like a little Elvis. That's right. Well, Eddie. We'll call him Eddie because that's what he preferred to be called. Sure. He was walking home from school one day in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston, and he was walking along the railroad tracks, and there just happened to be a train loaded with gravel hauling out of the area very slowly while he was walking alongside. And he said, you know what? I'm just going to have a little thrill right now and grab onto this train. And he did. He successfully grabbed onto the train, was hanging with, I believe, his right arm, and was having the time of his life just dangling there when he misjudged the distance between the side of the train and the side of a tunnel. And he was pulled into the tunnel support, smacked it and hung on for a second before he was dropped off of the train. The train kept going through the tunnel, leaving Eddie kind of crumpled in a little shivering mass at the mouth of the tunnel. So he stands up and he grabs his arm. He's like, oh, my arm doesn't feel very good. And he starts walking toward town. And apparently he walked about 100 yards uphill when some workers saw him and said, Grab that kid. Because he was covered in blood. He was staggering. He looked like he was out of it. He's clearly in shock, ran and got a woman. Because at the time, this is 1962, a woman was the only one who could provide any kind of initial emergency care. Yeah. And a clerk at, I believe some sort of warehouse came out and started to apply pressure to this boy's wounds. But she had a little bit of trouble when she tried to close the wound with a tourniquet. She found that his arm wasn't attached to his body any longer. He's just kind of holding it there. Very luckily, he was wearing a jacket or else his arm would have been back at the mouth of the tunnel. Yeah, man, can you imagine, like, the guy is holding his arm basically to keep it from falling out of his jacket. Although he didn't know that. No, he didn't. He was in shock. Luckily, he was still lucid enough to tell everybody who he was, where he lived. And they called the hospital, and the hospital scrambled some surgeons, but it wasn't until Chuck He got to the hospital and they started cutting his jacket off that they realized the extent of the damage. This kid's arm was torn clean off. But the operative word is clean. Yeah, that's right. Because Eddie Everett Noel's Jr. Of Somerville, Mass. On May 23, 1962, became the first recipient of a full, successful limry attachment service. First human recipient, right. Yeah, it's a good point. They had done that before in dogs successfully, and they had done all the different surgeries that are required to reattach a limb, but they had never done all of them at once. Like, they'd reattach nerves, they'd reattach bone. Right. They've reattached blood vessels. But they had never had a full amputation than a human being successfully reattached. And from what I read, the doctor was, I don't know, about excited, but they had been looking for a case because they thought, like, I think we can do this. We just need the right case. Right, exactly. When he called his buddy and he's like, I think we got one. Get in there. Like you said, they successfully reattached arteries, nerves, bone, that kind of thing, but never the whole shebang. So they said, well, we know how to do this if somebody will just come along and present us with an arm pulled cleanly off. Especially a twelve year old, because that definitely worked at his advantage. Apparently, an artery, when severed, will plug itself up, especially in younger kids, that plugging is way more successful and happens more quickly. So this kid just basically presented like the perfect case. The main artery, I guess, is brachial artery leading out of his shoulder was a full, like, two inches out of the wound. So they had a lot to work with. And work they did. Yeah. And the arm was on ice and they began working immediately. This is Mass General, by the way. And they started with the arteries and veins and then the nurse felt well, they all sort of saw color and they described it as a glow. Kind of came back into the arm. This kid hopped the train, had his arm pulled off, and within two and a half hours they had gotten circulation back. Yeah. And the nurse grabbed the hand and said, hey, it's warm. That's good. It's warm. She shook it, made it to the metal sign. Everybody in the operating theater is laughing. The bone and the muscle and the nerve and the skin happen in later surgeries. And I think the nerve they made a pretty important decision at the time was to wait on that altogether and let it heal somewhere first. Which is, as it turns out actually, as it turns out, most of this was sort of how they do it today. Yeah. Like they perfected the process from that point through the in the 80s is when they really started coming with lime reattachment. The only difference that I saw was and we'll get into it a little more, but they reattach the arteries first to get circulation, I guess, to keep from more and more tissue dying. Right. And then they reattach the bone by driving a screw and using a hammer. They nail the screw into the marrow and then reattached the armbone. What is it, femur? No, femur is in the leg. You think I would have looked this up already. Yeah, the upper arm bone. Then they drove that into the other end of the screw. Normally now, though, they reattach the bone for us to provide stability. So when you reattach the arteries and veins and stuff, they won't pull away. Yeah. And it was a success story because he couldn't use that hand as his dominant hand any longer, which he said, because he was a good pitcher. Yeah. But he was able to eventually get enough use out of it to where they said about like a left hander would have use of his right hand. So he just sort of had to switch that up. But for 1962, that's pretty successful. Especially considering in 1960 was the very first micro surgery performed just two years previously at the University of Vermont. Oh, yeah. Cocat amounts. Nice. That is dedication. So microsurgery, that's really what we're talking about here. It's the use of a microscope to perform surgery. And when you're attaching, you're essentially sewing together little nerves and blood vessels like a millimeter in diameter. You need a microscope and a tiny, tiny little needle. Right. And you're using tiny, tiny little suture thread, which is about as big as a hair. That's the stuff you're using to suture these blood vessels back together? Not cat gut. No. And it's an extremely involved surgery, as you can imagine, but it's step by step. Like, first you do the blood vessels, then you do the arteries, and you do muscles, ligaments, tendons, all this stuff. And you're doing it in this process, but each part of the procedure is like an enormous surgery in and of itself. Yeah. So like a limery attachment, which is called replantation. I thought it was going to be called, like, limery or something. Yeah, some people call it that. I'm a memorists the sauce of your doctors call it limery, but it usually is. Like, on a whole, the replantation surgery can last like an entire day. Yeah. It's intensive. And I read, too, that the whole micro surgery, the concept of using a microscope for surgery was not accepted at first. Like, doctors and surgeons were like, no, we can't do that. We have to look with our eyes. And so it had to be perfected sort of on the fringe by doctor, by surgeons who are willing to accept this might be the future, and experiment in their basement, I guess, on hapless victims, maybe, or dogs. Yeah. And I didn't look it up, but I didn't get the impression from this article one way or the other how dogs lost their limbs to begin with. Like, was it accidental? And they're like, okay, well, this will reattach it. Or were they cutting dogs limbs off and then reattaching them? Because I'm guessing it was probably the latter. Probably, yeah. I mean, we've talked plenty about that kind of topic. Because, I mean, think about it. Why would dogs limbs be pulled off in any more frequency than human limbs and hence present more cases to practice on? I think they were cutting off dog's limbs and then reattaching, which is messed up. Yeah, it is. So you were talking about microsurgery. What I saw was replacing toes for thumbs got big 60s. That was a big one. So you had a thumb on your foot or a big toe on your hand? Big toe on your hand. Wow. Because apparently 50% to 70% of all the utility in your hand is in your thumb. And if you're missing a thumb, you might as well just not have your hand. You don't need a big toe quite as much. You can use a cane or something like that. To your new Totom. Yeah. And that became perfected in the 60s. Totom, that's a good band name. Yeah. And then in the seventies, free flat tissue transfer became a big thing, which is basically going to a part of your body harvesting an area of your body, like under your thigh, your abdomen, I think, your back, lower back, and then just basically taking the gap and sewing it back together. Right. Yeah. So you have a scar, but you also have a portion of your body that's diminished in size. And then taking that and using it to basically do what we understand as a skin graft, which requires microsurgery as well. It's just basically taking this part here and putting it back over here where there's a bunch of damage and reattaching all of the nerves and the blood vessels and everything. Yeah, I saw when I was looking up photos of this kind of thing, I came across something that I had never seen before. And I didn't get the story, but you could almost sort of gather what was going on just from the photo series. But someone was degloved on their fingers, basically from, like, the hand knuckles forward. All the fingers had no skin from the looks of it. They inserted it into an arm, like, into a bicep. The fingers and, like, they live there for a while, like, inserted under the skin of the arm, and that skin, they later would remove the fingers, and it came off as, like, a big, flat skin graph. Like sticking your hand in an envelope. Crazy. And eventually formed, like, webbed fingers and then fingers. That is crazy. But like I said, no. I don't know, man. I just saw these photos I should have done. I mean, it doesn't really have anything to do with this, but it was just remarkable to see someone with their fingers stuck in their bicep under the skin. Like, I'm having trouble visualizing this. I need to see these photos. Yeah. I'll take a moment, show it to you. Yeah. If you want to see some really gross stuff, you can just Google microsurgery or replantation is another one. Yeah. Man, it's nasty stuff out there. Yeah. But amazing. I looked at so many of them, I kind of got to that point where I was like, well, this isn't gross. This is what the body looks like without skin sometimes, which is gross. No, I wouldn't. Grossed out bodies without skin are gross. I don't think so. I think it's the beauty inside. You become desensitized, my friend. I have. Well, before we get any further, Chuck, let's do a message break, because I got some good stuff coming up. So, Chuck, we understand microsurgery now. It's Frankensteinian, right? Yeah. You're basically just throwing stuff together. Yeah. Because let's say you have a dead person who has a great hand, and you have a live person who's got a poor hand. You cut off the live person's hand, cut off the dead person's hand and attach the live or the dead person's hand to the live person. That's Frankenstein. That's what they're doing. And it's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. But if this ever happens to you, if, say, you have a poor hand in that, it's no longer attached to your wrist. Yeah. That sucks, right? And it's all crushed and damaged or whatever. No, let's say it's intact. Okay. And you say, you know what? I think through my shock that I might be a good candidate for replantation of my hand. What do you do? Well, you want to call 911 immediately because that's just the first thing you do. You go ahead and get folks on the way, or you can ask someone with you to call 911. That's not putting anyone out. Yeah, that's true. If you can't dial, maybe you don't have hands. You could tell Siri to call 911. Yeah, that's the job. Yeah. I actually changed my series to a dude, so it's not her anymore. Oh, yeah. To an Englishman, actually. Yeah. It's kind of fun. Reginald, I don't know what his name is, actually, but he'll say stuff like, say, Call Josh, and he'll say, Ringing Josh. Oh, yeah. Instead of calling. Yeah. It's classy. Kind of fun. Anyway, you want to dial 911, get them on the way, and then immediately you want to just try and stabilize the patient. You want to stop the bleeding. Right. Either with heavy pressure or a tourniquet above the wound. Like a 1960 female. Yeah, exactly. And once you get the patient stabilized and they're not going to bleed out there in the kitchen or wherever it is, you want to get the digit or the hand or the limb and put it on ice. But not directly on ice. Right. Put it in a bag and then put that bag on ice. Yeah. You want to pack it in ice, as much ice as you can find. But you want to make sure that in the bag that you put the hand or the digit or whatever in, there's no ice and there's no water because water causes it to shrivel, and that means you won't be able to reattach it. Yeah. And ice you can actually, if I cut off my finger and I threw it in a bucket of ice, it could actually get frostbite. Yeah. That's crazy. That is crazy. But it's also pretty cool. Yeah. And you don't want frostbite on your because you won't be able to use it anymore. No, frostbite is just dead tissue brought about by exposure to extreme cold. That's right. So after the T shirt right there, after you've got it on the ice, in the bag on the ice, you've called 911, you've got the bleeding stopped. You want to cross whatever fingers you have remaining and hope that you've got a good hospital nearby with some surgeons that aren't doing much at the moment right. Or who are willing to cancel their schedules and say, let's go do this. Yeah. Get off the golf course. So when you get to the hospital, there's some things you can expect. If all of your surgeons have come in from the golf course, they should be ready and waiting for you. And like we said, first, they're going to reattach the bone to provide stability for the rest of the surgery. And there's probably still going to be a little bit of a gap there because they need to get in there and then they start reattaching your blood vessels. That's right. And just like with Eddie Knolls, that just gets the blood flow going and essentially makes that limb alive once more. Right. It also keeps it from further dying. Because, Chuck, it turns out that there is a finite amount of time, which is understandable, sure. But we are aware of how much time a limb can just sit around in the hot sun starting to go fetch it. For example, if you have a whole arm or a whole leg cut off, remember death proof? Yeah. That girl has her legs, like, sticking out of the window. And Mad Mike. Is that his name? Kurt Russell. I don't remember when he hits them and her leg just goes yeah. If she had survived and her leg just laid there out at room temperature, it could have been good for six to 12 hours, I imagine. You're really pushing it at 12 hours. Yeah. But if, say you have somebody who's like this leg needs to be put on ice and does everything right, it could stay refrigerated for four days and still be reattached. Yeah. They point out, though, in this article, ideally, you're having that surgery that day. Yeah. But if you within hours yeah. Within minutes, basically, the sooner the better. As soon as they're ready to go, you should be ready to go as well. Yeah. But you are right. If that is not the case and you have some good refrigeration going on, you can last for about four days. Yeah. And apparently it's not even necessarily the skin tissue that leads to problems and reattachment after being exposed to room temperature. It's muscle degradation. Oh, yeah. Interesting. So you get there, you're getting your surgery done. You probably are going to expect to go through that first long surgery. Bone reattachment, blood vessel, maybe some muscle fiber, maybe. Sure. And then they'll say, we'll put the nerves off for later, and then later on down the road will be a skin graft of some kind, like a free flap surgery, like I was talking about. And the free refers to the free. Like this part of this tissue from your body has been removed, the donor site. Oh, it's not the cost of the surgery. No. Okay. It's been cut free. Right. And there you have make sense. And then it really is simpler than you think. It's reattaching and hopefully everything takes and you fight the infection off and you start the rehab process, which takes a long time and it's grueling and not fun. It can be weird at first. They point out an article and be weird to look down and see your army attached, but I imagine no weirder than looking down and seeing your arm not attached. It'd probably be a comfort to see it reattached. You're a jerk if you're like. Oh, it's kind of crooked. Yeah. But apparently sometimes it can feel a little different and that can be a little strange and off putting. Sure. It's not like, oh, just like I was before, right? Better than ever. Right. And Tom wrote this one. My good friend Tom chief, he said he also talked about something called cross transfer. This was mind blowing, which is basically like if just replantation is Frankensteinian, this is even more. Yeah, I didn't quite get the purpose of the hand. Basically, you're getting a left hand on your right arm, let's say. So your thumb and your pinky would be in weird places, right. Your palm is still facing the right direction, but it'd be really weird. Thumb is switched. Yeah, but what's the point of that if you have a bad hand and a good hand? I don't know if they only had like a left hand available at the time. I don't know that one. OK, I got the other one where basically they take your lower leg beneath your knee. So like, if your upper leg is damaged and your lower leg is fine, let's just say your upper leg is wasted for whatever reason, but your lower leg is fine. They'll cut it off the lower leg and basically turn it around. Right. And then your knee becomes locked. Your calf muscles then serve the function that your thigh muscle is used to. Right. And your knee joint is now in your ankle. Then you're also going to be wearing a prosthetic, obviously, because you have no thigh muscles. And your turned around foot, which is now backwards, is extra support for that prosthetic foot or leg or limb. Wow. It's pretty cool. It's basically saying, like, how can we take this and use it to even better utility now that it's original purpose has been destroyed? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. I tried to find photos of a cross transferred hand, but I couldn't find any photos. And weirdly pictures of Madonna kept popping up. Does she have something? I don't know. What? Dude, I tried all sorts of Google searches and images of her kept popping up. So maybe she's got two left feet or something. She does not. What was that in waiting for? Guffman? He literally had two left feet. It was kind of a dumb joke. Yeah. So, Josh, that's one way we talked about microsurgery, but there's perhaps another even better way, which will cover right after this message break. All right, so we've discussed how you can have surgery, but there may be an actual way to regrow things. Yeah. This is by far the more preferable of the two. Yeah, like fingers, but not like you can't lose a whole finger and regrow it. It's got to be above the bone. Like, let's say you get the tip of your finger, like your fingernail cut off, right, and you can't find it. And even better, this just involves like dumping a magic powder on that wound. So if you have your finger cut off below the nail. Right below the nail. Which happened to a guy in Cincinnati in 2005 who owned a hobby shop. I used to love those places. Oh, me too, man. I'd go in and be like, I just want all the model airplanes and everything. Yeah. Eddie's Trick shop in Atlanta was my go to oh, nice. Which I've just discovered still exists not too far from my house. Is it a magic shop? It's like everything, like, they had models, they had magic kits, they had whoopee cushions. Sort of like a catch all. Yeah. I liked both of those, but I never went to one that was the same. Yeah. Anyway, this guy, this hobby shop owner, as far as we know, he sold no magic items. Okay. He was demonstrating why a motor was very dangerous in an RC plane. He did a good job, I guess, and cut his finger off. And apparently his brother had something to do with tissue regeneration and said, yeah, he was in the biz. Yeah. The guy went to the doctor, the hospital, and doctor was like, we'll give you a skin graft to just kind of cover this weirdness. But you lost your finger. TS. Yeah. And the guy's brother was like, don't get this congratulations just yet. Come over, I'll give you a beer, and I'm going to put something that's called extracellular matrix on your wound, and let's see what happens. And they did. Yeah. And magic happened, and it regrew. The guy not only regrew his finger, he regrew apparently not the bone, but very surprisingly, the nail bed and fingernail, which apparently you don't grow a nail bed back. Like, even if you cut off just the tip of your finger, like, that nail bed is never growing back. This guy's nail bed grew back. That's awesome. Yeah, extracellular matrix is awesome. That's basically like the glue that holds our cells together. And not just us plants and animals and trees, they all have it, and it functions outside the body cells. That's why it's called extracellular, obviously. Right. And it's collagen. We talked a lot about collagen, the protein that's super good for all kinds of things, especially growing skin. Yeah. Like skin cream and stuff like that. Sure. So typically what they use is this is a powder from pig bladder. But I saw a video on New York Times site that showed how they do it today, and this is mainly for, like, let's say you didn't want a skin graft for some reason, or it wasn't possible to get a skin graft and you lost all the skin on your thigh. They would get a pig bladder and they spread it out and they remove all the cells, basically. Yeah. Because this stuff doesn't have pig cells. No, it doesn't have to. This is harvested from a pig body. Yeah. But they still remove the cells and all the DNA with a chemical bath and basically what's remaining is the matrix. And they ended up drying it out and it looks like cut it into sheets and it looks like a sheet of like, parchment paper. And then they will put that on your leg and it immediately just starts going to work. Yes. They used to think the extracellular matrix was just something that provided structure for cells to grow around you. Like a fetal in the fetus. Yeah. Because if you're in the fetus and something happens, you lose a toe in the fetus. If you are a fetus, if you're in the fetal position in the womb yes. And you lose a toe, the toe is growing back. Yeah. You grow a vestigial tail that goes away. Your feet and hands start out being webb, so you're growing a lot of stuff and then getting rid of it. But you can also regrow stuff that you're not supposed to lose. Yes. Up to the age of about two. And then I think the general idea is that the extracellular matrix just kind of goes dormant in humans. Right. But they thought that it was just structure and then they realized that, no, this is actually creating some sort of signal to the rest of the body to say, hey, don't scar regrow instead. And it goes and recruits stem cells and says, come over here and let's rebuild this finger. This hobby shop accident was too ironic. Let's reward this man with a regrown finger. And don't forget the nail bed. That's what exercise matrix says to everything else. Yes. And it's pretty cool. The problem with why you can't normally just regrow a finger is because when something like that happens, the trauma happens, your body recognizes it and the immune system kicks in and it's going to swell up and get inflamed and scar tissue is going to start to form. And the extracellular matrix prevents the inflammation, prevents scar tissue from forming and basically tells the body like, no, I'm just going to grow like, normally. Right. Not scar tissue, just regular old cells. But like you said, after a certain age, it just goes away. Like, we have the extracellular matrix still, but its function or its ability to trigger regrowth just becomes dormant or something happens to it. And with this pickladder stuff, they're starting to wonder, is there a way that we can just trigger this naturally in the body? And if that's the case, then say hello to regrowing a whole head. I mean, you never know because they pointed out that deer can regrow antlers and things like that. And they're different than us cellularly. Right. Because as bone cartilage skin, sure. All those things are in your hand, your arm, your leg, and you would need to regrow all those for something to really be considered regrown. Sure, you can't just regrow the leg, but not the bone. It'd still be impressive, but you're like kind of flopping there. Have you ever seen the picture of. That UFC fighter who's, like, kicking the guy, and he breaks his own leg, and it's just like almost like a cartoon. Yeah. Or Mcgeehe. Oh, yeah. Well, if McGee. Yeah. That stuff triggers the old mirror neurons big time. It makes me weak. So that's basically it. I mean, they've been experimenting with war veterans, iraqi war veterans, and actually, the New York Times video I saw, it was a war veteran who was having this done to his thigh. Yeah, it was a great success. Tendons, right? I think it was skin and tendons, and it looked kind of gnarly, but it was functioning. Yes. And that counts. You got anything else? No, I think that's it. There's literally nothing else to say about it. I agree, sir. All right, well, then, if you want to learn more about replantation, you can type that word into the search bar athousofworks.com, and it'll bring up a couple of cool things, at the very least. Also, type in Extracellular Matrix, which is pretty cool sounding. And that will bring up another article, too. And since I said those things, it's time for listener meal. That's right. I'm going to call this correction. We get these from time to time. We like to read them. Yeah, from time to time. Hey, guys. And Jerry. Love the work you do. I love listening to the show. I wanted to write in, though, with a correction regarding Lewis and Clark. I'm working towards my PhD in art History, and I am particularly interested in the history of medicine and disease. In the middle of the show, Josh mentioned that the Adventure Party inadvertently discovered syphilis had not been known to Europeans up until that point. This is actually not quite the case. Syphilis goes back pretty far in European history. It was first documented in the late 15th century after a conflict between France and Italy and remained an issue for Europe, peaking around the mid 19th century. 19th century. Yeah, you said it okay. Josh did have part of it. Right, though, when he said that the Party blamed it on Native American groups. Early on, everyone wanted to blame the disease on everyone else. No surprises here. But after that initial conflict, the French referred to syphilis as the Neapolitan Sickness, while the Italians named it the French Sickness, a trend that continued as the stuff spread. You no, if you're interested, it's really fascinating stuff, especially the cures that became popular. Mercury was a really nasty one. History of Syphilis by Claude Cattle is a pretty good reference. She read a book called The History of Syphilis. Somebody wrote a book called The History of this book. Anyway. And that was Claude. Q-U-E-T-E-L. He's French. Isn't that what that's called? I don't remember anymore. Anyway, I justan yeah, that is from Kathryn. I'm sorry. Kathleen Pierce. Nice. Thanks. She was into disease. Thanks for complaining about disease. I guess so. Thanks a lot for letting us know that, Kathleen. I feel like I've been set straight. If you want to set us straight, we like to be corrected. Nothing better. All you have to do is tweet to us. Sure. To initiate contact. You can tweet to us using our Handle S YSK podcast. You can go on to Facebook. That's another great way to contact us. Yeah, you can complain there. People love doing that we're at Facebook.com stuff. You should know you can send us an email to stuff podcasted discovery.com. And although you can't complain, you can enjoy our website stephysiome.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. With over 1000 titles to choose from, Audible.com is a leading provider of downloadable digital audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Go to audiblepodcast.com. Nostuff knowstuff to get a free audiobook download of your choice when you sign up today." | ||
5 Successful Counterfeiters | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/5-successful-counterfeiters | Counterfeiting currency successfully takes serious skills, and some consider counterfeiting an art. Josh and Chuck recount the stories of five artful counterfeiters and their successful careers in this episode. | Counterfeiting currency successfully takes serious skills, and some consider counterfeiting an art. Josh and Chuck recount the stories of five artful counterfeiters and their successful careers in this episode. | Thu, 13 May 2010 20:10:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=20, tm_min=10, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=133, tm_isdst=0) | 25567184 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworks.com. This episode of stuff you should Know is brought to you by GoToMeeting. We all have have to meet, but the average cost of a single business trip is $1,000. With just one click, you can save time and money and have your meetings online with affordable and easy to use GoToMeeting. Use GoToMeeting for sales, presentations, product demos, training sessions, collaborating on documents, and more. And $49 per month for unlimited meetings. It saves time, money, and travel. Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days. Visit gottomeeting. comStuff. That's GoToMeeting. comStuff. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. This is Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. This is stuff you should know. Hey. To live and die in La. Yes. Chuck just did a little. I don't even know if it's foreshadowing. I am really off my game today. No, you're not. Yes, I am. You're so on it. I am. What Chuck brought up see, listen to me. What Chuck brought up to live and I want to get through this sentence. What Chuck brought up to live and die in La. For yes. Is because we're talking about counterfeiting today, and that's the best counterfeit movie in history. It is. Easily. It is. And we've talked about it before, but I think it's worth talking about again, like you just did. It's great. Thank you. You're welcome. Moving on. So, Chuck, counterfeiting, as you may or may not know, is a dying crime, a lost art. It really is. And actually, this is one of those old school types of criminal activity that people who are good at it have the respect of law enforcement. Yeah. I was reading an article about this bust of some counterfeiting ring, and it amounted to just some guy with an inkjet printer who was printing off terrible currency on fiber paper. Right. And the secret service guy who's, like, a 22 year vet shook his head and discussed, and he's like, it's a dying art. You don't see good paper any longer. Yeah, it's definitely a lost art. And I know this sounds goofy, but I kind of like the idea of since it doesn't have that much anymore, I can say this of counterfeiting. Like, instead of a thief, anyone can throw a chair through a window and go break into a cash register at night, but to think, like, I'll print money that's so believable that you can pass it. Yeah. It was artistry. For sure. It is. And when researching this article, there was a common theme among these great counterfeiters, the five most successful counterfeiters that they had tremendous guts. They tried to break out of jail at every turn, and they were just really admirable criminals. Yeah. And most of them wrote books about it, too, which is interesting. Well, it's a good way to make some money afterwards. You don't write a book about my life as a flat screen TV thief? No. And if you do, no one reads it. It's self published. Sure. So, Chuck, let's get into this. All right? All right. We're going to talk about some of these successful counterfeiters. And we should also add a caveat here. Successful doesn't mean that they never got caught. Oh, no, we don't know about those counterfeiters. Yeah, exactly. Right. The ones who got caught but still had these tremendous careers are the ones we're going to talk about. And we're going to do it chronologically, buddy, starting with a guy named Steven Burrows. Stevie he was born in New Hampshire, Josh, in the 17 hundreds. Late mid 17 hundreds. And was raised throughout the United States. And I think that you have one of the best sentences you've ever written in this article. Which one? From an early age, he showed distinct signs of a cute chicanery. Why did you read that? Like Anthony Hopkins? Oh, that was Anthony Hopkins. Yes. Oh, you said why did I? Yeah. That wasn't supposed to be okay, that was just my news real voice. That was good. Thank you. And he was a little mischievous guy all his life, it sounds like. Apparently, he gained a reputation as the worst boy in town at a very young age. He stole a bunch of watermelons from a local farmer, and he joined the search party to find the thief. That shows he's smart. Right. And I think at age 14, he ran away, joined the Merchant Navy, ended up basically being the de facto ship doctor. Well, he deserted that's right. He went to the army. Deserted the army, then went to college, bailed on college, and then became like a de facto doctor on a boat. Right. Which led him to say, you know what? I could probably get away posing and stuff. His father was a clergyman, so he decided that he was going to pose as the leader of a church, which he did successfully for six months. Right. Led the congregation, like, mass everything. And he probably could have done that indefinitely, because people aren't that suspicious of preachers, usually. But he got busted passing some counterfeit money in Concord, right. Springfield. Close enough. Yes. And then he was sent to jail, and then he thought, I bet a good way to escape from jail would be to set the jail on fire. And it worked. Yeah. He successfully escaped. Yeah. He fled to Canada, actually, and I think did he get caught again? Well, that's where he led. The most serious counterfeiting ring was when he went to Canada. Right. So he was in Canada and he led this ring for years, and then suddenly he just decided to reform himself. Yeah. He gave up crime, started supporting himself by tutoring wealthy Canadian children, or the children of wealthy Canadians, I should say. Yes. He founded a library. Is that what you said? Yeah. He became kind of like a cultural benefactor up there. Even though people were aware of who he was, they still respected him because the stuff he did right was just so respectable. Sure. He printed some funny bills. He built us a library. Yeah, he built a library and he died in 1840. But before that, he wrote a book, like you said a lot of them do, called Memoirs of My Own Life. That's the best memoir title in memoir history. Yes, it is. Memoirs of my own life. Yeah. So it's still in print, apparently. I haven't read it. I haven't either. Well, moving on. Number four yeah. Is Drumroll, the Lavender Hill Mob, which I found out was a movie from 1951 with Alec Guinness. If we try researching them, I know that's all you see is the movie, but it's unrelated. No, not related at all. Right. Instead. Lavender Hill Mob, actually. A fairly recent origin. They were operating in the Britain around Lavender Hill. I would imagine they were founded by this guy named Steven Jorry. And this guy was awesome. He was what they call an old school rogue. And that's a quote. And another guy named Kenneth Mainstone, who is a retired printer and jewelry, recruited Mainstone to come up with some counterfeiting plates. Right, right. And they did very successfully. And by the way, Jury is widely credited as establishing the knockoff perfume market. Yeah. I found he actually bribed a perfumer to get recipes and by the time it was all said and done, had bottled 5 million phony. Chanel Number Five. Really? That a factory in Acapulco making stuff. That's how successful he was. If you love Georgio, or if you like Georgio, you'll love Olala and like, a little spray aerosol can. Yes. When was the last time you were cologne? Oh, it's been a long time. Yes. I work cologne when I was, like, 17, I think was the last time. It's about it for me. You know, it's funny, when I lived in Yuma, Arizona, all those dudes work alone. Yes. Because everybody's sweaty out there. Well, I don't know. There's a different culture. And they're like, you don't work alone. They have, like, gel in their hair. Okay, I know the culture. You're speaking to the Jersey Shore type of thing. Yeah. Okay, so the Lavender Hill Mob, right, they were very successful. They printed about \u00a350 million worth of fake notes, and not pounds by weight, but pound by currency. Currency. They also sold fake stamps, which I thought was sort of ingenious. It is. But at the same time, it's like, look, you just made \u00a350 million of fake currency. Right? And one way to get rid of counterfeit money is not to just pass it, but you can actually sell it for pennies on the dollar to people who know that it's counterfeit or going to go past it themselves. But even for pennies on the dollar, that's still many millions of pounds. And these guys are making stamps on the side. Yeah, it was a little odd. It was a little odd. Apparently the first bills didn't work out so great, though. Did you hear about that? The Queen of England looked like she had a beard. Maybe that's why they were making stamps until they perfected the note making, which they did because they fooled UV detectors. They got so good at it. Yeah. And actually, they got good enough that the bank of England actually changed their design for their 20 pound note because of the Lavender Hill Mob's activities and success. Pretty awesome. It is. And he wrote a book jury did before he died. Just died a couple of years ago, didn't he? 20 06. 20 06? Yeah. It's under two titles. The first one is called Funny Money. Decent. The second one was great. Second one is called loads of money. And that's one word loads of loads of money. The true story of the world's largest ever counterfeiting ring. Colon in there as well. Yeah. It kind of classes up your book when you have a colon in there. Loads of money. Yeah. We should write a movie about that guy. We should. All right. Chuck onto the Nazis. Yeah. I didn't know this. Most people think of the Nazis as, like, the worst fascist state to ever emerge in the history of humanity. Not true. Worst state ever. Oh, no, that is true. Not first. Right. Because miscellaneous isn't all that successful. They directly murdered 10 million marginalized people, including Jews, Roma, Catholics, homosexuals and others. Sure, they invaded Poland and France and other countries, but they also ran arguably the most successful counterfeiting ring in the history of humanity. There were a lot of in the history of humanity with Nazis. Almost all of them were horrible, actually. All of them were horrible. This is the least horrible thing they've ever done, probably, but it was going to pan out pretty bad in the end. Yeah. They made about 650,000,000 pound notes, which would be about $7 billion today. Right. Which was about 15% of the currency in circulation in Great Britain at the time. Right. And their brilliant idea was to fly over England and drop cash money from planes. Right. They actually figured out, and this is called Operation Bernard, after Burnhard Kruger. Yeah. He's an SS officer who is in charge of this operation. Yeah. The head of the operation named the operation after himself. Basically, what they did was they went around and figured out what nearly dead people in their camps used to be printers in the time before the war, and they identified them and drafted them to work in what was called the Devil's workshop. Right. Which is like a secret printing press or printing office. You speak German? What camp? Saskatchewan. No. Shouts and housing. Nice. Chuck so they had some guys there all assembled to crack the English currency, Jocelyn Housing, and they did successfully, leading to the 650,000,000 pound notes yeah. Well, they didn't drop it from the plane, though. They laundered it, used some of that money to import things. And this isn't factually backed up, but there is rumor that they actually use that money to pay for the rescue of Mussolini. Do they really? Yeah. Well, they apparently made a bunch of catch. They gave the money to a German businessman who served as a front for him to launder it, and he bought anything of value that he could get his hands on with this money. And apparently, it wasn't a secret, like England had known since, like, 1939 that this was going on. And they tried to close their borders to incoming currency, but it didn't really work. Right. They finally cracked the American $100 bill just as their camp was liberated. And the Nazis knew these guys were coming. So they took all the printing by these guys, the Allies. They took the printing stuff and threw it in the lakes, blew stuff up with explosives. I don't know why they were trying to cover this aspect of the Holocaust up. Right. And they were about to execute everybody who is involved, and the Allies showed up and saved the day. Yeah. And I think we should point out the idea behind all of this was to undermine the economies of England and the United States. Oh, do we not point that out? No, that's a pretty important part. That was the plan. They weren't just like, oh, we'll get English money, and then we'll buy things, because if you have a sudden influx of cash, a lot of cash on the market leads to inflation. Yeah, indeed. There was a BBC TV show josh about this in 1980 called Private Shorts. And then one of the Jewish prisoners forced to do this was named Adolf Berger. Yeah. And he later wrote a book, and that book was turned into a movie that won Best Foreign Language Film in 2008. Yeah. The counterfeiters in English. Nice. Don't ask me. I was in German. What's, to check it out? Yeah. Moving on, Chuck. Moving on to number two. Charles Ulrich. Yes. Not related to Robert Uric, as far as I know, because there are two different names right. Now, this guy was another kind of dashing counterfeiter filled with daring dew, and he was also a ladies man, actually. Daring Dew. I couldn't help. There's no other better way to describe it. A cute chicanery. Yeah, he was a ladies man. Right? Yeah. It actually led to his downfall. Right. He was a polygamist, and he wasn't shy about it. He was like Bill Paxton, for goodness sake. Right. And this was in the York. Like most of these counterfeiters, he was a gifted engraver of plates. Right. So the local mob figures out that this guy is a gifted engraver of plates, and they corral him to try to get him in working for them. Right. And he does, and he ends up getting in trouble and ends up forming his own mob, his own gang, with all the women included. Right. He finally gets caught in 1868 and stands trial. He was in Cincinnati and he got twelve years in the federal pokey. By his own estimation, he printed about $80,000 worth of phony bills. A lot of data back then, which is equal to about 1.3 million in $2,008. Right, right. But what was his downfall? Chuck? I said women. But specifically what? Well, like you said, he was just sort of a blatant polygamist. Made no bones about it. And he moved all around, engaged in relationships and never broke off the old ones. Eventually he moved his wife and to live with he and his girlfriend and a third woman. And one of them finally said, you know what? I'm going to turn you in, jerk. Actually, all of them turned on them. But they did? Yeah. Interesting. And they turned them in. That's where the Cincinnati trial came from. Before that he had been incarcerated and in the grand tradition of counterfeiters, he broke out and actually led the cops on a chase across the Niagara River right at the fall and made it across, actually into Canada and escaped. And he was like, who's that lady in the barrel? As he was going. And if that's not Daring Dew, I don't know what it is. That's daring. Du, my friend. That's a cute chicanery. You really liked it? It's great. All right. The last one, buddy. And this guy's pretty familiar. Yeah. Everyone's probably heard of Frank Abignal because the Stevie Spielberg movie catch me if you can. Yeah. Tommy Hanks. It was made at a time when Spielberg unwittingly had a fake or a stolen Rockefeller in his collection. Yeah. I love this movie. Did you like it? Yeah, I liked it, too. I don't know when Spielberg had kind of put out some stinkers and everything was so serious and then he just kind of did a fun, entertaining heist movie. Right. And it's one of those movies you can lay on the couch and watch for the 50th time on like a Sunday. Yeah, agree. But they never show it on TV. Yes. I think it ran on like TNT for a while because I saw it. That's it, though. Yeah. I love this movie. Leo DiCaprio obviously played Frank and funny story, when Abigaile found out DiCaprio was going to portray him, he was worried because he didn't know if Leonardo DiCaprio would be able to be smooth enough to play him accurately. He's like the smoothest dude on the planet. He is smooth. Did he stated, oh, Leo. No. I don't think this guy cares. I don't think he thinks Leo DiCaprio holds a candle there. Goodness me. He can land giselle. So can Tom Brady. Well, look at him, dude. Stud quarterback. Yeah, but I mean, chiseled out of stone. He's a quarterback. Shut up. All right. He did most of his work in his teens and twenties, which is the remarkable thing about his story. And he was a check forge. Yes, as anybody who's seen the movie can tell you. And actually, between the ages of 16 and 21, he cashed more than $2.5 million in fake checks in all 50 states and 26 countries. Yeah. That's some serious work. And he was also a confidence man. Yes, he was, because he would not only write fake checks, but he would masquerade, as you saw in the film, like an airline pilot or a doctor or an attorney professor. I think he did at one point and fooled everybody. Yeah. And he just fought whatever documents he needed to prove that he had the education or training or resume or whatever and get hired. Which made him a good comment, which made him chuck smooth. He said, Catch me if you can suck it. A few things here, Josh, that are similar and different from real life and in the movie, because they always beef it up a little bit in the movies. Yeah. He did actually pose as a federal agent when they busted in on him and kind of snuck out the back door to keep looking. Yes. He ordered the Feds who are looking for him to keep looking. He said he was like a treasury agent or something. Absolutely. Yeah. And he was there first. He actually did escape from a moving plane, taxing on the runway. That's pretty serious. That's awesome. That really happened. However, in real life, he never saw his father again after he left home. And he had a real problem with his parents divorce. More so than any kid I've ever heard. He would fantasize about meeting his parents again and then being proud of him and then getting back together because they were proud of his exploits. Weird. It's kind of like Ralphie dreaming that he was going to go blind from having to eat soap for swearing. Do you remember? It was so poisoning. He was one of four kids, and in the movie, I think he was an only child. Hannity or Hanratti? The character handratty. Yeah, tom Hanks character. Yeah. I was actually got in Joshua. They changed his name. Weird. Yeah. I don't know why, because they said the original script, it was Joshua, and I could never find any reason why they changed it to Handwrite. Did they say anything about Captain America? Did he use the Captain America alias? No, I didn't notice. He was in the film, actually as one of the French policemen that nabbed him. Oh, really? Yeah, he had a cameo. Yeah, because he did a stint in French jail. French prison. French prison. He is actually married a woman. As soon as he went straight, he married a woman. Still married to her. Today. He's got three sons, and one of his sons is a federal agent. Cool. And he did remain friends with Tom Hanks. Or not. Tom hanks got you. Yeah. And he does consulting on identity fraud and bank security and stuff like that, right? Yeah. Everyone on your list wrote a book except for number two, Charles Orwick. Yeah, well, in the Nazis, yeah, but the guy wrote actually, one of the guys involved. Yeah, Charles Ulrich was just too involved with the lady, I guess. I waste time writing a book. You should write a book about that. Chuck, do you want to finish this? Do you want to wrap this turkey up? Get in the oven. Exactly. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by GoToMeeting. The affordable way to meet with clients and colleagues for your free 30 day trial visit. Gotomeeting.com stuff. Okay, so if you want to see some pictures about the guys that we were just talking about, one I couldn't find, so I used a picture of Dartmouth College. It was the best I could come up with, and I apologize for that. Sorry. Type in counterfeiters. Counterfeiters in the handysearchpart houseupworks.com. Which leads us to the listener mail. Thank the Lord. Josh, I'm going to call this sinister. Yeah, we got a bunch of them. They did it's. Pulled another out there being all weird. This is three quickies. I edited them down, guys. First one's from Jonathan. When I hear spoken words, I see the written forms of the words in my visual field. I see them much the same way I see a memory. They don't scroll across my visual field like a stock ticker. Whether they appear in flashes, in seemingly random positions and sizes. I see the words most clearly when I'm deeply focused on the content of speech, like at a lecture or when I'm listening to lyricsized music. I often even see words when I'm dreaming. As for the color, the best I can do is say that they are a generic sans serif font white fill with black borders. Cool. And he's a researcher at UC San Diego. He said, perhaps I should just ask Professor Ramachandran next time he's sitting across from me at Perks Cafe. That's like, dude, if you see that guy yes. I'm glad that we can bring these two together. It's like the mom with her son who went off to college. That's right. Yeah. So that's from Jonathan. Here's. The second one from Ben. When I was eight or nine years old, my best friend moved to another town. That summer, after not hearing from them in a while, I decided to give them a call. Once I walked home from another friend's house. A couple of seconds later, my right wrist suddenly had an intense pain and throbbing. For no apparent reason, I iced my wrist and made it feel better. And when I got home, I was still very confused why it happened. I called my best friend to tell him about this weird thing, only to discover that he was also in pain, waiting for his mom to get him to the hospital. It seems he and his brother were playing Indiana Jones and the Escape from the closing garage Door when he landed the wrong way and busted his right wrist. I'm a pretty logical guy, but that is really creepy and 100% true. Is that the work of neurons or a minor psychic event? Who knows? Who knows? And this last one is from Jordan in New Zealand. He's a Kiwi. We love New Zealand. I associate all numbers and letters with colors, and my mother and I also used to argue at times about what color a letter is. Just like, navika. Yeah. And they didn't know that they were sinisters, like the famous book and Avocado awesome Police Got. What a bad show that was. I thought it might also interest you to know that I experienced music as a projection of colors. I can only explain it as a sort of mixture of fireworks and a fountain. Cool stream of water shoots in the air changes colors and the shape in relation to the music, a loud beat is annoying because it's like a pulse ripple in the pond. It distracts and muddies the other tones. Although it is sometimes annoying, I find music distracting. It can get distracting. And I still find it very difficult to focus on a conversation if there's too much background noise or music. But now I can actually partially mute colors, so I can concentrate on music. And while I still see no colors, I do see the explosions. So, like, a classical piano piece is really intense. He says he still sees oh, I'm sorry. He still sees colors and explosions even though he's muted it, but he's lessened it to the point where he can actually listen to the music and not go crazy. Got you. Goodness. I'm having an off day, too. Wait, what do you mean too? If I'm talking to someone and music is playing in the background, I can focus on the speaker much easier than I was previously able, thanks to his new muting ability. That's from Jordan in New Zealand. That's cool. And we heard from other Sinisteets, and I just couldn't get them all in the air, so thanks. Yes, we heard from one guy who was like, wait, I thought everybody saw the date physically wrap around them. Right? This is pretty cool. Yeah. Join us on Facebook and Twitter. Yes, please do. At S-Y-S kpodcast for Twitter. And just look up stuff you should know. Website, I think it's called. Website on Facebook. Yeah, do those things. We're having to get an email about anything at all, right, Chuck? Sure. I've got nothing, so just send us an email, will you? That's stuffpodcast at housework. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housestoftworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you summer school's out the sun is shining, the daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart 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." | ||
d65cb8b6-3b0d-11eb-aa42-c3dbc6a21cf2 | Karaoke: Tuesday Night Fever | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/karaoke-tuesday-night-fever | Listen in and learn all about the fascinating history of everybody's favorite pastime... karaoke! | Listen in and learn all about the fascinating history of everybody's favorite pastime... karaoke! | Thu, 11 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=70, tm_isdst=0) | 51714169 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Chucker's. Chuck. Yeah. I had to spice it up a little bit with some old school stuff. And no one else is here with us. We're alone out there in the ether. And this is stuff you should know. Although my prediction is we started recording a bit early today since we're on our own. I bet guest producer Dave and short Stuff producer Dave is going to chime in in about five minutes. Okay. Yeah. Well, I look forward to hearing what he says. What's your deal with karaoke? I sort of know, but I think the people should know. We should exchange stories. Okay. I like karaoke. I particularly like karaoke in the K box, which we'll talk about, which is basically a little private karaoke room for you and your friends. Have some great memories of karaoke like that, but I'll do it in front of an audience. If I get a drink or two in me. Not too much, though. You go too much, you start trying to fight the piano player or something like that. Like live karaoke? Yeah, I've mentioned it a couple of times. But Siggold's Request Room in Manhattan is the place to go for live piano karaoke. It's just a beautiful, wonderful place. So if you haven't been there, go check it out. It's great. About as good as live karaoke gets. Like live instrument karaoke. All right, so I haven't been there. I will go still. I forget. I thought you would have gone this past year. Yeah, right. Haven't been there. Never been in a K box. Really? No, never had the private carry. We'll pronounce it karaoke even though it's car AOC kata. OK, but we're not going to do that. We're not. Because I think Dave Ruse helps us out. He's like, you can pronounce it correctly, but don't be expected to be invited out to karaoke night with your friends anymore. Right. After you practice your codate. Right, exactly. So I have done live karaoke. A few years ago on my birthday, we went to the one that has the rock band in the Virginia Highlands. I don't know that one. Yeah, I mean, they have the full on band. It's rock and roll. Live karaoke. Sounds fun. One of the local Atlanta DJs, English Nick, is there to serve as sort of a backup singer, and they can mix his vocals and more if you're really bad, because no one wants to hear that kind of thing. Sure. But I get up there and did Surrender by Cheap Trick, and I saw him at one point even stand away from the mic, and I was like, I've got this. Oh, wow. He like, went and did something else. Maybe ate some corn chips or something. The tip of the cat. Right. But my deal with karaoke is I used to be scared to death to try it. And that was when I had severe stage fright performance anxiety, which I completely got over because now I'm in a band that sings in front of people. You and I get on stage in front of 1400 people and it doesn't bother me anymore. I think I'd still probably be a little nervous to do like an acoustic open mic thing. Yeah, and you should be for a number of reasons. But it's just funny how I used to be so scared and really overthink karaoke. Like, sit in the room, anxiety, sweat. I really want to do it, but I won't put my name down. Right. And then the night comes and goes and I don't do it. Then I have this guilt and bad feelings. It was a thing. Wow. How old were you at the time? This was in my twenty s and into my early thirty s, I think. Yeah. When I moved to La. Is when I really started I guess it was in my 20s, because when I moved to La is when I finally did it. I was like, this is fine, and I sing better than a lot of these people. Yeah, it's a great feeling to be done and have the people you're with be like, I had no idea you could do that. That's really impressive. It's great fun. I enjoy it thoroughly. Do you have a standard karaoke song that you do, or too? Yeah, I mean, I usually try to do and I think we've talked about this under Pressure by Queen and Bowie, and I do kind of both parts oh, wow. At the same time. You do like the Tibetan throat chanting kind of thing. But I have made some mistakes, too. I tried to do Foreigners Cold, as I said, of friends, not at their wedding, but wedding weekend at a bar in Philly, and I just was feeling it and was like, I'd forgotten how high that song is. Yeah, that can be a problem when you start in your range, but then you forget, oh, it keeps going up. That's a real karaoke problem. And actually I saw Chuck, that if you do that enough times, you can get what is called karaoke polyps, which are really yeah, it's basically like polyps that grow on your vocal cords from straining your vocal cords by trying to sing like a professional without the training of a professional singer. So it can be deadly dangerous. Maybe not the deadly part, but it can be dangerous. Yeah. And I used to do the mental gymnastics of kind of like stepping outside and going through the song mentally real quick. Yeah. Sorry, can I hit the parts? For sure. And you should. I think just as a responsible karaoke singer, you kind of do need to make sure that you can sing the song because it's kind of funny to you if you do a bad karaoke performance, but the point of karaoke is to, like, blow everybody's socks off. Just tear the roof off the sucker is kind of my personal motto every time I grab the mic. Yes. And I've had some times where I've seen some performances at the live karaoke thing. There was this country guy that clearly drives in from Country, Georgia, to do this, and he had a cowboy head on, and he did want to dead or alive, you could tell. That's his deal. He comes into the city, he crushes it, and then goes back to the farm the next day. And everyone's like, who was that lonesome cowboy town? Who was that mask stranger? It's pretty cool to see an everyday person just get up there and really kill it. Yeah. And I'm sure that guy has to go out of town because he'd probably get beat up at his town if he tried to do that there. He's got, like, this being anonymous too, kind of enables that karaoke gusto, I think, as well. Yeah. So you said something earlier. You compared karaoke and karate, and there's a good reason for that, because karate karate means empty hand, and karaoke is actually short for karaoke. I even practiced it, which is like Romanji, when people in Japan take an English word and just kind of Japanese up a little bit. So instead of orchestra, it's Okestura. And kara means empty, and Okastura means orchestra. So it's an empty orchestra. And that's really what karaoke karaoke is. It's slang for empty orchestra. And it actually predates the concept of karaoke that we think of today. Yeah. Apparently in the early 50s, there was a pit orchestra in Osaka. They said, we want to share what they wanted. You would assume better wages or more bathroom breaks or something, and they went on strike, and the theater replaced them with a sound system. And it was from Matzua Electronics. And apparently, as the story goes, executive from Metsuda came there, heard the system, and said, there's music playing, but the orchestra pit is empty. And plus, the term was coined empty orchestra, that he needs to work. That was in the think, was it? Yes. So karaoke, as we understand it today, didn't come along for good almost two decades later. So there was this idea that anytime you had pre recorded music, especially if it was played instead of where a live performer would play that, that was karaoke. Kadoke. So it was kind of a handy term that a guy named DeskA Enoe used when he came up with karaoke. And the idea of who invented karaoke, who came up with it, is not just widely settled, but for the most part, those who know site Desk, in a way, as the guy who actually came up with this, as we understand it. Yeah, I did see there were a couple of other people in the late 60s that kind of messed around with machines, that kind of did what the karaoke machine does. But yeah, his story is great. If you look him up a picture, he's a pretty cool looking customer. And in Osaka in the 50s, he was in high school, and he was a drummer in a rock band and then tried to be a musician professionally for a little while. But so many musicians that tried that for a little while ended up back at home in his late 20s, living with his parents in Cobay. Yeah, but he gave it a good decade long try. He was out on the road. I read this really great kind of mini biography or autobiography from the early 2000s that was published in the Appendix. It's called Voice Hero. Look that up. He's just a charming guy. Totally. But he tried it for about ten years, and it just didn't work out because most of the money was pocketed by the older, more established musicians, and he wasn't going anywhere. I think he said that he realized that no matter how much he practiced, and he really practiced, he would never be as good as somebody who had natural talent, and it just wasn't for him. So he decided to try something else. But he didn't want to give up playing entirely. He wanted to try to make a living somehow from playing music. And it just so happens that his parents living in Kobe placed him at this really particularly good spot for karaoke to begin, which is Kobe, which is about 30 minutes outside of Osaka, where the very famous Kobe beef comes from. And at the time in Kobe, and for a while before that, there was a popular pastime of singalongs, which is basically like, you go to a bar, a snack is what they were called, and there'd be somebody playing a piano or a guitar or something like that, and everybody would sing popular songs along with the mini band that was playing. Yeah, but that was like group singing together, not like a single person either delighting or embarrassing themselves. But he got into the scene a little bit, and it was clearly a popular thing. So he's like, I'm a musician. I guess he played piano, too, and he learned a few hundred really popular songs on piano and then started performing as the accompany accompanying accompaniment. I think that's the Latin plural accompaniment. What's the word for the person? The accompaniest. Accompanies. The accompanying minimist. None of these sounds right now. It's accompaniest. Okay, yeah, that just sounds weird to me. But you know how that your brain just broke. It did a little bit. So he was doing this as the piano guy, the piano man, if you will, and one day this customer comes in who had been frequenting these nights where he was playing piano, and he was like, Listen, I'm a business guy. I got to go to a different city for the sales meeting, and I got to take these other people out to go out drinking and singing after and You're My Guy, I can only sing along with you. So would you mind recording something for me that I can bring along? And he said, sure. So we recorded some stuff on a real to reel, gave it to him. The trip was a big hit and the guy came back and said, I need more of these. And that was literally the AHA moment. He grabbed Desk, in a way by his lapels and shook him and said, give me more, man. I need some more. And he did. And apparently right at this time, as he was being shaken, DeskA left his body astrally project elsewhere into the universe, where he was greeted by the same entity that led to the creation of Ketchup and the same entity as Ketchup and Karaoke under its belt because it met with Disk and said, this is like pay attention to what's happening right now invent Karaoke. And Disk basically came back to his body and said, I have it. I have this great idea. I'm going to invent a machine that is basically me, what this guy wants me to do live, that I can multiply, create a bunch of different machines that do the same thing, and it's going to be the first karaoke machine ever. And that's what he did. He came up with something called the Juke Eight, which is a great name. Yeah, it's cool looking, the idea. And you can look up pictures of the guy with this thing and it's about the size of a small guitar amp or something, which is not bad. You'd think it'd be the size of like a smart car or something for the first prototype back in the day. But it was simple. I mean, they had amps at the time. They really just combined a few technologies, which was an eight track player, right from a car, a car atrac players where they started with. Oh, yeah. Which are really no different than any other HREC players. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah. I mean, maybe they worked better in Motion, I don't know. But that's probably why those cars were so big, because they had to be that big back in the day to hold the track. It's like an a track player mixed with an amp or a PA, a small PA. And his idea, he called the Juke Eight because it was kind of like a jukebox, is that you would put money in it, like a jukebox, to get a certain amount of time on the clock, which I think was kind of brilliant. Instead of like a song, I think the idea is that people would just keep feeding it. Yeah, he actually specifically said that he chose five minutes, \u00a5100, about $0.35. Bought you five minutes of singing time so that you'd be partway through the second song and have to put more money into finish the second song. He was a sharp tack in a lot of ways. Well, in some way. In some way. So I think they took a couple of months to build each. They cost them about $425, which is about $2,700 today. And he said, I got to get some of these tracks recorded. So he got a bunch of his friends to record musicians to record these instrumental tracks, started shopping it around, and sold all eleven of those machines in pretty quick order. Yeah, I think I don't know if he sold them or if he took them as, like, basically proof of concept of money. Yeah, something like that. Either way, he did get them in eleven different clubs around Kobe, and everybody was glad to have them there to look at, and that was about it. They just sat there, and nobody did anything with them. Nobody knew quite what to do with them. And even if they did, I think it took, you know, how much gumption it takes in an established karaoke place when other people are doing it. Imagine being literally the first person to do karaoke. It just took a little bit. So desktop hired somebody. He said a pretty girl in a sexy outfit is how he put it in that one autobiography, and had her go around all these eleven clubs and basically, like, sing karaoke. And she did it because he hired her, too, but apparently she came back and was like, I would do that again just for fun. That was a lot of fun. And from that point on, basically, the whole concept of karaoke took off, at least in Kobe. Yes, there were about 200 of these machines in and around Kobe in pretty short order, and I think it's a good time to take a break. I think it is, too, because karaoke is just simmering. The lid is, like, rattling on the pot right now. Yeah, it's about to blow. All right, we'll be right back. Driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. Okay, Chuck. So there's rendered fat spitting out the sides of the pot and steam going everywhere. I just burned my hand on it. Let's tear the lid off of this sucker. Which is tangential to my karaoke motto of tearing the roof off the sucker. That's right. So they're going gangbusters in Cobay, and like you said, it's not too far from Osaka, which is a bigger city, and a couple of entrepreneurs from Cobay said, this is great, but we need to get this to Osaka. And they brought a juke eight around, kind of showed it around, and it really hit big to the tune of they were moving about 25,000 of these a year pretty quickly. Yeah, because remember, I said that Kobe was, like, a perfect place for karaoke to kind of be incubated, because people already did these singalongs in Tokyo and Osaka. It wasn't like that. They liked watching an actual band perform or listening to actual songs in the jupox. But when these guys could not find the name of this club, but when they opened essentially the first karaoke club in Osaka, I guess it just hit just the right chord, just the right time. And all of a sudden, Osaka was a karaoke town. And in very short order, Tokyo was as well. And because it kind of blew up for the first time in Osaka, osaka is considered the birthplace of karaoke, even though it really was born in Kobe, very plainly. Yeah. So you mentioned earlier that he was a pretty sharp tech in some ways, and I'm not saying he wasn't smart, but he didn't patent the thing. His brotherinlaw said, you really should patent this Juke eight. He said, you know what? Patent law is really complicated here in Japan. It's super expensive. All I can patent is the business model. Because all of these, it's just a combination of other components that already have patents on them, which is, I guess it's just different. I know just from my Shark Tank viewing, that in America, if you put together these different or any different technologies in just the right way, you can get a patent. Not always, but I've seen patents go through where I'm like, well, that's just this and this. They're like, yes, but we combine that and the patent often recognized it. Yeah, I think it's called an improvement, or something like that. And I actually read this really interesting article, Chuck, in a on magazine, like, I don't know, five, six, seven years ago, where it basically made the case that we stopped actually innovating. We humans did back in maybe the 60s or seventy s, and that everything we've invented since then is basically just putting existing stuff together. And they use the example of the iPhone, which basically is like, it's amazing, it's this amazing technology. But it's a camera, it's also a phone, it's also your email, it's also textbook. It's all these existing things just put together in one convenient place. And that's a really great example of how we actually stopped creating new stuff and just basically repurposing and repackaging existing stuff. And hopefully we're due for another huge technological advancement sometime soon if we don't just decline from utter decadence before we get the chance to do that. Yeah, I remember there was a meme a few years ago, or probably a little more than that, that showed up the front page of a Radio Shack magazine ad or whatever. And at the bottom it said, all of these are now on your smartphone. And it was like 40 things, from tape recorders, to microphones, to cameras, to what's the thing that tells the temperature? But basically everything on that page is now on an iPhone. It's kind of like, well, now I see why Radio Shack is no longer around. Yeah, poor Radio Shack. They did a lot there, and they got kind of dissed at the end. It was pretty great. I love that story. It was. And they had a really cool logo, too. Agreed. You said that he did not patent the karaoke machine, the Juke Eight, right? Yeah. He made plenty of money still, though. Yeah, he still manufactured Juke's Eight and sold them, and he sold tens of thousands of them a year, and they were his machine. So basically for a long time, until other competitors figured out that there wasn't a patent on this thing. If you wanted a karaoke machine, you had to go to DeskA inoui right. And buy one. So, yes, he definitely made money. And he continued to make money over the decades and through the years, selling, like, equipment or CDs, stuff like that. Right. So he was fine. And he actually seems very Zen about this, but it is entirely clear that had he patented this and I think this really kind of drove home to me just how globally popular karaoke is. He would have been a billionaire many times over just from inventing karaoke and kicking back and taking the royalties from the initial patent. I agree, though he doesn't seem like that kind of guy from reading about them, because once you do that, your job then is fighting people in court for a living. Yeah. And he wants to do that. No, he didn't seem interested in it. He also wondered, I think, in that one autobiography article, if it would have taken off had he had a patent on it. It might not have just gotten as big as it was. I think that which is an argument in favor against intellectual property laws, but I think we should do an episode just on intellectual property one day. Let's do it. Let's do it. Chuck, who didn't feel that way, was an inventor from the Philippines named Roberto del Rosario, because he did get a patent on his karaoke singalong system in 75. I don't know his full story, but surely he knew what was going on with the Juke Eight and knew that he could kind of capitalize on that. I read a little bio on him, and apparently he claims that he had no idea about karaoke as far as Japan is concerned and that he invented it independently. So who knows about that? But he's also very frequently cited as an inventor of karaoke, incorrectly. And then there's another guy, too, who will meet actually, let's meet him right now. There's a guy named Kay Takagi. Come on in, Takagi. So he was a Japanese businessman who happened to manufacture karaoke machines. And the reason that he's frequently cited as the inventor of karaoke is because he and another guy named Earl Glick are the two men who introduced karaoke to the west through a machine debuting in called the Singing Machine. Yeah. And we should say that Dave, one of our great writers, helped us put this together. And he got a lot of this stuff from this point forward from a book by a man named Brian Raftery called the Don't Stop Believing how Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life. And I think this is kind of one of the seminal books on karaoke. That's the impression I have as well. But it came to America, like you said, it had been spreading throughout Japan, and obviously with international business travel and international travel, period, it's the kind of thing that eventually made its way to the States. And this film producer, producer of Children of the Corn, Earl Blick, was yeah, that's sort of his most noteworthy movie. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I had respect for him just being the head of Halroach Studios. Hal Roach Studios were responsible for Laurel and Hardy and our gang, The Little Rascals. So by the time Earl Glick was presiding over it, it was, like, basically teetering on bankruptcy and resting on its laurels had no idea that he produced Children of the Corn. So, yeah. Mad respect to Earl Glitch. So in 1980 and again, this is a great story, I hope it really went this way. He was on a cruise ship, and he was playing blackjack, ran out of dough and needed to double down and needed more money because he had a great hand, apparently. And there was, like you said, a man named is it Kai or K? K, which is short for Kisuko? Kisoboro. So K is nearby. He said, here's three large. I can cover you on that. Gave him three grand, click one. And obviously that formed a friendship. He was like, you're a great guy. Just to give me $3,000. Yeah. And Kaye was like, you're a great guy to pay me back. Exactly. And they bonded there on the cruise ship. And when they hit Tokyo and docked, takagi took Mr. Glick back to his office, said, hey, look at this karaoke thing. It's pretty great. You should get this going in the States. And Glick was like, yeah, I'm not so sure about this. But Takagi was not to be deterred, and over the next year would kind of send them sales figures to the point where Glick was like, hey, there's some real money to be made here. Yeah. At least in Japan. By this time, 1980, 81, 82, karaoke had been, like a huge sensation in Japan for a full decade. Like, it changed the culture. Desk inoui basically points to the invention of karaoke as giving all these intensely overworked Japanese office workers a way to blow off steam and just feel better about themselves that they otherwise didn't have. So it really took off in Japan, but it was questionable whether it was going to take off in America. So it wasn't like a given thing that just because the sales figures were high in Japan that they were going to translate into America. And at first, actually, that is how it went when they came up with The Singing Machine in 1982. Apparently, Kate Takagi would demonstrate it on the street and get booed. As he recounted later. It seemed like the American public took offense or was generally agitated when people who weren't professionals publicly performed music. And that was the whole basis of karaoke. It still is. It's reasonable, though. Here's my deal. There can be a certain amount of bad that's still kind of entertaining and fun. Depends. But there are some that's so bad where it's just you're waiting and waiting for that song to end. It's just so painful. Sure. And that's when you boo to let them know that you need to stop it. No, there's a certain booing threshold, for sure. Especially when you know that they are essentially deliberately singing badly. They deserve to be. Yeah, okay. That's a different thing. If someone is just super drunk and being really obnoxious, you can boom. That's different. It's when they're trying and they're bad. That's when you shouldn't boom. Because you'll totally shatter their spirit forever. Yeah. So it's up to you as an individual to cast that judgment at that moment. Exactly. Just use it wisely. That's right. All right. So it's not taking off quite yet. He's demonstrating it, like you said, not doing a good job, as legend has it. Click. Supposedly even took it to Frank Sinatra, who will figure in always figures in it karaoke, it seems like. And Frank was like, no, thank you. He said, what is this hunk of junk, baby? You can do Sammy. I'll do Frank from now on. That was actually me doing a bad Phil Hartman impression of Frank Sinatra. Well, mine is just Billy Crystal doing Sammy Davis, Jr. Oh, I like to think of you doing Sammy Davis Jr. Well, it's funny, because Sammy was actually there when Frank turned it down. He was like, I don't know, man. You could make some real dough with this thing. And frankly, don't contradict me, Sammy. Not in front of Glick. Oh, boy. That's pretty good. Phil Hartman I think Joe Piscopo used to do it back in the day. Phil Hartman. Phil Hartman was a great member. He was doing some round table discussion about current topics or something. And Shiny O'Connor was one of the panel members. And he kept calling Cyanide and cue ball and like, she was trying to have this legitimate conversation or whatever. He just kept dismissing her. Jan Hooks, I think. Yeah, it was great. That was back when he was really mad at her because she tore up the picture of the pope protesting abuse. And it's like, maybe we should revisit that. Yeah, right. Exactly. I think Shanade was kind of right on target. There still around. I can't remember. I was reading about her not too long ago. And I mean, she's still, if not putting out music, I think she's an artist. At least she's still. Creating still creating things. Yeah. So karaoke takes hold, at least on the West Coast. And I saw some places like, we're going to cover the East Coast and the West Coast. I saw that before this even happened. The Midwest? Yeah. Did you see that? No, I was totally joking. Really? Yeah. I saw an archived New York Times article about the place we're going to talk about in Manhattan, and they said that it had already been sort of making the rounds in the Midwest because of Japanese auto workers. Oh, wow. That's really impressive. But it was in the Midwest and no one knew about it. Yeah. So did this predate dimples on the West Coast, though? Or did it kind of also simultaneously go on in La. Well, it's Dimples. What year was dimples? Dimples, I have the impression was in the mid eighty s. I would say probably. Let's go with 85. No, I'm sorry, 87 is when it really took off. Well, the article in The New York Times was from 87, and they said that it had already been a thing in the Midwest. Wow, that's really hats off topeka for innovating with karaoke in the US. Probably Detroit, maybe. I guess that's I don't know where the Japanese auto manufacturing was back then. I wonder if it was Japanese executives coming over and talking about karaoke or American auto executives going over to Japan and learning about karaoke, then coming back to the Midwest and being like, let's do something tonight. Right. I put on a bunch of mufflers today. Exactly. I'm ready to unwind and build something that's really interesting. Man nice nugget. So, Dimples, like we mentioned, it was, until, I think, the mid 2000, the bar in Burbank, 2014, from what I saw. Oh, is that when it came out in favor of a whole food to be built over the top of it? Whole food? Well, there are multiple Whole Foods, so yeah, Whole Foods was built over there. So this is in Burbank, right across from Warner Bros. Studios. And the owner there, Sal Ferraro, bought a bunch of these karaoke cassettes. He started advertising, like, hey, we're America's first karaoke bar. You're going to love it. People didn't catch on at first, but they kind of took a page from the earlier days with Dice Kay when they said, well, there are plenty of young, attractive actors and actresses out here, so let's just get some of those in to perform. And it took off. People like, Well, I want to be a star, too. Right? Exactly. People started hitting the mini stage. Dimples was known as America's first karaoke bar, apparently incorrectly, but it certainly was America's first widely known karaoke bar because it was in La. But it was extremely old fashioned in a lot of ways. Number one, there were no K boxes, which we'll talk about in a minute. It was you performing on stage in front of the whole bar that's considered an old fashioned style karaoke bar. Number two, you probably don't necessarily know every single lyric to the song you're singing, so they would hand you a book with laminated pages with the lyrics, so you would be reading from a big binder while you were trying to sing and perform at the same time. That's certainly very old fashioned. And then also number three, I think there were only two. Now that I say number three, I think it was those two that made it super old fashioned. So you perform in front of strangers and then you had to read from a book. And so Dimples apparently really took off, and then karaoke also really took off around the world when they added something called CD plus G, which is compact disk plus graphics. Oh, that was the third one. They would literally use eight tracks or cassettes of recorded karaoke music. And then all of a sudden, in the late eighty s, you had a disc that you could buy that had a whole bunch of karaoke songs. But then also it had a video component to it as well, so that you could see the lyrics on screen. And around the late 80s, when karaoke as we know and love it today, was born. Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite things still about karaoke is that sometimes it can still have that old school look with a nature scene like a waterfall right behind this looks like the late 80s up on screen in front of me. It's delightful. Yeah. Or at least the early 90s. Yeah. So that was the west coast. In New York, there was a place called Singalong that opened in 87, and this was opened by, I think, like four people. Zack Smith, who was a drummer for Scandal, great band, if you remember Scandal. I remember the Warrior. Yeah, exactly. And then an attorney named Mindy Burnbaum. And then scandals manager Donald Zuckerman. And we also should say that they sort of put it on the Western map. But there were places already in Manhattan. There was one in Chinatown called Lotus Blossom, another one at a restaurant called Ichiban. So there were some karaoke bars in Manhattan, but kind of like with everything else they're like, in history says, until it's introduced to white America. Right. Doesn't exist. Like it doesn't exist. Maybe we'll mention it later in a retrospective in 30 years. Exactly. Yeah. But it did hit it big because of Sing Along. So are you saying that Sing Along spread karaoke in America more than Dimples did? No. Okay. Although they did franchise, I think they opened one in a buckhead here in Atlanta as the second one. Is that right? Singalong was also this place that innovated the KJ karaoke jockey. I couldn't help myself. That was totally involuntary. Yeah, but the KJ is the guy who is like English Dan, who gets everybody psyched up to come up on stage. English whoever english Dan was a yacht rock guy. Right? I'd really like to see you tonight. Yeah, it was he was English. Dan. English. Nick was a KJ. English dan was an English dan. And John Ford coach. Exactly. That's a great song, too. Sure. The KJ was innovative at singalongs, too. And you said the second sing along was in Buckhead, right? Yeah, I think. And then Chicago was next. So that would have been like, the early 90s because the late 80s saw the beginning of the entrenchment of karaoke. And then the spread really took off in the all of a sudden, it was like pop culture everywhere. Karaoke the first time for the first time in America in the 90s. Yeah. And it's funny to go back and read I know Dave pulled a quote from the AJC here in Atlanta, but to go back and read that New York Times article sort of describing what karaoke is really very charming. I know. I'm saying contemporary journalism is so helpful. I love it. It's neat because they're like, people get up on stage who have never sung before, and some people are bad and some people are great, but everyone has a good time. That's karaoke. Yeah. And so people made fun of it, but it was still an extremely popular thing to do. Typically, like ladies night, trivia night, karaoke night. Like, it wasn't necessarily like a karaoke bar, but it was kind of everywhere. But then there were places that were karaoke bars that started to spring up, too. And apparently it started to hit on hard times. In the nineties, at least, the trend started to die out a little bit. Grunge. I'm sure grunge had something to do with it. It was kind of a sea change when Grunge came along. But then American Idol actually revived Karaoke. Like gangbusters, basically. Yeah. I think that's a good place for a nice little cliffhanger. Okay, well, we'll leave it there, see what happens next. Did American Idol last? We'll find out 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. Okay. Chuck, lay it on them. Yeah. American Idol comes on the scene. It was huge. I mean, I'm not sure what their ratings are like these days, but in those early years, it was, like, one of the biggest TV shows in the history of American television. Yeah. And it apparently revived karaoke because people were seeing regular folks get up on stage and sing. And I think that just sort of coincided with people remembering, like, hey, wait a minute. This karaoke thing that Kurt Cobain killed, that was kind of fun. Why are we too cool for school now? Exactly. Because I guess it kind of is what American Idol is. You got the company is playing and you're singing. It kind of made people get back into it a little bit. So I think 2002 was the first season where Kelly Clarkson beat Doctor Pepper's Lil Sweet in the finals. Haven't you seen that? Doctor Pepper with Lil Suite. Was it a little sweet to run around? Yeah. Justin Guarini. Yeah, that guy. Yeah. So American Idol was big, and then that was like regular America was like, oh, yeah, let's go karaoke. And I forgot about that. And then Cool India. America got back into karaoke thanks to Lost in Translation. Yes, the very famous scene in the Sofia Coppola film where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are in a K box having a lot of fun on their big night out in Tokyo. And it's a really great movie and a great scene. Unlike all of the scenes in the 2000 film. Duet one of the worst ever. Obviously, there's like, Absolution the Journey or whatever, that Mario Lopez movie that Riftracks recently released. There's obviously really bad movies out there. They're so bad, they're almost unwatchable. Duet is bad, like, on an offensive level that is really hard to put into words because they clearly sunk money, time, effort and thought into it. And it's still so bad. Like these other bad movies, somebody just pooped it out in, like, a couple of months. This is like a huge, major motion picture. And it's so bad that it almost ticks me off just thinking about how bad that movie was and that it got released. Yeah, I never saw it. If you don't know what we're talking about, this is the movie directed by Bruce Paltrow, starring his daughter Gwyneth, Hughie Lewis, Paul Giamatti, Andre Broward, Scott Speedman, a bunch of people. And it's literally about karaoke. And I watched the trailer today and now I have that stupid Cruising song in my head. Yeah, that Geico commercial where they're on the moon gives me flashbacks of duets because it's like the main song that they sing in it. Yeah, I didn't see that. I do have to say there's one thing where I didn't know it was Bruce Paltrow that directs it. But there's a shot where Hughie Lewis and I think Gwyneth Paltrow are checking into a hotel. And it's like the scene ends in Gwyneth Paltrow leaves the shot and Hughie lose the stands there and he spiked the camera and blinks a couple of times. And you see more clearly than you ever possibly could how blank it is inside of Hughie Lewis's head. You just see it. And maybe it's not blank all the time, but for that moment, he was totally blank. And it's great. It's one of the great shots of all time. But that movie that out just for that, it's worthwhile the whole movie is worthwhile just to see that one shot. But it's so bad. I love Huey Lewis, too. Yeah, me too. Nothing. Again, very sad. You got to see it. But lost in translation was the exact opposite of dot. So that scene was, yes, it made it cool and hip again, like you said. And it was already kind of picking up steam anyway, but that definitely was like, well, Bill Murray can wear an inside out t shirt and get up there and sing, what was it, ellis Costello. I don't remember what he sang. I think he did Peace, Love, and Understand so that put it back on the map. And now I guess we need to talk a little bit about just the industry side of it. Because when you're putting hundreds and hundreds of songs out performed by different people, like, these aren't the original versions, they're recorded by session players and session singers. Because you always have that sort of background track going and there's a lot of money going. I mean, karaoke is like a $10 billion industry or something, and everyone gets a cut. Like if you wrote the song or perform the song, or if you have the publishing rights to the song, everyone has to say, it's okay to have my song recorded for karaoke. Right? And it's okay to have it performed. And each one there are different monies that people have to pay. Yeah, there's a mechanical fee to actually record the song. There's a synchronization fee to sync up the lyrics with it. Any kind of video presentation. There's a performance fee if it's not done in a keybox, which I don't even know if we said. A K box is just a little soundproof room that you can rent, that's a private room for you and your friends or whatever to perform karaoke. And so you're not doing it in front of strangers. You don't have to wait for other people to go. You just go as often as you want it is, and then it's just way more fun. And most karaoke places have K boxes now, but if you're not in a K box, if it's in front of people, you probably have to also pay a performance fee as well. Not you, the karaoke person, but either the venue or the KJ or the company that's actually directing this. Because time was you used to have to get an HRAC and everything was very tightly regulated. Now there's centralized servers basically, that exist in countries around the world that have these huge databases of karaoke songs. So where if you go into a karaoke place, it's just hitting up a computer, probably in the Philippines or Malaysia or something like that, and it's sending back that song and the lyrics with it onto your video screen and through the sound system. So to keep up with all of that is really difficult. And there's a lot of lawsuits that were filed. Probably the biggest one was sony music. Suing KTS karaoke they sued him for like 125 billion dollars for copyright infringement. Yeah, I mean, there've been plenty of lawsuits and the same goes with jukeboxes. And anytime you have a venue where people perform music if there are cover songs performed and stuff. Yeah, it's sort of a legal quagmire and like you said, even more complicated these days when you can be sort of off book and just do like a YouTube version on a Wednesday night at the bar and sort of be off grid as far as people seeking money are concerned. But if you're a legit karaoke club, obviously you're doing it right or have a legit real karaoke night with a company coming in, they're doing it right, as in paying all the artists and stuff like that. But there are some artists who have never signed away their rights. I think Springsteen is one. There are some people who used to but now the songs have been removed. Like a few print songs, Bonjovie Abba, Coldplay have removed certain songs, maybe because of complications or because they couldn't get everyone on board. But if you used to sing a song and you come back a few years later and it's not available, that may be why. Yeah, probably is. So what's weird is that you would think would kill karaoke, but the burgeoning of the internet and YouTube and just basically people creating karaoke songs at their house and being able to in like a home studio with just their laptop has actually kept it going. So karaoke doesn't seem to be going anywhere, although it does seem to be getting more and more removed from the group. There's a new thing called Wonkara, which is a solo karaoke singing box. There's room for one person in there and that's all the rage in Japan right now, from what I understand. Maybe it's just like a practice. No, it's just I just want to sing because I want to sing. No, I'm sure there's been a person who's like, before I try my chops in front of people, I'm going to rent one of these for myself. Sure. But I think there's also people who are like, all I want to do is one car. I don't want to talk to any of you that matters. There are home karaoke machines, obviously you can buy. There are apps now. One of the great delights of my life is when my brother sends me a Mule song. S-M-U-L-E. It's a singing app where he will be sitting in traffic and he'll record a full song. And my brother is a better singer than me and he'll just send me like I'll just get a text and it's attached. Like here's a smile from Scott Bryant. I've not heard of that. It's great. I mean, I have it too. I don't use it much, but he's kind of a smile king. And you can connect with other people to do duets and stuff like that. You don't even know. So there's a whole community around it. So I know we've talked about it before, but we can't stop until we talk about my Way killings and violence in general around karaoke, because there has been there is something called the MyWay killings, which we talked about in our tone deafness hereditary episode. But at least six people have been killed in the Philippines during or after a performance of My Way, frank Sinatra's song My Way. And there's all sorts of interpretations of why that My Way is a really popular song. And so in bar fights happen. So it just was coincidence. Other people are like, no, they really take My Way very seriously in the Philippines. And if you sing it tone deaf, you're in trouble. But it wasn't just my way. Apparently, John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads is one of the bloodiest songs of all time. Right. Is that a murder trigger? I guess. There was a guy in Thailand who killed eight of his neighbors eight. Partygoers at his next door neighbors house, one of whom was his brother in law, because they would not stop singing. And they sang Take Me Home, Country Roads, and he went over and shot them all dead. I mean, clearly other stuff going on there. Yeah, he seemed a little high strung, but it was the karaoke that had pushed him over the edge, for sure. Yeah. What do you think Frank would say about the My Way killing? You're going to lighten up sometimes, baby. I tell you what, they don't kill people, too, man is Mr. Bojangles. You got that right, Sammy. Yeah. And we should also mention, too, that it is huge in the Philippines. Like, anywhere you go almost in public, there might be it's sort of like the going to Nevada and there's a slot machine, like every time you turn around, except there's someone singing in the Philippines. Yeah, for sure. It's huge in Asia in general. Yummy has this great story about how she would kind of go duck out and go to lunch and sing karaoke and go back to work afterward. You're there. Good stuff. So you got anything else? Nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to know more about karaoke, just get up there and do it. It's not going to kill you, and you're going to be happy that you did. And since I said you're going to be happy, that means it's time for a listener mail. Of course, this is from a new 15 year old fan. Hey, guys. Big fan of the show writing to say hi. Just turned 15. I'm from California. I started listening in December, so I'm fairly new, but you guys have quickly become my number one show. Multiple times I've heard you all say that you lose listeners around high school, but I'm here to assure you that there are high school listeners out there. Anyway, a big reason why I love the show is because all the seemingly boring topics you cover, there's so many ordinary things that we take for granted that have such an interesting history. Like barcodes, for instance. That has been one of my favorite episodes so far. I'm glad that Natalie is saying this, because that's something that we love about the show is our episodes, like ballpoint pens and barcodes. Yeah, that seemed boring but turned out to be fascinating. Love it. Just today I was asked for a random fact. I was able to talk about the failure of the Pony Express, thanks to you guys. I also want to say thank you to everyone and stuff you should know for keeping the show so enthralling yet educational and like so many other listeners, has helped me through the tough times. I can always count on you for laughter, education, and tangents, one of my favorite parts of the show. And then a final, very kind correction. And we welcome those. Now we get rid of the meat of it. They've been very unkind lately. Yeah, we've noticed. It almost feels like there's a new breed of listeners who's like, look, I don't know who you jerks are, but I think you're jerks. And here's everything I think that you're a jerk about. There's been a lot of that. I think it's I don't know what it is. Maybe the pandemic wearing on people here. It could be. We've gone through waves of that, though, where we'll get, like, a new swath of listeners and then like, six months later, we'll hear from a lot of them again, be like, look, I'm really sorry about that first email. I really can't do without you guys. Yeah, you still don't know what you're talking about, but I find it endearing now. It's weird. She not only listened to the Walrus episode I'm sure you got email about this, but wanted to make sure you knew the beach creatures by the hearse castle that you thought were sea lions are elephant seals. And that is Natalie last name redacted. And she says, PS. Don't be Dumb was a great series. Well, that was nice. I don't know that anyone else ever wrote in to correct that. So thanks a lot, Natalie. Nicely done. Totally. That was a great email, Natalie. Perfectly done. Welcome to the fold, and good luck with high school. If you want to be like Natalie and get in touch with us, you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it lightly on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-03-06-sysk-sea-monkeys-final.mp3 | The Strange Story of Sea Monkeys | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-strange-story-of-sea-monkeys | Anyone who ever picked up a comic book as a kid probably marveled at the ads for the mysterious Sea Monkeys. In reality, they are just brine shrimp, not fantastical beings with magical powers. But the story behind the invention of the Sea Monkey is tale a | Anyone who ever picked up a comic book as a kid probably marveled at the ads for the mysterious Sea Monkeys. In reality, they are just brine shrimp, not fantastical beings with magical powers. But the story behind the invention of the Sea Monkey is tale a | Tue, 06 Mar 2018 15:32:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=15, tm_min=32, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=65, tm_isdst=0) | 50433546 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global energy company with customers in different places on different systems? So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carousel 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. We are swimmingly excited about this one because it is about sea monkeys. Jerry is Mama Sea Monkey. Yes. She's got a little blonde bob hairdo going on. And I guess we're baby sea monkeys. I guess, yeah. That's cool. We'll let the dad not exist. Okay. We're brothers. That's right. I think that's a good move with a non existent father, which really explains a lot about us. Nonexistent sea monkey father, no less. Yeah. So, Chuck, I realized that I don't know something about you, which is weird because we've been doing this for almost ten years and we're SeaMonkey brothers. We are. We know a lot about one another. We know one another. Smells, looks, scowls, all sorts of stuff. Right. Triumphs, victories. One thing I don't know about you is whether you were into comic books as a kid. Wow. Glad you asked. I feel like we've talked about this at some point, but maybe not. Yeah, we have, for sure. Okay. Because remember, I read Archie and Ritchie Rich. Oh, yes. Well, here's a couple of things. I read Archie and Richie Rich growing up and didn't get into the superhero comics much because I don't know why. But then also you don't know this part. We used to go to visit my grandmother on my father's side. She was big time into Thor, granny Thor. She lived in Jackson, Tennessee, and I had sort of the modern grandparents with cable TV who lived in a condo. Yeah. And then old school granny who lived in a house in the country. And so Granny Bryant didn't have TV or anything like that, but what she did have in the back room was a bunch of my dad and Uncle Ed's old toys and comic books from when they were kids. Nice. So I think they're mainly Uncle Eddie. So I had a big stack of comics from, I guess the were like, man from uncle. I'm trying to think of a few more no superhero stuff, but just those weird sort of I guess it wasn't weird, but the man from uncle is the only one I can remember. But it's a little weird. Long story short is because that's all the entertainment we had to ingest. My brother and I would go back there and read those every year for years. That's pretty awesome. The same comics. So you made your way through that stack multiple times. Many times. Got you. I remember the ads. I remember everything about them. So then you remember, obviously. I think you probably knew where I was going with this from the outset. You remember the ads for the Sea Monkeys then? I remember Sea Monkeys. I remember X ray specs sure. Which we'll get into. And I remember for sure all the ads. Can you draw this parrot or pirate? Oh, yeah. Remember that? For the art school? Yeah. What was that? I think they just took your money and then sent you a degree for your art school. Is that what it was? I'm pretty sure. So disappointing. Yeah, but the turtle was pretty cool. He had, like, a newsy camp on and a turtleneck, and he just looked like he was ready to get mellow, you know? Yeah. You know, the other one, too, was the Charles Atlas workout thing. Do you remember that? Yeah. Where the 98 pound weakling gets kicked in his face. Totally, man. Yeah. That's really playing on some 15 year old Insecurities, and it works, for sure. What about you? I remember Sea Monkeys. There's one that always stuck out to me was a bonkers ad from the 80s. This would have been way past your man from uncle era comic books, but I think I've asked you before if you'd ever had bonkers. They're like these fruit shoes. They were, like just the superior starburst. And there was a comic book ad in there with this kind of crotchety old lady in it, and I don't even remember the gist of it. I think maybe she was mad that the kid was eating bonkers and enjoying it. I don't know. But I'll never forget that comic for some reason, because the colors in it were just perfect, and they struck my brain just right. So I've always got that bonkers comic book ad in there, too. And a lot of bubble comic book ads are stuck in there as well. Nothing that means anything, really, and certainly nothing pertinent to this episode. Except for that Sea Monkeys ad. Yes, but you and I were also into Mad Magazine big time, which I believe was ad free, wasn't it? It was. They had, like, those fake ads oh, yeah, of course. Which were pretty hilarious. Sure. But no, I don't think they had any, like, actual ads in them. They were just strictly subscription based. That's right. So in that Sea Monkeys ad, if you'll remember correctly, and I think for many decades, it was virtually the same thing. It was this kind of group, this tribe of humanoid figures. It was a family. It was a family. But exactly what kind of family they were is really up for debate. So they're kind of lanky, like stringy ropey arms and legs, palmy, tummies, naked as the day they were born. Sure. Web feet, webbed tails. Like, the end of their tail was, like, webbed, which, if you look closely, I think was probably just a device to cover dad's junk. In the illustration, they were like, we need something on the end of their tail there, buddy. And it's just like this classic illustration of the Sea Monkeys that apparently was done by this guy named Joe Orlando. Mad magazine. Yeah, he's from Mad magazine. Creepy magazine is another one. He ran some comic lines at DC Comics for a while. It's kind of a legend. But he's also extremely well known outside of the comic world for having drawn that sea Monkey family. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at it right now. Look at that. It's, like, unchanged. I know. And what's great, too, is we'll talk about later. Some people went in and fiddled around with it. And if you look now, if you go to buy the Sea Monkeys now, they're basically back to the way they were before. Well, yeah, and we'll get to that, too. You also did mention the castle, which is kind of key because somehow they have these little crown like heads, and I guess we're kings of the bowl. I guess they were a royal sea Monkey family, kings of the fish bowl and only inhabitants, actually. Right. So you could proclaim yourself the royal family, you mean? I have done that at our house. So if you look closely at some of those ads, there's, like, a little fine print that says, these are caricatures of sea monkeys. It's not actually what your sea monkeys look like. It's an artist interpretation or something like that. And it turns out that sea monkeys and just prepare for your childhood to blow away, like, so much dust in the wind. Chuck, sea monkeys don't actually exist. There's no such thing. Yeah. Did you know that already? Well, of course. Well, sea monkeys, as sea monkeys, don't exist, but they are real little living creatures that you buy. They have shipped in an envelope back in those days in an envelope to your home, and they are actually their own thing. So what they are ultimately is something called Artemia or Brian Shrimp. Yes, but the guy who ended up calling them sea Monkeys was actually well within his right to call them something different than just Brian Shrimp, because they're a hybrid version of Brian Shrimp. The guy who invented sea monkeys actually tinkered along with a microcrestations expert named Diagastino. I can't remember his first name. I think when you have a name like destino. You can just go by that. So de Gustino and this guy named Harold Von Braughton hot. Right. They got together and they actually took Brian shrimp and made them into something different, a hybrid version that we now know and love is sea monkeys. Yeah. So the literal sea monkeys that you buy don't exist in nature. Right. They are a manmade creation. I don't think we can get that through clearly enough because it's pretty scientifically. It's pretty amazing. And they did that because they couldn't find any of these brine shrimp varieties that would live through the shipping process and be able to be essentially rehydrated and brought to life to the delight of children. So they made them. Right. There was no clapping and squealing with original brine shrimp. Right. No. So through these cross breeding programs, they made brine shrimp, brian shrimper already. I think you can still go to pet stores and buy them. They're a type of food. They're a pet food. They're just like tiny little micro crustaceans, and they enter into what's called cryptobiosis, and they're basically, if you'll remember our tardigrade episode, they basically do the same thing that tardigrades do. They enter into the state of suspended animation, a desiccated state where they're just dried out and just sitting there waiting for the conditions to be right, to basically come back to life. That's what sea monkeys are. Yeah. So you get this little package. They're brine shrimp eggs is what it is, or what they are. And then you get purified water, put them in there. And I believe there's a growth formula as well. Right? Yeah. That's like their food. It's like spirulina and yeast, I believe. Right. But no one truly knows what the exact formulation for all this stuff is because it is locked in a vault in Manhattan, because it was the only one that worked, and it was owned by the Van Bratton character, van Broughton Braun Hunt. No, it's a tough, tough name to say. I've seen it 100 times in the last 8 hours, but still. Yeah. Until he died in 2003, harold Von Braun Hutt and his wife Yolanda were the only two people on the planet who knew what the special formula was that created those conditions. Because, remember, you've got sea monkeys, little brine shrimp that are in the state of cryptobios. This is dried out desiccated state. And when you put them just in the regular tap water, they don't necessarily come to life. There's something in that powder that alters the PH and the salinity and makes it just perfect for them to emerge from this cryptobiosis almost instantaneously. In fact, early on, the sea monkeys were originally just called instant life, I believe is what the name they were originally marketed under. Yeah. Not the best name. No. It's weird that that name was chosen, because it turns out that Harold Von Braun Hutt is or was a marketing genius. He wrote the original 32 page booklet that I believe still comes with the sets. Is that right? I couldn't find evidence of that, and I was looking online to find a transcription of it and was very surprised to find no one's done that. You would think there'd be entire fan sites, that this is like the Bible. The original version of it would have later editions of it. Couldn't find it anywhere. Well, I don't know if it still comes with it, but for many years, and even after his death, that original prose which told this fantastical story. That's the whole point. It wasn't just like, add water and you're all set. Right. It told the whole story of sea Monkeys. Yes. It said things like, your sea monkeys can be hypnotized. You can train them to play baseball. You can race them. They love to race, all sorts of things. You can basically train them into a pack of friendly seals, I think is the way they put it. It talked about their courtship and reproduction and just all sorts of stuff. This guy is just basically do you remember that treatment that George Lucas wrote about Wookies and Chewbacca's Planet that got turned into the Star Wars Christmas special? Yeah. This is the exact same thing. But this is the Sea Monkeys world. Right. I would like to see I was about to say I'd like to see the Sea Monkeys TV show, but I did. What did you think? Did you watch any of it? Yeah, I did. Yeah. So there was a TV show in the 80s starring Howie Mandel. Yeah. It just really doesn't get any better. Like, who else would have been better than Howie Mandel for that? It was Howie Mandel. He produced it as well, along with the Kyoto brothers, who were known for making killer clowns from outer space. Yeah. So you know what? You're kind of going to get there. It is the definition of camp. Like, they watch Pewee's Playhouse and they're like, this is kind of campy, but let's increase it by 35%. Yeah. And that's what they did. It was not long for this world, though. What? Right. No. And the thing is, I don't know if we've gotten this across. It was live action. Oh, yeah. It wasn't a cartoon. That's what made it so not just campy. That made it unsettling as well. Like, the actors were all done up as, like, sea monkeys, and it was four kids, but it was obviously made by adults with a wink and a nod to other adults. It was a weird, weird show. Yeah. I only watched, like, a bit of one episode. I didn't see enough to judge the whole eleven, I think, episode lifespan. But it was like Sid and Marty Croft without the LSD. It was with PCP instant. That's how it struck me. I was like, These people are on angel dust. Yeah, but all this to say that it was, and continues to be a big selling item. Like, kids loved sea monkeys. They bought them. And from what I can tell, when kids bought sea monkeys, they didn't care that they didn't look like those things, and they just thought it was cool that something they got in the mail really did come to life. Yeah, for sure. And you could raise them, and after some tinkering, von Braun hut managed to get them to live for a while. So these were like pets to the kids. Plus, I also think, Chuck, I suspect and this is a big reason why sea monkeys were such a success von Braun, when he started to market these things early on, he was following immediately in the wake of something called instant fish that I think Whammo had tried to market and had failed terribly at. And he was going around trying to market something similar, and toy stores and retailers were like, we don't want anything to do with those. People almost lost their jobs over that instant fish stuff. Get out of here. So Von Braunhot and a stroke of genius said, you know what? I'm going to go right to the source. So he started marketing directly to kids. He started hanging out at elementary school parking lot. He did. And he'd be like, here, kid, come look at my minivan. I've got a bunch of stuff for you to choose from. Right, yeah. Well, the comic books was a stroke of genius. How many? Like three and a half million ads a year. Was that it? Or pages? 303,000,000 pages. Wow. A year. Most of those were two page inserts. So that's 150 issues of 150,000,000 issues of comic books a year. I wonder how expensive that was. I don't know. I'm quite sure he got some deals over the years because he started that marketing push in 1964. And I don't know exactly when it stopped, but it was well into the there were sea monkey ads and comic books still. They were virtually the same as ever. Did you ever buy any of that stuff? I had a friend who had SEAMonkeys. I never did myself, but that was the point that I was getting away from that I wanted to make. I think one of the reasons sea monkeys were successful was because it wasn't just that these things were pets or whatever. You ordered them yourself. Like, you handled this transaction yourself, right. And you got to show your friends something that you purchased, like your parents didn't take you to the store or anything like that. You contracted with this strange man to buy these brine shrimp from them, and they arrived and you followed the instructions, and now they're floating around. Yeah, well, you probably got mom or dad to cut you a 49 cent check or have them cut a check. Or you maybe got the funds from your eliminate stand and converted that to a cash bond. I don't know what any of that stuff is. But yeah. So you probably have a little assistance from mom and dad. Or maybe you put a dollar in an envelope. I'll bet many kids did. I wonder if Bronhit sent the change back. It was like, I'm keeping this changed, kids, just to teach you a lesson not to send a dollar bill in the mail anymore because you can't send change in the mail. Right, right. I mean, suffice to say, sea Monkeys and are just like one of the classic toys of all time, largely because of the way they were marketed. Right. Well, yes. And Von Brown hut this was not his only jam. He had close to 200 patents on everything. Like, we mentioned the X ray specs and that great, great ad of the guy looking at his hand, or the sexist misogynistic ad of him leering at a woman in a dress. And X ray specs were very disappointing when you got those, because it was two pieces of cardboard with little pinholes that you look through, and in between the cardboard where that pinhole is, is a feather. Right. And so what it did was it basically projected two overlapping images of the same thing, so the edges around the outside of it were just kind of fuzzier than the middle, basically. Supposedly, that was what an X ray of your hand looked like. Yeah. So that's a case of fraud. Yeah. Good way to put it. Or what about the invisible goldfish? That was another one. Is that's so fraudulent that it's just beautiful, it's elegant and it's fraudulent. Well, but it's almost not fraudulent because here's the deal. He sold what was called invisible goldfish, which basically means nothing. He sold nothing successfully. Right. The kit came with the fishbowl, fish food and instructions, and that was it. And there is a guarantee that you would never see your invisible fish, that they would remain invisible. Yeah. And I think that is the distinction that makes it not fraud. Right. He basically said, you're not going to see anything in this bowl. Yes. And that was that. What else did he do? He invented baldardash. That's right. He also invented those doll's eyes where you lay your doll back and it's eyes closed. He invented those. Yeah. He invented that technology, which was a game changer for creepy baby dolls. He also, even before his days of inventing, he was an interesting guy. Basically, his whole life, he raced motorcycles and cars under the name the Green Hornet. He was a talent manager for a couple of people. One was a mentalist. Yeah. Talent manager. Like Broadway. Danny Rose was a talent manager. Okay. I don't know who that is, but I'm going to go along with it. What's that from? The name is familiar, but I don't know. It was a Woody Allen movie where he played. It was a talent manager that managed like people like this, that were the high divers that would dive into shallow pools and mentalists and this guy was even a waste of mental illness for a little while. I didn't see that. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Yes, I think he did a little work as the Great something. Well, he managed a guy named the Great Damager. I didn't get whether that was him or not, though. It could have been. No, that was him. And he had his own act for got you. Okay. Did you see the high dive guy? Did you see his jump? No. Oh, my okay. There's a guy named Henri Lamoth, I believe. Yeah, Henri Lamoth. If you go look him up, H-E-N-R-I-L-A-M-O-T-H-E. You're going to be treated to an AP video that was shot in the early 70s, from the looks of it, where he's opening up for an evil kneeval act in a parking lot and God knows where in New Jersey. And he climbs up this ladder, a 40 foot ladder, and below beneath is one of these tiny little kitty pools filled with, like, 18 inches of water. And this guy, who is clearly in his mid 70s, maybe older, dives 40ft into 18 inches of water in a kiddie pool, belly first. He does basically a belly flop and immediately stands up with, like, TADA. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life. And this guy, Harold von Braun Hutt, managed that guy back in the day. Yeah. Okay. He was a magician who worked under the name the Great Tilepo. That's a pretty good name. And he also invented something called the Directmat, which was this device where you punch in your destination. Like you're in New York City, you punch in your destination and the machine told you the fastest subway route. Oh, that's smart. It was Google Maps. That's very smart. Like, 50 years early, but using punch cards instead of real technology, basically. But the guy, not only was he a marketing genius, he had a real knack for inventing some successful, useful things. So he had this other thing that you could get for, like, 59, 95, and it was actually a weapon. So much so that he was stopped at La Guardia Airport, 1979, and arrested because he had a briefcase of samples of this stuff that he was selling, I think through mail order, and it was called the Kyoga Agent M Five. Yeah, the Kioka agent M five. It's basically a telescoping metal whip. You've seen the telescoping batons and things that cops can use, I guess. Sure. Anybody can use them. And do actually had one of those for a little while for some reason. Did you really? I did. I thought you know what? I'm not a gun guy, but I thought, I'll put this thing in the floorboard of my car. Sure. And if anyone ever reaches their hand in the window, then they're going to get a wrapped knuckle. Smart. It's funny. I don't know where it went, though. It didn't telescope properly, so I was like, that's probably not good. No, it's not, because that's not what you want. And plus, you have to practice with that kind of thing. It's a big commitment. Just turning and running is way better. Well, yeah, I went back to plan A, which is poop my pants and cry. Right. Hopefully that works. No one wants to punch a guy who's just pooped his pants, all right? Not in the butt, at least. Right. So this M five telescoping whip. This is where things get weird. And we'll set this up right before the ad break because it turns out that Mr. Von Brown Hut was perhaps almost certifiably a white nationalist Aryan Nazi. Sure. Is that fair to say? I think so. All right. And we'll get to that right after this. 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Okay, Chuck, I'm sure everybody just bit the tips of their fingers off waiting for those ads to finish so we could get back to it. Is it fair to call him a Nazi? So here's the thing. It has been so thoroughly documented by legitimate sources like The Washington Post, the los Angeles Times. His own mouth? Yes, his own mouth. The Jewish AntiDefamation League. I don't know if the Southern Poverty Law Center actually tracked him or not, but this guy has definitely been identified as somebody who was a longtime contributor to white nationalist groups, specifically the Aryan Nations out of Idaho, which is one of the original white hate groups in the United States. That's right. Here's the problem with that. This is the guy who invented Sea Monkeys. Problem number two is that if you ever sent your money off to buy some sea Monkeys, some of that money had a very good chance of having been turned around and given to the Aryan Nation. And herein lies a real moral conundrum for a lot of people, understandably? So. Yeah. Well, I didn't see did he just give money, period? Yes, but the people are saying, I gave you some of that money for Sea Monkeys. Who knows what dimes and nickels that I gave you went to Aryan Nation. I don't want any money going to Aryan Nation. So I feel horrible that my money went to you, which you, in turn gave to the Aryan Nation. Right. However this m five was, there was a man named Richard Butler. This guy was a real piece of human garbage. He was the founder of the Arian Nation. Yeah, he was the worst. He's not with us anymore, thankfully, but he was a very bad man, and he was brought up on trial. And basically, this M Five little telescoping whip that was invented by Von Braun Hut that was specifically used that product, and proceeds from that specifically went to a fund to help out Richard Butler. Right. We know that for sure. Yeah. Everything's going along for Harold Von Braun Hut pretty swimmingly until the late 80s. Right. In the late 80s, richard Butler is brought up, along with, I think, 14 or 15 other white nationalist leaders on sedition charges, basically trying to overthrow the government through plotting, assassinations, trying to start a race war. They had some serious charges against them. They were eventually acquitted of these charges. But as part of this defense fund in the Area Nation newsletter, richard Butler talks about the Kyoga agent. M Five is a great tool for every area Nationalist to have a great weapon and defense mechanism. And if you order this thing on the order form, write the letters A N for Area Nation, and the inventor of this product has pledged that 25 of those $60 will be given to my defense fund. So now, all of a sudden, for the first time ever, the guy who invented Sea Monkeys is tied to the guy who founded the Aryan Nation hate group. Yeah. And this was just like the beginning of the can of worms, which he did not invent the can of worms, but he should have. It was the beginning of that being open, because, like you said, late 80 is. What was the 88, I think. And the Washington Post basically got a hold of the story, did some investigating and found that he was involved in quotes, some of the most extreme racist and antisemitic organizations in the country. But here's the deal. Like, there are quotes from his mouth that say things about inscrutable slanty Korean eyes when dealing with Korean shop owners and talking about Jews and black people, like literal quotes. Yet when he's finally contacted this great article that we kind of started with was when he was still alive, he would deny that this was him. Right. But not try and clear it up or anything. Basically just say, that's a bunch of bunk, where there were newsletters written for an organization called the National Antizionist Institute written by one Hendrick von Braun. But the return address was the same PO. Box that you sent off to get sea monkeys. Yeah, sea monkey like paraphernalia still today, same address. It's in Maryland, which is where he lived. Right. So he wasn't, like, covering his tracks very well at all. So all that started that Washington Post expose specifically also came out of a property dispute. He later claimed that all of these were lies and that they were drummed up by somebody who was in a property dispute with I think there was a developer who was encroaching on his land and he was suing them. And I think he said that the developer had brought all this up. The thing is, whether the developer exposed it or not or tipped the Washington Post after this or not, this is already like, pretty well known in the toy industry, supposedly. Yeah, and pretty well documented. It wasn't just that this Herald von Braun hutt gave money to the Aryan Nation. Like, he would go to their annual rally in Idaho and light the cross himself. He would speak at some of their conferences and apparently not very well received. I thought that's pretty funny. But he wasn't like the best speaker. No, he would kind of go off on topics that the Aryans weren't particularly interested in, like numerology or the pyramids or how it all tied together. But the thing is, he had a lot of money and he was apparently quite willing to give it. Now we have to say, no one has ever documented a penny that was given to the Area Nation. The closest thing to a smoking gun is that newsletter from Richard Butler saying that the inventor of this is pledged $25 per. But the very fact that he was basically allowed into the orbit of Richard Butler himself strongly suggests that he actually followed through on those campaign pledges and legal defense fund pledges. And apparently a former spokesman for the Area Nation who is now a reformed racist, he says spoke out about Harold von Braun hutton said he didn't know exactly how much he gave, but he gave a lot. And he gave pretty frequently when he was asked. Right. So things get a little weirder here because it turns out that von Braun Hutt was actually Jewish. He was born to Jeanette Cohen and Edward Braun Hut, not Vaughn Bronn. Hutt had that little van to, I guess, Germanized him. I guess so. And he was born in New York City on March 31, 926 as Harold Nathan Bronhutt. And if you know anything about Aryan Nations or any of those groups, they don't take kindly to a Jewish guy, even if he's, like, rebukes that to being a member. Right. But like he said, he had a lot of dough, and that's basically why everyone thinks they allowed him to stay on as a member. Yes. So the 1988 Washington Post article did a couple of things. One outed the inventor of Sea monkeys as an white supremacist, or I should say just a white supremacist, he was an Aryan. It also outed him as a non Aryan, as a Jewish person born Jewish to Jewish parents. About as Jewish as you can possibly get, aside from being a practicing Jew. Right. So he was outed in this Washington Post article, like, two times over. So everybody was mad at him from either side. Right. The thing is, even after, I guess, the Area Nation released a press release about this, saying that they were disappointed to find out this guy that they were friends with was actually Jewish, but he was not kicked out of their circle. He stayed apparently as intracted as he was before and still was always a part of the organization's conferences and stuff like that. Yeah. And it wasn't just the Aryan Nations in 1985. The Washington Post says that us. Attorney Thomas Bauer, there was a weapons case in 1985 against a member of the clan Grand Dragon, Dale Royce. Yeah, it was in 1980, I think, that the transaction happened. Okay, but the weapons case was in 1985. Got you. And Van Braun Hut basically loaned the guy $12,000 so he could buy more than 80 firearms. Yeah. Like, he would go buy a bunch of guns. Okay. Yes. And this is a Grand Wizard of the clan, I believe. Right, yes. So the reason I pointed out that it would happen in 1980. The year before, the Washington Post had drummed up in that 1988 article. The year before, he had paid, like, one $300 for his parents graves in a Jewish cemetery to be kept up in perpetuity. So this is this weird dual life this guy is living, like, born and raised Jewish, respecting his Jewish parents funeral wishes and burial wishes, and then months later, helping a Grand Wizard of the KKK by 83 firearms and then taking possession of the firearms himself until the loan was paid back. It's crazy. It is a little crazy. It's quite surprising, actually, too. I mean, that's like a big one two punch. Yeah. So he would do licensing deals over the years that's how he ran his business. Probably smartly to do that, if you ask me. But over the years, there have been many companies that held a license for Sea Monkeys that he partnered with, and they all kind of had different reactions. There was one called Larmy Limited, one called Basic Fund, one called Educational Insights. There may have been more. Today it resides with Big Time Toys. But this article that we dug up from when he was still alive, basically, this guy gets in touch with a lot of these people, and some of them said they believe the story, that it was just some story that this angry neighbor cooked up to slander his name. Other ones have said, yeah, you know what? Everyone kind of knew about it, but we're not going to take that out on the Sea Monkeys. Right. And he was a nice guy to us. And what he does in his private time is no one's business. Yeah. The thing is, some of the people that he was doing business with were Jewish. And we're taking some of the things he was doing in his private life personally, themselves. Like the guy who was the president of Basic Fund. It's one of the worst names for a toy company basis. It's like, don't get too excited. This is just basic fun. They had a spin off company called Minimal Enjoyment. Right. He got the license or his company got the license for Sea Monkeys to handle distributing and marketing sea Monkeys. And he apparently asked von Braun, hut, Is this true? And von Braunhut told him no. There's this developer I'm in a dispute with who's, like, trying to drum up bad press. They're all lies. Well, within a year, The New York Times wrote an article about that annual rally at the Ariannation compound in Idaho and said that Harold von Braunhead had been a speaker there. So the guy from Basic phone was like, that's it. I'm done with your contracts. Broken. Yeah, I mean, that did happen sometimes over the years, and other times people I guess money talks. So they were willing to put up with it. Yeah. It's crazy. When he was called personally, he said, I don't have to defend myself to you or anyone else. I'm hanging up. Right. So I guess it was a time when pre Internet, pre social media, where you could kind of get away with stuff like this a little easier. Yeah. It was just an open secret. And I think, like you said, I think you hit the nail on the head, man, when there's, like, this much money involved. And when you're talking about a brand where it's just like a beloved American icon, people just look the other way on the fact that you're a white supremacist. It's bizarre, but apparently this is a story of how the world works in that respect. Yeah. It was interesting for this one article, I think from the early 2000s, from the all. No, that was from 2011. The other one was oh, yeah, that was when he had currently the license. He was Educational Insights, and they at the time, it was funny to go back and read this that they were trying to update the image for the Sea Monkeys. Yeah, they had, like, these drawers. They hired some big advertising guy and marketing guy, and he came in and was basically like, no, man, like kids these days, they don't want these little skinny, pot bellied king, queen, prince, and princess family. They want superheroes. So he buffed them up and put capes on them and made a new jingle. And they never went with any of that stuff. It kind of all went in the waste basket, I think. Well, one new thing did come out of it, and Harold Bronn had a patent on it was one of his last patents. It was a watch that you could inject a couple of live Sea Monkeys into, and they would live in there for 24 hours before, I guess, either they died or if you could suck them back out and put them back in their aquarium, but you could walk around with your two favorite or luckiest Sea Monkeys for the day and tell time as well. There was at least one thing that came out of that updating. But if you go back and look if you look at those, you're like, this is pretty lame. And you go back and look today at the Sea Monkey packaging, it is basically back to how it was like in that Joe Orlando style. But if you do want to watch some business people do some tap dancing, it's really interesting. Read this article. It's called the Sea Monkeys and the White Supremacist It was in the La Times on October 1, 2000, written by Tamar Brat, who did a pretty good job of just some good old fashioned footwork or legwork. Going to pound the beat, pound the beat with the footwork, sniff them off the case, you know what I'm saying? All right, well, let's take another break, and we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about where things stand today in the fight over the rights and the fortune of the Sea Monkeys. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to just as you should know, 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. 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And what you need is to make this refreshing crowd pleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on, let's work hard, play hard, and drink. Martha's Shard, available at a wine aisle near you. And on 19 Crimes.com. That's One Nine Crimes.com. Please drink responsibly. All right, so we know what happened, actually. How did he die? I didn't even see that. I didn't see that either. He died in 2003, but I'm not sure why. All right, so he died. That's true. But he left behind his wife. Yolanda, signerelli von Braun Hutt. Did you look her up? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, she was an actress. She was sort of like a pin up, bombshell, B movie actress. Is that fair to say? It's fairish. I'd also seen her movies described as adult films as well. Sure, she was in a movie. I got to see this one. It's called Love After Death, and it's a softcore zombie flick from the but, yeah, she's a pretty interesting person in her own right as well. Yeah. And she says for her, as far as the Aryan Nation stuff, she says, I never knew and saw this side of him. So I don't know if she's being on the level or if she's just kind of quashing this and covering for him. It's kind of not clear to me. I don't know if it was in that New York Times article or in the 1988 Washington Post article, but his first wife was contacted and interviewed for it, and she was like, what are you guys talking about? Really? Yeah. So who knows? Maybe he did just keep that. He was clearly somebody who could compartmentalize the different parts of his personality, so maybe he really did just leave the wives out of it. Man, how could you not know something that's crazy? Just going to Idaho on my yearly trip. Yeah, that's weird. He always goes to Idaho when the Arian nation assembles. All right, so Yolanda Signore Levon Bronhutt lived and I think still lives, at least as of two years ago, when this article came out in the Potomac River Estate in Southern Maryland, but she is she's broke, basically. No electricity, no running water, and she has been in a legal battle with Big Time Toys and their chief executive, Sam Harwell, for basically several years trying to get money because Bigtime Toy says, this is our company now. Yeah, Big Time Toy sounds like I'd be nervous about going into business with them. I'm more of a basic fun guy. Big Time Toy sounds like they're moving too fast for me. You know what I mean? Yeah. So Yolanda Brownhutt, she's got kind of like a Great Gardens thing going on right now against her will. This is not something she's happy about at all. And her position is. As far as the Times tells it. Is that she engaged in a licensing deal. Which is how Sea Monkeys have been produced basically since the beginning with a company with that company. Bigtime Toys. Where they would handle the packaging and the distribution. And her company. Her own little company. Would handle making the actual sea monkeys that were put into the packaging that Bigtime Toys sold. Right. So Big Time Toys would buy the sea monkeys that they would put into the packages and then would turn around and sell to the public. That was the arrangement initially. Right. So we have the secret formula that no one else has seemed to be able to crack. This is Yolanda talking. Yeah. Should I have done my yolanda voice? Yeah, let's hear I don't know if she sounds like high pitched Italian stereotype. Let's hear it. No, no. It would have been, like, three different groups of people if I yeah, I think you are. She basically said, we have the secret formula, the only one that works, that can keep these things alive. Everyone else has tried and failed, and so we will sell this to you, and you can do everything else and cut me a check. And there was also a side deal that said you can buy this company, including the secret formula, for $5 million upfront and then another 5 million in installments. And so Bigtime basically called her up a few years ago, probably about five years ago at this point, if my math is right, and said, you know what? All these payments we've been making to you for the licensing deal, we just kind of consider that layaway. And as far as we're concerned, we own Sea Monkeys now. Yeah. We've reached that $5 million point. So there are which ostensibly should not have been that money. It should have been separate payments. Right. If I understand this correctly. But, I mean, when somebody does that, what are you going to do? You got to go sue them. Right. And that's what they're doing. And they're bleeding this lady dry, at least as far as this New York Times profile is concerned. I mean, if you get into a fight like that and you don't have the money, you can lose. So this could be a sad end to the Sea Monkey saga, because here's the other problem. You might be saying to yourself, well, why doesn't she just not sell them the Sea Monkeys anymore? Well, she did. She stopped when they stopped making payments and said they owned the Sea Monkey brand. And it turned out that in this court case, that Big Time Toys have been buying knock off Sea Monkeys from China, and then that's what they were putting into the Sea Monkey thing. So apparently, if you buy, currently, a Sea Monkey package, you're getting Big Time Toys packaging and Chinese knockoff Sea Monkey packets, which don't work. Apparently. I went and looked at Amazon reviews, and almost all of them, for all the products, said none of them hatched or they hatched for, like, a day. These things stink. When I was a kid, they worked. So it's weird that it's sort of ironic that they ended up creating this special breed, essentially. Right. That worked, and that ended up being their undoing. Because in court, in the affidavit, the leader of this Harwell guy whose wife, by the way, is ahead, she's the speaker of the House of the Tennessee House of Representatives. Oh, yeah. They're a power family. Okay. All the way around. And not to be trifled with, in his affidavit, he says he outsourced the Sea Monkeys to China and says there are seven recognized species of artemia brine shrimp, and this is not one of them. So because they had created their own species, it ended up being their undoing. A court, it looks like, because it doesn't officially exist as a real species that these guys are getting. Yeah, but I'm pretty sure he got a patent on the species that they made. Well, no, that's what I'm saying, though. But he's not getting that species. Oh, I see. He's getting these well, they're not knock offs. They're Mother Nature's own from China. But they're not the ones that are working. Right. I got you. It's just a mess. But then still, doesn't that raise questions about how you could use the Sea Monkey's name? That's what I wondered. But I guess if they had the license to use the Sea Monkey's name because they were in charge of packaging and distribution, maybe then, yeah, I guess they could say, well, we're not going to use the official ones any longer. We're going to use these natural ones. Man, what a mess. Well, and it's a mess, too, because you're like, oh, do I root for the side of this guy who was a White Nationalist, but his wife said she didn't know anything about that, and she's going broke and basically have this company stolen from her, it seems like. I don't know what to think. Or do you root for the guys who are apparently stealing the company for Big Time Toys, widow of the White Nationalist? Yeah, for big time toys. Yeah. You know what I predict, though, Chuck? I predict that Sea Monkeys, the brand, will ultimately rise above this, that it will survive this somehow and still be around 2030 years from now. The Sea Monkeys will take over. Yeah. They will eventually overthrow the human race like the Aryans plotted to overthrow the US. Government. What a story. It's quite a story. That's a good one, man. Thanks for digging us up. Sure. Well, if you want to know more about Sea Monkeys, just start digging around, pulling at the loose threads. You're going to find some interesting stuff. And since I said interesting stuff, that means it's time frames for listener mail. I'm going to call this Pompey in Lemons. Is that how you would say it? Pompeyan? Yeah. I thought that was beautiful. All right. Long time listening to first time emailer guys. Recently listened to the Pompeii show. Very informative. And I used to be a tour guide in Europe and led close to 15 tours on the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius. I listened to Josh experience with the lemons. They do, in fact, grow to be the size of your head. However, those gigantic lemons are actually called CEDRI and are more for show than anything. They're called CEDRI. The entertainment. If you ever cut one in half, the inside, is actually about the size of a normal lemon. The rind can be a few inches thick, and boy, are they bitter. Definitely not something you keep around for lemonade. Just something I wanted to share. Thanks for ruining everything for me. And also another thought the other day in the car, have either of you just said no? When one of you asked for a commercial break, I thought it'd be funny if one of you just said, nah, we've come close. We have, haven't we? I don't know. Did it not make it into an episode? It might not have. We have. And we just edited that part out and kept going, I think. Well, that is for Matt McDonald, who is a software developer at NeoCloud. Thanks a lot, Matt. I think I was kind of disappointed to read that email originally, but whatever. I guess you got to just live with reality, right? You've made an enemy today. If you want to get in touch with us and ruin our reality like Matt did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua Clark. There's also an S YSK podcast Twitter handle. I also have a website called Ruceriesclark.com. Chuck. Your friend Chuck is@facebookcom Charleswchbryant. There's also facebook. Comstepysheanow site. You can send all of us, including Jerry and email, to stuffpodcast@householdtepforce.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstopworks.com hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural, science based nutrition guaranteed to support your daughter top's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | |
445fcae2-53a3-11e8-bdec-03995c49061c | How Macy's Thanksgiving Parade Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-macys-thanksgiving-parade-works | For almost a century, Macy’s department store has kicked off the holidays in America with a grand parade. And when you march thousands of clowns, lip synching celebrities, bands, and giant balloons through New York things get remarkable. | For almost a century, Macy’s department store has kicked off the holidays in America with a grand parade. And when you march thousands of clowns, lip synching celebrities, bands, and giant balloons through New York things get remarkable. | Thu, 12 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=317, tm_isdst=0) | 47811692 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, jerry's out there dressed as turkey dresses a pilgrim. Weirdly. And that makes us, of course, stuff you should know. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade edition. That's right. This is an episode we've wanted to do for a while and there's a lot here. It's really pretty interesting. Do you watch, by the way? I'm just curious. If I missed one, I would just be in shambles crying. Really? I love the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. For sure. I don't think I've ever watched one. Really suck, man. I'm really surprised, especially in the 80s, too, that you didn't watch it back in the day. Yeah, it's great, ma'am. It is a very fun thing to watch. It's like full of glad tidings and cornucopias with pumpkins and stuff and it's great. I mean, I feel like it's on houses that I go to, so it's not like I have never seen bits of it. Right. But I've never like, popped the popcorn and sat down and be like, I need to get my parade on. Yeah, some people do. That weirdos. But for the most part it's meant to just kind of be seen as you see it, you know what I mean? Like you'll see some of it while you're making your trimmings and stuffing. Yeah. Or you can sit down and watch bits of it, but if you sit down from nine to twelve, I'm quite sure there are plenty of people out there who do do that, but for the most part it seems like something you just kind of watch here or there. And I know we talked about it at some point because I did tell the story about Emily and I going to we were in New York over Thanksgiving a couple of times, and both times we went the day before to watch the balloons being blown up. Yeah. That's an event in and of itself. Inflation day is what they call it now. Yeah, it's really a good time and just little kiddos everywhere and can't wait to go back with my daughter one day once it's safe to do so. Yes. And one of my friends, Molly, she works in the Macy's for a very long time. Okay, well, Molly has been in the parade. This is going to be her fourth time, as a matter of fact, and she said some of her best memory I was texting her about asking her some questions and she said some of her best memories ever were formed because everybody's just in the best mood and watching the parade and you're just marching down the street waving and everything. She said it's just amazingly cool. Yeah. And I think can we go ahead and drop the fact of the episode for me since you said that? Okay. Does that make you nervous? Yeah. Which one? Well, I never knew this, but except for the performers and the host and stuff like that, everyone you see in that parade works for Macy's. Yeah. Or they're a friend or a family member of a Macy's employee. Yeah. I never knew that. And I'm sure, like, a straggler might get in there, but it is largely Macy's friends and family and employees. Yeah. Very cool. And that's actually to kind of get into the history of this. That is a tradition from the very beginning. So, like, the first ever Macy's parade wasn't even a Thanksgiving parade. It was called the Macy's Christmas Parade. Even though it was on Thanksgiving still, back in 1924, there were a lot of recent immigrants to the United States from Europe who were working for Macy's who said, hey, we've got these parades that kind of celebrate things over in Europe. We should start doing one here. And they actually led to the first Macy's Thanksgiving well, Christmas parade in 1924. And so all the clowns and the cowboys and the people pulling the caged wild animals, they were Macy's employees. And that's always been the case ever since then. Created by immigrants to the United States, everybody. Yes. Rich American tradition. I love it. Except for a three year break during World War II, they have been launching this Thanksgiving Day Parade for 96 years. It has morphed and changed over the years from sort of a small thing to a very big thing to an event, one might say an entertainment event. About a quarter of a million people showed up on that first one, and I think, what is it, like, three and a half million people now go in person? Generally, yeah, and we should say generally. Traditionally, we got to qualify with that, because the 2020 parade, thanks to the pandemic, is going to be different, and we'll talk about it. But yes, under a normal year in the last decade or so, three and a half million New Yorkers or people show up on the streets of New York to watch this thing and then like, 50 million more watch it on TV. Amazing. So quarter of a million, that first one ads read, a marathon of Mirth is coming to this Macy's Christmas parade. And it was about a six mile route in that first year, and it was pretty long for a while, and then they narrowed it down there, like, we can't go 6 miles anymore. This is getting ridiculous. No, it started in Harlem and went all the way down to Herald Square, where Macy's flagship store is, which is where it ends. Yeah, 6 miles. That first marathon of Mirth, like I said, they had caged animals that they dragged along, and they did that for the first few years, and then they realized, actually, the animals, they're scaring all the little kids. They're not delighted like we thought. So they stopped borrowing them from the Central Park, too. It also wasn't much fun for the animals, I'm sure, as well. And so they replaced the animals with floats, I think, in 1927, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, and that was a good idea because they're like, what do kids not like are angry tigers. What do kids like are happy balloon tigers? Yeah. Especially when it's cold out. You don't want your pants to be wet. That's right. By the midst of 1930s is when the Christmas parade really made the transition to the Thanksgiving parade that we know and love. And that's when pop culture started to be a thing. And people felix the Cat was the very first character balloon in 1927. And traditionally celebrities started taking part in about 1934. I think. Eddie Cantor was the first big celeb, who is a pretty interesting guy if you want to look him up. Old band. Joe is Eddie Cantor. So not only was he the first celebrity to take part, he's also the one and only celebrity to have a balloon based on him, too. Yes. I'm kind of surprised by that. Yeah, that's the only one. Yeah. You'd think? Orval Red Rock? I don't know. I'm hoping that this really tips the scales in our favor, though. Man, that would be amazing. Mine would be mostly beard, you know, it would be cool. As if they made a balloon of us as the thing with two heads. With Rosie Greer and Ray Milan. Yeah. Do you remember that movie? I sort of do. Ray Milan is like a horrible, racist old rich guy who pays to have his head put on Rosie Greer's body and they have to get along the first deep fake, I guess, maybe parade wise. Boy, this is a deep cut. Shrunk this thing down, like I said, to about 43 blocks that we see today. The balloons and the floods just got bigger and bigger. Of course, the Rockets started kicking their way in 1958 and then in 77, with the addition of Jean McFadden, who was the Macy's day planner. The parade planner. That's when they started doing the big Broadway performances. Yeah, jean McFadden, she was from Texas, and so, of course, everything is bigger in Texas. She injected that idea into the Macy's parade, which is already like a big deal by the time she came along. But she really blew it up and turned it into this incredibly huge event that it is today. And she also will see brought in sponsors, too, which definitely altered the complexion of the parade for the better and the worse. Really? Yeah, I think so. They plan the parade for about 18 months. So if you do the math there, there's about six months where there are two parades being planned at the same time. Can you imagine? Yeah, I bet you it's pretty segmented, though. It's not too confusing. I would be totally bald, I think, if I were in charge of that. And then last year, in 2019, it was the 93rd parade they had 26 floats, 16 giant helium character balloons, and 40 heritage and novelty balloons and eleven marching bands. Yeah, that's a lot. I mean, especially up from four horse drawn floats to what they've got now, 26. And those giant character balloons, those are the ones you always see. But in addition to those, there's all those other balloons you mentioned, too. Like there's a lot going on in this parade. I mean, it's a three hour parade, for Pete's sake. That over two and a half miles. Still takes 3 hours or so much to it. Yeah, and it's interesting, there are a lot of balloons, and over the years, what happens is this parade acts like a time capsule. So whatever's going on in 2019, they're going to try and feature very 2019 things. And over the years, that is paid off. You've got your timeless characters that are always there, but sometimes you're going to have characters like in 99, when they had the Ask Jeeves float, or I'm sorry, the balloon. And that one didn't age so well. Ask Jeeves went away. Jeeves retired. Right? He retired for sure. But at the same time, fortunately, somebody videotaped that and you can go on the Internet now and see footage of the Ask Jeeves balloon. It's kind of the point, though. It's like it does transport you to 99 when you see something that exactly kind of was only 1999. Or if you go on if you watch the 2008 parade, you'll see Rick astley Rick rolling the parade, he comes out and sings like, never going to give you up. And that is about as 2008 as it gets. It's like these time capsules, and you can go watch entire parades on YouTube right now. One of my favorites is the 1980 parade. Remember where's the beef balloon lady? She was great, man. She was great. Or I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler lady. Yeah. Or the time to make the donut sky. Oh, yeah. Or 99. I think they also had the Fight Club float, which was fantastic. It was. It was just Edward Norton staring at his hand with a Lie chemical burn growing on it. We're kidding about all this, by the way. Although I wouldn't be surprised if there was a beef lady. Might have. She was pretty big. She was very big. She was. So maybe we should take a break okay. And really get into these balloons after this. Okay. So balloons, like we said, first, came about to replace those poor animals from the Central Park Zoo, which was a good move. And there was a guy who really put the first stamp on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. His name is Tony Sarge. And this guy is just such an amazing character. He has his own American Experience documentary about him. I watched that. I have not seen it. I saw a clip of it to make sure we're pronouncing his name correctly. Is it good? Yeah, it's good. It's short and sweet. Did you see the beginning part, that little stunt he did about the sea monster? Yeah, that's pretty great. That was a Macy's Day float. I mean, it wasn't a Macy's Day float, but it's essentially what it was. I think it was originally, and he borrowed it. Oh, was it really? I'm pretty sure it was used in the parade, and he repurposed it. I guess for those of you, the million of you who don't know what we're talking about, this guy Tony Sarge was a puppeteer designer, and he was responsible for creating the first floats and balloons in the Macy's Parade. He was also a bit of a prankster, and he took one of these sea monster balloons from the Macy's Parade and had it come ashore on Nantucket as, like, a sea monster. It was like this early 1930s prank, but he was just this whimsical, great guy who really kind of took this humdrum parade and turned it into, like, a major annual event for the first time. Yeah, he was you said he was a puppeteer. He is the father of American puppeteering. Very big figure in puppeteering in the United States. I think it was basically in the history of the parade. You can look at Tony Sarge and you can look at Jean McFadden. It's kind of being the two people that really injected the most. Yeah. I don't see enthusiasm because everyone's always been enthusiastic. Yeah. Magnificent. It's the SARG McFadden effect. It's a good band name. Yeah. So in 1928, they had a little promotion. It's kind of funny to look back on these promotions over the years and little things that you try that don't necessarily work out, but this was one of them. They said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to release five balloons. Like, release them, and they have slow release valves, and they're going to sort of float around the country and get lower and lower and lower, and about a week later, they're going to land. And if you gather this thing up, travel to New York City and bring it back to Macy's, I guess. Could you bring it back to your local Macy's, I wonder? I don't know. Anything I'd say would be a guess. Okay, but you bring it back to Macy's and you get $100. And that ran for four years until a dangerous thing happened, which was people started using their airplanes to try and go catch these things. And they said, you know what? We did it for four years. Maybe we'll just kind of trim that down now. Yeah. I think it was either Civil Air Patrol or Tuskegee Airman episode where we talked about like, that was about the time when flying was like this cool new thing that people were trying. Right. And they were also dummies, so they would do horrible daredevil stuff like that, which is the Macy's credit that they stopped doing it, rather than they're like, yeah, let's see what happens. Let's keep this going. You ever been to that flagship store? I have. They have, like, the original Escalators in there. That's all I can think about. In fact, sometimes I'll go to New York and I will ride that wooden escalator. Yeah, just to do it. It's so cool because if you look through the gap between the handrail and the stairs, you can see the army of monkeys cranking the levers to make the thing go up. No, it is stink really? So bad. The monkey poop. Yeah. All right. Thanks to our buddies at Mental Floss, we know that how these balloons are done these days. They are hand drawn at first, which you might kind of assume. And it's kind of cool how they used to do it. They used to create an actual model and immerse it in water to see how much to kind of calculate how much helium they would need to float this thing. Today, you can use just math and science and computers to do all that and figure it out, but you still start with that pencil sketch. Then you submit it to 3D modeling software. You're going to fine tune it, and then you're going to 3D print a few of these things. They probably do a bunch because I would want to take one home, but they print a couple of them to use one to use that the actual hand paint to say, like, here's how it's supposed to look like. Every part of it is painted exactly right. And then another one is a blueprint that's going to guide the cutting of the fabric and the heat sealing of the fabric and everything like that. So the dimensions of the balloons vary, obviously, according to what kind of character it is, but most of them are about five or six stories, about 60ft long, about 30ft wideish. And they actually have to employ engineers and aerodynamic experts just to make sure these things do what they're supposed to do, which is float with guidance from their human friends on the ground, which we'll talk about. But they don't want that kermit arm dragging along down behind them like it's gympie or something. Or even worse, like flying higher than the head. No. Unless it's supposed to. Well, sure, if it's supposed to, but what kind of world is that? Well, I don't know. He waves his arms about in a crazy way he does, in case they wanted to do something funny like that. I've been corrected for sure. But they make these balloons. It's not just one big balloon, it's a bunch of different chambers. And they do this for a few reasons. One is because one like, let's say you do want that arm. Let's say, where's the beef lady high fiving somebody, you're going to want that arm higher than the head in that case. So more helium, less air, and also, if there's the beef lady, which never existed, the balloon that is like, let's say her leg popped or something, the whole thing wouldn't go down. They'd be able to still float her. Yes, and that's the other reason to have it in chambers, too, because I believe it's easier to make in different parts, different components that you end up putting together. Too. So where do they do this, though? They have what's called it's one of the most magical places on the planet, from what I can tell from videos I've seen, macy's Parade studio, and they used to have it in a Tootsie Roll factory in Hoboken, which is a pretty New Jersey sentence. And then they moved to a different part of Jersey Munaki, not to be confused with one of our former favorite words on the podcast. And they went from 16,000 Tootsie Roll factory to 72,000 ft high ceilings. So now they can build these balloons and test them indoors in their enormous magical parade studio. Yeah, and here's another cool little fun fact. Up until the 80s, they would repurpose the balloon sometimes, which I think is pretty cool and efficient. The Smile balloon. This little smiley face from 1972, just one year as smiley guy, was actually made from Elsie the Cow, which was Borden's mascot. And then after that, repurposed into a hot air balloon for old album and the chipmunks in their float. I love that fact, too. Pretty neat. They also have they have something kind of newer. I think it started in 2005, maybe it's called the Blue Sky Gallery, where they're like, how about you? Famous artists submit some designs for a balloon that you would make? And so there's like a Yayoi Kusama balloon, there's a KAWS balloon balloon. But then the balloon of balloons, and I'm not sure how many times it's flown, but it's flying first flight was in 2008 is a Keith Herring balloon. So, you know, like his little kinetic figures. Of course it's one of those, a black and white kinetic figure. And he's holding a red heart over his head. So I guess in that case you would want the arm above the head. Right. And it turns out that apparently Keith Harring had for a very long time wanted to design balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but died before he got a chance to. Yeah, he died of complications from AIDS in 1990. And I think this is a lovely tribute in 2008, on the 50th anniversary of his birth to do this. I think that was really neat. And it was wrangled by his family, his father and his siblings, which is really beautiful. Yes. And keep an eye out for the Keith Herring balloon because it makes another appearance later in this episode. That's right. So what you were talking about was inflation day, right, where people go and watch the balloons being inflated and it's the day before into the wee hours before the parade. And it's outside of the Museum of Natural History. Right. Yeah, it's really cool. Don't expect to go and have just a very leisurely it's pretty hectic if you think there are a lot of kids at the parade. I felt like there were even more kids at the inflation date. But it's fun. It's relaxed. You walk around. It's the opposite of what you just said. Well, no, I mean, it's not an organized thing. That's what I meant by relax. You can just kind of wander about. How close can you get? I mean, you can get really close. We have a great picture. We recreated probably 15 years later in front of Kermit. So we did a 19 whatever. I don't even know the years, but they're about ten or 15 years apart. That's cute. Yeah, it's good. And they use up something like 350,000 to 400,000 cubic feet of helium to fill all those balloons every year. Yeah. And if you listen to our helium podcast, we talked about the helium shortage. We're actually good right now. There have been three major shortages over the years, and apparently 2020, we're doing great because of the pandemic. Oh. People aren't buying, like, balloons and stuff as much. I read this article that's what it said and said that we're, like, flush with helium right now. Well, yeah. So apparently, Macy's used to be the number two consumer of helium in the world after the US armed forces, but apparently that was true 60 years ago or something. Since the advent of medical imaging and aeronautics, they started to kind of use a lot more helium than Macy's. But still, I mean, 400,000 cubic feet of helium, that's nothing to sneeze at. No. And I think they drop about a half a million bucks on helium every year, don't they? Sure. A lot of money. Yeah. We should say. Apparently they don't ever release numbers. Like, every number that I found, I guess, is an estimate or just a straight up guess. Mark Twain's Three Most Hated Lies so the helium is actually, I think 1928 is when they started using helium, which is pretty close after the debut of balloons in the parade in the first place. I think it was 1927 that they really started. Right? Yeah. They used air at first and had people with sticks, and it was kind of like a big marionette, which makes sense with Tony SARG. But I think everyone was like, this is for the birds, and we need to get some helium up in these things. And they've used helium ever since, except for, I think, 1958, because of the first helium shortage. They went with air. Yes. And so because you have helium, that means that those balloons can float away, like, if they're not held down. And so they're held by ropes on that inflation day when they're blown up, they throw netting over them and then put sandbags on the net and connect the things to sport utility vehicles, basically to keep them from floating away overnight. But then you can't just keep it under a net during the parade and drag it along the ground. You want to kind of float up in the air a little bit. So they need something like 80 to 90 handlers per gigantic balloon. That surprised me. And this is, under normal circumstances, up to 3000 balloon handlers. Again, all Macy's employees are friends and family at Macy's employees. That's right. If you want to be a handler and let's say you work in the cosmetics department at Macy's, they're going to sign you up and say, step on the scale. Need to weigh at least \u00a3125 to carry these things. Okay. They're going to check your ID to make sure you're over 18. Yeah. It's like getting in the club, sort of. They're going to make sure you're in good health. And if you want to, you can go to training. But I think only the team leaders have to go to the training, where they're going to learn about aerodynamics and geometry and physics. They're going to practice. They're going to take you out to field with a real balloon and practice and say, as team leader, you're going to be in charge of this thing. You're going to have a pilot and a captain and two drivers. Right. And I think the pilot is the person walking backwards that you see on TV kind of guiding it along with a rope. Right, yeah. But while they're managing the balloon, in that sense, they're not actually a leader. They take their orders from the leader leader. Right. And there's also apparently an NYPD representative or cop, basically, who is also trained in balloon handling that marches along with everything. I love balloon, too, but they're, like, highly trained in balloon handling. The NYPD is generally, from what I understand. So should we take a break? Yeah, I think we should take a break and maybe talk about some of the Foibles over the years, because those are always fun. It is fun. All righty, so we talked about Foibles. Everyone watching this thing on TV and in person loves to see a well timed, well honed parade that goes off without a hitch. But sometimes it's kind of fun to see a balloon going a little crazy oh, yeah. Because of the wind. It adds a little excitement. It adds a little something else, a little air of what is going to happen now, maybe. And I don't think people root for that. But when it happens, it's always kind of fun. It's thrilling. It is thrilling. And in fact, if you want to see a crowd react, how a crowd reacts to an out of control, giant character balloon in New York City yeah. Go look up Barney the Balloon Macy's parade, and just thank me later. That crowd is screaming and thrilled. It could be in 1927, or it could be in cloverfield. It could be. But clearly it's that kind of scared where it's like roller coaster, it sounds like yeah, it's real delight. Several hundred thousand people on the same roller coaster right then. Yeah, but that was just one year. 1997 was a particularly bad year. There have been people who have been seriously injured when balloons go wrong. One of the first injuries came in 1993 when an off duty police captain was injured by a street light that fell on him when a Sonic the Hedgehog balloon ran amok and knocked the street light over onto the cop. And I think he broke his shoulder. Something horrid like that. Yes, that seems to be sort of and it's not common because it doesn't happen that much, but it seems like lampposts and street lights, which really goes to show you how big and heavy these things really are. In 97, like you were talking about, besides Barney, the big wind gusts that year, about 40 miles an hour, but there was a cat in a hat balloon hit a lamp post and it knocked his decorative arm to the ground and actually put a woman in a coma for about a month. And if you think that is interesting, the same lady, her name is Kathleen Corona, she recovered and she went on to be the same lady who remember when that Yankees pitcher Corey Liedell crashed his plane into a building in 2010? Yes. That was her apartment. I know. So that's man, that woman had a specific New York strain of bad luck. I know. And it was a cat and a hat. So I don't know. How many lives does she have? That's a great question. She's on at least three now. The third one, I think I might move. She may. In 2005, there was a big incident with the Eminem's balloon that, yet again, hit a street lamp and knocked it onto a pair of sisters who were injured. And then we said before that the Keith Harris balloon was going to make another appearance, and it did in that 2008 parade because it sideswiped the NBC broadcast. And apparently I haven't seen it, but it scared Al Roker and Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer quite badly for a second there. The urban legend is that it knocked the broadcast off the air, but that's not true. Not true. Because of these accidents. They're always trying to make it safer. Giuliani, when he was mayor there, he appointed a task force to review the 97 Cat in the Hat balloon accident. And in 98, there were some rules that came out that said, you know what? If the winds are 23 miles an hour or higher, or if it's gusting 34 or higher, then you can't fly these things. Yeah. So think about that. That was a big enough incident. Again, a woman was put in a coma, but it was a big enough incident that the administration of New York. City got involved and appointed a task force to figure out how to make this work. This is a few things, if you step back and think about it. One, these balloons can pose a danger to some extent if they go wrong, and they can under certain circumstances. But two, the Thanksgiving Parade is so beloved that they're like, we're not going to stop this, so we need to figure out what to do to make it safer. New York is not a nanny state. No, which is funny because Mayor Bloomberg, who created the Soda Tax, which is like the pinnacle of the nanny state in some people's eyes, he still wouldn't change things. He appointed his own task force after that M and Ms incident, and they still were like, we can just figure out how high each balloon should fly. That's another thing we should do. So New York has taken steps the city of New York has taken steps to ensure that parade keeps going on regardless. And one of the things that they do that I saw, they have contractors that come through the night before, and they take street lights and the Arm, the posts that go over the street that hold the street lights, they take those down on the parade route, two and a half mile stretch of New York overnight. They take down all of those arms and they take down other street lights, street lamps. They trim trees that might get in the way. And from what I saw in those incidents where at least with the M and M balloon, if not also the Cat in the Hat balloon, they went out of the way. I think the handlers didn't keep them in line because of the gusts, and they went out of their normal route onto a street lamper that hadn't been taken down. Should have gone to that training, I guess. So those are balloons. You've also got your floats. These floats really started when the big spectacle floats, when float designer Manford Bass got on board. Yeah, this is another big moment. It was, manford. Bass was like, you know what? We can only make these things so big because they have to travel from New Jersey to New York. And we're not putting them on a barge. We're going through the Lincoln Tunnel. So he said, how about this? How about we figure out how to collapse these things and fold them down and then fold them right back up so we can get them through the Lincoln Tunnel, and then we can just pop them right back up. And that collapsibility is what really changed the game in the when these floats got to be really big, and it takes three to five months to build them, up to $100,000 to build them. And it kind of goes the way of the balloons as far as just sort of starting out with a sketch and then eventually a little 3D model. Yeah, they start out with architectural drawings from the sketch and then make the models. And then they start building and they make them out of like these things are like welded metal structures. They're like, really sturdy. And they have to be because, like, the Santa Claus float, the one that the current incarnation, that was designed by a guy named Joel Napperstek, I think. N-A-P-R-S-T-E-K. It's an amazing float. Like, it's four small houses, snow covered roofs with Santa's reindeer swooping down the roofs. And Santa is on the top of the sleigh, which in reality is like three stories up. And I guess it's enough to keep Santa's bowl full of jello intact. They're that Sturdily made. You've also obviously got tons of costuming going on. They've got about 5000 costumes in their costume house. They're led by Kimberly Montgomery, and the costumes are estimated to be about worth $2 million. Just the Clauses each. Mrs. And Mr. Santa Claus. They cost about 20 grand each. And they reside in the little specially made cedar chest all year long. And they add about 700 new costumes a year and then end up dressing about 4200 individuals a year in costumes. Which is mind boggling. Yeah, and they do it in like a couple of hours. It's just 4 hours. You really have to be on your game. I've been on movie sets. Yeah, that's very impressive. And then there's one other thing that a lot of people don't think about. All of those costumes have to be washed and wandered after the parade, which I would not want to be on the wardrobe team just for that. I bet you they sent that stuff out. Or maybe they have it in house. So remember Tony Sarge, the amazing puppeteer? Sorry, the father of American puppetry. Thank you. He was, from what I could tell, the first parade host. I don't know if that's supported by the facts or not, but I saw it mentioned in a couple of places and I traced it back to one site that said it, and I can't find out if he was or not, but I believe he was, if not the first parade host, one of the early parade hosts. Because in pretty short order, within less than a decade, that parade started to be broadcast, at least locally on the radio, I think starting in the then very quickly after that, it was broadcast in the CBS picked it up and started broadcasting it nationally in the late 40s, early fifty s. And then NBC picked it up. And when you have a broadcast, you need to have a host. And so, from what I saw, Tony Sarge was the first host. And then eventually, as the parade got bigger and bigger, he was supplanted by more nationally recognized figures. Yes. And for many years it was kind of kid friendly stuff. Not that they ever went blue and Richard Pryor doing it or anything like that, but kid friendly, meaning like, Captain Kangaroo and stuff like that. They did have Andy Kaufman on one of the floats ones, but he was ironically very kid friendly at times. You're right, that's true in a dirty community. But that changed, I think, in the 50s, jackie Gleason, who was certainly not kid friendly, he was a host. And then basically it kind of just became like, let's get as big as celebrity in here as we can. And they got bigger and bigger, which of course, there's a lot of eyeballs on this thing in person and at home. And so they said, you know what we should do? We should probably try like this and cost us a lot of money. We should probably offset some of these costs by allowing people to sponsor some of these balloons. So they did that. And selling sponsorships has become a great way to alleviate those costs. Yeah. And we should also say that they are, like, adamant that they're like, this is not we have never said that. So it's like but it's all out there. A bunch of people have done a bunch of number crunching and stuff and reported that it costs about four and a half million dollars to put on the parade, and that they have something like $9 million in balloons and floats and studio space and costumes, and then again, like you said, about a half a million dollars worth of helium. So that's a bunch of cash. And when G McFadden came in and said, wait a minute, you guys aren't selling sponsorships. Let's get sponsors in here in the late seventy s. That really changed everything. And so now from, I think, CBS News, if not Bloomberg, somebody reported that the rumor is companies pay about 200 grand to sponsor new balloon, which I have to say, these are like national, sometimes global companies. That seems low to me. Don't you think so? Sure. When you look at advertising for the big game yeah, 50 million people, plus another three and a half million in person, everybody's in really good mood, all looking at the same thing. That just seems like a bit of a deal to me, which makes me wonder if it's way more than that in reality. And then CBS News also said that it supposedly drops to 90% after that initial year because you don't have the cost of designing and building it. It's been in storage for a year, and they just have to fill it up again. Yeah. And there have been a lot of celebrity appearances over the years. Some, I think, a little more. Some make sense, some don't make as much sense. Yeah, I love the ones that don't make sense. I didn't get what didn't make sense, though, about Miami Vice. That's what I didn't get. So to me, I picked this. It's Miami Vice in New York in the fall, almost winter time. It's the Big Apple float, which makes sense, but it's also Miami Vice on the Big Apple float. And then the speakers blaring. Glenn Fry's, you belong to the city. That's, like, one of the least holiday theme songs anyone's ever recorded. But it's the Miami Vice song. I know, but it just doesn't make any sense. Like, just have Philip Michael Thomas on there waving at people. Everybody loves Tubs. Rico Tubs, why have you Belonged to the city? Like a real downer song playing in the Thanksgiving parade. It just struck me as weird. And I love the Miami by steam. Would that be better? Much better. It's upbeat. It's energetic. Okay. Can you imagine you belong to the city just dragging you down on a nice Thursday Thanksgiving morning while you're standing out there, you'd be like, Get on with that. Keep going. I don't know. I mean, I'm living in a river of darkness under the neon lights. Exactly. Don't ask me. Yeah. What else? Buckar's himself, Mr. Gil gerard on the Ocean Spray Cranberry float. Right. Got to put somebody up there. Andy Kaufman on the rocking lion float. So two facts. One, Andy Kaufman was the first celebrity to ever ride the rocking line. So instead of a rocking horse as a rocking lion, OK, he was late. So they actually had somebody feeling I don't remember who, until he made it onto the parade route. And then three, that is one of the oldest floats still in the parade. So when you see the rocking lion on the parade, you can be like, andy Kaufman once stood there. I know. There was, I think, like five or six years ago, there was a bit of a kerfuffle with the rock band Kiss the Parade. They can't sing live. That's just not how parades work. And give me lip syncing. And depending on how things are going and the weather and the wind and the sound, sometimes lip syncing is better than others. But I think the deal with Kiss was they got really kind of mad afterward because they thought they were going to be on the Gibson guitar float, which makes sense. Huge Kiss worthy float because Kiss does the big, big thing, okay? And they were like, Paul Stanley got to play Gibson guitar up there. He's like, I don't play Gibson guitars. I never have. I'm not going to play Gibson. So they said, all right, well, you can't be on the Gibson float, but we got a float for you. And they put them on. I mean, you can look it up from 2014. It was a little underwhelming for Kiss, but does the Ocean Spray cranberry float? No, it's just sort of a flat bed with rails and it was not the most impressive float. Do they at least have bales of hay on there? No bales of hay. It's worth watching. Interesting camera work, cutting way to things that are not kissed while they're playing. They were pretty upset about the whole thing. You mentioned lip syncing. This parade is well known for bad lip syncing. There's a great one if you go watch again, that 1980 parade. One of the guys from Little House on the Prairie, Dean Butler, is doing a horrible lip syncing job, so don't fence me in. And it's definitely worth watching. I think it says that it starts with a 48 40 mark. Just go check it out. And then I guess John Legend was on. And he's well known as a very talented musician. Sure. And he felt compelled to actually tweet out an apology, saying, like, hey, I'm sorry. I know I was lip syncing. I actually don't lip sync at my concerts. But these floats are not set up for concert quality sound production. They just can't possibly handle this equipment. And so we lip sync instead, and that's just part of the parade. And I guess he was forgiven because everybody loves John Legend. Yeah. The whole thing with live music at a parade, it works for this because it's televised. But if you've ever been to, like, a local parade where they have bands on a flatbed, it's just the worst because it sounds terrible. Well, it sounds terrible. It's like, hey, do you want to hear 17 seconds of a song? Right. Because that's all you get. The bands up there having a good time, but no one watching it enjoys it. No. So there was another great lip syncing episode in the 1989 parade that you can go watch. Just look up. Melba Moore holding out for a hero. Marvel Superheroes. Yeah, that was pretty great. And it's just this weird. So, Melba Moore's, great Broadway talent, she was also a huge disco queen. Right. And for some reason, she's lip syncing to Bonnie Tyler's holding out for hero. She had plenty of her own hits, but it's a cheap midi cassio version of Holding Out For Hero. But then bizarrely chuck, have you seen this one? I did. So pre Marvel like cinematic universe version marvel. These puffy terrible costumes. Version 1989, Marvel Superheroes are all gyrating as her back up dancers for some reason, and helping her dance. And it was named by The Advocate magazine as one of the ten gayest moments in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade history. I love it. And, brother, is it I love it. I love The Advocate. That's very fun. I think you should take the most infamous one, though. Well, yeah, this wasn't lip syncing, necessarily, but in 1964 is that the one? Yeah. This is when they got the Monsters. They got Fred Gwyn and Aleuis Grandpa and Herman Monster to recreate their characters and dress up and ride a parade float. In fact, the Monster Coach, which was great, and apparently Fred Gwen just got ripped or drunk. He brought a brown bag bottle of liquor on board, said it was nerve tonic to everybody, and just got hammered and was, like, cussing at people. And he was cussing at the hosts and the driver of the car just had to, like I think he was the show's producer, had to just crank the music way up so no one could hear him. Yeah. Can you imagine seeing a drunk Herman Monster shouting at you, shouting curses at you? And the host that year were longtime host Lauren Green from Bonanza and Betty West. I know, it's like the two nicest humans, right? And he apparently shouted like the mother of all expletives at them over the Monsters theme song. I love that. Great. God bless Fred. Gwen. So, Chuck, if you want to go under normal in a normal year, if you wanted to go, there's a few things you should remember. Right. There's some insider tips. Yeah. It starts at nine. You should show up as early as six. They recommend insider tips. Say West Side of the street on Central Park West from 59th to 75th is a good place. Yeah. If you are sleeping in and having mimosas, you may want to go down toward the end of the route and catch things because they're going to end up there later. Obviously. It's also less energetic further down. Like the highest energy stuff is closer to the beginning from what that makes sense. And Herman money is going to be plowed by the time he gets to the end of the route. Exactly. So it's actually a reason. Maybe that's what you want. Yeah. They don't sell tickets. If you see people in seats at the end of the route that is reserved for Macy's friends and family, bring your kids, but don't bring your strollers because they're just a nightmare. You can bring a blanket. If you want to sit on the curb, you have to burn it afterward. But Jean McFadden said, you know, what you do is bring a plastic garbage bag because you can wear it as a raincoat, as a wind breaker. You can sit on the curb with it to burn it, and at the end you can pick up a little trash and be a good New York citizen. Yeah, I thought that was pretty great. Totally. So for this year's parade, for the 2020 parade, because of the pandemic, they're actually not going to have the parade wind two and a half miles through New York in front of three and a half million people packed cheek to jowl on the street. Instead, it's going to be TV only. It's not going to be anybody watching the parade in person, and the whole thing is going to just be shot and take place in front of that Macy's Herald Square flagship store. And apparently they're all going to socially distance and wear masks and it's going to be pandemic horrific. But the show's still going to go on. Yeah. I thought this was a good compromise. While you won't be able to go in person, I think people on Thanksgiving Day that love to watch it in full or have it on in the background, it'll still be there. That comfort food will still be there on your television. And hats off to them for figuring this out. Yeah, agreed. So that's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about it, go on to YouTube and watch old parades and then watch the One. This Thanksgiving, it's going to be the 94th. Since I said that, it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this Australian voting. Okay. Hey, guys. I was just listening to the voter suppression podcast. Thought I'd touch base. Where is that from? Is that from, like, a wallabies corner accent? I don't know. It's a good one. Yeah, totally. I'm just trying to put my finger on it. The system we have in Australia works super well. Voting is compulsory. It's on a Saturday. There's always a sausage sizzle going on, so you can get to snack as well. That's great. So this stops voter fraud. Everyone is accounted for and well fed. And for people who say it should be a person's democratic right not to vote, if they don't want to, then they have the option of putting in a dummy vote or just getting a fine of about $200. Most people in Australia are amazed at how silly the US system is. It is. But the US does have good podcasts. So there's something I just went into something weird at the end there. I'm not sure what that was. And that is from Jackie. Jackie. That's great. Yeah. I didn't realize that other countries have compulsory voting. Where you're 18, you're automatically registered just from turning 18, and then you have to vote in every election from that point on. I love it. Thank you for Jackie. It feels so weird to do the opposite of trying to get people to not vote. Doing the opposite. That seems right. Yeah, I agree. And as it turns out, Jackie is a pretty prominent Australian artist. Is that right? Well, thanks for listening, Jackie. Hopefully we've had some influence in your art and that it wasn't one of your darker periods. If you want to be like Jackie and get in touch with us from your home country that Chuck might do an accent of, we would love that. You can send us an email to stuff. Podcast. It's iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
How Customs Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-customs-works | description | description | Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:51:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=15, tm_min=51, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=252, tm_isdst=0) | 27631084 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Opposite me is one Charles W, Chucktran Bryant. Nice. Call back. Yeah. Chuck Tran callback. Yeah. The thing auditioned. And you've never acted or auditioned for anything, any? Sure. No. I used to be in children's theater. Really? Yeah. Interesting. I've never done that. Except my audition with you, of course, for this spot that went really well. So good. Yes. So you're so kind. You're too kind. You're generous. Gross. The actors always say about each other, so generous. So, Chuck yes? Move on. Sure. Okay. If you've ever had a hankering for African monkey meat, I can tell you where in Europe to go get it. Really? Yeah. You can go to Paris, to Charles de Gaulle Airport. And they have monkey meat. They have bush meat of all kinds, apparently. Bush meat. Bush meat is what it's called. Bush meat is another term for any kind of wild game or unregulated game. You can make the case that livestock that doesn't pass through any kind of regulatory body sure. Is considered bush meat. But typically, bush meat is a bush man goes out into the wild, shoots a monkey through the head with an arrow and chops it up, and there's your meat. You can also do that with crocodile. Sure. You can do that with river hog, porcupine, whatever. Gross. It is a little gross. But there was a study, I guess somebody noticed that there was a lot of bush meat coming through Paris. And so these wildlife officials got together with the customs agency there, and over 17 days, they searched 134 passengers randomly, I guess. But they were probably like, oh, you're coming out of Africa. Right, right. And they found that half of them were carrying bush meat in their luggage. Wow. Unrefrigerated luggage. Like, you opened up their duffel bag and there was a lot of monkey right there. As opposed to the refrigerated luggage that you like. Right. Well, you would like to think that they would at least rig some dry ice, something. No, that's nasty. It is a little nasty. But that, my friend, is part and parcel for a day's work for a customs official, is it not? It can be, for sure. Let's talk specifically about us. Customs for a second. Where did it come from? Chuck, where did this idea originate? Where? Chuck? Well, dude, I know everyone likes to think that our Founding Fathers were just all about everybody having freedom and the government no one owing government money for anything. But that's not true at all. George Washington and the founding fathers in the first Congress actually said, you know what? We are a struggling nation, and we need to raise some dough by way of tariffs on how about imported goods? Right. And so they said, sure. So that was the birth of customs. Right. Actually, we can point to the very day that it was born. The Tariff Act of July 4, 1789, was passed on July 31, 1789. And it did exactly what you just said. Right. Like you said, if you're carrying stuff into the country, we get to tax you on it just because it's originating outside of the country. Right. And they're not paying for set up. Right. Yeah. Like Savannah. Yeah. And so people come in, they're funneled in through these ports, and they're charged dough. Right. Yeah. Big time. Actually, I was staggered by this. The US. Customs, for like, 100 years, supported the entire government infrastructure. Yeah. By 1835, we had zero debt, thanks to Customs revenue. And even today, as far as I know, the Customs Agency is second only to the IRS in generating revenue for the United States. Right. Yeah. I think I didn't get a hard number, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of about $30 billion a year that they bring in. $30 billion a year from that's, like, booze and stuff. Almost what we bring in for discovery. Yes. Close. Yeah. Originally. Chuck the Custom Service did a whole lot of stuff, including Census, Veterans Affairs and the National Institute of Standards and Technology was actually born out of the Custom Service. They're the ones who came up with our system of weights and standards because they had to come up with a way to describe stuff that they were seizing or taxing or that kind of thing. And actually, I wrote a really cool post on the metric system. I don't know if you ever read it, but that's where I learned that it was really cool. It's a cool post. And the Coast Guard too, was Burfed from the customs office. That's right. Jerry thinks you are hilarious. Any time I mispronouncing something. Perfect. She titters. Yeah. So, Chuck, the customer service did all this stuff, spawned all these extra agencies, and then pretty much stayed the same for a while until 2003 when George W was in office. The Customs Service became us. Customs and Border Protection. Yeah. Part of the Homeland Security Office. Department? Yeah. Which makes sense, I guess, in a way. It does. You have, like, a comprehensive immigration agency. Good point. And so pretty much their main job is to control or oversee the flow of goods from outside the borders in and inside the borders out. They are the thin blue line between free trade and total anarchy. That's a good point. Thanks, man. So they seize contraband, they process people, they process cargo, they enforce stuff laws as disparate as bush meat importation to intellectual property law. Like, if you get caught with some burned DVDs that are clearly pirated, you're going to get in trouble, and you would have gotten caught by the Customs Department. Right. Yeah. All in all, they're enforcing about 400 different provisions of law. Right. Yeah. And they like to refer to themselves as the oldest law enforcement agency in the United States. And I think the duty that scares me and we're going to say duty a lot in this podcast, we should probably just get it over with. Yeah. Not D-O-O-D-Y duty. D-U-T-Y duty. Right. Just want to clear that up. Yeah. And Chuck, they oversee what's called Exodus cases. Yeah. What's that? Exodus cases are, I guess that's kind of like Broken Arrow or something like that. If you have weapons technology, weapons intelligence, anything you can destroy the US with or attack the US with, customs is on that and they deem those Exodus cases, and those are big time. Yeah, I just saw a guy, I didn't look into it too heavily, but like, in the news this week, there's some custom sting operation where this big businessman was selling like, some sort of batteries that help a missile launch to Iran or something. I don't know. I need to look it up, but big sting going down. Wow. Exodus type. Wow. That is Exodus. It is. I guess if the urban legend about Saddam Hussein importing PlayStations to use the very sophisticated chips and his guided missile yeah. Really? I think the first PlayStation came out that was an urban legend around it. Yeah, that's a silly one. So, Chuckers, like we said, at the basis of all this, the Customs Service in any country is charged with keeping an eye on the flow of goods across the borders. Right? Sure. And one of the reasons why is because, as we saw, george Washington and the Founding Fathers were hip to the idea that being government and all, you can push around guys who are importers exporters right, yeah. And say, hey, give us a cut. Yeah. The idea is kind of twofold. One is because America wants you to buy American goods, but a lot of times, most times, goods from other countries you can buy cheaper. So they say, all right, well, if you're going to buy something from over there, we want you to support America. But if you're going to do that, then we want to get our piece of the pie. Right. Well, they charge duty on, say, some boroughs in Mexico, right? That's a good one. So you can get a sombrero here, but you're going to pay like, $17 for it, right? The same. Sombrero virtually the same, except it was manufactured in Mexico. Mexico is a bad example after NAFTA has passed, but let's stick with it, shall we? Okay. You can get that one for $2 while the government's going to impose a duty on it. So maybe ultimately, once you pay the duty and how much you're being charged for the sombrero you're actually paying $19 for the Mexican one, where you can get the $17.01 here in the US. So you might as well just get that. Well, yeah, but that's if you're shipping, like, large, like there's duty free exemptions we should go over that real quick. Yeah. Duty free. Explain it. Duty free is in the United States. You get a $400 exemption if you come back into the country from anywhere except a Caribbean basin country or the Virgin Islands, Guam or American Samoa. So if you come in from Europe, let's say you're allowed to bring $400 worth of stuff in and you declare it $400 worth of bush meat. And then after that, you have to start paying your tariff on that. Okay. They have specific outlines. For tobacco, you can bring 200 cigarettes or 100 cigars as part of that under $400. Okay. And alcohol, of course, you can bring in one liter of booze, duty free. Nice. You can bring in a carton of cigarettes and a leader of booze. Yeah. That's a party right there. You got it. And a few cigars. As long as they're not Cubans, which we'll get to. But I did find this interesting. Fine art and antiques that are at least 100 years old are not subject to tax. Really? No matter. It could be like a $10,000 painting and no duty. What about a $12,000 penny? No duty. Ask me about full cart. What about full cart? Chuck Duty. Really? Yeah. Just fine art. Folk art. Folk art and handicrafts. The customer service has an opinion on art and they deem folk art is crappy. Yeah, or maybe not. Or maybe they think it's so great it should be taxed. No. Have you seen folkart before? Yeah. I should say this real quick. When I was living in La, I went to a show with Emily, one of those shows where they have full cart. And I thought that, wow, what a scam. I should do this. And I came up with an idea to drum up buzz by calling over the course of, like, a year or different places and saying, hey, do you have any art by Chuck Bryant, this artist? And to the point where they'd heard this name. And then at one point, I would enter these places and say, hey, I'm Chuck. Brian. I didn't know if you want to carry some of my art nice. They'd be like, well, we've heard of you. Let me see that piece of tin that you slung paint on. That's actually a brilliant idea, Chuck. Somebody should go do that. Why didn't you ever do it? Because it's fraud and it's not nice or ethical. I don't know. That's fraud in the art world. No. Okay. I think that's just normal business. You know? I didn't do it. Why? I was lazy. Yeah, I got you. So that's duty free. That is very odd. Did you find out why folk art is no, just that it is. No. We could probably call and get an answer to that. You want to call right now? No. Okay. So we covered duty free, right? Yeah. And I guess we should talk about big business because there are two different kinds. There's people, there's businesses that ship in and import tons of stuff in ports of call, and then there's you and I get off an airplane. Well, we should say also that with duty free, the exemption applies to the importer, not the customer. Right. Right. So if we come back into the states or yeah. If we come back into the state and we say, I could use a leader of Scotch and a carton at Dunhills. Right. So we pick them up and then we continue on into the United States, we don't pay any duty. But if we do the same thing at Charles de Gaulle Airport right. And then come into the United States, we pay a duty because we're still importing. Right? Yeah. Okay, so you are actually an importer that you're classified as an importer. Yeah. So big business, Josh. Millions of dollars worth of goods each year is imported and are imported. And they kind of keep track of it the same way as they do with individuals. They can't inspect every single thing or every single person. No. No way. So they'll just kind of pick and choose. They'll open up a cargo container and say, I'm going to look at these seven boxes in container eight. And then the guy crosses his fingers that the cocaine is not in those cargo holders. Exactly. That's a deterrent in and of itself, the randomness of it. All, right? Yes. But at the same time, that method means that tons and tons and tons of illicit substances seep through our rather porous border. And it's not just with big business, too. It's individual travelers as well. Like, some countries use actual chance. They leave it to chance who gets searched. So they have people passing through their borders at their airports. Press a random number generator and a certain number will trigger a green light, which means you keep going. Another will trigger a red light. That means your rectum is about to be probed. Yeah. Or instinct, which is my favorite. When they count on the border agents to be the Customs agent to be so skilled that they can eyeball you and say, that guy has something stuffed in a place that we should check. Either that or the GDP of that country is so low that we don't have enough money for a random number generator. They rely on instincts, which comes with the salary. Yeah, that's a good point. Chuck, we talked about illicit substances. Sure. Cocaine, marijuana. Sure. So, like we were just saying, this stuff is coming through all the time. And Customs is aware of this. I don't know if you knew this or not, but they know that there are drugs coming across the border and they have equipment at their disposal. Right. At the ports. We talked about the random number generator. The US. Is fairly flush with cash as far as Customs go. We actually have truck size X rays that you can literally they're big enough to drive a truck through at the US. Mexican border. I've done that. Have you really? Yeah. You've driven through the Xray before? Wow. What's it like? Were you inside? What do you mean? Yes. Dangerous. Well, I mean, it's the same as walking through an X ray, which is pretty dangerous. This is like a truck size X ray. Yeah, good point. And really think about that. Sure. Yeah. I've been over and across the border quite a few times. I got you never carried anything illicit. That's very smart. Don't you worry. Yeah. We also have blackhawk helicopter citation jets at our disposal. Cigarette boats? Yes. For kitchen cigarette smugglers. Yes. Now, those are the super fast boats, like Miami Vice. Oh, yeah. Apparently, the drug spongers that come in under cover of the night really fast. And so the Coast Guard works in concert with the DEA. It's a joint effort. And customs agents it's not a joint effort. No, it is. That was a funny pun. Yeah. So they're looking for bad things. And I looked up, they mentioned in here that people actually smuggle things in on their person. They'll go through customs instead of trying to smuggle it around Customs. And I thought they should have a TV show called Smugglers Do the Darndest Things. Because have you ever seen I know you hear about these stories from time to time, but the way that these people try and get drugs in the country, it's crazy in their bodies. Do you remember the guy that made a cast, a foot cast out of cocaine? No, I hadn't heard of that. I think we talked about that on the Webcast. It was either that or we talked about they made a dinette set, like the plates and the bowls were all made of cocaine. It's crazy. That was 20 kilos of coke, by the way, for the dinnerware. Wow. One thing they'll do is they'll put it in a condom and feed it to their snake. Their pet snake. Yeah. And then smuggle the snake in, which I guess is easier than smuggling drugs. And I don't know that's I wonder if the average customs agent is afraid of snakes like any other person. Yes, maybe so. And they figured that out. Frozen sharks. I saw some I think it was Cambodia. They had, like, 40 frozen sharks, and they were stuffed full of drugs. Well, and then the sad ones, like, when they smuggle them inside, the dogs liquid heroin inside those puppies. Remember that? A few years ago? And then this yellow lab had like $30,000 worth of cocaine in its belly one time when they were smuggling this dog in. It's a bad dog. He's a good dog. Bad people. Jerry's laughing so how would you stop that, though, in an airport, let's say? Well, again, the randomness of the whole thing serves as a deterrent intuition, as you said. And dogs, good dogs, not ones that are drug smuggling bad dogs. Because the kind of tattoo on drug smuggling bad dogs, good dogs, beagles specifically are good, apparently not just for illicit drugs, but especially for agricultural or cultural products. Apparently they're fine tuned to sniff those out. Really? Yeah. And bombs, of course. Right. Which has nothing to do with customers'but. I was actually in, I guess, atlanta. I don't know where I was coming back from, but there was this cute little beagle who walked up to this woman and just sat down and looked up at her, and this Customs guy was like, man, please come with me. Really? And it turned out she had fruit on her. Oh, yeah. Well, you should go ahead and mention that, then. Well, it's more of a threat than you would think, right? Absolutely. There's apparently a guy in the late 80s who brought a piece of fruit, one piece of fruit back from the Mediterranean, and it was infested with Mediterranean fruit flies, and it contaminated and destroyed millions of dollars worth of crops in California that year. That's crazy. One piece of fruit. Have you ever driven into California? I've always flown in, yeah. You got to stop. They check your car. It's a real bummer, too, because when you make the Vegas to California trip yeah. You're coming back from Vegas and all you want to do is get back to your house and sleep, I'm sure. And you got to stop at this. It's always backed up for miles. And it's the fruit, it's the agriculture stop. Really? Yeah. No, they either ask you to, do you have any fruits or vegetables or seeds? Or they just eyeball you in your car and we'll wave you through or say stop. Yeah. They rely on intuition. See if you like a pear smuggler. Yeah. I was getting nervous. I don't know why. It's just fruit, the drug, dogs, everything. They always make me nervous. And of course, I don't have, like, cocaine strapped to my belly, but it just makes me nervous. No, I think that's pretty typical. I think they make everybody nervous because you know you're being scrutinized. Right. And nobody feels comfortable being scrutinized. Right. Or maybe it's a T shirt that don't scrutinize me. T shirt. I have one. Right. I don't have drugs on me. Dogs also get taken onto planes. Chuck I thought this was kind of cool. It's very roundabout, but it makes sense. They'll take a dog onto a plane to sniff around after everyone's disembarked, and if somebody had drugs on him or her, he or she would have left some sort of trace on that seat. Right. The dog will say, this seat right here. They'll look up on the flight manifest who is sitting there, find them and then take them to be thrown in prison. It was Josh Clarke black go to the sky. Right. The other cool thing, too, that we didn't mention was the electro vacuum device. It's like a handheld dustbuster, super dustbuster, sort of, but it analyzes particles in the air. So if you have cocaine packed in your suitcase, in theory, there's probably some residue floating in the air. And these things will sniff that out. Well, it's like poop. When you smell poop, it's an odorant. It's an actual poop molecule that you're interacting with. Same thing. Yeah. That's very good. He just winked at me. What else we got here? Oh, money. That's a big deal. That is a big one. Cash. You're not allowed to take more than $10,000 in cash out of the country. But I would suspect that if you had 9999, then you're probably a little suspicious. I don't know that for sure. Or maybe that happens a lot and you're not suspicious. What do you think? I think if you're a penny over $10,000, they know it okay. I think if you get anywhere near it, or if you declare $10,000, they check you. Okay. I never lived. I mean, I never have more than, like, $8 on me anywhere I go. Yeah, I've never had $10,000 in cash on me ever. No, probably never will. Of course not. Chuck, you mentioned art. Customs agents are also on high alert for antiquities, including once you remember when we invaded Iraq, there was a huge cultural ransacking. Their museums were getting looted. Ancient stuff is just being moved out of Iraq. Right. Once it's in US. Borders, that doesn't necessarily mean you're out of the woods. There was the example of customs finding 1000 year old Chinese sculpture that had been stolen from a tomb in 1994. Turning up Christie's auction catalog, I guess they monitor these and then cross reference them, and they found that it was going to be auction, contacted Christie, said, hey, we're going to be taking that, and gave it back to China. Right. So that's something. Yes. And this new story I pulled from just a couple of days ago in Bulgaria at a border check between caliphina and Serbia, they discovered four artifacts from third and second century BC. And first century AC that were wrapped in napkins at the bottom of a suitcase. And the guy was like, oh, those are just trinket gifts for my family that are thousands of years old. Wow. So busted. Yeah. Is he busted? Busted. They didn't believe him. No, they didn't believe him. And they did some checking, and they haven't like nothing has turned up missing from museums or anything yet, but I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of it. Got you. Lastly, Chuck, we were talking about bush meat. You were also, you can't bring dog meat into the US. That's a good thing. Especially after 2000 when the US. Passed the Dog and Cat Protection Act, which is the most adorable act we've ever passed, I think. It is, but it's sad that we needed that. Yeah, well, not every country, they don't look at dogs necessarily the way we do. Yeah, it's a good point. Some countries look at dogs the way we look at monkeys. It's like meat. Yeah. We prize them for their further. I didn't think about that. Oh, another thing, too. It's not always illegal stuff, per say, like Cuban cigar. Sometimes it's just there's like an embargo, a trade embargo. That's a really good example. But I mean, don't you regard Cuban cigars in, what's, the same way you would drugs, too? Just because it has that stamp of forbiddeness on it? It is, it seems like, highly illegal on the internet. I've heard that you can they send you the cigars and then like a week later in a different package, they send you the bands. The bands, yeah. Heard of that? I wouldn't know. I know you wouldn't like Switzerland or Sweden. You can buy them from something like that. Well, if you want to know more about customs, we have a lot of articles on the site about it. I think if you just type in customs in the search barhowtofworks.com, it's going to bring up probably all sorts of stuff. Things for Christmas, illegal border crossings, that kind of stuff. Yeah. There's one on US. Customs in particular, and I said search bar, right? Which, as everyone knows, is the automatic trigger for listener mail, right? Yes. Okay, Josh, this one struck us both pretty well here from Sergeant Walker in Afghanistan. Yeah, this is cool. This is awesome. We love hearing from our men and women service men and women over there putting their lives at risk. And this is a good one. Hello, guys. My name is Sergeant John Walker. I'm with the 103rd Special Ops Division in Afghanistan. I cannot give you a more descriptive location. My platoon and I protect the surrounding areas near schools so that children may achieve a well rounded education. My life is not easy, but one thing makes it all the better. Your podcast is the thing that keeps me going strong out here. Every podcast keeps me wanting more, and the next one comes out and so forth and so forth. I always have my ipod on, listening to you guys, and some of my platoon asked what I was listening to all the time, so I turned them onto it. And now there are at least 100 guys who use my computer to download your podcast. How cool is that? It's cool, but it doesn't stop there. No, it doesn't. Like I said, with the children in the school, although some speak poor English, most speak the local dialect of farsi. My friend and I have learned a little bit of farsi and actually translate your podcast for the older children to be able to understand it. We don't do some like the Large Hadron Collider, but more simple ones that they can understand and that we can translate. We are expecting care packages soon, and I asked my family for a camera so I could share all of our happiness with you. I wish I had something I could give back to you guys. And clearly, Sergeant Walker, what you give us is mine. And cool emails. And cool emails. Yes. So we rode him back and he's a very cool guy and he's still over there and he's still safe. This came in a little bit ago. Yeah, pretty cool. So good luck to you, sir. Good luck. Sergeant Walker, right? Yes. And if you have a cool email about translating our podcast into some other language to help other people, we want to know about it. But we don't get anymore. If you have one though, or if you just want to say hi or something like that, you can email checking me at stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-09-01-sysk-negro-leagues-final.mp3 | How the Negro Leagues Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-negro-leagues-worked | A decade before the U.S. officially segregated in 1896, baseball banned black players. A decade before the US integrated, baseball broke the color barrier. Between, the Negro Leagues produced some of the finest players to ever take the field. | A decade before the U.S. officially segregated in 1896, baseball banned black players. A decade before the US integrated, baseball broke the color barrier. Between, the Negro Leagues produced some of the finest players to ever take the field. | Thu, 01 Sep 2016 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=245, tm_isdst=0) | 52497843 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. 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Actually, you earned Advantage Miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. There's the stuff you should know. sportsy edition. sportsy. I think really we should err on just the side of history. Well, I even put a note in here. If you don't like sports, listen to this one anyway, because this is about much more than baseball. This is about history and about overcoming adversity. Yeah, it's a very interesting story because we'll get into this, but I think people better tend to think of the Negro leagues. And that's what this is about, the baseball Negro leagues, which is what they were called. We don't use that word anymore. No, but you called this that because that's what it was. Right. You tend to think of it in a certain way, which is only yeah, well, baseball was segregated and they couldn't play in the white leagues and that's awful. Which it is and was. But there's another side to it, too. Yeah, that's a good point. Where these men and these business owners were empowered and the players yeah, that's just a tease. I just wanted to wet their appetite. Oh, you did my appetite. I'm sitting here like, keep going. Yeah. So I think we should start with a little bit of history, right? So just a brief primer of American history. We'll start with slavery. It's a good place to start. The transatlantic Atlantic slave trade built this country. And frankly, I'm just going to come out and say it. I think some of the major issues that the United States faces today comes from a lack of accountability for slavery. Really is contributing to a lot of the inequality and a lot of the strife that we still face today and have faced over the decades. Yeah. So you've got slavery and then you had the end of slavery. You had the Emancipation Proclamation, which a lot of people say, oh, well, that was great. Abraham Lincoln spoke some magic words and freed the slaves and everything was great. Yeah, it was just perfectly equal after that. Right. No, so it took the Union to win the Civil War to begin to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the south, and in Texas, apparently. Texas were among the last holdouts, and there was slavery going on in Texas, like, years after the Civil War was over. Yeah, they were just like, It's not going to pay attention to that. Sure. So the civil war is fought. The part of the Union victory of the Civil War was coming into the south and saying, like, all you Confederate, you guys are out of power. And as a matter of fact, this power vacuum is perfectly willing to be filled by freed blacks. So go ahead, run for office, become judges, like, become part of the Reconstruction power. And that lasted for a very, very short time. The white Southern, former power base who were leading the Confederacy, and even ones who weren't necessarily part of the actual Confederate government, or even the Confederate Army, but just the people, like in your town, who used to own the sawmill or whatever. Right. That guy came back in power within a couple of years, and the white Southerners had been supplanted. When they came back into power, they remembered the black people who had tried to take their positions. Right, and so it got ugly. Yeah. And so rather than having actual legal slavery, it came in other different, horrible, pernicious forms, which came to be called post Reconstruction. The Jim Crow South. Yeah. And, boy, we need to do one. I've had it on my list for a while on Jim Crow, period. Yeah. How about this? First of all, where did you get this other really good article? It's on the Major League Baseball website. Yeah, in the Pre History section of that one. And this is just to show you the tone of things. In 1857, there was a Supreme Court chief justice yeah. Roger Tanny, who it's funny the way this writer put it. He said he's campaigning hard for a spot and the American Scum Hall of Fame, like, that pretty funny. In his official writing this is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said negroes were so far inferior to whites that they had no rights, which a white man was bound to respect. This is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Yeah, I think I need to say that, like, four more times before it sinks in. That was two or three. This is what was going on. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation, despite the 14th amendment. Well, that was actually before it. That was during the time of slavery. Yeah, just to excuse that guy. But after that, despite the amendments to the constitution, despite all of that, it took to the 1960s to even begin the slightest bit of real progress. Yeah, that's true. Not quite true, because the history is littered with people who made advancements, and I don't want to knock that, but in a systemic manner, you're right. It wasn't until the 60s. But part of the problem, too, was and this is a valid point other courts had said, like those justice Henry billings brown said, legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences. Basically, what he's saying is we can create laws, but you're not going to change public's mind by creating laws. You can't abolish prejudice. Right. And so if white people think that black people are inferior to them, who are we, the government, to say otherwise? We're going to try maybe and legislate our way out of it even. Right. So in, I think, 1896, there was a court case called plusy versus ferguson, and in plusy versus ferguson, the supreme court upheld and legitimized and actually made real the segregation that had already been going on ever since reconstruction, or ever since the end of reconstruction, the beginning of jim crow laws. Right. So the United States is officially segregated in 1896, but baseball had actually segregated years before that. But not as far back as people think. And a lot of people think that baseball had always been segregated up until 1946 when jackie robinson broke the color barrier. I think 99% of people think that jackie robinson was the first black american to play baseball, including me, until yesterday when we started researching. Oh, did you know this already? Yeah. I'm a big baseball fan and a bit of a student of its history, so I knew. Okay, so tell him, chuck. Well, who the guys were, specifically? Well, yeah. So in 1867, I think, two years after the civil war, there was already baseball. Remember abner double day created baseball in 1839. But that's a legitimate story. Right? He really did. He was the inventor of baseball, and it did happen in cooperstown, new york and all that, right? Yeah. Okay. I don't know. But was he in cooperstown? I believe so. Okay, well, that makes sense. So within just a couple of decades, there was the national association of baseball players. They were the league, right? Yeah. I mean, not within a couple of decades. A couple of years. Oh, really? Yeah, like, literally two years after the end of the civil war, there was an african american team called I actually don't know what their name was, but they were out of Philadelphia, and they said, we want to join your league, which was the national association of baseball players at the time. And they were rejected as a team, of course, at the time. But that didn't mean that there were not players individually. Right. That's a huge caveat. Yeah, it was a little bit later in 1886, finally, and not for too long, we had two brothers, moses Fleetwood Walker and Welde Walker. Who do they play for? The Toledo Bluestock. That's right, baby. My hometown integrated baseball team in the 1880s. You were totally right. Moses, he was older. He played 42 games for the team. Well, they only came along and played in six games. Moses hit 263 that season. And they were the son of a physician. Like the first black physician in Toledo. Nice. And went to college. Played baseball at Oberlin in Michigan. I know the Wolverines. I didn't know Oberlin even had sports. Well, this is the 19th century. I think they phased them out. Phased them out in favor of debate. Acoustic guitars and debate. I know a lot of people that went to Overland. Weirdly. Really? Well, my good friend Robert Shahadi from Boston that you met that came to our show. Okay. Lucy Wainwright went to Oberlin. Didn't know that. David Reese really went to Oberlin. Okay. And I feel like a couple of other people. Yeah, it's got a nice reputation. Yeah. Great name, too. Oberlin. Oberlin. It sounds Ivy League. Yeah, Oberlin. The sound of quality. Oberlin sounds Ivy Leagueish. Right. That's on their T shirts. Although we do need to give a shout out. There was one guy in 1879, William Edward White, who substituted and played one game officially, and this is a little murky history wise, because we don't know much about him or how it happened, but supposedly he played one game as a professional baseball player, as a black man. Is that right? Yeah. And this is when? 1879. Okay. So the Walker brothers are playing for Toledo in 1886, right? Correct. And actually this article on how stuff works gets it wrong. Says that they just played for the team for one year before the team went under. That's not the case. As a matter of fact, moses Walker, they may have only played together on the team for that one year, but Moses Walker had played for years before them. And actually, Moses Walker and there were several other players at the time in 1886 and 87, there are at least four black players and the minors. But the Walker brothers were playing for Toledo, which was a major league team, right? Correct. But the presence of Moses Walker actually brought to the fore this kind of simmering resentment and kind of the big elephant in the room. There's a black guy on your team. What are you guys doing? And so Toledo actually went to go play the White Sox in Chicago. And the White Sox had their great player of that season, I think, in 1884. Who was it? Cap Anson. It's great nicknames back then. So Cap Anson said he said some horrible things and ultimately was like, I'm not playing if that man is on the field. And Moses Walker was actually injured and still was like, oh, well, I'm definitely going on the field today anyway. So he dressed out and I'm not sure if he actually played in the game, but he was like part of the team. And Cap Anson was not indulged. Toledo was like, we're not taking our guy out. He's one of our players. So Cap Anson can go stuck an egg and Cap Anson went and sucked an egg. He was really mad. But the issue that day, that dispute at Kaminsky Field, brought to the fore the concept of integration and ultimately segregation among Major League Baseball teams. And it actually increased the pressure among owners and managers to get rid of the black players, not just in the majors, but in the minors. Yeah, there was another player too. I read another story about and we'll get to Roy Campanella. He was better than Jackie Robinson at the time, a catcher who was just amazing hall of Famer. And there was a white pitcher. It was like he was a great catcher, but I didn't want to play with him. So when I pitched to him, I would just ignore his signs through whatever I want, like to his own detriment and to the team's detriment. He just wouldn't take the signs. Sort of putts. I know. Career sabotage, essentially. Yeah. I don't think he lasted long either in camping. Ellis in the hall of Fame. Right. The other guy who knows? I want to give these names all out, though. The four black men and the minors in 1866. Besides Moses Walker, we had Bud Fowler, Frank Grant and George Stobey. And as far as I'm concerned, all these dudes are American heroes. So all of a sudden, they succumbed to pressure in 1890 after hate mail and death threats to the coaches and managers and umpires and basically everybody, the players themselves. And they said, you know what? We're going to shut it down, essentially in 1890. We can no longer have any black men in our league. So here's the thing. They never officially did that. They had the minor league ban black players on that way into the majors through the minors. Well, and it was never on the rule books either. It was an unofficial non gentleman's agreement, which actually, when it was broken, it wasn't like a rule was broken. It was just an unwritten rule. Right, exactly. Which paved the way for Branch Ricky to break the unbroken rule without actually breaking a rule. Yes. It's a good point. Chuck, you want to take a break? Yeah, 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 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, man. So 1890 it's now there are no black players resegregated in major league baseball or minor league baseball in America, right? That's right. That actually paved the way for one of the great unsung chapters in baseball history, which was the creation of the negro leagues. Yeah. In a true show of American spirit and determination and just love of the game, these men got together, they formed their own teams and they did what's called barnstorming. Yeah. Which is pretty awesome. And they would load up in cars on a bus and they would go from town to town and take their show on the road. And they would get a game up wherever they could and wherever people would pay a couple of pennies to come watch a baseball game. They were playing white players in these barn storming games. Or black players or latino players. Yeah. Because that's a definite overlooked segment of the early baseball history. Or latino players. Totally. And one of the cool things about the negro league is they were integrated. They had latino teams like the Cuban kings out of New York, I believe. Yes. And one white guy. All right, so barn storming is going on. Like I said, they would roll into town, they would play whatever teams they could play, and it started to gain some momentum. Like people started to follow these players and they actually got fans. And there was a former player named Andrew Rube Foster who owned one of those teams, and he said, you know what? I think we need our own league. Yeah. They won't let us in their league. Let's start our own. Because besides the fact that people want it, there's money to be made here. Yes. And as a matter of fact so this barnstorming thing, I want to talk a little more about that. Right. Yeah. One of the reasons barn Storming came about was to make ends meet, but it was also because these teams had to figure out a way to put on games as cheaply as possible. Yes. All of the stadiums at the time were owned by whites, and the whites apparently were not very friendly to the idea of black teams playing in their fields. So if it were just like black teams playing one another, the white owners of the fields would just charge an exorbitant amount. These guys were going basically anywhere they could find a place that would stand still long enough for them to play a baseball game on. That's what they would play. And they play, like, three games a day, every day. And they all traveled together and hung out with one another and spent a lot of time together. So the Negro Leagues came out of this kind of camaraderie of barnstorming together, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, it's very cool. So, yeah, this guy, Rube Foster, he owned the Chicago American Giants. And confusingly. There's also another Negro team called the Chicago Giants and the St. Louis Giants. Yeah, but it could be like St. Louis vs. Chicago. But if it was Chicago versus Chicago, well, which one the Giants? Well, which one? The American Giant. Okay, now I understand not just the Giants, but Rube Foster was like this booster of boundless enthusiasm. This guy literally put together the first real Negro League, and when he was basically removed from it, the whole thing fell apart. That's how much of a driver this guy was. Yeah, he's in the hall of Fame, too. Yeah, he was a catcher, I think. I don't even think he was in as a player, but he was really yeah, I think just for his achievement. I got you. Although it may have been both. I don't know. But in 1920, he said, here's what we'll do. Let me get these 17 owners of the Midwestern League that are doing these Barn Storming traveling shows. Basically. Let's get together in Kansas City, seven all black teams. In addition to those two Chicago Giants, we have the Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marcos, the Indianapolis ABCs, and the very famous Kansas City Monarchs in St. Louis Giants. And this is the really great thing about the story. All of these teams, except for the Monarchs, were black owned teams. Right. Not only do you have black players careers developing, you have, like, black enterprise developing in a time when there are very few avenues of opportunity for black people to advance in business, in a sense where they own the business, this is a really good way to do it. Yeah. And not only that, the Major League Baseball site points out it should be embraced in some ways because this, at a time, was one of the only ways that minorities could fully excel to their fullest potential. Right? Yeah. And that was a point of that article that I thought was pretty cool, is that one of the things they lamented about the segregation of baseball during this time is that we'll never know how Babe Ruth would have stood up against Satchel Paige pitching to them because they never got to play each other. So the truly great players are truly great during this time within their own skin color. You can't say they were the greatest in baseball because there were two legitimate parallel leagues going on at the time. And, yeah, they played each other sometimes. But if you wanted to sit down and put stats against stats, you'd be very hard pressed to do that, right? Sure. Tycob, Babe Ruth, Christie Matheson. We know they were good. We're not knocking their talent, but who knows what it would have been like in a truly integrated league. Yeah. And actually, it's funny you bring up Tai Cobb because I was like, oh, yeah, Ty Cobb was a huge racist. I wonder what he thought about the Negro League. And I looked it up and I found an article from a guy who argues that Ty Cobb was not the horrible racist that he's made out to be these days, written by Jimmy Cobb. Well, he actually did cite his son, and I think his son might be Jim. Really? Yeah. But the guy found an article from maybe the something where Tycob is quoted at length coming out in favor of integration. Integrated baseball. Yeah. Saying, like, of course these guys should play. As long as they conduct themselves like professional baseball players. Why would they not be able to play? I'm totally in favor of it. Interesting. Did Ty Cobb say this? I think that bears more research because he was supposedly very racist. Yeah. Not what this guy says. All right, well, I'm going to look into that. It's not what his son says. I'm not doubting you, of course. I just wanted to know. I'm with you. I understand. So we talked about the integration of the Negro leagues, which is awesome. Pretty soon, other leagues form not just teams. There was one right here in the south and Negro Southern League with teams from right here in Atlanta. Dude, do you know the Atlanta team played directly across the street, constantly on park? Yeah. Where there's now a Staples in a Home Depot and a Pet Smart and a Whole Foods. How funny is that? If you walk into Whole Foods and listen, you can hear the ghost of a back cracking on a ball. Yeah. I don't think this was the first team in Atlanta that played in the Negro Southern League because they folded that same year. But the Atlanta black crackers. We also have the Atlanta Crackers, which is the white theme. We have the Atlanta Black crackers. And it sounds funny that we say Ponsta Leon, not Ponce de Leon, but that's how we say it here. It's the street that fronts our office building, pont Steel. Leon himself would have punched you in the stomach if you heard you say his name like that. But that's the street in Atlanta that fronts our office. And if you go and look on the Internet, you can see these awesome pictures of this cool little baseball stadium right there. Hundreds of feet from where we sit. Yeah, really neat. Now you have whole foods. You just have to listen close. $7 for artisan mayonnaise if you're lucky. $7. Oh, that's just for the one smear. Yeah, just one smear. Did you hear Whole Foods got caught with uncalibrated scales for their hot bar stuff? Like, it's not already expensive enough. I expect a lot more from them. Yeah. Never get anything with bones at one of those. Oh, never. Or liquid. What a waste. Yeah. You throw half of that chicken leg away. Yeah. You paid for it. Sure. Or just grind that chicken bone up and eat it and get your money's worth. Yeah, like peel off with your teeth, spit the meat into your little basket, and throw the bone back into the hot bar. Yes. Oh, I didn't think about that. Sure, it's a great idea. And you can say I'm no chump. Yeah. Just go around screaming, I'm not paying for that bone. All right, so where are we? The Negro Southern League folded. The Eastern Colored League opened in 1923. And then finally, in 1928, the American Negro League formed. And that was when things like they called eventually the American Negro League and the National Negro League, the majors of the Negro Leagues. Right. That was where the Crim dela Crim played. And everything's going pretty smoothly, except two things happen right there's. Even like a Negro League World Series. There's a best of nine. The Kansas City. Was it really? Yeah. The Kansas City Monarchs narrowly beat the Hildale team. They're from Derby, Pennsylvania, which I guess is near Philadelphia in the first one in 1924. So these leagues have established themselves by 1924, they have their own World Series going, right? Yeah. But just within a few years, there are a couple of hits to the League that ultimately led to the Negro Majors disbanding. One is that Rube Foster suffered gas poisoning in a hotel room in Indianapolis. He was found unconscious. And there's some theory that everyone believed in ghosts and spirits and mediums in the 19th century because they were all being poisoned by the natural gas that was, like, leaking into their kitchens and homes all the time. Right. Well, this guy had, like, an acute poisoning and was found unconscious. And after that, when he regained consciousness and was nursed back to health, he lost his mind, and he just kept getting worse and worse. By this happened in 1925, he was institutionalized, and by 1930, he died of a heart attack at age 51. And again, his guidance was so integral in this first incarnation of the Negro Leagues that when he was institutionalized, obviously, they weren't like, well, what does the League do next? He was in an institution, and the League started to falter and fall apart. And eventually that, coupled with the depression and the onset of the Depression, really kind of led to the unraveling of the first Negro League. Yeah. And the Major League Baseball site. They profited on certain days of the week. Sundays were big days because they were played double headers. But the fact is black Americans didn't have a lot of expendable money to throw at going to baseball games, even though they're pretty cheap. That was commissioned with what people made at the time. Unless you were one of the Walker brothers whose dad was a physician. Yeah. They probably had a little money. Sure. They were playing, so I'm sure their parents got it for free. Probably. So it's all just a moot point. I wonder if he did get free family tickets back then. I would hope so. That's got to be as old as tickets, right? Probably. We got to do an episode on tickets. Guess what's? They were making a little money on Sundays. They weren't hugely profitable overall, even though they were known as somewhat successful. No, a lot of these guys were still barnstorming on their off days. Yeah. And these are the players trying to make ends meet. Like the owners themselves were struggling here and there. White people came to see games sometimes, especially when they were exhibition games against white teams because they love to go out there and see something they've never seen before. Which many times was the black team mopping the floor with the white team, although it seemed pretty evenly matched. Like, from what I gathered, it wasn't like lopsided one way or the other. Yeah. Like they were good competitive games. Yeah. There are plenty of white players who are better than the black players and there are plenty of black players who are better than white players. Yeah. I'd say evenly match is a good way to put it. So if you had an integrated league, you would get the best of both. Right. Which is eventually what we got. Plus, also in some of these cities, Chuck, they were not just baseball was segregated, but just within the city. You had a white team and you had a black team. Right. And that's evidenced in the names of some of the black teams, like the black crackers. Right. The black Yankees. Yeah, there were the Yankees and then there were the crackers. Right. So if you were a white player or a white person, you're probably a fan of the white team and you weren't going and watching the black teams play. Right. So they list out four things here on the site. They said the two leagues, the American and National Negro Leagues, were northern and basically city dwelling teams, a couple of that with there weren't a lot of black people living in northern cities at the time. The south was way more well, I want to say integrated, but it wasn't integrated. Way more black people living in the south at the time. Yeah. Which is I wonder why the Southern Negro League didn't take off like a rocket then. Yeah. I mean, probably for the other. Reasons, like you couldn't afford to go to the games and all that stuff. Yeah, that's a good point. Black people that were in the north didn't have a whole lot of money, and so basically, all that adds up to not a lot of audience buying tickets. And the only way to keep a league of float is to sell tickets and to sell concessions. Same as it is today. Yeah. So all those things, coupled with rube foster and the depression, they're their greatest champion and probably sharpest mind, sadly succumbing to mental illness and then the depression. And that was the end of the beginning of the negro leagues, right? Yeah, that was the end of the first one. Yes. And there were more to come, and we'll talk about it 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 it didn't take long. The old saying, you can't keep a good man down. People wanted to play baseball. They were good at it. They thought there was more money to be made in leagues. And so what happens is these numbers guys get involved. And the numbers game was basically like an illegal, unsanctioned street lottery. Right? So numbers guys have a lot of money. And some of them said, you know what? Let's put money into starting baseball teams and leagues. Yeah. And one guy in particular in pittsburgh, gus greenley. Great name. He was a bar owner in pittsburgh. He bought the pittsburgh crawfords in 1931. He said, I've got a team, but I don't have a league. So two years later, he formed the second negro national league. And other numbers guys bought in, and all of a sudden, they had another league going. Yeah. And this basically kicked off what's known as the golden age of the negro leagues. Starting about 1931, 32, 33, when these other teams came about. And Greenley's team himself was it his? No, I'm sorry. It would have been right across the river. The Homestead Gray. Yeah. They eventually migrated back to Pittsburgh. Did they go over to Pittsburgh? Yes. So they were the same team that went from one town to another? Or they weren't rivals. No, I think there was still the other Pittsburgh team. But from what I understand, the Homestead grades eventually became part of Pittsburgh. Okay. Or maybe there was another team. I'm not sure. But I do know they eventually went to Pittsburgh because, you know, Homestead, we've been there. We did a show there. Yeah. Okay. And I was like, Are we going to the right place? And the car was taking me. So Homestead used to have not just a team, they used to have the best Negro League team possibly ever. Oh, yeah. Easy. For nine consecutive years, they won the pennant. All right. Yeah. Nine years in a row. Josh Gibson cool Papa Bell and Buck Leonard. Some of their stars. Yeah, just some of them. In 1935, they had no less than five future hall of Famers on the team. Five. That's amazing. Point to a team that has five future hall of Famers on it now or ever did. Well, some of the Yankees teams did over the years, but I don't think anything right now oh, yeah. Now, even the best team right now doesn't have five future hall of Famers here. Certainly not the Braves. No, we don't have one. I don't know. I can see Freddie Freeman hitting the hall of Fame one day. Oh, really? I haven't been watching the last couple of seasons. I mean, he's our best player, but I'm freddie the best player on the worst team in baseball. Not very good. Casey at the bat. All right. So we did mention that there were exhibition games going on, and things really picked up with the exhibition games now because they were a little well funded. And this is when white players would come and see the teams playing. It was basically more popular than ever in both communities. Yes. And we said that they had the Negro League World Series going on. Right? Yeah. There was actually another game that came out of this. I think it might have been Gus Greenley, I think it was, who came up with the east versus west allstars game, and that became bigger than the World Series. Whatever was in the Negro League. It was huge. Yeah. So that became kind of like the de facto big game of the year rather than the World Series four. And they played it every year, I think, in Kamisky Field. Oh, really? Yeah. In Chicago. Because east east west in Chicago. That's right. That's what it says on the T shirts, at least. So players are starting to make some like the top players are starting to make some pretty good money at the time. You can't go any further without talking about satchel page. Leroy Satchel Page, dude. He was a pitcher. Very interesting dude. Maybe the greatest pitcher of all time in the sport of baseball. Maybe he was eccentric. He was an entertainer. Yeah. He was like the Usain Bolt of his day. People loved him. Okay. Except he didn't like to run. That would make it a little different. Even said he didn't like to run. Yeah. What was his quote? He said that training for me is rising gently from the bench back at home to the bench. Right. Have you ever seen video or I guess film of him pitching? Yeah. With those old timey baggy baseball pants. Yeah, that was the style. But he had a weird wind up. He had this sort of double windmill that he would do with his pitching arm. And then when he was younger, he had a great fastball, and he was noted for his control, like Greg Mattox and his pinpoint control. Supposedly, you just put a baseball, then a half inch of where he wanted it to be, which is big deal for a pitcher. Sure. As he lost his fastball over the years, he learned basically every pitch under the sun. He pitched until he was 59 years old. Yeah. He first signed in the majors, white majors, at 42. Yeah. 42 year old rookie. He's the oldest rookie ever in Major League Baseball. And I think the oldest pitcher ever as well. Yeah. He was even older than Gaylord Perry. How old was he? He was in his forties. Like Nolan Ryan gaylord. Perry. Nolan Ryan made it to 50. No, not 50. But he came close. Like, pictures, notably, have been a little older, which is crazy because they're arms. Yeah. But they're not, like, running around and batting like other players. Yeah, but you're right. Like Freddie Freeman. Like, the stress on the arm is amazing. So one thing that was problematic, or is problematic when you're going back and looking at the Negro Leagues, is that a lot of teams were allowed to, depending on the league, were allowed to set their own schedules. Stats weren't kept quite as well as they were in the White Leagues. Yeah. We don't know. Saturday pages. Real lifetime stats. No, but in full there are some estimates, and they are high. Oh, yeah. So the one that I saw was that Satchel Page had I think it was in this article on MLB.com, which eventually will say the author's name. Right. Yeah. They said that he had 300 career shutouts. 300 career shutouts. And this guy says in italics, not wins shutouts. Right. Yeah. If you don't know baseball, shutout means you have pitched a game where no one scored a run. Right. And back then they were probably complete game shut out. Meaning he never came out and was relieved by another pitcher. Right. He would have pitched, like, all nine innings. Back in the day, they used to do that way more than they do now. Okay, so he had 300 career shutouts, 1500 wins is the estimate that's on MLB.com? Yeah. To put that into perspective for non baseball fans, again, if you have 300 wins, not shut out wins, then you're a hall of Famer. And in fact, they don't think there will ever be another 300 game winner again because of their more pitchers in the rotation. Now, they usually have five guys instead of four. They don't pitch as deep into games. They rest them a lot more. So it's just we may not ever see that happen again. Right. Just because of the way it's built. To also put in perspective, say Young is regarded as one of the best pitchers ever in Major League Baseball. Named the top of word after him. Exactly. He had 76 shutouts, which is amazing. He had the most wins ever still in Major League Baseball at 511. So Satchel Page had conceivably three times more wins than the highest win count ever in Major League. And that's counting his entire career, I assume, which, again, was very long. It was a very long career. But that just makes it all the more amazing, especially as he gets older. Yeah. Let's say that people don't count the Negro Leagues as being in the top league at the time. Like, cut it in half, and he's still way ahead of everybody else. If you subtract 50% of everything he did, and the fact that he sat in a rocking chair and the dugout and had, like, a huge personality, it's just awesome. Yeah. So he learned all sorts of pitches. By the end of his career, he was pitching knuckle balls, and he was famous for the hesitation pitch, which he invented, which was when he got to the white major leagues. They were like, that's illegal, you can't do that. It's called the bulk. And he was like, all right. He's like, no, it's called a hesitation pitch. Don't you know? It was very sneaky. You act like you're pitching, then you stop. He was like, I got guys out there that are starting to swing because I'm so fast. Like when they see me winding up, they're starting to swing. Yeah. So if I just put a little slight pause there, then they're swinging, and then the ball comes. So it's a very tricky little pitch. And he was making between 30 and 40 grand a year. And this is also with appearances and stuff like that, but in the Negro Leagues, which is about half a million dollars today, amazing amount of money at the time. And those appearances, if you are a team owner that has such a page on your team, you might let them go, make some scratch, and probably take a cut yourself by lending them to another team whose attendance was struggling, and all you had to do was advertise for a week that Satchel Page is going to be pitching one day, and you would sell out. So he would help other Negro League teams that were struggling yeah. To be a draw. Yeah. And here's one little cool thing about our own Atlanta Braves. In 1968, Satchel Page was lacking one more season to get his Major League Baseball pension and was out of the league and retired. And the Atlanta Brave signed him as a player coach. Like Terry Pendleton. Yeah. He was never a player coach, was he? No, but he was a player and then a coach. Oh, yeah. Pete Rose was a player coach. Was he really? Like, he managed the Reds and played for them. I didn't know it and bet on them. Yeah. But they signed him to a one year deal so he could get his Major League Baseball pension. That is awesome. Which is really cool. What year was that? 1968. That's really cool. Yeah. Go Brave. So if you see a picture when I saw a picture of him in the Braves uniform, I was like, Wait a minute. He never played for the Braves? And he really didn't. It was sort of just a little sneaky way to get him in there. That's cool. Which is great. All right, so Satchel Page is killing it. Other players are killing it. It would not be long before somebody in the white leagues, somebody said, the talent is too good. Somebody has to be the first to make this move and break the color barrier. Yeah, right. That was the thing. The Negro Leagues were ultimately, as we'll find out, victims of their own success. The players that they supported and brought into the game were of obvious major league caliber in any major league. They were the best in the world. They were just playing on segregated teams. And so, finally, a group of people, but especially it usually comes in the form of one guy named Branch Ricky. Yeah. Did Tom Hanks play him? No. Harrison Ford? No. Maybe. Well, I didn't see the most recent Jackie Robinson movie was Harrison Ford, maybe? I've seen him portrayed in other movies. I can't tell if it was him or not because the actor didn't have a diamond studded earring in, but Harrison Ford could have taken it out for the role. This guy named Branch Ricky, was he an executive or a manager for the Dodgers? He was an executive for the Dodgers. And he said and this is when they were in Brooklyn, right? Yeah. He said, this is ridiculous that we need to break this color barrier. There's plenty of great players out there that I want to sign. I'm going to break this unspoken rule. And he looked around to find a player who was not only good, but who he felt could withstand this horrendous reception that whoever the first black player would be would definitely receive and who did receive. And he found it in the person of Jackie Robinson. Yeah. That's a huge point, because, like I said, Roy Campanelle was probably a better player at the time than Jackie Robinson. But if you see the Jackie Robinson story I didn't see the recent one, like I said, but I just know a lot about his story. He was the right guy. He had the temperament. He had the leadership. Roy campaign. Elle, take your head off. Yeah, he did. He was a tough guy, but Jackie Robinson was the man in every way. And we should also shout out to the road being paved by people like Joe Lewis and Jesse Owens before Jackie Robinson, as far as just white America accepting mainstream black athletes into their lives. Yeah. And I don't know if it was on this or there's a site called Negroleaguebaseball.com that has a really good article called Negro League Baseball One or something like that. The basics. There's definite story to the whole thing, right? Yeah. But they point out that probably more than anything that helped break the color barrier was blacks serving in World War II. Oh, yeah. Serving alongside white soldiers. And stories coming back from the front of, like, hey, these guys are killing Germans just as fast as any white guy. Yeah. And at the time, America was like, well, we love that about people. So when they returned, the black soldiers came home to a different America that they helped change by fighting in World War II. That's pretty cool. And, I mean, the timing of this apparently is not coincidental that Jackie Robinson was signed in 1946, a year after World War II, for sure. So Branch Ricky, he was a very puritanical guy. He would often lecture players on sex and drinking and stuff, and he wasn't just some benevolent champion of the black man. Yeah, that's a good point, man, because a lot of times stories like this end up being about the guy who took the chance and paved the way for the black player. But he did. He did. But he was an ideal emphasis. It's just too easy sometimes for the emphasis to go on to. That where it's like, well, the black player was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Exactly. Let's put it this way. If Branch Ricky hadn't wanted to sell tickets by fielding a good team, he would have never signed Jackie Robinson. He was a businessman. The Dodgers sucked at the time. Did they? But he was an idealist. I mean, he was very much like, no, this is wrong, and they should be allowed to play. Yeah. Okay, so he was a complex human being like all other human beings. Yeah. He can't just be shoehorned into an easy caricature. No, that's great. So Branch Ricky complicated human being, he selected Jackie Robinson, and it was a great selection. Yeah. Jackie Robinson played one year in the minors, which was ridiculous. They should have just like he spent his entire life playing in the minors. They should have just promoted him right away. But I think they just wanted to ease that transition. He won the batting title and the Miners his only year there, and then won Rookie of the Year in his very first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yeah. And that was April 15, 1947, was when he made his debut, which was a very historic day. Yeah, an amazing day. Major League Baseball is really like honored Jackie Robinson to the fullest now. Yeah, they should. Great. Jackie Robinson definitely threw up in the floodgates within four months of Jackie Robinson being signed, I guess actually being called up to the majors, two other guys were signed, both in July, and I think that year there were a number of other black players suddenly playing for white Major League Baseball, which is suddenly not now, just Major League Baseball, not white Major League Baseball. That's right. Larry Dobby, cleveland Indians. Willard Brown, the St. Louis Browns. Henry Hank Thompson, the St. Louis Browns. Dan Bankhead. Leroy Satchel. Page made it finally. And, of course, Roy Campanella, among others. These were the first African Americans in Major League baseball. And by 1952, just a few years later, there were 150 black players. And by 1954, all but four major league teams had black players. There were a few holdouts. Yeah. The Boston Red Sox, notably, were the last. They waited until 1950, 913 years after Jackie Robinson's debut season in the minors. So with the signing of Jackie Robinson and all the players to follow, like you hinted at earlier, and like this article plainly says, it was very bittersweet end. In one way it was great. The color barrier was smashed, league was being integrated and they were getting their due, although it was a struggle. But in another way, it was also sad that this league that had so much gumption and such a great we'll do it ourselves then attitude and empower these men to play and these people to own these teams and start their own leagues. So it was definitely like a weird time in history. I think nowadays there's much more of a reverence and a bit of mourning for the disappearance of that league. But in another way, like I said, it was smashing. The color barrier was way more, way more better. Just went into hulk speaker. Yeah. It would have been a much more satisfying end of the whole thing if the Negro Leagues had poached the best players in the white Major League Baseball. Actually, you know what the best possible thing could have been was if the white major league absorbed those teams and owners and ownership as part of one big league. Nice, but they're like, no, we're just going to take your players. Yeah, give them to us. So that is Negro League baseball. The history of it. Yes. They officially disbanded in 1948, and this article says into the 1950s there were still a few teams playing here and there, and in the early nineteen s, sixty s even. There was like one final team, or I guess one final pair of teams. I guess they had to play somebody still playing or they could scrimmage themselves. Yeah. It says the Negro American League was the last to throw in the town in the early sixty s. Yeah. So, yeah, more than one team. And this article makes a point. Today, or at least in 2012, major League Baseball was 40% non white, which I was like, what? I would have guessed it was the opposite of that. I would not have guessed 60% of Major League Baseball players are white. Yeah. And, you know, there's a big push, I think, like one of the least represented demographics now in pro baseball or African Americans. Really? Yeah. Partially because of the rise of Latino players and then partially because there's not a bigger push to play baseball these days as kids in America. And so there's a lot of concerted efforts to try and get baseball going again in black communities, which is awesome. Sure. Yeah, I know. I was pushed to my dad's, like, get out there and get hit in the head with the ball. See, I wouldn't allow I had to play church softball. So lame. So then the color barrier is broken, and now the last vestige of any sort of color issue is the Native American slurs that are rampant in all sports as far as teams go. If you want to know more about the Negro Leagues, you can type those words in the search bar@howstoughforks.com. You can also go check out this amazing article called Negroleagues a Kaleidoscopic Review. It's on Mlbcom by Stephen Goldman. Yeah, he's a great author. And check out Negroleague baseballcom. They have all sorts of great profiles on the players and all that stuff. We never said the nicknames. Oh, yeah. Can we rattle off a few of those? Sure. All right. Boy, these are some good nicknames. How about jelly? Gardener or spoony? Palm. Turkey Stearns. Turkey Stearns. He's a hall of famer. Coperni Thompson or Steel Arm Davis? I think you mentioned cool Papa Bell. Yeah, Cool Papa Bell. That is the greatest name ever. Possum poles. Ace Adams. King tut Smoky. Joe Williams. Bullet Joe Rogan. Yes. Joe Rogan. Did you know that? Rats Henderson boy. Turkey stearns. That might be the best. That might be my new hotel suit. Them Cool Papa Joe. Yes, but no one would buy that at a hotel registry. Oh, yeah. If you go up in Stearns, they definitely go for it. Those are great nicknames. All right, now that we said Turkey Stern, this time for Listener Nail, this is going to call short and sweet. What do you call it when you remember something with a Pneumatic device? No, pneumonic. Pneumatic is when you remember it while you're pumping air up and down. Was it Pneumatic? You remember it while you're wandering around mnemonic. Of course. I feel like a dummy. Howdy Josh and chuck friend recommended your show to me recently, and I love it. You satisfy all my nerdy entertainment requirements while I'm at work. You seem to have a bit of trouble recalling the order of taxonomic taxonomic there you go. Categories I'm going to have trouble missing during woolly mammoths. Not woolly mammoths, as our typo originally said it was was my fault. That's right. I just forgot to know. Wally, here's an easy memory trick we learned in high school biology. Kings play chess on fine green silk kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. I love that stuff because I will never forget it. Now, that's not a mnemonic device, is it? It's pneumatic. I have no idea why this is still in my head over ten years later. Well, that's exactly why. Sure, Katie. I hope that helps. And that is Katie from West Texas. Thanks a lot. Katie from West Texas. We appreciate that. Kings play chess on green silk. Fine green silk. I'll never remember the fine part. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syscape podcast. You can also hang out with me at joshlark on Twitter. You can hang out with us on Facebook. Comw and check out Chuck at charleswbryant charles w chuck Bryant. Appropriate on Facebook as well. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffysheago.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. 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434f1cac-53a3-11e8-bdec-43adcafb75f6 | How Wastewater Treatment Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-wastewater-treatment-works | All that gross stuff we humans put in the water that gets flushed down the sewers has to be taken back out before that water is reintroduced to the environment. That’s the ideal, and it’s essential to staving off the imbalance people bring to the planet. | All that gross stuff we humans put in the water that gets flushed down the sewers has to be taken back out before that water is reintroduced to the environment. That’s the ideal, and it’s essential to staving off the imbalance people bring to the planet. | Thu, 16 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=107, tm_isdst=0) | 56128238 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry just ghosted us like a cat. Catfish, I think, is how they put it. And that, of course, makes the Stuff You Should know from the abyss. How are you doing, man? I'm just doing great. Everything's totally normal. Everything feels comfortable and fun, so I'm good. How about you? Have you done anything really weird in the last few weeks? I think a more legit question would be what have I not done that's weird? What's the weirdest thing you've done? I'm trying to think, like I shouldn't have said anything because I really haven't done anything that weird. It's just been more like I've developed this weird kind of I guess it's indigestion, which I don't get. I have, like, an iron constitution. But I don't know if it's because I've been pounding vitamins lately and they keep lodging in this one spot, my esophagus. I think there's a weird bend in there somewhere. And so I constantly feel like I've got some throw up just sitting in the middle of my chest. Oh, God. That's a new development. Okay. And I've noticed that when I don't take vitamins, it still happens. So I'm kind of up the creek in that respect. And I know that's not doing anything weird, but I guess aside from that and setting out box traps for coyotes and then eating the coyotes when I catch them, those are the two weirdest things. It's not bad. What about you? I haven't really done anything weird. I shaved my head, but that was just because I was bored and hot. Nice. Britney Spears. Yeah, I usually do that once a year and I haven't done it in a few years for some reason. Yeah, it has been a little while. You've been rocking the grown out stuff. I know. I thought about shaving my beard, too, just for funsies. Oh, boy. I don't know. I think now's the time to try all these weird things where no one's going to see you for six weeks. Yes. As a matter of fact, after we get done recording, I have a date with you me to go cut my hair because I've got the covet hair. It is really long. It's just out of control. You know that point where when you grow your fingernails out too far and they just turn that corner? Well, you wouldn't know because you bite your fingernails, right? I quit biting my fingernails a while ago. Yes. Okay, so maybe you've experienced this. There's a point, and it can happen within an hour where they're just too close to being too long and then all of a sudden they turn this corner and you can't go like, another minute with them being unclipped. They just feel so gross all of a sudden. That's how my hair feels. Right. Now, I think the corner of your fingernails turn is called the tip of your finger. Start wrapping around. Sure. Yeah, man. So I guess we're talking wastewater treatment then. Obviously with all his fingernail talk. Yeah. And I got to say, who did this one? Did Ed put this together for us? Ed did this with a high fever, from what I understand. Right. Non COVID related, we should point out. Yeah, he was just sick. He came through. He's doing okay. He's on the mend. But yeah, he turned this in. He's like, I had a fever when I wrote this. So it might not make that much sense. But it did. I think it did. But we should say if you work in wastewater treatment, what I did find out, doing supplementary research, was that there are clearly a lot of, like, there are almost 15,000 treatment plants in the United States, and there are clearly a bunch of different ways to do it because I saw a bunch of other different stuff. Right. So let's just say what we're going to talk about is one way that it can go. Yeah. And we'll probably touch on some of the other ones that people use, but there's just no way we could cover everything. And the other thing that I saw too, is there's a real sentiment that the United States, in particular's infrastructure for treating wastewater, is aging really rapidly. Like we need to do something about it soon. I saw some watchdog group said we need to spend about $240,000,000,000 to upgrade our wastewater treatment around the country. Somebody else said 600 billion. But everybody's saying, wait, wait, okay, that's great because we're using really antiquated methods that work. They work pretty well, but they're having a lot of trouble keeping up with the Joneses. Yeah, because the Joneses now because we live amongst plastic everywhere. They poop and pee plastic. They throw stuff in antibiotics into their toilets. There's like a different world than the wastewater treatment plants were built to handle. Like in the early and mid 20th century. This is like a real opportunity to update our infrastructure as we rebuild it. So hopefully we'll be doing that. Hopefully. And you know what? 250,000,000,000 doesn't sound like a lot of money. I thought I was going to hear a number like 1 trillion. That's what I would have thought, too. I was actually kind of surprised. I went back and looked and they were talking about the wastewater treatment. So I don't know if it's I know that some of the technologies are very expensive and maybe they're saying to rebuild as is, it would be 240 to 600 billion. But maybe to implement some of the more high tech stuff that has come along in the last few years, maybe that would be a little more high dollar. All right, well, let's talk about low dollar by way of history, because at the beginning of wastewater treatment, well, you can't even call it wastewater treatment. It was just calling it was basically like how we dealt with wastewater. We weren't treating it at all. No. The very most rudimentary thing that you still can see in places are out houses in Latrine is just an outhouse is just a latrine with a little bit of privacy involved. Yeah. And you know what, I was looking up out houses. They're still around. They are like composting toilets and urine diverters and all sorts of hippie stuff you can get into if you want. But one thing I kept seeing was there's always like a crescent moon cut out on the outhouse. Yeah, I've seen those. It's almost synonymous with an outhouse. It looks weird without one to me. So I looked it up and it turns out that back in colonial times, when there was a preliterate population, the crescent moon indicated that the outhouse was for women and a star cut out indicated it was for men. So there's the history from oh, you knew that. I never had any idea. Yes. I want to that visiting Mount Vernon. That would be a good place to learn, that for sure. And George Washington just had a big cut out of a marijuana leaf. He did. It was only for him. Yeah. He'd come home from working in the fields and Martha would have a big fat bowl waiting for him at the end of the day. Very nice. Yeah. So if you're talking about 20th century, you would think like yes, but surely when we got to the 20th century, they were really handling the sewage properly. Not so at all. It was well into the 20th century when we still had suburbs with people living in them with no sewer connections and outhouses. And this is kind of hard to believe, but I guess in more rural areas but that even said suburbs. Yes. He made it sound like basically if you went into like, I don't know, Dunwoody or something like that, which is a suburb of Atlanta. Okay. You would have found outhouses in the 50s, which maybe that's true. I don't know. If you think about it, a septic tank is really just kind of a fancy latrine pit. Yes. But it's interesting too, because like 6500 BCE, there were places that it's funny because it seems like there's a lot of advanced thinking in ancient times that goes by the wayside for just thousands of years and then it comes back. But in what is now modern Syria, they actually had drainage pipes and stuff that fed wastewater from the outhouses, basically to the streets and rivers. So it's not like it was great, but it at least got it out of there. They didn't have a lot of follow through on their ideas. Great first idea. And then they were like, just forget it after that. Pretty much. But hey, have you ever heard why things were possibly more advanced or very advanced early on? And then they went dark for a little while. I feel like we talked about this before. It must have been the enlightenment episode, because it was the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, right? When the church took over and basically said, science can burn hell. Amazing. That works. Yeah, it's crazy. And then the enlightenment came along and said, no, science is back, everybody. And we started to have, like, sewage treatment again, which, I mean, not coincidentally, that's around the time we started taking sewage treatment seriously. And it wasn't just that we got a lot smarter all of a sudden from the enlightenment, which definitely was partially the case, but there were way more people. And so things like digging a hole in the ground, pooping and peeing into it, and then once it got full, burying it and digging another hole, methods like that just became unsustainable. Or putting all of your sewage out into the street, it became unsustainable just because there were so many people. Yeah, and there was poop and pee literally everywhere in the streets, in the rivers and the lakes. And the first sort of push toward treating the sewage was literally just because the smell eventually they were like, this is terrible to live amongst. Maybe we could do something. Maybe we could throw some lime or some charcoal or some sawdust on this stuff, and it won't be safe, but we won't be, like, walking around gagging 24/7, right? They're like, at least there's some sawdust on there. Do something, for God's sake. Kitty litter. Sure. So they did do that, right? But that's still wasn't enough. People were still just I think in our great Stink episode, joseph Basilgatt was just revered as a saint, basically for saving people by diverting sewage into sewers, away from people's drinking water and stuff. But even still, I think he was also responsible for helping design some of the earliest wastewater treatment plants. But still, around the time and into the 20th century, it was basically like, here's a sewer, and then we're just going to make the sewer come out downstream of our drinking water supply, and then problem solved, right? Sorry for Shelbyville, but we're exactly chew on Shelbyville, chew on our fecal matter. Oh, God. But that was kind of exactly what happened. If you were downriver downstream or on the other side of the lake from this area, you got their poop in your backyard, and you didn't want that. So eventually people started realizing that there are things that you can do to make water better and then put it into rivers and lakes and streams and even the ocean and seas. And that is basically where we're at right now with wastewater treatment, which is we poop and pee and we flush stuff into the sewer, and then the stuff goes into a wastewater treatment plant and we do some stuff to it. And then we put out slightly better than sewage water into the rivers and lakes and streams and hope for the best. Yeah, that's right. Some of the early things they also did was like flood a field with wastewater. This allowed sedimentation, which is the feces, basically settling. And then actually, the plants can help out. The plants take up all that growth stuff as water that they use to grow and kind of traps it in there, which is nice. And then you sell those plants to Shelbyville that's right. To eat. But it still didn't change. It didn't make anything less harmful as far as bacteria go. So that's why typhoid and cholera and everything was a huge problem. And that's why wastewater may be the biggest advancement in life saving device. Like that in penis in our neck and neck, I think. Yeah. Really? Just not being around water that contains all sorts of harmful bacteria that people pooped out, that's definitely going to improve your lifespan for sure. And that whole thing about putting sewage onto a field and letting the plants deal with it. That's actually still around. That's a sensible way to treat sewage. Because not only do the plants take care of it. But as it trickles down through the soil to the groundwater. There's all sorts of microbes and minerals and all sorts of ions that pick up that harmful stuff and that actually purifies the water. The problem is, once you get too many people, which can happen really quickly, that soil and those plants get overwhelmed and a lot of bad stuff gets through and then you're polluting the groundwater. So as more and more people came along, we realized we had to come up with technology. We couldn't just rely on soil anymore. Yeah. Massachusetts was a little forward thinking in Worcester, Mass. In 1889. They actually treated sewage with chemicals. And this is one of the first chemical treatments for sewage in America, I think. And that would cause these solids to clump together and then settle out. Like, obviously the fecal matter. And that was good because bacteria is more apt to cling to the poop than it will to stay in the water. So that helped for a little while, and then for a long time after that, they would just sort of dilute the water with clean water and say, well, this is as good as we can do, basically. Yeah. Which, I mean, again, that's kind of what we're doing now. It's just the stuff we're putting out now is way better, way less harmful, and has way more stuff taken out than it did in the 19th century. But ultimately, that's what I'm saying. We're still working mostly on those premises. One is that you allow sedimentation to happen, which is like putting sewage over a field and letting the sediment settle. And then you use chemical or biological treatments to filter out stuff that is leftover even after sedimentation. And again, that's where we're at today. It's just the techniques we're using are much more advanced. Yeah, I don't think we even said what wastewater is because I think a lot of people might think that wastewater is just something that goes down your toilet, but wastewater is any kind of water affected by human use at all, period. Yeah, so there's storm runoff, rainwater is wastewater. And you might think, like, rainwater is beautiful, it falls from the sky and it's so clean. But this stuff is running through cities, and especially in cities because there's not enough dirt and grass to soak it all up. So it's taking everything on every urban city street in America and collecting that and taking it with it. So fertilizer, pesticides, any kind of agricultural grossness oil roadkill. I mean, just think about every disgusting thing on the ground and that's what stormwater is. And that's why stormwater is treated just like it is, which is wastewater. Whole possums, tons of possums. Guns, apparently. What? I saw one wastewater treatment explainer video, and apparently a lot of guns end up getting filtered out in that first big filter. Oh, my gosh. Because I think people like, I don't know if they're just murder weapons that people throw down a sewer drain. I mean, I would guess so. Or at least crime weapons. It's kind of scary. Yeah, you'd like to think like that happened one time somewhere. Not like that's a regular occurrence. That's nuts, man. Well, I mean, I say a lot of guns, I don't know how many guns, but tons of guns. It was enough for them to mention that guns show up quite often. Right. The one you were talking about, which is like all that wastewater that goes down toilets, the poop and the bee water, that's actually called blackwater. I love that term, man. I'm going to go make some black water. Yeah, that sounds like a hardcore cocktail that would involve jagermeister and the dooby brothers. Let's work it out here. So jagermeister, okay, a little bit of simple syrup. Very simple syrup. Orange juice, fresh squeeze orange juice. How would that be with I bet that'd be awful. With the yeagermeister, of course, everything's going to be off with the yeagermeister. Yeah. And then a little freshly muddled basil, little star anise perhaps. That's the blackwater cocktail. Oh, my god, that's terrible. Gray water is not as gross as that by any stretch. This is all the water. And we've talked about gray water in our eco friendly episodes because a lot of households will reuse their gray water. The water that goes down your sink or your shower. A lot of individual households try to recycle their own gray water. If you're one of those forward thinking hippie dippy types, sure, if you've got a composting toilet house in your backyard, yeah, but generally there aren't like, big cities with huge gray water recycling systems. Yet I predict that in the next 20 years, we will see those rise pretty commonly. Yeah, I hope so. I do, too. I mean, it's definitely about time. Like we waste water. Like it's nothing. Yeah, it's crazy how cheap our water is, especially in the States. Yeah. There's also a couple of other things that if you're a wastewater, I think actually they don't call them wastewater any longer. They call it water resource reclamation plants, which really kind of drives home what we're talking about a little more. Like this is something you don't want to just pee away, you know what I'm saying? This is important stuff. And so they're starting to use that kind of nomenclature to indicate how important it is. But if you run one of these plants or you work at them, a couple of other things you're going to be on the lookout for is the amount of pollutants that you have in your water at any given time, the amount that comes through, and then in addition to storm runoff, blackwater and gray water, you're also on the lookout for industrial affluent. Sure. And we should probably say real quick, if fluent is what most people call wastewater. All forms going into the treatment plant. Yes. Not affluent. No. Effluent is all wastewater if you're not in the know. If you are in the know, effluent is what a water reclamation treatment plant puts out. The treated water is affluent. All the untreated stuff that comes in is influent. That's right, but I think if we say affluent, we're probably just going to be talking about it in general throughout this episode. Yeah. And you mentioned industrial processes. We should probably point out, too, that if you have an industrial plant manufacturing something, you probably have your own wastewater treatment system on site. You don't just dump all that stuff and say, here, county or city, deal with it. You have to clean that stuff first to send that really still gross water to the city. Probably depends on your mayor, if he's spineless or she's spineless. That's true. Mayor Quimby. Mayor Quimby. He wouldn't let it happen because he was spineless. He'd let it happen because he was getting kickbacks for it. Oh, man. My favorite. I don't even know if I can say this on the air. Okay, should I? Do you know the line? My favorite? No. I can't wait to hear it. Well, edit it out if you can't, too. All right. I can't remember which episode, but it was when everyone was freaking out about something, and Quincy came up to the podium and said, calm down, everyone. I know we're all frightened in horny. Yeah, that's right. I think that was the comet episode, where the comet was headed towards Springfield. We're all frightened and horny. That's so funny. And then he introduces Professor Frank, and Professor Frank goes, good evening, everyone. And somebody stands up and goes, quit stalling. What's the plan? He goes, okay, all right, sit down. Oh, man, I missed that show. I do, too. You want to take a break? Yeah. Let's take a break and we'll talk about how this stuff is treated. We've talked a lot about wastewater up to this point, chuck and I feel like we should talk about it some more. Yeah, and let me point something out too, real quick, because Ed said in here that wastewater treatment plants is not water that you're going to end up drinking. That is not fully true. Right. In water challenged places in the world, they don't like to call it this, but there are treatment facilities where they can go toilet to tap. Places like Australia, Singapore, Namibia and then New Mexico, Virginia and California. They convert this stuff back into potable water. And it's pretty great, actually, because they've said it's shown that it actually has fewer contaminants than existing. Just like what you and I are drinking in Atlanta, let's say. Yeah, for sure. Because they put it through such a rigorous process that, from what I saw, singapore actually has to remix it with rainwater so that it will get some of the local minerals and terror water, basically, because they strip it, they strip everything out. It's just like water molecules. And that's it from what they do with it. And the one in Singapore I was reading about, did you read about that one? They seem to be like the leaders of the pack with this stuff. Yeah, I think Singapore is especially challenged with water supplies. Yeah. So they came up with something called new Water, new Order and the New Capitalized. It's just great little word and spelling and everything. But they also, in addition to just coming up with like a bang up water filtration system or water reclamation system, they also had a bang up PR campaign and got everybody behind it. You have to, then you totally do. There was a town, I can't remember the name of it, in Australia, where they needed to do this, and it got sunk because some people started speaking out against it. All of a sudden, the city council started turning, changing their minds. I think Malcolm Turnbull forced a referendum to try to gain favor with some of the residents there. And it was just a big mess. But this paper was basically demonstrating side by side how bad it could be and how good it could be. But a big part of talking people into drinking water that somebody else peed out at some point or contained poop at some point, you really have to be committed to it and have a united front and basically show the science saying this is 100% harmless. There's nothing wrong with it. It's more pure than anything we're feeding you now. So just try. And Singapore was apparently very successful with it. Yeah, you really have to do that. I saw other places where they say they try not to make it too big of a show of it, but sure, I think the opposite. I think you really got to educate people so they know that this water is safe and tastes fine. It's a miracle of modern technology. It really is. It totally is. I'm with you. I think that's one of the things you need to be upfront and transparent about not letting people find out the hard way. Yeah. And new water is a great way to go, because if you notice, new water sounds nothing like fecal water. No. Sounds like new Coke. Right. That was a big hit. Yeah, it was. All right, let's follow this stuff. Let's say it's raining one day. We're standing in a sewer now, Chuck. Okay. Yeah. By the way, what we're about to describe takes about 24 to 36 hours, depending on the plant. Cool. So we're standing right outside of a sewage treatment plant smells great. Or a water reclamation plant. And we are knee deep. Our galoshes are on, and we're standing there, and all this water is coming through. It's raining. There's storm water runoff. Wait, where did you get Galashes? I'm sorry. I only have the one pair. I got flippers saved up for them. That's so gross. And there's a possum floating by because it's a stormwater runoff. Maybe there's a gun over there. People are pooping and peeing, so there's black water all around us, as well. People are taking showers, so there's gray water coming through. There's corn all over the place. I could not stop thinking about corn when I was researching this. Yeah. At what point does corn get filtered out? So we're about at that .1 of the first things that all this water is going to do is go through a pretty good sized fence. Right. And that's going to hold back all of the big stuff the possums, the tree branches, probably a gun. Unless it's a real tiny little old daring gambler's. Daringer. Right. And all this stuff is going to get caught up on a fence, and eventually somebody's going to come along and scrape it off, sell the gun, eat the possum, who knows what with the tree branch, and then just basically keep it clean for other stuff. That's the very first step. That really before the water ever even goes into the plant, it's going to pass through one of these grates. Yeah. Or there may be, like, a vertical conveyor system so some unlucky individual doesn't have to scoop poop possums and poop guns out of water. Right. A clean possum is bad enough, but one that's been bathed in blackwater, that's not good. And then we're making jokes. But God bless those people who do this work. Yeah, for sure. Hats off to them, because, again, they're keeping all of us safe and healthy. Right. Galash is off, right? No, I'm keeping mine on. We've gone through that first grade now. There's another series of screens that are going to pick out smaller stuff, like bits of tire or little car accident pieces that run off with the storm water. Do you know what I'm talking about? Sure. There's just all sorts of glittery stuff in the road. All that stuff gets picked up and coarse sand, that kind of thing. And now you're talking. Now you've got some water that's ready to be treated. Yeah, there's something called the grit chamber. They can be horizontal aerated or vortex. The vortex ones are kind of cool and called it a hydrocyclone. I think it's the same thing. And it basically just spins the water and slings all that grit and stuff, I guess. Car accident stuff right out to decide where it's filtered out. Do you remember at the county fair or whatever, that ride that was like that Six Flags had one. Yeah, what was it called? But yeah, it spun and then the floor dropped out from under you. Yeah, right. It was probably called the Blackwater. I can't remember. I did not like it, though. Oh, I loved it. Six Legs have one of those, huh? Yeah, they got rid of it pretty quickly. And of course, you always get these Six Legs rumors. The rumor was that some child didn't get slung out and got trapped when the floor came back up, which may have been true for all I know, but I don't like dizzying things. Yeah, the trick was to just keep your focus on something inside, in the middle, like the person across from you who was moving relative to you and that kept you from getting dizzy. Got you. Okay. But if you were so inclined and also, I have to say, reading all of these different steps, I'm like this would be kind of a fun ride, actually, to slide through here 24 hours. If you're just a little piece of car headlight to make it all the way through. That would be pretty fun. It's a wild ride. So now you've got water that's ready to be treated. The grid has been taken out, the big pieces have been taken out, but there's still plenty of stuff in it. And the water is very turbid. Right. There's a lot of suspended particulate matter just kind of floating around, making the water murky. And this is where it enters what's known as primary treatment, where basically, if there's any water reclamation plant anywhere in the world, it's going to go through this stage at least. The primary treatment. Yeah. You think about during the daytime, there's a lot more activity. So these facilities aren't meant to operate at full board during the day and then be cool at night. They depend on a very steady flow and pollution can't all bum rush it when everyone goes and takes their morning poop. They have these holding tanks, basically, where they can hold this stuff during the day that's coming in and just sort of balance it out and distribute it over a 24 hours period. So the system's never overwhelmed, basically. Yeah. It's called flow equalization, where if you imagine this. Is a river running through. They keep very tight control over the volume and the speed and the flow of the wastewater that's going through the plant. And so when that flow is exceeded, whatever is exceeded gets diverted off to one of these holding basins so that when the flow goes down, they can move some from the holding basin into that flow to make it so it's steady basically 24 hours a day. That's pretty ingenious stuff if you ask me. I didn't know that. It is. And then one more gross thing that we should mention is oh yeah, we forgot that. Yeah, grease and fat. Restaurants use grease traps, but there's still so much industrial and consumer like think about anytime someone pours grease down their drain or oil down their drain in their house, which you shouldn't be doing, that stuff ends up in the wastewater treatment facility. And it all loves to hang out with each other and congeal up together. And there's something called fatbergs that form. Do you remember the one from London? Oh, God. Yeah, they're horrid. It's a huge, sometimes multiton ball of fat and grease. And apparently they're really good at attracting flushable wipes. Although you're going to say the ladies, right? The ones that have like gold medallions and chest hair stuck to them. Yes, the normal fat birds. The ones with glasses and buck teeth, they don't. Right, so disco stew versus cletus. Like Job yokel. Exactly. And I didn't know there was going to be some Simpsons heavy. I had no idea either. But yeah, I remember learning about fatberg back in, I think it was 2011, something like that, where London had one, and they were like everybody stopped flushing wipes and everyone said, no, you can just get the fat burgers out every once in a while. But yeah, that's horrid. But they have to get those out. Not just because the fatbergs are so gross, but like you were saying, that can really screw with the machinery in the water reclamation plant. So I guess that would be after grit. Potentially, yeah. They go into these aeration basins and they basically just inject a bunch of air in the bottom of the tanks, or not even tanks. A lot of these are open air, we'll mention that later. But it just creates bubbles and it aerates the water and that kind of just works everything free where it can float to the top. So you can just skim it right on off and slap it on a hoagie roll and go to town. Yeah, it's a great mayo substitute, I bet. Okay, so now we finally enter this primary treatment. Although I would argue that removing grease and fat, or I think the acronym is fog fat, oil and grease, that's part of primary treatment. But we'll say that it's step five. We finally reach step one, which is where this turbid water with all of this kind of suspended particulate matter in it is going to be dumped into a tank. I can't say usually, but there's like two main versions that I've seen. One is a big round one where the water just flows into the middle and then just kind of slows down as it reaches the outside of the tank or the edges of the tank. The other makes a little more sense. It's almost like a big swimming pool where the water comes in one end and slows down as it makes its way toward the other. Either way, the point of this is slowing the water down so that it continues to flow, but flows so slowly that all those suspended particles have a chance to settle to the bottom under gravity. And that's sedimentation, like we talked about way back in the day, where they used to take sewer water and put it over a field as it was trickling through that soil under the force of gravity, that's sedimentation. We do the same thing today, except we usually do it in a tank rather than a field. And then we also may use some agents to speed it up, like Flock Elating Agents, which is one of my favorite words. Maybe a good band name. I'm not sure. Not bad. There's also Coagulating Agents, which is a terrible band name. And they'll actually do what they were trying to do with the Greece, which is kind of fluff it up or make it attracted to one another and inform larger solids that are way easier to get out of there. And after this primary treatment, the water looks pretty good, but you would not drink it because you would die almost immediately of a horrible, terrible death. Yeah. And the key with these primary clarifiers, which are these main tanks that they go into at first, is there's something called settling velocity, and that's the speed at which the particulate is going to settle. And we mentioned earlier the flow rate coming in. The reason they have to be just manic about how much stuff is coming in there is because your flow rate, 100% of the time can never exceed that settling velocity. So in other words, the stuff coming in can't be coming in faster than all that nasty stuff can settle. Right. But that nasty stuff does settle, and it forms what everybody calls sludge. But what I saw, Chuck, is that is not the term of art these days. The current term is raw primary biosolids. Formerly sludge. That's the full name of it. RPBS. Rpbfs. Oh, those are different words. Like formerly sludge is part of the name. They changed the name of Sludge to raw primary bile solids. Formerly sludge. Like prints, basically. Yeah, right, exactly. Just formally known as prints. Right. Oh, man. R IP. Yeah. For real. Oh, my gosh. So things are going to stink. There's no way to get around it. If you've been to a wastewater treatment plant, it's going to smell. That's why they're usually not close to residential areas, although there is one in Atlanta, over in the West Side that's just kind of right there. Yeah, I've never smelled it. I haven't either. It may be capped. Like, if you get complaints of odors, then basically, if you get enough of them, then the city says, all right, we got to do something here. Party is over. Yeah, maybe we need to put a roof on this thing. It can't be open air any longer. Or maybe we need to. And this is probably what they do. And the one on the West Side is they treat that air they ducked it out and treat it old school. They basically take a bunch of toilet paper rolls and stuff them with dryer sheets, like the old dorm trick. Oh, I remember. Sure. We talked about that recently. I don't remember what episode, though. Oh, did we? Yeah, I can't remember what it was, but yeah, we did. But if you work in one of these plants, it's not like working at a tulip farm in Holland. It would be a nice smell, though. I don't think tulips actually smell, but I'm sure it's still better than whatever everybody at the reclamation plants are smelling. But you know what? Tulip farmers and Holland smell great, right? They do. They have a musky earthy odor. Okay. So, yes, it smells. I thought that was a cute, hilarious little sidetrack included in this for us. But this water, though, Chuck, right? Yes. Once it's treated, primarily, it looks fine, but it's not fine. And for a very long time, that was the extent of water reclamation. You would scoop out the sludge, send that primary treated water out to lakes and rivers, and then you go, geez, why are all these fish dying off? What's the problem? And the problem, it turned out, was that we really needed to add a second stage of treatment, that even though you couldn't see the bad stuff in there anymore because you've taken it out, there is still plenty of microscopic material that could cause all sorts of havoc on the body of water that you release this out to. And they're described by a term called biochemical oxygen demand, which is the amount of basically living aerobic bacteria in this treated water and how much oxygen it will suck out of that body of water growing, like forming an algae bloom. And then as the algae bloom uses up all the oxygen and dies off, the bacteria that eats those use up the rest of the oxygen and kill off a lot of fish and a lot of other wildlife in that body of water that you dump that sewage into. So as they kind of figured out that there's this stuff you can't see in there that's still a real problem, we've added a secondary form of water treatment, and that's really improved things tremendously. Yeah. So let's take another break, and we'll talk about secondary treatment, and then eventually tertiary treatment right after this. All right. So where we left off was and we should also say, too, that there are probably out of the 150 treatment plants in the country, I'm sure there are still some that stop at the primary treatment. Yeah, I'm positive, too, that, to me, is an ecological crime. It's an environmental crime. Oh, absolutely. Because it's so damaging to water resources, in wildlife resources, too, it should be a crime. It's not yet, but hopefully it will be soon. Oh, absolutely. So secondary treatment is key. And if you're working at a modern wastewater treatment facility, then you're definitely going to go with secondary treatment. I'm not sure what year they started coming around, actually. I can tell you something. The main process of secondary treatment is called activated sludge, and it was developed starting in 1912. Okay, so there are still some that are behind the 1912 barrier. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So in the secondary treatment, this is where it gets kind of interesting in a chemical way. You talked about the algae blooms, which are no good. So to prevent stuff like that from happening, what's going on in this water is what's basically going on is aerobic digestion. They're putting things in there that can eat this stuff. Right. It's crazy. Like it's beneficial bacteria to the rescue, which is just wonderful. This is the biological treatment we referred to earlier, where they're saying, hey, there's all this bacteria and all these other terrible little byproducts and things that we don't want in there. Everything from gasoline molecules to whatever. And there are different types of bacteria, protozoa, even tiny, tiny, tiny little invertebrates that live in the water most of the time are microscopic, and they'll eat this stuff. And if we feed them this treated sewage, they'll make it even pure. And that's the secondary treatment, which I just love. And we've been doing it for over 100 years now. Well, most of us have been, I should say. Yeah. And it's crazy to think about when you look at a wastewater treatment plant, they have all these cool mechanical processes going on, but they're also growing essentially in living things there that are their little work buddies. They're their little cohorts that do part two. And they have to foster life for these microorganisms, I assume, on site, right? Yeah. But from what I saw, it's kind of like a self sustaining thing. Monkeys, right? There probably are a few sea monkeys mixed in there. I wouldn't be surprised. But from what I saw with the activated sludge, you're actually taking bacteria that's already alive and eating this stuff in the sewage. You're just fostering it by pumping air and more specifically oxygen into the mix, which mixes this stuff up, but also gives them oxygen to really kind of be powered by. And so they really go to town eating this. So not only do they break down during this activated sludge process. These beneficial bacteria not only break down the stuff you're trying to get out of the water, they also multiply and create more and more bacteria. So that part of the activated sludge process is after being treated for several hours, you move that treated secondary treated water out and then you take the sludge that you let settle to the bottom and pump it back through for another round because you've got all new bacteria that was produced in that last round. And so it's kind of like this nice circular closed system that is so effective. I saw that usually at night they have to skim off some of the bacteria that's been produced that day because it's usually so successful. Yeah, and I think they even pay someone to stand there and go, what do you think of that? How about one more round? It's a miracle. Every 6 hours after treatment process goes through, they just shout it's a miracle. So we're talking about bacterial membranes, like a sheet of bacteria that might churn through one of these basins or maybe an algae sheet or something like that. And like you said, you got to keep the stuff alive. So the PH is important. Oxygenating, like you were talking about, for sure, the temperatures got to be regulated. You just have to make sure these little boogers stay healthy and happy. You want them to be happy as can be and as long as you're pumping oxygen there and making the PH the way that you want it or the way that they want it, they're going to be happy and reproduce and multiply and go forth and spread the gospel. Alright? So that is secondary treatment. And that is apparently it gets it to the point where the United States has said fine, dump it in a lake, dump it in a river, dump it in the ocean, it's perfect, don't call me late for dinner. But then if you really want to kick things up a notch, you can go for a tertiary treatment. This is just showing off. Yes, it really is, isn't it? Another word for it is disinfection or polishing. And this is pretty interesting because you wouldn't know it, but there are tiny little things ranging from parasites to antibiotics and we'll talk about all these a little more detail to micro plastics. Like there are micro plastics in some soaps or just larger plastics that break down and some of that stuff gets through these first two processes and there's actually plastic in the water. Yes. I'm guessing Emily doesn't use plastics in the soap. She makes for love, your mama. She does not. No plastics. No. But I had no idea until I read this that was a thing. But it makes sense, I guess, the exfoliating stuff, it's not all crushed walnuts shells or anything like that. It would make a lot of sense to use all of this waste plastic or it makes sense and I guess it's strictly business sense, but these plastics that they can be filtered out, but they can also be broken down to this point where they're microscopic as well. And so if you're just doing primary treatment, you're sending a lot of those micro plastics right out the other side, and that's allowed them to kind of spread throughout the entire food chain. I saw this I think it was a front line just the other night on plastics, and, man, it was eye opening. Like, we need to do an episode on plastics. I've been wanting to for a while, but this one kind of lit a fire under my butt. But it's just everywhere. It's so much so that not just washing up on beaches, but it's in the water we drink, right? Yeah. So one of the things they figured out is there are types of bacteria that eat plastics. So now they're trying to figure out how to cultivate those bacteria. And that's another thing, too. What we were saying with that secondary treatment, like activated sludge, it's not just one kind of bacteria. It's a huge microbiome of bacteria that eat all sorts of different things, specialize in all these different things. But when you have a big, huge, diverse colony, you can get that much more stuff out. And so there are some bacteria that eat micro plastics. I also saw, and this, to me, is the future. It's Ozone three oxygen atoms put together. Yeah. From what I saw, Chuck, it handles every single thing that you would possibly want to get out of water. Yeah. So with ozone, what they'll do is they'll send an electrical charge through the water, and these two molecules disassociate from one another and then recombine to form ozone three. And it's just kind of a superhero accident that does a great job killing bacteria. I saw it as more like a coked up John Belushi just running through a room or something like that. That's how I saw it, because it just goes in there and messes stuff up. Like anything it touches, it just starts to break down because it's so reactive that it basically says, give me an electron, baby. And whatever it just took an electron from starts to fall apart. Yeah. You can also chlorinate the wastewater. We've talked about chlorination before. It works pretty well, but it's not like a 100% disinfectant. And the chlorine itself can break down into toxic substances, which is not good, because then you got to go treat that with other tertiary methods. And that's no good either. That's right. Like, chloroform, I think, is a byproduct of it. And then there's UV radiation, which takes a ton of energy. It can be effective, but it's really expensive. Yeah, it is. But it does work. I mean, most things do not stand up very well. The UV radiation or UV light. We have one of those phone cleaners. A UV phone cleaner. Have you seen those? Yeah, I saw those on Shark Tank many years ago. Oh, yeah. So I can't tell if it works or not, but I think it really is it's kind of a matter of faith here, but it makes me feel good. And then there's another one called reverse osmosis, which I think deserves its own episode, or at least needs to figure in, like a Desalination episode or something. But it is basically using a membrane that is so small, only water can pass through it. So when you push sewage or treated water or anything through this membrane, on the other side, water comes out. Everything else is left behind. And what I saw about Singapore's new water is not only do they use that very expensive, very effective UV radiation, they also use reverse osmosis in addition to microfiltering to produce this new water, which is why it's, like, so pure that they have to add it back with rainwater to get some of the minerals back into it. Yeah, reverse osmosis rejects, I think, 99.9% of bacteria. Los Angeles and some other cities are using this. Like we said, cities that have water shortages. Generally, it really depends on not only this membrane, but tons of pressure, up to \u00a3600 per square inch. Very highly pressurized. And if you want to get what they're calling IPR indirect potable reuse, which is eventually you can drink this stuff. I've seen all kinds of, I guess, this new water, that's what their aim is. But you take your tertiary treated water, you hold that in a reservoir for a while, then it goes through osmosis, then it's treated with either UV or ozone or both. Then it goes back to a reservoir for about six months for just natural processes to go to work, and then it gets sent just through the regular standard water treatment that everyone else's water goes through. Wow, that's like La is doing that. I think if you're doing IPR right, then you're doing many of these steps in concert with one another and then sending it through the regular system in the end. That's really interesting. I'm sure there are different ways in different places, but it's pretty amazing that you can drink water that goes down your toilet eventually, and it's probably better than a lot of city water. Yeah. Oh, for sure. One of the things that got me, Chuck, is that we still do that thing where we take that sludge and spread it over farmland, create those sewage farms so everything's going to come back full circle again. And we also use semi treated water for irrigating parks and stuff like that. So there's a lot of good uses for water that's not quite indirect potable reuse quality, but it's still good enough. You just wouldn't want to drink it. Yeah. Or you can just dump it back into your local river lake or something like that. Yeah, that's always great. And then just lastly, real quick, the future of this stuff that I saw is that they're getting so good at filtering stuff out that they're like, well, wait a minute. We're accumulating a lot of this plastic, so let's start collecting it and selling it for reuse. Right. Which is wonderful, because otherwise they are just diverting this stuff to a landfill. Or they're getting so good at getting, like, phosphorus and nitrogen out. Let's make a sideline of selling fertilizer to farmers or something like that. Rather than adding more to the water supply, we'll just reuse the stuff that didn't get used the first time, and then they're also reusing cellulose fiber from used toilet paper. Isn't that amazing? That is amazing. So they're filtering out cellulose that was part of toilet paper at one point, and they're using it for everything from insulation to roadways, I believe, which I didn't know they used cellulose and roadways, but by God, they do now. Crazy. So that's wastewater treatment, everybody. One of those great engineering episodes that we do from time to time. Hope you enjoyed it. Yeah. I got one more. We always like to think of our friends in New York, because that's sort of the gold standard of huge city doing amazing things. And there are 14 plants in New York City alone. How many gallons of water per day do you think they treat? Just take a stab. 90,000,001.3 billion gallons of water per day. Wow. I was way off. Apparently, the statistic I saw said if you that is enough over eight years to fill the entire Dead Sea with toilet water. Wow. Which you should not do. Don't do it. The Dead Sea Special. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about wastewater, just show up at your local wastewater treatment plan or your water resource reclamation plant, and they'll probably give you a tour, especially if they're friendly types. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. You show up and say, I want to see the artist formerly known as sludge. Right. But also doing a really kind of hostile, demanding way. Yeah, absolutely. All right, I'm going to call this from a teacher. We love hearing from our teachers here during the worldwide lockdown, now that Georgia is finally on board. Yeah. They just found out that you could be contagious and not show symptoms yesterday. I'm so angry about that. It's not my daughter literally knew that before our governor said he did. Yeah. For probably a good month, I would guess. Probably. Yeah. You should listen to our show. We talked about it last week. Well, in real time, weeks ago by the time this comes out. That's right. All right, so this is from a teacher named J. Alexander in the mathematics department at LHS. Good morning, guys. I wanted to thank you for the distraction episodes. As a teacher working from home, I've been helping my 130 plus students and their parents navigate this challenge while also making sure my two biological kiddos are doing their work as well. With the governor closing schools for the rest of the year, I woke up pretty sad this morning. I'm sad for my seniors. We didn't know the last time we were together would truly be the last time. I was thinking about that the other day, too, man. Like, it's all sad, but seniors and prom and last day of school and all that fun stuff to miss that. It just sucks. Yeah, it really does. Do you know what they're going to do? Is it like you're just going to continue on the rest of the year from home and still graduate on time? I think everyone's just trying to figure this out in real time. My own daughter is graduating from her preschool, so she's not going to see a lot of these kids ever again, which is super sad. That's sad. But also, congratulations. Well, they're doing these two times a week, these Zoom meetings, which is kind of fun to see all these kids on there, I bet, just crawling around, not paying attention. They're actually pretty locked in. It's very impressive. Oh, really? Yeah. Their teachers are on there and they kind of are in a rhythm. It's kind of cool to see that's. Cool, man. All right, so let's just continue here. I'm sad for my own kids who won't see their friends and teachers for the rest of the school year. I'm sad for all my co workers who are retiring this year. They didn't plan for it to end this way, although, quite frankly, they may be pretty stoked early retirement. They're definitely silver linings. So I'm seven months pregnant and don't mind working in my pajamas. The weather is great, and your podcast is keeping me sane. So thank you all so much for being my normal in this Twilight Zone world. I pray that you and your families are safe and healthy. And again, that is J Alexander, the letter J from the mathematics department at LHS. And right back at you, too. From us to you. Thank you very much. And thanks to everybody out there sending us good vibes. We're sending them right back out to the entire world. It's basically like a delight concert in here. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us during this weird time or any time, you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, hit it with a Lysol wipe, and send it to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 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." | |
2a9de782-3b0f-11eb-a672-d37b1e3125d4 | What's the deal with phantom pain? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-phantom-pain | Phantom pain is when you sense pain from a lost limb. We don't entirely know how why, but we have some ideas. Listen in to find out.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Phantom pain is when you sense pain from a lost limb. We don't entirely know how why, but we have some ideas. Listen in to find out.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 01 Mar 2022 14:33:46 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=14, tm_min=33, tm_sec=46, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=60, tm_isdst=0) | 44409921 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. Straight ahead, head both barrels blazing. Sciencey strange, unusual, fascinating type stuff you should know. That's right. And both of us fresh from vacation. I just got to say we took the first family trip to Disney World and it was great. That was the first ever. Wow. I'll bet that was something special. It was. I haven't been in 35 years wow. Myself. And the same with Emily. And it's remarkable how much of the Magic Kingdom is exactly the same. Oh, sure. But then I realized that Disney cultist diehards. Would culinary cultures appropriate? They don't want anything different, so that all made sense. But it was great. My daughter was you never know till you get down there. But I had a feeling, because she's not a very fearful kid, that she would ride stuff and she rode everything that she was big enough to ride and then pride on the things that she wasn't big enough to ride because she couldn't ride. Yeah. She did Space Mountain twice. She did Tower of Terror. She wanted to do the aerosmith ride at Hollywood Studios that she was bummed out about. Have you ridden that one? Many times. Did you realize you probably realize this. The little video they showed at the beginning of the studio, that's Ken Moreno as the engineer. Oh, no. I thought you were going to talk about Ileana Douglas. I had no idea. Was Camarino from that one show from the well, please. He was the co founder of The State, but he's one of my comedy heroes. Oh, that's not who I'm thinking of. Then. Yeah. Ken Marino is from the state. And wet, hot American summer and party down. And he has literally no lines, but, oh, there's Kimarno. He's going to do something funny. But I guess it was after The State and before he had done a ton of other stuff, so he was just punching buttons. I thought it was very funny. But anyway, that makes it even funnier that he didn't have, like, any kind of talk, maybe. I kept waiting for it. It was a lot of fun, though. If we went back, we would do it a little different. We went to Universal Studios and tried to park up, but it's too much to do in one day. And we did all the Harry Potter stuff, but didn't get to ride some of the big rides we wanted to ride. Well, that's cool. I'm glad you guys had a good time. It was wonderful and refreshing and boy, I think we both needed a little respite. We definitely did. Me and you went to Hawaii for our 10th anniversary. Anniversary, yeah, it was the first time we've traveled in about two and a half, three years, something like that. First trip? Yes. It was something else, but it was great. See, I went travel crazy after I got covered for a while. So I'd gotten some trips in you're. Like, I only have a few days to spread this far and wide. I'd better get out there. No after. I got it. I got you after I recovered. You know what I mean? I know. I'm with you. No, I stayed inside and scared, but it was something I was like, I don't know how this is going to go, but it went really well. But we're back, we're here to do a job. And you're right, this is very old school stuff, you should know kind of topic. I'm shocked that we hadn't covered it yet. I think the reason that you're shocked is because we actually have no, we did. We did amputations. I know we talked about in there because we talked about the mirror box before. Plenty. Yeah. And then possibly talked about it in limb reattachment. I'm not sure, but definitely in amputations. We did. Alright, well, this finishes up the sweet in full then. I agree. So what's Phantom Pain? Well, shout out to Livia, first of all, for helping us out with this. I realized that we didn't acknowledge that she helped us with the Chocolate Bus kidnapping article. So sorry for that one too. So I want to let that pass. Libby is all over RCN now. She's really great. So she does a good job basically getting across what Phantom Pain is and that we actually don't really know what it is, but you can describe it as anyone who's had an amputation. About 80% of those people suffer some sort of pain sensation. And it's a whole range of pain as we'll see. The problem is it's in that limb that's not there anymore. It's not in the residual limb. What people colloquially called the stump. Yes, you can have pain there too. That's called residual limb paint. This is Phantom Limb Pain where, let's say you had your foot cut off. You feel like there is a nail being driven into the bottom of your foot. The problem is your foot is not there anymore. So you can't pull the nail out. And hence we get to the meat of what the big problem is with Phantom Pain. That's right. Usually think of hands and feet and arms and legs and stuff like that, but it can be after a masectomy. It can be removal of testicles. I know that's not exactly a limb. It depends on how big it is. Oh boy. I did set it up with that inflection of my voice. Right. Will you please be honest? Of course. There's also sort of a side affliction called Phantom Limb Sensation sensation. Which is it's not exactly, but it's like I feel like my foot is moving that's not there. Or my hand feels hot even though I no longer have that hand. Or maybe pressure or something like that, but it may feel like, swollen or like, when you're asleep. I feel like my arm is stuck behind my back and it's causing me great discomfort. Even though you don't have that arm, that kind of thing. Yeah. And so for a long time, people have said, like, well, clearly these people are nuts. It's in their head. I saw it as recent as 1987 that they finally said, no, that's not the case. And we'll talk about some of the historical view of it. But the upshot of it is now we understand that people who experience phantom limb pain are in fact experiencing pain in the same way that you or I would experience pain in that same limb. Like, it's just as real to them as it is to us. And it means that the brain's gone haywire and there's all sorts of ways it can manifest itself. There's shooting pain, stabbing pain. It could be cramping pain, pins and needles, which is bad enough, but pain from pins and needles, which would be awful. And itch you can't possibly scratch oh, boy, that sounds about as bad as you can get. A crushing pain, throbbing basically any variety of pain that you could have experienced in that limb before it was amputated. You're capable of experiencing it after it was amputated to you. Yeah. And Livia makes a good point here. And as you'll see in the history part, there have long been philosophers and people like to think of scientists even, that are just fascinated with this curious syndrome. And it makes sense that people would be fascinated with it like that. But it is a real problem. It can cause people to not sleep. It can cause people to not have the job that they want. It can lead to suicidal thoughts. Like, it is a real affliction and not something that should be just treated as an interesting curiosity. Right, but it also is an interesting curiosity. It's something that we need to understand to help people with. But it's fascinating. And the reason why philosophers are so nuts for it is because it proves that our subjective experience of reality is not necessarily fully in line with reality. It shows that we're capable of experiencing the unreal. Wow. That was dramatic. I thought so, too. So you want to dive into the history a little bit? Yes. And let's talk first, chuck, I think at the beginning about Ambrose Pare. Oh, yeah. He was a French surgeon in the mid 16th century. And this is one of those kind of rare cases where someone from hundreds of years ago described something and had a handle on something in a pretty solid way. Like, looking back, he really was pretty close in a lot of the things that he thought about phantom limb pain. And he was the first dude to describe it, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah. I mean, we're talking the middle of the 16th century, like you said, that's crazy. That's a time when people didn't really think that the people working in science were scientists. Like, science kind of came later, according to some people. And it's like if we had just kind of built on Paris understanding of it, who knows how much further along we would be in treating and dealing with that kind of stuff? But it's like you said, he had a really good handle on it. He was the first to differentiate. Remember how I said there's, like, residual limb pain and then there's panel limb pain? He was the first one to say, those are two separate things. It's not the same thing. He said that there's different factors that can set it off, like the weather, change in the weather, and then there are different things that could treat it, like sometimes massage around the residual limb helps, too. What else? He also made the distinction we described the phantom limb sensations. He described the difference there between the pain and the sensation. Oh, yeah, that's a big one. He said two things. He said that his guess for what was causing it was that either there was some problem with the nerves and the residual limb. I think he said that he thought they were retreating, possibly, or withdrawing, which makes sense in a weird way. Or he thought that it originated in the brain, not through some sort of psychosis, but through some sort of foul up in the brain, like a glitch in the brain. And still today, as we'll see when we're talking about this, our understanding of phantom limb pain basically boils down to those two general concepts. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And we'll get to that. I want to save that. I don't want to spoil it. Okay. I mentioned philosophers being sort of delighted by this idea. Descartes was one of them. In the kind of early to mid 16 hundreds, he talked a lot about phantom limbs. He was one of the people that was really blown away by what he called non resemblance, which is what you were talking about your subjective experience not aligning with reality. And he also thinks or thought it had to do with severed nerves. So he was sort of on the right track as well. And then the Scottish guy, William Porterfield, in 1759, he was a physician that lost a foot, and he had an actual physician's, first person autobiographical take on it all and talked about his toes, heel, and ankle, spelled with a C, which is fantastic, like experiencing pain. And itching several years after I don't think we said it can start up to in as short as, like, a week afterward. And it can go on. Sometimes it comes and goes. Sometimes it's persistent. Sometimes it goes away entirely. Sometimes it lasts forever. So it can really be all over all over the map. But his description was at least a few years afterward. Right? So that was 1759, and that was almost exactly 200 years after Perry first identified phantom limb sensation of phantom limb pain. And it just kind of got lost from there. And it wasn't until the American Civil War when a surgeon named Silas Weir Mitchell. Who I know we've talked about. His name seems very familiar. Who took part in the removal of 30,000 lamps. Not himself personally. But he was among the battlefield surgeons who took that total number during the American Civil War. Thanks to advances in certain kinds of bullets and projectiles that could really do so much damage that when they hit. Like. A bone in a leg or an arm. Like you just were going to lose that arm or leg to save your life. He had all this firsthand experience with these people who had just lost a limb and were complaining about pain in the limbs. So this idea of phantom limb pain kind of came back to the fore at a time when surgeons were starting to talk to each other more, and science was starting to be practiced in a more methodical way so that the discovery of one person could be understood and learned and built on by other people a lot more easily than it was in the 16th century. Right. But he took a kind of weird approach initially. Yeah. And that he wrote a fictional account, basically a fictional short story called The Case of George Deadlow. And he talked about a Civil War veteran who experienced phantom pain and legs and arms that he had lost in the war. And it ultimately led to a seance where he's communicating with these limbs and then walks around the room on these invisible limbs. And a lot of people thought this was real and started sending donations in and wanted to visit with this person. And six years afterward, he was like, maybe I should write something real, a nonfiction piece. And he went on to do that, I think, to greater effect. Yeah, because he finally, after six years, he stopped face palming. Okay. That's how long it took. It sounds like people today, doesn't it? Can't you see people a day sending in donations to the guy who lost his legs but was able to walk around on invisible residual limbs and seance? Yeah, facebook told them. So Silas Wear Mitchell finally creates what you could kind of point to is like the first modern scientific paper on phantom limb pain. And he estimated as high as 86 out of 90 of his amputee patients experienced phantom limb pain. Not just phantom limb sensation, but phantom limb pain. And that is a really high number. It's higher than average. But like I said before, in the neighborhood of 80, I think I've seen as high as 85% of people who have an amputated limb will experience pain to some degree in that phantom limb. Right. And I think most people experience sensation, right? I believe that's correct, yes. My understanding is more of the phantom pain stuff, though. Is phantom sensation more prevalent? Yeah, for sure. Okay. All right. Well, that makes sense, too. And that's just merciful. That's right. And for a lot of years, up until, like, the mid 20th century, there were a lot of psychological or they were attributing at least to psychological causes. Earlier on, it was doctors would say, oh, you know, people who experience this have one quote was an unsatisfactory personality, or they said, they may be obsessive people obsessed with things being wrong. They may be anxious people, they may be overly dramatic. Can you believe that? I know, but all the way up until 1954, people were arguing, doctors were arguing at the Mayo Clinic that phantom limb pain sufferers, if it was persistent, reflected a preexisting difficulty in adapting to problems and maybe influenced by just knowing that it exists. Like, oh, yeah, I've read about this. I'm feeling that pain, too. So if you suffered phantom limb pain, you are neurotic, easily suggestible possibly you consider yourself a failure now that you've lost a limb and you're worried about disappointing your father or mother who might be overly concerned with sports triumphs or beauty or something like that. And like I said, I dug up a reference that said it was 1987 when they finally did a meta analysis of all of the literature and said, everyone, these people are not crazy. Like, for years, they used to compare it wasn't even a comparison. It was a tangential syndrome where if you experience phantom pain, it was tantamount to having psychosis. Like, that's how they were treated. And so for years and years, people just knew. Like, you didn't complain about your phantom pain, or else they were going to give you electroconvulsive therapy, maybe even a lobotomy. I didn't turn that up, but I guarantee someone got a lobotomy for phantom limb pain sometime in the 1930s or 40s. That would not surprise me. I would put a lot of money on that. They would lobotomize domestic housewives for not wanting to do dishes. Exactly. So, you know, somebody with family limping got that treatment. Yeah. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. That was chock full of information. Yeah. So we can only go down from here. No, let's keep chalking it up, Chuck. All right, we'll be right back to chalk it. Let's chalk it some more. Oh, hold its mouth open. This is really interesting. Livia dug up a couple of first person descriptions of phantom pain syndrome. Is it a syndrome? I don't know why I'm calling it that. Because of alien hand syndrome, probably. Yeah. The thing is, I don't think it is a syndrome because the syndrome is usually a cluster of seemingly unrelated symptoms. So probably not. Look at you, smartypants. I can't remember what that was from. I think in our Albinism episode, I learned, what the difference between a syndrome and a non syndrome? Yeah. Okay, so it's recent. Don't be too impressed. She dug up a couple of Norwegian academics. And this is just to let you know what some of these people go through. One of the patient described a phantom arm being stuck straightforward, just sticking straight out from the shoulder. And basically every time he walks through a door would go through sideways and you hear something like this. And it's not like shooting stabbing pain and pins and needles, but it's something that you have to explain to everybody. It's something that you're living with that people would see as abnormal. So it causes psychological impacts. Yeah. I mean, if you saw somebody with only one arm just turn and go gingerly kind of sideways through a doorway for no reason, yes, it would be a little odd. But the idea of your arm never being down, I mean, that kind of goes back to what we were saying, the difference between being fascinated with it and the difference between having to live with it. Just think about what it feels like to have your arm up, like, just for a minute or two. Imagine always feeling that. And then the guy that you mentioned, who is also in that Norwegian paper you mentioned before, where there was a patient who couldn't sleep on his back because he felt like his arm was twisted behind him at all times. And yeah, that sucks to not be able to sleep on your back. That's like the money sleep right there. But imagine feeling like your arm is twisted behind your back every waking moment and that you can't do anything about it that would drive you nuts. It's as simple as that. Yeah. So those are like on the sort of lighter psychological side. On the other end of the spectrum, another man who I think lost both legs was woken up periodically thinking that the nail of one toe was growing into the next toe. And another amputee said they felt like the skin on their arm was ripped off, salt was being poured on it, and it was thrust into a fire. Right. And then other people report to Chuck. This seems like something that would be easy to overlook, that having consistent pain in this phantom limb remind them that they have a phantom limb, that they have like, an amputation, and it just makes the whole thing that much more already distressing. Event is consistently distressing over and over again because it's just a reminder of it. Right. Especially if you're trying to rehabilitate and move on with the new normal. Yeah, exactly. So we kind of reached finally, like, where we're at with our understanding of phantom limb pain. And that's basically where we were in the 16th century, if everyone had listened to Ambrose Para. And that is that despite a lot of people getting amputations every year in the US alone, I think there's something like 185,000 amputations every year, the vast majority of them due to complications from vascular disease including diabetes, having a whole bunch of troops come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with amputations needing treatment and rehabilitation and 80% of these people suffering phantom limb pain. We still don't know what causes phantom limb pain, what the basis of it is. And that's despite thinking we did for a little while there, right. Like in the late 90s, early two thousand s and we talked about it and I think our amputation episode, we thought we had a handle on it and that's since been challenged and possibly debunked. Yeah, and like we said with Michael Pere, is that his name you're thinking of Michael Buble? I was thinking of Eddie and the Cruisers. Maybe that's how I was thinking you were talking about when you mentioned Kim Marina. Oh man, you should remake that with Ken Marina. What a funny movie that would be. Who is the guy I'm thinking of? I want to say it's like he was like a kind of like a dark night kind of figure who would help people in maybe the 50s. Arthur Fonzarelli. No, I'll try to remember. I'm going to portion off like 7% of my brain just to be working on this problem while the other 93% is focused on this episode. Okay, you know what, it's funny that I said Arthur Fonzarelli because our friend of the show, Paul F, tompkins and sort of colleague pal in real life for us. He mentions Arthur Vonzirelli more than any other human I've ever known in my life in his show Threedimen, and then conversationally on his other show Stay of Homkins with his wife Janie. It's a great comedic effect. He brings up Fonzie a lot. It's pretty great. Well, yeah, I mean if you want to get an easy laugh, just bring up Fonzie. Yeah, he times it out. Well, it's really well done. Like you just did it yourself. I feel like I channeled Paula Tomkins here so I can tell you what the show is now if you want to know. It has nothing to do with the 50s dark night thing. I'm still not sure what that show is. It's a show. I promise. It's called Growing Pain. The guy I'm thinking of is Ken Wall in the show. Wise guy? Sure. He kind of looks like Ken Marino too. Yeah, if you put them next to each other you'd be like, don't be ridiculous. But if you saw one at a party and then went to another party down the street and saw the other, you'd be like, gosh, you guys look a lot alike. I remember Ken Wall, I don't know what happened to that guy. Maybe everyone figured out he was a bad actor. Was he a bad actor? Come on. Wise guy has a 7.8 out of ten on IMDb and that is really high these days. Well, that says it all. Yeah. So I think where I was headed before I got sidetracked was like you said with Peree, they are still sort of looking at two schools of thought and who knows, it could be a combination of both, but central nervous system stuff and then brain mapping and literal nerve issues. Like the first thing you're going to do is put you into the wonder machine and see what lights up when you feel that type of pain. And they have found that it does show activity in parts of the brain connected to the nerves of that missing limb. So that's a good place to start. It could be thickening of the severed nerve endings, like after the operation, making things a little more sensitive. But there's still a lot of debate on this. Yeah. And that last one is called the neuroma theory. And that was a leading explanation for it. And it still could be. Right. But when they amputate your limb, they're also amputating a lot of other stuff than just like your leg. There's a lot of stuff that still remains that is no longer intact and that includes nerve endings. Those nerve endings have lost their attachment points, their end points, but they're still capable of transmitting electricity through your peripheral and into your central nervous system. And so they actually seek connections and will sometimes connect with each other and cause all sorts of haywire stuff. And they are like, well, maybe that's what phantom limb pain comes from. And it's entirely possible. It is. Well, here's something that I had no idea. I knew a little bit about this, but when I read this, I was pretty dumb struck. If you had like a bad knee and then you had to have an amputation from the thigh down, you're more likely to have phantom limb pain because you had that bad knee before. Right? Yeah, that's a risk factor. I don't know if it's still considered that, but it was for a long time that if you have pain in your limb and we're talking like in the hours leading up to your amputation even oh, really? Yeah. That your brain remembers, that could just be really recent. Yes, that's kind of evident. Like your brain never got a chance to work out that it was no longer in pain. It's just continuing on. And they've done studies of people where they give a local anesthetic to just to your leg and they really numb it and then they move it and then they bring you out of anesthesia and they say, what direction is your leg moving in? And almost consistently across the board, people report the way that it was before it was moved, when it was under anesthesia. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. So like, you remember this kind of stuff and that actually kind of leads to another theory of what causes phantom limb pain. It's called proprioception theory. Yeah. Laid on me. Proprioception is just your awareness of where your limbs and extremities are in space. I've seen it explained as like how you can close your eyes and touch your nose. That's all appropriation. And this whole idea behind proprioception having to do with phantom limb pain is that we do this because we're able to touch our nose with our eyes closed, not just because we know where our limbs are in space, but because our brain is constantly keeping track of it and has basically a general map of our body at any given point. So if we lose a part of that body, that brain map doesn't necessarily catch up with it. So the brain map is still expecting signals and is basically creating signals based on its expectations. And that's the appropriation theory of phantom limb pain. It's interesting because it's almost as if some of these theories point to the brain being, I guess, less neuroplastic than they thought, right? Yes. Yeah, well, that's the thing. The neuroplasticity that's the leading, most dominant, accepted explanation for phantom limb pain, which is that the part of your brain that was dedicated to sensation and movement of your arm that has now been amputated, it's being restructured, rewired, reconnected. So you're getting all sorts of weird cross talk and it's creating the sensation of pain and a limb that's not there anymore. That makes sense. And it's been accepted since, I think, the 90s. But it's been challenged recently by findings that show your brain actually doesn't seem to be restructuring itself at all. Yeah, there's a famous Ted Talk, a researcher from Cal, San Diego named Vs Rama Chandran, who he argues about neuroplasticity and he's the one that uses the mirror box, which is what you mentioned at the beginning, which is the idea. And this is, I think in the 90s where there's a box and if you're a unilateral amputee, you would put your, let's say you've lost your right arm, you would put your left arm into one side of the box and the residual limb and the other side of the box you would see a reflection as if you still had both those arms. And the idea is that your brain sees this and so it can map this out. But I think they've done studies and meta analyses that have found that if it does work, it's very short term. It's not like the brain completely remaps long term. So it's more like a sav than a cure. That's what the studies have shown. But that's kind of surprising because it was touted early on as like, this is going to cure it. And it makes sense from a neuroplastic way, like you're allowing your brain do you remember I was just talking about how it's possible that your brain hasn't caught up to the idea that limbs not there any longer and so you think your limbs in a different position or the last position it was in, or it's in the pain that you thought it was in. If you could trick your. Brain with the mirror box to see that thing and make your hand wiggle or make your brain think your hand is wiggling, it can be like, okay, good. I'm not actually experiencing any pain. I can stop that signal, and you can go on with your married life. It makes sense, and a lot of people accepted it for a long time. But like you said, the follow up studies and analysis has shown doesn't really have that long term effect like you would think. And then on top of that, some of those MRI studies that you mentioned a few minutes ago have actually shown like no, actually, that region that was in control of your left arm that's now been amputated, that region of the brain is still fully capable of causing your arm to function and whatever. There hasn't been like some great reconnection where other your tongue sensation has taken over that part of your brain to become a super tasting tongue that's just not panned out in the reviews and follow up studies. So we're back to basically square one. We don't know what causes phantom limb pain. All right, I think we should take another break and we'll talk some about treatment when we come back, including what I think, if I can speak for you, I think you'll agree some of the most fascinating headway they're making, which is working with prosthetic limbs to be more realistic, is also having an effect on fan limp pain. All right, hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. What happened? I just want to give an update here. Okay, you can probably understand why I confused Ken Wall as the lead of a mid 50s, like, dark night, kind of helping people out, because Kenwall was the lead in the 1979 Greaser flick, the Wanderers. Okay. I knew he was in a Greaser movie. I think that's what I was confusing. Yeah, his hair looks good in a ducktail. I think I had confused the Wanderers with the 80s TV show crime story as well. I think I conflated all those. I don't know what that is. It was a cool one. It was like, I think a mob Vegas mob show. It was like a cop drama. Was Wanders like an outsiders rip off? No, it's a little more true. Outsiders was weird in Avantgarde. I'm sorry, did you say outsiders or what am I thinking of? What's? The weirdness the weird one? Warriors. That's what I'm thinking. Oh, no. I'm thinking of Pony Boys. I think the Outsiders came after the Wanderers and was probably something of an homage to that. No, it was a book from way back. Okay, fine. We're never going to get to the end of all of this. I'm losing my stuff. It's all Ken Wall's fault. I think it's all Ken Marino's fault. All right, so what we were talking about before, and we'll talk a little bit about some of the treatments, but for my money. Some of the most fascinating work going on right now is research that is trying to help people use prosthetic limbs more effectively. There's a couple of different things they're doing. Well, there's a lot of different things, but a couple of them are targeted muscle reintervation and targeted sensory reinteration, which is either using leftover motor nerves or leftover sensory nerves from that amputated limb connecting those two muscles that lost their function. And all of this is in service of all the work they've done with prosthetic limbs to make them smarter and like, hey, you grab a coffee cup in a different way that you would grab a pillow and you may be able to know when something's hot or cold. Like the advances that they're making is unbelievable. And some of these advances are helping with basically telling the brain, no, you've got a real limb there again, and so you don't have that phantom limb pain. Yeah, I found this one mention of how apparently people who have prosthetics are faced with this terrible choice where the prosthetic feels way heavier than their limb ever did. Even though the prosthetic probably weighs less than their limb did for some reason because it's foreign, it's not really part of their body to their brain. It's very taxing to wear it or carry it around or use it. And it can be so taxing that it can increase their risk of cardiovascular disease, of heart attack and all sorts of stuff like that just by overexerting themselves. And then the other thing they could do is not use the prosthetic at all and lead an increasingly unhealthy sedentary lifestyle. So these new prosthetics are kind of getting around that by recreating, as far as the brain is concerned, a limb very closely. And the way that you do that is, like you said, give it senses that it used to have, like, give it sensory information from this lamb. And what they're doing is information from, say, like a prosthetic foot, just the fact that it's receiving pressure from the ground. It will send an electrical signal up through its cables to a terminal where it's connected to the actual, like, nerves and then muscle tissue also in your leg. And it will send that on up to your peripheral nervous system and into your central nervous system and your brain experiences. This is so awesome. The sense that it's pressure from the bottom of your foot when you put that prosthetic foot on the ground. That's the level that we're at at this point, which is amazing. Yeah, I mean, I remember many years ago, it may have been one of those episodes you mentioned where we talked about and this was probably at least ten years ago. So I imagine the strides since then, or even more, that they've gotten to the point where you can think, grab coffee cup and that prosthetic hand will grab coffee cup. Right. And the more life like that feedback is the more it seems like at least that it's going to help alleviate phantom limb pain. Exactly. Because that seems to be one of the bases that they're figuring out about phantom limb pain. Is that these nerves. Whether it's muscle tissue nerves connected. Formally connected to muscle tissue. Or axons or some type of nerve impulse carrying material. A nerve. I guess if you're not a total weirdo and say things normally. They still want to carry these impulses. So they're still accepting like. Impulses. But they're just not cut out for the task any longer. And what they're figuring out is like, hey, surgeons, if you leave some muscle tissue attached, we'll come back and attach the sensory cables from a prosthetic to that muscle tissue and we're going to be back in business. And the brain is going to think like, hey, I got my foot back, I got my leg back, I got my arm back to the brain. It's all the same. It's still getting some sort of sensory information. It might be kind of primitive compared to what you had before, but from what I'm seeing, it's not necessarily we're getting more and more advanced by the year. Well, yeah, and it's that muscle tissue that allows the body to sense things like applied force or sensation of stretching something. And not only are they saying to surgeons, like, maybe we should rethink the way we're doing amputations, but they're saying we can go back in and attach muscle to the end of those nerves from amputations that happened years ago. And so if you give these nerves something to do productive, they're going to stop looking for something to do, basically that's actually very unproductive and causing phantom pain. And so that's, like you said, that they think that is not they think they're seeing quite clearly that that helps alleviate and maybe cures phantom pain, just giving these nerves a productive job yet again, because they just want to work so bad, but they got cut in half. Yeah, it's remarkable. On the less remarkable side, treatment wise, and this is, I think, just residual, I mean, that's a very forward thinking way to do things, I think, with phantom limb pain, which is this prosthetic stuff that they're working on, the old school treatments are literally like giving people pain drugs and giving people opioids, muscle relaxers, beta blockers, stuff like that. And I'm not poopooing medication if it helps people out, but it does seem like a bit of an antiquated thing to do. It's just to throw pain med somebody's way. Right. So there are other nonpharmaceutical techniques, too. One of them is kind of like a low five version of what you would get with a really advanced prosthetic. It's called Ten S. It's been around since at least the 80s. My mom was a hospital administrator later in her career, and I remember we had pads of paper laying around her house that had pictures of Tens units on them. Really? Yeah, I guess the Tens unit supplier gave us some free pads of paper. That's so funny. So it's transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation and it's basically giving those nerves something to talk about without them having to make it up themselves. But it's just stimulating them with electricity. And they think that what happens is you're kind of overwhelming that pain signal with a more robust electrical signal that just turns off that pain signal. And it actually helps really well, helps a lot of people with back pain. Have you seen those like little electrode things that you can put on your lower back and there's like a little looks like a beeper attached to it. That's a ten unit. And all it's doing is sending electrical pulses through your skin to your nerves and basically saying, shut up. Pain signals. Here's something bigger. It's the Bonnie Rate treatment. Yeah. Let's give them something to talk about. Or what was that ad? Move over something. Now there's something leaning. Move over. Bacon? I think so. But what was the product? I think it was Sicilyne, wasn't it? That's a disappointment. Maybe. What was Sicilian? It was not good, I'll tell you that. I don't even know what that was. Remember steakhams? The steakhams you like stakeholds? Well, it's the budget version of a Philly cheese steak. Yeah, and that's how I always ate it too. But even still it's like this is terrible. It looks like a shoe answer. Yeah, I did. I liked steakhouse for many years. Having said that. That was 40 years ago. And now if you make a homemade cheese steak, slice that rib eye, fold it up and roll it up and slice it really thin. Is that right? That's what you use as some good ribeye? Yeah, flatten it out, pound it out really thin. Man, you have come so far. You have arrived because of pounding ribeye? No, because you left Steakums in the rearview. Wow. You went from steakhouse to ribeye. What else? I think there's a few more treatments. There's biofeedback, of course, there are very simple things like just propping up the residual limb repositioning it being distracted. They say lifestyle changes like yoga, meditation, music, stuff like that can help. Probably better than throwing opioids at the problem. Yeah. And again, I mean, just doing stuff like moving the limb massaging, it just giving it some sort of other very real stimulation tends to help. But if you feel like you can't sleep because your arms twisted behind your back and it's like that constantly, especially if it starts hurting like you get a charlie horse like that. Nobody is going to blame you if you ask for opioids. That's the reason why this is not just interesting that it's an imperative that we understand it and learn to secure it fully. Agreed. So that's it for phantom limb pain and phantom limb sensation, everybody. If you thought that was pretty neat. There's a lot of interesting stuff to read about that phenomenon. Not syndrome, though, we don't think. And since I said not syndrome, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this just sort of an enlightening email from a listener. Hey, guys, longtime listener. My first email to you was in 2013 when you were working for Discovery Channel. In the episode on Albinism, you mentioned that it's the bareest minimum of parenting to explain to children the scientific reasons behind why we have some variety in the expressions of what it means to be human. And yes, that is important. It's also important to teach children that society creates isms about these expressions which serve to privilege or marginalize certain groups of people. My research is around race and racism, so I'll use that as an example. Yes, it is important to teach children what science says about how variety manifests in the human body. Likewise, children need to learn that racism exists and that racism is a social construct that is not biological just. The former without the latter fails to prepare children to react appropriately when they are faced with racism. And the same goes for any of them. As I wrote almost a decade ago, I still use your podcast with my grad students, and that is from Judge Judson Laughter. He him his from UT in Knoxville. Goval. Yeah, Goval's. Right up the road. My, I guess niece in law, maybe. Okay. I think niece in law in law potentially just got into University of Tennessee and it's like her dream. Like she wants to go study the body farm. Chuck, doesn't that just do your husband? I love that. So congratulations and thanks. Professor Laughter. Awesome name. That is a really important thing to point out, and thank you for sharing that with everybody. If you want to be like Professor Laughter and share your awesome name and or awesome point, you can email us. It's stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuffy 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." | |
Some Really Interesting Cases of Mass Hysteria | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/some-really-interesting-cases-of-mass-hysteria | Around the world and across time, people have fallen victim to one of the strongest contagions of all - the power of suggestion. Here are just a few examples of these bizarre cases. | Around the world and across time, people have fallen victim to one of the strongest contagions of all - the power of suggestion. Here are just a few examples of these bizarre cases. | Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:31:09 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=14, tm_min=31, tm_sec=9, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=75, tm_isdst=0) | 37108186 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. It's charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. Stuff You Should Know. I'm so sick of my voice right now. I just looked over almost to check to see if Jerry was there. Even though this room is so small, she's always visible. Right. I don't know why I did that. How are you? I'm okay. Good. Dude, my voice, man, is driving me crazy. I'm so wound up. And caffeinated. Yeah, we just talked about dark money. Oh, yeah. Maybe we should have recorded that last. Maybe we could have just done power lifting for the rest of the day. The gym. So we did an episode wait, I'm not done talking about power lifting. Okay, go ahead. I'm just kidding. I don't want to interrupt you. November 2014, we did an episode on collective hysteria yes. Not too long ago. What is collective hysteria? Yeah, and it was a good one. Was that a shot at me just now? Because I interrupt you a lot. Was what a shot that you don't want to interrupt me? No, because I interrupt you. It's part of the show. Okay. I don't mean to, and I feel badly when I notice it. Oh, really? Yeah. How often do you notice it? I would say six 10th of the time. So three fifth is another way to put that. I can live with that. It was a good episode, but we did not cover there are a lot of cases of mass hysteria, and we only covered a small portion. Yeah. We're not going to go in depth about what mass hysteria is. If you want that, go listen to that episode, which is a good one, if I remember correctly. Yeah. We should talk about it a little bit. Sure. Because I think there's stuff in here that we didn't even cover about the overall thing, or at least it didn't seem familiar to me. Right. So it's also called mass psychogenic illness, collective delusions conversion disorder. What else? You need to duplicate that, though, with, like, ten. Josh is doing it at once. That's a good right there. Maybe Jerry could do that. She says she can. It's a real thing, though. And basically it is when people have physical symptoms of something without there being a physical cause. Not only that. So that's a psychosomatic illness. True. For a mass psychogenic illness. The psychosomatic illness is catching. Yes. It's an epidemic. An infection of imagined illness. That's right. Which is pretty awesome. Oh, it's amazing. I mean, not when you're going through it and you're suffering, because the people who are suffering are actually experiencing suffering. It might be made up, it might be all in their heads, but to them, it's quite real. Yeah, but it is sociologically and psychologically. Psychologically speaking, I'm sick people, so I apologize if I'm not talking. Good. Psychologically speaking and sociologically, it's just like utterly fascinating. Sure. Yeah. One thing that happens is it's usually triggered by some sort of stress. Sure. Some sort of emotional trigger. Yeah. And it usually happens in very close knit communities, often among young women. They're very susceptible to it, apparently. Perhaps isolated communities. Yeah. And then communities of people who are fairly high on the totem pole in that they don't have a lot of social status, necessarily, or a lot of say in their own lives. And this is a means of saying there's something very wrong in my world. Yes. That's people who study these things, that's what they've come up with. Like, I've got no voice, but I can break out in a rash. I can bark like a dog and make you do it, too. Exactly. That's power. So the outcome supposedly for this, for getting over this, is better in children than adults, even though more children are stricken with it. Right. It seems like than adults. Yeah. But that makes total sense. Like, a kid's more likely to follow along with the crowd, but then also be like, what were we just having a rash about? Let's go play Nintendo. Right. So let's all go play Nintendo. Because it's I wish I had an old NES, like the original one, and a copy of my Texas punch out. That's all you need. Yeah. I was into whatever that first Mario game was, where it was the big World. Yeah. Super Mario Bros. Was that it? Super Mario Bros. It was a good one, too. Yeah. And then Metroid. Did you play Metroid? I don't think so. I didn't play a ton of NES, but I played what was the first really? Not Sega. Was it the first PlayStation that had Street Fighter? No, I think it had Street Fighter. I can't remember what it was. All I remember is Genesis maybe had Street Fighter. No, it wasn't Sega Genesis. I don't know. This dude I knew in college had street fighter. And Mortal Kombat. Yes. Mortal Kombat was definitely it might have been Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64. Did you play? Gold Nye? Oh, yeah, man. That was the first great first person shooter. It was so well done. Yeah. But I just remember listening to Dr. Dre. Chronic and playing Street Fighter and that was it. Mortal Kombat for a year. Solid. Right. And I think I went to school and made grades into classes. Good. Go to classes. That's nice, man. I need a nap. You want to talk about some necessaries? Yes. You want to talk about nuns in the Middle Ages? Yeah. So in medieval times not the restaurant. No, but maybe there, too, if you had a sister or a niece or somebody who is a rightful heir to the estate that you wanted. Yeah. Well, there weren't mental asylums at the time, so you couldn't commit them, but you could have them sent to a convent or a nunnery. Wow. So, like, a brother could do that to a sister. Oh, yes. Unbelievable. Yeah. So you could usurp that inheritance that was rightfully there. Or if you had a daughter who was unattractive or possibly disfigured, you could say, I don't want the world to see you. I'm going to send you a comment or notary. And it sounds pretty bad. In a lot of cases it was, sure. But it also was a good deal for a lot of young women because they would get a high quality education. They could pursue creative interests like drawing and painting and sewing or whatever floated their boat. Sexy outfits. Sure, it wasn't all bad, but I was like, why did anybody get sent to convents? And that was why they either get rid of them or to give them an education that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But these places were very strict and tight knit. Sure. And so they were ripe for mass psychogenic illnesses. Yeah, I bet if your daughter kissed the boy that you didn't like, if you're worried about that, off to the convent, off to the nunnery. So we're going to talk about a couple of cases with nunneries. But in medieval times, there were more than 100 cases of mass hysterias breaking out. It happened a lot. There was one in Spain and the 1500s where nuns bleeded like sheep and had convulsions. Sweet one in France and 1491 where they yelp like dogs. Okay. And then this one in France where all of a sudden one day a nun started meowing like a cat. Yes. And caught on. Caught on like wildfire. Apparently in this convent, within a few days, all of the nuns were meowing. And it was loud, like the neighbors could hear it. Yeah. And not only meowing, but it became they meowed in unison. It became structured right with their meowing. So for a few hours a day they would all get together and meow. That's right. Imagine just like stopping by on your travels because you heard this one convent has really good roasted turkey leg. Sure. You show up and you enter into a giant room filled with nuns, all meowing and unison. Yeah. That one might have been some guys idea of a good time. You just kind of make a face and go help yourself to a turkey leg and kick back and watch the weirdo meow. Well, here's one of the problems though. In medieval times in France, cats were not well regarded. They were thought to be of the devil. And so if you're meowing like a cat, it's a nun, it's not good. They also believed in demonic possession. And so they brought in some soldiers who said, we're going to whip you and beat you unless you stop meowing. And it worked. And they stopped meowing. Yes. Hooray. But that's a really important point that there is a widespread belief that you could become possessed. So in that it provides this platform that removes individual responsibility and that is the basis of this. For the person to really experience it and take it away from an act of their own willpower and rather be a sufferer of some weird illness is a belief that something like this could possibly happen. And so they were possessed rather than them just meowing and going along with the crowd or whatever. They were instead possessed at the time, and so their responsibility was removed and therefore they could really give themselves over to it. Yeah. I think that's a hallmark of mass psychogenic illness. Yeah, absolutely. It also happened in Germany, not the meowing, but in the 15th century, a nun bit another nun in the convent, and then I don't know if that nun, in turn, bit another, but they started biting one another. Yes. A lot. Yeah. And that didn't just stick around that nunnery, it spread all over Germany. They were worried that there was, like, an actual infection going on yeah. That would cause you to go crazy and bite people. Right. Not only did it spread to Germany, Chuck, it also spread to Rome, even all the way to Rome. Yeah. And then apparently, they stopped biting when they got really tired. Yeah. That was the end of that. That seems like a very ham fisted follow up. Wouldn't you be like, that was a weird week. Yeah, they probably did. But yeah, it's very interesting that mass psychogenic illnesses in and of themselves are very interesting. But I'm also interested in the transition back to normalcy. How do groups that go through that work that out together, or do they just separate? No, I don't know. Like you said, that'd be totally weird to be like, hey, remember last week when we were all meowing? That was so weird. Yeah. Where are all of our roasted turkey legs? All right, male, let's move on to the kissing bug scare of 1899. Triathlon bugs. They looks sort of like stink bugs, but they carry a parasite that can cause a disease called Chagas disease. Right. And Chagas disease wasn't described until 19, six or nine. And this kissing bug outbreak was 1899 in the United States. And a kissing bug is called that because they bite you. They feast on your blood through your lips, which has only three layers of skin, whereas the rest of your face has about 16 layers of skin. Yeah. Or your eyelids. Sure. So it's easily penetrated, and the bug will just sit there and stuck on you while you're sleeping. But it has a little parting gift for you. Afterwards, when it finishes feasting on your blood through your lips, it turns around and poops on the hole that it made on your mouth or your eyelid. I knew that was coming. And in doing so, it can infect you with Chagas disease. Yeah. No good. If you live in the upper one third of the United States. You don't have to sweat it. No. Basically, draw a line from the top of California all the way across the United States and anything below that you might have kissing bugs. So by 1899, this bug was well known to science already, but it wasn't popularly known, so it was an exotic, weird species. And a couple of cases of Chagas disease did sprout up. But what spread this thing and turn it into a mass psychogenic illness was newspaper reporting. Yeah, and this one's a little bit different. It seems like most of these cases of mass hysteria were pretty confined, but this one is a clear indication of people having maybe a mosquito bite or any bedbug, maybe, and itching at it and then seeing something on the news and then saying, oh, no, I got bit by the kissing bug. Right. So part of what it was attributed to and actually, the guy who is the head of entomology for the USDA at the time said that he called it a newspaper epidemic. And it was because the newspaper reporting so clearly described the symptoms that a person's imagination could create these symptoms in himself or herself. And so they started collecting bugs. Like, if somebody was bit by a bug or even saw a bug in their house, they'd be like, oh, God, a kissing bug. Catch it and send it off to the USDA for analysis. And the USDA got everything from house flies to bumblebees a lot of bugs from people who were worried that they had broken out in this kissing disease. Yeah. And the good news is it stopped when the newspaper stopped writing about it. Everyone was like, oh, it's just a bumblebee. And it happened in the 1890s. And the 1890s were really weird, decade. There was a lot of death cults that sprang up around the world. But have you ever read that book, wisconsin death Trip? No. It is crazy, man. It's basically this really artful collection of newspaper clippings from Wisconsin in the 80 90s. Wow. And assembled, it paints one of the grimmest, bleakest pictures of humanity ever, of civilized humanity. Just the worst stuff happened to these people. They did the worst things to one another. They just endured so much. And it was a really good example of what happened in the 89s. Something weird happened that decade. Crazy. You should check that book out. It's neat to just look through. Have you seen the witch yet? Tomorrow, so don't tell me anything. So speaking of the witch actually, Chuck, I want to give a plug to Cinema Jaw. Yeah. So you were on Cinema Jaw, like, a few months back? Yeah, it's a great movie podcast. It is. And I was on it recently, and the episode that came out on Monday or Tuesday, and we talked about missing persons like that tie into our episode. Nice. What movies did you talk about? We talked about the Lady Vanishes missing the jack lemon. No, not that one, because I haven't seen it okay. Have you ever seen the Vanishing? The original one from the Franco Dutch production? Yeah, that was the superior version. Right. So I'd only seen the Jeff Bridges keeper Sutherland. Right. Which I liked. But then I started reading up on it and I was like, oh, this sucks compared to the original. If you watch the Dutch version of anything before then it's probably better. It was so good, dude, I was watching it via YouTube on my TV, so it couldn't have been more grainy. Right. It was in spoken French with Dutch subtitles, with English subtitles. hazardously slapped over the Dutch subtitles, and I was still like, oh, man, this is so good. Good movie. It was very good. Well, I can't wait to hear that. Yeah, go check it out and see The Witch tomorrow. Yeah, they did a review of The Witch and I put the phone down. Really? I could just barely hear that they were still talking. And when they finished, I put the phone back up for the interview. Yeah, it's good to see horror movies. I don't know if you want to call it a horror movie, but movies like that coming back with like, The Babadook and it follows people are making good quality movies now. I didn't like the babadook. Oh, man, I thought it was great. A lot of people did. It got high ratings on Netflix. All right, well, let's take a break. Maybe we'll just come back and talk about movies for the rest of the show. Man alive. All right, we're back. We are so back. Let's talk about the Halifax Slasher of Halifax. England, not Nova Scotia. That's what I thought at first. Me too. Nova Scotia. I didn't know there was two Halifaxes. I didn't either. Halifax in November 1938, there was a woman named two women. Two women, Gerdy Watts and Mary Gledhill, were taking a little walk after work at their mill, I guess they were walking home and they said, a man came out and slashed us with a knife. We're bleeding, for God's sake. Look at me bleed. There's blood. Go find this creep. Right? So they told the cops and the cops were like, a slasher. Right? So they started looking for the guy and never found any trace of him. And it was like kind of a thing for a little while, but it really became a thing five days later when another woman came to the police station and said, look at this, some guy just came by and slashed my wrist. Yes, that was Mary Sutcliff. And she supposedly fought him off even, and gave a very clear description of what he looked like. So the newspapers are like, I think there might be a slasher at large. And within the next five days, several more people came forward and came to the police station or came to the newspapers with stories about how they've been slashed by some anonymous stranger. And Halifax was reached out. Sure. They compared the same fear and panic to what was experienced during the Jack the Ripper era. Yeah. People were just nervous that somebody was going to slash them. Yeah. Soccer hooligan started beating people up. That guy doesn't look right. He looks like a slasher to me. That's what soccer hooligans do. Or a West Ham fan. Let's go take him down. And it became a real problem. There's a couple of things, though. One, the slashes. He wasn't a very good slasher. No. These were all very superficial cuts. No one was severely wounded at all in any of the cases. No. But it was still confounding and people were still scared. He could be a bad slasher. He could improve. So we better call Scotland Yard. And they did. Scotland Yard sent two detectives, and the detective said, well, let us start interviewing witnesses. And the moment they did, they found that the witnesses stories just started crumbling. Well, first of all, none of the descriptions matched. Right. So they thought at first the dumb cops in Halifax thought, well, maybe there's multiple slashers. Scotland Yard said, no, there's not multiple slashers. No, there's not one slasher. Like they would have known that in Nova Scotia. The final lady, Beatrice Sorrell, said they finally, I guess they put the bright light in her eyes. And she said, I did it myself after having a row with my boy. After she discovered she was pregnant, she had bought a new razor blade and said, I held hold of the blade in my right hand and slashed down my left arm, making a long cut in my Macintosh coat and cardigan. And I know what you're thinking, it's a waste of a good cardigan. Sure. And Macintosh, whatever that is. I think it's a raincoat. That sounds about right. Yeah, I think so. A mac. The mac. No, I think a mac is a raincoat because the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby, the Mac, he never wears a mac in the pouring rain. Very strange. Bam. Man. I never realized that. All right, so Macintosh coat. I hope it's a raincoat. Then she said, I then put the blade back into the cut and scratched down my arm twice to put my fingers through the cut in the cloth. I saw that they were covered in blood. The reason why I cut my arm was because I was in a temper and had been reading in the papers about girls being slashed. So she, I guess, was in a temper. And it wasn't just her. Like nine of the twelve victims eventually confessed to doing it themselves. And this is a weird mass psychogenic illness, you know what I mean? Yeah. Because these people are slashing themselves. They're not like, catching something they think is making them dizzy or whatever. They're cutting themselves and then going to the police and saying a slasher did it, I guess for attention, maybe. Well, they did get attention. They got attention in jail. Yeah. They served a whole whopping four weeks. Still, if you're like a normal ordinary citizen who slashes herself or himself just for attention, four weeks in jail, it's going to be a problem. That'll set you right. I wouldn't want to do four weeks in jail. Now, the thing is, Chuck, is I could not find whether the first two victims were actually slashed at. I don't think so. They didn't show up. As far as I know, they weren't ones that confessed. Right. And I didn't see that they got any jail time. So did somebody initially get attacked and it led to the slasher scare, or did they do it themselves or to each other? That's a good point. The Halifax Carrier on December 2 said carry on, Halifax. The slashing scare is over. The theory that a half crazed, wild eyed man has been wandering around attacking helpless women in dark streets is exploded. Waka. Waka. I wish people talk so much better back then. I was in a temper. Macintosh, man. This is not the only slasher mass hysteria epidemic. Oh, yeah? What else? There's one in Taipei, Taiwan, in the 50s where there's basically this idea that there was a slasher walking around, and this one was more akin to the kissing bug thing, where people who had cuts on and says, you'll get a cut every once in a while and be like, where did I get that cut on my thumb right now? Okay. If you had been susceptible to this Taipei, Taiwan 1950 slasher scare, you may have gone to the police and been like, I was slashed, because this one is a little more legitimate to me. The idea behind the slasher was he would brush past you in a crowd and you wouldn't even notice you've been slashed until later. Yeah, that's the better of the slasher mass psychogenic illnesses. Between that and Halifax, if you ask me, the greed. I wonder if Tina Fey was a part of that. You know, that's how she got that scar. Which scar? She has a scar on her face, and she was slashed when she was a kid playing in her front yard by some random crazy. I didn't know that. And that's kind of all the information that's out there. She admitted that in an interview, and that was the story. Slashing. That's a terrible crime. Yeah. It just sounds like seeking to disfigure somebody. Yeah. It's like throwing acid on their face or something. Do you remember that Saturday night Live? Mel Gibson was on it was back in the was set in the Old West, and he was like an Old West, like, gunslinger, I think, a sheriff. But his thing was rather than guns, he threw acid. It was like Matt acid or something like that. That's fantastic. He got in a gunfight with somebody, he throws acid on them, and they didn't show the acid being thrown on the guy. It just showed the crowd's reaction, and they were all like, oh, God, that's awful. Oh, that's great. Don't you hate it when you get a scene from a movie in your head and you can't pinpoint where it's from? Yeah, I got one right now. There's a scene where a guy gets slashed right under the eye as like a parting shot. Like, these two dudes are going to fight and it doesn't happen, and the guy just slashes a guy and Princess Bride. No. Yes, it is. It's not The Princess Bride. King gets it or Prince Humperdin gets it from somebody. That's not the one I'm thinking. Well, that happens. Are you sure there's not the one you're thinking? Yeah, somebody will write in and tell me. It was like, they were faced off and we're going to fight. And then the guy had a knife, I think, on his knuckle. And then at the very end, I know Platoon got it. Tom Barringer and Charlie Sheen, he cuts the blade on his knuckle and he had it right in his eye, and he was going to punch him, and they all talked him down, and right at the very end, he just went, well, Platoon and Princess Bride are virtually interchangeable. Same story. Good point. So, yeah, Platoon was a good movie. That was a big college movie for me. I watch that a lot. Yeah. All right, we're rambling, so that means we should take a break and Jerry will get us back in order. I think I said Platoon is a good movie. All right, Chuck, let's head on over to Tangenika, also known as Tanzania. You mean Tanzania, but back in 1962, it's known as Tanganyika. That's right. And in Tanganyika, there was a boarding school, a girl's boarding school. So you can understand what's about to happen there. Sure. And some girls started to giggle, and apparently it wasn't like a happy giggle. It was like a nervous giggle, like anxious laughter. And it started to spread. Yes. Which is normal enough. Giggling is like the church giggles. You have heard of that. It's contagious. Hard to stop. Yes. And that's usually if you're in a place where you shouldn't be laughing and you can't contain it, and then your friend starts laughing and you can't contain it and you have to go excuse yourself, then you never go back in the room. So this supposedly lasted, though, for like six months. Six months to a year and a half, spreading all over the place, depending on who you ask. Uncontrollable and contagious laughter. They had to shut down the school for two months, and then they're like, okay, surely it's over. And I open it back up, starting right back up. So this one bothered me a little bit because you can't just constantly giggle and laugh. No, that's impossible. I read this interview with the guy. I read the same one, the Chicago Tribune interview. Yes. I think he made a pretty good point, he was saying that there's a lot of misinformation about this. First of all, it's called a laughter epidemic. So people just think like it's like the Monty Python world's. Funniest jokes get something right. That's not the case. It was again, it was not joyful laughter, it was anxious laughter. And then there are plenty of other symptoms, too. There was crying, there was pain, there was fainting rashes. Yeah. And there was definitely laughter. And it definitely did spread. But it wasn't just like constant laughter. Yeah. It would come and go. Yeah. And it did last for at least six months. And it did spread to other villages, because when these girls who are at this boarding school, away from home, were sent home because the school was shut down, they actually took it with them to their other villages. Which suggests that the stress that kicked this off was not just at the boarding school, that it was larger than that. And around this time, Tanzania had gained independence, so there was a lot of anxiety about what the future held. So it started at the school, where the girls were apparently very challenged academically, and then it spread through the stress of what's the future going to bring. Right. That's the official line that this one linguist has come up with. I believe it that one's not so great. Now, I think that's one of the offsited examples, though, of a genuine mass psychogenic illness, because the fact that it's spread from outside of a tiny boarding school into the larger into villages outside of it. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah. That's a tense situation. It is very tense. The West Bank Fainting epidemic of 1983, that spring, about 1000 young Arabs in the West Bank started feeling sick. And like a lot of these cases, it's like dizziness, headache, weird stomach pains. It's like things that you can't really put a finger on as far as tracing it back, like, well, this must be something. And so, of course, because of where it was then, these were young school girls, largely 70% were twelve to 17 years old. So because of where it was in the world, palestinian leaders started saying, you know what? Israelis are using chemical warfare against us. Yeah. Because the first kids to fall ill had reported smelling like, a foul odor, kind of like rotten eggs. Sure. And if you're in that part of the world, you got kids breaking out in rashes and stomach pain and blurred vision, and they're smelling something funny. Yeah. It's a pretty logical conclusion to come to. And so the Israelis counter back with if there's any chemical warfare being used, you guys are using it on your own people, so you can blame us. Right. So these kids fell ill from the smell, and all of a sudden Palestine and Israel are, like, publicly going at it, accusing one another of using chemical warfare on Arab kids. Yes. This is a big. Deal when this happened. It was a big deal, and it could have escalated to who knows what. But the fact is there was nothing going on at all. It was another case of mass collective hysteria. They closed schools in the west bank. No one else got sick. They searched all the buildings in the schools, and they found no chemical residue, no malfeasance going on whatsoever. They found a smelly bathroom, though, and they think that might have been the source of the initial foul smell that kicked it all off the sticky bathroom. Some boy went into the hurt locker, he logged out. That was a reference to a listener mail, by the way. I know. And somebody else wrote in the best one, in my opinion, logged out. I was like, you want logged out for taking a poop? Yeah, I got to go log out. Oh, that's okay. I got it. It's pretty good. It is good. Information age. It does. It's relevant like that. Simpsons I think I just logged on to my internet. Do you remember? Was that Ralph? No, it was carl back when they were kids, when they can't figure out why homer is having a mental breakdown, it's because he discovered a dead body years ago and then repressed the memory. And Carl's talking about the internet on his bathing suit. And then later on he goes, I think I just logged onto my internet. So great. All over the place, they blame the west bank fainting epidemic on stress and anxiety. And then, of course, there were news reports of the toxic gas, and so that's why it spread. And chuck, we could do this all day, but we're not going to. Let's bring it home with one more. So in portugal in may of 2006, there was a teen soap opera called save by the bell called morangos.com asuka. That's my portuguese. What do you think? Pretty good. I mean, strawberries with sugar. It was the name of the teen show delicious. And in may of 2006, the show aired an episode where this mysterious illness was striking kids down left and right. And the source of the disease was at school. It was being spread at school. It was a virus. And all of a sudden, kids in the real world who are watching strawberries of sugar started to come down with a very strangely similar disease. Yeah, I don't know if we said it was in 2006. I did say, all right, well, let's drive that home, because that was a big year. Was that the year we started our show? No, 2007. Eight 2008. We've been at it since 2008. That's crazy. Year eight. Man, who knew that we would one day be veterans of a medium old not crazy veterans. Yes. I didn't say we were good. We found on our porch with our confederate pistols under our blankets. That's right. So these kids were not only at one school, they were at 14 different schools around the country, which was a little different than most cases because usually it starts in this one school. Right. But that's because the clear cause of this was this television show that kids loved all over the country. The Vector. Yeah. Was this episode of a TV show? Absolutely. And luckily, the Portuguese authorities, health authorities, they did some investigating, and they figured out that this is mass psychogenic illness. Pretty interesting stuff. Agreed. And they said, what? The kids are really stressed about our final exams. Well, they think it started with some kids who had actual allergies and had seen the episode and started worrying that their own allergies were actually a symptom of a disease right. That spread to kids who were basically going along with it out of stress from exams. Yeah. The good thing about this one is, because it was 2006, you can go on the Internet and look at their articles. You can log on to your Internet. You can log on to your Internet and look up articles that are like, is the strawberries with sugar virus real? Like people were writing into newspapers, my kid is having these symptoms. Like, is it a real thing, or did they just make this up? And it still goes on? I mean, apparently so there's two kinds, basically. There's motor illness and then there's anxiety. And anxiety is more like fainting, upset stomach, headache, motors where you're twitching and meowing and stuff like that. But there's supposedly hundreds of these cases around the world every year. They happen a lot. Maybe it'll come to your town. If you're lucky. Join right in. I say, yeah, and bite the night away. Let it loose for a week. If you want to know more about mass hysteria, go listen to what is Collective Hysteria? Or other episode. And then you can search for Masteria. Also in search barhouseofworks.com it's at all. It's time to listen to mail. Going to call this long overdue. I printed this one out months ago and told Georgia that I was going to read it, and I forgot. Okay. It's about the fairy tales. All right. Hedge. Hedge. My name is Georgia. I live in Stockholm. Hedge. Hedge, I think. Hedge. Hedge is hey. Hey. Sure. In Swedish. Stockholm, Sweden. Yeah. We did another good episode on Stockholm, too. That was a good one. Aka the Swedish Delight. That's what the cops call it. He's got the Swedish delight. My name is Georgia and I live in Stockholm. I've been listening to your show for a few years. I love it. I recently listened to the Dark Fairy Tales episode, and I asked my husband about the term ashin potor, since he's German, and I often use Disney movies to help teach me Swedish. He figured out that it's kind of a play on words that implies a scullery made covered in ashes. Ashton is ash as opposed to cinder, which is incorrectly used in the English name since if you were covered in cinders, you'd have severe burns as it is pieces of burning flag. True. It is translated from the French word for ashes, which is cinder. Puto doesn't exist in German. He says I don't know, that sounds so German to me. Sounds pretty German. But the term for scullion or kitchen helper is Ashenburg. I'm so glad you took German. So this is the mail form. He thinks ashenputo. It sounds like words are just growing in your mouth. Like you know those dinosaurs you can get wet and they turn into giant sponge dinosaurs. No, but I do know the little lead pellets that you would like that were growing too big. Snakes. Close enough. Those are what are growing in your mouth when you're saying German words. He thinks ashenputo is kind of a feminine version of ashen. Brutal. Since German is nonsensical engendered her words. I hope this information is still interesting to you guys. Her in bra dog. Hedge. DA hedgehedge. Georgia, thanks a lot. That was extraordinarily intelligent looking at mail and we appreciate it. Good to if you want to send us an extraordinarily intelligent message, we love those. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffiesto. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstoughfworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshoot.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics at how stuffworks.com." | ||
41bef9ca-53a3-11e8-bdec-db5ce61185f4 | The Tylenol Murders, Part I | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-tylenol-murders-part-i | On one terrible day in Chicago in 1982, seven people died suddenly and mysteriously. In just a matter of hours, it becomes clear, someone has poisoned bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol, one of the most trusted and widely-used products in America. | On one terrible day in Chicago in 1982, seven people died suddenly and mysteriously. In just a matter of hours, it becomes clear, someone has poisoned bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol, one of the most trusted and widely-used products in America. | Tue, 28 May 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=148, tm_isdst=0) | 43660095 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends, before we get going, we are super excited to announce our 2019 live tour. Yes, we're still alive. And we're gonna come prop ourselves up on stage in front of you in cities around the country and Canada. Yeah. That's right, everyone. Tickets go on sale this Friday at 10:00 a.m. Your local time, wherever these cities are. And we're going to kick things off in the great city of Chicago on July 24 at the Harris Theater. Followed the next night at the Danforth Theater in Toronto, Canada on July 25. Yes. Then we're going to take a month long nap and wake up. And on Thursday, August 29, we're going to take ourselves to Boston, Mass at our beloved Wilbur Theatre. The next night, we're going to a new city, first time ever in Portland, Maine, at the State Theater. I'm so excited about that one. Me, too. And then, Chuck, we're going to take a nap for another full month, wake up again, dust ourselves is off, and go to Orlando, Florida. For the first time ever, we're going to be at Plaza Live. Yeah, man. First Florida show and then we are finishing up that minileg in New Orleans. Yes. Thursday, October 10 at the Civic Theater. We're returning, so prepare the city for partying, everybody. That's right. And we're going to wrap it up, at least for now, at our beloved Bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York, for three shows, october 23, 24th and 25th. Again, folks, tickets for all these shows go on sale this Friday, 10:00 a.m. Your local time. And just go to all of these venue websites for ticketing. Yes. Thank you for coming to see us in advance, everybody. We are excited. Welcome to Stef. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. Not me, too. Hi, Chuck. Guest producer Josh is back in the house. And then there's little Chuck in your pocket. Remember little Elvis? I was just about to say that you got that right kind of ease. Oh, man, what a great sketch. It really was. That was Nicolas Cage, wasn't it? Yeah, man. Did you ever see Mandy? Yes. It was terrible. I don't care what anybody else says, you hate it. Terrible movie. Yeah. Nolan and I talked about it on Movie Crush. He's seen it like four times. Thinks it's the best thing ever. Come on, Nolan. He was like, people either love it or hate it. Now it's like actually, I was kind of in the middle. Were you really? Yeah. I mean, I told him young Chuck like, 22 year old college Chuck sure would have probably liked it a lot more, but today Chuck was kind of like, I get it. Sure, parts of it were fine. Sure. To me, spending an hour doing character development but not successfully making you care about the characters just really irked me. Wow, you had structural issues. Yeah. That was really the big thing. I also thought Linus Roach was very odd for casting, but who's that? Which one was the main bad guy that call later? That was weird. Very weird. I don't even know him, but he's from Law and Order and like, some other stuff. You got to get into Law and Order. See how much you're missing out on. That's becoming a bit do we start recording yet? I think so. Oh, I already welcomed everybody to the podcast. That's right. So, Chuck, this is some true crime stuff we're getting into here. That's right. But I feel like we need to set the tone right, because this didn't happen just yesterday. This happened way back in 1982 in Chicago, Illinois. And I remember this even though I was like, six at the time. It was one of my favorite years. Because of this? No, the opposite of that. Right. Mainly because of movies. What was so great about 1982? Look it up, man. Well, I was kind of hoping et. Plate Runner. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's one of the best movies. Do you know I didn't see Blade Runner until I was 40? That's not true. Yes, it is. Oh, really? Yes. The original. The original Blade Runner. Did you like it? That was good. I liked the second one, too. You're like? But they spent way too much time on characters. Yeah. And I just did a little poking around about 1982, and it was a good year for an eleven year old, but it was an uneasy time in America. Why? Well, for a bunch of awful things happened that year, and I don't know if it was any more or less than other years, but Air Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River. Remember that? No. In Washington, DC. The plane crashed in the river. Didn't it hit a bridge? Maybe, but there was, like a daring icy river rescue. Oh, really? Yes. 78 people died, though, that same day, a Metro train in DC derailed killed three people. February was when Wayne Williams was convicted. Got you. And that was just the end of a lot of unease for years. Yeah. Klaus Van Bul was found guilty of attempted murder of his wife in March. I didn't make it to the end of Reversal of Fortune, so I honestly didn't know what happened to Klaus. Guilty. Okay. In June was the murder of Vincent Chen, who was a Chinese American who was beaten to death by two men in Michigan thinking he was a Japanese, and they were, like, stealing their auto work. Oh, my God. I know, right? And then July 9, Pan Am Flight 759 goes down in Louisiana, kills all 146 people on board, plus eight more on the ground. And then in September, early September I know, man. Remember planes used to just crash a lot? Yeah. That never happens now. Not as much, but yeah. Weird that we're recording it in the midst of more plane crashes. And then early September was when that paper boy in Iowa was kidnapped and never seen again. Johnny Ghosh. I don't know that one. That was a big deal too, because it was the paper boy and there was this false story about a pedophile ring from politicians and that turned out not to be true, but he was never found again. So basically everything that's going on today is just a rehash of 1982, it sounds like. I just remember being about that age and they're just the nightly news sort of just being a horror show and not politically speaking, like really bad incidents and occurring. Well, yeah. Plane crash just about at any age that will bring you down if you see that on the news. For sure. Yeah. Because when you get on a plane, you think, maybe this plane will go down while I'm on it. And that would be terrible. Although I was applying at eleven, so all of those things you just mentioned, sweep them totally off the table. Okay. Because come the end of September of that year, nothing else mattered but what we're about to talk about now. That's right. Nothing came close to taking over the national psyche like the deaths of seven people beginning on September 20, 1982, in Chicago, Illinois. Yeah. And one of the articles I read about this. Are we trying to keep it a secret? It's a show title, right? Yeah. I think they're going to have to figure it out. Go ahead. The Tylenol Murders. Yeah. Okay. You're like, oh no, that comes up in part two. Yeah, this is a two parter as well, so buckle in everybody. So I was doing some research, though, and I saw one article that said something about the first domestic terror incident in United States that nobody's ever heard of. I was like, what? Who hasn't heard of this? A millennial wrote that headline. Well, I have to say, Josh on the way in here yeah. I told him tylenol murders. And he went, huh? He goes, what's the Tylenol, you old codger. We should probably say what Tylenol is, huh? Okay. Yeah. I guess just in case you are a millennial, you've never heard of Tylenol. But Tylenol was and still is an over the counter pain reliever. It's like you have aches and pains and apparently what's crazy people would take Tylenol, whatever was wrong with them. Right? Because now you can go get Aspirin and you could get Advil and leave. There was no leave back then. That was the 90s drug. There's way more over the counter pain relievers now than there were back then. Back then, Tylenol was basically it. Yeah, it's acetaminophen, which is different than Aspirin. And I think a lot of people just think those are interchangeable. Right. The reason I believe Tylenol became so big is because Aspirin upsets a lot of people's stomachs. Right. Tylenol does not or it's not supposed to. And that's why it came out of nowhere and just took over the Aspirin market. I think by 1982, Tylenol had 37% of the market. It's pretty good cornered. Yeah, almost half. Especially since some of the other Aspirants have been around since 19th century. Right. So it makes sense then, that when a little girl named Mary Ann Kellerman complained that she had a sore throat and wasn't feeling too good at 07:00 a.m. On Wednesday, September 29, 1982, her parents said, just take an extra strength Tylenol and go back to bed. Man, for a sore throat. Can you imagine the guilt? Oh, no. These parents feel? Well, don't blow it. We haven't said what happens to Mary Ann Kellerman yet. I think everybody knows. Yeah. She got up, said, I'm sick. He said, Take this. The father said he heard her going to the bathroom and closed the door, then heard something drop and went to the door, saying, Are you okay? You're okay? No answer. Open the door. And there she is on the floor. Taken to the hospital, but died very quickly. Yeah. Probably was dead when she went to the hospital, was pronounced there. And they suspected this is just a little twelve year old middle school girl, went to Jane Adams Middle School. They think she died of a stroke. That's what they thought happened to her. They were just so baffled that they're like, it had to have been a stroke. That's the only thing that can come on like this. Yeah. So that's 07:00 A.m., the day is just beginning, and one atrocity has already happened. Yeah. This is a very bad day in the history of Chicago. September 20, 1982. Yeah, absolutely. And it started early. Adam Janice, who will detail his story, but put a pin in this one, too, because he figures in even more prominently in a minute. But a little bit later that same morning, this gentleman, Adam Janice, he's 27 years old and lived in Arlington Heights, another Chicago suburb, and he died. And they think that this is a heart attack. He complained of chest pains after he had driven his daughter's neighbor home from school, said, I'm going to take the day off. Comes home, eats a little lunch, takes two extra strength Tylenol that he bought from a local drug store, collapses in front of his wife, and by a few minutes later, when the paramedics arrived, he was dead. Right. And again, like you said, they said heart attack because he'd been complaining of chest pains, which had nothing to do with it. Right. But just like Marianne Kellerman took an extra string, silent offer, sore throat, he took some extra strength, silent offer, some chest pains. This is just what people did back then. Yeah. And that's what complicated it a little bit at first, was that if you take the Tylenol, it means you felt bad already. So obviously they're going to be saying, like, wait a minute, chest pains or sore throat. How does that figure in? And it didn't. Plus, also what made this even more baffling is that Marianne Kellerman was twelve and healthy. Adam Janice was 27 and healthy, and all of a sudden, they just dropped dead. People don't just drop dead. No matter what you see on TV or in the movies or whatever. Dropping dead inexplicably is a really bizarre thing when you're a healthy person. That doesn't happen. Next. We have Mary Reiner. Same day, same day. This is still all on the same day. She's 27 years old, she's feeling a little dizzy. She had just come home from the hospital after having given birth to her fourth kid a couple of days before. Super, super sad. All of these are obviously but being just a brand new mom for the fourth time is just so tragic. Then by 345, she was so ill, she was rushed back to the hospital and again died very quickly. Yeah, and like, Adam Janice collapsed in front of his wife. She collapsed in front of her young eight year old daughter. One of her children saw her and yeah, when she was taking the hospital, they pronounced her dead as well. This is midafternoon. Mary McFarland was up next. She was over in the suburb of Lombard, and she worked at Illinois Bell Phone Center. Where do you remember you'd go get your phone, like the rotary phone, you would actually lease your phone? I wasn't involved in that process, but we had them in our home. Okay, well, your parents, I never knew that. I figured they just bought that stuff. No, there was like a store where you would go it's like the phone company's retail store, and you would go and be like, that pink one. It's like smartphones today, kind of. Same model, kind of. Yeah, I guess so. But this is with a big clunky rotary phone, and you had to pay extra for the extra long court. Well, Mary McFarland worked in one of these stores, and at about 04:00 at the Illinois Bell Phone Center, she had a massive headache that just came on out of nowhere, and she went back and got some extra shrink Tylenol out of her purse, took a couple of them, and within minutes collapsed in the store. Yeah, she was young as well. She was 31 years old, mother of two. And then remember I was talking about Adam Janice a few minutes ago, his family goes to the hospital. Obviously, everyone converges there. He passes away. And so the family makes their way home to begin mourning and just sort of trying to reconcile what had just happened. His brother Stanley, who was only 25, and then his wife Theresa, who was only 19, are both just overcome and worn out and have headaches. So there at Adam's house, they go to his medicine cabinet, get out the Tylenol that he took, completely unknowingly, obviously, and Stanley hits the ground, foam comes from his mouth, his eyes roll back in his head, everyone's freaking out and a few minutes later his wife collapses and they call the ambulance. By the time the ambulances get there, I think Stanley died that day. And Theresa somehow managed to live a couple of days. Yeah. She hung on and I don't know if her dose is lesser or what, but she survived for a couple of days after that. Yeah. My guess is that there just wasn't as much cyanide in the capsule she took. Right. Did I just give something else away? Yeah, you did. So Stanley took his Tylenol first and then Teresa took hers. And one of the paramedics noted like Teresa was the one that called the ambulance out to come out for Stanley. And when we get there, they're both like on the ground and they're like, what's going on? And one of the paramedics said everything that was happening to the guy happened to the woman like a couple of minutes later. Right. She was just following him through this process of basically systemic organ failure. And this is the same day that his brother had passed away? Yes. This is about five, 6 hours after Adam Janice had died. Then finally I know this is all tough to go through, everyone. We almost selected this as our next live show. I'm really glad we did that. Can you imagine trying to liven this up with some jokes? I saw it the whole time. I was like, no, we can do that. But yeah, the more I got into it, I was like, yeah, it's probably not good live material. Right. We should have a rule of thumb that any story that begins with the death of a twelve year old girl probably is not live show material. I think you're right. So finally we have Paula Prince. Paula Jean Prince. This is a couple of days later. This is not the same day. This is on Friday evening. She was a 35 year old flight attendant and she was found dead in her apartment after police responded for a welfare check that her sister called in saying, hey, I know she's a flight attendant and all, but no one knows where she is. Can you go check on her? A welfare check up. And they finally found her and she was gone. Yes. Very sad. She was found in her bathroom with a bottle of extra shrink tile and all still open on the counter. And they looked into her receipts and found that she had purchased it on Wednesday, September 29. That's right. So at the end of this very short span of time in the Chicago area, we have seven people dead. And I feel like that's a good time to take a message break. Yeah. Alright, Chuck. So you said cyanide. How did you know that? Because I was eleven years old and I watched the nightly news, like all eleven year olds did. He just called it. Right. Just me and Brokaw. Dan Rather. Yeah. Copple. Who else? That was it. Peter Jennings. He came a little later, but sure. Was he? Yeah, he came after somebody. Well, I mean, Cronkite wasn't still around, was he? Or was he? I don't know. I don't think so. I was kind of into the news as a kid, a little bit. Oh, yeah. I mean, that was where you got your news back then. Yeah. You would watch the evening news. It's very strange to think about now right. With the up to the minute news cycle. Oh, yeah. I know how much more innocent things were back then. I know. So remove yourself from the benefit of hindsight or the benefit of Dan Rather insight and put yourself in the shoes of the people in Chicago. Right. Yeah. These are seven different deaths, I think from five different townships in the greater Chicago area, including Chicago. Paula Prince, the last person to die, lived in Chicago. These people aren't talking. These people have no idea what's going on. It's just that there were five seven separate Baffling deaths. You keep saying five. You want two fewer people to be dead. Yeah, I do. That's good. My wishes aren't working, though. It just so happens that the ambulance, the paramedics that showed up to attend to Mary Ann Kellerman, the first girl to die, they were just logging everything because it was such a Baffling thing. And they logged her tylenol. Yeah. Logged in and collected right. Took it as evidence to maybe look into who knows? But they took the extra strength Tylenol that she had taken, not thinking anything of it, but just basically throwing anything at the wall to see what stock. Yeah. I'm sure the dad was like, she went and took some Tylenol and dropped dead. Right. So it probably made sense, even though it's just Tylenol, to say, like, well, hey, let's at least take this in. Yes. And that Tylenol. Right. Because that bottle of Tylenol made its way into the hands of a medical examiner whose name was Michael Schaefer. And Michael Schaefer tested the Tylenol and was rather surprised to find that some of the capsules had not Tylenol in it, but 65 milligrams of potassium cyanide. And it takes about 50 milligrams to kill a healthy adult. Yeah. I don't think they're all exactly the same, but some of them had been completely emptied of any acetaminophen and completely filled with cyanide. With cyanide, right. Yeah. I mean, it was someone intent on, for sure, killing people. Yes. Because cyanide is no joke. No. It's a really small molecule, and it normally attaches to metals outside of the body, which is why you have minerals, I guess, which is why you have potassium cyanide. Right. When it goes into the body. When you ingest it, however you ingest it, whether it's from a Tylenol capsule or breathing cyanide gas like they used to use to execute people with? Yes. They stopped using it for executions because it was such a brutal death. Yeah. It's very cruel, painful way to die in the body. It detaches from its mineral or metal, and it attaches to a protein in the body called cytochrome C oxidase, which doesn't sound like it'd be a big problem, but it turns out that that's about the worst protein that cyanide could attach itself to because we really need cytochrome C oxidase to breathe. Yeah. Basically, this sounds like such a cruel thing because it's just rapid cell death, and it's not like your throat closes up and you can't breathe. You're inhaling oxygen, and you are technically taking breaths, but the oxygen is not getting in the cells. No, it's not, because that Sidochrome C oxidase is what helps transport the oxygen and allows the oxygen to be used for energy. So if the potassium is clinging to it, the oxygen can't it just stays in the bloodstream, and it doesn't get used by the cells. And since your central nervous system is the most oxygen hungry system in your entire body, it's a lot of work. It starts to shut down first. And when your brain and your spinal cords start shutting down, all sorts of things happen. Your lungs start shutting down. Your heart, God bless it, keeps beating for minutes after the rest of your body shut down, so you're not technically dead. They're not sure exactly how long the pain and excruciation of dying from cyanide lasts, but they think you're probably conscious and aware and freaked out for about a minute at least. And your heart may continue beating for three or four minutes after that. So it's not a pleasant death at all. No. I mean, you're gasping for air. You're breathing in air. Nothing's happening. Like I said, Stanley Janice, he was foaming at the mouth, and his eyes rolled back in his head in front of his family. It's just like it's awful, like writhing on the floor, gasping for air. You're breathing, but it's not doing anything. I can't imagine anything more horrifying. Right. Because your central nervous system is kind of falling out of control or rhythm convulsions are usually a hallmark of cyanide poisoning. And then you turn bright red at the end of it. Yeah, a cherry red, they said, because when your body has gotten rid of oxygen to your cells and the oxygen becomes depleted, your skin kind of turns like a rusty brownish red. But because it can't unload that oxygen when you're dead, it stays a bright red, and your skin turns bright red. And then the other real telltale sign is your breath will smell a bit like almonds. Yeah, not a bit. These bottles supposedly were really pungent with bitter almond, and unless you know what that means, then you're probably not clued in. I wouldn't have known if I opened a bottle of Tylenol and it smelled like bitter almond, I'd probably be like, right. It's a nice smell, actually. Yeah, I like this tylenol. I guess they have a new almond flavor. Awful. So Michael Schaefer, the medical examiner, has just realized that this little girl has been poisoned, but he knows nothing about these other deaths. There's nothing like that. It's not entirely clear how everything became connected or who connected it. But what I find is particularly astonishing is that within just a few hours, by that evening, by the evening of September 29, people were saying, there's something up with the Tylenol in these mysterious deaths that have been going on all around Chicago. Yeah, I mean, we'll get into the dragnet they cast, but within a few days, they had kind of solved everything but who did it and how it may have happened, who done it, who done it. So, yeah, very quickly they figured out the Tylenol. There are a couple of different stories on, like you said, said on who was the first person to point this out. One story is that a reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago was doing the reporter thing and doing some deep diving and investigating and called up a deputy coroner and said, hey, I think this is what's happening. They told the police another story is that two people who didn't know each other kind of came together independently to let people know. One was a fire cap to name Philip Capitali. I knew you were going to do that. There was like a 90% chance. You know why? Because we got a lot of support from people that wrote in saying, I'm Italian and I love it, keep doing it. Right. And only one guy who hated it. But ironically, it was Fire Captain Philip Capitali who had written in and said no. So here was his deal. His mother in law was friends with Mary Kellerman, the victim's mother. Yeah, the first of the little girl. And she said, hey, would you mind looking into this because I'm friends with this little girl's mom, and it's weird that she dropped that at twelve and he's a fire captain, and they're all connected to the police and to the medical community. Everybody knows you want something done, ask a fire captain. I would, sure, because they'll bust into the room with an axe and get everybody's attention. So he's investigating. And then there's a nurse named Helen Jensen. Do you know why she was so into this case? Was she just a doctor? No, she was the public health nurse for Cook County, I believe. Okay, so she had an official designation to investigate. Yes, but unfortunately no one would listen to her because this is 1982. And she was a nurse. Right. Even though she was like a public health director, she was still a nurse and people wouldn't list her. And she recalled in an oral history I read about this, that she was stomping her feet out of frustration saying there's something wrong with the Tylenol. The Tylenol is behind all this. And people wouldn't listen to her. Amazing. Supposedly she and Philip Capital got together and joined forces. Right. And I guess we're able to convince everybody that, no, there's something wrong with the Tylenol. And by this time people started talking. Sure. And the idea that Michael Schaefer had identified Tylenol, I don't know if it was the same day or the day after, something like that, but all this is within a span of 36, 48 hours. Top it's really fast that all of this is going on, that the dots are being connected. Right. Then what follows is Cook County's Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Edmund Donahue holds a presser I either watched this one or one of the other ones. I remember specifically seeing this press conference on the news. Probably saw Jane Burns. That would have been the nationwide one, I guess. Yeah. And I was like, how would that have been nationwide? And then I looked it up. WGN was a superstition starting in 1980. Oh, you know it, man. So everybody saw it because WGN could broadcast nationwide by 1982. I watched Cubs games as a kid just because it was on. Yes, that was it. Like that. Embrace games for all you can. Yeah, man. So Doctor Donohue has a presser, a local presser. Of course there is panic initially. Yeah. He scares the s out of everybody because he comes out of nowhere and says stop taking the Tylenol. Oh yeah, sure. And so anyone, I mean imagine how many people in Chicago had taken Tylenol within 2 hours of that press conference, right. And are thinking like, should I go to the hospital? Right. And as a matter of fact, the poison control lines, basically in every city where somebody saw this started to light up right after that. People were like, I just took Tylenol. Am I okay? Or gave my kid. Can you imagine? And what came to be the pat response was if you are still standing and talking to us, you're probably okay. Which is sort of a double edged sword. Right. It's like don't worry, you die super fast. Right? Kind of. So just relax. So just hold the line for five minutes and then I'm going to come back and check on you. And if you're still talking, you're fine. Oh man. All right. So then the Chicago Mayor's Office gets involved. Like you said, Mayor Jane Byrne, she says, print a bunch of flyers, print them in a bunch of languages, maybe on goldenrod and cornflower blue. Sure, why not? Really catch people's attention. She had police drive through with loudspeakers on their car, literally saying like, don't take Tylenol. Reenacting that scene from the Blues Brothers where they're driving. I was thinking slacker. That's funny. Two different movies. But do you remember they're driving through in the police car with the loudspeaker talking about their show. Yeah, same as. Slacker? I don't remember. I guess I didn't make it to the end of Slacker either. It was in the middle ish there was no days being confused, huh? Oh, just different movies. Okay, so they're posting flyers. Cops are driving around, blaring it through neighborhoods. And then she has a press conference. She has all Tylenol removed from the Chicago area. She calls for it. Well, sure. She didn't go around with her basket. Right now, I'm not 100% clear if she was actually able to demand that the tile and all be removed. I think she was more warning. Yeah. I mean, I doubt if there was any law she could invoke. I wonder though. Seems like you would want afterwards, I would imagine. We'll talk about that later. Okay. So the TV and the radio, obviously everyone picks us up, not just in Chicago or the United States, it goes worldwide. And so there's people in Europe and Asia pulling Tylenol off the shelves. Yeah. So this is a big deal. And there was a lot of attention lavished on this. There was a poll that was taken the next month in October that found that 90% and this was in cities all over the country that found that 90% of respondents were aware of this Tylenol poisoning story. Yeah, some press agency, like a news clipping service, said that the number of stories dedicated to it were second only to the number of stories dedicated to the assassination of JFK. That's how big the story became overnight. And again, one of the reasons why is because everybody took Tylenol for everything all the time. That's just what you did. It was just something everyone took. And that same product was now killing people. So the most chilling part of all this to me, and this is all chilling, maybe the copycat stuff, because almost immediately copycat incidences started popping up all over the country. There were 270 reports of product tampering in the month after. 36 were, quote, hardcore true tamperings. And that's what's most chilling to me is like, there were that many people, at least 36 let's go on the low end. 36 people across the country that wanted to kill people and just saw an idea and we're like, oh, that's what I'll do now. I should have thought of that myself. I mean, that's scary, man. Yeah, what's scary, but also infuriating is that there's such terrible self starters that they had to be a copycat murderer in that. Right. You know what I'm saying? Sure. Like, it's bad enough that they're trying to kill somebody, randomly kill somebody, anonymously kill somebody, they didn't even think of it themselves. I know. That is a pathetic murderer right there. Pretty pathetic. Put my foot down. Excedrin, extra strength excedrin capsules were found, poison with mercury chloride. And that almost killed a man in Colorado. His name was William Sinkovich and he had liver and kidney failure, but he did survive. This one gets me more than one person thought, oh, well, people spray and drop things in their eyes and nose. I'll put acid in there. So tampered cyanus and tampered Visene both turned up after they had burned people with acid. Chemical burn up your nose. Unbelievable. Yeah, that's a bad one. So food was also on the list of things being tampered with. Orange juice, chocolate milk. Very high profile incident with ballpark hot dogs. They pulled a million pounds of wieners off the shelves and ran them through a metal detector. Yeah, because this was a scare. The old urban legend of razor blades and Halloween candy. Did they actually find pins and needles and things? For sure, yes. Okay. Because I thought that had literally never happened. It hadn't. It was an urban legend that became true. Okay, but nothing in the wieners. No. Some boys, I think, in Detroit claim to have found razor blades in there, ballpark wieners. And like you said, a million pounds were recalled. And then the boys were like, well, we're just kidding. Wow. Yeah. We'll talk about how ballpark was treated after that, but they were put on shoulders and carrying around for how great they handled everything. And there were a lot of hoaxes. There were a lot of tips called in about other tampering. And it had a really, like, if the purpose of this was to induce panic and fear and terror, then it absolutely worked. Absolutely. Should we take another break? I think so. Man we're going to come back and talk about the investigation. Stop. Okay. Chuck I also want to point this out. Time magazine, you know how I'm super into going back and reading contemporary news articles about an event? This one, I mean, it's all over the place. But Tim wrote about the copycat incidents back in 1982, and they said that the copycats were trying to, quote, emulate their demonic hero, the still unknown poisoner. The demonic hero. That's what the journalists from Time decided to go with. That's funny. That seems like a very 2019 thing to write. That's what I'm saying. I feel like we're reverting back to right now. Are we? I guess so. After that intro of yours, I'm now convinced. So everybody's freaked out. There are whole towns that canceled Halloween because remember, this happened like, a month before Halloween, and everyone was very scared about candy tampering because of the urban legend. Sure. In some places, it turned out to be true. A self fulfilling prophecy. There are all these hoaxes. There are all these actual true product tampering copycats. People were freaked out, and the cops needed to do something. And initially, these seven different deaths in five different towns in the Chicago area were being treated as five different investigations that didn't last very long. Within two days, by Friday, by the time Mayor Byrne holds a press conference on WGN, what came to be called the Tylenol Task Force was formed. All five of those investigations got folded into not just local investigations. The FBI, the Illinois state police, FDA, of course. Yeah, the FDA was involved. And then the whole thing was led by the Illinois district attorney's office, who was the nominal head of the investigation. Yeah. So they figured out pretty quickly that, like I said earlier, they cast their dragnet. They come up with about a 50 miles radius of where all this stuff was bought and sold and go investigate drugstore after drugstore. And they did find more bad tylenol that's still sitting on the shelves, thankfully. Yeah, I don't want to skim past that. They found more tylenol waiting to be bought. That's right. Like, just sitting there like, hey, come by me. Within two days of the first deaths. That's right. These first murders, we keep calling them deaths. These were murders. That's right. And they name their case. They're always code names for all these cases. This one ranks pretty low, in my opinion. Timers. T-Y-M-U-R-S. Short, obviously, for tylenol murders, at the very least, the s should have been a z. Timer. Yeah. Just give it a little flavor. Agreed. There was some confusion about how this went down, because they're trying to figure out, did it happen at the factory? Did it happen after the factory? What's the supply chain like? That's huge. It's like the crux of the investigator. Yeah, absolutely. Where did the tainting occur? Yeah, so they found out that all of the containers were from lot number MC 28 80, which was pushed out in August. Again, this is the end of September. All states east of the Mississippi, plus the Dakotas, nebraska, and a bit of Wyoming. Just a touch of Wyoming for flavor. That's right. Like the z for that mesquite flavor. Right. However, they were from different production plants, and they were sold in different drug stores, which is weird. It's tough to wrap your head around that because it's the same lot, but they came from different plants. Right. And it turns out tylenol has also a really weird convoluted distribution network. I think that's every company okay, I have a friend that works in supply chain management, and I was like, huh. Supposedly they'll take boxes and open them up and repackage them in smaller boxes. And it happens at different companies at different points around the country. Yeah, it's pretty complicated. It is. From a product from factory to your mouth. Right. Like what happens to kind of everything. I would think simplicity would be safer. Much. Probably not cheaper, though. You're probably right. So what they finally figured out was, here's what we think happened, is this stuff was not tainted at the factory, this stuff was not tainted in the supply chain, but this stuff was tainted from the store and then returned back to the store. Right. Because these pills were sold in different stores, which is a big one, because not only could it have been like, part of the factory. It could have been one of the local stores, distribution centers where there was somebody messing with it. Right, but since they were sold in juul food stores in Walgreens and other places too, around the Chicago area, that didn't make any sense. It couldn't have just been like the jewel distribution center. And also because they were coming from different production plants, it really couldn't have been the production plant or the factory where it came from. It had to be, like you said, happening at the stores. Yeah. And there were a lot of initial theories. Was it someone who like, a former disgruntled employee of Johnson and Johnson? Was it just a serial killer who just picked tylenol and wanted to randomly kill people? Right, and that's weird. That's a weird idea at the time. Like now it just seems normal, probably sad. But this was two years before the San Jacidro McDonald's massacre, which is one of the next random killings of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is kind of the first of that. But it was still so new and remote and alien. That didn't seem like a realistic idea at the time. Yeah, some of the other ideas, they thought maybe this was someone that was targeting a specific person or people and then randomly poisoned other people to cover their tracks. One of the weird theories that came out later after in spoiler alert, we now have tamper proof medicines where everyone's noticed there was one theory that it was someone who had a financial stake in tamper proof technology. Yeah, I saw something like that, too. I don't think there was ever a ton of credence put into that one. But point is, they were flying blind, basically because it was just such an unexpected, odd, random thing. They were basically coming up with kind of any idea they could think of. But the one that the cops settled on and the one that Johnson and Johnson also settled on too, because they went back and tested samples from lot MC 28 80 and found that there was no tainting of the lot. Their samples were pure. So the cops and Johnson and Johnson both decided they settled on what's called the mad poisoner theory. That somebody went around this 50 miles radius in the Chicago area in about 7 hours is what the cops calculated it would have taken either bought a bunch of tylenol and then took it back to their house and poisoned it. Repackaged it. And then drove around and redistributed it. Or went from store to store. Went in. Bought some tile and all. Took it out to the car. Poisoned it. And then repackaged it and brought it back in. But it was local and it was specific to Chicago. That was the mad poisoner theory. And again, why still no one has any idea why it could have been random. They could have been targeting somebody. It could have been a disgruntled Johnson and Johnson employee. But the main theory for the Tylenol killings of 1982 in Chicago is the Mad poisoner theory. Yeah. And do you know how they tested that? The rest of that lot, they got Detective John Pinky McFarland, who had the best drug pinkie in all of Illinois. And he went around and dipped that pinkie in, touched it to his tongue and said, it's good. He's like, I can't feel my face right now. The guy's a legend. Yeah. His pinky ring is so significant he can barely lift his finger. He only lifts it to test drugs. I told you we'd find some jokes. Sure. So by mid October, this is sort of the final bit of part one here. There was another bottle that people that they found another tainted bottle this is so crazy. That was purchased on September 29. So it fit the bill. And it was a woman who was feeling bad and went to go get that Tylenol and her sister was like, no, I've got some Buffering right here. Just go ahead and take that. And the lady presumably said, well, I really prefer Cede of Nathan, but I guess I'll take an aspirin. Her sister in law saved her by offering her buffering. Instead. She was steps away from dropping dead at a family gathering. Unbelievable. Yes. That is a good place to stop, huh? Yeah. So that's part one of the Tylenol murders or Timers with an S. And we're going to come back with part two after this. If you want to get in touch with us in the meantime, you can go on to stop youhadow.com and check out our social links. Or you can send us a good old fashioned email. 1982 version 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 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. 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." | |
434334dc-53a3-11e8-bdec-87230e096574 | Student Loans: UGH! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/student-loans-ugh | Student loans can be pretty complicated. Luckily Chuck and Josh are here to wade through the financial muck for you. | Student loans can be pretty complicated. Luckily Chuck and Josh are here to wade through the financial muck for you. | Thu, 02 Apr 2020 12:49:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=12, tm_min=49, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=93, tm_isdst=0) | 54106559 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. There's Dave C, the guest producer extraordinaire. And this is stuff you should know about. Wait, don't go anywhere. Student loan now. Really? Don't go anywhere. Yeah, this is pretty dry. I mean, we'll add our funnies. No, we won't. Okay. We'll add our funniest like we always do, but there's no getting around it that this is one of those Stuff You Should Know episodes that sort of falls under the banner of PSA. A little public service announcement for people to learn about something that they may not get, but it's just not scintillating. Right? How's that? To drive people away. I really think you hooked them for sure. No, listen. For the funnies. And hey, man, if you're out there and you don't understand student loans, don't know what you're getting into if you're a high school student yeah. Or if you're already drowning in debt already drowning in debt, we will pay that debt for you. Yes. Send us an email with your monthly bills, and we'll pay them all off. Now, this should really clear up a lot of that stuff, though, because it's not complicated, but there's just a lot to it. Yeah. But, like, how we got into this place, because yes, there's student loans and applying for student loans and what you should know. But then there's also what you should know about after that, when you join this 45 million loan debt holders, or debt owers who owe like, $1.6 trillion worth of debt. And, like, a lot of that about a trillion of it. I think a little less than a trillion has been generated since, like, 2010. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of progressives in this country that say you want to really kick start the economy in a long, permanent way. Just forgive all these student debts. Yeah. And other people say you're a Communist. Some people do. Yeah. I should go ahead and preface this with my personal experience. I did not get a student loan. I went to school and college. You were a little behind me, but it wasn't as big of a thing back then. No. I saw in the average student loan debt for a bachelor degree not a year, not a minute. A bachelor's degree was nine grand. Yeah. College used to be a lot cheaper. State universities are still not the most expensive, but when I was going to University of Georgia, dude, it was like tuition for a full load for a quarter was something like $600. Not that much money in, like, pot, especially at Georgia. So when my parents got divorced, part of the divorce was them selling a couple of things. Like, we had an Airstream Camper and things that clearly the family wouldn't be using anymore. And so they agreed, like, let's sell these couple of things and trucks. The last one going through because my brother, of course, had an academic scholarship, of course didn't have to pay for anything. No, Chuck, he needs that money for school because he's not getting anything. He needs that camper money. I needed that camper money. So they said, let's put that in an account for Chuck to go to school. That lasted me two or three years. Camper money did? Yeah, because Georgia was so cheap, man, it was a heck of a camper, too. Okay. But, yeah, Georgia was really cheap and living there was cheap and books were pretty cheap. So that lasted me a few years. And then after that, I've been working since I was 13 anyway. I was going to say you had a job throughout to help me with, like, living stuff, right? Totally. And I just kept paying for my college after that. It wasn't like some big, like, hey, I'm going to pay for my school starting from now. I was just like, well, that money is gone, so I'm not going to ask my parents for it. I've been working since I was a teenager. They sold their camper, so I'll just keep working and pay for my remaining education. Yeah, and it was not that big of a deal. I lived very well in college. You know what that's called, is pulling yourself up by your bootstraps 90 style. I don't even feel like it was, though. I was just like, hey, I wait tables. I make pretty good money. I can afford that $600 a quarter. The thing is, the idea of being able to live as a college student and pay for college and feel like you're doing fine waiting tables today, I know, it's just outrageous outlandish everything. I cannot imagine leaving Georgia with 30 $90,000 of student debt. I cannot imagine that. Well, that's one of the things that makes all of those people who say, like, you winers, you took out these loans, you owe them. We paid off our student loans when we went to school. All those older people who are saying that are missing the point that college has gotten way more expensive in the last Tennessee for a lot of different reasons, but it turns out largely because of an Obama era initiative to make higher education accessible to more people, there were just a couple of safeguards that weren't put in place that really let this thing run rampant. Yeah. And that if you say I paid off my student loans with no problem, why can't you? You're missing the point that it's different. It's a different world now. Things are different. And it used to be before when you had your first real piece of lifelong or long term debt, it was a mortgage for a house. You were paying for that house, and you were virtually guaranteed that at the end of that mortgage, that last mortgage payment, what you paid for that house was going to be less than what the house was worth then it was an investment. Right now, we're putting out teenagers into the world who have, in some cases, mortgage level debt without having any income yet whatsoever. And when they pay off that last bit of debt, there's nothing that was of value necessarily associated with it because they had to get a college degree just to try to get a job. Whereas before it was like you got a college degree and you automatically were going to get a good paying job or certainly a better paying job than you would have gotten with the high school diploma. It's a different world now. Definitely. You probably didn't get a student loan either, did you? No, I luckily didn't need them. They had the what was that grant that the lottery paid for? Yes. I think when you came along, that was in place that started right as I was leaving, I think first year for me, was it the Pill or was it the Georgia Lottery pays for it? Man, I can't remember. I can't remember the name of it either, but it was kind of crazy that yes. You had basically a free ride in school if your GPA was high enough at an in state school. That's right. Great deal. Yeah. And if you are a student now, hope Grant. Hope. That's it. Hope. Because I just remembered all the parents saying, you better not lose that Hope Grant. I think it was like, was it 3.0 or something? 3.2, something like that. Something definitely attainable. Yeah. So, I mean, our first bit of advice we're going to pepper some advice in here is old dudes. So I should say shout out to my dad once I inevitably lost the Hope Grant. Right. He stepped in and helped pay for college for me. Yeah. The herbal doubles. So we want to give out a few pieces of advice here and there. Avoid taking student loans if you can. Try and get as much free money as you can grant scholarships. What I don't get is why so many parents of these children didn't set them up for college. What do you mean? Start saving for college? I see. By the time my daughter's graduating high school, all her college is going to be ready to go if she wants to go to college. Right. One of the things that this Obama era initiative to expand higher education, one of the purposes of it was to make it so that people, lower income families had an easier opportunity to go to college. Yeah. So they basically said, come all who want to borrow money to go to college. Yes. Regardless of your ability to repay. Well, go finish. But I want to amend my statement. Okay, but go ahead. A lot of people who started to get to go to college, their families didn't have any money to put them through school. Yeah. So I think for people whose parents have been planning for it. Very little change. But it was an entire tranche of Americans that hadn't really had much access to higher education all of a sudden. Did starting in 2010. Yes. To be crystal clear, was not talking about those people you weren't pulling. Why did their parents just set them up? The Mitt Romney thing, right? Remember when he said that? No. He was like, why don't you just go borrow the money from your parents? That's right. When he was binders full of women, was that Romney who had binders for forever? No, I'm talking about the tranche of kids whose parents could afford to save money for their kids college and did not. Is that as a tranche? I don't know. I think one of the other things maybe there are a lot of parents who are like, you know what? This is your education. You pay for it yourself. I think there are also a lot of selfish people in that generation of parents sure. Narcissist who did not plan for that stuff for their children. Right. Because they were busy taking care of themselves. They blew it all on pot. Hey, I don't know, man. I'm not saying that. But I just want to make it clear I was not talking about less fortunate people that are totally now able to go to school. I think that was good that you amended that. Okay. But if anybody didn't know that you weren't saying that they haven't listened to stuff, you should know very much. That's true. We haven't even started this podcast. I know it's going to be 3 hours long. No, we'll blaze through this. There are different types of student loans. The main two big groups are federal student loans and then private sector student loans. So again, after you've exhausted all chances for grant scholarship, any kind of free money grandma and you turn to grand dad. Right. The first ones you want to turn to or the federal government's, because the loans you get from them are top quality as far as being a borrower is concerned. That's right. And there are a few different kinds of those. There are Direct, Subsidized, Direct Unsubsidized, and Direct Plus is capitalized all the way across subsidized direct loans. The Department of Education as your lender. I didn't know any of this stuff. But it's new. Yes. I mean, I was just surprised at some of this stuff. I'm sorry it's not new. Member Stafford loans. Yeah, that's what they used to call direct loans. Okay. I remember. It's basically the same thing, but it's just radically expanded since 2010. Okay. So I don't feel as old as I thought. There you go. The Department of Education is going to cover the interest under a few circumstances. And the interest is you're going to hear that word a lot. That's a big deal with any kind of loan or credit that you get. That's where they get you. And this is specifically the direct subsidized loan that they will cover the interest on that's? Right. If you were in school at least part time, that is one during the first six months after you leave school, don't even have to graduate, but you either graduated or disenrolled or whatever unenrolled, you've been dishonorably enrolled. Or if your loans are in deferment, only undergraduates can get these. They are based on financial need, and the school is going to say how much you can borrow. You can't just say, like, yeah, tuition is ten grand, but I'd really like 30. Well, even if you could do that, these things are capped because the interest is covered by the Department of Ed, like you were saying, which is a big deal. So if you go to school full time for four years and get your bachelor's degree that whole time, you are not accruing a penny of interest. Yeah. And that's a big, big deal. Huge deal. But there's a cap on the amount that you can borrow, right. If you're a dependent student, meaning that your parents still claim you is dependent on their taxes and they could conceivably help you out or whatever. They don't have campers to sell. Exactly. Or they sold all the Campers and now they're tapped out, you can conceivably borrow $3,500 and have it be subsidized. Correct. And I think over the course of your college career, it's something like $23,000 or something. No, I'm sorry. It's $31,000 for a four year degree that could possibly be subsidized, which, as we'll see, is not enough to cover a four year degree basically anywhere these days. No, I didn't tell you. What the second thing they sold, though, by the way? We had a food truck. What? This is prefood truck. It was a trailer. You didn't even call it a food truck. You know what it was called? What? The Food factory. What kind of food? So my dad and my mom would go to these arts and crafts festivals and set up and sell, like, hot dogs and hamburgers and popcorn and stuff. And they still got a divorce after that kind of experience together. Some might say it had a direct correlation. Burn the popcorn again. So they sold the Airstream in the food factory. Wow. So would they sleep in the Airstream and the food factory would tow the Airstream? No, these were just local things. Okay. She could set up for the weekend at the Yellow Daisy Festival and sell hamburgers all weekend to Redneck. Did they do it for fun? No, they did it to make money. My dad was always trying to make extra money. He always had these I don't know about get rich quick schemes because they weren't right, but make just enough money to cover the cost schemes, breakeven schemes. Yeah. It's funny, my brother is kind of the same way, but he's actually smart. Right. And does make money on the side sure. And spend it on Pinball machine. I said way too much Direct unsubsidized. I know. Our Wikipedia page is going to really expand too annoying. These unsubsidized Direct loans you can get undergraduate and graduate students, they are not based on your financial need. Even though the school is still going to say how much you can borrow, it can't be more than the cost to attend the school, obviously. And the interest rate is probably pretty low. But you are going to pay interest and they are accruing interest over the life of the loan. Right. That's a big deal. It's basically like you're still accruing interest. So it's like a regular loan. But what makes it so much more attractive than say, like a private loan, which we'll talk about, is that the interest rate is fixed and it's low. The government's like, we're not trying to screw you over or anything like that. We're going to loan you money. It's still a loan, but we're going to make the terms pretty good. Right? So just bend over and we'll make a deposit. You're still going to wow, teens getting ready for college, listening to this with their parents right now. They get it. Yes. Kids, ask your parents what Chuck just meant. They get it. Okay, so there's Direct subsidized, there's Direct unsubsidized, and then there's the one that comes from the federal agents that most resembles like a regular private lender bank loan. That's the Direct Plus loans. Do you know what plus stands for? No, I should have looked it up. This is a Household Works article, by the way. Yeah, very thorough. I wasn't telling you. I want to know, though, now, too. All right, so you look that up. The rare and show lookup. Best in show look up federal student loans. These are the direct plus. They are federal student loans borrowed by your parents. Or if you're a graduate student or a professional student, let's say. I've got it. What is it? Parent loan for undergraduate student. Oh, well, there you have it. Okay. But it doesn't really make sense in a second. Really? What am I missing then? No, just go ahead. Okay. If your parents are eligible, is just going to be based like a regular loan on their credit score, that kind of thing, right? And the cost of attendance, where you're going to be going to school or enrolling in school, is going to set that limit again, kind of like the other ones. But your parents are just taking this loan. And these are unsubstitised. They're unsubsidized. You can also borrow for an entire education and you can also use them not just for undergrad, but for graduate school, too. Which is why it doesn't make sense because the Grad Plus loan means graduate parent loan for undergraduate students. Somebody didn't think that went through. Thanks, Obama. But with the plus loans, that cost of attendance is a really big deal. And it's true with any loan. Every school you go to has a cost of attendance and every year they calculate how much it costs for everything, for tuition, fees, books, transportation, room and board, everything. How much it will cost the average person sure, pot to go to the school for a year. But the problem and you can borrow up to that amount, you can't borrow passive, you can borrow up to that amount. So you can say, I'm borrowing and I don't need to spend a penny other than what I borrowed. The problem is, it may cost you less to go to school than the average amount. Yes. And so you've borrowed up to that amount, which means you're paying interest on money you don't need. And when you get these loans, there's a lot of different things, a lot of different processes that it's going to go through. But the upshot of all of them is it doesn't come to you, it goes to the school. Never knew that. I didn't either. But the school says, okay, let's deduct for this and this and this and oh, they have this scholarship, so we can take that out, they have this grant, we can take that out. And let's say that there's some money left over, then they will send you a check or deposit it directly into your account. That's right. But when they do that, you would be very wise to say, no, you guys hold on to this, I'm going to use it for next year. Yeah, you can just roll that right on over. That's the best thing you could do with a bad situation. The reason it's a bad situation is because you have borrowed too much and now you are paying interest on money that's just sitting there for a year in the school's, coffers they're actually making money off of that interest. You're paying interest on that money you're not using until next year. So the best thing you can do is really try to calculate as best you can, down to the penny, how much money you really need to borrow and borrow that amount, and not just borrow the cost of attendance, because it might be less than that. Yes. Is the school really making money on that? Sure, yeah. Anytime any institution has money that they're holding, they make interest off of it. I didn't know if it was like an escrow situation. I don't know. All right. I don't know. That's a good point. That's a great point. Oh, I thought you said you knew for sure. You just were thinking, hey, they got the money in the bank, they're making some money, basically. Yeah, like Tony from Jersey would think. So here's the deal. Some private schools are really expensive. Even if you max out, you may not be able to cover the cost of your school. Take it or leave it. Here's some more advice from your Uncle Chuck. Don't go to one of the schools. Yeah, just don't do it. Go to a school you can afford. Yeah, because you know what? Doesn't matter. The one thing I saw you get that college degree, right. How many people have been like, oh, well, I mean, there are some prestigious schools sure. Where that really does matter. 90% of them. I don't think it really matters. I think it's more the networking that's available to you at those schools that's what they say is necessarily a degree these days, I think. But the thing is, they go to a big state school with so many more students and such a bigger net. Right. The thing I saw that was like the most foolish thing you can do is to go to a state school that's out of state for you. Because the education you get at that state school is going to be virtually identical to the education you get at the in state school. But you're paying three to four times as much for that same education. But your parents don't live an hour away. I guess so. But surely there's another state school 4 hours away or 2 hours away or whatever. I get wanting to be with your parents or whatever, I totally get that. But figure out another way going to a different state school is not a good idea. Agreed. And you can just flush all this advice down the toilet, kids. But what you really shouldn't do, I think, is go to that super expensive private school that has like 1200 students because the networking opportunities there are so slim. Right. Well, they say that people who borrow for liberal arts degree typically have the hardest time repaying it, even if they come from the socioeconomic class that is more likely to repay it. That could repay it because the wages don't pan out to be anything that can really pay off. So you have a really expensive education and then you would sit in a coffee shop reading poetry. Yeah. And it's not all about money. Totally. I totally get that. Chuck gets that too. That's not the point and it's not the answer to everything. Money is not the answer to everything. No, but having lifelong debt, you will never get out from under that's crippling. It's hard to fathom at age 17. And so hopefully your parents are worried about this and saying like, hey, you need to be thinking about this, you shouldn't do that, and giving you good advice. But if they're not, please seriously sit there and consider whether what you're going to spend astronomical amount of money on is actually worth it. Yeah, because it's not just about money. But having that mountain of debt at 21 years old really narrows your opportunities in life. Yeah. You might think it broadens opportunities to have gone to the school, but if you've got $90,000 in student debt, it narrows your opportunities. It just does. Not opportunities, but on the path that you might be able to take, right? Well, you're probably going to be in a situation where you don't have the luxury of saying, I'm going to wait for a better job offer to come along. Right? You'll be like, Just give me a job. They'll take whatever, and you're going to be very unhappy. What's more, there's a really high likelihood that the more astronomical your debt and the lower your wages, then you're going to default on it, which we'll talk about later. But once you start defaulting on loans, then you really are on a hard path because credit opportunities are closed to you. You get harassed all the time. Yeah. It's a bad jam. Bad things can happen if you owe people too much money. Even the federal government. All right, we should take a break. But it's really occurring to me how smart we are and how every child in America needs to be listening to us. Sure. Now, all right, we're going to come back right after this, and you just made me really nervous. All right, kids, we're going to catch some heat for this, aren't we? Nah, we're going to talk because I've guaranteed their parents that are going to be like, hey, you should listen to this. Yeah, you won't listen to me? Listen to Josh and Chuck, your stupid heroes. You want to go to Sarah Lawrence? Listen to these guys. Yeah. Don't blow it all in Pot. All right, so now we're talking about private loans. Where is Sarah Lawrence? Is that Massachusetts? Seems like I'm in every school is in Massachusetts, didn't it? Yeah, a lot of them are. Yeah, they are all in Massachusetts. That's one of the great Spinal Tap jokes. When they talk about canceling a Boston show, they say, oh, sorry, it's not a big college town. Save like that one. And you finally saw it, right? I've seen it before, yeah. Okay. I don't know why you can't take this kernel of information and subsume it into your general awareness. It's assumed. So private loans, there are a bunch of little bells and whistles that a private lender can offer you that a federal government loan will not. They can be like, hey, we'll knock off a little quarter for percentage point if you sign up for auto pay, if you refer people, you might get a little kickback. The guys they send to your house to break your leg, they're usually really well dressed and polite. If you pay on time, you might get a little discount along the way. So there are little fun things like that that they can do that the federal government does not do or can't do, maybe. Right. Sometimes they say, you can defer this until you graduate six months after we'll talk about deferments in more detail in a minute. But it's also a private lender, so the only thing they care about is taking your money. Sure. And they know how to lend it, and they know how to get it. That's right. One of the other things, the other cons about going to a private lender for a loan is like they might say, no, you can't have it. Sure. That's a huge distinction from a federal loan. The federal government analyzes your ability to pay as a kid. They're just going to say, yes, fine, come on in. Here's your money. If it's a plus loan and your parents are on the hook, they don't look at your parents credit score, they don't look at your parents debt to income ratio, meaning essentially their ability to repay the loan. I think they do look at their credit score. They look at their credit worthiness. Well, sure. And there's a big difference. Basically, they look to see do your parents have any negative reporting on this? Have they defaulted on other ones in the past? No. Great. We don't need any other information. Yeah, I see what you mean. No, they pay their bills, but they also only have 5% of their income left after the bills are paid. And this is a horrible hardship for us, but please lend us the money anyway. A private lender is going to be like your parents, that the income ratio is too high. We're not going to give you this. I hate to break it to you, 17 year old, but your parents are in a really bad financial situation, in case you didn't know. They had to sell the food truck and the Airstream put you through college. That's right. So the private lender may turn you down. That's another con, too. Yeah. You can get a co signer. Of course, this is when you get usually one of your parents on board or something. They're of course, on the hook for it, just like it is their loan. But lenders offer a couple of different things. You can get a fixed loan, you can get a variable loan. Those variable ones, if anyone learned anything from the housing crisis, they can be very dangerous because they are based on a couple of things. The Libor London interbank offered rate and the prime rate. And that's when, if you have the best credit in the world, you're going to get that rate. Right. But the variable rate can vary. And so three years into school, you could be paying a different rate. Yeah, because those rates change that prime rate and the library rate change. And so they're taking that as the base rate and then adding to it percentages based on your credit worthiness. That's right. And then that's the interest rate you pay. And because those base rates change, your interest rate changes. And if those go up dramatically, your monthly bill goes up dramatically from month to month. It can just kind of swing kind of wildly. And it's not good for the old ticker when you open those envelopes or get that email with your monthly bill. Yeah, we dodged a bullet with that. With our house loan because we had one of those variable arms and it just didn't bite us in the butt. That's good. We just got kind of lucky. I remember hearing about that with the subprime mortgage debacle. People were getting these loans in the first four years. It was easy street. And then year five would come and the payments would just balloon. Yeah. That's variable rate, you can also get fixed rate, although it's usually higher than what you're signing up for, but you know exactly what you're getting through the life of the loan. And that's what the federal government loans offers. A fixed rate almost always lower than what you're going to get from a private lender. Right. So if you're going to a private lender, you're probably going because you have exhausted the money that you got from the federal government. Yes. The private loans are still going to disperse the money to your school, which I didn't know as well. Yeah. Everybody's just going around you. That stuff drives me crazy. It's like, I'm borrowing. Give it to me. Give me the money. But they're like, no, I guess because they're like, There he goes with his bindle bag. They're like, you're 17, you can't be trusted with $30,000 check. It's not the worst thing in the world to maybe do that. Agreed. It would still drive me crazy, though. So repaying these loans. There are a bunch of different ways you can structure these with private loans. You got a few different options. Full deferral. And deferral means while I'm in school, I don't want to work, I don't want to pay off this loan, so just give me the money, give it to me, and I'm not going to work. I'm not going to pay anything until six months after I graduate. And they say, we'll give it to your school instead. Fine. And they'll say, Fine. But you're going to be paying that interest that's still accruing the whole time. Right. You're not making any payments whatsoever until after you graduate or leave school. Six months after, sometimes. Right. But like you were saying, the interest is accruing. It's going to be a bigger payment. It's going to be an eye popping payment when you start finally making payments. Right. Depending on how much money you make when you graduate and start paying, you can deduct some of that interest on your taxes. About up to $2,500 currently. Yeah. So that's nice. Immediate repayment means you're in school, you get this loan, but you start paying every month just while you're in school, because you're smart. Got a job at Mexicali Grill. That's right. Start making some payments. Yes, start making those payments. At least on interest. You have an option, I think, whether to pay interest or not. Yeah. There's interest only payments, too, which is basically like, I want to pay just the interest on my loan so that I know exactly what I'm paying when I finally start paying off the principal after I graduate. Or you can even make partial interest payments, which is you're just keeping it from being tidal wave that's right. Of interest when you finally start making payments federal. Also, I think this is just a little bit for me, just getting in the habit of making payments, even if it's just a little bit every month, has got to help ease that transition. When you finally do start attacking it after college, we should have a little bell in here to ding every time we give a little personal nugget. You know what, we need an arm extender so we can pat ourselves on the back loudly every time we give one of these. That's a good idea. They make those little robot arm grabbers. I think we should just say bear saying one more time, even though our school was paid for paid for it ourselves, we don't have student loans. We totally sympathize with anybody who struggles with student loan debt. That sucks. And we don't want you to feel like we're talking down to you by giving you this advice. Not at all. Okay. That's a very nice thing to say, though. Federal loans, it's a little bit different with the repayment structure. Just like with the private loans, you can have that option of full deferral if you want, but federal government has this deal where between like ten and 30 years, they say you can repay this thing in a standard way or the extended way. I think standard is ten, extended is 25. But if you consolidate loans, it can go up to 30. Yeah. In the private lending world, consolidation is called refinancing. It's basically taking all of your loans and combining them into one new loan. It's also called loan consolidation. Sure, yeah. But in this case, from what I saw, it's like the government calls this consolidation. The private lenders call it refinance. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, so where do you go? But when you're consolidating the federal loans, you're not saving money, you're just making it easier on yourself. That's right. When you refinance the private loans or with a private lender, you're probably going to save money. Because not only can you consolidate or refinance your private loans, if you have federal loans, you can consolidate them with the private lender. That's right. They go in, pay off your loans, the federal government, and they say, now you pay us, but maybe it's at a lower rate, maybe it's at a fixed rate. Who knows? If you're doing that, you're probably doing it to make it so that you're paying less every month or over the course of the loan. That's right. It's a federal loan. If you go the graduated repayment route over that ten years, repayments start low monthly and then they increase over time with the supposition that your salary is increasing over time. Right. Which makes sense, I think the standard one or the graduated one that's the default setting when you start repaying your loan. Yeah, but what a lot of people don't realize is that the federal government, on their loans, offer what are called income based repayment plans. Yes. Income driven. They make a lot of sense. They're a really good idea. Yeah, I read a really great article from Brookings, I believe, basically saying, like, here's all the ways that the student loan situation is just totally broken, but it's based on some really good ideas. It just needs to be fixed in some ways. It was written by Adam Looney. It's called a better way to provide relief to student loan borrowers. Really interesting stuff on bookings, but one of the things he says is the default should be a repay, income based repayment. The repay revised pay as you earn type. Because what it is, it says, okay, what's your income? Every year, you file a new income report, and then they say, well, they take 150% of the poverty limit, whatever the government says the poverty level is, they subtract the two and you pay 10% of that. That's your payment. Right, okay. So it actually is set up so that as you start to make more money, your payments go up. But if you don't ever really start to make more money, you pay about the same. So the whole idea behind all the income based repayment solutions is that if your diploma is paying off, great. If it's not, we're not going to treat you like the people who are benefiting from the college experience that they had. Right? You with the philosophy degree, bless your heart. Go start thinking about existential risk. That's the best thing you could do. There are other different kinds of income driven repayment options. You talked about revised pay as you earn. There's also pay as you earn, income based repayment, income contingent repayment. And they're all just Tweaked versions of sort of the same idea, wherein you're figuring out how much you can pay out of your discretionary income or whether they're figuring it out for you. Exactly. It can be between ten and 20 years to pay off. It can be 10% of your discretionary income. In the worst case, it could be 20% of your discretionary income. But, yeah, it's a set amount in its income. It reflects the amount of money that you make, so it's pretty cool. The other great thing about these with the federal government that you are not going to get from a private lender is after the term of your loan, right? Ten years, 20 years, whatever. 30 years. I think if you get like, the super duper extended version, they say, okay, well, you tried to pay it off. This amount that's leftover, we're just going to discharge. You don't have to pay it. It's going to be forgiven. Oh, are we talking forgiveness? I think so. All right, do you want to take a break first? Yeah, let's take a quick break, and we'll get more specific about forgiveness right after this. We'll call it a cliffhanger. All right, so you teased forgiveness. Teases so hard. You're the one who said, bend over and I'll make a deposit. I don't want to hear it from you. I'm sorry. Again, parents with children listening. That's right. There is a plan called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Plan. What you were talking about. Under certain circumstances, they will forgive your remaining balance. If you have been paying for that ten years or 120 qualifying month, you are working full time for a qualifying employer, which is government or nonprofit. That is a true nonprofit. So you can't go work for the Democratic National Committee or something like that? Yeah. It has to be a nonpartisan nonprofit. That's right. Literally, from what I saw, any 501 c three organization that isn't partisan or involved in labor unions, it would qualify. Yeah, but here's the thing, is, these got a bit of a bad rap when that first wave came through, because 99% of these relief applications were rejected. But then other people pointed out that, you know what, some of these people didn't make those 120 payments. Some of these people filled out things incorrectly on their applications. They weren't eligible. They didn't work for a qualifying employer. So, like all the things you said you had to do, a lot of people didn't do these. Right. So I don't know if we have a real good percentage number. I don't think they were just rejecting people, like, just for fun. Yeah, no, we'll have a better view of it next year, the next couple of years. But the point of it is to drive people into careers, like being a cop or a firefighter or working for a nonprofit. Because, again, after ten years, just ten years of making payments, once you've made that 120th payment, they say, thanks for the memories. You don't have to pay anymore. Not bad. Your loan is gone. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars is gone, and you still get to keep that degree. Plus you're ten years into a career that you hopefully are really happy with. That's right, because that's how it works. Exactly. Here's the thing, though, is loan forgiveness, there's something called the tax bomb, and it works a little something like this. You eventually will get taxed, because whatever they forgive, you have to count as income, and then you are taxed on that income. Right. They always got their hand out. So this is not for you gotten away with something. This is not for that ten year one. The ten year one, did you say? It's called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Plan. That's right. Okay. That one, the text bomb, doesn't apply. This is for the forgiveness for just regular federal student loans where somebody's been paying for 20 years or 25 years, whatever's left. The federal government says, you know what? You did it. You faithfully paid this stuff off, but you just never made enough money to really pay it off. So we're going to forget about it. It's clear that you're not going anywhere in life. But the amount that's left over, we're going to count that as income on your income tax. So you have $30,000 left if you're a high income earner by that time. Well, we should pay probably aren't though, right? Exactly. But let's say, let's say all of a sudden you just had a huge uptick in your salary and two years before that 20th year of payments went along and you just still had a big amount leftover, you could be paying 37% on that. So if you had 30 grand leftover and you're in the highest earner bracket, you would owe eleven grand in taxes on that debt forgiveness. The thing is, some people who know about this stuff say there's no way the federal government's actually going to do this. Yeah. Because we're not there yet. No. We've got about ten years before the first people who are eligible for that will come. We'll be able to test that. Yeah. And we should also point out that it's all relative. If you are not in a high tax bracket, it could still be a big burden on you because you're not making that much money. Sure. But when you reach that right. Yeah, you're right. You know what I mean? But hopefully some observers are saying they won't do that to anybody. Other people say, I don't know if you default, which we'll talk about in a second, if you default on federal student loans, they take your tax refund. So who knows, maybe they will charge people with that tax bomb at the end. Maybe. So defaulting, well, that could mean a few things. If you're a day late, you're delinquent dollar short. If you're three months late, if you're 90 days late, then they're going to report you to the credit bureaus. If you don't make a payment for 270 days, then you're finally considered in default. And you don't want to do that. You don't want to default on any loan no in life. Because, hey, it's the wrong thing to do. So if you can help it at all, I know sometimes life happens in such a way that you can't, but if you can avoid defaulting on that loan, please don't. Yeah. The thing is when people are calling you every day right. No, please avoid that took a second. Jeez. When people are calling you and harassing you every day, apparently the federal government uses a company called Navy who are particularly despicable when it comes to some of the stuff they'll do. I think they had like 500 federal lawsuits filed against them in one year. Really? And the second largest competitor to them had like 40. Wow. So yeah, they're not very well liked, but when they're calling and harassing you multiple times a day, the last thing you want to do is reach out to them and say, hey, how can I get back on track to paying you guys? You just want it to go away, right. But that's the opposite of what you should do. If you find that you can't pay your bill, you should get in touch with your lender and say, I can't pay my bill, I need to make this more manageable. Yes. What can we do? The problem is, one of the first things they'll offer is something called a forbearance. That's right. And that is just, hey, take a little time, don't make any payments, get yourself together. Yes, maybe you need a couple of months, maybe you need a couple of years, who knows? But we're going to put you in forbearance so you're not delinquent on your account, you're not in default, but the problem is you're still accruing interest, and that's actually not the best solution that you want. Yeah. So you turn the interest switch off, right? And they're like, oh, no, we don't know how to do that. There is no switch. Sorry, I couldn't hear you. By you're not in default, but you're still accruing interest, you're just not making payments. And the problem is, apparently these servicing companies that actually make the collections on the loan payments for the government or for private lenders even too, it's way more expedient to be like, hey, we don't want you to be in default anymore. How about a four Barons? Okay, we'll get you in the program. By and it sounds really good to you, right? Exactly. Like, oh, great, I could use six months or a year, but if they would take five more minutes, they would say, actually, if you're a federal loan borrower, there's all these income based payments that are going to make it way more realistic for you. Rather than just kicking the can down the road and having to face this in six months, when your forbearance is over, we could put you in one of these income based plans and you'll be better off. And a lot of people don't know that. So the forbearance does seem like a great, basically, gift from God all of a sudden, right. When actually it's a bite in the bottom, but from the horse God that you aren't expecting. That's good. We talked about consolidation. That can be a very good idea. What? We haven't talked about rehabilitating your account. If you go through a period in life where you default and you're like, screw it, I can't or won't or refuse to make my payment. You can pick up a year later and say like, jeez, is it too late? And you know what they'll say? Oh, no, calm, brother, calm. Yeah, get out that checkbook. You can rehabilitate that account, which is a really good thing. Start making payments again. That's all you have to do. And if you couldn't afford that payment before they'll even restructure that back to what you were talking about, to your income. Like, if you, let's say, have a salary reduction in life sure. And that's why you defaulted in the first place. Pick up the phone or just answer the phone. They'll be calling you and rehabilitate it and say, listen, let's talk this through. I'm a good person, I really want to pay this. And they'll say, Great, what can you afford? Let's look at your numbers. And then you start paying it. And then all of a sudden, if you've paid nine payments over ten months, then you're considered current, your default status is removed. Credit bureaus think you're a great person again. And you only get one shot at this, though, right. That rehabilitation. You get one chance. One chance. And that's just with federal loans, right? I believe so. I'm pretty sure, yeah. That's just federal. Yeah. Ultimately, you want to stay out of that. There is a second chance with the federal government, but it's not necessarily easy to do. Right. So with one of the things that happened with all of the student loan, there's like a student loan debt bubble that a lot of people are worried about. There's like $1.6 trillion out there right now, which is good in one way, because with student loans, the system is set up so that the people who are benefiting from it now, people who are borrowing to go to college are paying back into it later to benefit the people who need to borrow that are coming behind them. Right. So it's actually a pretty interesting, good system. But the problem is, with that much money out and as many people at risk of defaulting on these loans, a lot of people are worried about it. One of the reasons that people are worried about being the risk of default among a large section are some people call sums. Right. People who have some college education. Do you see that? Yeah. People who went to college and didn't graduate, basically. Yeah. And one of the problems from that Obama initiative to expand higher education was to say, oh, yeah, online colleges we've never heard of before. Sure, come on in. Barely accredited colleges. Come on in. Like, basically, scams, come on in and take all this money. I won't mention a very prominent no, we can't. Okay. I looked it up. That didn't apply. Okay. Not even accredited. Yeah. Wow. The fact that the country was awash in easy money for college education and that no one was watching the sharks who were coming to soak it up means that a lot of people went to schools that they got zero benefit from, but walked away with a lot of money that they owed. And so these are the sums. So basically, these people would have been better off with just a high school education, because to an employer, a little bit of college doesn't help. No, you have to go graduate. Yeah. You don't walk in and say, well, I spent three years so close, Jim. Jim? Can I call you Jim? Yeah, sure. So close, Jim. What's called the sheepskin effect, which is the actual increase in wages that you can typically expect from a college diploma. There's no proportion to it. Right. If you get three years of schooling, you don't get three quarters of a sheep skin effect. It's all or nothing. And you only get it when you graduate. So if you don't graduate, you got nothing from that increase in wages and you actually owe money through student loans. So there's a big problem associated with student loans and a lot of people are kind of worried about it. And one of the things that is causing worry too, are people have figured out how to take a bad situation to make it even worse, because some lenders, and I think the federal governments among them, take student loans, package them up and sell them as securities. It's like the housing crisis. It's exactly like the housing crisis with one big difference. That subprime mortgage crisis. Even if somebody defaulted on a loan, there was still a house that could be taken and sold. Right. And it sounds extraordinarily heartless, but I'm saying from an investor's point of view well, that was a physical thing. There's collateral. Yeah. With the student loan, there's nothing backing it. If the person defaults, then you just lost everything from this investment. But the idea that people are like, oh, there's a student loan bubble, let's figure out how to turn it into an investment that is really ill advised. Yeah, I think something like $280,000,000,000 of that 1.6 trillion is securitized. Wow. I think Mark Cuban, one of his big deals is student loan, like paying it off or relieving it, trying to help solve the problem. I think he's one of the ones who's kind of been shouting like, there's a big problem coming. There's a huge problem coming. I think a lot of people know it, but very few people know what to do about it. Right. There is one other thing. There's a proposal by Rand Paul that was brought to committee on December 3, 2019, and it basically says you can get like $5,600 out of your 401K penalty free and tax free if you use it to pay off your student loans. Yeah, that's a tough one. It's a math problem. Like, just do the math. It's sort of like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Right. You're not going to have that money later on. Right, exactly. But depending on how the numbers work out, it could benefit you. It could benefit you in the short term. But what some people are saying is like, no, dude, we're going to have a big enough problem with a lot of people not prepared for retirement in 30 years. We should not be encouraging those same people to take whatever money they have saved away for retirement to pay off their student loans. It's not a good idea. It's not for everyone. It could be for some people. It depends on how your life goes. Well, yeah. Plus, a lot of people are like, I don't have five grand in my 401K. What's the 401K? All I can think about is my student loan debt. Yeah, it's a bad situation. I'm very curious to see what happens. Yeah, me too. And go to school where you want to go to school, kids. But I'm telling you, try to make it someplace you can afford and really look at the benefit. And if that outweighs, if it's worth it. You think to spend all that money? Just think more about it. Well, you want to know one thing that's really despicable that I came across that I did not understand? Chuck? The federal government is not allowed to share data on outcomes from schools. Right. So, like, if you went to a private school and you just got a wash in debt and you make ten grand a year, there is no way to share that with prospective students to say, oh, I want to stay away from that school. I want to stay away from that procedure. Sarah Lawrence. The average salary as, like, all the outgoing senior is blank. Like, they don't share that. So what we're advising people to do, it's very tough to do because the federal government is barred from sharing that information, I think. I mean, more look within. Sure. You got anything else? Nope. This is a big one. We could talk about this forever. This one, Chuck, may have broken a record. I had 64 tabs open on just student loans today. I believe it 64 too many tabs. It's a lot of tabs. Okay, since I said it's a lot of tabs and Chuck said something horrid about deposits, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this two listener mails because they're both pretty short in both corrections. Hey, guys. Been listening a long time. I really love the show. I finally have some info that I can share with you regarding a recent episode. I was listening to the coyotes episode, and Josh was searching for a word for something that is active at dawn and dusk. Oh, yeah. And I'm here to tell you that word is crepuscular, which sounds like a Pete and peak kind of word. It does. The crepuscule is another word for twilight or dawn and dusk. So crepuscular means of the twilight or an animal that is active at that time. Hope that helps at your next tribune. That is Sarah from Wisconsin. And now we're going to read one from Bethany. A correction for my pronunciation of tagalog. Hey, guys, we got a few of these. Listen to your show every day during work and love listening to what you have to offer. Because of my frequency of listening, I know you're always looking to improve pronunciation and want to be respectful of other cultures. I'm currently on your latest short stuff on the murder of Teresita, Bassa and Orbasa and wanted to point out correct way to pronounce the Filipino language. Chuck said tagalog. It's actually tagalog. You were thinking of those Little Debbie cookies or no Girl Scout cookies tag along. Yeah, no, I just didn't know that's how I pronounced it, too chuck. I just wanted to help where I can say thank you for continuing to produce awesome content year after year. Once again, it's Tagalog. Tagalog, tagalog. Tagalog, I think. Well, this is G-A-H not G-U-H. Somebody else said G-U-H. Oh, boy. Here we go. That's from Bethany. Thanks a lot, Bethany. And from Sarah. Two two listener mails. Two top notch ones. If you want to try your hand at sending a top notch listener mail, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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. Bye." | |
c3d91586-5460-11e8-b38c-a72e68fb33c9 | SYSK Selects: The Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-the-star-wars-holiday-special-of-19-1 | Long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, George Lucas allowed the Star Wars Holiday Special to be made. What happened on the night of November 17, 1978 can never be fully explained, but we make our best effort in a very special edition of SYSK. May the force be with us all. | Long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, George Lucas allowed the Star Wars Holiday Special to be made. What happened on the night of November 17, 1978 can never be fully explained, but we make our best effort in a very special edition of SYSK. May the force be with us all. | Sat, 21 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=355, tm_isdst=0) | 52368298 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. And it's that time of year again. It's time for our annual Stuff You Should Know select release of how the Star Wars Christmas Special work. I hope that by now this is th tried and true American world tradition prior to Christmas that everyone will stop and bask in the glory of the Star Wars Christmas Special. Technically, our episode on the Star Wars Christmas special. I hope you enjoy it, and happy holidays. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chucker's Bryant and Jerry Jerome Rowland who is the wiki mother? Yeah. Mala. That was the Wookie wife. Oh, and mother. Yeah, sure. Chewbacca's mom is not with them any longer. She left. She was not about to appear in that. She went out the window. I'm excited about this, I have to say. We should say happy Star Wars Day. Yeah. Today is December 17. I have my opening night tickets. Do you really? Sure. Wow. You don't are you into it? Yeah. I will definitely go see it in the theater, but I won't be there opening night. Sure. I've gotten really adept at ignoring spoilers people, talking about stuff. I could conceivably see this movie a month after it comes out and still going fresh. I'm in Ostrich. Yeah. You black yourself out. Yeah. You go dark. I do. I make myself go to sleep. You go to the dark side. I've been there a while now. Well, happy Star Wars Day, though. I'm sure that I think this pairs nicely with Christmas. Star Wars Day. It's all come together. Yes. We already missed Life Day though, so happy belated life Day. Are they celebrating it this year, november 17? Yeah, but it's every three years. Arcane. Yeah, man. Okay, so it's every three years started in let's do the math, shall we? Quick math break. I believe that 2014 was the last Life Day. We just missed it. And then again in 2017. Okay, so 2017 will celebrate Life Day. We'll put on our red robes, our ultra long straight iron wigs sure. And we'll celebrate Life Day the way it was meant to. Yes. And if you have no idea what we're talking about, we are talking about Life Day, which is a celebration that rookies in the Star Wars universe have every three years. Yeah. It's like their Christmas. Yeah. Or Veronica or their Quanta or their tet supposedly. It's sort of like Earth Day, too. They celebrate the diversity of their ecosystem and also remembrance of the dead. And they also give gifts. They like the Finns, basically. Yeah. It's a very interesting part of the Star Wars canon. It is. And it's almost entirely made up, dashed off, you could possibly say, by George Lucas in the 70s. Yeah. And it's the basis of what has become derided as one of the worst things that ever happened to the Star Wars galaxy. Well, not only that, one of the worst things ever aired on television in this galaxy. Yeah. At first, that sounds like hyperbole. Like, come on. It's because it was Star Wars and we had high expectations, but it's really that bad. Yeah. The people who say that haven't seen even a second of it. Yeah. However, I watched it when I was a kid, then again this week. And you watched it twice this week? Yeah, I watched it last night and this morning. There's something about it. It's mesmerizing. It really is. It's one of those things that you start watching it and you want to turn it off, but you want to see just how absurd it can get. Almost. Yeah. And it starts absurd. It stays absurd in the middle and increasingly more absurd. It gets a little less absurd, finishes super absurd. Yeah. It's just a train wreck in every single sense of the word, top to bottom. It's extraordinarily difficult to overstate how bad this is. Yeah. And some people, in researching this, you read about it, you read descriptions of these things, and it just can't possibly be gotten across until you see it. So luckily, as we will see, you can go onto YouTube and watch it, and you may even enjoy this episode more if you pause, go spend 2 hours watching this thing and then come back and laugh along with us. Yeah. There's a great over the years, there have been many segments of it on YouTube from badly dubbed VHS tapes, but there is one really pretty good version of it in full. Brought to you by Whio dayton, Ohio. Channel Seven, Ohio. Because that flashes up on the screen periodically. Man, it is high quality. Yeah, it looks good. It has to basically be the copy that the actual affiliate broadcast. It's like that quality compared to the other stuff floating around on YouTube. Clearly recorded on a 1978 VCR. Yeah. Which were really expensive. Very expensive. I did some calculating on West Egg. Okay. So the average VCR went for about $1,000. They were brand new. That's amazing. $1,000 in 1978 money. So they're about $3,800 in 2014 money. Crazy. Luckily, there were some rich people out there recording this stuff. And the wealthy have saved us all again, yet again, as they always do. Yes. We need to shout out some articles that we use for this. There's a great article in Vanity Fair called The Han Solo Comedy Hour. Exclamation point. Yes. By Frank De Jacob. And then the Star Wars Holiday special was the worst thing on television ever by someone we kind of know, alex Pasterneck knows from Motherboard. Yeah. Which is not wired. It's Vice. Yeah. We wrote a little bit for Motherboard back then, and we had a call with that. We're like, old Motherboard vets, basically. Wasn't there one more? There was another one, and I don't know who wrote this one. Chuck. Yeah. The title is the star wars holiday special. George Lucas wants to smash every copy of with a sledgehammer, which is a famous quote, supposedly at a convention by Lucas. Yes. Which is not correct. He didn't ever say that. No. Okay. That sounded like something that people made up. Yes. But if you go on the internet, you will quickly believe that he did, but apparently didn't. So I'm sure he felt that way, though, clearly, because he did appear on robot chicken and I think 2005 on the therapist couch talking about how much he hated the special. All right, so let's set the background, shall we? Shall we go back to 1977? Yeah. Summer getting the old way back machine. All right, let's do it. All right, here we are. There's woodterson. Yeah. I'm just a little six year old excited about star wars. I've just turned one. Yes. You don't know what's up yet. Please forgive me if I urinate myself. No problem. Okay, so what has happened is star wars has become a huge hit, seemingly out of nowhere. Establishing George Lucas is one of the brilliant young minds in filmmaking. Even though in his first movie, it was his first huge breakout hit. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, talk about a breakout hit like no one had ever seen anything like it before. No. 2001 had come out in the late 60s, but it still isn't accessible to all audiences. Yeah, it's pretty cerebral film. Yeah. It's not an adventure movie. This is star wars. This is like basically swashbuckling on the screen, but in a galaxy far, far away. Star wars just changed everything. And it came on just like a hammer and a new hope, by the way. Yeah. And I know we're going to get stuff wrong. Nerds. Yes. Just go ahead and get your little fingers ready to email us. If it wasn't driven home that I'm not nerd by the fact that I don't have opening night tickets or any tickets yet. Give me a break. Okay. And by proxy chuck, too. Okay. Thank you. It's hard to say how great star wars was in everyone's mind. Right. Bill Murray came out with that lounge singer star wars thing. Yeah. It was everywhere. And if you just listen to the lyrics of it, really, it's just bill Murray singing about how much star wars is awesome. Right. So by the following year, George Lucas, he wanted to figure out a way to keep audiences just engaged with the whole star wars franchise that he was just starting to build. But he knew the empire strikes back was a couple more years out. Sure. So I think he was approached by some TV executives who said, have you considered doing some sort of TV special? They're all arranged right now. We have a graphic that's really awesome that we set aside just for TV specials here at CBS. Why don't you let us let's get together and do a star wars special. That's right. Producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion were working over at CBS and they said, this is a great way to keep the spirit alive while you're making your other movie. Maybe move some more toys. Yes. George Lucas got a cut of all the toys. Sure. It was right before Thanksgiving and he said there would be a lot of people watching TV pre holiday season or I guess in the holiday season. Well, the weekend before Thanksgiving, it's like everybody's shopping, sitting around family, like, waiting to actually do stuff. That's right. Perfect time to broadcast something on TV. So Lucas says, all right, let's do this. I don't have a ton of time, but how about this? I'll get a story together and then you can go hire a whiz bang team of veteran writers and producers and directors, whatever genre you think is appropriate. And those are the words that will haunt George Lucas to his grave. Yeah. So Lucas said, here's my idea. I want it to be based on rookies and I want it to take place on their home planet of Kazuk, or wookie planet c. Is that how you say Kazuk? That's how it's pronounced in the holiday special. But it's also pronounced different ways. Other times I would have pronounced it kashy e e. Spell it K-A-S-H-Y-Y-Y-K which I mean, I guess that sounds like Chewbacca's planet. Sure. Also called G 5623. Wikipedia or.edu is a mid rim planet. Right. So the whole reason apparently that George Lucas was interested in featuring the Wookies was it is what we in show business call low hanging fruit. The reason why it was low hanging fruit was because they had just established the different scenes that would make the cut for Empire Strikes back. How did you pronounce it? Again, Kazuk had not made the cut even prior to this. Apparently for a new Hope, george Lucas had whipped up a 40 page what's known as the wookie bible. It's like a 40 page supplement that's all about Kazuk and Wookies and Chewbacca and his family and everything about wookie dough. Right? That's right. So he's like, I've got this thing already established. I love Wookies. They didn't make the cut. I'm a little sad about that. Kazuki is not going to show up in Empire Strikes Back. Let's build the entire special around rookies. It's basically the one demand me, George Lucas has. Yeah, that's it. I'll be totally hands off from this point on. Which he kind of was. He totally was. And it was actually this experience that apparently taught him to be the very hands on person that he is famous for being. It came out of this Christmas special. Absolutely. He was burned and you had an iron grip after that on everything. So here's some of the folks behind it. Bruce Valanch. Famous TV writer. You probably seen him on Hollywood Squares. Wasn't he suspected of being Thomas Pinchon for a while? I don't know. Or was Thomas Pinchon on Hollywood Squares? I have no idea. I may be confabulating some stuff. Confounding? Yeah. There's some con of some sort going on. Sounds like it. Yeah. So Valancie was hired as a writer. A guy named Lenny Rips was hired as a writer who has some great quotes in that Vanity Fair article. He does. His first quote was, we were really excited because this is Star Wars. How could it lose? Famous last words. Who else was hired? There was a husband and wife team, the Welches, who are the parents of folk singer Gillian Welch, who I'm a big fan of. And I had no idea that her parents were producerssongwriters of the day. They were big on the variety show scene, which would turn out to be a really key cog in this whole experience. So I feel like right about here, jerry should insert a needle coming off of a record sound effect. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Jerry. So, Chuck, you just said singer songwriters. Yeah. What would that have to do with Star Wars? Yeah. Well, actually, in the Star Wars Holiday special, for those of you hadn't seen it, there are musical numbers. They decided from the outset that there should be musical numbers. And the reason that they decided that there should be musical numbers is because the people who sold George Lucas and at the time it was the Star Wars Corporation was what it was called on the idea of doing this TV special was that everyone would love a variety show. Yeah, it was the 70s. Great idea. Let's do a variety show. The problem was this apparently George Lucas didn't watch enough TV and he also overly trusted people who talked to him. Sure. Because by 1978, yes, variety shows had dominated television for over ten years, but it had come to an end. It was getting stale. Yeah. We're talking Carol Burnett show. One of my favorite had just been canceled after Eleven season. It's a big red flag. Sonny and Cher had just had its last season. What else? Like He Hall was still going on, probably they didn't know what to do. Hehaw still on Solid Gold had yet to come on and take up the mantle that would never ride a show. That was a little bit there's, talking in between the songs. Yeah, I remember the Mandrel Sisters show. I never watched that one. But with that country chic thing that happened yes. It was a big deal in the sense it's kind of happening again, I think. Oh, because of that dude, the guy who won all the CMA Awards. I don't know, he came along. He's like, actually country. His dad's like a coal miner. For real. From Kentucky. I think I know what you mean, Chris. Yeah, he is good. He's come along and been like, what are you guys doing? Well, there's a revival in good country music again. That's great. Like, in the tradition of Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and I guess it's probably where the country she came from because there was actually good country going on. Yeah, johnny Cash had a variety show. Did he really? Oh, yeah. I knew they did, like, a Sunday singing thing, like, out in Virginia. Yeah, he had his own variety show. It was actually pretty good. There are some really great performances. Do you know how many nerds are like, Get back to Star Wars? I know. I'm so sorry. All right, so the variety show is dying, sort of. And so they figure, what a great time to take the biggest movie property on the planet and wedge it into the variety show milieu. I don't know if wedge is the right word. I think maybe nestle it in there and then start hitting it with the blunt edge of an axe until it mashes into that crevice. That's right, because this is the time when Fantasy Island had just started. Morgan mindy was about to change things. Charlie's Angels was getting huge. Basically, television as we knew it from 1980 to whenever the real world came along, just escapist. Television is what they call it was starting and it was the hip new thing. So basically, if they had turned Han Solo and Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker into maybe sexy detectives, it might have gone over even better. But they went the other way. They decided to latch onto this extraordinarily stale genre of television and they hired the best in the business. There was a quote from, I think, Lenny Rips who was saying, like, we had literally a dream team, a variety show dream team. And everybody was good, but there were probably no bad welders on the Titanic either. That's a great quote. Yeah. The guy they hired to direct it initially was a dude named David Ecomba and he had made his name for welcome to the Fillmore East. It was a concert documentary with Van Morrison and the Birds in and he actually was at USC Film School at the same time as Lucas, even though they didn't know each other. And he only ended up directing about three segments of the thing. Before he quit. Yeah, before he walked off. Some say he was actually let go, but we'll get to him in a minute. And who replaced him. Okay. As we get along down this gross road. Well, let's take a little break because I'm overly excited. Okay. All right. So we've established most of the main players. We'll get to a few more. We should point out that Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. Sure. Peter Mayhew, they had no grounds to refuse to be on this, basically. Yeah, pretty much. They were not huge stars, yet they could throw their weight around and say, this is terrible, and I'm not doing it. They were big overnight because of Star Wars, for sure. But they weren't to the adoring public. Sure. Back in the studio, they could still be bossed around. And this is the result of it. And you can tell also, just from watching the actual special, harrison Ford is not happy to be there at any point. Oh, no. Princess Leia is clearly on drugs. Was she on drugs at this point? If you watch it, she's on drugs. Especially the ending scene, mark Hamill, it looks like he's happy to be there, actually. He was fine, but apparently he said, no, I'm not doing a musical number. Yeah. And if you watch his part, wedging a musical number in there would have been even more painful. Sure. But everybody who was part of the actual Star Wars franchise that wasn't wearing, like, a full body costume was like, I really wish I wasn't here. And you can tell. Yeah. In fact, in the opening credit sequence, they're showing the picture, the faces of the people, and you see Harrison for it as if he's flying the Millennium Falcon. And you can just hear the guy off screen going, now look at the camera and just give a nod. Just look at the camera and give a nod. And finally you can tell he's pissed off. And he looks up at the camera and just sort of smirks. Yeah. And point to the camera like, okay, I'm looking at the camera. And then goes back to what he's doing. Yes. It's pretty awesome. I felt bad for him so early on, valanci and others. Did you feel bad for him, though? Really? Come on. It's harrison Ford. Han Solo. He has to go do this for, like, five days. Yeah, I felt terrible for him. I think it's hilarious that they had to do this, especially now. Well, early on, Avalanche and others knew that they may be in trouble because they decided not to subtitle any of the Wookie dialogue. Right. And they literally started after a brief opening scene. Setting it up. Here's the basic plot. Han Solo is trying to get Chewbacca back to Kazuk in Time for Life Day so we can celebrate with his family. That's the basis of the entire 2 hours. That's the basis of the entire 2 hours. They encounter a space battle and they are delayed. And the next 2 hours are kind of what's going on while the delay is happening. Back on. Back on. Kazakh. Because you hear like, okay, well, Han Solo and Chewbacca evading the Imperial Guard and all that stuff for 2 hours. I would watch that. Sure. I would, too. That's not what they show. Killing time at the Wookie household. That is what they show. Yeah, that's what they do. It's people hanging out, waiting for Chewbacca, worrying about him, and then killing time while they wait for him to come back. Yeah. Literally. Hold on. So you say there's a setup, right? Yeah, that's the initial set up. And then Chuck, that's followed by this? Yeah, it's followed by literally ten minutes. Ten solid minutes of incomprehensible Wookie speak. So let's join it for a second, shall we? Yeah, let's all enjoy it. And again, you said ten minutes. And you're not exaggerating. You're not being hyperbolic. You can time it. It's ten minutes of Wookies talking to each other with no subtitles. Fortunately, I couldn't follow it at first. I didn't even know who it was. I thought it might have been Chewbacca's mom and dad. Oh, yeah, that's little brother. And I don't find out until later when Mark Camel shows up via Skype Call and says he really explains everything that had just happened. Like your Chewbacca's father. Itchy. You're Chewbacca's, son. Lumpy. Yeah. And you are chubaka's wife. Okay. Mala. Yes. Thank you. So before everybody starts, like, freaking out, we know that that's actually their nicknames. Their real names are his father is really hard to pronounce. Mulatto Buck is his wife, and his son is Lumpo. Or Lump, as named by Lucas. Yeah, but Lucas also named him Lumpy, Itchy, and Mala. They're all back there wringing their hands, trying to figure out ways to pass the time until they get word from Chewbacca that he's made it to what is it? Ketchup. Kazuk. Did you say Ketchup? Ketchup. Or Ketchup, if you're fancy. But Chewbacca is having trouble getting back to Kachuk because there's Kazuk, because there's a blockade by the Empire, and they're looking for rebels, specifically Chewbacca, who I didn't realize is he's the most famous Wookie of all. Did you know that? Yeah, of course I didn't know that. Well, I mean, he's the only one that really appears in the movies, seeing, like, these people's view of the universe. What about back on Kazuk? Yeah, it might have just been a fly by night Wookie, right? Yeah, but not the case. Very famous Wookie. Yeah. And he really loved to soak in his fame. All right, so he realizes there's a problem. valanche, he goes to Lucas and is like, I don't know, man, this is your world, but it may not be the strongest thing to do to set this in Woky land and have all this comprehensible dialogue. And he says he was met with a glacial stare. Well, he put it a little differently than that. Well, he said glacial stare. He did. The glacial stair that he got was for this quote. He said, these people just talk and what sounds like fat people having an orgasm. He goes, if you want, you can set up a tape recorder in my bedroom, and I'll do all of the foliage for it. Yeah, he's a large guy. He is. So that's what got the glacial stare. But Volunteer said that there was one development meeting that Lucas attended, and it was here's the Wookie Bible. Tell me what you got. And Villanch said he and the other writers and producers and director were just kind of throwing ideas and george Lucas would either say, like, no, that doesn't work, give them a glacial stare, or say, yes, that's exactly it. Yes. Let's make this a variety show. Yeah. And there was a little bit of background there. The Cantina players in the band had appeared on other variety shows at that point, and I think it went over fairly well just as a short segment. Unlike the Richard Pryor variety show or Donnie Murray, there were a lot of variety shows. But that's what I'm saying. That was television. That's what you did. Like the Brandy's. The show had its course, and then it became a variety show. Everybody loved variety shows. Yeah. By this time, though, everybody was sick of variety shows. Right. And so it really was a terrible choice. In fact, they even hired a couple of writers from Shields and Yarnell, which I hadn't heard of. I do. Oh, yeah. I watched it. It was creepy. This Mime couple who had their own variety show, and they figured, these two will be great because they are used to working without words. Right. There is a certain logic to the variety shows. It's not just all over the place. It's just that variety shows were popular at the time. Somebody was like, Wellkie, you don't understand what they're saying, so this is all going to be very physical. So these people who did what is it? Shields and Yarnell. Yeah, that's a perfect choice. That makes complete sense. You can see this whole process of leading up to the point where it was produced and shot and everything, a series of like, oh, we have this problem. Well, here's a fix. Yeah, but that leads to another problem. Well, we'll fix it with this. And no one's stepping back and being like, all we've done is create a series of problems that are going to come together and make one extraordinarily large problem that will become legendary. No one did that. And so the whole thing was made. That's right. And it eventually airs on November 17, 1978, on Friday at 08:00 P.m. Eastern time. That's right. And according to the Nielsen ratings, it attracted 13 million viewers, lost the second hour just in the US. It aired in seven countries total. Yeah, but no one cares about that. I guess not, because none of those are on the Internet. It finished second to The Love Boat in the second I'm sorry, from eight to nine. And then the next hour actually finished behind part two of a mini series about Pearl Harbor starring Angie Dickinson. So it didn't even win their respective hours. No, 13 million. That's not bad. The thing is, apparently, if you look at the Nielsen ratings graph for the first hour yeah, we know about that graph. It's okay. Yeah, we do. And then after a very important part, which we'll talk about soon, it just drops off at the end of the first hour. And that actually probably made the executives at CBS Cringe for a number of reasons. Number one is this special was originally supposed to just be an hour, but so many advertisers wanted to sign on that they extended it to 2 hours, and it shines through. You can totally tell that this thing was never supposed to be I think an hour might have been stretching it, to tell you the truth. It's 30 minutes of content, 40 if you're generous an hour. And then 2 hours, it becomes one of the worst things that was ever put on television. All right, well, let's take a break, and then we'll talk a little bit more about the actual I don't want to call it content, but it is content in the strictest definition. Sure. Right after this. All right, so the show itself, we've given you the main plotline, which, again, is that Chewy is trying to get back to his home planet to celebrate Life Day with his family. Right. That's it. And again, we almost barely see Chewy. The rest is his family on kizzuk, waiting for him to come back for a lifetime. Yeah. So some of the various things they did, there were guest stars. There was Harvey Corman from The Carol Burnett Show. Okay. One of my all time favorites. Him or Carol Burnett? Both. He's great. Yeah. He actually, if you watch what he's doing, this is a comedy genius. Well, apparently he, too, was, like, the only one on set that was bringing levity. He was joking around and kind of kept spirits up. Good for him. That's what I say. He had three different parts. Yeah. I don't even know the names, actually. We could look them up, but he played a Julia Childlike cook. There's an actual cooking segment, a long one. A very long cooking segment where Chewbacca's wife makes bantha stew to kill some time. To kill some time because they're both waiting on her planet and in our living room. Yeah. So Harvey Corman is in drag as a four armed Julia Childlike TV chef. Right. I think it's Gormanda. Is her name Gormanda? That makes total sense. Yeah. He also plays there's this one weird bit where Chewbacca's son tries to figure out a way to trick the stormtroopers that the Empire had come because the blockade raided the house and other properties. So he tries to trick them by, I think, rigging a.com link to speak in a different voice. So he has to watch the instruction manual. He watches an instruction video, which was Harvey kitel as a robot. Oh, it would have been wonderful. Harvey kitel. Oh, I did say Harvey. Harvey Corman. Harvey kitel murdered someone in the middle of the installation. Great. Harvey Corman. And then the final role he had was a bar patron in the cantina that drinks. He has a hole in the top of his head like a volcano where he pours his drinks in. That's how he drinks. And he loves bee. Arthur. Did we mention B Arthur was in it? B Arthur is not only in it, Chuck. She sings a song. She does. She is the notes to everyone. She manages or maybe owns the canteen. She's the owner. Yeah. What's the maz? What mazdev? Cantina no. Mozdef is a rapper. Oh, yeah. You mean Maas Isley? Yes, that Cantina. She's the owner. B. Arthur is the owner. The Arthur of the Golden Girls, but in this case, be Arthur of Maud, because as one of the people who wrote one of the articles we base this on points out she's just basically playing Maud as the owner of the Cantina. Yeah. And her song comes because they basically say there's a lockdown, so you got to call last call at your bar. So she calls last call by singing a song to everyone. Right. And again, we can't possibly have the script lead anywhere else but Chewbacca's house while his family waits for it. So all this takes place as part of a public service announcement, basically broadcast by the Empire about how immoral life on Tatooine is. So let's go see what's going on in the Maze Isley Cantina as it's being shut down for curfew. Yeah. All right. This is incomprehensible, but it goes on. So there in it there's also Art Carney. Yes. He's the honeymooner. Probably the star of the whole thing, really? He has the most lines. I would say the most comprehensible line. Right. Yeah. So he plays a human trader that has recently been with Han Solo and Chewy and actually gets to Kazuk and says, they're on the way. It's all good. Yeah. A trader. Not traitor. Yeah. Traders and trades humans for money. No, he sells goods. Yeah. A trader isn't trade humans. Yeah, he's in the human trade. No, he isn't. Really? Yeah. He trades humans like he sells humans. I looked it up in Star Wars encyclopedia. It said that he was in the human trade. So in this Christmas special, apparently they sanitized his background because he's basically just selling gadgets and novelties and stuff like that to the Wookies and the Empire who were occupying the area. Yes. He comes bearing gifts. Yeah. Because he's a friend of Chewbacca's family. Yeah. So he comes bearing gifts. One of the gifts he gives is sort of like a little digital insert to a I guess you would call it a virtual reality hair dryer hairdryer. Like a beauty shop hairdryer. Right. He gives it to Grandpa. Itchy Grandpa. Itchy sits under this hairdryer pops in this digital cassette and it can only be described as softcore porn. Apparently, the writers who were interviewed for this said that was totally the intent. They were trying to get what amounted to softcore porn that would pass the sensors. That's right. You can't even say it's innuendo. It's too obvious and overt for innuendo. Instead, it's just gross. It's really gross. Diane Carroll. Yes, she is a Vegas staple. Shows up and starts basically tantalizing Grandpa Itchy again, this is Chewbacca's elderly father who now engages in some sort of well, he's watching virtual reality pornography now. And this is a pretty lengthy segment in and of itself. Oh, yeah. And she literally says to him, now I can see you're really excited. Yeah, it's pretty rough to watch. Yeah. So then you've got another musical number, because also, again, he shutters. Yeah, it's really strange. All right, so there's also a I know it seems like we're jumping around, but it's so mind blowing. This is pretty much like blow for blow. Actually, I forgot earlier on in the special there's, one of my favorite sequences is when Grandpa Itchy goes over to Lumpy and basically sets up remember the Hologram chess board that they played in A New Hope basically kind of sets that up and says, Here, just play this. He pushes the button, which is clearly a cassette recorder. And another, it's like a Cirque du Soleil acid trip gymnast routine. Happens in front of the kids eyes. And again, it's not like it shows a snippet. They show the entire segments, like, 5610 minutes long of all of these things. So you would think, okay, they've gone to this Hologram well, a couple of times. Why not go to it again? Well, they do. To kill more time while the Imperial Guard is ransacking their house, art carney, apparently, I guess, is trying to get one of the Imperial Guard the leader, I think, or one of the leaders who looks like somebody from spaceballs, by the way. Very much so. Yeah. And the writer of the Vanity Fair article, by the way, said, this is so incomprehensible. The specialist, George Lucas, didn't even have the Schwarz with them at the time. So, anyway, our carney is distracting this Imperial leader while they're ransacking the Wookie's house, Chewbacca's house with a hologram. And this Hologram, instead of being an acrobat or Diane Carroll or any kind of porn or anything like that, is Jefferson Starship. And they decide that they're going to play Light the sky on Fire, which apparently is about UFOs. It's a little music video, basically. Yeah. It's the predecessor to video Kill the Radio Star, you can tell. And again, it is the whole lengthy song, the whole thing. So every time that somebody's like, we need to escape mentally from what's going on here in our house, let's go into this video world, and they don't cut back and forth. No, it's okay. Here's five minutes of Jefferson Starship performing this song. Yeah. And even the Jefferson Starship guys were like, sort of a weird trip. Like, we didn't get it, but we did it right. They gave us some money and some cocaine. Well, probably, we said, yeah. Chuck, I think that yet another segment like this is actually widely regarded as the high point of the whole thing. Oh, sure. Great. There is a cartoon, actually. Yeah. That lumpy watches. Yeah, lumpy, like the Imperial Guard is still reinstating my house. I think I'll entertain myself by watching a cartoon on my little I guess it was an iPad. And he watches this cartoon and it's actually remarkable for a number of reasons. It's the best part of the whole special. Yeah. Generally agreed upon as such. It's not just us. And it introduces Boba Fett. It's the first time Boba Fett ever makes an appearance in Star Wars universe. Yeah. It's actually not a bad and you can't find it in the one version I told you to watch. They removed it for copyright. But you didn't watch a separate version. Right. You can find it on its own. Yeah. And it's very much reminiscent of the cartoon style of the day, like a heman or something. For sure. It's even a little more artsy than that. Yeah. But it does have a plot that you can follow that makes sense as a Star Wars thing. And it introduces Boba Fett, like you said, and it's actually not bad. It's like Luke and R two and C three. PO. Yeah. They crash on a planet or something. Yeah. And Han and Chew, where you're in it. And it's the first time we see in Darth Vader, it's the first time we see Boba Fett and that he is just doing whatever he can do for money. Right. Like Luke trust him. At first, C Three PO is like, you sure you should trust him this quick? And he's like, oh, three PO. You and your non trusting ways. And then it turns out he's selling them out to the dark side. So it's basically boa. Fett is an allegory for George Lucas himself. So the cartoon comes and goes. And that was the thing that came at about the end of the first hour mark. And after that everybody just turned off their television sets. Yeah. I don't remember. Did you watch this when it came on? Yeah, I remember watching it, but I don't remember much about it. Like, if I made it through it all. I mean, I was seven and it was until ten, so I probably didn't make it through it all. Yeah. Plus you're probably disturbed. Who knows? I just remember that I have to ask my brother. He might have a memory of this. Oh, Betty does. I'm sure he met everybody afterward or something like that. It has a picture. Well, he was ten at that point, so Cynicism had become a thing in his life probably by then. Sure. When Cynicism kicks in to Scott holding on to 1415. Yeah, maybe. So, Chuck, the whole thing finally does in. And actually there's a guy, his name is Nathan Rabin. He writes over at the AV club. He had a great quote. He basically said that one of the great redeeming values of this special is that it does eventually end. Yeah. You know what the first part of the quote is, I'm not convinced the special wasn't ultimately written and directed by a sentient bag of cocaine. Yeah, go read his review of the Star Wars holiday special because he goes on to describe exactly what that must have been like. Development meeting, where the bag of cocaine is pacing back and forth, talking about what should happen. That's what it feels like, but it doesn't, and it ends. It takes this bizarre 2 hours and wraps it up in just a nice bizarre bow. Yeah. So what happens is eventually, Han Solo should we say spoiler alert? Eventually Han Solo and Chewy make it to the planet. They park on the far side of the planet because they know the imperial forces are there and the exercise will do to be good. Yeah. So they have to hike over there. They eventually make it back home. They find the storm troopers at their house, their tree hut. The paintings that set this up, I don't think we mentioned. I don't even call them matte paintings. It looks like someone painted something on the wall and they just put a camera in front of it. Pretty much, yeah. So they get back and Chewbacca han Solo hides around the corner. Chewbacca steps in front of his son to protect him. Sure. Han Solo jumps out, and the stormtrooper trips over a pile of logs and falls over the balcony and dies in a holiday special. So they wouldn't even not only could he not shoot first with GREETO, but they couldn't even have him, like, wrestle the stormtrooper and throw him off. He trips over a log. Right. And Han Solo has his hands thrown up like, Wasn't me. It might as well have been a banana peel. But again, this is basically produced by Vaudeville, starring Vaudevillians. Why not have the one death take place from basically what amounts to somebody slipping on a banana peel? Exactly. It's a perfect way to end it. So that guy basically represents the end of the imperial threat for the rest of Life Day. And we then see Life Day being celebrated, which is celebrated by lots of wiki's assembling in what looks like a giant Olive Mills portrait. And all of them are wearing red robes. Sure. And I know I'm up talking, and it's because my mind is still having trouble wrapping around, though. And then Princess Leia comes out with C. Three PO. Is Mark Hamill there? The whole gang is there. Okay. The whole gang is there. And then they all gather around to hear a great quote from Princess Leia, which we will read verbatim. This holiday is yours, but we all share with you the hope that this day brings us closer to freedom and to harmony and to peace. No matter how different we appear, we're all the same in our struggle against the powers of evil and darkness. I hope that this day will always be a day of joy in which we can reconfirm our dedication and our courage and more than anything else, our love for one another. This is the promise of the Tree of Life key song. Right. And we should also point out the Tree of Life has never been mentioned up to this point. No idea what that was. It makes a sudden appearance at the end. And when you said QSong, by Q song, you mean Princess Leia starts singing. Yes. And apparently that was one of the big contingencies on Carrie Fisher being involved. She was going through a phase where she was like, I kind of like singing. Bruce valanche calls it a Joni Mitchell period. Yeah. And she somehow convinced them to let her sing as Princess Leia. And she does. And again, I've said that she looks like she's on drugs. This is the point where she really does look like she's on drugs. And it's not just me. Other writers who have written reviews of this it's really obvious that she possibly smoked a decent amount of pot before she shot this scene. But she sings. Okay. It's fine. It's just the fact that Princess Leia's singing. And actually, Bruce Valanci had a really great quote, too. He says that she very much wanted to show this side of her talent and there was general dismay because this was not what we wanted Princess Leia to be doing. Yeah. She did it anyway. So the whole thing ends with her singing this song about Life Day which is set loosely to the John Williams Star Wars theme. Yeah. So along the way, the director, original director quit. A new director, Steve Binder was hired to finish the job and bring it in. And he did over the original $1 million budget. Of course, always he did bring it in. And at this point, George Lucas, he was working on Empire Strikes Back. He didn't know what was going on. He wasn't around for the shoot. No, it wasn't until aired, I think, that he actually saw it. Yes. And it was a travesty, obviously, if you haven't noticed that by now. Critics hated it. Star wars fans really hated it. Everybody hated the people who were in it. Hated it. Lucas hated it. Even Harvey Corman secretly hated it. Yeah. Even Harvey. Kaisell hated it. Actually, he loved it. But Lucas has been asked over the years about it a lot. And he doesn't talk about it much. But in 2005 and I don't buy this for a second he says it was an interview. He said his special from 1978 really didn't have much to do with us. That part is true. I can't remember what network it was going on, but it was a thing that they did. That's a lie. There's no way he doesn't know that. With CVS. Yes. We kind of just let them do it. I believe that it was done by I can't even remember who the group was. But there were a variety of TV guys. I'm sure he remembers a few of them. We let them use the characters and stuff. And that probably wasn't the smartest thing to do. But you learned from those experiences. Yeah. I think they even use some of the footage from the movie at the end. It looks like some of the space stuff, like a highlight reel. The gang well, it looked like some of the they had some insert shots of Imperial Cruisers and Tie Fighters and stuff. Remember when Chewbacca leans back and puts his hands behind that's in there? It's like just a highlight reel from the movie saying, feel like this? Go see the movie. Well, and also, that means it doesn't match the look of the rest of it at all. Yeah, that's true. It's just sort of inserted. They tried. They definitely tried. And George Lucas is totally full of it because in 1987, he told Starlog magazine that the Christmas special would be out on video cassette very soon. Yes. And in 2007, two years after that quote you just read where he's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Basically, he apparently considered releasing the Christmas special as a bonus on the DVDs of the first three. Right. But did not. And apparently Kerry Fisher told Lucas that if you want me to do DVD extras commentary. Yes, commentary. Then I want a clean, original copy of the holiday special. Yes. So why go ahead? So I can play at parties when I want people to leave. It's pretty great. It is. And there is one of those clean copies is floating around out there. So you can watch this in its entirety. Some of it, like the cartoon was removed due to copyright infringement and that kind of stuff. But as the case with the rest of the Internet, you can just go find it elsewhere and piece it together. There's also the original ads that aired in Baltimore that are just fascinating. Yeah, those are always fun. GM ads where one of the guys who's in quality control, he says, did you watch it? I don't think I saw that one. He goes, we really care about these cars. That's no jive man on the GM. It's like, serious. They tried to be hip. Yeah, it's pretty good stuff. Here's my final thought on it. I love it. It does not taint my Star Wars experience or my love for the franchise. Okay. And I'm glad it is out there because it's a fun little stain that shouldn't be taken too seriously. I think it adds to it, actually, because it's campy and awful and I don't know, somehow that enriches the rest of it. I'm with you. You like it? Oh, yeah. I mean, I watched it twice. I wouldn't have watched it a second. I wouldn't have made it through the first time. Let me take that back. I'm a pro. Yeah. So I would have made it through the first time. I wouldn't have watched it a second time if I wasn't there wasn't something about it. And I figured out I think the thing that I like the most about it is Lumpy Chewbacca's son, played by an actress named Patty Maloney, who, frankly, is hands down the best actor in the entire thing. Her responses and everything is just awesome. I think my favorite parts are well, there's a great Wilhelm scream. Yes, I know. Trips over the law. Jerry would not have noticed it. And then there's a part where all the Wiki dialogue you can't understand, but there's clearly one part where itchy and Lumpy are having exchange where Lumpy, you can make it out because I love you. Yeah, I noticed that, but it's covered up. But someone was like, we have to have at least one exchange where you sort of know what they're saying. Sure. Or they were like, I think she said, I love you. Should we have them redo it? And the director was like, no, I want to go and check. There's one other thing that I figured out from watching this. What's that? It's not readily apparent the whole thing is made all the more odd and that there's situation after situation after situation where we, as normal audiences, were trained to expect a laugh track, but there's not a laugh track. Had there been a laugh track, it might have been less bizarre, but the fact that it's missing, it agitates the mind. So it's this whole additional element that it is weird. I never thought about it. There's just weird moments of silence all throughout it. Yeah. Like when Art Carney is doing his thing. Yeah. Telling jokes. Yeah. Okay. I agree with you, Chuck. Don't take things too seriously. I think that's the great lesson in this. Yeah, it's the Lesson of Life Day. It is. And in 2007, Rift tracks the Great Mystery Science Theater 3000. Guys. Mike Nelson, Bill Corbin, and Kevin Murphy provided audio commentary for the full version of the special. So try and go grab that if you can, as well. Oh, you can. It's on their site because it's great. I think it's, like, $8. And those guys are awesome. I think Corbett listens to us. So hey, Corbett, you got anything else? No, I think we did this. There's some good stuff. Go read the Vanity Fair article. Han Solo Comedy Hour. There's a book called How Star Wars Conquered the Universe that has a very interesting chapter about this. That's where we found it asserted that George Lucas never said that he would match this thing with a sledgehammer. Right. And there's also an entire website dedicated to it. Star Wars Holidayspecial.com. Yeah. And if you want to know more about the Star Wars Holiday special, we have a ton of Star Wars stuff on how stuff works, by the way. Yeah, we have cool, sort of fun articles about the Death Star and Lightsabers videos with Holly fry from stuff you missed in history class. Yeah, she knows her stuff. She does. So you can just type Star Wars in the search bar@housefours.com, and it'll bring up some cool stuff for you. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. Just finished listening to the Voyage Manuscript podcast. Found it super interesting, especially the theories on its definition or origin. I know Josh mentioned Chuck theory, but being drug induced is somewhat surprising, or even unlikely, given a language in the manuscript follows linguistic laws only founded in the past 100 years. But if you think about it, it's tough to stray away from familiar structures, especially for something like language. I think back to when I was younger and friends invented their own languages, or even in writing a song or poetry. Creativity can sometimes be limited by what we know, so I just thought I'd contribute that to the conversation. Big thanks for all you guys do. I found the podcast after moving to San Diego in the last few years for some noise around my apartment. So basically, we were blocking out noise. We do that, and then as a way to get through traffic on my commute home from work, you guys are far more interesting and enjoyable than television and YouTube videos. Sure, I've listened to hundreds and will continue to listen to hundreds more. Keep on keeping on. That is from Amy J Muffet. Thanks a lot, amy in San Diego doesn't mean, like, places the whales in German or something like that. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at s yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstudgenal. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@householdworks.com. As always, join us at our homes. One on the web. Stuffyoushouldnow.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." | |
20f06718-121b-11eb-85ed-8b2e2e388cba | Short Stuff: Venus de Milo | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-venus-de-milo | Step into today's short stuff to learn all about the armless wonder! | Step into today's short stuff to learn all about the armless wonder! | Wed, 07 Apr 2021 21:59:47 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=21, tm_min=59, tm_sec=47, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=97, tm_isdst=0) | 10650477 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Neither one of us have forearms, which means that this is the short stuff about Venus de Milo. Let's go. That's right. Who resides de Lulu. Right. I think since 1821, when Louie no. Yeah. The 18th. Man, you threw me off. I always forget how to read those. It's been a while. Yeah. Louis the 18th donated Venus de Milo, one of the most famous, dare I say, statues in the world. Yeah. Also, just as a little aside, Chuck, if you ever kind of get tripped up by something like that and you're talking to somebody, just swap it out for, like, a word, like Louis the Magnificent. But say it authoritatively and the person will think that that's the name for that particular Louie. Right. Louis the overeater. The Venus de Milo first ended up in Paris in 1821, and apparently that was a really good timing because the nation of France is kind of in the doldrums as far as art is concerned. Right. Yeah. There's a gentleman that'll make a couple of appearances in this episode. His name is Andrew Stewart, and I think he's a professor. Right. Art historian and professor. Yeah. Professor of Greek Studies at UC Berkeley. Emeritus, too. Oh, wow. Yeah, the guy knows what he's talking about. Yeah. So apparently France, they needed their national pride kind of picked up. And apparently Venus went a long way toward doing that. Yeah. Because Napoleon had sacked a bunch of countries and city states and nation's art collection plundered. And after the French Revolution well, no, that was way after the French Revolution. After Napoleon was banished, we'll say that France had to give back a lot of that art. So the Louvre kind of got sacked in reversed, and then also the big dumb rival England from France's vantage point. Of course not. Mine had just acquired the Elgin Marbles, which meant that they had some sculpture by the greatest sculpture of antiquity known to humanity, faidius Faith. Yeah, I got it. So the Venus de Miley comes along and they're like, this is the most important thing ever found. Let's bandy it about as much as possible as such. Yeah. And the whole thing with Venus, Amylo, is sort of the mystery surrounding the origins and who the artist was and who maybe she may have been. And of course, the big question is two questions what happened to those arms? And what were those arms doing before they were broken off? Which, I have to admit, I'd never thought of until reading this. Oh, really? Yeah. I just never thought of her arms were doing anything of note. It's kind of weird, now that I think about it. But the funny thing is, like you said, she shrouded in mysterious to her identity. But the one thing we know for certain she is not is Venus, the goddess of love to Rome. She was Greek and produced by the Greeks. So she would have been aphrodite at best. But we're not even sure she's aphrodite. She could be a number of other people that have been proposed or number of other goddesses. It didn't even have to be a goddess. Right? No, it didn't. I saw that she could have been an everyday person. But also she was found on Milosh, the Greek island, which was really engaged in the sea as far as trade and fishing and all that. So some people have supposed that she was amphetidi. Is there an R in there? Amphatriti. Thank you, Chuck. She's the goddess of the sea. Poseidon's old lady, as far as bikers would say. Yeah. And Venus was always thought to be classical, but I think they did enough digging and found that she was actually neoclassical and not classical. Although they say they sometimes still refer to her as a masterpiece of the classical genre. Yeah. Because she, again, kind of carries France's national ego on her shoulders. So the idea that she was created by some unknown master far back in antiquity, in the classical period, is kind of part of Frances pride in this thing. But supposedly yeah. They figured out there was a German archaeologist named Adolf. Seriously? Fert Wrangler. I love that man's last name who's been there. That's even better. Yeah. Who basically said, yes, she's neoclassical. You can tell from how she's dressed. But then I guess they also, when she was found, they discovered a pedestal that had the sculptors signature that showed that she was very clearly created by a guy named Alexandros of Magnesia. Not to be confused with the milk of Magnesia, but then they lost it. They conveniently lost this pedestal and said, no, this is clearly created by one of the masters. We just don't know which one. Right. So good set up. I think we should take a little break and talk about those arms and dine know about the arms right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh? Yeah. Again, never thought that her arms were doing anything. I think I just assumed she was being like, hey, how's it going? I'm just holding my hands out here. Or maybe like, I don't know, kind of thing. But there has been a lot of debate about what was going on with her arms. Apparently, at some point, an arm that would fit this statue, the Venus de Milo, an arm holding an apple was found. And they think it's possible some people think it's possible that that was originally attached to the Venus to myla yeah. And we should also point out there were some other things missing from the original statue. Like, originally, she supposedly had metal jewelry, bracelet, earrings, and a headband because there are little fixation holes on those places in her body. And they think that she might have also been painted at one point, and now that had faded away, and then the arms were I guess maybe some people might think, if they've never looked into it, that she never had the arms, but they were broken off because you can see where there were the dowel rods and everything, because it wasn't carved as one big piece. These arms were put on afterward. But, yeah, like you said, they found an arm with an apple. And some people were like, well, yeah, she was holding an apple in one of those hands, which actually fits. There's a Greek myth called the Judgment of Paris about a mythological contest between Aphrodite, the goddess of love, hera, Zeus wife, and Athena, the goddess of war. And this contest between them was won by Aphrodite, and the prize was an apple. So this would have kind of commented on The Judgment of Paris and Aphrodite winning this. And apparently it's symbolic of, like, the choice that people have in life or that men back in ancient Greece had. Right. So your choice in life was between love, war, and politics, right. Aphrodite, Athena, or Hera and the Aphrodite one, they wanted to live with their heart. That's what the statue symbolize in that sense. Yeah. And that's one take on it. I like this other one a lot. This woman, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who's professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College, which I used to live near, so I'm all about that. Okay. She says you know what I think? And she even did, like, this 3D renderings to sort of prove her point. She said I think she was a regular lady who was weaving thread. And she said if you look at the angle of the back and ladies were doing all this textile work back then, if you look at her positioning and the way she was leaning and even where exactly she was looking, it looks to me like she was spinning thread. And if you look online, she has their pictures of her 3D rendered spinning the thread. And it looks real enough to me for someone who knows nothing about thread spinning. Well, also, not only that, apparently the musculature of her shoulders and arms would be about what you would expect for somebody who is spinning. She makes a weird decision. Yeah, well, she makes a really good case. But also, this doesn't even need to be a statue of just an ordinary person, because apparently she says Aphrodite was also the goddess of spinning as well as the goddess of procreation and love. So this would fit still anyway, yeah, that's a good point. I did see another thing that said from the angle of her back, that they said it's one of those things where, retroactively, you look back and, like, did Mona Lisa have a disease or something? And they said, Did Venus de Milo have some sort of spinal condition? Because when you look at the way her back is twisted, and angled. It is a very irregular route for the spine, but it's also a statue. Is it one of those things that would be explained by the spinning position? Well, I mean, she says it matches what could have been a spinning position, but a spinning position could have been hard on your back. Maybe. I don't know. I would guess it would be hard on your back for sure. It doesn't sound like something I'd want to do. So the Venus. If you haven't ever seen it, go see it. It's pretty neat. It's in the loo. You can get there pretty easily, especially if you are vaccinated against COVID-19. Since I said COVID-19, 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, you." | |
How Mummies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mummies-work | A mummy is a human being whose soft tissue has been preserved after death, and there are mummies around the world -- including natural mummies, as well as corpses that have been intentionally embalmed. Join Chuck and Josh to learn more.. | A mummy is a human being whose soft tissue has been preserved after death, and there are mummies around the world -- including natural mummies, as well as corpses that have been intentionally embalmed. Join Chuck and Josh to learn more.. | Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:09:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=14, tm_min=9, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=74, tm_isdst=0) | 37570836 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today, this July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. We're about to do this stuff you should know. Thanks. Yeah. Did you like that? I did. How are you doing, man? Great, now that I've switched out my foul smelling microphone cover. Yeah, this is actually take two things. I'm not getting near it, but I can imagine. Yeah. Something's future factor on the mic cover. The P clipper cover. Yeah. Weird. You know, in real studios, they changed out every now and then. These things have been running for at least a year. $0.50. All right. What's your chuck, it's your sterling intro. Speaking of $0.50, do you remember when we were talking about fossils? Oh, yeah. And we said that every once in a while something happens so that a fossil naturally occurs and that it's desiccated, the skin is dried out. Yeah. That's a mummy. Yeah. Who knew? I knew. Yeah, me too, actually, when we talked about it, I was like, we have to do how mummies work. And here we are. I'm kind of surprised this one has slipped under the radar for so long. Yeah. Right up our alley. Yes. I went and looked. I'm like, surely we do have it. And that's where it was gruesome. Yeah. It's like stuff you should know. Died in the Wool. Yeah. And you're about to hear why, dear listeners, because we're about to talk about all the things that happened to a corpse after death, which we've done before, but we need to go over again. Mummies are cool, though. They are very cool. So, Chuck, let's say that you were stabbed in the stomach enough time so that you could not move any longer. You couldn't walk back home. It was on the woods. And the one person you're with, the very person who stabbed you, left you there to die. You bleed out, you're dead, things start happening to your body, right? Yeah. Pretty quickly. Up first is autolysis. Yes. That's kind of gruesome. That's when your organs that have digestive enzymes actually say, well, this is what we do, so we're going to start digesting the organs. Right. And not like my stomach is eating itself because I'm hungry. Like my stomach is actually eating itself. It's rupturing and oozing, and it's it's being reduced to nothing while that's going on. And that actually, I think, if I remember correctly, that kind of helps kickstart the process of future faction. Right? Yeah. Auto license starts within a few hours after you're dead. The body knows. And if you want, like, a really big overview of this or an in depth look at what happens to the body immediately after death, you should listen to our rigor mortis podcast, if you haven't already. Yeah. Body Farms. We talked about it in there, too, so yes, putrefaction you're right. Is follows autolysis, and that is when bacteria does its little job and reduces everything to a skeleton. And depending where you are, this can happen in a few months. Right. Depending on where you are. Now, we as human beings are a subtropical species, right, Chuck? You know that. Sure. So we are designed, if you believe in that kind of thing, to decompose most readily in a warm, humid climate. That's where the bacteria that breaks down our tissue lives or thrives. Moisture, warmth. If you have cold, dry things change a little bit. Like a refrigerator. Exactly. Which is a good place to store body if you want to preserve it. Or food if you want to eat it. That's a good point. To store body if you want to eat it. For an in depth look at that. You might want to listen to our Cannibalism podcast, though. That's right. But let's say you don't have a refrigerator. Nature provides it for you on some occasions. There's the iceman, right? Yeah. That's the iceman. Yeah. 1991 in the Italian Alps. This dude is very well preserved, natural mummy. Amazing. Died and basically got buried in ice and kind of stayed that way. Yeah. I think they have the impression that he fell into a crevasse, died, but it was during, like, a blizzard, maybe. And he was covered with snow and ice that stuck around for millennia. But he's so well preserved. You can see the tattoos on his skin still. Yeah. And we knew, hey, they tattooed people 5300 years ago. Exactly. Little window into what life was like for iceman. Yeah. He had, I think, a nice little set of arrows and his bow and Copper Age European guy. I think he had a wallet size photo of you as well. Of me? Yeah. He was from the future. That's what I think. It just blew my mind. Chuck. Good. So, Ice, as we talked about in fossils, too, is a very good preserve. Sure. But nothing does it. Oh, Pete. Bugs, too. Remember I finally showed you that picture of tolerance again? If you have not gone and looked up to a man, it's awesome. Like his whiskers are still there. And he lived a couple of thousand years ago. Right. What's his name? Did they name him just Tolerance? Tolerance. I would have named him Pete. It's terrible. So those two are pretty good, but the natural money preserving is sand. Yeah. I had no idea. The reason why sand is such a great preserve is because it actually wicks away and absorbs and just removes any type of humidity in the body, which allows the body to desiccate, which means that there is no place for bacteria to live, which means the tissue remains intact. And that's all mummy is it's a corpse with its tissue intact? Well, and this kind of kickstarted the whole artificial mummification craze in Egypt, because at first they buried bodies, they weren't in caskets, they were buried in the hot sand. And that preserved the body for so long. They said, well, hey, if the body is preserved, and that means the spirits preserved, and all of a sudden we have new views on the afterlife and life. Right. So what they decided to do, I guess what you just said, though, is that mummification, the whole concept of mummies that we have that was so engraved in the Egyptian culture happened by accident, right? Yeah. So they figured this out. So they start purposefully burying people in the sand with the intent of them being mummified. Right. But the problem is, somewhere along the way, they began to have horrible thoughts of their dead relatives choked with sand. Right. So they started to say, maybe we should put some sort of barrier up in between the corpse and the sand. And that led to caskets. Right? Yeah. It started with just like a wicker covering, then that eventually led to wooden boxes. But here's the rub. Now the body is not preserved. Now the body rots, desiccates. It's just a normal corpse. Now it becomes a skeleton. You put a barrier between the body and the preserve in the form of a tomb. So what's an Egyptian to do, then? Well, the Egyptians, being the very pious culture that they were, and the very intuitive and smart culture that they were, for that, you should go read. Did the Greeks get all their ideas from the Africans? Good article. Did you read them? Yeah. Did we do that podcast? Oh, man, let's do that. Okay. They decided that they needed to rectify their religious beliefs with their problem. They need to preserve bodies. And what did they do? Well, they said, maybe we can replicate this natural process that we've discovered through man made artificial means and trial and error. Yeah, it's called embalming, Josh. And they actually figured out, Chuck, that one of the problems with the natural desiccation in the desert was that the skin turned like this crisp brown right. Like over baked chicken. That's exactly what it looks like, actually. Yeah. And with these embalming techniques that they eventually mastered, they could preserve a body better than it could be preserved naturally. Which is man conquering nature. That's right. Conquering death, even. Well, come on. It's close. They didn't have huge success at first. They would embalm the bodies mainly to keep it away from the elements, wrap it in linen soaked in resin, and they would create nice little shapely forms that look kind of like people. But that didn't really do a whole lot because the bandages didn't really halt the composition. They basically figured out that it happens from the inside out. Right. It took them a few centuries, if not millennials. They're basically wrapping it up, and it's just disintegrating within the bandages at first. Right. But those bandages are important because they stick around pretty much the whole time. Same with the resin. Right. Yes. So those two very early embalming techniques or mummification techniques stuck around. But it was a big leap when they figured out, oh, wait a minute, it's going on inside. And so we need to start addressing that by removing organs. Right. And it's about here, I think, that we hit the middle kingdom, and, like, the mummies that we think of were produced from the 18th to 20th dynasties of the middle kingdom. Yeah. That was when the heyday of mummification. Right, right. Which was between 1570 and 1075 BC. Yes. The mummies that we think of, the ones that are still around, like, really well preserved today, they were preserved during this time. Right, right. So what do you do when you realize that everything bad is happening to a corpse from the inside out? How do you address that? So we just walk through the process one by one. The gruesome process. Yeah. Okay. First thing you do is you take it, and it varies the different processes. And within the processes, they had things that they would say, like religious rights that they would go through as well. It's a very sacred process, but they would take the body generally to the Redland Desert region. It's not near a whole lot of people, so people aren't grossed out. But it is near the Nile River. They needed the Nile River. Well, we'll see that in a second. Step one. Step one. You need the Nile for step one. They think they did it in open tents, obviously, to get some good ventilation going. And the first place they took the body was to the ibu. The place of purification. Yeah. That was basically the Nile, or the place near the Nile where they rinse the body with you, wash the body off. Yes. It's like a rebirth. Symbol of rebirth. Right. So the corpse was hastened, or some of the spirit was hastened in the afterlife. And we should probably say here, so it doesn't get too confusing, there were three spirits that the Egyptians believed comprised a person, right. The Ka, the BA and the AK. Yeah. It's always tricky to pronounce that. Right. So I think with this purification process, the CA or the Bach or the AK were moved along to the next world. But the Ka, that was the one that was inextricably linked with the corpse, which became the whole reason for mummification. As long as the corpse was preserved, the car was preserved and the afterlife, the person could live in the afterlife. But once the corpse died, the car died and the second death was final. Which is why they wanted to preserve bodies in the first place. Right. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like the opposite of ashes to ashes and dust to dust. So after they've washed the body and sort of reborn it in the rivers of the Nile, they carry the body to the pernifer. And that is the house of Mummification. And this is the basement of the fisher house, basically 6ft under the fishers. Yeah. This is in the basement. This is where Rico and the gang would get to work. They would lay it on a wooden table. The body, they removed the brain by hammering a chisel to the bone of the nose. I knew that already before this article. Christian Slaters in one of the creep shows or Amazing Stories or Tales from the Crypto movie, pump up the volume. It might have been that, but I think it was like a smaller vignette, like a mini movie within the larger movie. And it's called, like, lot number Nine or whatever, gleaming the Cube. No, that's called Brotherhood of the Tiger now. I think they changed the name. Anyway, there's a mummy who's hell bent on taking other people's brains using these hooks or whatever. Well, and that's exactly what they do. They make a nose hole basically larger than the nostrils. They insert a big hook, iron hook and start scooping it out. Eventually they go down to a spoon and eventually they just rent out the remaining bits of brain. And what's funny is hold on. They discard the brain because they thought, I don't know why we have this stuff in our head, but we probably don't need it in the afterlife. Which is kind of unusual for the Egyptians because they preserve organs. Yeah. But the brain and what's funny. Though. I think what we just kind of meander path that we should kind of meditate on for a second. Chuck. Is that they get to a point where they fill the head with water. I imagine. Close the nose and the mouth and shake the head around to slosh all the stuff out and then lean the head over and let all the last bits come out. Yeah, that's how I would do it. I wonder if they did shots of that stuff. It was like part of the ceremony. I would draw the line there. Would do well, they probably just thought, I don't know. They didn't even know what the brain was. Yeah, that's true. Just waste. So the brains out. Josh then they take a blade made from obsidian, sacred stone, cut a little incision on the left side, and reach in and start pulling out the organs that they can get to. Right. And then preserving those, like you said, except for the kidneys, because they didn't think they were important either. The kidneys are important, but it's not like brain important. Well, you need kidneys to live. I'm sure they preserve the appendix. Yeah. That was probably the most holy of the organs. So they actually, when they preserve these things, they would wrap them in resin, strips of linen. Right. Basically, they would mummify each organ, and then they put them in canopic jars. Basically, it was like, here's your body, and then also here are your organs. Don't forget they leave the heart, though, because they thought the heart was linked to the soul and the spirit and kind of on the money there. So these organs take up space in our chest and abdominal cavities. So they would actually stuff the body with incense and other materials as well, right? Yeah. Well, first they'd rinse it. I forgot they took out the lungs to the abdomen. Yeah, right there. You can't get along, right. A little side slit. And then they would rent the chest cavity with palm wine, and then they would stuff it. They would take that, basically. Yeah. Straw. It didn't say what actually. Just said other materials. I would use straw. Maybe frankincense little mer to complete the trilogy. 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. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner. And there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage Miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs and with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first. Because when you earn 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. That kept the body from like, caving in on itself, basically maintaining a little bit of shape. And then here is the key. This is the key to modification. And as a matter of fact, I was going to say it now I found it on the Internet. There is a step by step, very easy to follow recipe on, I think, wikihow, which I don't normally go on, but it's the only place I can find a recipe for mummifying. A chicken using the Egyptian method. And it calls for nature, right? Yeah, that's the key. Nature is this basically a compound that the Egyptians figured out they could gather and combine from the Nile, which is basically baking soda, sodium bicarbonate and salt, table salt, sodium chloride. You mix the two together and it becomes this perfect preservant. So they would put nature in powder, which is like this just accelerated the technique of mummification by light years. Sure. And they would cover the body with this stuff and leave it and it would just completely dry the body out. Right? Yeah. This took about 40 days. They had to guard the body while this was going on, obviously, because they didn't want vultures digging through the nature for what lies beneath. After the 40 days, they moved the body then to the Wavet, which is the house of purification. Yank all that incense and the stuffing out, refill it with the nature resin soaked linen and other materials. Again, whatever these mysterious things are. Then they would sew all the incisions up, cover the skin with resin and then say, hey, it's time to wrap this puppy. Yes. And this is where we get the idea for the mummy, our modern idea of a mummy always wearing bandages. They're always coming off. Yeah. You can just see the eyes. Maybe some teeth or something. So this is where we're at. They're at the bandaging procedure. That 35 or 40 days. While the nature of powder was doing its work, wiping away all of the basically acting as the desiccant, the family of the deceased was going around town going, do you have any linens we can have forever? Yeah. Do you have some linens we can have? How do you like your linens to spend eternity in heavens above? With our dad? They collected about 4000 off top of my head. That's about how much they gather sure. Of linen. And we bring it to the embalmers and the embalmers would say, hey, we like this piece that piece is horrible. You're really going to bury your dad in this? And they would take the best stuff and they would cut it into or they would tear them into strips three to eight inches wide of bandages and they would start the rapping. Which would take a little while, right? Yeah. It takes a week or two, I guess, probably, depending on how big the body is. Common sense. Start with the hands and feet. All this is the initial under wrapping, I guess. You wrap everything individually, each little finger, each little toe, everything's wrapped. And then once everything's wrapped individually, they do a whole body wrap, applying new layers, coating the linen with, again, the hot resin to keep everything in place. Uttering spells. Sometimes they would wrap amulets over different parts of the body, wrap it up in there with you, protect you in the next world, that kind of thing, right. And then presto, change. O, you are a mummy. And before we go further, the process we just described, this really ornate, wonderful lengthy process where this is going. You would think about it. There are a lot of Egyptians running around and a lot of them died on any given day and there was a lot of work to be done. So this process that we just described was for the people who had lots of money. For some reason, the wealthy have always been revered, right. And gotten special treatment. Right. If you were just an ordinary schmo like me or Chuck, you were going to get the budget package, which is basically like, instead of carefully removing all of the organs, preserving each one, they would inject this oil mixture into your cavities, let it sit for a few days. It will stop up all your orifices first so it wouldn't leak out. Thank you. I don't know how they did that. I guess with other materials. Right. So they would stop you up full of oil, let you sit for a few days, and then unstopp your orifices and let all the oil drain out. And it would carry the liquefied organs and tissue out with it. It's a lot easier, a lot faster. So even this many thousands of years ago, you get what you pay for. Exactly. That's pretty sad. Yeah. There's always been a budget package, or maybe that's a good thing, that it wasn't only just reserved. Like, if you don't have any money, you just can't get mummified. That's the way to go, they thought, you know what? Let's think of a cheaper way to do this for you folks, right? Let's just fill you up with oil, stuff up your orifices and give you a good shake. So you're prepared, you're all wrapped. However they got your organs out, you're bandaged, and you are now about to be outfitted what's called a cartridge cage, which is kind of like a breastplate, some cool, like, forearm armor, leg armor, pretty much this thing that's going to hold your body together for a while. Right. And a funerary mask, which is like the famous masks we think of when we think of, like, King Tut, like it's a death mask. And these were extremely important because they directed the spirit, the right body, afterwards. So it was in a person's visage or possibly that of a god, but the spirit would be in on what to look for. They would know that. That's how they knew it was who. Sure. This guy is supposed to either look like Josh or Anubis. Either way, I think that's him right over there. Right. So let's grab him. And speaking of Anubis, you would be committed to your tomb following a funeral procession where you were carried in your suit, right. Yeah. That's what you think of with King Tut. That's the casket that looks like a person, like the gold casket in the shape of a human. Right. It's a suit that would be carried to your tomb and there would be a priest dressed as the Jack O'God Anubis, where there was the ceremony of the Mouth, which is pretty cool, because there was some sort of weird understanding, I guess, that you had died. Right. And now certain things had to be restored. And the ceremony of the mouth was the passing over of sacred objects across the Stewart's face, the casket's face, and it would restore your five senses. Yeah, because you need that. Exactly. And this is weird. Chuck, did you find this odd that your casket was placed leaned up against the wall? Yeah, I would do that while I was getting everything ready, and then I would lay it down. So it almost made me think that they kind of forgot, and they say, oh, well, we left that first one leaning against the wall, so I guess that's the way we do it. Yeah. But that's not true. No, I'm sure they had a very good reason, probably because it was easier to just walk up right out of there. Well, yeah, I would think they wanted to leave it upright, but standing it upright, they didn't have like the perfectly level floor probably wasn't too secure, so they just gave it a little lean. Sure. Little help. Which is far less secure than just laying it down on the floor. Following that, your furniture, don't forget your canopic. Jar of organs laid next to you. Little food, maybe. Sure. Your furniture. Basically the stuff you're going to need in the next life to be comfortable. Yeah. And you're set your tomb is sealed up and it's probably inscribed with something along the lines of as for anybody who shall enter this tomb in his impurity, I shall bring his neck as a birds. As a standard mummy curse. Yeah. A mummy curse on the tomb. Yes. People became in the 1920s, Howard Carter dug up King Tut's tomb and people were just crazy for mummies at the time. Westerners were like, oh, my gosh, this is so interesting. This curse thing is so neat. Laurel and Hardy are doing mummy curse movies, and a microbiologist from Germany named Gautard, Kramer or Cramer said there may be something to this curse thing because they bury people with food, produces mold spores. So when they unearth this tomb, all these mold spores are released into the air and it might kill you. So it's not that there's something to the curse, but it could lead people to tie the two together. Well, if you unearth the tomb, then you die. Certainly there's something weird about the Carter Expedition. Who on earth king Touch Tomb in 1922. Because eleven of the people who were involved, not necessarily present, but involved, died within seven years. Eleven people in a canary. His canary died right when they entered the tomb. A cobra ate it. Bad luck. It is. And then it just went downhill from there. So there's all sorts of explanations, but it's also oddly intriguing. And like you said, Egypt mania gripped the west. They loved it. All right. And there was actually unraveling parties where people get their hands on mummies and then, like, unbandage them, see what's in there, which is like, that's not what you do with a dead body. Desecration. Yeah, it's bad luck, too. So that pretty much is the Egyptian mummy. And that's what we mainly think of. But they weren't the first people to do this kind of thing. No. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. The oldest mummies actually on the planet are from northern Chile. The chinchoro people. Okay, what if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more Sherpaline jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule off their own sleeves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Itautomation josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner, and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage Bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table. Because there's so much world to see and the city Advantage platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. They started doing this about 2000 years before the Egyptians but they were not very much like the Egyptians. They basically dismembered and disemboweled the body, put it back together again, sewed it up and then covered it with black mud. Well, they put it back together with like, straw and sticks. That's what they had. It was like they made cute dolls out of like these bodies basically covered it with black mud and shaped it into a human form. But they believe that this wasn't necessarily done to preserve the body for the afterlife. Maybe it was more for the people left on the planet Earth to mourn the death of their loved one, keep them around a little longer. Which is very sweet because they saw evidence of retouching of the paint, signs of wear and tear. So that basically they were kept in households for a little while, they think. Basically it's statues. Freaky statues. Yeah. And that was 5000 BC. Which is 2000 years before the Egyptians came onto the scene at all. That's right. And the would you say the Chincharo people? Yeah, they set a lot I think I went with Chinchorro. But someone will point that out if I'm wrong. They're not the only ones in South America who got into modification either. The Incas very famously did as well. They had a little habit of sacrificing children to their gods and culture relative isn't chuck through this process. Like the child and the child's family were just treated like royalty for this. It was a high honor to be chosen to be sacrificed to the gods and they would get the child really wasted on this fermented corn concoction. Take the child up to the cave. Sometimes I think they would whack the kid over the head or other times they would get the child so wasted that they just would leave them there in the cold temperatures exposed to the freezing temperatures and the child would die of exposure. I can't say jerks about this. You can jerks. But there's a very famous mummy called the Maiden who's a 15 year old girl and she was sacrificed as thanks to the gods for a really good corn harvest by the Ink, as in Peru, 500 years ago. Did you see that picture I sent you? Yeah. Was that her? It's like looking at a girl who's sleeping. But she's been dead for 500 years. Yeah. If you've been to South America, as I know you have, or Central America she looks just like one of those girls you might see down there. Like a Central American Indigenous person. She's probably short then. She looks kind of short. Yeah. That'd be funny if she's like six too. But then moving on up, there's also one and it didn't make it into this article. But, Chuck, I've been there myself. Guanajuato, Mexico, has a mummy museum, and they have the world's smallest mummy. I think it might have been a fetus, really, but they were all naturally mummified to the great surprise of the 19th century townspeople who had to move a graveyard and found, like, okay, there's a lot of mummies. How big was it? It was very small and object. Coffee cup. Coffee cup. Okay. Standard coffee cups. Got you. But then there's, like, people, they're still wearing their suits. And it's really amazing. You walk into this little Mexican building and there's just dead people everywhere, just behind this glass. It's very neat. If you ever go to Guanawato, Mexico, you have to go to the mummy museum. I think I should. Yeah. Lady Chang. China. Chinese. They were lousy with Mummies. Yeah, they love to mummify people. She was an aristocrat from about 2000 years ago, and she is believed to be about the best preserved ancient mummy so far. Did you see her picture? Yeah. With her tongue sticking out pretty well. Mummified and her hair still. Yeah. They haven't studied her a whole lot. The Chinese haven't, so they don't know exactly how she was prepared. But they do think that mercury and the embalming fluid might have something to do with it. I would imagine that will do it. Mercury, yeah, sure. And also in China, mummies have kind of rewritten history a little bit. Some very ancient mummies from 1000 BC. Before 1000 BC, they found some people of Indoiranian descent. They linked them to basically Mesopotamia through tattoos and other implements that they had in the shape of their face, the way they looked. Yes. And they figured out, like, wait a minute, these people were like Indo European traders. What are they doing here? And they just made their way to settle right in the deserts of China before the Han Dynasty ever showed up. So that kind of changed things a little bit. I'm sure if we talk about mummies, we got to talk about the more modern day mummies because of the big interest in mummification, thanks to Tut being found, was the big one. That's right around the time Lennon died in Russia. And they said, you know what? Let's preserve Lenin and display them in the Kremlin. So that's exactly what they did. And we do not know exactly how because it's an ancient Russian secret. I don't know about ancient, but it's a Russian secret. And it's ongoing because they continue to immerse him in a preservative bath every now and then. Andy wears a waterproof suit. That's right. And if you've ever seen pictures of linen or Eva Peron, they look pretty lifelike. Yeah, but hers is way cool. They basically replaced all the fluids in her body with wax. Right. Which would be a very modern take on the ancient practice. There's also incorruptible corpses of the Catholic faith. What's that? It's basically a person who is so pure on Earth that their body just didn't rot. And there's examples of those. There's one prince, he's like a child prince. I think he died more than 1000 years ago or about 1000 years ago. And his body is totally preserved. And there's no evidence that he was embalmed or anything like that. What they don't understand there are some bodies out there that just defy logic. I wrote an article and you should read it. It's a miracle. How can a court be incorruptible? Are you keeping track of these awesome ideas? Where's our person? Where's our boy? Charlie? No. Our Boy Friday. Okay, Charlie. Got you. And then Josh, finally we have in the 1970s, some scientists discovered something called plastinization. And that is when all of the water and lipids in the body cells are replaced with polymers and you basically become like plastic. Very flexible and durable. You don't decompose and you don't stink too bad. And that is used to preserve bodies mainly for anatomical research at this point. Or for bodies world or bodies. The exhibit you've been? No, I've never been. But that's how they do it. It is really something. I mean, you're right there up on this corpse missing its skin and like, it is a dead person. It's really interesting. The one that I went to in Atlanta, it's two eyeballs and they're connected to the spinal cord, which is going down. And then those coming off the spinal cord are the major nerves of the central nervous system. And that's it. And it's just laid out perfectly and really kind of surprising. I'm shocked that I haven't been to that yet. It's pretty cool. It's definitely worth going to I did the dialogue in the dark thing. I have not been there. That's next door. Yeah. Was that kid, you know, I was a little disappointed. Yeah. Not in the exhibit itself, but the way they do it. I think it could have been, like, really awesome. But the way they do it wasn't as awesome as it could have been. Just my take you, me and her sister went and she said they would have liked it. But there was this very loud, drunk woman who kept falling into people they wanted to kill near the dark weather. You could just kick her in the shin and run away. We should mention Dr. Bob Breyer real quick, though. He is an Egyptologist who in 1994 said, you know what? I want to try and replicate the Egyptian technique. And he did it with a chicken. And he did it was pretty successful at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And one of the things he learned from doing this that the way the body ends up looking as a result of the mummification process, not the fact that it's been in the ground for thousands and thousands. Like the shriveled, wrinkled look. Yeah. So that's one thing I learned. That's a big thing to learn, though. I mean, think about it. Egyptology hasn't really advanced much in the last 50 years, is it? Not that I know of. I know Geraldo didn't find squat. No, he didn't. No, that wasn't Haroldo. Geraldo looked for Capons. I watched that one. That was fun. I was a youngster and I was so excited. Yeah, but so disappointed when it happened. Just a total disaster. Well, that's it for mummies, right? Chuck, you got any more? Are you mummied out? Yeah. All right. If you want to learn more about mummies, check out M-U-M-M-I-E-S in the handysearch bar. Howsoftworks.com you can learn how to modify a chicken on wikihow. And what else? I think there might be a website for the mummies of Guanawanto that's I think G-U-A-N-A-J-U-A-T-O maybe. Sounds good to me. Does it? You know, I think Matt and Rachel from Cool stuff on the planet did a thing on the Egyptian mummy. Oh yeah. Or not. Egyptian Mummy Museum. Want to want stuff on the planet? Check it out. That is definitely worth watching as well. Worth watching. Anyway, and I said handy search bar somewhere in there. Which means, I guess, time for listener main. Hi, Chuck. And Josh and Jerry. My name is Mattie. I'm twelve years old. I love your podcast. I wait all day at school to get home so I can check for new podcasts. They always help me fall asleep. But not because you're boring, but because it gets my brain thinking and the brain gets tired. That's cool, man. I was wondering if you give a shout out to my best bud, Casey. Casey has a tumor in his leg and is in a wheelchair. He tells me he is very miserable, but at least he gets to listen to me talk about you guys. And fun fact, he also has a pet rooster named Lewis. Sweet. And Louis is house trained, so he just runs around the house. That is awesome. House train chicken. So please give Casey a shout. And Louis, well, make him feel better. It would make his day, or even his year. And tell me which podcast you're going to put it on because I am just twelve and some of them are inappropriate. Was this one appropriate? I don't know. Probably not. The shaking the brain part out. We'll figure it out. Okay, let's tell them to just listen to the listener mail and let his parents listen to the rest. And also a suggestion. The infamous story of that French queen who said let the meat cake I don't remember her name. Marie Antoinetoine. That was Kristen Dunst. And remember, I do not have Facebook, so please answer me by email. She says, oh, is it she is a DD or TT? It's DD. Okay. And then her signature is potato and a mushroom for Maggie. I don't even know what that means. All the kids in Santa. Really? All right. Potato and a mushroom, everybody. You said Maggie? It's Maddie. Right. Maddie. Okay, Maddie. Thanks for that email, Maddie. Did we give a shout out to Louis and Casey? Well, Casey, we hope you're feeling better, but I'm sorry to hear about that and hope you're up and around before, you know, take care of Lewis. Yes, if you're an Egyptologist and you have some good mummy stories, we want to hear it. You know what? If you have any good mummy story, we want to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and send that email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more howstoftworks. Check out our blog on the houseupworks.com homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this 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." | ||
How Lighthouses Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-lighthouses-work | People have been burning fires on cliffs as long as other people have used boats, but after the Age of Exploration, lighthouses took their unmistakable form and the great stories of the people who kept the lights around the world began. | People have been burning fires on cliffs as long as other people have used boats, but after the Age of Exploration, lighthouses took their unmistakable form and the great stories of the people who kept the lights around the world began. | Thu, 30 Jun 2016 13:44:31 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=13, tm_min=44, tm_sec=31, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=182, tm_isdst=0) | 42967947 | 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 Gary over there. And this is the Lighthouse episode, take one. Can I just go ahead and say that I love lighthouses? Do you love already before you fell in love with them and researching both? I grew up going to Honey Island, South Carolina, not every year, but we went quite a few times near Beaufort and they have a lighthouse. And it was one of my favorite things to do as a kid was climb the lighthouse. And if I'm near a lighthouse now, ever, I will go climb it the outside. I will seek it out and then shimmy up the outside like spiderman. No, I will seek it out and go look at it and then climb it. And this article just made me love it even more. I have a precious memories lighthouse too. Let's hear. Marblehead lighthouse near Katava Island. Which is where? What state? By sandusky in Ohio. Okay. On Lake Erie. Yeah. And it was same thing when I was a kid. We used to go vacation on Kataba Island and we would go to that lighthouse every once in a while. I don't remember ever going inside, though. Really? It might not have been open because there's no reason why you would go to a lighthouse more than once and not go inside, climb it up. But I don't remember ever going in. But maybe you're just like, yeah, it looks nice from down here. Yeah, I would have climbed it. I was a climber. Yeah, me too. But I think the other thing that factors in for me is I really love antiquated systems that could still be viable, like post apocalypse. You could fire up lighthouses again. Sure. Yeah. And it would work. Yeah, it would. And I think that's a weird thing with me, that I love stuff that's still around that you could use, if need be. Right. I've never really looked at my environment that way to see what I was going to be standing after an apocalypse. Maybe I should. Well, I don't know about standing, but let's say there was some weird domino effect type thing, like that movie where electricity and Internet and everything went out right. And people turned on each other. You could still light a lighthouse and Bobby could find their safe harbor. What movie are you talking about? The domino effect. Oh, really? There's a movie like that called that? Yeah. I didn't know that. I think it was called with Elizabeth and Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks. Kyle what's? His face? McLaughlin and he is so great. Is the Mareim Portlandia? Yeah, he is good. I love that guy. I think it's called the domino effect. If not, that was essentially what happened. There was a domino effect like a blackout, right? Yeah. And it created a domino effect that things kind of spun out of control. You're talking about? Fury Road. Right. Sorry, Chuck. I love lighthouses, too, but I knew virtually nothing about them until researching this. If you think about them, though, it's like you were saying, after the Apocalypse, they'll still be standing. You just need to replace the electricity with the fire. And then you'd have basically what lighthouses have always been, which is some sort of highly visible signal. For most of the time, it was a fire. Either a wood fire, coal fire, tar fire that you could see that was meant to signal to ships that, hey, man, there's some treacherous waters around here. Yeah, it's one of the main things that they did. And as the light got better and better, one of the roles that lighthouses play was not just to say, careful in this area. We went to the trouble of building a lighthouse here because it's so treacherous. But also, check out these rocks. Yeah. See this with this light? There's some rocks there. Yes. Like, literally lighting up a harbor because there was no light otherwise. Right. And then the other role that they play is in the daytime. Right. Because lighthouses, I don't think that they actually keep them on 24 hours a day. Highly inefficient. On a cloudy day, if it's foggy, they'll turn it on and start sounding the fog horns, which we'll talk about. But for the most part, in the daytime, it's off. But a lighthouse still serves a purpose during the day because they don't decorate them the way that they decorate them just for looks. They do it so you can differentiate one lighthouse from another. Yeah. Like, this one looks like a barber pole. So I know I'm near North Carolina's. Cape Hatteras. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And there's like a whole book called The Light List where it has pictures of them. And did you get your hands on that? No, I meant to look it up, but I ran out of time. I'll bet it's neat. I bet it's neat, too. By the way, that movie is called The Trigger Effect. I have heard of that one. There was a movie called The Domino Effect, but it's not the same one. What about the butterfly effect? Remember that garbage? That was the cooch. Right? Yeah. Man, why does he haunt us? I don't know. He comes up a lot. All right, where were we? Were we in the lighthouse? We were talking about the day mark. Yeah. Pretty neat. But there's also what's called the light signature. Right? Yes. We're going back to nighttime again. Yeah. Sorry. The sun's going up and down. Well, you turn the lights off, it got weird. It is a little weird. Yeah. Sorry. Jerry, are you still here? She's here. So at night, the light has its own flashing signature. Light signature. And that's also in the light book, too. And there's actually a number of different ways that a light can flash. Right. Who knew? I didn't know you've got the fixed. And that is, of course, if you just have a light on saying, we're open. Yeah, it shines continuously. Come on in. It's a awful house. You have the occulting light. I love this one. The creepiest of all lights. It has longer periods of light than darkness, and a flashing light has longer periods of dark than light. So occulting and flashing are just sort of inverse of one another. There are two sides of the same coin. That's right. You can't have light without the dark, is the whole premise. And then you have the isophase light that's equal light and dark with its signature blips and then a group flashing light. Super 70. Yeah. It has a regular repeating number of flashing lights. It's the same pattern, right? Yeah. And there's actually a really famous one of those, the Mino's Ledge light in Boston. It was very famously known as, I think it still is, the Ilove U light, because it would flash one, then it would flash four, and then we flash three. So I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U So it's like a very romantic light. That's how people took it. I didn't make that up. See, I thought I hate cow. That's the secondary way that it's known. The people in Boston are known for their soft side. They're prone to break into sobs and the public on the street frequently just walking around thinking about the beauty of life. That's right. And, hey, Boston, we'll see you this fall at the Wilbur Theater. Tickets still available. Just wanted to work that in. Nice. And then finally we have our alternating I'm sorry. We have the Morse code, which is what it sounds like. It mimics Morse code with dots and dashes. That's marriage code. Dots and dashes, man. To spell out things like, I love you, but that's not what mano's ledge does. No, it's not Morse code. It's just one, four and three. Yeah, and people took it that way. I hate cow. This ledge actually is pretty awesome to begin with. It's under 10ft of water at high tide, and they had to build it, I think, in the 19th century whenever the tide was out. So they only had, like, X amount of hours in a day during low tide when the ledge was exposed. And it's still there. It's tough cookie. Wow. But, Josh, these are all sort of mis modernish. Modernish. But although old, they can go back to 1200 BC. Homers Iliad. They mention a lighthouse. Yeah. Crazy. And I mean, like, we're talking basically a huge bonfire on a cliff. Yes, exactly. Not like manufleeds or anything, but it still qualifies as a lighthouse. It was the premise behind it. Yes, exactly. I sounded weirdly defensive just now about it. Still lighthouse. Yes. Like you said, you have either wood or coal burning on a long pole. And then finally, in the 18th century, they started using lanterns which is a little more probably controllable. Yeah. The problem was they kept running into is that the oil or coal would smudge the lantern, the glass around the lantern, so the glass top the whole thing where the light is that you can walk around and that's the lantern of the lighthouse. And if you're burning a coal fire in there, it's going to get so pretty quick. Yeah, that's one of the main jobs of the lighthouse keepers, to wash windows. Right. The problem is in between washings, which they did at least once a day, normally the light would degrade as the soot build up. Right. So they figured out, well, we need better fuel than coal or tar. We thought they used tar. Let's burn the dirtiest thing on the planet. Inside they were working with what they had at the time. So they figured out, especially in New England, that they could use things like blubber and lard, which they did. Yeah. From Wales. Burns a lot cleaner. And then they also figured out, hey, you know what, this flame is okay, but wouldn't it be great for electricity if we had something like electricity to beam this thing out there for miles and miles? And a very smart physicist from France named Augustine fresnel. Frenell. I like Fresno. That's cool. Frenele said, alright, take my lens and do with it what you will. And he invented the Fornell lens. He did. And it's like what you would think it would be. It's a bunch of prisms that through magic can cast a beam like 20 something miles out to the ocean. It's amazing. They concentrate on that. They gather light from the top and the bottom and in the middle and basically just shoot it all back to a single magnifying point. Amazing. That just goes 28 miles. Yeah, that's a long time. Yeah, and that changed everything and did a great job of handling the load until electricity would come around. And that's when everyone was like, you know what, we don't need these silly flames anymore, let's just plug in a light. But you can still use a for now lens with the light and it's even brighter. Like today's modern lighthouses use or have produced lights between 10,000 candelas and a million candelas. What's a candela? Did you see this reference? Like, this is the worst analogy I've ever run across. What'd it say? A candela is 1200 the brightness of a 50 watt light bulb. Oh, okay. Yeah, I know exactly how much a candle is. I also saw that it's roughly the brightness of a candle, which makes sense. And that's a much better frame of reference. So the brightness of a million candles burning in the same place. Right. That's how bright modern lighthouses are. Okay. Not 1250 watt bulb. Let's take a break. Yes, seriously, let's go find out who wrote that and write a strongly worded letter. Okay, well, that got ugly. So I feel like we're still talking about the history of lighthouses, right? Yeah, sure. Well, they were made of wood early on, but the problem with a wooden lighthouse and a massive burning fire of tar is that they can burn down and be washed out to sea or in rough weather, can just be knocked plumb over by waves. But like I said, they used what they had at the time, and over the years, they got sturdier and sturdier with steel and concrete and stuff like that. Well, even before over the years? Before over the years, yeah. Ferris to Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world was this lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor to Alexandria, Egypt. Yeah. And it was around I'm not quite sure when it was around. I think the which one? The Pharaohs of Alexandria, 270 BC. My friend. That thing was pretty sturdy. It took a massive earthquake to bring it down. Yeah. It was made of masonry. It wasn't made of wood. So it looks like lighthouse construction got dumber as the years went on. And then it got smart again. Then it got smart again. It just dipped down in the wood era and then came back up. Well, what you normally have is the lighthouse, which can be just a lighthouse. Or there might be a fog signal building. There might be a boat house. You might have a little house or apartment attached to it. Right. And you might live there with your family in a very remote part of the world all by yourself or with a couple of other dudes. Yeah. And take turns and take shifts. That's called a stag station. Yeah. And I think the other thing that appeals to me about lighthouses is I could have lived that life. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I could have seen myself dropping out. You got a neck beard. Yeah. All you need is, like, a cable net sweater. And living up there all by myself. Corn, cobb, pipe. Really? Yeah. Grow my own crops and just sit up there and be quiet. No one bugging me. It appeals. Wow. I did not know that. I did not picture you as a lighthouse keeper. I could totally do it. Or a light keeper, for sure. And this is another thing that I thought was remarkable in this article you might as well mention it, is that if there is a lighthouse near you that nobody operates, it is possible that you could own that lighthouse for $1. The National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of $2000. It got a process together where the Coast Guard, which is what runs the lighthouse, biz now, the lighthouse racket. You can basically start a nonprofit or have a nonprofit, and at no cost, they will give you a decommissioned lighthouse if you maintain it and keep it open to the public. Yeah. For the most part, it's like preservation societies for Hampton. But if nobody wants it, they put it up for auction, and then you can do what you want to. I can live out my dream. Yeah. And I wouldn't have to do the windows either. I could just live up there and be a crusty old permit. We could do a Kickstarter to help you live out your dream truck. Well, I have a fan. Let's do a few more years of stuff you should know first, though, before you go, okay? Okay. Yeah. All right, so back to more modern times. We're building them out of concrete and steel. At this point, they're a little more sturdy. You got your little keeper's house. You're not getting paid much money. How much money, dude? Not much. So this article says that they earned about $200 annually in the late 19th century. I went on to the G. Whiz. West Egg inflation calculator fee. That was five grand. Today. Your provisions are covered, though, right? Yes. At the very least, your room is. I don't know about board. I bet you all the way large. You can eat. Yeah. No. Imagine they take care of stuff because you can't leave and go shopping. Imagine you have everything shipped to you again, ideal. I love that. Don't have to go out. You don't have to spend any money. It's like webvan. Yeah. Coming to you. You're banking that five grand a year, essentially. Wow, man, when you get into, like, lighthouse mode, you're lowering the standards like you're like, man, I'm making five grand. People are bringing me food. I don't have to talk to anybody. Yeah, that's awesome. It's like your fantasy. That's hilarious. So that lens we were talking about, we didn't use that in the United States for a while because the way I read this is we kind of cheaped out when it was being run by this guy, Steven Pleasant for 30 years, 32 years, he ran an efficient, some might say chintzi program to where he was like, we don't need those fancy French lenses. Take these Freddy versions. They probably wouldn't even a lens, just like a mirror reflector or something, if that. Yeah, maybe a piece of metal that somebody had to just stand behind the light with to reflect it. My mute assistant. Right. Be quiet. But then finally the US. Government got involved and they said, you know what? We need to regulate this. Well, no, they were involved. That's when yes. From 1716 to 1789. It was not run by the US. Government. No, it wasn't until Alexander Hamilton almost got in a shipwreck off the coast of, I think, North Carolina, and he went back and said, hey, I think we need some lighthouses. The federal government needs to get involved. And so I think the 19th piece of legislation the US. Congress ever passed was to establish the Lighthouse Board. The US. Lighthouse establishment initially is what it was called. Okay. And socialist program. He said, The Federalist are going to run this thing right now, and you know what? Things went downhill. Proved everyone who's critical. Big government. Right? Yeah. But there were a lot of lighthouses at the time. By 1900, we had about 1000 light houses. Well, by 1900, the government had reformed its reputation, like, seriously, the world round. For the mid 19th century, the US lighthouse system was second rate at best. They just had a terrible reputation. And I guess it sounds like they got rid of Steven Pleasant, whose name is basically mud these days, and the quality went up. Yeah. And that's when they established the lighthouse aboard, which is, I think, what you were thinking to shape things up. In 1852, they said, let's get some French lenses for all these lighthouses. Right. Finally we can be like the rest of the world. Pleasant's dead. Did you know the Statue of Liberty was a lighthouse? I don't know if I knew it, but when I read it, I'm like, well, yeah, but I don't know if it unlocked some memory or if I'm just like, that's just too obvious. Same thing, I have to admit. I didn't know. Yes. I was like, surely I knew that. Right, right. Yeah. That was it. For 15 years, it was a lighthouse in New York Harbor. Yes. Which is pretty neat. By 1930, when electricity was effective and rampant, you didn't need these fires burning or candles burning or whale blubber. No, but there were a lot of lighthouses where that were on, like, islands or on offshore ledges, like Mino's Ledge or Eddie Stone in England. The technology to run electricity out there just was not around. Yeah, of course. So they were still using oil of various types to fuel these things well into the 20th century, into the 60s. Easily. Yeah. And they still had people working there, living in the lighthouse or on the property. Into the 1960s, it was definitely more rare. But that's when the Coast Guard brought about their lighthouse automation and modernization program. And that pretty much dwindled by the end of that decade. It dwindled it down to 60 that still had people working there. Oh, really? Yeah, 60 out of 1000 today. There's one in Boston. The Brewster Island one. Little Brewster Island. Little Brewster Island. I was confusing it with Big Brewster. Well, there might be one Brewster's Millions Island. Little Brewster. That's right. It was the first one in the United States, 1716 was when it was built. And then that one was replaced in 1783. And it's the second oldest working one behind Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Is that right. And the person that lives there is basically living there as a tour guide. Not necessarily like guiding boats into harbor, although they may do both. No, I think it's still working. Yeah. Well, then I guess they do both duty. I saw Modern marvels on lighthouses and they interviewed one of the light keepers on Lil Brewster Island and they showed him, like, polishing the glass and everything. Yeah, but it's automated. I got the light itself. I see. So the upkeep and tour guide it, right. Okay. But yeah, he's providing a function. There is not just show. Maybe that's what I could do then. There you go. You should have heard that guy. He's like, I can't even begin to do it. But he was, like, a hardcore lightkeeper in Boston. Yeah, I can imagine. Although I wouldn't be the best person because Chuck's Silent Lighthouse store isn't really you just sweep your arm in a room and turn down quietly. Leave people ask questions. I just wrap them on the knuckles out. All right. I'm getting all excited thinking about the prospects of living in a lighthouse. So let me go do some push ups and we'll come back right after this. So, Chuck, say that you did live your life as a light keeper. What would it be like? First of all, what's your family background? Well, my dad was a fisherman, probably. Actually, my great grandfather was a fisherman. My grandfather was a light keeper. My dad was the son of a light keeper. My mom was a lightkeeper pirate captain. Pirate Captain? Like Gene and Davis? Yeah. That's a good movie. She's awesome. Yeah. Jesse Thorne interviewed her recently on his Bullseye show. She's just, like, the best. They were all excited in the office. Everyone was like, oh, man, gina Davis is the coolest. She supposedly was known for bringing cookies that she baked herself to interviews. Really? Yeah. She's immensely member. Yeah. Got a lot going on there. Julia Smith, who works at Max Fun HQ and produces Judge Sean Hodgman, said on her Facebook she's like, gina Davis is like, the coolest aunt of all cool ants of all time. Yeah. She's in Beetlejuice. Yes. It doesn't get much cooler than that. She could just be a total jerk. And she was still awesome in Beetlejuice. Yeah. So anyway, hats off to Eugenia Davis. How did that come up? I don't even remember now. Your mom was a pirate captain. All right. Gina Davis. Was that a shout out to Cutthroat Island? I guess, the movie. You're the one that said it. Yeah, cutthroat island, huh? Is it the name of it? Yeah, it was that bad pirate movie. I loved it. It wasn't bad. It got bad press. It wasn't bad. It's funny. You like, some of the most legendarily bad movies of all time. It wasn't that bad as far as just, like, critics. And you're like, yeah, man, ishtar I never saw it a wonderful movie. I've actually stayed away from Istar. I also stayed away from Rock the Casba because I saw that it was basically an updated ishtar. Did I even see that? I can't remember if I watched it one night. Rock the Casba? Yes. Or if I wanted to and didn't like that's. How little of an impact it made. It's on Netflix, I think. I actually did watch it. And it was just sort of like not very good. Yeah, no, ishtar is a pretty good code word to stay away from a movie. I never saw itchar. What else do I like that was bad or supposedly bad? Have you seen Katz? Rhode island. Sure. It's terrible. It's not happening. It's terrible. Okay. All right. So we were talking about the lineage, what might get you into the light keeping business. We were being coy and role playing, but that is true. It's a family business for the most part. Your parents or your father might have done it, or you come from a long line of seafaring types, at the very least. Yeah. You feel close to the sea. Yeah. But if you want to spend your time out there on a rocky point overlooking the waves all day long, like, you probably didn't come from Kansas to do so. They have wheat watchers. They just sit in the tower and watch the wheat and the flatness. They stand up. All of a sudden they're like, oh, my God, there's a wheat missing. There's a wheat. One thing we keep saying is men. That's because most of the lighthouse keepers were men. But not all. No, not at all. And not all of them were necessarily white men either. There were some very famous, legendary African American light keepers, too, and Life Savers as well. Surfing and is what they were called to. Yeah. Because supposedly you're just there to provide light and signal. But when the s hits the F right. I think you can say fan. Fan. Right. When the s hits the fan, brave lightkeepers were known to go out there and provide rescue. Yeah. And one of them was a woman named IDA Lewis, actually, American hero. She grew up on Lime Rock Island near Newport, Rhode Island and Newport Harbor, and her dad was a lightkeeper, so she followed that tradition. And she actually started taking over the duties after her father had a stroke. And she just became a lightkeeper. But a very famous one for her life saving skills. Yeah. Rescued a dozen men over the years. No, actually 18 confirmed. They think it's as high as 25. Then I'm going to say dozens. She rescued her last person at age 63. Wow. Yeah. She's quite a lady. Yeah. That's spunk. But for the most part and she's not the only one who saved lives. Like, there are plenty out there that did. But it was not an expected role of a light keeper because the Coast Guard had a lifesaver house, usually nearby, a lighthouse, because the lighthouse was there in the first place, because there was a treacherous area. So it just makes sense to also put a lifesaving house there, because even with the lighthouse itself, the ship may still run the ground and there may be rescuing. And if you want to be thrilled, there's a really neat article that's posted on this podcast page about the pea island life saving house. By the way, the pre Coast Guard, we have the US. Life saving service. Right. Which is what that term comes from. Yeah. And then they merged everything together under Roosevelt. Yeah. And the lighthouses and the life saving service all came under the purview of the Coast Guard. Right? Yeah. We should do it on the Coast Guard. Sure. Remember that married couple that were both Coast guarders yeah. That lobbied us for many years until they gave up. We're still thinking about you guys, and we're still going to do a Coast Guard podcast. Don't worry. Eventually, years and years later so pre 1939, when they made the Coast Guard is where you really can't find a whole lot of written history now. A lot of that has been lost to time. And they say here in this article that what we have now are stories from families that remain. Lore. Yeah. Lore. It's pretty neat. Yeah. And then chuck so if you're in a lighthouse, even as remote and cut off as they are, if you hated it, you would still be like, at least I'm not working on a light ship. Yes. So before, they had buoys, like modern buoys, today there's buoys out there. They're basically like floating lighthouses in areas that require some sort of warning but are just too far off land to build a lighthouse. They put buoys out there, and today the buoys are like, sometimes something like 40ft in diameter. They're huge, massive things. But before buoys, even, they would use something called light ships. And it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a lighthouse on a ship, and it's in a very remote area. You are out there for months at a time. Yeah. You just sail out and anchor down and live there. Right. And the boat is anchored all the time. You would have to go to and from the boat to shore, but while you're working there, it's just mind bogglingly awful. Yeah, I bet there's a lot of insanity that would happen. Like when the fog rolled in. Before the event of foghorns, you would have to yank the bell's rope, the fog bell rope, every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day for as long as the fog was around. Crazy. Every 10 seconds, you had to ring a bell. That was your job. And if you didn't, then you were risking the lives of anybody passing by in the area. So not cool, man. Not cool at all. No, but the light ships apparently were just about as bad as it got as far as boredom, loneliness, isolation, hatred of bells. The light ship had it all. You hate bells. I didn't. I never worked on a light ship. All right, but I'll bet they hated bells. Yeah. You would hear that in your sleep if you rang a bell every 10 seconds for hours at a stretch. You're not going to get that out of your head. And. Even if you did, when you tried to go to sleep, one of the guys on the next shift would be out there ringing the bell. Anyway. Yeah. Drive you nuts. Let's talk about some famous lighthouses. Well, we already talked about the Pharaohs of Alexandria, which is the oldest known lighthouse and at the time, they contend might have been the tallest thing on the planet at 450ft. That's super tall. Yeah, and it was masonry, too. They found it in 1994 underwater at the bottom of the ocean. They found pieces of it in Alexandria harbor. I guess you mentioned Eddie Stone light already in Plymouth, England. I guess that's where the fine gin comes from. Yeah. Still hitting Plymouth up if anyone out there works for Plymouth. Oh, man, it's such good gin. It's delicious. So is Leopold's. Leopold's gin. Yes. American gin. Really good. Too good. It's my go to American gin. Nice. Although I like most American gins, but that's pretty good. You had St. George. I love that stuff. Yeah, there's three of them. One of them I do not care for at all. Really? But the other two I like. I'll bet it's the terra terroir you don't like. It's got a weird taste. Yeah, but people love it. But I don't appreciate its own thing. It is its own thing. The fact that it doesn't have its own classification of gin, like old Tom or Jennifer or something like that, it should have its own thing. Yeah, like Foot gin. I love that stuff. It tastes weird, dude. It's really good. You know what it's really good with? Have you ever had fever tree bitter lemon? No, it's like a lemony lemon limey citrusy drink, but without much sweetness. That with the territoroir gin and juice. Yeah, it'll knock your socks off. Yes. I don't care for it. You know what? I'll just go ahead and bring you my bottle because I've had like two drinks out of it. I had to wrap my head around it, and I just can't do it. I will email you tonight as a reminder to say, hey, I'll bring in that St. George. Thanks, man. And also, by the way, I am now on because I drink the dirty martini, but I don't eat olives, which is a little weird. Just like the juice. Yeah, the brine okay. With a twist. It's a little different. I know I've had that. And for years I would have empty jars of dry olives in my fridge and very little juice in there. Oh, I know what you're talking about now. So now I bought dirty soup olive juice, and you can buy it in a bottle, and I bought a box of it, and it just sits in the cabinet. My house. Nice. So big. Shout out to Dirty Sue. Olive brine. Nice. Really dirtys up your martini. What's your gym that you use for this? Well, I mean, I love Plymouth. I love Hendrix and our friends at Spring 44. Jin dude sent us. Jen. They said it's all about the water and they have the best water on earth. They made some old Tom gin. Yes. And it is delicious. I love Martinez's. It's old Tom gin. Martino Liqueur. Not the cherry stuff, but like the real lacore. And then some sweet vermouth. Yes. It's like probably the most perfect drink anyone's ever made. It's very old. That maybe the best Martinez I've ever had. That was good stuff. Well, for a while lately I've been stirring and I got a little martini pitcher or a cocktail pitcher to stir. But I'm back to shaking now because I found out that Bruising gin is a total myth. So James Bond wasn't cuckoo. No, you can't. Bruce Jin. Yeah, that's all just garbage. Do you use orange bitters in yours? No. Really? Brightens it up. Straight up dirty. Sue gin. I do use a little vermouth. Like, I know that people don't like vermouth at all anymore. Oh, really? Yeah. I see. Bartenders now don't use any vermouth. That's not a martini. Well, agreed. That's a chilled gin up with some olive branch. What kind of mouth do you use? Just the one in the green Italian bottle. Dolan blanc. Yeah, that's good stuff. But I also found out recently that vermouth is a wine and you don't just keep it on your shelf for two years. No, you keep it in the fridge for maybe a month. Yeah. I didn't know that. So I've been drinking this old, old vermouth. You still can. It's not like you can't, but for the best possible impact, you want to just get that small bottle. Yeah, I learned that the hard way. Yeah. I'm going to start doing that. Man. We should have our own cocktail show. We should. Because we talk about booze a lot. We don't need to let's drink about it. Has that covered. Yeah, that's true. Our good friends that let's drink about it. Yeah. And thanks also to Ben, who sent us some what was it called? Contradiction. That stuff is good too. That's right, man. Booze talk on lighthouses. Who knew? Oh, I bet you there's a lot of boozing that goes on at lighthouses. I bet, too. They're not making amazing drinks with St. George and Bitter limon. No, they're just drinking that stuff straight out of deer skin. Yeah, exactly. Where were we? Eddie Stone Lighthouse Plymouth, England. That's how this got started. This thing is a very rough area to have a lighthouse. And it seems like nature doesn't want a lighthouse there because over the years it has been knocked down and burned down many times. Yeah, this dude basically went out there by himself, Henry Windstanley, in 1696 and just started building this wooden lighthouse out and these rocks off the coast of Plymouth himself got captured by a French pirate, released and lit the thing in 1698 and he actually died. He deconstructed it and rebuilt it and died in the second version of it. Oh, really? It got swept away with him inside, but he was a pretty cool cat. That was 17 three. Then another one in 17 eight was built that burned down in 1755. And then a guy named John smeaton, he was an engineer. He built one that was built to last for a little while. He actually came up with what you think of as the modern lighthouse. Really stick at the bottom, papers at the top, and then it flares out right below the lantern. And the reason most lighthouses flare out right below lantern is when a wave comes up and the waves can get that big. Sure. It won't ride up into the lantern. It will be thrown back out to sea when it hits the flare. Oh, it's a water guard. Pretty much. Interesting. Yeah. Did not know that. He's a smart dude. So that one lasted for 123 years, which was, as far as the Eddie stone light is concerned, in eternity. But eventually the trinity house, which is England's version of the coast guard of the lighthouse. The lighthouse establishment. Yeah. They said, no, let's tear that thing down. It's this long, but we think it might not for much longer. But then they built another one, this one actually they used almost a jigsaw puzzle foundation. Yeah. So when a wave hits it, it actually compresses together and becomes stronger when a wave smacking into it. So that was there for good. Yeah. Wonderful. We talked about Boston Light. There's also the cape hatteras on the outer banks of north Carolina, which is, I believe, the tallest one in the United States. Yeah, 208ft. And it's one of the most famous as well. It's the one with the black and white barber pole design. That's 63 meters for our friends everywhere else in the world. Did you know that one was in trouble? The sea was encroaching upon it. And they got some money together, congress did, and moved it moved this lighthouse, 2900ft, back inland over the course of 23 days. They slowly moved it on tracks. Wow. It was pretty amazing. It was on that modern marvels one. It's like Fitzgeraldo. Sure. I got a few more fast facts. Unless you have something else. No, I'm done. 680 lighthouses remaining in the US. Estimated out of that original 1000 plus 37 states have lighthouses, just not Kansas. Michigan has the most, don't they? Of all the states? Yeah, 120 in Michigan because of the great lakes, I would imagine. Makes sense. The east coast says 391. West coast only has 94. I guess there's just a lot more shipping and stuff, huh? You need to step it up. West coast and worldwide, we estimate more than 17,000 light houses in 250 countries. And the brightest one, oak island in north Carolina. 14 million candle power. You can see it 24 miles. Wow. Isn't that great? Yeah, that's a lot. 14 million candles all burning at once. Pretty neat. Sounds like a new religion. Candelos. Really? A million is one lighting their candle. I think he just established it. Reciting the Candela's prayer. Nice. See? We just started a religion. Yeah, that easy. Well, you did. I just bore a witness. That's all right. You can be my faithful assistant. Thanks. Can I baptize you? Sure. Okay. If you want to know more about lighthouses, you can type that word into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I talked about baptizing chuck, it's time for listener man. Since you talked about baptizing chuck, that must mean it's 1984. Hey, guys. I recently discovered your podcast and immediately fell in love. I'm thirsty for knowledge. Find it quite impressive that you've become quasi experts? Not really. Yeah, but I'm writing in to respond to the controlled burn episode. I used to work for my local county park system doing habits, out and wildlife management, and controlled burns took up many days in the early spring for us. Our department only consists of about six to seven people, three of which were licensed burn bosses by the state. They make the burn plan, they light the fire, and basically coordinate and oversee the entire operation. I would make everybody call me burn boss jobs. Totally would. Additionally, local fire departments volunteer personnel and sometimes equipment, so they lend out their stuff, which is nice, and people such as water trucks to assist. We also had quite a large number of park volunteers that go through our training and help on the fire line as well. That'd be neat. I would do that. Yeah, like a Saturday afternoon. Sure. I'm sure it's different for each state and agency, but our burn bosses go through training put on by the state in order to get certified. I can't recall if this is mentioned, but another advantage of controlled burns is that the charred earth absorbs light because it's black in color more than it normally would, causing the soil to heat more quickly and thus early germination for the desired species. I had not considered that. We didn't mention that. Yeah, good factoid there. Thanks for satisfying my wandering mind, tracy Comp in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thanks a lot, Tracy. We appreciate that. We always love to hear from people who know what they're talking about. Burn boss company. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at fysk podcast or hang out with us on Instagram at Saskat. You can join us on Facebook.com 30 you should know you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
429ea84a-53a3-11e8-bdec-5b4e45119f9c | What Makes a Must-Have Christmas Toy? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-makes-a-must-have-christmas-toy | Ever since Cabbage Patch Kids came along in 1983, there’s been an annual holiday frenzy around one particular toy – the must-have Christmas toy of the year. But what makes a toy a must-have toy? Josh and Chuck investigate (and kick off the holidays). | Ever since Cabbage Patch Kids came along in 1983, there’s been an annual holiday frenzy around one particular toy – the must-have Christmas toy of the year. But what makes a toy a must-have toy? Josh and Chuck investigate (and kick off the holidays). | Thu, 21 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=325, tm_isdst=0) | 47362387 | 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. Hello, Seattle and surrounding greater Seattle area. We love you. That's why we come to see you every January. And we're doing that again this year. Coming up. Yes, Thursday, January 16, we're going to be at the Moore Theater, and you can get tickets and info by going to Sysklive.com and follow all the links there. You can also go in person to the box office of the Paramount Theater, who is apparently selling tickets to our show at the More Theater to get around a lot of those online fees. That's right. So we'd love to see you there. We have rubbed our snake all over that theater, and we want your stank on that theater as well. Yes, we'll see you guys in January. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there. There's Fury over there. Early Christmas a dish. Yeah, we're kicking it off early like the rest of the retail world. Yeah, man. This year you could find Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas stuff in stores at the same time. Like it was just the most normal thing in the world. But you don't follow me on Twitter, and you should. I'm not on Twitter. Well, I'm saying you should get on Twitter to follow me. No, thank you. But at 730 in the morning on November 1, the day after Halloween, I tweeted, Merry Christmas, and got a lot of hate back for it. Yeah, what do you do on Twitter? Do you just poke people like that? Yeah, pretty much. Just troll. I got you. Yeah, well, that was my plug for Twitter. Oh, yeah. Here we go. So let's see, back in 19 eight three. Chuck, you were twelve. Okay, I was seven. You didn't have a Cabbage Patch Kid, did you? Well, there's a story there if you really want to know. I think you've told it before, but let's have it. Well, we bought my sister one of the very first little people is what they were called before they were Cabbage Patch Kids. That's right. In Helen, Georgia, when they were handmade by Xavier Roberts, who I recently learned stole that idea from a woman and took it as his own and made millions of dollars off of her idea. Yeah, maybe we'll do a short stuff about that. I wanted to do a full length episode, but we definitely talked about that because I think we have talked about like must have toys of the past, maybe last year or the year before Christmas edition. Yeah. And she got this doll, it's name was Chuck, which was kind of funny because that's my name. That's so funny. And it was a big deal. I think it was like the number 70 something or 80 something made and now it's worth a lot of money. Does she still have it? Oh, that's great. And we'll finish with Cabbage Patch Kids and then I'll take issue with you. So go ahead. Okay. I know what you're going to take issue with. I don't know if you do know. Let me start. All right, so back in 1983, Cabbage Pet Kids were like the musthave toy of the Christmas season for sure. And from what I can tell, they were the first musthave Christmas toy ever. Now, that's not to say there weren't extraordinarily popular toys around Christmas time before Star Wars very famously offered their early bird certificate package, which was basically an empty box that said, at some point in the future you will get Star Wars figures instead of this empty box. One of the great marketing gems of all time. Yeah, so that was the thing all the way back in 1952. Mr. Potato Head was a hot toy that year. Robert the Robot was a hot toy in 1954. And when you say hot toys, it's tough to overstate that. Like Robert the Robot had T shirts in the didn't even know people wore T shirts in the 50s. He was in a movie. Those were big deal toys. But my premise is this. This is my thesis, okay? This is my own. So I'll take the hit if it's wrong, sure. But that in just the same way that there were hit movies like The Godfather or like Ben Her before Jaws came along. There wasn't such a thing as the summer blockbuster until Jaws came along and made the summer blockbuster a thing. There wasn't such a thing as the must have toy of Christmas until the Cabbage Patch Kid came along and made that a thing. Okay, so what issue are you going to take? I can't take it any longer. You're driving me crazy. Well, I don't think it was cabbage patch kids. It was the must have toy. The first must have toy. That's what I take issue with. What was the first? Well, I don't know. I'm just speaking for my own lifespan. And I definitely think star wars counts, because if you can sell an empty box to a kid for Christmas, then that's a pretty strong position as a must have thing. And by the way, if you're listening, the reason they sold empty boxes is because they didn't know star wars is going to be a big thing. So Kenner didn't have as many of these made in the run up to the film release pre Christmas. So they got caught with their pants down and they realized that there was a big demand. A huge demand. Okay. They sold like 40 million of these no, 40 million boxes? Yeah. Okay. I don't know. 40 million star wars toys inside of a year. Okay. Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. And did you know that you can even buy these empty box kits on ebay now? Oh, yeah, I'm sure I saw one listed for $1,500. I'm not at all surprised. And then just very quickly, I also want to point out that the biggest, most in demand toy of my young life was the Atari pacman cartridge. Oh, boy. That was sold 7 million cartridges. Okay, great. The numbers don't lie. That's a big number. 7 million. 40 million. You can toss big numbers out all day long. But let me ask you this. For that empty box of star wars, for that Atari pacman cartridge, did a woman have her leg broken because a crowd trying to get their hands on those things turned violent? Or before you answer, in addition to that, did a department store manager in Charleston, west Virginia, have to arm himself with a baseball bat to defend himself from his very customers who are trying to get to the star wars empty box or the Atari cartridge? I would guess that the answer is no. Well, I think human behaviors have changed over the years. I don't know from I guarantee I could find one violent incident about the Atari cartridge. I bet you couldn't. Well, there wasn't then because they met the demand. Okay, so that's a big part of it, too, right? Let's just move on from this. The cabbage patch kids, if not, were the first, which they were. Did you have one? Yeah, weber. Dino. You had a cabbage patch kid? Yeah, I ended up taking his head off and giving him a mohawk as I grew older. But not to be too gender binary here, but I didn't know a lot of boys that wanted the cabbage patch kid. What? I've always broken the mold. Well, sure. No, there's nothing wrong with it. I grew up with william wants a doll on free to be you and me. So I get it, but that's why I just don't know. I think a must have Christmas toy would be one that everybody wants. Yeah. As far as I knew, everybody wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid. All right, we'll just put this into bed. Okay. Like a Cabbage Patch Kid with a Mohawk that you adopted. Yeah. Right. Well, that was a big thing. There were some hallmarks to the idea of a musthave toy that were surrounding Cabbage Petch Kids. Violence is one. Right. There was a lot of buzz that was picked up by the media. And one of the ways that that was generated was by, I think, Kaliko, who owned Cabbage Patch Kids at the time, sent these dolls directly to reporters. That was a big one. And the fact that there was not enough supply to meet the demand, these things kind of came together to make Cabbage Patch Kids that must have Christmas toy. And this has been carried on as a tradition ever since then. Ever since that very first time in 1983 with Cabbage Patch Kits. There were Nintendo's that dominated back in 1980, 819, 89 and 1993, years in a row, Nintendo had three different products that were like the must have Christmas toy. Yeah, that first game console, huge. The Game Boy huger. It felt like. And then, of course, in 1990, possibly the best game gaming system of all time. If you look at just relative to the time, the Super Nintendo console. I don't know, man, N 64 was pretty great with Golden Eye. Oh, God, n 64 was great. Yeah, with Gold. And I mean, it would have been fine on its own, but the fact that Golden I existed was the thing that made N 64 to me. That game blew my mind. Yeah, it was great. Especially the Battle Royale, where you could play your friends. Oh, man, that was fun. Yes. We call that hunt and chase. Yeah, I get so mad in those. That's the only time I ever got mad playing video games because I don't do that thing where you play online and you can exact revenge on people. So I did not take it well when my friends snuck up behind me and shot me in the head. Right. Yeah, that was always a bummer. What about Tickle Meoma? That was a big one. Thanks to Rosie O'Donnell. I was a little old for that. Oh, really? I was in my mid twenty s. I had one. Oh, yeah? Well, you were in late high school. Not really. This was 1996. This is post high school even. But this is such a craze that there was that characteristic violence where a Walmart employee was trampled while he was trying to restock the display late at night, I believe. But he had a pulled hamstring, injuries to his back, his jaw, his knee, broken rib, concussion, and it continues on. I haven't read about any violence from Hatchimals, but from 2016 to 2018, they were the if not one of the top must have toys of the year hatchimals. How come? Because you have to put it in a dish or a bowl that you eat out of and you have to leave it there and leave it there and leave it there and then it hatches into a garbage toy. So my experience is that they're good. Oh, yeah, yeah. You like your hatchimal? Yeah. Are you talking is it like animatronic? Huh? Is it animatronic? I'm talking about hatchimals. Yeah. Okay, so I don't know anything about the dish. My experiences from my niece and I don't remember any dish. Oh, wait, are we talking about two different things? This is the thing you put in water. No, you electrocute yourself when you touch it. Okay, maybe I'm thinking of something else. This is like an animatronic thing that hatches from an egg, but you have to teach it and train it and raise it and give it attention and everything. It's a bit like the tamagotchi, but like an animatronic pet. Oh, I got you. Now. I'm thinking of the thing that it's an egg that you put in water and after a few days it hatches into a garbage toy. Yeah, no, that's not this got you. Hatchimals are much different. Okay, so there is this tradition of a must have Christmas toy and you can find all you want about them every year because they're everywhere all the time. And the media reports on this kind of stuff and they're on TV and there's ads and there's like social media stuff now. But there's like a really big question that doesn't have a lot of press associated with it and certainly no studies or anything that I could find. But there's a question check like how does a toy become a must have Christmas toy? Well, let's take a break and we'll get to the bottom of it right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflow so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and 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 It's 2022. When things look different, like doctors visits, for example, sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7 so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teledoc is ranked number one by JD Power and Telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Teleadoc is available through most major health plans and many employers but even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teletock. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teletoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's T-E-L-A-D-O-C comStuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. That's quite a set up. I think so. Back in the day, when you were shopping for Christmas, if you were a kid or a parent, it didn't matter, right? You knew exactly what to do. You know exactly how to do it. There was no frills, no nothing. It was all just holiday joy and the goodness of the Christmas holiday season. That's right. That is correct. And you've learned what you wanted if you were a kid from two things saturday morning cartoon commercials and whatever your catalog was. The Sears wishbook is certainly one service. Merchandise catalog was another big one for us. Yeah, there's a Montgomery Wards catalog. Yeah, of course. And you put this together and you introduced me to a website called Wishbook Web that might as well be called Timesuck.com. Yeah, it's pretty great, isn't it? Because someone has gone through and scanned is it just Sears Wish books? No, it's Sears, JCPenney and Montgomery Ward. And then I think there's the occasional what stores that here and there. Right. They have scanned these entire wish books up to which everyone knows is the cut off date for nostalgia. That's right. From the earliest days of 1933. And boy, let me tell you, dude, and I know you know this because you've done it. If you go through and spend a few minutes clicking through these things in the years where you were like six to twelve, waves of nostalgia wash over you. John Hodgeman would succumb to these waves. Yeah, I know. It's amazing. I remember some specific pictures. I mean, the NFL section alone brought tears to my eyes, and I forgot how much they hyped football back then. You just can't stop crying. It was crazy. The clothes, the alarm clocks, the clock radios, the tech section. It was off the charts for me looking through this. I almost did nothing else today. Yeah, I know it is. Wishbook. Web is pretty awesome. Like, somebody went through and scanned every single page of these several hundred page, each catalogs for decades worth of catalogs. It is God's work. And just to get laughs by seeing the two four year olds posing in bathrobes. Really funny, right? One's got like, a pipe that blows. Oh, my God. This is just amazing. What a great website. So, Wish Book Web is kind of preserved how you used to figure out what you wanted for Christmas, which was you go through these wish books or these catalogs or whatever, and then you'd tell your parents you dog earm, maybe drop some hints it was the correct way. The 21st century has kind of an updated version of that but it still kind of follows the same general contours right. Where there are lists still and like, catalogs. But now it's not just department stores that have the market cornered on them that's actually kind of gone away. It's very tough to find a department store catalog. I believe Myers still does that. I think they're kind of like a Midwestern target. Oh, really? Yeah, and they have a toy catalog that they put out still, I believe, to this year. Well, now you get the Restoration Hardware, right. But there's lists everywhere and it seems like every retailer has one or all the major retailers have one. And depending on where it's coming from, some are more trustworthy or above the boards or objective than others when saying, like, these are the must have toys. Right. On one end of the spectrum, you have third party websites and publications and organizations like the Spruce or Toy Insider or Toys Tasks, Pets and more, and they actually evaluate the toys when they make their lists. Yeah, it's just different now. And I don't think it's nostalgia, like thinking things were better back then, but it seemed easier and better to let a kid sift through a catalog and pick out stuff. Then I guess what are you supposed to do today? Like, sit down with your kid at one of these websites and look at the top 20 hot toys and say, what do you want? I don't know how it works these days. I don't know. Maybe instead of like dog earring the pages you send your parents Linked. I'm sure you do, actually. Yeah, but I mean, if your kids are too young to be on the Internet, I'm not sure how to do it because I could hand my four year old a catalog and say, pick out some stuff. That would be great, right. But I'm not going to say, hey, just log onto the Spruce and go scroll down until you find something you like, right. Stay out of their parents section. What do you do? You literally have a kid, Chuck. What do you do? I don't know. I mean, we just buy things that we think she might like. So there's like a whole world out there of like lists and websites that show toys and stuff that she's unaware of. Oh, sure. Oh, wow. She's got a big surprise ahead of her. I guess so. That's great. I'm excited for her, actually. Yeah, but you definitely feel like you're sort of stabbing in the dark. I mean, a parent can go through and look at those lists but kill me. Well, a lot of people are excited about that kind of thing. They're like, good, yeah, I don't have to go to the store and stand there and be like, what are we getting here? You could go to some website or USA Today or the Today Show or whoever is partnering with some of these trusted sites like Toyota, Pets, and more, or toy insider. And they kind of take a lot of the guesswork out of you. They're basically saying, these are what experts are saying your kid is going to want. If you go by this, you will score a home run with your kid. Yeah, I think my problem is I don't know what is bought and what is real reviews, because as you have dug up and I didn't even know this of course they do this. If you go on Amazon, you can spend $2 million as a retailer to be on their top list or whatever. Okay. Yes. What I saw, though, was that you spend that money to nominate your toy for their consideration to include on the list just for nomination. I don't know how the process works, but yeah, like, the headline say you pay 2 million for a slot, but if you read the finer print and it's saying you pay 2 million for them to even consider it, and then I guess I don't know how they curate it. They actually kind of keep a close lid on it. But it generated, like, $120,000,000 in revenue for Amazon just to be on their list of hot toys for the year. Walmart, they charge ten grand a month per toy to be on their Buyers Picks toy list. And as you point out here, walmart starts their list in August, and you've got to wonder, is that because they're making ten grand a pop right off of the stuff per month? Yeah, they released theirs in late August, before Labor Day even. And this isn't like, hey, we think these toys are going to be hot this year. Here's the hot list of holiday toys, and Target release theirs at the beginning of September. I think Bullseye is the name of their mascot. Dog mascot. Buzz McKenzie basically, yeah. Bully bullseye. And I couldn't see if they charge for placement or how they compile it or anything like that, which actually makes me suspect that they don't, because there's plenty of inc by Amazon and Walmart's lists and how they charge for them. And the fact that there's not one for Target makes me think either they're really keeping a lid on it, or they actually don't charge for that. But there's kind of two lists where if you're a parent yeah. You need to ask dog people and cat people. You need to ask, Where is this list coming from? And if it's coming from a third party site, go look up the third party site, and they will tell you in their About US section how they determine what toys or what. And if you really want to get that information, that's fine. But even if Amazon or Walmart or even if Target charges for placement on their lists, just the very fact that those things are on their list is going to make them among the hot boys of the season. So it's like a self fulfilling or self paying prophecy. Yeah, I mean, I guess anytime you look up something on a major retailer website, those first few things are sponsored and they say sponsored in little letters. Sometimes they don't. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's kind of hard to discern whether or not you're looking at the real top thing or the sponsored thing. Right. And I think with the gift list in particular, I don't believe that they say that these are sponsored. I think it's just like here's the hot list, according to Amazon. Well, let's talk a bit about marketing in general around the holidays. It's a science in a way, and they have found out through science that happy people buy more. Not everyone's happy around the holidays, but they definitely, as marketers, play on the idea that you are happier around the holidays and so you should be in the buying spirit. Definitely when you're talking about kids, that is the case. They pummel children with ads. There was one study here at University of Hertfordshire, counted 100 ads in a three hour Saturday morning kids slot. Christmas 100 and a three hour slot. That's a lot of ads. It is. And then, of course, children are on more than one screen these days, so they're also getting ads when they're watching YouTube or whatever, or just on kids websites. There's ads everywhere. I can't remember what episode. We really kind of dove into that. Advertising to children. Oh, man. I think it was about advertising for children. That was the sole goal. So the idea is that just the holiday season itself puts most of us in a pretty good mood and advertisers say, oh, well, if we release ads that are holiday themed, we'll be able to kind of tap into that good will and good mood and make you nostalgic or feel good about things. And so by doing that, we'll be able to kind of tie our brand or our product to that holiday sensation. And you'll say, oh, I do want to go buy that, because it makes me think of being a kid at Christmas time. That's really basic stuff that's everywhere. You can't get away from that in the holiday season and there's not even necessarily anything wrong with it. It's just basic marketing and advertising 101 when it comes to holiday advertising. Yeah. And the other thing we mentioned earlier in terms of marketing, and this is also marketing 101 is about scarcity, right. If you have a toy that there is a limited amount of, that is when you're going to find people trampling each other to get there, because people are motivated by fear. And if you know that a toy is a must have and there aren't many of them and they're going on sale at a certain time, it is frightening what some parents might do to secure that toy. Yes. So this is finally we've reached the key ingredient, right? You've got lists of toys that are promoted and advertised and maybe even show up with their own articles in the media, then you have the fact that we're already kind of primed to buy because it's the holiday season, we're in a good mood. But when you add that scarcity marketing, it ramps it up to a totally different level. And when you have a must have toy that is hard to find, like you said, people will do very crazy, violent, mean stuff to get it. And there's a lot of reasons why even if you're not willing to throw an elbow to get a toy, you might still be willing to camp out at 04:00 a.m., waiting for a 24 hours retailer to restock their supply of this so you can buy it. That's unusual behavior. And the reason why it all comes down to scarcity marketing, the idea that we have a fear of missing out of fear of social embarrassment, a fear of our kids not loving us as much as they could had we gotten them this toy. And that all of these things. The scarcity marketing is the real driver. That kind of hypercharges, must have toy frenzy. Yeah. And it's not just toys. You've seen everything from you make a great point about Pappy Van Winkle whiskey. Oh, I should say that's from Marketing Land. A guy named Jacob Bodskar wrote an article on Marketing Land where he cited that and the Disney Vault is really good examples. Yeah. Disney Vault is another great one. They were very famous for not just saying, like, here's all the movies we've ever made that you can buy on VHS all in one big package. They would release them every now and then and you knew you had a limited time to get them. And I wasn't really hipped all this, but my dad and his wife were way into the Disney stuff, and they were adamant about making sure they filled out the entire collection and really kept up with when they were going to be released and what a big deal that was. Yeah, that was a big one. And Bodzgard makes the point, like, by making them limited and available also only for a limited time, with years, sometimes a decade in between times when you can buy these things, it creates this frenzy to go buy them, and it also makes them a treasured part of that person's home. You know what I mean? Yeah. And you can also fake out the public a little bit and mislead them on the scarcity. You might have a lot of this stuff and just kind of lead the public to believe, like, now, you better go get one right now because they may not be around next week. Yeah. The people who made hatchimals spinmaster hatchimals were really hard to find in, I think, 2016 17 and 18. And Spin Master was basically accused of purposefully using scarcity marketing. And for their part, they said, hey, we were. Totally caught off guard three years in a row by the popularity of hatchimals. And other people were like, that's BS. You can totally ramp up production pretty fast. Another musthave toy was fingerlings. Remember them from, like, last year or the year before? Yes. They were like little monkeys or sloths or dragons or whatever that would hang onto your finger. And they were little finger sized robots that would, like, blink and blow kisses and do all sorts of cute, terrifying. They weren't they were cute instead of uncanny because they were kind of the words finger size robots together sound. Right. They would cut your throat while you slept. But they were caught unaware. Even though they really tried hard to make them hit through social media, they were still surprised when it actually happened. But they ramped up production. They brought a third factory in China online. They went from shipping via cargo boat to air transport to get supplies here faster. And they were able to ramp up and meet demand pretty quickly. So the idea that hatchimals just couldn't possibly do that really smelled to a lot of people. Like they were purposely using scarcity marketing. Yeah, scarcity, I mean, it's an interesting concept because you see it everywhere. They have restaurants that here in Atlanta, holman and Finch had the Holiday and Finch burger that one day a week we'll sell 100 of them starting at 10:00 P.m. On this night. And then everyone's like, oh, my God, what is in that burger? People would line up, I got to go on the block. Or, this is a nice little tidbit here that you dug up about supermarket experiments. Yeah, that's from an article from Market Watch by Mark Ellwood on that one. It's amazing. Even putting up a sign for soup that says, limit twelve per person will make people be like, oh, I should probably buy twelve of these for whatever reason. Campbell they might stop making their chicken noodle soup. Right? Or in this case, it was soup that was on sale, so who knows what the price is going to go back to? Well, that's true. So one of the other things that scarcity produces is this idea that there are haves and have nots, right? So it's the idea that you're fearful of missing out or fearful of your kid not loving you isn't enough. There's a whole other cognitive bias of being a have not or being left out in the cold, which I guess is a fear of missing out. But there's also the benefit of being a have, where if you're talking about, like, a fingerling, which is a $15 toy, but people were crazy for those things either last year or the year before. Just about anybody can afford this $15 toy. So even if you're like a have not throughout the year, you're down on your luck. Maybe you're unemployed or you're under employed. Things just aren't going your way. You could still camp out and wait for that late night restocking the fingerlings, and get your kid that toy. That's right. And for that time, you are a have. And maybe even somebody with a much higher social status than you couldn't get that fingerling, which makes it all the more sweet. And then let's also not forget, like we said, this is during the holiday season, so emotions like count extra. So to be a half when you're normally not during the holiday season because you got a must have toy is exponentially increased. Yeah, it's a big deal, because even if it's just emotionally equal for a brief period of time, it can be a big deal for somebody. I say we take our final break here. Same here. And then we come back and talk about the worst people toy flippers right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. It's 2022. When things look different, like doctor's visits, for example, sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for non emergency situations like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teladoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Teledoc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit Tedoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JD. Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. All right, so I set up the worst people are toy flippers. Obviously, there's a lot of really bad people in the world, and I'm being somewhat hyperbolic. But I do think somewhat the idea of buying, targeting, and buying a lot of musthave toys to sell later for profit on ebay makes you a pretty rotten person. Yeah, go ahead and lay that judgment down. Some people do. I reserve judgment for the ones who do it professionally. I think if you are a person who is just trying to augment your own holiday expenses and you are foreseeing a lack of supply ahead of time, I say more power to you. Yeah, I'm not into it. I feel the same way about ticket scalpers. Yeah, it's the same thing basically. Yeah, it's buying up a bunch of things sometimes and this is completely gross and awful. Using bots. Yes, that's the pitch. Especially for concert tickets. Like when bots buy up all the best concert tickets, especially our tickets. Yeah, exactly. I don't think anybody uses Bots on ours. Well, probably not. But actually, stuff you should know is we've seen very few bad examples of people trying to overcharge for a sold out show. More times than not, it's a fellow listener that's like, hey, just come along, you can sit next to me for face value or I'll even give it to you. Yeah, that happens quite a bit. I mean, there's only been a couple where somebody's like a million dollars and of course they didn't sell it. No, but yeah, we haven't run into that. Mostly the problem is from ticket outlets just charging ridiculous fees on top of our ticket price. Well, that makes us mad. And you all should know we don't have control over that. No. We're the Eddie veteran of podcasting. Right. But if you ever find yourself in a situation where you got shut out of the Stuff you Should Know show, and your option is to not go or to pay like a ridiculous amount, just send us an email, we'll put you on the list. Oh, got you. Well, you just opened some floodgates. I mean, there's very few list spots, so it's not like right now you just started a must have toy friends for the list. Look what you've done. Let's get back to bots. These bots are so savvy that they can buy out. They can have hundreds of credit card numbers on file because sometimes they'll have a limit to how many things you can buy. They are all these shortcuts and ways to bypass all of these safeguards put into effect, including CAPTCHAs. They will hire foreign workers to sit around and type in the CAPTCHAs to get through security, which I mean, if there is anything that says holiday spirit more than that, I can't think of it. But these bots can sometimes buy out something in the second that it goes up online for a regular human being to say, all right, they've released the tickets or the doll gone. So what they'll do is they'll go on to retail websites and figure out what the unique ID is for the product that they're looking for. That's the real art. It'll start right? It'll start monitoring that page because people who built these pages will put them out and just won't really open the curtain for hours ahead of time. So the bot will have the page targeted and just keep refreshing it hundreds of times a second until that sale goes live. And they will have ordered scores of these things or dozens or hundreds, whatever, however many it can before you can even if you're sitting there refreshing your browser between the time it takes to refresh your page they will have wiped the place out using these bots. And then if you're truly sophisticated, you probably have another set of bots who take your inventory and then put it up for sale at some exorbitant price on Amazon or Ebay or Craigslist or something like that. Yeah. The worst people. So, like, you don't even have to do anything, you just stick your bots on it. Yeah, I stand by it. Even for the enterprising person who I don't know, I have a big problem with someone making money off of someone else's misfortune to not have been able to get that themselves, I don't think it makes someone scrappy or enterprising at all. Hey, man, that's fine. Yeah, I'll die on this hill. Okay, that's fine. So if you are one of those people that Chuck hates and you want to be enterprising, there is an article written by Lisa Smith. It's on investopedia. And it's called the guide to reselling toys at Christmas for extra money. Oh, God. Which is very innocuous. Then there's some tips, actually that make a lot of sense if you want to do this. Do you want to go over them or are you going to remain mute? You can go over them. So you could talk to parents if you wanted to. Right, Chuck? Yeah, that's right, Josh. Good idea. Because they know what kids want. You can talk to kids themselves, which makes sense. I mean, just go right to the horse's mouth. I've already said the same thing, Joshua. You can talk to Santa. I thought this was pretty enterprising. So what you're trying to do here is to identify what toy you want to buy as early ahead of time as possible so that you can have identified the hot toy of the season and bought them before the demand really struck. So you talk to Maltainas, hang out in stores. You can talk to cashiers, stock people, all that stuff, because not only will they know what toy you need to look out for, they'll know when these new supplies are coming in. Maybe slip them a Starbucks card or something like that with $10 on it as a thank you. But be sure to deduct that from your bottom line. Sure. Bribery. Deduct that bribery. Right. And then you can actually hang out in chat rooms. There's entire websites that are dedicated to this kind of stuff that say, here's the toys we're looking for. I spotted some at this Walmart or whatever. This stock guy said that Walmart replenishes them on Thursdays at ten. There's a lot of stuff you can do if you really wanted to put the leg work in. Great. Or you could put all that energy into doing something worthwhile. Right? I know what you're talking about. This is like the Michael Larson approach to the holidays. The man who got no whammies on pressure luck. Oh, I had no problem with him. Okay. This is virtually the same thing no, it's not Michael Larson. There wasn't some father who didn't have much money that overpaid for a doll to make his little girl happy at Christmas time. Michael Larson didn't do that. Right. He would have, though. I'm sure of it. Oh, goodness. So that's what you can do if you want to flip toys and ruin the holidays as far as trucks are concerned. That's right. And that is a big part of the competition of people who will go buy out stocks. Like, you're not really facing them nationwide unless you're talking about people who release bots onto websites or whatever. But they are out there, and they do actually create competition and help drive that frenzy even further. Because remember, what's behind must have toys is scarcity marketing. And if there are people out there actively contributing to the scarcity, that's a big deal. Here's what I want to hear from. I want to hear from some women listeners who let's say you go on a date from a dating app, and you sit down across from your date, and you're like, what do you do? And he goes, I'm a toy flipper. And she's like, what's that? Around Christmas time, I go out and I buy, like, tons of toys that I know little kids really, really want, and then I mark them up so I can make a lot of money off their parents who may not be able to afford it. Right. And just tell me how that date goes from there. Yeah. Does it have to be a man and a woman? Can it just be anybody? It can be anybody, but I think the guy that does this is the guy that I just did that voice for, who's apparently from Jersey. Sure. They're all from New Jersey. Okay. And I love New Jersey, so I feel like we've learned a lot here. Yeah. We've talked about how a toy becomes a must have toy of the season. Usually it has to do with some combination of advertising and buzz marketing, as well as scarcity. The flippers get involved, and I want to back this up, Chuck. There's not a lot of stuff out there on this. This all had to be brought together. This is kind of one of those rare stuff. You should know theses about what makes a musthave toy and must have toy, but I think it holds up. Should we talk about some of the big toys of this year? Yes. So those lists that are out there, this helps me, actually. We put a bunch of well, that's the point. We're trying to help you. And all of the toy flippers out there. So actually, this is for all the parents. This will help you get a drop on the toy flippers, because I guarantee there are very few toy flippers listening to stuff you should know. No, because we have good people in our audience. So all those lists that are out there now we kind of compiled and cross referenced them, a number of them, lists from Target Toys tots Pets and more. That's just one. Amazon, the Today show toy insider, the spruce crazy coupon lady who had a post about toy flipping walmart and New York Magazine. All of those lists we looked at, and we found one that appeared on at least a couple, if not more. And one of them, the first one appeared on basically every single list that we saw. Yeah. This one. The Bloom Doll. B-L-U-M-E. Nothing to do with the rest of the development, but this is something that my daughter might like, apparently. This is another thing you add water to and it blooms, but I don't think it hatches from an egg. I think this doll just grows like a Chia pet might, kind of. And like, the hair that grows is I can't tell, it looks like some sort of foam or styrofoam or something, but it takes different shapes, like pineapples or cakes or something like that. So cute. And there's, I think, 22 different versions. Okay. 10,000 of them. Yeah. But they're super affordable, too, so they're probably going to be the hot, must have Christmas Toy of the Year is Bloom Dolls hatchimals are still around? Yeah. And there's one that's from how to Train Your Dragon toothless dragon. The baby dragon. They have a hatchimal version of him. What else? Are the Barbies on the list? Yeah, Barbie has a Dream Plane, which I saw in a couple of lists where yeah, it's a plane for Barbie. There's, like a snack cart and everything. Okay. It comes with a dog that I guess lives on the plane. Great. There's also Lol Surprise. Have you heard of that? No, I hadn't heard of it either until we started researching this, but they're like a whole brand, and a lot of these, including Bloom Dolls and Lol Surprise, they tap into this whole trend of unboxing. Do you remember when we talked about unboxing on YouTube where people open toys? Yeah. Because our good friend Joe Randazzo did his Lego Man unboxing videos that were still, to me, one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Yes. Great plug, by the way. But they still do that. Like, they're still unboxing. It's a huge trend, and that's worked its way into toys. So Lol Surprise is kind of based on that. And there's, like a whole line of dolls, but they're, like, into, like, DJ stuff and fashion and all that. But they also have surprise. And there's also a kid named Ryan's World. I don't think that's his last name, but that's his YouTube channel. I guarantee we talked about Ryan's World in that Unboxing toys episode, but he's got all sorts of toys that are out where you just don't know what you're getting when you open the thing. It's just surprise, unboxing. Weird subgenre on YouTube of unboxing. Or I remember we talked about the one where the lady's hands would just play with things? Yeah. Remember? She was like Peppa Pig. Yeah, it's so interesting. I'd say the one on the list, though, that I like that I usually look at the toys, and I'm like, well, I like to play this with my daughter, because that's important. I can't be bored out of my mind. Yeah, good point. And this Lego make your own movie kit looks pretty cool to me. Yeah, I was kind of hardened to see that on a couple of lists, because it's like this is stop motion movies you can make. Yeah, it's thoughtful. It's inventive. I love it. Yeah. They have a bunch of different stages and backgrounds and props, including a banana. It's great. So you learn how to make are you going to get her that? I might. I think you should. You want to make a movie? Anytime, buddy. All right. Can we make a flaming hoop out of a coat hanger and do things with that, too? Sure. Okay. And then the other one was the Fisher Price Linkables, which are super cute, including the Smooth move sloth. Hey, I'm down with Fisher Price. Yeah, sloths are huge right now. Yeah. Do you remember Playmobile? Playmobile? Remember? They were, like, the vaguely European kind of action people, but there was nothing, like, violent or military about them. They would explore or I probably recognize them. I definitely know that name. You've seen it a million times. Right? When you see it. Yeah, I'll look it up and show it to you later. But you'll see it and be like, yeah, of course. Wait, I see them right there. Sure. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, I was kind of a Fisher Price kid, but we still have some of that stuff that our daughter plays with that we had when we were kids, like the barn and the boat. It holds up. Definitely does hold up. You got anything else? Got nothing else. You're going to go buy a bunch of toys and flip them? I got nothing else except for 20,000 hatchimals in my garage, man. Here's the other thing, though, Chuck. You're taking a risk because you got to predict what the must have toy is. And if you guess wrong, you got 20,000 hatchimals that nobody wants. Boy, I'd love to see that happen in real life. I guarantee it happens. So just keep an eye out. All right? If you want to know more about the must have toys, there's basically nothing you can't know that we haven't already told you. So just, I guess, go get your kids some Christmas toys. That's right. Is that a good way to sign off? That's great. Okay, since I said, is this a good way to sign off? It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this from a teacher. We always like to shout out our teachers and their students. Hey, guys, just sending one of what I'm sure is among infinite thank yous that you receive. As a teacher who regularly references knowledge I gain from listening to your show in my class, my students, unwittingly and I are eternally grateful for your work. They give a hearty laugh whenever I steal. Your characters took Tuk, the wise proto homo sapien, and ERG, the folly prone genetic defect to elucidate points about the evolution of early humans. I knew you wouldn't mind my poaching net. That's what you think, John. You'll be hearing from our lawyers. John, you're the toy flipper of teachers. Just kidding. The reason I'm writing is to say I think you should not be discouraged by any Illustrator mail you receive telling you to keep your opinions to yourself. My favorite episodes are the ones where either or both of you have such strong feelings about the subject that you can't help but go on a rant. Maybe it's just because I agree with every rant, but I feel like it is important to take a stand on issues that matter to you and admit that you're human beings with a real stake in the game. Thanks again. I'll keep listening as long as you keep podcasting. That is from John Leboshkin. So thank you, Mr. Le Bushkin. And hello to your students, Mr. Le Bushkins class. Yeah. Hi, guys. You got a cool teacher. Yeah, he does sound pretty cool. He's doing God's work teaching the next generation. That's right. I hope he doesn't work in a public school because he's going to be like can't say God's work. If you want to get in touch with us like Mr. Le Bushkin did, or if you're a toy flipper who has an argument against Chuck's argument, we want to hear from you. Bring it. You can go on to stuffiesteo.com and check out our social links. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. 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How Con Artists Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-con-artists-work | They say you can't con an honest man, and that's key to thwarting cons; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Learn how to avoid everything from small-time scams to the Nigerian money transfer in this captivating episode with Chuck and Josh. | They say you can't con an honest man, and that's key to thwarting cons; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Learn how to avoid everything from small-time scams to the Nigerian money transfer in this captivating episode with Chuck and Josh. | Thu, 12 May 2011 19:23:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=19, tm_min=23, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=132, tm_isdst=0) | 36550184 | 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 with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply Capital One in a member FDIC brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant that makes this stuff you should know. Guest producer Casey in the house. Yes. It sounded like Oprah. You did good. Welcome, Casey. That's pretty good. Thank you. Yeah. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever heard of a guy named Gregor McGregor? That's not a name. It is a name. You know, I once lived with a guy named John Johnson. Really? Yeah, in college. He was a college roommate. Gregor McGregor had an equal sense of humor or else just was driven by greed. But at the beginning of the 19th century, he fashioned himself as the Prince of Poisois. Did he make up that name? Completely okay. P-O-Y-O-I-S completely nonexistent place. No. Not only was it a non existent place in a non existent country, it was a non existent island supposedly off of Honduras that he supposedly owned because he was supposedly the prince of this place. This is at a time when you could basically say, hey, you want to go colonize this country called Poiwa? That's rich with oil and probably not oil at the time, but rubies and gold and timber and all this stuff, and you guys will be the first settlers there. So you're going to be in on the bottom of this and you are going to make tons. The guy basically went around selling stock, the right to go colonize this place that didn't exist to the English, I imagine to the English. 250 settlers traveled there. 200 died on the journey looking for this place that didn't exist because they got the coordinates and there was nothing there and they were all exactly bitcher. Not necessarily. While these people were off, he moved, gregor McGregor moved on to France and was doing it again. Finally, about 50 of these people came back and they still couldn't believe that this guy made this up, that some of them testified on his behalf. When he was finally caught and tried as a con man, sounds like he had a lot of confidence. He got the confidence of the 250 settlers and then some, actually, during his trial, this guy was so audacious that he was still selling stuff. He was still selling stock and land rights to this place to, like, local nobility, whoever he could get to buy it. Sounded like a skilled con man. He is a con man. And like you said, con is short for confidence man. Most people knew that, but it turns out that's not true. Yes, I just told Lizzy that and she went really well. She probably wasn't paying attention. You never know. So, Chuck, Josh, I think it's high time, after all these requests that we've gotten to do, how common work that we do. How common work. Yeah. This was on the Facebook page the other day. I should have written down the name. So apologies to whoever put this on our Facebook wall. Mid April. Yes. This is for you. And we've done at least one before we've done Ponzi schemes. Yeah. And that'll pop up here. Yeah, but this is like an overview. There's a lot of different cons going on at any given time all around you in the world that you take as real and genuine. You're actually being conned an average of eight to twelve times a day, studies show. Con artists, Josh, are deceptive, they're liars, they are cheaters, they trick people. They're probably pretty smart. They take advantage of your weaknesses if you're lonely, if you're not too smart, if you like cats, if you're elderly. Unfortunately, a lot of times they prey on the elderly if you're in poor health, or if you're just plain ignorant and dumb. And this is a very, very important point. If you are greedy. Well, yeah, greed. What's the saying? You can't cheat an honest man. Yeah. That's as true as true gets, my friend. It is. There's no such thing as something for nothing. And if you are greedy, you are likely going to fall prey to a confidence scheme. Yeah. Because you're going to go against your better judgment. And once you take that step, you've just become ensnared in one of the eight to twelve cons that are taken on you every day. Yeah, it reminds me of the movie Wall Street. Charlie Sheen got swept up in that greed and they weren't cons. Well, I thought it was Shy LaBouf, but there was inside trading going on. But remember Sheen's father, Martin Sheen played his father in the movie. Yeah, I remember. In Hotshots. They pass one another on the river and go, I love you, in Wall Street. That's true. I forgot about that. But the father was honest. He was an honest man. He couldn't be con, he couldn't be bought. He's like no son. He can't get something for nothing. Yeah. You got to use elbow grease and your strong back to make your money. Yes. And what happened? Charlie Sheen went to jail. Martin Sheen did not. And look at Charlie now. Yeah, he's psychotic. Let's talk about conman. So, Chuck, one of the hallmarks of the confidence man is or woman. Or woman. That's a really good point. Because they're just as likely to be a con person as a man. Yeah. A woman will more likely play on a man's lust to get his money, whereas a man will do other things. Yeah, because women aren't stupid enough to fall for that. That's a good point. Although a gay con artist could still pull it over because you're still working the man. Yeah, true. Chuck, one of the hallmarks of con people is that they travel frequently, mainly because they don't like to be chased by mobs with pitchforks and torches, although they frequently are. Right. So to kind of explain or excuse this frequent travel, they may say that they have a job that causes them to or they may actually have a job that gives them a reason to travel. Like, you could be a traveling salesman, but really you're a Connor, but you really do have a job as a traveling salesman. Yeah. Have you seen Paper Moon, your favorite movie? Paper Moon? I have indeed seen that, yes. They were always just sort of from town to town, right? Yeah. Bible salesman. Oh, that's right. Traveling Bible salesman. Although the whole thing was a con. She was the cutest darn little con artist I've ever seen. She was awesome. You could also be a carney, which I think partially explains why a lot of people don't trust carney. Do you ever see the famous Simpsons episode with what was the guy, jim Varney as the carney? He and his son ultimately got by Homer and Bart? They did, yeah. Casey, can you verify that? Yes. All right. Casey always knows he's the Simpsons guy. Josh, if you want to throw some other cool 1920 style terms out there, like get on the trolley yeah. You could call him a flim flam man, a sham artist, a Shista, a bunko man, a grifter. Swindler hustler. Bamboozler grifter is my favorite. It's my favorite, too. It's a good one. Let's call them grifters. It sounds like you do not mess with this person. Griffin grifter. Sounds to me like a professional. Yes. And the awesome movie The Grifters from Stephen Frears is what I think is one of the top three con man movies of all time. Did you like that one? I made it halfway through the grifters. Yeah, I loved it. Yeah. We'll talk about the movie part in a minute. So we talked about Ponzi schemes before. That is one of many types of cons. And there's actually, under the umbrella of cons, there are sub umbrellas of types of cons, and then under those are actual different cons. That's right. That is the granular level we're going to get to on this. Yeah. And there's all kinds of cons, but it is funny how many of them are just variations of the same con. Yes. For example, street cons. Yeah. Let's talk about some street cons. Street cons is generally characterized by the traits that they happen in public. They happen quickly, and usually for a fairly small take, a couple of $100 or less. David, if you can make a couple of $100 in a street con in 15 minutes, you're doing pretty well for yourself. But you shouldn't be doing that at all. No, that's wrong. Immoral, unethical. It really is. I mean, it's fooling someone out of their money. Yes. It's kind of the worst thing you could do. I almost respect the guy who, like, hits you over the head and steal your purse a little more. I don't like that guy either. Yeah, you're right. They're both jerks. All right, so let's talk about some street cons. Okay, what about Chuck the pedigree dog? And by the way, this article has the most superfluous illustrations of any article on how stuff works at all. Really? Yeah. There's very app descriptions, and then there's some illustrations of the app descriptions. And this is written by the grabster. We should point out it's all the fun articles. Yes, the Pedigree dog. But you can insert dog with violin or really anything of value that you can trick someone into thinking is valuable. Right. So go. Let's hear it. Okay, so let's say that you are a shop owner, and some guy comes in with the dog and says, hey, can you hold this for me for a minute? I got to go down the street and place a bet, or I got to go down the street and rob another store. Just be thankful it's not your store. And the store owner goes, sure, I'll watch your dog. I love dogs. Yeah. So the first guy comes out and it goes out, and then the second con man comes in, unbeknownst to the owner, related to the first guy, at least in a business sense. And he goes, wow, where did you get that dog? That's like very rare pedigree dog worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Can I buy it from you? And the owner says, maybe so come back in 20 minutes, I'll see if I can buy the dog from the owner. That's the greed that they play on the bartenders thinking, hey, I might can make a few bucks here. Exactly. Or the store owner do I want to say bar owner? Yeah, either way. So the first guy comes back, the owner of the dog comes back and finds that the owner of the store wants to buy the dog from them, says, oh, I guess so. All right, I'll sell it to you for two grand. The owner pays the two grand, and the second guy never comes back to buy the dog from them. And so the owner of the shop all of a sudden is out a couple of grand, and they have a mutt on their hands. Yes. The dog was never pedigree. No, it was all a lie. The dog is a real loser here, too, I might point out. Yeah, because the guy's probably not going to be like, oh, well, I love him anyway. He's probably going to kick them, put him out on the street, and plus his name is Jason. Who names their dog Jason? That's so weird. The pigeon drop. That's another old school con. This works. Let's say you're hanging out on the street and you spot something that you have placed there. Let's say it's a money bag from a local vendor. They dropped it on the way to the deposit thing. Yeah. And a good way to make this work is if you can get the other person to notice it first. That way they don't feel like they're being conned because they spotted it. Right. Then you say all of a sudden you realize, hey, both of us are looking at this thing that says the savings and loan, and it's got a little money spilling out of it. That's the most generic thing I could think of. Yeah. And they said, you know what, let's put this up and see here's where an honest man can't be cheated. Comes in for sure. Because if you said, well, maybe we should also just try to take it to this bank first, the con is over. It is. But let's say you are a greedy guy and you're going to go along with it. What happened? Well, the second con artist might show up and say, hey, listen, I saw this too, so I want my fair share. There's no easy way to solve this, so why don't, in good faith, why don't we all put some money in an envelope, show good faith, we're all financially on the up and up, and then the money is in, their little sleight of hand goes on, and the original dude ends up with an envelope full of coupons. This one I don't get. You don't get it? I don't like it and I don't get it. First of all, sleight of hand, that is not a good con. It's not solid. If it involves basically, like, magicianship, well, that's what three card money is. Agreed. The other thing I don't like about it is why not just split the money up three ways? Why would you put money up to split money? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'm actually angered by that. I agree. Another way to do it, though, is if it's a ring, okay, or something like that, then it makes sense to put up money because one of the con men says, well, actually, I do have a little training in diamond appraisal, and this thing is probably worth about five grand I can't go onto or anything like that, or there's no way we can go onto right now. Do you want to buy my share of something for $500 or whatever? The guy who's being conned, the target says, well, yeah, sure, here's $500, and I'll take the ring and go on my merry way. That makes more sense. That does make more sense. Putting up money to split a bag of cash is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Well, it's a con. And if you have fallen for that con, that might make you one of the dummer rubs of the world. If you have sent us an email so we can come to your house and hit you in the head with a tack hammer. In the case of the ring, obviously the original person ends up with some sort of diamondoid and out whatever amount of money they're stupid enough to give up. Yeah, that's the pigeon drop. I feel mean saying stupid and dumb, but honestly, if you give up cash like that, then on the street, let's say naive. Okay. All right. Three card money that we mentioned, that is more magicianship. My friend Jim used to do that in high school. Really? Jim was really good at three car money, and he would just do it among friends in the cafeteria at school. So it's not like he hit the streets. But that's when you have three you know of well, that's true. That's when you have the three cards. And one of them, they said ace of spades. But I've always seen it as the queen. Find the red queen, you know what I mean? Exactly. Find the queen and you'll get the green. Jim did all that stuff. Flat white, candy stripe, doesn't matter to the mac. That's one of those things that he would say. So it's like the shell game, and you're moving these cards around such I mean, they have it on the big board at baseball games, follow the brace, and they do the quick switcheroo at one point, and you can't tell. I actually know how to do that, I'm just not very good at it. I know the trick, though. Okay. It's like you put both of them in one hand and do one of these, and you drop the one that you're not supposed to drop. And so once you lose track of it, then unless you guess, luckily you're not going to know where the queen is. I always just assume one was sticky. No, you're just good at it. Okay. And there's also, as we mentioned, the other cons. Usually other con artists are not usually a lot of times they'll be working concert with you. So they'll come up and win a couple of rounds while people are watching, and they'll say, that guy just won a couple of times. I can do this. This must be a legit game. Three card mining. Yeah, exactly. So those are just three of many examples of street cons, which are all short cons is another way to put them, too. They fall under another sub umbrella of short con. That's right. There's no long street con, as far as I know. I don't think so business and internet cons. This can tape into the long congenre of co confidence tricks, but for the most part, they're usually fairly quick. For example, the pump and DUP scheme. Right. I've never heard of this one. Yes, pyramid schemes. We covered with the Ponzi podcast. And how detailed do we need to get here with the pyramid scheme? I say we just go back and listen to Ponzi. Okay. Is that what you should do? Yeah. You should give them another Ponzi, though. It's a Ponzi scheme where basically there is nothing exchanging hands many times, and you recruit people under you to give you money, and they recruit people under them to give them money. And the only people who ever actually get a payout are the very few people at the top of the pyramid. It's an unsustainable business model, if it actually is a business at all sometimes. Ponzi's original scheme wasn't a scheme. It was basically buying and selling like postage stamps because there was an exchange rate associated with it back at the time. But he started taking new investors money because the investment wasn't paying off like he thought, and giving it to old investors. And that's the creation of the Ponzi scheme. The people on the bottom pass money upwards, so only the people in the first couple years of the actual can make money. That's right, Josh. And the way they get you in is they tell you that you're one of the top people, even if you have suspicions, like, this is a pyramids game. They're like, it totally is. But you're one of the top three, so you're in. Right. Which makes you a greedy jerk. Exactly. Playing on your greed once again. Yeah. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com 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. Multilevel marketing. Josh a lot of times that's basically a pyramid scheme. There are some legitimate companies like the Pampered Chef or Tupperware or Amway, and it is legitimate. I mean, they can be, but they have a pyramid structure. It's not grift. Yeah, but if you start poking around and they're a little vague about the product and payouts and things like that, then it's probably not legit pyramids. Right. Not one of those companies. But yeah, if you start asking questions, if you ever start asking questions of somebody who wants to buy into their franchise and they start sweating and getting all KZY walk away. Yeah, it's a good sign. Do we really need to talk about the Nigerian money transfer at this point? I would think our listeners are wise to this, but it still happens. It's an Internet scam. The prince of some country in Africa usually has this large sum of money, and somehow we got your email address and you are the lucky guy that can get a portion of it because the money will be freed up. We just have some problems within our own country with customs or whatever. Yeah, we have a bunch of money. It's locked up. We need some of your money to unlock it. Exactly. To bribe people to pay whatever fees, all that stuff. The thing that I was surprised about is that this one, the Nigerian money transfer, aka advance fee fraud, aka 419 scam because Section 419 is Nigerian, I guess federal code deals with fraud. It very frequently becomes a long con. Yes, that's what I was I didn't know about that either, actually. Yeah. So once you have given these people your money, they're like, oh, okay, well, let's see what else we can get out of here. And something got held up at the border, so we need more money for more bribes, or we need your Social Security number because the bank is asking for it. And it just keeps going on and on. And then the insidiousness of the long con is once you've bought into something and you're invested for a substantial amount, it becomes increasingly difficult to walk away. Exactly. And it's always just tantalizingly right there. If I pay just a little more money, I'm going to get everything back and then some. And it just never pays out like that. Because you're being conned. Yeah. And the reason we didn't know this is because we never fell for the beginning of the Nigerian con. But I make fun of a little bit because I thought everybody on the planet knew about this. But it still happens, I'm sure. And it probably happens to your grandmother. Yeah. And that's so sad and so wrong in so many ways. It's like stealing half of the value of somebody's 401K or something overnight. Yeah. Or issuing a mortgage to somebody when you know they can't pay it back because you're just going to foreclose on their house and sell it. You know what another I wouldn't call it a con, but have you ever seen that guy that sells the Learn how to Email with this DVD? Have you seen that dude, I think I know who you're talking about. Yeah, it's very trustworthy. White guy with silver hair. Yeah, it's very rudimentary things like learn how to access the Internet or learn how to operate email. We'll send you these DVDs. They're legit. I'm sure the DVDs show you how to email someone. Sure. But it's a shipping scam, essentially. Okay, we should probably see a way here. Is this an actual scam? It is. Here's what happens. How about this? I will tell you what happens, and then you, the listener, can decide whether you think it's a scam or you the lawyers of this guy explain it to us in court while you're suing us. What you see when you see these commercials is pay 995 for the set of DVDs to Teach how to email. Shipping is 795 money back guarantee. So what happens is, if you're not satisfied, you get your money back. You have paid 895 to ship a DVD. The DVD is shipped to you via Media Mail, which is slow and very cheap. You can probably ship a DVD for, like, $0.10 via Media Mail. Right. So he's making 885. Even if they return the thing and he gives them their money back, he's made the difference of the shipping. So basically, this guy's making money no matter what, scam or not a scam. Probably not, because you're getting well, not in a legal sense. Yeah. The guy is providing the service that he's saying he's providing. That's right. So he guarantees stance. I reversed my stance. I call that man the smartest man on the planet. I don't know about that. All right. He's somewhere in between, and we might cut all this out, even. Yeah, right. What else? Oh, Chuck. What about home improvement? Yeah, you know, man, I was just working on this house down the street. I was putting a roof on it, and we got all this extra material and I'm going to have to return it. But I could give you a heck of a deal. Here's all my money. The end. You've been scammed? Yeah. There are two kinds of home improvement scams. One that are perpetrated by actual contractors, where they basically sell you shoddy work or something like that. Or another frequent one is where they do the work. Get halfway through, say, tear your whole roof off, put half the roof back on, and say, I'm going to need more money. And what can you do at that point? You are over a barrel. Yes, that's a scam. Or they might do shoddy work and have you sign a contract that has something like some clause in where if you don't make the payments, if you don't pay them in full. They can put a lien on your house and basically take it from you. So you have to pay them for shoddy work no matter what it happens. There's also scans perpetrated by people who are not contractors. There's one that's, like, they'll re asphalt your driveway, and this group of guys will just basically paint your driveway black and be like, give us our money. They're not actually contractors, right? They're painters. Really? Yeah. And since you mentioned it, the guys who approach you in the grocery store parking lot to fix your dents, they are not auto body specialists that just happened to be there with all their materials. They have their materials. And I'm really sorry to say that my wife fell for that. Oh, really? Her old Honda Accord that I drove, honda Civic that I drove until recently, had two of the worst smeared bondo jobs I've ever seen in my life. Because he was going into the grocery store, I was like, I can fix that for you just while you're shopping. I saw them. I never mentioned them. Yeah, she fell for it. And I try not to give her too much of a hard time, but she's like, well, they seem really honest. Well, they gained her confidence. Yeah. Awesome. That's a con right there. You could also have the fake home inspector who supposedly is an official of the city, state, municipality, county, who's just dropping by and announced at your house for a surprise inspection is going to find eight things wrong with your house that don't meet code right, but really do, because this person is not legitimate, but he has a friend who can do it for pretty cheap. Well, it's going to be terrible work, unnecessary work, and expensive work. I got one for you. Yeah. If you ever see the words debt removal or debt erased, yeah, just walk away. I didn't even know this exists. Oh, yeah, man. You're looking around. There's signs on telephone poles that say, debt removal, we can remove your debt. Which means they'll hand you a document that says your debt has been erased. And that's literally all it is. It's a piece of paper that says, we've erased your debt. But you bought it. Yeah. Well, you've bought that piece of paper. Well, I imagine, sadly, some people have probably taken that piece of paper into, like, a bank and said, but no, look, it says here that my dad has been erased. Not so. Yeah, I bet there's a lot of discomfort in that first few moments where the person's trying to convince the banker that they don't have any debt any longer. This whole podcast makes me feel bad. We mentioned mortgage refinance scams, where basically you find somebody who has some equity, a lot of debt and not a lot of income, and you issue them a refinance, a mortgage refi, and you have to be an actual banker to do that. And they. Do it. They do it because they want that house. Yeah. You might be signing away your house. Yeah. And also there's bankers who have been known to slip clauses into the fine print of a home mortgage loan or refi that says, these people can have this house, by the way, and you just sign over your house for nothing. Which I don't understand how somebody could get away with that. I know. And then, of course, Chuck, I think we're at the public service announcement part, how to avoid the con. Yeah. First and foremost, don't be greedy. Yeah, don't be greedy. If it looks too good to be true, then you're right on the money there. Don't trust anybody, especially if you're an elderly person. You never get something for nothing. That is not how the world works. It has never worked that way. It will never work that way. If someone is promising you large amounts of money for very little, what you considered very little money, it's wrong. Solicitations are usually basically that's a horrendous business model in this day and age. So if a company is still using door to door cold visits, they kind of deserve to go out of business. So you can go ahead and assume that. Either one. You don't want to do business with that company that's soon going to go out of business because they're using a business model from the 50s or a marketing model from the 50s. Or that these guys are actually con artists and they're not really going to sell you a security system and they're actually probably just casing your house to break into it later. Yeah, maybe so. You need to look out for other signs. Like, if you meet a nice man who's got a great deal for you and he gives the business card and it says, Jim Smith, PO. Box 14, and that's all it says on it. Hand it back to them, walk away, ask for information, ask for their driver's license. Let them see you taking down their license plate number. Yeah. If you're asking them all these questions and they're legit, then they're going to be like, sure, man, here they will be. It's going to be a little uncomfortable because you're basically saying, like, I don't trust you. Right. You have a little too much pain on your jeans or whatever, so I don't like the look of you, but I'm willing to see what you do when I do this to you. Now squirm. Right. And if they don't squirm, then you might be able to trust them. Right, right. And if they really need that decision fast, if you say something like, you know what, this sounds really good, but give me about a week or so, and they're like, no, this deal ends today. Okay, sorry. This very likely there's not any deal that ends today when there's lots of money involved. Yes. And then, Chuck, if you have been conned the point of con artists confidence is that you'll feel too embarrassed and foolish to tell anybody. So they'll be able to keep operating in virtually the same place for a while. Yeah, right. So you want to actually go and tell somebody, go tell the popo. Tell the popo. Call up that annoying guy on the local news that goes and sticks microphones in people's faces. Maybe he'll help you out. Yeah. You know, there was a guy named Count Victor Lustig who managed to sell the Eiffel Tower twice. Pretty good story because the first guy was too embarrassed to tell anybody that it had happened. But basically about 15 years after the World Fair in Paris, the Paris exposition that saw the raising of the Eiffel Tower, the city was really having trouble paying to keep it maintained. So it wasn't just completely unbelievable that the city would hire an agent to secretly shop around the right to tear it down and use the steel for scrap. Yeah. It was originally supposed to be temporary, right? Yeah, it was. Who knew? I don't know. So he would take people in a limousine and make a big fancy show about it to come up to the observation deck and show them the metals that they were going to be buying. Exactly. And somebody paid out. This one guy paid out. Andre Poisson was a steel dealer who paid out for it and was too embarrassed to tell anybody. And so Lustig did it again a month later, and it was lucrative both times. I liked the guy's first scam I see, he created a machine that basically turned out blank paper. Right. Printing machine. He built it as a printing machine that could print $100 bills. And basically what he did was he stuck $200 bills in. The problem was the machine could only spit $100 bill out every 6 hours. So even if you had the time to spend 12 hours staring at this machine, you're going to see it spit out $200 bills just waiting on that third. Exactly. $330,000 for a machine like this. And he was a very smart man. Very smart, unethical man. Yeah. Because you'd make that 30 back divided by 6 hours or divided by 103,000, divided by six. So that's how long it would take the time six. Yeah, whatever. I think 1800 hours or 180. It's a variation of 18. What fun would it be to get a calculator out? What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflow so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. So I guess it's it. Yeah. We should list some movies here. Yeah, because I love a good con artist movie. Yeah. The Sting classic. I've not seen it. House of Games. David Mammoth. Not seen it. Classic. Catch me if you can. We talked about that. Confidence. I saw that one. I didn't see that one. It was a good day. Definitely. You'd watch it on a Sunday afternoon. Eddie Burns. Yes. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of the great comedy con men. One of the great movies ever. Absolutely. If you're into Mammoth, of course, you got to go with The Spanish Prisoner. So he wrote two, huh? He wrote The Spanish Prisoner and House of Games. Yeah. Okay. And Glen. Gary Glen Ross, which is not a con man movie. And State and Maine. Another great movie. Yeah. I'm a big Mamma fan. Met stickman. Yeah. I'd say it's slightly slicker than Confidence. Yeah. My favorite was the grifter's Steven Fears movie, which you didn't get through. No. And then The Hustler, which preceded this thing, of course, the number one confidence movie of all time, the Baltimore Bullet. Have you seen it? No. Okay. I hadn't even heard of it until today. I had neither. But it's got a great movie poster and it starred Mr. James Coburn. Can't go wrong there. No, you can't. If you want to learn more about cons, basically you should print out this article and carry it with you at all times. So if a stranger comes up to you and you suspect they're conning you, you can use it for quick and easy reference. You just pull it out and unfold it and be like, oh, an envelope full of money. I know what's going on. Come with me, sir, I'm placing you under citizens arrest. You can type con artist into theandychurchbar Athowstopworks.com. And by the way, Chuck, citizens arrest? What do you think? We've got a lot of requests, and I don't know how that works. I've tried it a bunch of times. I'm just getting beat up since I said search Barhouse of courses.com, etc. Or that means that it is time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this a plea for joining our show. You're Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I've been listening to and enjoying your podcast for about a year now. I wanted to thank you for reinforcing the crumbling concrete of my sanity with your rebar of knowledge. That's why I read this one. I just like that sentence. I'm 26 years old. For the last three years have been working in a windowless office, endlessly shuffling paperwork. Your podcast, with its breadth of subjects, with a d and cheerful banter, has allowed me one glimmering sliver of anticipation. Every day I have to drag myself into work. Despite your insistence that you have submitted clumsy podcasts in the past, I have found something endearing and enjoyable in every one of them. Your inclusion of pop culture references asides in jokes and personal anecdotes is what distinguishes you from more mediocre podcast. So who knew? That is nice. If all the slattery didn't tip you off, I was going to suggest one minor change, however. Possibly the addition of a hip, young smart alec looking for a career change. I can assure you I have a voice and face made for radio and sensibilities and overall coolness to mesh seamlessly with this newfangled medium. So he's basically saying, Can I be on your show as the third team member? Okay, I thought Jerry was the third team member. Well, the third podcast or fourth team member. Oh, thanks so much for putting out a consistently great show. I'm a loyal listener. I will upgrade myself to fanatical if you can explain open source computing in 30 minutes. Sincerely, Matthew G. So, Matthew, I can say two things. We will neither explain open source computing in 30 minutes, nor will we accept your gracious offer to join us as a third podcaster. What? Do you want them on the show? No. Okay. I'm trying to break it to him easy. That the position has been filled. There are no openings here. We are what's called a comic DIAD. Yes. I don't know how we could ever become a triad, even for a single episode, if it wasn't an interview. We had strickland in here. Oh, yeah, that's right. But he's not funny, so that's no threat to our comic diet, and he can explain open source computing. Well, let's just get Strickland in here again. No, just give this guy to Strickland. All right, done. Either way, though, it's just you and me, right? That's right. Okay. Thank you, Matthew G, though, for your spunk. We like that. Yes. If you have ever been conned, we'd like to hear about it. Right, Chuck? Yeah. No. It's sad, but yes, let's hear it. Okay, well, we can share with people. How about this? Why don't you go share your cons on the Facebook page so everybody can look out for the hottest, newest, hippiest cons going on? We're at facebook. Comstuffysheno. You can reach us on Twitter at syskpodcast, and you can send us plain, old fashioned email at stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit housetepworks.com to learn more about the podcast. Click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House 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 school is out, the sun shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarriff and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today, you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. 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3f9f71ce-5461-11e8-b6d0-3fdb9d7bcede | Selects: How Profiling Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-profiling-works | At its base, criminal profiling is a legitimate investigatory tool. The Supreme Court has drawn a clear line that bans profiling when it includes race. So why do we still do it? Take a closer look with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | At its base, criminal profiling is a legitimate investigatory tool. The Supreme Court has drawn a clear line that bans profiling when it includes race. So why do we still do it? Take a closer look with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Sat, 24 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=114, tm_isdst=0) | 47987227 | 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 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 is host Barrattunday 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. Hey, everybody, it's your bro, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've Chosen, our episode from July of 2015 on the extraordinarily controversial practice of profiling. You'll find out all the ins and outs of profiling when it actually works, why it generally doesn't, and why it's so just utterly offensive in general. Plus, you'll also get to hear Chuck classic Chuck after he got back from adopting his daughter, and he gets to thank everybody who helped him along the way. And it's just very nice and heartwarming, especially considering the episode it's attached to. So, at any rate, I hope you enjoy it and take good care. What was that? That is a heraldic announcement. Yes. Before we get going, I know people on social media already know this stuff, but I wanted to announce on the podcast that Chuck here has adopted a baby girl. Chuck has a baby? A beautiful baby. Yeah, she is. She's cute. She was ten days late, so she came out not looking like one of those little alien creatures. No, she's fully formed. Yes. What's her name, Chuck? Her name is Ruby Rose Bryant. Man, she is so cute. And she was born on your birthday? Yeah. Isn't that crazy? One of the better days of the year, July 15. But isn't it remarkable? I think it is remarkable. Out of all the days. Yeah. And I was literally I was just like, well, let me scroll through the celebrity birthdays, just for giggles, to see who shares your birthday right about three quarters the way down. It's all your face, that's all. And I'd forgotten it was your birthday because I was just in another plan. And immediately I was like, Emily, you got to see this. You'll never guess whose birthday she shares. So I think that's really neat. So anyway, thank you, everybody, for the support. Stop. Chuck. Yes. On behalf of every Stuck, you should know listener out there. Yes. Congratulations to you and Emily. Do you feel like you can speak for them? Yes, of course. Okay. Because there might be one guy out there. He's like, I don't care. He can stop listening right now. But I do have some people to thank. This happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we stayed in this little area called East Village. It was literally like, a block in this loft and airbnb loft and above pizza place and across the street from a bar. Oh, I bet you have some people. I think. Yeah. These people took us in as family. It was, like, literally every day for ten days late. We're out there two days early. So for, like, two weeks, they were like, what's going on? Where's this baby? So I want to thank Hodges Bend, which you would love. Dude, this cocktail bar yeah. Right up your alley. It sounds like it. You said cocktail bar. Yeah. And not only do they make, like, fresh ingredients, but they don't have, like, a thing of cucumber sliced up. They sliced as needed. Nice. And the jalapeno, they were doing it right there. So Jamie and Nate and Nicole and Ian the chef at Hodges band was the stuff you should know. Fan. Oh, yeah. He came out, and he was like, is that who I think it is? How fortuitous. How fortuitous. And then East Village bohemian pizzeria. We stayed above this place, and they were great. Did the smell drive you nuts all the time? No, but we ate a lot of pizza. So Pat there, and my boy Max max and I really hit it off. We're like genuine life pals now. Nice. And he at the end, I go to leave, and I just give him a letter saying thank you, and here's my contact info. And, like, PS, by the way, I have a podcast. He's an ornithologist. He has his Masters. Wow. But he's not doing that right now. He's running his pizza joint. And just a really smart guy. I think you might like this podcast I do. He comes up and tells me afterwards, this is, like, our parting words. He was like, Dude, you're chuck. Oh, really? I had a weird thing he said. I knew that you seem familiar, but I didn't want to say anything. Like, he can watch the TV show. Oh, wow. So Max was like, that's probably why he didn't want to say anything. Yeah, he didn't want to bring it up. So a huge thanks to those guys. And then our case worker, Jessica. Also a stuff you should know. Fan. That is amazing, because at the end of our first call, like a month ago, she went, all right, we've got business done. I have something. I have to admit, she's like, I'm a huge fan. So it was weird. It was like, the Stuff You Should Know nation sort of caring for me. Yes. And all of the people you put a picture of ruby Rose up and broke the Internet. It was people love newborns. Well, yes, but people love Chuck newborn. Yeah, but it could have been a puppy and probably gotten the same. I don't think so, man. I don't think that was very sweet. Yes. So that meant a lot to me. But Jessica and her two sons, Hugh and Henry, I know they are listeners, too. They are awesome boys. And she really took care of us. I'm glad it worked out like that, man. Three weeks in Tulsa. It was weird and stressful, but it sounds wonderful. Yeah. Good start, though. Yeah, we were in there. Emily helped deliver this baby. That is so good. I was in the man zone right behind me. I am so proud of you guys. I'm so happy for you guys. I also want to say Jerry is not allowed to talk. Jerry feels the exact same way. She's well, we could take the duct tape off for today, maybe. Jerry, how do you feel? Yes. She said yeah, she agreed. She just spelled out on the speaking spell, call the police. Anyway, this is not going to become the new baby show. She will probably disappear from your lives. But just know that we're all doing great and thank you for the support. All right. Yeah. Nice job, Chuck. Thanks, man. Congratulations. Thank you, sir. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. Which means it's time for listener mail. Oh, wait, that's early. Wow. I know. That my brain just hurt. That's how we leave that in there. Do you want to y or maybe I should just read listener mail. We can go home. Okay. It's build your own episode. Yeah, it's a mad libs. Just fill it in. I'm profiling. Yeah. Styling and profiling. I'm pretty excited. Are you styling and profiling? Well, this is a graph. That's a different thing. Yeah. Okay. I think that has to do with photography. No, I think styling and profiling just means you're living large. Yeah. You're fashionable and hip. Oh, got you. Yeah. This is different. And this is a grab stir article, which is the mark of quality as we all know it is. It's refreshing to see. And we should just say right off the bat, profiling is a super divisive topic. Oh, yeah. There are many ways to look at it and they make sense sometimes on both sides. It's a tough one. Yeah. So that's my caveat. It's divisive. So one thing that grabster immediately points out is like, not all profiling is profiling. Like you think of sure. We're going to talk about all the different ways. Right. There's plenty of accepted forms of profiling, and the first one is the standard all points bulletin. Or be on the lookout. Right. That's the kind that no one has a problem with. No one does. Yeah. Because you know what that is? That's the silver Toyota Tacoma was spotted today. And white male in his mid 40s with spiky hair and sort of chubby with a big, gross gray, black beard has committed a crime. Right. And he's wearing cargo shorts and flip flops. Oh, I see you're describing yourself profiler, but you put in there white male. Yeah. And the reason I am the reason why people don't have a problem with this is twofold. One, a crime has already been committed. Okay? I committed a crime. So the police work is finding a perpetrator that has already committed a crime. And secondly, that profile is based on eyewitness accounts, descriptions of the person. That's right. So that profile is being used to track down a specific person. It has nothing to do with anybody else who's white. Right. It has nothing to do with anybody else who drives a silver Tacoma. It has nothing to do with any of that jazz. It's just this guy is suspected of having committed this crime and he looks like this. Yeah, you see it on the news every night. It's not just cops that use this. The news will say the suspect is wearing a handsome checkered oxford buttondown, wispy hair and white straight teeth. Exactly. So they're describing you. Oh, you think my teeth are nice? I didn't say that. They said they were white and straight. That's nice, if that's what you're into. This is coming from a guy who just found out he's about to have to lose his front tooth all over again. Start over? Yeah. Man, that sucks. Which I know there are some fans out there that are laughing. Aaron Cooper, that toothless Chuck is coming back in the house for it's. Really? Just him? Yeah. He's the only one who'd be jerky enough to laugh at that kind of misfortune. I know. I'm sorry to bring that up. I'm just still reeling from that discovery. It stinks. You think you get an implant and it's for life. Yeah. Especially when they sell you a lifetime implant. Yeah, exactly. All right, so like you said, including descriptions and skin color is not controversial in this case. No. Everybody from the Feds to the local police are okay with that? Yeah, they're all in on it. Like, everybody's like, yeah, this is fine. This makes sense. Sure. Not a thing. That's right. The next one is psychological profiling. And this is when you don't have a lot of physical evidence or you don't have an eyewitness and you're trying to fill in the blanks and make some good guesses. Billy Blanks based on I remember that guy. Some good guesses. Based on the crime scene or just the circumstances of the crime? Yes. Again, a crime has already taken place and you're trying to figure out who solved it, and you're taking committed it. You're trying to figure out who's going to solve it. Precogs which you figure out the same moment as you do when you figure out who committed it. It's interesting to mind bending. Right. Twice you've jumped to the end of something. It's so weird. I don't know what that means. I think you know what it means. Sometimes they are vague. Oh, wait, I hadn't finished my thought. Okay. I didn't mess it up that bad. Let me go back and finish. All right. The point is, it's drawn from available evidence yeah. Clues. Clues, yeah. That you're bringing together to try to drum up an idea of who did this. Yeah, right, exactly. Okay. Sometimes it can be vague, but if you watch TV and movies, it is probably not how it really goes down, but it's super specific when you see it in fiction. Right. Like, I think this man who was beaten as a child and he probably lives alone. Sherlock Holmes was really good at that kind of thing. It's a good point. Love Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, that's good stuff. Did you know he was a morphine and cocaine addict? Oh, really? Yeah. I guess you need both in, like, the original stories. Really? Yeah. Oh, like in the books. Wow. Not the real guy. Right. Are you sure you're not just thinking of Robert Downey, Jr. Oh, I'm 100% sure. Yeah. I mean, I've read the originals, and he shoots morphine in it, and Watson's not very happy with the whole thing. Oh, is he clean? Yeah. Is he straight edge? No, he's not straight edge, but he's not a junkie, you know? Right. But he didn't care. He was like, Watson, wash my toes. All right, moving on to predictive profiling. Well, yeah, this is where it starts to get a little messy. Yes. It can get a little controversial. Even psychological profiling is a little controversial, I have to say, Chuck, like, it's not a proven, tried and true thing. It's as much a guessing game as anything else. That's true. But it's not nearly still as controversial as predictive profiling, because now you're trying to say these people will probably commit a crime. Right. Now, civil rights are an issue. Big time. Big time. Police officers do great work. Ideally, they're not just reacting to committed crimes, but they are driving around the neighborhood looking for a suspicious person that might be about to commit a crime. To prevent crime. To prevent a crime, which is tough to do. Right place, right time. In most cases. Yeah. And you use the word ideally, right? Ideally. Okay. Yes. So even when this happens, the Supreme Court has roundly sided with police officers profiling for justification. So it's, legally speaking, okay. It's on the books. It's on the books. Give an example of the kind of profiling that's okay to be used. The one in the article is great. Let's say you're in South Florida, and you're traveling up I 95 and it's 04:00 a.m. And you're in a rented black SUV with tinted windows, and you have the spare tire in the back seat removed. I'm sorry, it's removed from the trunk area. It's in the back seat. It's just sitting in the backseat. Might be a drug trafficker. Right. And the cop is basing this on something like a profile. Yeah. But a profile based on previous experiences with other drug dealers in the same area, because that's a really big one right there. One of the things for using profiles successfully is it has to be over a certain period of time and associated with a certain place. So you use Miami and say Miami in 1985. Okay. Right. If you saw that person, and you would say, well, this is probably a cocaine trafficker based on all the other dealings with cocaine traffickers who use the same transportation Mo. Yeah. And we should point out the tires removed because you can then hide the drugs where the spare tire went. Right. And then that's why the tires in the back seat. Yeah. So these are red flags. Yeah. But if you're, like, in Wyoming in 2015, and you read an article about how that held true in Miami in 1985, that is not necessarily a justifiable transference of profiling, because it exists in a different time and a different place. That's right. So, like you said, this can be high level policy. It can be unofficial policy. It can be just merely experienced as a police officer. That's something you've encountered from time to time. And basically, to determine if this profile justifies a search warrantless search, that is. In other words, you haven't gone to the judge and applied for a warrant and had them review it and all that stuff, or rubber stamp it, which will get to it's got to stand up in court. So you got to be careful. As a cop, you do. You have to have what's called an articulable suspicion. Yes. Which was established by a Supreme Court ruling, terry versus Ohio. And the Supreme Court said and this is actually from a Matthiabi article, it's really worth reading. It's called why Baltimore Blew up. It was in Rolling Stone, like, a month or two ago. It's a very good article, but he talks about this Terry case led to what are called Terry stops. Whereas if a cop has a suspicion that they can put into words, meaning it's not just a hunch right. That somebody is either just committed a crime or going to commit a crime, that that is probable cause. And it sounds first search. Yeah. And here's Ed had a great example here. Like, let's say the cop in court would say this. The suspect appeared nervous, made several contradictory statements. In the back seat, I saw a shoe box full of old film canisters, which drug carriers commonly use. The car smelled like air freshener spray, which is used to cover up the smell of drugs. And I spotted them driving slowly up and down a block that I know is frequented by drug dealers. Right. That's called good police work. In court. Right. That's called, like a prosecutor's dream cop. Yeah. And if you go back and you notice all that stuff, all of these things are based on a block that he knows to be frequented by drug dealers. 35 millimeter canisters. Maybe he read a police benevolent association newsletter article about that. Right. All of this stuff together becomes what's called cumulative similarities. And supposedly a Florida highway patrolman named Bob Vogel is the first guy to put this down on paper. He was very controversial, which is you take all of these different things and put them together, and you can form a profile and you can use that to pull somebody over right. And then eventually search their car if you're a Florida highway patrolman, right? Yes. So you have the Terry stops, which are used for broken windows policing and just for pulling people over. But they require an articulable suspicion. Right. But they can be based on what are called cumulative similarities, which is a profile. Either, like your police department is saying, be on the lookout for people driving with their spare tire in the back seat at this time of night. Yeah. On so far, this has all been upheld by the supreme court. That's right. But there is a very, very fine line that is frequently crossed, and we will talk about how that runs afoul of the Constitution right after this. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes. LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. 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All right, Josh, before we took a break, you mentioned something called the constitution, and there are a couple of amendments that come into play when you're talking about search and seizure, probable cause, profiling. And they are the Fourth and 14th Amendments. The Fourth reads in whole the right of the people to be secure in their persons. You said JFK that went into him, winston Churchill. Sure. It's both houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by otho affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons of things to be seized. Right. So there's some big words in there, right? Big like money words, like it's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which means as far as Supreme Court is concerned, some cops can't say, I'm going to push you up against the wall and pat you down for no reason whatsoever. Yeah. Or I'm going to pull you over for no reason and I'm going to search your car on the side of the road. Exactly. For no reason does not happen. Right? Of course not. Sure. So that's the Fourth Amendment right. Yes. And there's another big term in there, it's called probable cause. Like you have to have and a lot of people say that 1968 Terry versus Ohio ruling is just too broad and articulable suspicion, like what is that? But even still, there has to be some sort of probable cause. And a lot of the times as we'll see it's just from something out in plain sight or something like that, but there's a big struggle over what constitutes probable cause. But the point is, the Fourth Amendment says you have to have probable cause or else it's an unreasonable search. That's right. And a police officer in most cases has to go get a warrant for the search of a home or something. And there's a whole issue of rubber stamping warrants these days, of course, that the judge may not even really review it's just a formality. Right. Or for anybody who's watched enough Law and Order episodes, all you have to do is go, I smell pot. Do you smell pot? Wink, wink and then kick the door in. Yeah, exactly. Because you can't prove that the cop didn't think he smelled pot. Exactly. Now there's the threat of perjuring himself on the stand, but I imagine at least as far as like Brisco and Green are concerned, they're hoping that they're going to find such gangbuster, overwhelming evidence that everybody's going to forget about the fake smell of pot. Right. So there was actually a case which relates to probable calls called the US v. Sokolo that made it all the way to the SCOTUS. Did you read about that case? I did. It was that was when the ruling was right. Yeah. So what happened was the DEA arrested a guy at the Honolulu Airport, found over 1000 grams of cocaine in his carry on. He had a kilo and the agents knew all this going into it. This is why they arrested him. He paid $2,100 for round trip tickets with a roll of $20 bills. He traveled under a name that did not match the name under which his telephone was listed. Okay. He was originally going to Miami, and this is why I got at the time, he only stayed in Miami for two days, even though a round trip flight from Honolulu takes 20 hours. So very quick trip. In other words, he was almost flying as long as he was there. In Miami, he met up with a man named Tony Montana. Apparently, he appeared nervous, and he did not check his baggage. And the district court denied motion to suppress the evidence, said it was justifiable the court of appeals disagreed and overturned that. And then eventually it went to the supreme court, and they said, no, it's okay, because they had what was, quote, a totality of evidence. So here's the thing, though. The thing that makes that so groundbreaking, and nowadays, we were raised under so close. Right. It seems like this is just the norm, but it was a groundbreaking case at the time, because none of that it's not against the law to pay your plane ticket with cash. It's not against the law to not check your bags. No. At the time, it wasn't against the law to travel under an assumed name. Yeah. And I don't think at the time, it was against the law to go to Miami just for two days. Right. Exactly. None of this is against the law. Yes. And so if you just follow the strict interpretation of law up to that point, they couldn't bust this guy, even though when they busted him, they found a kilo of coke, like they knew they would, in his bag. Yeah. There wasn't enough there. And the supreme court said, you know what? We think that when you put all that stuff together, there is enough there. Yeah. Now, what constitutes that totality? Is it two pieces of evidence? Is it one thing? Sure. How much does it take to profile? But what they were saying in so colo was yes. The stuff that you've seen from other proven criminals applied to somebody else who you don't yet fully know as a criminal is enough for you to bust them and see if you're right. Yeah. Again, it's not like, kind of groundbreaking. He didn't go straight to jail. They looked in his bag. But do you have the right to look in the bag, is what it comes down to. Yeah. And they were saying that the supreme court's interpretation is this stands up to the fourth amendment. Yeah. The guy went to Miami for two days. Right. Get your civil rights. Goodbye. So, with the 14th amendment, it states in part that no state shall make or enforce any law which will abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the US. I think everybody wants the Kennedy voice again, Chuck. Okay. I think any time you read amendments from the bill of rights, you have to do it like that. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws. Yeah. So this one applies. You might say, well, we've got the fourth, we don't need the 14th. 14th says, look, man, you can't just bust somebody without this. Again, due process of law, and we have a due process of law. And what the supreme court did with cases like So Colo and with cases like Terry versus Ohio is they said profiling is part of the due process of law. That's right. So one thing that they have gone back to again and again and again and again is that if race is factored in almost any circumstances, there are circumstances that is where racial profiling is allowed in police work. But for the most part, if you're basing your suspicions of criminal wrongdoing on race, largely or in part, then that runs afoul of the fourth and the 14th amendments. And you're not allowed to do that. Yes. The gravestor points out that cops, unless you have an APB out on a hispanic male or a black male right. Then you are supposed to be colorblind as a cop. Exactly. All right. You're supposed to be supposed to be so the Eric Garner case, the Michael Brown case, all of these cases where black males were basically stopped from either doing a petty offense or just stopped based on suspicion because they were black in their neighborhood. It prompted the executive branch to release a new set of guidance, like an updated set of guidelines for racial profiling. And they basically spelled out examples. I posted to it on the podcast page for this episode, but they spelled out examples for when it's appropriate. And they said if it's an all points bulletin for any police yeah. Yes. If you're patrolling and looking for criminals and you're basing it on race, absolutely not allowed. But they said they gave an example where. Like if. For example. You are looking for somebody who carried out a hit on a gang leader. And. You know. There's this rival gang. And this rival gang is probably the ones who carried out this hit. And every member of this rival gang is Hispanic. That you could use that as part of the profile and searching for your suspect. It just makes sense in that case. Right. Because you don't look for the little old white lady. Right, exactly. Yeah. Because it's that specific. But you wouldn't cast a dragnet over all hispanics. It would be hispanic men related to this gang. You see what I'm saying? I think the lesson here is get the little white lady to do the hit. It's been done before, and you're golden. It has been done before, which is one of the problems with racial profiling. Is it's distracting? Yeah, we'll get to that, but that's definitely true. And when you watch Cops, it's not always like, sometimes I will see on the TV show, they will pull over. They'll stop a white kid, like, suburban white kid that's in a bad neighborhood, because they'll be like, well, he doesn't belong here. He's probably buying drugs. Right. Because this is a street where people buy drugs. There's a crack house down there, and this guy is from the white suburban county out in the suburbs. Let's pull him over. It's a racial profile. That's the same thing but different. Right? Well, it's the same thing. Yeah, but you know what I mean. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about probable cause analysis. This is good. During a traffic stop, there's several things a cop can do, and each one requires different kinds of cause in order for it to be legal. Yeah. Again, they aren't supposed to just pull you over for no reason. They're not supposed to you're supposed to fit some sort of either you broke a traffic law or you fit a profile that has been agreed upon is okay. Yeah, but a cop can pull over for and again, we're not knocking police officers hard work, and mostly they do great work, but a cop can pull someone over for anything and say, like, when you made that turn, you swung a little too wide, or you hit that yellow line. And so I'm suspicious that you're drunk. Right. You can almost invent a reason to pull someone over under any circumstances. Right. So let's just start with that. When you pull over a car, supposedly to pull someone over legally, you need to have witnessed a violation, or you can run the plates and see if their car is stolen or if there's a warrant out for the owner. That's a big thing you see on cops all the time. Yeah. And the cop can make a stop as long as they can describe specific factors that fit the profile. Right. Car full of black kids. Not okay to just pull the car over. Not for that reason. Right. But if they say, like, I saw smoke coming out the windows, they were driving erratically, and it smelled like pot smoke from the road, then that is a reason. Right. Number two, when you go to question the suspect, that's moving things up a notch. You don't have to get a ticket when you get pulled over. You might just get questioned if you seem suspicious and they'll shine that light in the car and they'll look at everything that they can see without actually searching the car, and that's well within their right. What's called plain view. Exactly. So if you have, like, a bag of pot sitting out on the front seat with you and the cop sees it, that just opened your entire car and your person up to a search yes. And you that means you are super high, because now there's probable cause. But if you have long hair and you have an open half gallon of ice cream next to you, still not enough might raise the suspicions, but that still should not be enough to give them probable cause to search your car. Well, I got profiled in Texas. Me and my best friend Brett, many years ago after college, did a big OutWest trip for two months, and the cop said he said he pulled us over because I didn't have my seatbelt on. Why he really pulled us over is because we were two scruffy looking guys with tattoos and beards in a Volkswagen van. And he searched the van. He asked if he could, and we said he could. And he searched the van for, like, an hour on the side of the road. Long story short, Chuck did five years, five hard ones. No, we didn't get caught with anything, and we got away. And he basically was mad at us that he wasted his time, and the last thing he said was, Get out of Texas. And I said, I'm trying to, sir, but the point is that the cop asked you if he could search your car, right? He did. And if you give consent, then you are waiving your Fourth Amendment rights, but you don't have to give consent. Not many people know this, and there's some states that make the cop tell you you are allowed to refuse the search of your car. Not all states do. I've never heard it either. Instead, the cop just says, can I search your car? In the most intimidating voice possible. And most people will just fold like a house of cards because they're scared of the cop or whatever. Even if they do have something in there, they're not going to be like, no, you're not allowed to search the car. So the point where the cop asks if he can search the car is usually in the absence of something that nothing in plain sight, but also that cops suspicions are raised. We just can't quite prove it. So I'll ask you if you can search your car. If you say no, the cop can say, Well, I'm going to detain you temporarily. Right? Yeah. Basically, I will wait it out. I can get a warrant. I'm going to search that car. Right. Okay. If he wants to get a warrant, that's different. What he's doing now is trying to do everything he can to search your car without having to go to the trouble of getting a warrant without probable cause, like seeing a bag of pot in the front seat. Right. Time was that they could detain you for up to, like, 90 minutes while they called the canine unit out, and the canine unit has been shown to if the canine unit sniffs around your car, that's not an unreasonable search. And if the canine smells something or indicates that there are drugs present, then that does provide probable cause for a full search under the Fourth Amendment, right? Yeah, they changed that. Oh, really? Yeah. In April, this past April, the Supreme Court had decision that said, no, you really can't make people wait around while the drug dog comes out. They're like, we're not opposed to that. But the point of a traffic stop is to promote and encourage traffic safety, not to cast a dragnet for drug couriers. And you cannot detain people without a reasonable suspicion to wait for the drug dog to come out. If they tell you you can't, you're not allowed to search their car. That's good. I wonder if it had anything to do with if you look up online, there are ways that cops can make a drug dog signal, basically by how they're handling the dog. Oh, I would guess so. And there's a lot of suspicion. And they'll play him side by side. Like, you see this cops doing it. Right. And if you see this cop watch this little thing he does, then the dog barks. And basically there was a lot of speculation that bad cops would with the dog's tail. Well, not that, but yeah, essentially making the dog signal a false alert just to give them reason. Well, the dog barked, so now I can search your car. And maybe it all started because I meant to bring this up a second ago. Suspicion can be they seem nervous. Right. Everyone's nervous when a cop pulls them over. Sure. Even if you haven't done anything. It's just nerve wracking. It's like white coat blood pressure. Yeah. Like a lot of people's blood pressure is high at the doctor because they're nervous about being at the doctor. There's someone standing at my window with a gun. Right. Like it's nerve wracking. Yeah. So the Supreme Court said, no, you have to have a reasonable suspicion to detain somebody on the side of the road that they've committed another crime. It can't just be, I'm pulling you over. You have to wait for 90 minutes while the drug dog comes out so I can bust you or try to bust you or whatever. That was a big deal that they came up with that. Yeah. We didn't in Texas, we didn't have the drug dog come out, but I felt like we were on the side of the road for an hour while he dug through that entire van. Just you could tell he really wanted to find something. Yeah. 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. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Okay, friends, so imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have Afflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Afflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let Aflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. All right, let's open the can of worms, my friend. Racial profiling. It's a big deal in this country. It's a problem, and let's talk about it. That's good. So that is basically it's a form of predictive profiling, where one of, if not the only factor is skin color, right. Let's say that Mexican people are way more prone to sell meth. So let's go hang out at that Hispanic neighborhood. Right. There's a couple of things wrong with that, right. And that is racial profiling. Some people actually defend it, saying, well, if you look at prison statistics, hispanics are far more likely to be imprisoned for drug crimes than, say, white people. So that makes sense, right? Right. Okay. The other side I'm playing along here, the other side of the coin is that you can use the same statistics to point to the idea that Hispanics and blacks are disproportionately targeted for drug busts than other people. Right. Ed points out this is one of the problems with this debate is both sides use the same statistics differently to prove their point. Yeah. Another thing he points out is that some people say that it is institutionalized racism and it's harassment. Minority, straight up people who defend against it say cops harass criminals, and if those criminals happen to be minorities, TS. That's not our fault. That's just the reality of the world we live in. Even further, there's people who say, yes, racial profiling is a thing and it's an effective tool of law enforcement. Sorry. Welcome to reality. Exactly. Those people usually have their arguments demolished pretty quickly, including by professionals. I read this interview or an article about a former chief of police of Palo Alto around San Francisco area, and he also grew up as an Oakland cop. And he was talking about that kind of racial profiling that you were where they would just sit out in high crime neighborhoods and pull over anybody white. Right. They were doing like that for the same reason. And he was saying it almost never worked. He said that they also would have long drag nets on stretches of highway and they would target Hispanic people in, like, low riders. And he said almost never worked. And he said that it's ineffective. Right. It's also lazy policing because he said the better alternative is to forget who's what color, but just watch for somebody leaning in a car that's just pulled over under the curb or somebody making furtive moment movement looking for actual crime. Right. Look for behavior that is actually linked to crime. Not there's a white person in a black high crime neighborhood, so therefore they're buying drugs. Or even worse than that, there's a black person who lives in a high crime neighborhood. They must be a drug dealer. Right? Let me go stop and frisk them. That is just lazy policing. It's shorthand policing. Whereas if you look for actual criminal behaviors, you're going to be far more successful in busting the bad guys. But even worse than it being like lazy policing and ineffective in a lot of ways, this guy pointed out, like, I've seen this in many different places. If you want to encourage mistrust and animosity toward the police, scoop up every member in the community and take them to jail just on the off chance that you might find something that sticks. If you want to set a town off or any population off, do that for a few years and see what happens. Yeah. And that's what we've been seeing time and time again. Systematic. Yes. Systematic targeting. And then a systematic reaction to that targeting. Yeah, absolutely. And I mentioned cops a lot. If you're out there saying, well, yeah, but on Cops, every time they pull over that shady black guy in the neighborhood, he has something on him and gets arrested, or that white kid in the bad neighborhood, he's there to buy drugs. It's a TV show that's edited. Right. They don't show you the 25 stops where there is no crime because it would not be a fun TV show. Exactly. All right. So I think people use that as, like, dummies. Use that as proof sometimes. Like, watch Cops, man, every single time. Right? Yeah, exactly. Right. All meth users are scrawny and white. So if you see a scrawny white guy, meth user that's right. Or marathon runner. Right. So obviously there can be rogue cops, racist cops that are doing their thing on a singular level or with their partner, but it becomes a real problem. That's a problem. It becomes a super real problem when it is part of the system. In which was the case with the New Jersey State Troopers in the late 90s. They did a ten year study and found out that 80% of all traffic stops were minorities over a ten year period. And they found that there was a, quote, macho, elitist culture within the state trooper ranks in, quote, and basically, even though they officially said racial profiling isn't right, there was a system in place where veterans would really coach and teach the younger cops, like, this is how we're doing it. And they were basically outed. The authorities assigned federal monitors to those troopers, and evidently by 2006, a report suggested they had eliminated that profiling completely. Which is good, if that's the case. Yeah, and I'm sure it is. New Jersey state troopers are intimidating. You ever seen those guys? No. They're the ones that look like the military uniforms, which is a whole other issue altogether. Well, I mean, not like M 16s, but they said, like, the dress blues and the boots and all that. It turns out, Chuck, 22 states have lost that ban racial profiling of motorists, which is great until you think that that also means that 28 states don't. It's kind of weird if you ask me. And I found a study also from Illinois that found that in Illinois, black and Hispanic drivers were two times likelier to be stopped and searched, but white drivers were two times likelier to have contraband on them. Weird. Not only weird, it's startling how it's not effective. It's not leading to stopping crime, which is sort of the point. Well, and then another very controversial bout of racial profiling that this country went through came after September 11, of course. And in the aftermath of that, you would remember every month or two you'd hear about someone who sometimes seeks who aren't even Arab, would get kicked off of like a plane or something like that because they made the pilot nervous just being there by being around. Yeah. Or TSA would pat down, disproportionately more Arab people than white people, and now supposedly they base it on your behavior rather than your race. They're not racial profiling any longer. I have to say I haven't heard of one of those cases in a while, but it seemed like for a while we were hearing about it all the time. Yeah, I think there was a heightened sense of everything back then, of course, right after, but so this guy who used to manage the Bengurian airport in Israel, Raphael Ron, he pointed out that that was the exact opposite of what you want to do. Yeah. He said the worst tack in the history of this airport was carried out by Japanese in the early seventy s. And he said, if we're focusing on an ethnic group, then we're potentially missing someone that's about to do something bad. Right, which is exactly what happened in 1972 at that airport. Three members of the Japanese Red Army walked in with machine guns and violin cases and just opened them up and started opening fire on the crowd and killed, I think, 26 people. And they were hired by the PLO. PLO knew that they could never walk into the Israeli airport, but Japanese people would unnoticed. And so this guy is saying the same thing, like, if you're really on the lookout for your enemy, again, watch for behavior. Do actual police work. Don't just use this lazy shorthand stuff because it's going to tick off this entire population and it's going to cause you to miss the real crime. Well, yeah, it sounds like a movie. The cops are at the airport and they detain this Arab guy who's like late for a business meeting. And then in the same shot, the white dude who is a Timothy McVeigh just walks right behind them with the bomb on his body. You realize you just described the subplot to Airplane, too? Did I? Yeah. Remember Sonny Bono had the bomb? Mild manner weasely dude. Yeah, that's right. And I think he walks through while they're jacking up some, like, I think PLO dudes. Maybe that was subconscious. Wow. So that's a profiling tip of the iceberg, I would call that. Oh, sure. We could do a series of shows on this, I'm sure. If you want to know more about profiling. In the meantime, type that word into the search bar of your favorite search engine and I'm sure it will bring up all manner of terrible stuff. You can also type it in the search bar@housetopworks.com and it will bring up this article by The Grabster. And since I said grabster, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this WiFi, which is short for water enema from a water slide or from a slide. And this is from Tiffany last name withheld. She says as a kid, I remember being a chubby eleven year old girl excited for her first trip to Disney world in the water park then known as typhoon lagoon. Had a brand new neon green with black polka dot bathing suit, was all excited and to go down the kawabunga, a 214 foot tall water slide on a steep 60 degree angle. They tell you to keep your ankles crossed. But as a little chubby eleven year old girl, my brain comprehended, but my little legs did not have the strength for all 214ft. I think you see where this is headed. After plumbing in the bottom, I immediately knew something was not right. I clenched my thighs as tightly as I could, pulling out the massive water slide. Wedgie. Not two steps from exiting the slide, though, a different type of waterfall began to trickle down my legs. No matter how tightly I clenched, I couldn't stop it. I waddled up to a gorgeous australian teenager employee and explained, I need a restroom right away. With a smug smile, he pointed all the way to the other side of the lagoon, which was a long walk. Just as I enter the bathroom, with all the force of the water that had entered my body, it exited and I single handedly shut down a small portion of disney that day. As embarrassing as this was, I was more upset that my new bathing suit was ruined. My parents were furious because they had to show out $50 for a new one pronto. I hope I didn't gross you out too bad. Oh, you did. Think of it as a cautionary lesson for your listeners. Thanks for all your hard work. I hope to see you guys sometime in Detroit. And hey, october. Tiffany last name withheld we're just going to call you Tiffany Poopypants. We're coming to Detroit in October. Yes, ostensibly. Ostensibly. And also we want to see Detroit in advance of us coming. We're sorry for all of the jokes we made about you. It'll all come home to roost. See you in October. If you want to tell us a gross story that happened when you were a kid yeah, don't. Just tell us something else and tweet to us at S-Y-S kpodcast. Join us on facebook.com stuffyshow. Send us an email to stuff podcast at how stealthworks.com and join us at home on the web stuffyshow.com stuffysha 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. Halo elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs? Better than leaving brands? Find Halo Elevate at Tekto Pet Supplies plus and select Neighborhood pet stores." | |
How Book Banning Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-book-banning-works | If you want to control the masses, control what they read. After all, books are seeds that germinate new points of view. As a result, the struggle against banning books is contentious and continual. Learn more about banning books in this episode. | If you want to control the masses, control what they read. After all, books are seeds that germinate new points of view. As a result, the struggle against banning books is contentious and continual. Learn more about banning books in this episode. | Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:47:17 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=21, tm_min=47, tm_sec=17, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=257, tm_isdst=0) | 29166101 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know. Did my little best anchor man move? Yeah. Getting the papers all in order, reading the prompter. Wouldn't that be great? I don't feel so funny these days, man. Well, we need to get the teleprompter writer to juice up your jokes. I agree. Everyone knows that. Right. We don't actually make any of this stuff up. We had somebody write the show, and we read it. This is a very well rehearsed practice labored podcast. That's right. How's it going, buddy? Good. I think this is the second of two good topics today. Yeah. Part one, asexuality part two, banning books. Yeah. What do they have to do with each other? Nothing. I thought I saw a common thread. Now that I've looked, I've forgotten it. But there is something. Discrimination, maybe. I guess so. Maybe we'll find out. It'll pop up. Possibly. It will be like the Pewee Secret word of the day. Oh, yeah. Is that what it was called? I think so. Man, that guy was cool. So you got an intro profit for this, Chuck? Yes. Are you familiar with the last week of September? I am. You are through it before? Yes, it's after the third week and before the first week of October. That's exactly right. Yes. It just so happens that that very week is banned. Book Week did not know that existed. Well, it does till today. It does. You haven't heard of Band Book Week before? No, I have. I've seen the subversive displays outside of B dalton booksellers. Right. And basically the whole point of it is like, hey, people have tried to ban these books, so make sure you read these, because it means that there's somebody out there who doesn't want you to. That's right. Hey, look what I've got. I've got to kill a Mockingbird over here. Yeah. That's tempted. Yeah. So the whole point of Band Book Week is to celebrate intellectual freedom. That's right. Because there are people out there who would take that away from you if they could. Yes. We know it. You go back and listen to some of our podcasts. There are certain words that were beeped out because the man has a son to his thumb. Thanksgiving. Yeah. So I would strongly recommend it's coming up. By the time this thing gets released, we will be in September. That's right. We should probably post something about Bay and Book Week when it comes. Okay. Yes. September 30 through October 6. Actually, it's really the first week in October this year. Oh, that's weird that they would put it the last week of October. Yeah. The first week of October. Yeah. Or last week of September. Yeah. It's confusing for a second. Let's talk Pan Books, man. More than 11,000 books have been challenged since 1982. Josh that's just since 82. I was reading about the Catcher in the Rye. It came out in well, man, I wish I knew. It came out in either the late 50s or the early fifty s. The late 50s or nineteen s? Sixty s, because in 1960, a teacher who assigned it to his class for reading got fired. Really? Yeah. It's one of my favorite books. Is it? Yeah, and it's one that I've re read several times over the years, and it always takes on a little different meaning depending on my age, which is interesting. Have you read The Kitchen Companion? No. We got that as a gift, right? No, I haven't read it yet. It's just like footnotes and extrapolations and explanations. Like, this guy went into the world of Catcher in the Rye and made footnotes of the whole thing. It's actually thicker than The Catcher in the Rye 1951, by the way. Okay, so 51 within nine years, somebody lost their job because they assigned that book to read. Well, that's pretty common. Usually, with book banning, it comes out of the public school system. Yeah. And less so libraries, though, right? Well, it's usually school libraries. No, less so public library. Public library. So if you go on the Internet and you look for banned books, you're going to find a lot of confusion. There's this body called the American Library Association, and a lot of people think that they're in charge of banning books. It's absolutely the opposite of the truth. The American Library Association is basically the librarian's lobby, and they're committed to no censorship whatsoever. Yeah. Ask any librarian, and they're going to probably be in favor of not banning books. Right. As a matter of fact, the Ala maintains the Library Bill of Rights, and in this Library Bill of Rights is a provision for the free access to libraries for minors, which basically says this we have a bunch of books that we're not going to make any judgments on. Right. We have a book that you don't want your kid to read. It's your job as their parent to monitor what they read, and you can decide what they read or not. Right. That's it. Right. Your opinion doesn't extend to anyone else's kids. So that means that if you want to ban a book, we're going to tell you no, because you're responsible for your child, but not everybody else's child, too. Which means, in short, that the Ala doesn't censor books. Right. This is a big deal because this happens a lot. There's 110 challenges, you said, since 1982, and I think in 2011. There were 326 challenges last year. A few of these are the Color of Earth series by Kim Dong hua and the reasons why nudity sex education. The Hunger Games Trilogy my Mom's Having a Baby a Kids Month by month Guide to Pregnancy We certainly don't want our kids to learn anything about that? No. Especially not with mom. Brave New World by Huxley insensitivity nudity racism. To Kill a Mockingbird, like we mentioned, Harper Lee's classic because of offensive language and racism. Those are just a few of the ten most challenged books of last year. Right. You'll also find in just about every list, the most challenged series since 2000 is the Harry Potter books. They received 3000 challenges, and that was from up to, I believe, like 2008 or nine now of 2010. From 2000 to 2010. Yeah. They received 3000 challenges. And it was because it had Satanic overtones or undertones one of the two or mid tones people challenging it felt at least. So for the most part, when you see a book being challenged or banned, it's because people are concerned about its influence on children. But as you've seen, the American Library Association says, hey, man, there should be free access to information for kids. Yeah. Judy Blooms Forever is one that's always on the list, too, for that reason. Because it deals with young girls burgeoning sexuality and the confusion and the awkwardness and the thrill that comes along with that. And that one is what? That was a great description. Yeah. From a 41 year old man with a beard. Well, dude, that was 14 once. Girls and boys are all like, we're all scared and awkward and thrilled. So how do you do this, man? How do you issue a formal challenge to a book? And what does that consist of? What does it mean? It means that you have gone to a library, a single library, and said, I want to challenge this book, and the librarian decides whether or not to ban it. So it's as simple as that. That's how book banning works. And you don't even have to use such lofty language. Like, I want to issue a challenge. You can just say, like, this book needs to be taken out of this library. Right. This book is filth. This book is pervasively vulgar. That's a big one. And the librarian, at that moment decides whether a book gets banned or not. And for the most part, they err on the side of not banning them. But when they say, okay, let's take that book out, that book has just been banned. So it doesn't mean that a book has been banned. It doesn't mean it's been banned across the country. Although some countries have banned books in its entirety. Like, countries entirety. But in the US. And in the modern world, it usually means that somewhere in the United States, there's a group of people, whether it's kids in a school district or people who are served by a public library, who don't have access to a certain book because one person found it offensive and convinced the librarian to make the decision for everybody else based on that person's objections. That's a bandbook. Yeah. Person or person, a lot of times it's a group together with a list even, and they'll rally the troops and say, come on out from your homes and let's get together and submit a list. And the librarians, like you said, most times, will say no because they generally have the courts on their side if it gets to that point. For the most part, the courts like to defend the First Amendment. Yes, but I mean, think about that pressure, especially if you are a school librarian and the school board is telling you, like, hey, don't forget we employ you, and we're telling you, remove this book. And the librarians like, no, TS. That's against the First Amendment. Should we talk about some of the laws? I think we should. Let's talk about do you want to talk about the history of it? Yeah. Who wrote this one? I think this is Congo, too. I don't think so. I don't know. Yes, it was a freelancer. Okay. Basically, since the days of Socrates, they've been trying to ban teachings of some sort or the other. He was heavily scrutinized. And back then, if you wanted to ban something, you just burned a few copies of it that existed. Right. There's, no problem. He was made to drink hemlock for what he taught. But, yeah, if there's two copies of a book in existence and you get both copies and you set them on fire, done. Problem solved, considered banned. And then what happened? What came along? Well, the printing press. And all of a sudden you had to officially try and ban a book because there were too many to gather up and burn. And you remember the Star Chamber starring Michael Douglas. Did you ever watch that? No. The real Star Chamber. There was a real yeah. Okay, so the real star chamber that was, I think, created in stewart, England. Stewart era England. Man. I probably shouldn't even say that because I'm not sure. Oh, really? In England in the 17th century, there was a group of judges that were in charge of, like they were, like, the elite judges. The Censor Board basically was one of their roles. And then Henry V. Eight came along and got rid of them. Right. But he started his own kind of censorship with licensing laws that basically said that the state had the opportunity to censor things before they were even published. That was one of the earliest forms of straight up book banning or book censorship. Good point. That happened a long time ago. So should we get to some landmark cases over the years? Sure. 1982 Board of Education island Trees School District VPCO yeah, that's a mouthful. They said basically that you couldn't remove library material just because, like, a school official doesn't agree with the ideas. They said that the books on their list were, quote, just plain filthy. They wanted them removed. And some people said, no, we're going to sue you for that. Well, the Supreme Court said so basically it has to be pervasively vulgar, I guess is why they use those words, because that's what they can actually ban a book if who finds it. That I think society basically well, for the most part, as far as books go for banning a book. Really tough to do once it reaches the Supreme Court. They're going to be like, no, it's a book, put it back. It's obscenity. That's not protected at all. Right, well, because the kicker there is the number three rule that they decided should be used to determine if something is, I guess, filthy was it could contain no literary, artistic, political or scientific value. And that's the one where you can pretty much say, claim any book has value. Like that. That's how we have hardcore pornography still. So you can say this is art. That's true. So that case, that 1982 Island Trees case or PECO case, I don't know what they call it, that was a really big deal because it took place in the school library. And basically the Supreme Court said school libraries are special places. Schools are places of inquiry. And so their repository of knowledge, meaning their library, has special protection. Like, we understand that you're worried about the children's minds being corrupted, but you don't get to decide that this is information that's out there. And as long as it's basically not like hardcore pornography, child pornography, obscenity, it has every right to be in there under the First Amendment. Amen. It was a big deal. It was a big deal. So it was 1988. I remember this one because I was on a newspaper staff at the time. Oh, yeah? And I got interviewed for the news. Oh yeah? Like the local news came out. Hazelwood School District v. Culmina that was very famously when newspaper, high school newspapers basically were said to not have the same rights as, like, if you were an adult running a newspaper. And it was not a form of public expression. So schools could, in the end, kind of censor what was going in these things, at least in, like, school curriculum. I thought it was in the paper. In the paper, too. I'm sorry, I thought you meant in these things, meaning libraries. Yeah, well, newspapers for sure, but it was extended into classroom curriculum, too, like that, which was a big deal. Yeah. Do you read that article about Texas? Yeah, let's get to that. You want to? Yeah. Okay. So Texas has this very controversial textbook review committee that wields a lot of power because Texas is the biggest textbook buyer in the country. And so if you're a textbook manufacturer and one state is ordering most of your textbooks, you're just going to print one and send it to everybody. Yeah, it's basically Texas and California are the two states that wield the most power because they spend the most dough, because they have the most school age kids, basically. Right, exactly. So they basically say what Texas decides goes in their textbooks. Goes in the textbooks for a lot of other states as well. Not just Texas, right? Yeah. I looked at the expense of a textbook, and I think one of the manufacturers said something like several million dollars can go into a major biology textbook. Oh. But because of the illustrations and everything that goes into it, and they're like, we can't make one of these for Texas and one for other states. It's just everyone's going to get Texas version of the truth. Exactly. So Texas has this committee that is largely conservative that starting in, I think, 2009, basically held hearings on revisions that they wanted to see done. The social studies curriculum. These are elected people, too, by the way, which is important because apparently a lot of them can buy their way right on that list. Okay. So social studies, you've got history, sociology, economics, and a lot of the stuff that they were adding in there were, like, I guess, kind of slanted everything a little more towards the idea that the founders of the United States were Christian. That one of the things they wanted to get in there was not just Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil rights protests, but the Black Panther's violent civil rights protests were another one. Yeah. If you're conservative, you're like, well, okay, I agree with a lot of what these people are saying. The problem is what they were saying was that there's a liberal slant to academia and that they were taking it upon themselves to correct that by putting a conservative slant. Yeah. One of the other amendments was to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures who inspired revolutions of the late 18th century and 19th century, and they said, let's replace them with Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin instead. Another one in economics, they wanted to add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, champions of the free market economic theory, to the list of economist studies. We talked about Milton Friedman in one where basically he used Chile as a laboratory for Reaganomics before Reagan was president, to trickle down economics. Yeah, I remember that. And then one of the ones that was shot down by Democrat Mavis Knight wanted to introduce an amendment requiring students study the reasons for the Founding Fathers protecting religious freedom by not saying, one religion is good above all else. And that was actually struck down. They said, you can't put that in this book. Right. She was a Democrat who introduced it. Yeah. The conservatives said no. Well, they basically vote along party lines, so the vote was ten to four or whatever. It was a big deal. It was one of those things that kind of went under, reported and underestimated. But there's a really good documentary out there that came out and I think 2009, maybe 2010. Yeah, the Revisionaries. Yeah. And I think it's up on Netflix streaming right now. It is. Scott Thurman yeah. And I lost. I was a trailer, but it looked pretty good. Yeah, I mean, it was a big deal. It's not just like some people in Texas want to change some textbooks. It has national implications. Right. It's an infowar, basically. And that's what book banning is based on in a lot of ways as well. It's like if you can remove a different viewpoint, especially when it's being presented to kids, then you can keep that viewpoint from taking from germinating in their emerging mind or worldview. Absolutely. And so books like Daddy's New Roommate Gets Banned? Yes. About a boy whose dad has a new boyfriend. Now he's a divorced dad, and his new roommate moves in as gay. And Sarah Palin herself asked for that to be removed from the library when she was the mayor of Wasula, Alaska. Oh, yeah, I remember that. And that guy came out and said, that woman is my mortal enemy. Really? That was his response. And thanks for the press, is what he should have said. In the meantime, in Texas, Mary Helen Borlanga has tried repeatedly to get Latino figures included in textbooks as role models for the large Hispanic population in Texas. And she's been repeatedly denied to the point where in 2010, she stomped out of a meeting saying they can't just pretend this is white America and that we don't exist. These aren't experts. These aren't historians. They are just rewriting history. So pretty hard words. Yeah. You want to hear some other challenge authors? Let's, man. Because there's challenges all over the place, apparently. Judy Bloom. Of course, yeah. Robert Cormier or Cormier. Did you ever read I Am the Cheese when you were growing up? No. Or The Chocolate War? I think I read that one. Great books. Banned many times. JK. Rowling, like I said, she is, I guess, of the Devil, because a lot of people have a problem with the Harry Potter books. Katherine Patterson Bridge steven King maya Angelou. Can't have any of that. Yeah, the Alabama State textbook Committee said that. I know. Why the cage bird sings. Encourages bitterness toward white people. R. L. Stein, who is sort of like a Stephen King for kids. Yeah. Goosebumps. Yeah. And I think I actually worked on one of his little TV shows, the Nightmare Room. Oh, yeah. Was it Nightmare Room? I think so, yeah. Back in the day. And John Steinbeck, of course. Yeah. In 1989 of Mice and Men was banned in Chattanooga because Steinbeck was well known for his anti business attitude. And then Alvin Schwartz was number one. And he wrote one of my favorite sets of books, scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Oh, really? I never heard of those. Oh, man. They were scary. With the most ghastly illustrations you've ever seen. They're awesome. And are those band just because they're scary and ghoulish? I guess so. It's probably Satanic, too. Got you. So we were talking about how if a book is challenged if it gets to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court is probably going to rule in favor of the librarian who said no. Yeah, but that's not the case with obscenity, like obscene literature. It is specifically excluded in US. Case law from first amendment protection. And that's kind of emerged over the years, starting in 1873 with the con stock laws. It basically said, like, you can't sell obscene literature in interstate commerce. Right. And then people are like, okay, well, then we won't or don't enforce it or whatever. Right? It just kind of went enforced or unchallenged for like three quarters of a century. And then in the 50s, you had Roth versus the United States, where all of a sudden we're like, wait, we need to start explaining what obscenity is. Because you can't just say it's just whatever. Right? That's what they started as though, like in the 50s, they basically said, obscenity pornography, basically is what that means is utterly without social value. That was a big quote. So that basically was a mark against anybody who's pro obscenity, right? Right. And then in the 70s, there was one called Miller versus California, and this guy basically sent out a mass mailer Chuck, of an advertisement for his adult magazines. So everybody got them old people, kids, housewives, businessmen, everybody went to their mail that they opened it up, and there was basically obscene advertising. Right. And so California arrested the guy and it went to trial and the Supreme Court said, okay, yes, obscenity is not protected, but we need to say what obscenity is. And they came up with this three point test called the Miller Test, which has that one prong you were talking about earlier. Yeah. The third one is no artistic merit, basically literary, political or scientific value, which is probably the terms that they nailed this guy for. Yeah, if it was just a flyer of pornographic ads, right, he couldn't really say, no. This is literature. Right? Like, check these out. The other two were involved patently offensive sexual conduct or appeal to prayed interest when taken as a whole. There it is. That's what connected asexuality period. Is that it? Yeah, but the big point with those Chuck, is that the period interest is local. So basically, like, if everybody in your town would be offended by this, then that's the local judgment. That's for that standard. But then the scientific, artistic, literary standard is national. Right. So if your town thinks it's science, but your town doesn't know what it's talking about, that's not a standard. Right. So that's obscenity. But the good thing is, if you are trying to ban something as obscene, the burden of proof is on you to prove these three. This thing passes all three points of the Miller type. That is true. And that's a tough burden to get passed in a court. I'm surprised that more book banning fans aren't trying to infiltrate the library community. You know what I'm saying? I think they do, constantly. Oh, you mean some librarians? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, if that's where the power is, I think the librarians, like, really the library industry, it's very powerful, and if they find out that you're a wolf in sheep's clothing, they'll kill you. Boy, have you ever talked to librarians? Chris Polette here is a librarian. They're really passionate people. It's almost like a public service in a way, because I'm sure they don't make a lot of dough, and they just all really believe in knowledge, in protecting protecting freedoms. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. Go, librarians. Yeah. Go give your local librarian a pat on the back today. Yeah, give them a hug. Ask them first, and then give them a hug. And if they say no, don't give them a hug. Right. Just shake their hand and politely nod. Yeah. Maybe a curtsey, and that's great. Chuck. I like the curtsy. All right. Well, if you want to learn more about band books, we suggest you go to the Ala site, I believe Ala.com. And then you can also write in band books in the search bar howstep works.com. And it's going to bring up this really great article. And I said search bar, which means finally, it's time for listener mail. Josh. I'm going to call this disco Fever from Diane in Kentucky. Okay. Hey, guys. Your disco episode brought back fond memories for me in the summer of 1978. I was in my early 20th, and I've just made it from the sticks to the big city. New York City. It's a big city. I had very little money. The city's infrastructure was crumbling, and that's kind of what we pointed out, the bad economy. And I was separated from my boyfriend by a continent. A bigger obstacle in those days before cell phones in the Internet and reasonable airfares. That was back when a long distance relationship was, like, serious. Yeah. Remember those days? Like, is it long distance? Don't talk too long. It's long distance, right? Yeah. Now it's like, what? Yeah, I forgot about that. Or 1010 to 20 or whatever. Like, certain times of day were cheaper or something. No, there's like a number you could dial. Yeah. Like real cheap long distance. Yeah. I was questioning the decisions I had made in my life, and it was pretty much a struggle for me. But I had this go. I would go with a guy friend to a place on Third Avenue that was more or less the equivalent of an Applebee's with disco music and a dance floor, complete with disco ball. It certainly wasn't what you would call a disco tech or a cool place by any stretch of the imagination, but she was broke, and we could order the cheapest thing on the menu and spend the whole night dancing. I was completely oblivious to any social or cultural implications of the music, but just knew that it was cheap entertainment and so much fun. Yes, the lyrics were silly and the beat was rather unimaginative, but coming off the era of Vietnam, watergate and a plethora of social upheavals, that was the great part of the appeal. Dancing to disco and laughing at the lyrics was play. It was easy to learn the moves, and much for her, not for me, and much more fun than the mindless dancing which attended rock music, which I like to listen to. But let's face it, dancing to rock music is pretty boring, pretty fast. I don't know if I thought it was the best disco song, but one of the most fun and exhilarating and only silly for me was Donna Summers. MacArthur park. Still brings a smile to my face thinking about it. I didn't know Donna Summers did MacArthur park. They had to listen to that. And that was Diane Rally in Louisville, Kentucky. So glad we could bring back some good memories there for you. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Diane. And we heard from a lot of people who are like, guys, you're saying that if I hate disco, it's because I'm homophobic. Don't be stupid. No, we didn't say that specifically. We said if you hate disco outright with a burning passion but for no real reason, but you can't really tell why it's getting to you like this, maybe it's time to step back and examine it. We also said that there's plenty of room for people who just don't like Cisco, just don't like the music, and it doesn't mean you're homophobic. So it works light enough and listen more clearly. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can tweet to us, Twitter to podcast. You can also join us on Facebook.com. You can also read us the Riot act via email at stuffpoadcast@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? 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 Kilgarriff and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listened today." | ||
What Makes Lead So Poisonous? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-makes-lead-so-poisonous | The people of Flint, MI were horrified to find their drinking water was poisoned with lead. As we learn more about lead's effects and realize how persistent it is, the more worrying it becomes. What makes lead so toxic? | The people of Flint, MI were horrified to find their drinking water was poisoned with lead. As we learn more about lead's effects and realize how persistent it is, the more worrying it becomes. What makes lead so toxic? | Tue, 19 Apr 2016 14:57:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=14, tm_min=57, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=110, tm_isdst=0) | 47355692 | audio/mpeg | "This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today@squarespace.com. Enter code stuff at checkout and you will get 10% off Squarespace. Set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry to my right. That's right. Recording in a new pop up restaurant called Jerry's Burrito Shack. Yeah, Jerry's eating a burrito right now. A frozen one, I guess, right? You didn't make that from scratch? Fresh Jerry frozen burrito is fine with me, though. Some of them. Nothing wrong with any frozen burrito ever created. Yeah, they're very specific. It's not like a fresh burrito, but it's its own thing. That's still good. Right. They should call it, like, a burritet or something weird like that. Something to differentiate it. I agree with you, man. Yeah. But, man, sometimes when that refried bean pops out and burns your mouth, it's just the best. You have a hole in your gums for a couple of days. Yeah, I'll throw a little cheese on top, too. To cool it in the oven? No, to melt on top. Oh, that's an enchilada, then. Not really. I think the enchilada. It's the sauce. Right? Yeah. Okay. That's what I'll say. Swimming in sauce, right? Enchilada, sauce. This may be your best intro yet, Chuck. We're talking about lead today. That's right. Do you know much about the Flint, Michigan lead poisoning scandal that happened? I just say. Blemish. Yeah, I posted about it on our Facebook call a couple of months ago and sort of was a part of a lively discussion there, but only from that and then this research. Yes, same here. I mean, I was aware of it kind of I didn't understand the details, but for those of you who don't know about the Flint, Michigan water poisoning, but Flint, Michigan, has faced a lot of problems since the auto industry went away. But one of them wasn't poor water quality. The people of Flint actually paid. I think the highest rate is among the highest rates in the country to get their water. Their water was pumped from Lake here on through Detroit. And Flint bought their water from Detroit. Yeah. Get that good, clean Detroit water. Right. You know you're in a pickle when you're buying water from Detroit, and that's the healthy water. Yeah. So they're building a new pipeline from Lake Huron that goes around Detroit, and Flint said, we're going to get in on that action. And Detroit said, oh, yeah, well, we're canceling our contract rather than pay for a short term contract with Detroit. The emergency manager, basically the emergency mayor appointed by the governor himself, said, we're just going to tap into the Flint River. Yeah. Not a good idea, as it turned out. No, it's not. Because in Flint, Michigan, there were, among other places, something called Buick City. Yeah. Buick City was a 400 plus acre car manufacturing plant that made Buicks. And it really heavily polluted the river. So much so that people in Flint, after just a few months of drinking this water from the tap, started losing their hair. Well, right away they said, this looks and tastes awful. Right. It's taste of chlorine. And the reason it tasted of chlorine is because there were E. Coli break outbreaks that they had to treat the water with chlorine. And then also to some people, it smelled like sulfury as well. It looked terrible. But people started losing hair, started getting rashes. There was one kid who had an autoimmune disease already. He just stopped growing and it was bad news. But the people of Flint, the Flint government and the Michigan Environmental Protection Division basically said, no, we're following all the laws. Everything is fine with the water. Just go back to sleep. Flint and Flint did something different. A bunch of them taught themselves the science of water and sanitation and the drinking water laws. They became basically citizen scientists. And they took it back to the Flint government and the state government and said, you guys are wrong. This is toxic water and we're being poisoned and you have to do something about it. And they finally did. Well, I think the issue was, don't play dumb. We know you know, why are you making us tell you? Exactly. And they kept apparently the company line was, no, here's the science. Here are the results of the tests. But the tests were terrible. And if you want to know all about it, there's a really great article on 538 dot.com called What Went Wrong in Flint? And it just really chronicles everything very well. But the big problem with Flint isn't that there was chlorine in the water. It was that there was a bunch of lead in the water. And the reason why there's a bunch of lead in the water is because there's lead pipes going to a lot of houses in Flint. And the water that was being pumped through those pipes was so corrosive that it was bringing a bunch of lead with it and poisoning the city of Flint for months. Yeah. And the reason people use lead and pipes is because it's not corrosive. That's how corrosive the water was. Yeah, exactly. That really says something. It really does. And I guess we'll loop back later and talk about the lawsuits and all that stuff. Sure, that sounds good. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. Kind of booking it. But let's talk about lead itself. What's the problem with lead? Where did it come from? That whole idea of using lead pipes is nothing new either. It's actually pretty old, to tell you the truth. Yes. Lead. Well, the Romans, of course, were the first to do almost everything, either Asians or Romans. Sure. Well, I don't know. Africa. That's true. Yeah. So basically everybody except Europe as the migration expanded. Exactly. And don't forget all the innovations going on in mesoamerica as well. Shout out to anyone who came before us. But it's been going on since ancient times. Romans using lead as lead, piping for sewage, draining and carrying water, even stored water in containers lined with lead. And in fact, this is pretty interesting, I think. The English word for plumbing and the chemical symbol PB, that is led, comes from the Latin word plumbum. Now, plumbing, is that plumbers crack. Oh, nice. If it wasn't, it is officially. Now, you know, my friend Eddie, his young daughter asked him what plumbers crack was the other day. Really? And he said, what did you tell her? And he said, Well, I told her what it was. Sometimes plumbers, they bend over a lot because pipes are below you, and sometimes their pants SAG a little, then you see their butt crack. Yeah. And she went, oh, okay. The only thing I take issue with is the use of the word sometimes. Right. All the time. Other than that's a great explanation. So the Latin plumb bum, which means lead. Yes. That has been mysterious to me for many decades. PB doesn't make any sense. Like, why would they call it PBL? Right. And PB is you'll find it on the periodic table, and the reason you'll find it on the periodic table is because lead is an element, a heavy metal, and it has all sorts of properties that make it very desirable. Yeah. Really unique, too. Although super toxic, as we'll find. Yeah. It's not often you can find something that is super malleable and soft, but also strong and dense. Exactly. Which makes lead perfect for water pipes because it also resists corrosion, like you said. So you can run water through it. And as long as the water is not super bad, the lead won't rust. It will leach lead into the water, but it still won't rust. Right, right. So it's also not very good at conducting electricity, which makes lead very useful for other things like soldering electrical connections. The electrical connection will remain the thing that transmits the current. The lead won't. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Did you say soldier? Solder. Solder? Yeah. Never heard it pronounced that way. How do you say solder? Solder. You got to say that. L, I think. The LSLA. Unless it's regional, maybe. Regional. Regional to my brain. I think solar. You said that because you're from Toedo. Right. So the use of leg goes back even before the Romans, actually. But it first appeared mostly in art, like lead paint. Yeah. It wasn't like they described in the article as a novelty. And apparently it makes colors more vibrant and it's less corrosive, which is why you still, even in the United States, the lead paint on street signs, because it's less corrosive. There's nothing really yeah, that's what they say. It's still used on signs, supposedly up until as recently as the it may still be going on depending on the country that it's produced in, the ink on the outside of a plastic bread bag frequently has lead in it, or it used to, really? And it wasn't a problem unless somebody kept the bread bag and turned it inside out to store food in than that food leaks the lead out of the ink. Wow. It was actually, like, a big problem for a while, but I'm not sure that it is anymore. I couldn't find anything recent. The most recent thing I saw was 1991, saying that, yeah, it still happens. Right? Well, it's less expensive as a paint, which is another reason, and the colors are more vivid, apparently. But this hasn't been a problem in the US. For a while, but in China, they still use a lot of lead and paint. And in 2007, there were massive recalls for everything from Dora the Explorer toys to Sesame Street toys due to the fact that they have lead paint on them. And little kids put everything in their mouths, including their toys, because they're big dummies, and they end up eating lead, which is a big problem. So it was a massive recall of Chinese products in 1997 because of this. Now it was 2007. What did I say? 97. Yeah, you were. Harkening. Back to the urban dance spot day. Did you look them up? No. Man, you're missing out. I don't think that's true. Really? Yeah. Why? Just because I like them. No, I remember them vaguely. Yeah. It wasn't like I'd never heard of the Urban Dance Squad. Now you have good taste of music, mental flaws for the globe. Great. Like a legitimately great album of the world. All right, I'll look it up. It's just weird that you say you think you're not missing out. No, because, I mean, again, I remember Urban Necks, but for some reason, I put them in line with, like, Spin Doctors and 311. Well, you know what I mean? 311 could be slightly compared because they were kind of a rock rap group, but they were Dutch urban Dance Club was. Yeah. Okay, so that makes them cool in here, right? Automatically, yes. Somebody who just picked this up is like, what are they talking about? I know. Enchiladas Urban Dance Squad. So lead paint in the United States is well, it's still an issue in some ways because older houses still have it. But as of they said, no more. Get the lead out. That's right. And they define it as any paint or surface coating that contains lead equal or exceeding 1. So basically, in 1978, it said if you're going to manufacture something for somebody's home that people are generally going to come in contact with. Most people don't come in contact with street signs. Yeah, that's the deal. Right. Then you can't have lead in it. But again, any house built pre 1978 and there's plenty of them out there, very likely has lead paint in it. It also probably has lead pipes. And there's a lot of lead around us, all over the place in places you wouldn't even think. Like there's lead glass. Not really like a glass you might be using. You conceivably could be drinking lead out of it. Oh, but you don't drink out of lead glass. Sure. Yeah. They use it to make regular, plain old dumb glass into more like crystal. It gives it like a ping when you tap it. It makes the reflection a lot sharper. It also lowers the melting point. So if you put it in the oven, it doesn't like right. But it's conceivably bad for you. You know who was on it? Long before the United States government, federal government was the city of Baltimore. In 1951, they banned lead pigment for interior paint. Very smart for their housing. And since the 50s, it had kind of been phased out in different parts of the country. And then in 1971, we finally got the federal lead poisoning prevention act. And then it took seven years after that to fully ban the paint. The paint. Lead paint. Right. There's another big source of lead that was all over the place in the 20th century, and that was in gasoline. In cars. There was an additive in gasoline that was added to gasoline called tetraethyl lead. Right. Yeah. You remember that? Like fill it up with unleaded or fully leaded. Right. And the reason that they added lead to gas is because there's a problem called knocking. Right. In a high performance engine, when the gas entered the ignition chamber, the combustion chamber, it may just get so amped up that it would combust, it would ignite before it was supposed to, and this would basically disrupt the movement of the pistons. Right. They knocked, they pinged, they did all sorts of bad stuff. The lead kept the gas from combusting or igniting before it was meant to. So it was a pretty great additive. The thing is, we already knew that lead was not good for you at the time, but we added it to gas anyway, and it was finally phased out in the 70s, starting in the should say, because we started adding catalytic converters to our cars. Yeah, that helped that. And just the process of the chemical process of refining petroleum just advanced so we no longer needed it. Right. So it wasn't just crummy gas. It was pretty good gas. It didn't need lead. Yeah, if you run lead gas through a catalytic converter, it totally messes it up. And the catalytic converter is there to prevent emissions. So you take lead out of gas. The problem we found is that during these few decades from actually 1996 was the last year you could have lead in your gas in the United States. Yeah. During this period, basically all the cars on the road were spewing lead vapors into the atmosphere that would just go into the air and then come back into the ground and settle in the soil and water and your face. Yeah, I used lettuce gas in my I had to put it in my early VW Beetles that I drove. I had a couple of old vintage. We bought them new. Oh, yeah? My mom, she bought a 68 Beetle, brand new. Wow, that's neat. That's when I drove when I turned 16. Wow. That thing was still around, huh? Yeah. Nice. Those things, they never die if you take care of them. Did you, like, ever use duct tape or anything like that on it? No, but I did. Funny you mentioned I had a sizable hole in the rear floorboard that my friends call it the Flintstones car. You can put your feet down and run. That's awesome. So I did have a board. A running board? No, just a board over the whole but I mean, you could remove the board and run while you're sitting in the back seat. That's right. Great. Car lead has been added to cosmetics over the years. Jewelry, pottery. And then today, because everyone knows that is such a jerk, one of the only places you're going to find in the US. At least, is in your car battery. Yeah, your car battery or your laptop, actually. Yeah. Which is why it's really important to recycle that car battery or that laptop. Don't throw it in the woods. Yes, responsibly recycle your electronics and batteries. Yeah. There's one thing that we've learned since the 20th century, is that lead has some serious staying power, and it has a very pesky tendency to get out of wherever we put it. Right. Yeah. If you put it in just a regular landfill that's not designed to accept things like lead. It'll just leach into the groundwater. And same thing with your e waste, your laptops. And the reason that they're used in laptops is because the lead actually protects you from the radiation that would shoot out of your laptop screen into your face if it weren't for the toxic lead in there. That's right. Glass cathode ray tubes, like you find in your computer laptop screen. Well, I don't know about your laptop or your computer. Yeah, your monitor. But you should let it in there. You should responsibly recycle your laptop, too. For sure, for a number of reasons. I know you did what was it called? Electronics Recycling. Yeah. What was it like, just a thought or I have no idea what you're talking about. You did a video series where you like, narrow sure. Deep thoughts. I can't even remember. I created the series. Yeah, but you do one on e recycling. Yeah, but nobody cared or watched, so the world was not safe. Everyone said, Chuck, quit doing it. All right, let's take a break. I'm going to go cry a tear for man. What was the name of that series? I don't know. We'll go get forty s and pour some out on the curb for them. All right, we'll be back in a second. All right, Josh, we've talked a lot about lead so far in Enchiladas, enchiladas and Dutch rock bands. Lead comes from the earth, though. Let's take it underground. Yeah. It is naturally occurring, but it doesn't naturally occur in its pure form. Yes. You don't just, like, dig down. You're like, hey, there's a big hunk of lead. Right? Let me pull it out. Instead. Lead atoms have, I think, four unpaired electrons, maybe, in its outer shell. So it likes to form connections with other things. So when you find lead in the Earth, you're going to find it in the form of an oxide or a sulfide or something like that. Frequently it's combined with silver. And so that means it has to be separated. And even the Romans back in the day, which, by the way, these Roman lead pipes that they used for baths and for sanitation and stuff still intact today. You can still dig those up and beat people with them. You could. They're so strong. That's the other place you'll find a lead pipe in the hand of some dude coming at you. Yeah. Or a game of clue. Yeah, that's right. It was bent. Even the guy was hit so hard with it. Yes. Colonel Mustard, he was not to be trusted. He was not. But yes, the Romans, man, they were so smart. They had a pretty ingenious process called compilation. The extent of that is basically the idea is that some precious metals I'm sorry, precious metals, all precious metals won't oxidize, but dumb metals will. So if you heat that junk up, it's going to separate. Right. And they used it mostly to separate from silver. But these days, we get most of our lead from something called galena, where a lead sulfide is found. Right. Yeah. And our process is sort of similar. It is very similar, like using heat to separate things. And this actually very much resembles do you remember our waste gasification episode? Yeah, I could not remember which one this invoked. It was that one, because the process is very similar. So you take some lead sulfide and you heat it up in the air. So there's the presence of oxygen, and it converts into lead oxide and sulfur dioxide. Right. So you separate them out a little bit, then you take that lead oxide and you add carbon coke, and you again mix it with some air. And as that happens, the air combines with the oxide into carbon. No, the carbon combines with the air and becomes carbon dioxide, takes all of the oxygen molecules from the lead atoms. So the lead basically what amounts to pure lead, becomes molten and goes down to the bottom of the furnace, and carbon dioxide goes out into the atmosphere. It sounds like a very safe process. Basically, you're creating molten lead and carbon dioxide. Yeah. That's called roasting and smelting. And once that lead sinks cools down. It's called a pig. It's just a big mess of lead, basically. Yeah. Like pig iron. Yeah, it's delicious. And then you have slag, which is the non metallic byproduct of the smelting process, and you siphon and cool that down. And it's waste product. Yes. And like I said, recycling your car battery is important because there's also a process called secondary extraction, where they get that lead out of your battery. You can keep using it. Exactly. That's the other good thing about lead. It is extremely reusable, because, again, it has a lot of staying power. So you're not going to use lead up. Right. Which means you want to reuse it. Yes. We should get to the point where we don't need to mine any more lead or process any more lead. Just reuse the lead we've got. Or maybe find some great substitute that isn't so toxic yet. Melt down those tiny Civil War figurines. Oh, yeah, those guys. Are those lead? Sure. Okay. I thought they were. Yeah. So handling and painting those would lead paint. It's dangerous, right? Yes, it is. Is that why we're losing so many Civil War figurine buffs? I think so. At an alarming rate. That's why they all have, like, spittle and drool around the corners of their mouths and zone out while they're painting. Well, there's other reasons for that, but sure. Contributes. Okay. Chuck, we mentioned lead refining and processing, smelting, roasting, that kind of stuff. Right. That does create emissions of not just carbon dioxide, but also lead vapor, which is not good stuff. And you want to control that kind of stuff, but it is emitted, and it used to be. Well, these days, lead emissions from refining and processing are actually the number one source of lead vapor emissions in the environment. Right. But about 40 years ago, 45 years ago, that was not the case. The case was all those cars driving around on the streets emitting lead vapor. Yeah. It used to account for about 78% if it came from your automobile. And since the phasing out in reversal, we now have 52% coming from the processing. And what is it, down to road sources? It's 13%. 13% fuel combustion. Yeah. Not bad. No, not bad. Still, again, you basically want it at zero, as we're finding, as we'll see, that lead exposure in any amount is not good. And it goes from not good to really bad very quickly, apparently. Yeah. Lead is no good. We mentioned kids chewing on something with lead paint is not good. If you're redoing your house and it's pre 1978, you want to get a piece tested, you can't just be like, oh, let me sand off the paint on this molding. No, because, again, even if you think you've cleaned it up, there's lead right there, buddy. Yeah. That you're not going to get rid of it. Apparently also opening and closing your windows in a pre 1978 house can create lead dust. Yeah. If you're lucky enough to be able to open your windows. Sure. That's a point. Minor sealed shut. Yeah. Or nailed shut or what have you. Yeah, just from years of painting, basically, with probably lead paint, guaranteed. No, it's not, actually. We had it tested. Oh, did you? Yeah. I mean, it wasn't 100% lead paint, but you had to test it all the way through. Yeah, but what I'm saying is, pre 1978, it's not like that's the only paint that was used. I know what you're saying. That's why you get it tested. Right. But did you get, like, all the layers underneath tested? Yeah. Okay. That was my all the layers sound effect, like we hired a lead person. I got you good. That makes me feel better. Yeah. And if there is lead and you want to get the lead out, you're going to have to hire someone that knows what they're doing. Oh, yeah. They'll come in with their hazmat suits on to do so. Right. You can also get it from plumbing, although apparently with lead plumbing, it's not quite as much of a threat as you would think. Doesn't that make you just want to never drink water again? Knowing that you have lead pipes in your house, you shouldn't necessarily be worried because over the years, water sanitation experts have figured out that if you have good water, that's non corrosive, it actually is not only non corrosive, the water will leave behind a protective coating that coats the inside of the pipes that it runs through. Over the lead. Yeah, nice. Over whatever it is. But, yeah, it's going to leave a protective coat of other substances that aren't toxic. It's going to form a barrier for later water and the pipes. Right. So you shouldn't necessarily be freaked out if you have lead pipes coming to your house. You got the money. There's definitely worse things you could spend your money on than replacing those pipes. Yeah. Move to what? Copper PVC. Well, copper can be a problem as well. There's actually a copper lead rule that dictates how non corrosive a city's water has to be to follow this rule. And it's protecting not just against lead, but copper. You don't really want copper either, although it's not nearly as bad for you as lead. Interesting. So if you have lead in your system, it goes into your bloodstream. It doesn't matter how it gets in there, if you inhale it, it'll be absorbed through the capillaries and the lungs into the blood. Or if you lick it. Touch it? If you lick it, it's going to find its way into your blood. And it's really easy to find out if you have lead in your blood. You just get a blood test. I don't know why they would do this other test. I don't either. And not just a blood test, unless it's prohibitively expensive or something. Yeah. The other test is called the zinc protoporin test, and that's a byproduct of red blood cells as they break down in the presence of lead. So rather than directly testing and finding lead, either you're, like going around to see excuse me, lead. I want to see if your shadow is detectable. I don't get it. It makes zero sense, because you got to take your blood for that, too. Right? Sure. And it's not as accurate. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. But the lead blood test is so easy that companies like Three M and plenty of others sell home lead blood tests. Oh, that's nice. Yes, it is nice, unless you're the parent who is freaked out giving one to your kid. Well, that's true. Anything over equal to or greater than five micrograms per deciliter is bad if you're a kid. If you're an adult, you can tolerate a little bit more, but it's still distressing. Right. And that's how it's expressed a microgram to a deciliter, which is a 10th of a liter. Right. And so five is not good. Ten micrograms in a deciliter is where demonstrable behavioral and cognitive problems start to develop. Yeah, that's serious trouble. But the EPA has said that there's, quote, no demonstrated safe concentration of lead in blood. Like, you shouldn't have any in it. Right. The problem is nothing but toxic to humans. There is no benefit. Yeah, and we'll talk about that in just a second. But the problem with lead is that we're figuring out that we shouldn't be exposed to it at all, while we're also simultaneously figuring out that we have awashed our planet in it from the last couple of hundred years, basically. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll come back, and we'll talk about all kinds of fun stuff. All right. So before I left, I teased that there is no function for lead in the body. It is nothing but toxic, and the way it behaves in your body in a negative way is really interesting. Your body and this happens a lot if you look, we covered the body mistaking something for something else quite a bit. Yeah. There should be a word for that case of mistaken identity, I guess. That's it. But the body treats lead like calcium, so it's going to go where calcium goes in the body, including your bones, which is super scary. Yeah. Lead settles in very comfortably into calcium receptors, and it's not just bones. Like, that's what I always think of when I think of calcium. Like, what do you need calcium? Because your bones will break, or you get rickets if you don't have it or whatever. But calcium comes in handy throughout your whole body, and one of the big places it shows up is in calcium ions in your neuronal activity. Right. Yeah. So when your neurons fire, one of the ways that they fire is because the neurons or the calcium ions get them. All excited, and then your neurons are fired if lead is in that calcium ion channel instead of calcium, that doesn't happen. And all of a sudden, your neurons aren't firing as much as they would if the lead wasn't present. And now we have a big problem here. Yeah. And it's especially a big problem with children, because children's little brains are we talked about plasticity before. They're constantly forming these new neural connections, and any kind of lead in the mistaken for calcium is going to disrupt those connections. Your child is literally their brain isn't going to advance like it should. Right, exactly. Intellectually, apparently, emotional centers like the amygdala can suffer. It's been found to produce hyperactivity, antisocial behavior, attention deficit disorder, all sorts of problems from the presence of lead. Right. And like you said, it's worse for kids because their brains are still developing and forming. It's bad for anybody, but it's definitely worse for kids. The other way that it affects kids is that the regions of their brains aren't developing correctly, but then simultaneously. Calcium is also important in the formation of myelin, which is that protective sheath around the synapses between neurons. So that's kind of like flimsy, which means that the neurons aren't firing efficiently. So not only do you have brain regions affected, but the communication between brain regions are affected, too, in little kids. And the upshot is that it promotes all sorts of problems with cognitive and emotional and behavioral development in children. Yeah. And, like, literally lower IQ scores. And we should say that's just like the most prominent, horrifying, effective lead, there's a whole laundry list of other things that can happen to you, like kidney failure, pain, and your bones and joints from all that lead settling into where the calcium is supposed to go. Yeah. How about decreased sex drive and sterility and infertility for both men and women? What else? Diarrhea. Lack of appetite, constipation? I think diarrhea is the least of your worries if you have high blood pressure, enlarged heart. It affects virtually every system in your body, basically. And the reason why, again, is because it mimics or takes the place of calcium. And calcium is incredibly vital. It's an extremely important mineral that you need found throughout your body. And if a leg goes in, it's like, I'm here instead. It's not going to do the stuff that the calcium is supposed to do, leading to all this cascade of horrific problems. Yeah. And one of the other scary things is that unless you have acute lead poisoning, you may not know in fact, you probably won't know that you're being slowly poisoned. And you might just think, oh, I have diarrhea, and I don't feel like having sex much anymore. Right, and you might be slowly getting lead poisoning. Yeah. You just blame that on too many buffalo wings, but boom, lead poisoning. It takes care of both. Sure. You remember being a kid and lead pencils like it was a big scare, like you got lead poisoning if you got poked with a pencil. Yeah, I remember that. But then I also remember learning that there's actually graphite used in pencils. Yeah, we should have by our age, you should have david Reissan oh, yeah. How to sharpen a pencil. And he can school you on some pencils. He wrote a whole book on it. Literally wrote the book on pencil sharpening. Yeah. I still have, I guess, graphite somewhere in my hand from when I was jabbed very deep with a pencil that broke off. Wow. And it never left. And there still looks like a little black freckle. It's like you're in prison and got shanked. I know. I can't find where it is. I see it right there. No, it's a scratch. Could try. So we've talked about all the cognitive problems that can come about in behavioral and emotional disorders that can develop from lead. And this is like study after study after study has found this. It's one of the big reasons why there have been so many restrictions placed on lead exposure. And recently. Some people have some researchers. Including a couple an economist. I believe. And an epidemiologist. Have kind of taken that idea that lead can create all of these behavioral problems and any social behavioral problems and extrapolated to this idea that there was a big rise in the crime rate in the United States and actually around the world that followed about 20 years. The same trajectory of the use of lead and gasoline. Yeah, super interesting article. Very controversial. It still is, sure, but yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah. It's called led. America's real criminal element. It was in Mother Jones. It was written by Kevin Drum. He's one of the all time greats working today. And I think I've mentioned it before, but I strongly encourage anybody it doesn't even matter if led is the most boring thing in the world to you, go read this article. You will just be riveted by it. And Kevin Drum does a lot of he does a very good job of keeping his extrapolations down as low as possible. Although anybody can see by the evidence that he lays out that it's pretty clear that lead is some sort of culprit in this, and it's been shot down in that there's this idea that the science isn't settled. I suspect that it's the same mechanisms that force with climate denial, like, oh, unsettled science doesn't prove anything. If you look at all the studies associated with this, the correlation between lead use and gasoline and therefore lead emissions in cars and criminal activity and its decline, again, it just follows it like 20 years after and the whole idea is that when we started emitting lead into the atmosphere, kids started suffering these cognitive and antisocial behaviors. And then about 20 years after these kids were born, they started actually carrying out criminal activity. And we saw a tremendous rise in everything from murder to rape to muggings to everything. And the article is too long to really go into detail again. Just I strongly urge anybody to go read it. Yeah. The backlash that I've seen on the article wasn't, to me, like it was all from scientists, mainly. Yeah, I read a few of them. They weren't poopooing the notion. They said, what this means is it bears a lot more investigation. But as much as you want, if you can't replicate it, it's still possible. Confirmation bias or just correlation and not causation could be a host of other issues that went into that. It could be. And Kevin Jones makes the same point. He's like, there's also a rise in the use of vinyl albums that followed roughly the same trajectory as well. But of course, it needs more study, for sure. Well, this one scientist said what you really need to do is follow what he calls a cohort study. When you actually follow individuals along a long timeline, it's just a tough study. To prove something like this just takes a lot more data than they have. Right. And I think the guy you're referencing is Scott Firestone. Yeah, that was a good article. Who wrote on the Discover Magazine blog. And he gives kudos to Drum, who definitely deserves it, for basically saying, every time he says, it's so obvious, you have to be just have your head in the sand to deny this. He does say that, yes. Speaking scientifically, it does require more study. Super interesting, though, because Drum followed it all over the world. He didn't just go to the United States and saw the same thing in Canada, Australia and Great Britain. The good news is, if that is the case, then we should see crime dropping what we have forever. Yeah, but the problem is that it also should get us to basically mitigate the lead that isn't around, like in the soil and in the water and everywhere in people's houses. And the dollar amounts that he estimates it would cost are pretty prohibitive, at least as far as the public will goes from right now. But who knows? If enough science is done on it and you get the scientific community, vocally speaking, about this, then maybe the public will will change. Yeah. If you do have lead poisoning, you can get on meds. There's a prescription called sussimar. S-U-C-C-I-M-E-R. That was beautiful. Either that or succumber. I like how you say it can reduce blood lead. There, of course, always side effects with every medication. And if there's been a disaster and you get toxic lead in your body very quickly, they can use something called collision collation therapy. And that's when they use a collating agent. I'm not even going to try that CTA. I'm going to try it. Okay. Ethylenidia tetracetic acid. Hey, not bad if you'd like tetraside super quick. I missed the last a that's just a few letters off from super califilistic exposed, like the alphabet when it's on paper, but we'll call it EDTA, and that's when it's infused into the bloodstream and actually binds. It basically says lead. You're coming with me through the kidney out of your body. Right. But they use that when it's just an acute toxic dose that a person has been exposed to. If a kid has been found to be poisoned with lead. Actually. From what I read. One of the best treatments that they'll carry out. There'll be other stuff. Too. Depending on how bad it is. But a really good nutritious diet. Getting the kid foods that are high in things like calcium and high in things like vitamin C that help the body absorb calcium so that they can go displace lead in the body. Because if you got lead and you got calcium fighting for the same place, if you can get the calcium in there, it's going to displace the lead and then hopefully leave the body. Interesting. It's like I'm going home. That's got to be hard on the kidney. I don't know. Yes, I think if you have an acute lead poisoning or a serious lead poisoning, it's not good. But yeah, of course it'd be hard on the kidneys because one of the things was kidney failure and anemia. Exactly. Lead is definitely invariably in the ground, in the groundwater, and in the soil around us. And that's a problem because it sort of works this way up the food chain in a weird way, because what you have are these tiny organisms. It gets in their body like plankton and microscopic plants, and they die. And then other things eat their waste. And then it just sort of like bigger animals come along and keep eating these things. Yeah. It's not just humans that suffer from lead toxicity. Other animals, too, even the small ones. So should we talk about these Flint lawsuits a little? Yeah. And then enchiladas, and that will fully non toxic enchiladas. I guess it depends on who manufactured it. So I did some reading on the lawsuits. Right now, there's more than a dozen and probably growing. I'm sure a few of them are class action suits on behalf of tens of thousands of Flint residents. And attorneys always look their chops when they hear stuff like this. But there's some concerns. One is that the state of Michigan is like, the city is broke, so don't even bother. Right. The state of Michigan may be a route to go if you want to get a lot of money, but then they say that'll just get passed along with the taxpayer. Yeah. And a lot of experts in the legal world say that compensation is unlikely to begin with. As far as money goes, because of a couple of things. One thing called sovereign immunity, which basically means the government can say giving water to the citizens is a core government function. So we're shielded legally from liability for doing that improperly. So like, you can't sue us. We're trying to give you water. And the other thing is specific causation has to be proved. So not only do you have to prove that the lead came from that water and not like the lead pipes in your house or other like the lead paint in your walls, maybe it has to come specifically from that Flint River water and you also have to prove that that directly led to the problem that your kid is having and not other things. Well, one of the things I read was that it's very possible that the lead came from the pipes in those people's houses, but that it's still on the provider of the water because they were supposed to be following corrosion protection techniques that they lied about following and they weren't following them. So it got rid of that protective coating that had been on the lead pipes before and was bringing all that lead into people's homes directly. So it may have been lead from the people's homes, but it was the corrosive nature of the terrible drinking water that was being pumped through those that caused that lead to be brought into the people's homes. And then again, on top of it, the government was lying about using the techniques that they were supposed to be using to prevent that from happening. So now that they've switched back over to Detroit water, it's going to take a while for that protective film to develop on the pipes again. Right. So even now that the different water is coming through, it's still lousy with lead. And the sad thing is that some people in Flint are too poor to do anything about it. They still need water, so they're still drinking leaded water even though they know that it's going to hurt them down the line. Well, and it's sad that it sounds like getting real compensation is maybe unlikely. Yeah. Because a lot of these people who have kids, if their kids suffer severe cognitive development problems, they're going to need help like the rest of their lives. Yeah. This one guy, he's a law professor specializing in environmental law named Noah Hall. He says probably the smart thing to do if you really want to help these people is set up do what they did with the Deepwater Horizons bill and set up a victim's compensation fund instead of doing it via lawsuit. Like legislate it. Sure, maybe that would help. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. He basically said what the state shouldn't do is fight this. He's like, that would be a big trouble. He said they should set up some sort of fund so then they look like the good guy still. But then I think you don't get all the dirty details dragged out in public like you would with a lawsuit. Well, apparently they're already coming out anyway. Like troves of emails have been released. The governor set up a task force to find out who is the blame. And they turned around and they were like, you. And he said, Fire the task force. Right. Exactly. You're all fired. Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's very scary. Public health care, Flint. I know. Talk about a city that's been roughed up over the years. I know. Well, we're there with you, Flint. Hang in there. If you want to learn more about lead or Flint or criminal activity, you can check out all these different articles on the Internet and you can type lead into the search Barhouse of works.com and it'll bring up a pretty great article. Since I said pretty great article, it's time for a listener. I'm going to call this Finland rules. Remember we did the Dark Money podcast and I was like, what's a good place, not corrupt. I remember we heard from a lot of people in Scandinavia, hi, I'm an American living in Helsinki for the last few years with my Finnish husband, Chuck. You were right on the money when you said there's very little political corruption here. Of course there are some because they're humans, after all. But the level compared to the States is laughable. When I asked my husband about it, he thought for a second. Asked about corruption scandals, he said a few years back there was something about a prime minister who accepted lumber from a company to build his house. That was it. It seems comical to me, considering the States in an election year. Also, the campaign season is much shorter here and it's done a little different. A party runs. There are at least five major parties. That's crazy in and of itself. Crazy good. Yeah. A party runs and whichever gets the majority elects from its ranks the prime minister and makes a cabinet out of a coalition of the other parties which receive high numbers of votes. How about that? Like you came in second. You're on board, too. Amazing. Come on. And here's your participant ribbon. Campaigns are paid for by disclosed donations and public funds. You also made a comment about the high taxes here. Many people, usually Americans, say that with this space that the taxes are so high here. But I've come to think very highly of it. I've discovered that I don't really need another pair of jeans or a new jacket. What I need is an educated society around me and access to quality health care and a truly equal society where everyone is safe and has their basic needs met. That is from Gabrielle. Wow. A lot of people hate your guts for saying that. Gabrielle, it was so brave of you. Thanks, Gabrielle, for writing in. I don't know how they say adios in Finland. No, she's American. Well, goodbye. Okay. Thank you for writing it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweak to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com Stuffychnow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And, as always, join us on the Web@stuffysheanow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com." |
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