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How Mercenaries Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mercenaries-work | Mercenaries are soldiers of fortune who fight in wars and conflicts for profit. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the fascinating history of mercenaries past and present in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Mercenaries are soldiers of fortune who fight in wars and conflicts for profit. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the fascinating history of mercenaries past and present in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:18:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=20, tm_min=18, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=7, tm_isdst=0) | 28166075 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, myland Chuck Bryant. I'm smiling. How are you doing, Chuck? I feel like I was just whisked in here like Elvis or something. You like Crusty the Clown when he comes in to do the recording for a Crusty doll. Right. You remember. Hey. Yeah. Again. Hey. That's my best. Yeah. So Chuck came in on a sick day on a wing and a prayer. I just walked in. Yes. Traffic is bad, nasty out. Raining, raining. Cold. And we're going to talk about something else that is cold. Hey, nice mercenaries. Yeah. Chuck. We've talked about Delta Force before. I remember. We had to keep our composure. Sure. Because we were tittering and excited and all that. Yes. We were taken to task a little bit by liking violence. That's not necessarily going to happen in this one, I have a feeling. No. Mercenaries, which are, as I think everybody knows, our soldiers for hire are pretty much universally hated by everybody. Are they? Yeah. Okay. I didn't get that. Yeah. Nobody likes a mercenary. One of the reasons why is because when you go to war, most people go to war because somebody's getting pushed around by some other big jerk country. Sure. Or there's some dictator that should be top alert. It's ideological on the surface. Right. And that's what attracts brave men and women braver people than us much, who go into service not for money, but because they want to protect democracy or freedom or what have you got. You mercenaries don't do that. They go and say, this country is paying a lot right now for this war that they're in, and I'm going to go kill for them. Killing for money. They're pretty much hitman. Yeah. I didn't realize the fascinating history of the mercenary until I read this. No. And William Harris, by the way, did a hum dinger of a job. He did. He did a fine job. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's talk about mercenaries. Where do they come from? Well, Josh, the earliest account that we know of is about 2400 years ago, when Persian Prince in general, Cyrus the Younger, which I like. That Cyrus the Younger. Right. Not to be confused with Cyrus the elderly guy, right? The bald. He hired the 10,000, which was an army of Greek mercenaries, to seize the throne in Persia right. From his own brother. What? Cersei's? Yeah. I'm not sure, but I've seen the movie 300, so I bet the 10,000 were pretty tough. Yeah. I was wondering, are the 300 and the 10,000 related? Are the 300 the remains of the Decimated. 10,000? So they're tough dudes. They were tough dudes. That was a great movie. I enjoyed it. That stupid, disfigured guy gave them up. Yeah. And oh, the ABS. Did you know in that movie they wanted to recreate what these guys probably looked like. So when they were training, they didn't use any equipment. They did things like roll tires uphills. They did real earthy, like the strongman competition very much. They carry, like, concrete beer kegs and stuff. Right. And, like, pick up tractor trailers. I like those beer cakes. What a waste of beer. Seriously. Yeah. So that was back in one BCE, right. And since then, we've pretty much used mercenaries. Almost uninterrupted. Yeah. They made a pretty big splash, I guess you could say, in the 100 Years War, which lasted longer than 100 years. But it did. But, I mean, they're not going to say, what, the 116 Year War? Yeah. That doesn't have the same ring between the English and the French from 1337 to 1453. Well, that's the problem with the Long war, is that your armies are going to be decimated. Precisely. So you have to turn to the paid for hire guys. Well, not only that, the standing political army didn't really appear until, I think, the 17th century. So back in this time, all these disparate landowning earls and dukes and princes, they had their own private armies, and they were all for pay, but a lot of them were drawn from their own countrymen. But, yeah, you make an excellent point. When you have 100 Year War, you're going to go through a lot of your countrymen. That's just kind of one of the aspects of war. So, yeah, in the 100 Year War, a guy named Edward of Woodstock, who is known as the Black Prince, which, by the way, from now on, I want you to call me the Black Prince. I was going to call you Joshua. Woodstock? No. Okay. Not for many years, buddy. Yeah. He made use of mercenaries. And how do you pronounce this, Chuck? I'm going to go with cheval. Chey? Yes. Which basically means burn, pillage, loot and rape. And that's our war. I think fans of Blazing Saddles might know that better. Is the number six that was in where they go riding into town, whipping in a whopping in every living thing? Yeah, that's what they say in Blazing Sails. Yeah. Then they also had a number six dance later on, which was a really great line. Nice. I want to go to dance. Maybe so, maybe, probably not. I think it's a little more bloody and horrifying. Yeah. And then the 100 Years War ends, and I guess the use of mercenaries kind of dried up for a little while, right? Yeah. So my earlier comment about them being used uninterrupted was totally baseless. Well, I bet you there were some mercenaries used here and there, right. Just not as widely. Right. Let's talk about some famous mercenaries there, Chuck. Okay. Like the Swiss Guard. I think that's a good example. Pretty tough. Yes. They made the point in here william made the point in here that sometimes a soldier would get a specialty, a combat specialty. So they would be sought out because of a particular war or a battle they might be in. And the Swiss Guard was such because they were masters of the pike. Right. And they're still around. There's a pretty cool photo of them. And they are holding their pikes. Really? And they look yeah, it's pretty awesome. It sounds like a euphemism. They're holding their pikes. Yeah. I'm not going to go there. What about the other one? You speak German? I found out Chuck speaks German or so ago. So, Chuck, how do you pronounce this one? I knew you're going to ask this, and I practiced it. I'm going to go with lanskonesta. Okay. That's better than what I was getting. And, you know, I do speak German, but that's a really tough one, even if you are German. Can you say hello to my little friend Zach Tallow? To maninlin freundin. Yeah. Chuck's. A Beverly Hills Chihuahua fan, by the way. Right. So, yes, those German soldiers actually also use the pike, but they also used guns, which was kind of new in the 15th and 16th century. Right. Muskets. ARCHIBUS. ARCHIBUS, yeah. So those guys made a pretty big impression. One of the reasons why they were, I guess, heavily sought after was because, unlike the Swiss Guard, they specialized in different weapons, but they had different aspects of their companies. Like, somebody would use the musket, somebody else would use a pike, somebody else would use a sword. Right. They were like everything you needed all in one. Right. Yeah. And actually, did you know that in the Revolutionary War, there were tons and tons of mercenaries? Not until this. And I'm surprised they have not made a film about it yet, because William and he even has this source said that during the Revolutionary War, americans probably fought more Germans than they did English, british. Right. Is that true? Is that possible? I could see that, yeah. Wow. It's crazy. You never hear about that. And one of those German mercenaries, I think they're called Hessians, turned out to be the headless Horsemen. Yeah. Well, it could bod foe. Oh, yeah, that's right. Sorry. He was the nervewracked, man. Sure. Like we said, standing armies kind of became popular in the 16th century. Their popularity never waned much, unlike the twist. So political standing armies have been around for a while. Right? You mean the dance. That's good. So as a result, mercenaries have kind of fallen to the wayside until World War Two. Yeah, which kind of changed everything. World War II was probably the most landmark event in the last, I don't know, since the Magna Carta, maybe. Everything changed after that. Germans got volunteers, actually, so technically, they weren't mercenaries. We'll go over in a minute what the Geneva Convention actually says as a mercenary, but I think the Germans actually had volunteers from other countries. Yeah. Let's call them Free Willy. Free Willy. So. Yeah, that was in World War II, actually. Right. And since they were volunteers and they weren't paid, they weren't technically mercenaries, but they fulfilled a lot of the other stuff, a lot of the other criteria. Right. So then yeah, after World War II, part of the Geneva Convention, this agreement among all the warring nations and the allies on the rules of war, mercenaries in their use, and their definition is very much addressed. Right, Chuck? Yes. In the first protocol of should we go with the criteria? Yes. In order to be considered a mercenary, Josh, you must be specially recruited to take part in the conflict, but not a member of the armed forces of the state that recruited you. Right. That's kind of a big one. Yes. Like the German volunteers in World War II. They are from other countries. Exactly. You need to actively engage in hostilities. Otherwise, I guess you probably wouldn't be very good mercenary. If not, you're just some guy standing on the sideline. Exactly. You are motivated by private gain, and you're paid substantially more than the ordinary armed forces of that state. Soldier of fortune. Yeah, we'll get into that, too. Though it's not quite as lucrative when you factor in some other things. I was kind of surprised about that. And what else? Is that the last one? Yes. No, Chuck, that pretty much does wrap it up. I think you covered all the big points. And even earlier than that, mercenaries were kind of put on the fringes right after World War II when the original Geneva Convention was established, because they created the definition for a lawful combatant. Basically what we think of as a soldier, somebody who belongs to a nation, that's important, too. That's a war. Right. Because if you're a lawful combatant, you can engage in offensive conflict with people in other countries. You can kill people. And if you are expected to be treated as a prisoner of war exactly. If you're a mercenary, you are way far out there on the edge. Yeah. You're kind of on your own. Like, you can be tried for murder and have tortured, whatever. Sure. And remember, I think in September 2007, blackwater, very famous outfit. It's like you're talking about the Dooby Brother song. No. Blackwater. No, we're not talking about that one. Different guy. Yeah. You know Blackwater. Right. Actually, I responded to someone asked to do something on Blackwater, and I responded, yeah, maybe we should do one of the Dubai brothers as a whole. And he didn't get the joke at all. He wrote back and said, no, that's weird that you thought that I was really talking about Blackwater. That's weird that you thought that. I know you burn out. Well, that's weird you didn't get the joke. Right. Yeah. Okay, so you are aware of Blackwater? Sure. Okay. And I think right after this, they changed their name to Blackwater Worldwide, and now they're Z exe. Oh, really? Yeah, they keep changing their name with horrible travesty, but a lot of people call them mercenaries. They're now called private military contractors. But basically they supply soldiers of fortune, right? Yeah. For security, mainly. And remember in 2007, there is this horrible thing that went down in Baghdad where I think 17 Iraqi civilians were killed when blackwater contractors opened fire. Section got real trigger happy, and I think they found that 14 of those deaths were unjustified. Yeah. They broke the deadly force rules. Right. And Iraq was chomping at the bit to prosecute these guys. I believe the US. Stepped in and protected them, but, I mean, it was very possible for them to be prosecuted because they weren't lawful combatants. Well, the US. Uses a lot of these contractors, as it turns out. Yes, because I saw the UN passed a resolution in the late 80s outlawing this kind of mercenary. But the US. Conveniently, has still not signed that document. Because we want to hire the mercenaries. Because what happened is and William makes a great point, is with the different rules of warfare. Now, you have lots of weapons systems and soldiers that are trained to man these systems and operate these systems. So what happens is they're spread a little thin with some of these day to day duties, like security of high ranking civil servants, that kind of thing. Right. Which the military would usually take care of. Right. Anytime you see Hamid Karzai, you'll see a couple of white guys who wear Oakley sunglasses and have beards with, I guess, heckler and cock guns. And they are, I think, former Delta Force, but now they work for Z. They're blackwater, they're not smiling. No, but they provide security, and they can do that lawfully. You can provide security. You can provide a defensive security where you're not engaging in any whatsoever. Right. Supposedly. Right. And then you're a lawful or you're a mercenary under the Geneva Convention guidelines and the protocol and all that. Right. Yeah. I got a stat for you. Okay. I said that the US. Likes to use these soldiers of fortune. There's no hard numbers, but they suggest that more than 180,000 of these contractors are working in Iraq alone, and that altogether all over the world, they outnumber the United States military in total. Yeah. And we've spent about $100 billion in the Iraq war on these mercenaries. Right. Which I think something like a quarter or a third of the total that we had spent when this article was written, I think in late 2008. Right. Yeah. Which, of course, is smaller now. So, Chuck, Africa has been a big site for mercenaries, and it still continues to be. That's what I hear. Pretty much anytime there's a revolution, a coup attempt, something like that, and then had some cash, they hire outside mercenaries. Right? Yeah. And there was a guy named Simon Man. Do you remember this? Yes. Back in 2004. March 2004. Man was the head of two companies that were private military companies, contractors, but basically mercenary outfits. Right? Yeah. Sand Line International. And I love the name of this one. Executive Outcomes. Right. I don't know what that means. Yes, but it sounds so shady. Like, you can just see, like, their company headquarters, Executive Outcomes, like one of those offices that you wander into to ask to use the bathroom. They never like, what is this place? What do you guys do here? And you just scored it out when you wake up on a park bench, a lump on your head, you have, like, ink on your fingers. Right. Well, man in March 2004, led a group of mercenaries from South Africa and I guess his company to Equatorial Guinea, and he didn't make it. He got picked up in Zimbabwe. It was a coup attempt. They were going to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. The president, Theodoro Obank. Right, nice. And they got picked up and held, and apparently he was just recently pardoned by President Obang and released in November. And he's out and he is naming names. The story that he tells now he's back in Great Britain is that Mark Thatcher? Sir Mark Thatcher, whose last name you might recognize. His mom was the PM for a while. Nice march. And some other people from around the world had an interest in the oil fields, the Equatorial Guinea, and allegedly hired Simon Mandy to overthrow the government so they could move in and get these oil revenues or control these oil fields. Yeah. And he was condemned. Pretty roundly man. Was, but he was fully pardoned by Obeying. He was. He was in prison for five and a half years, too. But he did have to shut down Executive Outcomes, apparently. Right, yeah. And Sand Line. Yeah. They're probably opened up under another name, though. Probably not. But if you think about think about how people think of Blackwater or Simon Mann. No one cared that he was in prison for five and a half years. And the reason why is because he's a soldier of fortune. These are mercenaries, and people just don't think of them very highly. True. Can we name some of these other companies? Yeah, sure. Just because I thought it was kind of funny, some of them. And if I had a mercenary company, I don't know what I would name it, but it would probably not be the Olive Group. That was one of them. Yeah. And Triple Canopy. That's probably a military term. And what's another? Golden. This one's good. Kroll. Kroll. Koll Kroll. Your government. Yeah. That probably stands for something. The one that got that I think stands out above all the rest is Global Risk Strategies. Yes. I can see us if you go to Guatemala calling on global Risk strategies to come get us out. I'd love to have that number, actually handy. Maybe we should look that up. So, Chuck, let's talk about another famous group of mercenaries that aren't necessarily going to look down upon the French Foreign Legion. You know, the guys with the white cats, the Cape Blanc with the do you remember in the 80s, did you break dance? No. Do you remember those hats, though? They were like baseball caps, but then they had the flap and back. Yeah, they were kind of based on engineers hat. You're right. What's up with that? Who knows? Weird time for fashion. Sure. They're always leading the way fashion forward. All right, so these guys with the white caps, right? Yes. The French Foreign Legion are technically, you could call them mercenaries, although they can eventually gain French citizenship through joining the Foreign Legion right. After three years, and they have to sign up for a five year tour of duty, five year contract. And the French Foreign Legion was established in 1831, because when the French Revolution happened in July of 1830, apparently this opened the floodgates for people, I guess, seeking their fortune in France, in the newly Free French Republic. And so the French said, well, you know what? Let's put all these raga muffins and no good next to good use. And they started the French Foreign Legion. So if you came in, if you wanted to become a Frenchman and I guess you're an able bodied man, they said, sure, you can become a Frenchman, sign up for five years, we'll put you in the Foreign Legion. After three years, you can become a citizen. After the fifth year, you can come back and do whatever you like. And many were no goodnicks, actually, in the early days. And still it's joining the circus. Right. Or sometimes we have some no good nicks that join up in the army at 18 because their parole officer says that might be a good move for them. Right. And the army will shape them up and turn them into good citizens, hopefully. Yeah. Vengeance killers. So can we talk more about the Legion heirs? I think we should, yeah. Okay. Well, they get recruited and they get approved for preselection, and that means you get a little medical check up and what they call a, quote, confirmation of motivation. Right. They want to make sure you actually do want to do this. You're aware that you're signing up for five years to go be in the military, right. And once you pass through that stage, you go to another set of more thorough questioning and medical checkups, and then you go to basic training for 15 weeks in a little country town in the south of France. And at the end of that, they introduce you to your comrades and your military life. They teach you French ideal. You can speak a little French at the end of this, and then at the end, you get your Cape Blanc. Right? Which is that goofy looking white hat, right? And it is goofy looking, isn't it? It is, and it kind of stands out. It's not very practical. No. And there's a picture of a modern Foreign Legionaire. French Foreign Legionaire. Really? And he's wearing like a beret and camo and all that stuff, so I think it's kind of like their dress thing. Right. Okay. So you have gone through basic training. You're a Legionnaire now. Apparently there are 8000 of them at any given point in time. Right. Now they hail from 136 different countries, including France itself. Yeah. How does that work? So I don't know. We'll have to find out. Yeah. After you get through basic training, you're now a Legionnaire. They send you to, I guess, one of eleven regiments all over the world. Yeah. Chad, Ivory Coast, Afghanistan, all over the place. Some places you don't really want to be, I would imagine. You want to go to Chad? No. I got another stat for you. Okay. 1831. Josh since then, more than 35,000 legionnaires have been killed in combat. Right. It's a lot. Yeah. I think part of the reason we mentioned that legionnaires aren't necessarily looked down upon, even though they are pretty much a mercenary group, because they do get paid and they're not doing it for ideology. Right. But I think the fact that you sign up for five years, you can obtain citizenship through this and you're serving a specific nation sure. Kind of adds like kind of a military tinge to it, you know what I mean? Well, they're no more soldiers instead of contractors. Right. Let's talk about the contractors there, Chuck. Yeah. These guys are typically ex military or former police officers. The batter the better. Like Green Berets, SAS, delta Force. This is who you want in your PMC? Yeah. Like Simon Man was an SAS guy. Right. So these dudes are brought in, they are paid, it says $600 to $700 a day, sometimes up to $1,000 a day for their work. Yeah. Not bad. It's substantial. But what we were saying earlier is, and this is kind of funny, as they typically don't get benefits, which surprised me. I thought any company would want to get a benefit together. I know, but no, you can't get a break as a merchant, so you got to pay for your own benefit. You have to cover your own taxes and all that. Yes. And how much is life insurance if you're a soldier of fortune? I have no idea. It's astronomical. Yeah. So at the end of the day, once you take out all the money for all those things and for milk and sugar, they're probably not paid a whole lot more than a regular military personnel, right? Probably not. Who knows? I think if you went to work for Blackwater or something, you could probably make a pretty decent amount of cash. Right. There's some other things that private military companies and contractors do that aren't necessarily war based, and they are actually kind of cool. There is a group that train guides who combat poachers in the Congo to prevent the extinction of things like the Black Rhino. That's pretty cool. Private security for corporations. Obviously, when De Beers is poking around Africa and Exxon and BP, de Beers definitely needs the security. They're traveling around the country in hostile areas, so they need the best of the best. And like you said, guarding high risk dignitaries like cars, that kind of thing. Yes. And then apparently they also are used in counter drug operations. Yeah. I didn't realize that. I didn't either. Can't do it. All right. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. So especially now, the use of private military contractors really exploded in the they become, like you said so far, entrenched in our military that there's almost no separating them. We become so dependent on them. And they also don't necessarily engage exclusively in gun toting missions. Like, they could cook the same company can send cooks, drivers, all this stuff that frees up our soldiers. Yeah. I didn't even think about that. But there are some risks, some definite downsides to using mercenaries. Right. Yeah. I would say the one that stood out to me the most is what you really want in a situation like war is loyalty above all else. Definitely. And when you're hiring a mercenary, they're after the buck, and they're not necessarily even from your country. So you can't really count on that nationalism. Right. The ideology that motivates you to go, you know, kill. Yeah. That's the biggest issue, I would say. There's actually a famous story from the 14th century about the Almogavaris. Yeah. Almogovaris. Yeah. That's good. How you say al mogaveros Spanish frontiersman. Right. Some Byzantine leaders hired these guys to defend By Xanthia right. Against the Turks. Yeah. And they did successfully. And then they turned on the Byzantines and basically just walloped them. Did what? Number six. Number six. And number six on them for the next two years. That didn't work out too well. Yeah. The very people you hire to defend, you can say, you know what? Let's just go ahead and take everything you got afterward. Yeah. It's much like hiring a hitman. Yeah. A really trained former military hitman. Right. If you're in a military detachment, a standing military detachment. Right. Political army. There's a lot of, like you said, loyalty to the state, but there's also a lot of interpersonal loyalty among soldiers. Sure. That doesn't necessarily happen with mercenaries. So there can be a communication breakdown. They're not sharing intelligence. That kind of imagine they look out for each other, and that's about it. Right. And whoever probably they were hired to protect specifically. Right. But all bets are off at the end of the day when you got a mercenary. I think that's pretty much the key takeaway here, Chuck. All bets are off. All bets are off when you hire a mercenary. That's in the fine print. Yes, sir. When you write that initial contract. Chuck, we talked about this article I think we covered most of it, but there's a bunch more information that we didn't get in this fine article by William Harris. And if you want to learn more about mercenaries, just type that word into the handystarch bar@howstepworks.com. Which leads us, of course, to listen or mail. Yes, Josh. I'm going to call this one from Anya from Boston. Just simple. And this is about a near death experience. And we got a few of these, but I like onions. I just listened to your podcast on NDEs, if you couldn't tell from the subject. I had one that I find interesting. I had one myself. I can't remember it, but my mom told me what I said about it. At the time, I was three years old and was sick in the hospital. I can't remember why now, but my lungs were mostly solid. Not a good way to be born or I guess. Yeah, she had to be born that way. It's like breathing through butter. Yeah. Suddenly she flatlined and she lived through it and she woke up. Her mom said she had a dream, or that the girl had a dream where I was standing at the entrance to the hospital and a big yellow school bus pulled up. There was no driver. And when I tried to get on the bus, a little ball girl about a year older than me told me I could not get on the bus because I was too young. Just to note, I had no idea what even a school bus was at this point in time because I'd been living in England. So that is my near death experience. She tried to board sound like a bus to heaven. And the little gatekeeper said, you're too young, you're not ready to go, so go back. She went back. So look out for a bald school girl. You know you're dead when you encounter one of them. And that's onia from Boston. Well, thanks a lot. Onion. Yeah, we did get a lot of pretty cool emails. Thanks to everybody who sent in and shared their near death experience with us. Somewhere just off the charts chilling indeed. Yeah. If you have any kind of story you want to share with Chuck or I, if you are a soldier of fortune, somebody for hire, if you are a line cook at a chain restaurant, we want to hear from you. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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 Kilgueref and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder one week early on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-04-11-sysk-supreme-court-nominations-final.mp3 | How Supreme Court Nominations Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-supreme-court-nominations-work | Being nominated as a Supreme Court Justice is no small thing, and it doesn't always go as planned. With this week's confirmation of Justice Gorsuch, Josh and Chuck take a look at the process of getting named to America's highest court. | Being nominated as a Supreme Court Justice is no small thing, and it doesn't always go as planned. With this week's confirmation of Justice Gorsuch, Josh and Chuck take a look at the process of getting named to America's highest court. | Tue, 11 Apr 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=101, tm_isdst=0) | 44111916 | 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 there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. I've object. To what? I don't know. I don't think you object in front of the Supreme Court. I think they strike you down with lightning if you talk out of turn. Yes. Did they even jeez, I'd love to see one of those hearings. Yeah. Do they even call them hearings? Magic Hour? I don't know. Yeah, they do call them hearings. I'm almost positive. It's like, shrouded in secrecy, though, right? No, they don't show that stuff on TV, do they? No, but they do have, like if you listen to Nina Tottenberg, she's a great Supreme Court reporter, and it's not televised. And I guess it is just traditional reporting reporters that are allowed in there. But it's not close to the press or anything. It's not like a FISA court or anything. It's not the star chamber. No. It's interesting, though. It does seem sort of secretive, though, because they like right. These rulings, sometimes they don't even read them. I saw that Clarence Thomas went seven years without speaking in court. What? Yeah, that's what it said. Where did you see that? In an article about Clarence Thomas. It said he's one of the quietest justices. They said he went at 1.7 years without speaking in court, but apparently writes a lot in his rulings, his briefs. Yeah, he writes in his brief. Yeah, I could see that. Because I guess when you're in court, you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court, I think, basically. And we'll do like a whole separate Supreme Court episode, right? Agree. Sure. Okay. Somebody mark that down. But you're being peppered with questions from them, and then you're trying to answer the questions to show why your side is right. Arguing the case clearance Thomas right. Now, here it goes. And intimidates you. Part of it is going back, thinking about it, and then writing your opinion on it. Yeah. Very weird job. It is. It's a pretty neat job, too. One of the big things about it is here in the United States, if you were on the Supreme Court, it's the highest court in the land. Right? Sure. You should say that. You're there for life. Yeah. It's a life appointment, as far as I know, besides working at the DMV, am I right? It's the only four life appointment in the United States government. Yeah. Which seems like kind of crazy, but it also sort of makes sense because you want a stable Supreme Court. Yeah. You want them focusing on cases, not what's going on, or whether they need to be elected again or campaign. It makes sense once you kind of put your head to it. Plus, it also kind of dovetails with the way that they're viewed here in this country and I'm sure abroad, too, that they are this panel of highly learned legal scholars, basically, like, I don't know. I'm sure there's something in Star Wars that resembles this. The Jedi Council. Oh, man. I'm always afraid to say hang about Star Wars, you know, the Jedi Council jar Jar Binks was on. Okay, yeah. We won't hear anything about that. How could we? Right? So this was written by our old buddy Ed Grabbienowski? Yes. Should we tell everybody the Grabster? Should we reveal the big reveal? Do we have an announcement? I think so. All right, go ahead. Oh, you're letting me do it. Yeah. So, everybody, you may not know this, because we tried to stretch out Grabster articles as much as we could, but they were starting to get thin. Grabster wasn't really writing for the site any longer, but we said, enough of this. We need them. We need them bad. So we did a little wheeling, tad, bit of dealing, and Grabster is going to be writing again, specifically topics that we are requesting. Yeah, it's pretty great. You and I were both so excited. Stoked, I think is the word. Yeah. So anyway, we love Ed and big shout out to him. And Buffalo, New York. Yes. And their wings and their football team. Sure, why not? So anyway, I wrote this, and it's a great article. So like you said, I think we kind of dove into it really quickly, but if you're not in the United States, you might be saying, what's the Supreme Court? Although I think you probably know, like you said, they are the highest court, and they're the third branch of our government, and they are specifically there to kind of keep everyone in check and to say, like, you may be the president, but you're not a dictator, because you still have to answer to the Supreme Court. At the end of the day, you can't run amok. And we're going to make sure that we and this is ideally, we're going to make sure that we review everything in a legal way, and we're going to get to ideology. You can't escape that, of course. Sure. But Supreme Court justices are supposed to rule on law, and specifically these days, at least how it relates to the Constitution. Yeah, and it wasn't their initial they weren't created to say, like, go defend the Constitution. Right. And the Supreme Court said, well, can we sow some patches or bedazzle our robes? And the framers said, sure, we don't care. So they went out and defended the Constitution. It actually is very vague. The judicial branch or the Supreme Court is created in the Constitution, but all it says is that they are there, that it's. Power shall, quote, extend to all cases in law and equity arising under this Constitution. That's it. The only thing it mentions about the Supreme Court and its power. So ever since the Constitution was written and ratified, the Supreme Court has kind of been this evolving thing, or it was evolving for a while now. It's pretty well set into its role and what it's meant to do, what evolves and changes are, like you said, the ideology and the personalities of the people sitting on the court. Yes. And their word is the final word. There is no court that can overturn or review even their decisions. And they review. They have about 5000 cases submitted every year and can only review about 100 to 150, which I thought was kind of a lot, actually. 150. Sure. Yeah. I was not expecting that. And they specifically try now, like we said, and focus on the Constitution or usually cases that have been appealed from lower federal courts. They work their way up the food chain. And I think they probably love these treason cases involving treason or disputes with other countries or ambassadors. Kind of like high stakes stuff. Sure. Imagine being an ambassador and getting dragged in front of the Supreme Court for something you did or your kid did. Yeah, probably a little snot nose Brett ambassador kid. So, like I was saying, the Constitution is pretty vague about what the Supreme Court is meant to do. And it wasn't even out of the gate that they realized that they were supposed to really kind of examine laws in respect to the Constitution. That started in an 18 three case, marbury versus Madison, big one. And it was a landmark watershed case, both kinds. And ironically, the court found that it didn't have the power to satisfy the petitions of the petitioners. Yeah. I think James Madison, or no, Stefan Marbury was suing James Madison because James Madison had said, we'll give you these commissions, and then he was taken out of office or phased out of office, and the commissions were forfeited. And the supreme Court said, we thought we had the power to do this, but it turns out we don't. Constitutionally. So sorry. And it was the first time that the Supreme Court had ever examined something through the lens of the Constitution, and that set the precedent from then on. Yeah. And they serve well, they serve kind of however long they want to, or if they die, obviously, but they average about 14 years. Or if they retire, the average retirement age is 71. But they can serve super long. I know that one justice served for 35 years. Yeah. If you nominate a young judge, which is kind of more of the trend these days, when you're thinking politically, like, we want someone in there for our team. So pick a young one. Right. Then they can have tremendous sway in how things go in this country year after year after year after year. Yeah. Because the reason why they have so much sway is the stuff that they're ruling on is constitutional in nature. And here in the United States, if it's constitutional, if it's guaranteed by the Constitution, protected by the Constitution, outlawed by the constitution, whatever. However, the Supreme Court measures the law against the Constitution, like you said, that's the law of the land. From that point on, any law similar to what the Supreme Court has ruled on, it's immediately null and void, like it's done. Ed Use is a really good example. And you said, like, if Main bans anti war signs from people's front yards and the Supreme Court rules that that law is unconstitutional. Well, if Rhode Island has a similar law, california has a similar law, those laws are immediately illegal, I guess. Right, and it's not like Rhode Island is going to bring their case and then California is going to try their case. Once they rule, it's done. It's been ruled on that's right. By the SC. Yeah. And there are nine justices right now. There are eight, which we're going to get into. And obviously having an odd number means you can break a tie. So with eight, you can have a tie. And when you do have a tie, they've actually thought about this, believe it or not, they arm wrestle. I'm kidding. Of course they don't arm wrestle. But what happens is the lower court decision is what's called passively upheld, which means that for that case only, it's upheld. But it's not like the Supreme Court didn't rule on it, and it doesn't create that nationwide legal precedent forever and ever. Yeah, it's passive aggressive. And someone could, once they get that 9th person, they could bring up a similar case, not the same one, but a similar one if they want to have that precedent set. Right. And the Supreme Court can be like, let's try it again. Yeah, but yeah, for a case to be decided definitively, all you need is a simple majority, five to four. And a lot of cases these days in the United States have like five to four decisions, which is the fact that that's a pattern. And that's routine really kind of shows you how just close to the center that ideologically the bench is, and that all it would take was one or two votes that you can really rely on one way or the other. It's going to be super liberal or it'll be super conservative. Yeah. And these days, sometimes you'll get surprises on ideology, like, oh, we thought this person would vote this way or that way, but generally you've got kind of the four on the left, the four on the right, or you did before Scalia died. And I think Kennedy is sort of the swing vote. Right, yeah. Generally speaking, of course. Right. It used to be Sandra Day O'Connor. Right. But when they say, oh, we were surprised, we thought they were going to vote this way, that's putting it about as mildly as you can. Surprise. Yeah. Outrageous. I wasn't expecting that. Fiddle DD yeah, and I looked up some of the I mean, we'll get to this later, but some of the appointees throughout history have been made by a conservative. Appoints a conservative, and then they might grow a little more liberal over time or the other way around. And they're always like, they're so upset. I thought, this is what we are getting. But to me, that's how it should be. That means probably that that judge is deciding cases based on merit. Right. And not like I'm just dug in and entrenched in one ideology. Yes. Which is exactly what you want from a Supreme Court justice. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. All right. We're talking about appointments, so we'll get to that right after this. All right. How does this work? Appointing? Yeah. So remember the Constitutions when their supreme court do it? I'm done. I'm out. I'm going to take a nap. So appointments, it's all just made up, right? There's no qualifications. There's no requirements. You or I could be nominated to be on the Supreme Court. Yeah, technically, you're totally right. But president was like, I want to figure out the fastest way to ruin my political career. Right. I've got it. Josh and Chuck. That's one. That'd be a good way to do it. Because, again, here in this country, people treat Supreme Court nominations like a religion. It's a big deal. Not even to get someone through the process. Just to nominate somebody can bring so much blowback from your party, from the voters, from the opposing party, from everybody, that you really want to think it through. It's not a haphazard thing. But as far as starting the whole thing off, you have a list of qualified candidates. I think every single Supreme Court Justice in history has been a lawyer, at least. Correct. But lately, almost all of them. The only person on the Supreme Court now who isn't a judge is Elena Kagan. But the trend is most of them are federal judges who are called up to the bigs. Yeah. And a lot of them have even served as clerks on the Supreme Court. Right. So what they're looking for with all that is experience. Yes. And for the last 150 years, not only have they been attorneys, but they didn't go to the strip mall. Although was it O'Connor? Well, she didn't go to strip mall law school, but she was a strip mall lawyer, I think. Yeah, at first. But they have all graduated from an accredited legit university. Not like Dr. Nick, who graduated from the upstairs medical clinic. Is that what it was called? I think it was tijuana. Upstairs Medical Credit. A lot of these justices before their Supreme Court appointment have been involved in politics. Some of them have been governors. Some of them have been in Congress. There was even one former president, one Howard Taft. Howard Taft is actually a great story. He hated being president. Hated it. Loved being a Supreme Court justice. I could see that. He said on the bench. It groaned. Anyway, I'm home. This is great. The bench groaned. Yeah, I know that for a little while, there are people there were rumblings that Obama might be in line for a Supreme Court appointment. Wow. Had the election gone a different way yeah. Which would have been I could see that. I could, too. But obviously that's not going to happen. No, I don't see Trump appointing Obama. No. All right, so once this nomination goes through and the President, it used to be like a very I don't know about solitary, probably they're a little close circle. But now, like you said, they get a list that's called from a group of very smart people that are trying to firmly entrench their own ideologies. Sure. Basically. So they're going to choose from that list the candidate and nominate them officially, and the Senate then will hold the hearings. And just recently, we've seen this going on. This is happening right now with Gorsuch. Yeah. And the whole thing would have started with Gorsuch getting a phone call from the Prez saying, hey, I want you to want me on the Supreme Court. And Gorsuch was like, I don't know what you're saying. He's like, you're going to be on the Supreme Court. And hung up. Right. That was it. And then the name gets released to the press, and the Senate says, all right, let's get busy. Let's get to work. And this whole beehive of activity just starts kicking up around this one poor SAP who accepted the nomination and now has everyone from the Justice Department to congressional aides putting on latex gloves and going right up their rectum to try to see what they can find in this person's past. Yeah. And not only what they can find in their past, but really grilling them on maybe where he or she might lie ideologically. Like, how would you rule in this case that has happened? How would you feel about this case? Right. And I was watching a news network the other day talking about how Gorsuch did such a masterful job of dodging deflecting it yeah. About not going on record with how they lean. Right. And that's tradition. Well, yeah. Apparently the one thing that you're supposed to do up there is not give anything away. No. Because it's a big dance. Yeah. Joe Biden back in I think the 80s called it a Kabuki dance, and Elena Kagan called it a vapid and hollow charade because the senators are trying to pin you down one way or another on your views on gun control, abortion, all of these hot button issues that the Supreme Court has either ruled on, may rule on in the future, may overturn at some point. That really split the country ideologically. And the point of these Senate hearings is basically for the nominee to sit there and not give up anything, because if they did do that, then they would have to recuse themselves from that case for having gone on the public record of stating their position. Well, yeah. And it's the opposition party's job to sit there and sigh and rub their temples and say, well, it just seems like you don't want to go on record for anything. Right. And they never get to respond. Duh yeah, it's a Senate hearing for Supreme Court justice is what always happens. It's really funny that they play that up. The senators act like they just can't believe what's going on, even though this has been happening for decades now. Yeah, it's just a big I don't know about a charade, but I think part of it is to see how well they can hold up to the grilling. Too I think that's part of it as well. But the group that probably plays the biggest role in kind of rooting out what the nominee's politics are, are the aides in the Justice Department and whatever, they leak to the media. Right. Because you wouldn't find anything out about, say, like, gorsuch from those two days of hearings, right. No one found anything out about him. If that's all you know about that guy, was those two days of hearings, you didn't read anything else about it, you would have no idea what his positions were. You'd just be like, that guy's got one of the better haircuts I've ever seen in my life. That's all you would get from it. But the media tends to report on it, and they kind of fulfill the role that the Senate fails at every single time. And it'll be things like, Harriet Myers was nominated by George W. Bush and he just got immediate blowback for it was a terrible nomination. But one of the things somebody found was that she had contributed some money back in 1988, like a good 15 something years before, to Al Gore's presidential campaign. They find, like, little stuff like that, and they try to put it all together to create a picture so that the Senators can ask them about stuff or whatever, or the media can paint a picture one way or another, and everyone can try to divine how they're going to rule. Now, did Harry and Myers actually go through the Senate hearings? No. That's what will happen. A lot of times, if there is a skeleton in their closet, sometimes they won't accept the nomination, not even for that reason. Sometimes they won't accept the nomination because they're like, no, man, I know it. I don't want to go through all that. I'm fine just being on my federal circuit here. Right. But sometimes they'll withdraw if they know that they won't make it through that and they don't want that drug out in public. And sometimes the president will withdraw that nomination to avoid that kind of embarrassment. Too right. Like Clarence Thomas, I don't know how they missed that or if they did, he famously, allegedly sexually harassed Anita Hill. Right. And I don't know if that didn't come to light until the hearings, or if that's what my guess was. Really? I think they started the hearings and they were still doing investigations and they hadn't gotten to Anita Hill yet. He might be today, I don't think, in today's climate. No, that was nuts. But what's ironic about it is that he wouldn't make it in today's climate with our awareness and understanding of sexual harassment. But those hearings, his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, were what exposed the world to sexual harassment. The concept of it that we understand today, it is rooted in that moment, in those three days where Anita Hill stood up and was like, this is messed up, and I'm going to share it. And Clarence Thomas famously called the whole thing a high tech lynching. And then after all this, so he was about to be voted on. There was debate in the Senate, which we'll get to this process in a second. After this came to light, they sent it back to the committee hearings. So we took a huge step backward in the confirmation process, had to go through three days of Anita Hills testimony, and then after that, the Senate still said, all right, cool, we'll confirm you. Yes. And he was so upset, he said, I'm not going to talk for seven years. Right. I'll show you. By and large, though, the vast majority of appointee submissions what would you call them? Nominations are appointed. Right. I think it's something like there have been 161 nominations and 124 have been confirmed. Right. I think there's only been 36 rejections, and so the rest are withdrawals. Or there's one very recent one that I think is the first in history, obama's nomination of Merrick Garland that just didn't even get heard, which is very much an unusual step that was taken in the process. Yeah. I mean, this just happened. Everyone saw it happen. Obama was in his last year of his presidency, and so Republican senators basically said, not only are we not going to vote on it, we're not going to hold hearings. Some of them refuse to even talk to the guy. They just basically took their ball and went home. Right. So we're not going to do anything. Yeah. Which received a lot of blowback from people already frustrated with the notion that maybe these people work for them and they should do their jobs. And that is one of their jobs, is to at least have hearings and take a vote. And everyone dug in and he went without hearings, went without a vote. Yes. And I don't know what he's doing now. I guess he just kept his regular job. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. I don't think you lose your job and quit and move and everything, right. Go on the trail. But I think the more to the point, it's got to affect your reputation, you know what I'm saying? Like, even if it was no fault of his own, it's still like a black mark on his history, at least. Well, it was a big deal because it's kind of tough to pin down someone's political ideology as a judge. They have a few ways of doing it. There's something called the Martin Quinn score for Supreme Court justices, and they compare how they vote relative to one another. And then there's something else called the Judicial Common Space Score, which measures their ideology based on the ideology of their appointing presidents and home state senators. And then I think this from Washington Post. I read an article that they're basically trying to suss out how liberal is Garland? Right? He was super centrist, wasn't he? Well, they said in the end they looked at all those scores and then they did one more where they basically looked at the law clerks that they hired because generally you're going to hire clerks that agree with you and clerks falling over you to work for judges whom they agree with. Right. And they looked at what the clerks political donations where they were. So what's this guy's score? They said that he was center left in the end. Sure would have definitely swung the court more to the left. But at the time, it was sort of a showdown. It was like, for the Republicans are like, do we let Garland go through because he's sort of center left, or do we take a chance that Hillary wins this election and goes whole hog left to someone that's way more liberal? And in the end, they dug in. Well, everyone knows what happened. Yeah, and I read both sides of this. Obviously, the liberals and the Democrats were just going crazy over it. They're like the audacity of not doing this right, because the Republicans were saying, well, it's an election year, so we don't want to put a Supreme Court nominee on the Supreme Court for life during an election year. Right. And the Democrats said, you're crazy. There's been like eight or nine Supreme Court Justices who were confirmed on an election year. That's a terrible argument. But apparently that was when I think the government wasn't split right. The Executive and Congress were in the same party. The same party was in power for like seven or eight of those confirmations to have gone through. So both sides actually have legitimate arguments. But it definitely seemed like a dereliction of duty from the outside looking in. Well, what it did, too is it set up the Gorsuch situation now, which is Democrats are delaying the vote. And I think by the time this comes out, they will have voted. I would guess so, because usually I think McConnell said by April 2 he be confirmed, was his estimate. Yeah, well, they delayed it one more week a couple of days ago. Okay. But regardless, it's imminent if it hasn't just happened. And so they set up the situation now where Democrats are dug in and they're like, don't expect any votes from us to confirm. And then the Republicans are saying, well, if you do that, though, we just need a simple majority. We can use what's called the nuclear option, which we talked about in the filibusters episode, I think. Yeah. So the Democrats would filibuster, then they would use the nuclear option, which means they can kind of rewrite the rules and confirm with a simple majority. And then there's a fear that if that happens, that will just be the norm going forward. Yeah. That they'll use that for everything. And on the one hand, it will definitely be the Democrats fault because they use the nuclear option first. Right. But they used it for a bunch of Obama appointees back in, I think, 2013 or 15, and they said specifically, this does not apply to Supreme Court nominees right now. The pendulum is swinging the other way. The Republicans are in control. If they use the nuclear option for the Supreme Court nominees, that'll just be like, there will be nothing off limits any longer. And yeah. There will be no filibuster power in the Senate any longer. Yeah. It really underscores just how ugly things have gotten. Yeah, it's pretty ugly these days in Washington. It is. And we should say we'll take a break in a second, Chuck, but we keep talking about the Senate. The House has nothing to do with this, actually. Is that why they're pouty? Yeah, a little bit. It's strictly the President appoints, and the Senate holds committee hearings and then debate and then votes, and then the person is either confirmed or rejected. Almost exclusively confirmed. Right. And if they are rejected, they can be submitted again. But it usually doesn't make sense, too, unless something big has happened that makes the President think that they can get confirmed. Right. Which happened, I think, with Andrew Jackson. Is that right? Yeah. In the 1836. Yeah. He had a guy named Roger Keney, who I'd never heard of before, who he submitted. Guy got rejected. And then there were elections that changed the complexion of the Senate that was much friendlier to Jackson. So he did it again. He brought him in with, like, a baseball head on. Yeah. How about this guy? And George W. Bush did the same thing, too. But his guy, John Roberts, didn't get rejected. But he nominated Roberts twice in the same month for two different seats. That's right. The second time he got confirmed. So there's a lot of politicking that goes on behind this. A lot of thought goes into it, not surprisingly. And we'll talk about all that stuff right after this. So, Chuck, again, this isn't taken lightly. It is a hollow and vapid charade and a kabuki dance, and it's ridiculous in a lot of ways. But the end result is really important, and that is that you have a Supreme Court justice who's one of nine voices that create the law of the land here in the. United States and that they're on there for life. So everyone, again, takes it extremely seriously. And there's a lot of things to be considered when a president is even picking a nominee from that list that they have. Yeah. Even though we said there are no rules for qualifications, there's long history that's kind of become accepted as qualifications, which we've talked about attorney, generally, a federal court judge. So once that is kind of sussed out, we talked about ideology a lot. And you're not going to find, as Ed points out, the perfect fit where someone agrees with everything that you agree with as president. But what you want is someone who, by and large, will side with your side. Good fella. Sure, he's like us, but again, it's not going to be a perfect fit. Yeah. But you also want someone who probably has a good chance of getting confirmed. That's a big point. Right. So there's a lot of factors that go into that selection. Right. So obviously, if you are a conservative president, especially like a deeply socially conservative president, you're going to try to find somebody who's a pretty socially conservative ideologue. Right. Yeah. And that'll be your pick. But you may want to stop yourself and think about this first. Let's think about this. Who's in control of the Senate? That's a big one. Sure. If it's the opposition party, well, then you may want to consider somebody who's maybe a little closer to the center because your person might get rejected. And if you're just an outside observer saying, well, who cares? They'll get rejected. Pick somebody else. You said you have a list. Go to the next person. Right, right. There's a lot of political ramifications for this. Right. So if you are a president and you're picking a pretty radical nominee, it can make you look bad, especially if you're not that popular of a president. Yeah. And it can also have a lot of bearing on midterm elections and how the public views the direction the country is going as a whole. Yeah. Because if the Senate goes along with your radical person and the public's not down with that person, that's going to be a negation on the ballot. You're not going to look good at all because of the Supreme Court nominee pick. Yeah. Whoever just left, whether it was a retiree or in the case of Scalia, someone who just died suddenly, the outgoing justice is going to play a large part in, again, depending on what party's in office, what party holds the Senate. Right. Because who gets the replacement? Can you get somebody pushed through? And if you can't, it's not going to look very good on you as the president. Yeah. And basically, with Gorsuch, I looked him up as far as where he might sit or is predicted to sit. He's pretty, right? From what I saw, obviously he's pretty. Right. But they said that right now, at least, this is from all the studying done, from those different methodologies that I talked about earlier, they said he would sit second to the right, next to Thomas. The silence Clarence Thomas. Right. Apparently, it's the furthest right at this point. Yeah. And then it goes all the way through down to Sonia Sotomayor, who's the furthest to the left. Got you. And then Mr. Kennedy in the middle. Man, what a powerful dude he is. Yeah. Really? To be the same boat. He gets gift baskets all the time. He buys muffin baskets. Yeah, he has muffins every morning. And, you know, depending on and people forecast this way in advance, it's not just Supreme Court justices. It's appointing judges all throughout the system. In the United States, republicans have had a tactic for years now that's really paid off for them, where they have really worked hard to appoint as many conservative leaning judges throughout the system and staunchly tried to oppose any liberal appointments. And you get those lower courts. I mean, people don't pay a lot of attention a lot of times to these lower court appointments, and it's made a big difference. Yeah. Over time. Sure. If you've got that many more bullets in the chamber. Just as far as, like, conservative rulings. Yeah. Just all over the country, if you have more of your people in place in lower courts, they're going to be more clerks that work for them, that are conservative, and then eventually they rise up, and you're probably going to have a better chance of getting a Supreme Court nominee appointed who's conservative. It's an incubator. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. Farm system. Sure. They probably love that terminology. Yeah. But you were saying Sotomayor is farthest to the left and Thomas is farthest to the right right now, is what they say. Yeah. And I think you were saying earlier, too, that depending on who's being replaced, that makes a decision on who's picked as well. True. Right. Yeah. Because if you're replacing a far right seat with a far left nominee, you're going to get some serious pushback from the right or vice versa. Yeah. And that's why this election that we just went through is so important, because there are some aging members of the Supreme Court. And if you get to a point like, Nixon got to appoint four Supreme Court justices yeah. And they turned on him like a pack of jackals. Yeah. Three of them did. I'm sure that's what Nixon thought. Yes. And this is kind of a pretty good demonstration of how Supreme Court nominees, they're appointed, or they're nominated by presidents, but they are in no way meant to be beholden to presidents. They should not be. They're not doing their job if they're ruling in line with what they think the President wants to hear. Yeah. And I guess that goes back to why they're in there for life. They still have their Ideologies, but they probably do feel like, all right, I'm in here. They can't take me out, right? There's probably some mechanism to take them out. If they do, there is something really bad. It's impeachment. It's the exact same process that you would get rid of a president with, where the House impeaches the person, and then the Senate votes to convict or not, and then they're removed it's only been threatened twice. One of them was an accident. Really interesting. But I was looking like I said at Garland, and I kind of got started digging into history. And in the modern era, antonin Scalia is rated as the number one most conservative justice in the modern era. Is that right? That's what it said. Because I have Thomas further right than him and that Gorsuch would be even further right than Scalia. I didn't create that. That's a WaPo created. Well, I didn't create this either. We have conflicting sources. Well, this was Stanford University and University of Chicago, northwestern and Harvard. All right, I'll defer to yours. Yeah, but it was based on it just depends on what they use. Let's just say they're both super conservative. Okay. But I mean, one of the things they looked at and they like to look at his campaign contributions either by, like I said, clerks or by them, and they said based on Gorsuch's campaign contributions, they said that he would be more conservative than 87% of all other federal judges. Yeah, that's pretty conservative. RenQuest was supposedly number two. They don't have Thomas. They have Thomas at number seven on my list. Wow. I don't know about that. They have him in the furthest right now, at least in the sitting justices. Well, and then there's people like I said, over time, that might change a bit. John Paul Stevens was the guy that was in there for 35 years, and apparently he became more liberal over time. And then Burton was very conservative, but he ruled against segregation. It's like you kind of never know. David Sauter became he was a Bush appointee, and I think he was one of those that conservatives were really mad at. They were like, you're not nearly as conservative as we thought, souter they would have never picked you. Yeah, I mean, you just can never tell. You can't tell. And the whole point is that makes a good justice. That's what you want. You don't want to be able to look at them and be like, oh, this is how they're going to vote, and be right every time. You want to be surprised, because if you can just point to a Supreme Court justice and say, this is how they're going to vote, they're doing a terrible job. They're voting ideologically, not on the merits of the case. Yeah, it sounds funny to say that you want a Supreme Court justice. Like, you never know what they're going to do. Unpredictable. Clarence Thomas, he didn't speak for seven years. Who knew? I did. Not see that coming. Sandra Day O'Connor, she wrote a penny farthing to work every day. You didn't know that Judge Rehnquist had a huge heroin problem. You got anything else? Yeah, one of the things that Harriet Myers was criticized for, harriet Myers nomination by George W. Bush was that somebody had dug up that she had called George W. Bush cool at one point. Oh, really? And that was used against her. Well, they were worried that she would be beholden to him or beholden to him because he was so cool. Cool. Interesting. Actually, we didn't cover this. I think it's pretty interesting. Arthur Goldberg appointment of John F. Kennedy. He was Jewish, and he took his oath on the Hebrew Bible and on the traditional official court Bible, which is a Christian Bible. And he signed that because everyone has signed it. And he said, I'm not going to make a big deal out of this. Even though I'm Jewish, I'll sign the Christian Bible just to kind of maintain that continuity. Right. But he said it was really neat when he was sitting at his bench for the first time, he opened up the drawer and there was a copy of the Constitution. He said it was a dog eared copy of the Constitution that actually belongs. And it was signed by who? Oliver Wendell Holmes. Pretty neat. Yeah, it was just in that drawer. Right. He calls them that old Yankee from Olympus. No idea what that means, but it meant something to Goldberg, I'll tell you that. He said he was looking for, like, a notepad. Yeah, there it was. Yeah, he thought that was pretty awesome. Well, I do, too. It is pretty awesome. And if you think Supreme Court nominations are awesome, you should go look them up. There's plenty of stuff out there. It's pretty fun to watch. If you go back through old articles, every nomination cycle or whatever pattern it follows has people griping about how you can't tell anything about this nominee and they never say, well, it's like that for all nominees anyway. Take a trip down memory lane. You'll amuse yourself. You can also type in the word Supreme Court in the search bar. How stuff works. And since I said Supreme Court, it's time for listening. I'm going to call this Georgia connection to Trail of Tears. Hey, guys. I enjoyed the episodes on Trail of Tears, which I literally just finished. I live in Calhoun, Georgia, which is home to the new X, and I think that's right historic site. It is home to the print shop where the first English language Cherokee newspaper was printed, the home of Samuel worstA, among other things. It's a beautiful and fascinating place. I think all North Georgia kids have gone on a field trip there at least once. There are also road signs that drive past every time I drive to and from my mother's house, indicating that I am actually driving where the Cherokee marched from their homes very sobering. The home of Chief Van is also nearby. I didn't know that. I'm going to go see that stuff. Yeah, because it's not too far. I enjoy your history episodes because the way you explain history in layman's terms and make it interesting to someone like me who couldn't quite stay awake in history class in school. I believe learning about history is important to help prevent society from repeating big, shameful, costly mistakes. Thanks for the work you do and all the stuff we should know. Have a blessed day. That is from Tiffany Waits. Tiffany, if you don't listen to stuff you missed in history class from our colleagues Tracy and Holly, you should check that out too. For sure. It's great. Sounds like it'd be right up her alley. Who was it? Tiffany Waits. Thanks a lot, Tiffany. We appreciate you writing in. And if you want to be like her and get in touch with us to tell us some cool stuff, you can tweet to us at s yskpodcast or Joshmclark. You can hang out with us on Facebook.com, Charleswchuck Bryant or Stuff you should Know, you can send us an email to stuffpodcastofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, 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 Kilgarue and Georgia Art Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. 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d2ef9a38-6a19-11ea-bcf3-a75b31633aed | SYSK Distraction Playlist: How Pinball Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-distraction-playlist-how-pinball-works | Pinball was actually illegal until the 1970s in NY and other cities, hidden in the backs of pornography shops. The game was finally legalized, thanks to a Babe Ruth-style shot by the best player in the world. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck. | Pinball was actually illegal until the 1970s in NY and other cities, hidden in the backs of pornography shops. The game was finally legalized, thanks to a Babe Ruth-style shot by the best player in the world. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck. | Fri, 20 Mar 2020 10:45:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=10, tm_min=45, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=80, tm_isdst=0) | 42820513 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. This is stuff you should know. The podcast. What was that? Pinball. The news desk. Oh, yeah. I thought you were making pinball pings and bells and whistles. No. Sounds like Vegas. Vegas is like one big pinball machine. It is now that you walk through those casinos. Yeah. You just made my neck muscles tight. Oh, man, I hate Vegas. I like Vegas. I don't want to live in Vegas or go to Vegas every weekend or anything like that, but going to Vegas once a year, once every couple of years, that's fine with me. Yeah, not for me. I mean, I've been a bunch and I'm done. Oh, you're done with Vegas? That's what you're saying? I don't see any reason to go back. I guarantee somebody you want to see will have some sort of residency out there and you will be back in Vegas when I'm like 60. Sure, yeah. Like Pavement will have a residency in Valleys. That's exactly, I think, what's going to happen. Well, then you'll find me living in Vegas, my friend. There you go. Yeah, I got you back on the Vegas train. But that sound. Yeah, it's like a million pinball machines that take your money faster than pinball machines. Yeah, and that was an early worry about pinball, actually, as we will soon see. Because I say, Chuck, let's dive right into the history of pinballs. Yeah. So pinball machines actually find their lineage. Back in the 19th century, there were things called I want to say baguette machines, but that's not correct. The bagatel table. Yes, the bagatelle table. Thank you. They were basically across between pool and pinball and used a pool cue and everything, and they sucked and nobody liked them. I think it looks pretty cool. Does it look old timing and boring to me? Well, if you're used to modern gaming table is not going to thrill you. But I thought it looked kind of neat. So the bagatel table was there, it was in place. In the 1830s, a guy named Monte Redgrove came along like you can't not say that guy's name like that. No, he came along and said, you know what? People just invented a spring. How'd you say his name again? Montague Redgreen. Like he's on Ladan. Yeah. And he came along and said somebody invented a spring recently. I'm going to add it to this bagatelle table, make it less sucky. And then all of a sudden we have the what did he call it? The ball shooter. Which makes sense. Sure. That's what you'd call it. And now we had the first introduced mechanism of pinballs. Things are starting to take shape a little bit here. Yeah. But you didn't stick a coin in the game. What you would do is kind of like pool tables these days at a bar. You would go up to the keeper of the balls and say, here's some money, give me my balls and let me go play the game on the bagatail table. Yeah. And then he would go, you know it sucks, don't you? And you would say, yes, but it's the 1830. Yeah. And if I play really well, then I can win free drinks and cigarettes. I know. And they said exactly. Can you see little twelve year olds winning cigarettes and then going back to play? More baggagel. Sure. So this is the way it went for many decades. People were miserable until the 1930s. And there was this enormous explosion of innovation and pool table read in the 30s. Almost everything that you think of when you think of a pool. I've been saying pool table just for the last minute. Why didn't you correct me? I thought you were talking about pool table. No, I'm talking about Pinball. Anyway, in the 30s there was a huge explosion in pinballery. Pinballery? Yeah. And everything that you think of when you think of a pinball machine, almost all of it came about in the coin operation. Sure. The back glass, the thing that has like Kiss or Hugh Hefner on it or something like that, stands up off of the playing field. The table electric. Well, I guess an electric current running through it legs. Sure. The tilt mechanism. Bumpers sounds scorekeeping. And then bumpers. Of course. I think I said bumpers, that I not I don't know, maybe. But bumpers. And then most of all, most importantly, Chuck, was the 30s led to a huge surge in popularity because you had the Great Depression and pinballs were cheap entertainment that were widely available. You noticed one thing we didn't say though, and all that innovation. What? Flippers. Because still, up until 1947, you just bumped the thing to make the ball move. Yeah. There were no flippers, which seems very counterintuitive to pinball. And the flippers really changed things. They fundamentally changed pinball. Heck yeah. Not just in the way you play, but in pinball as a game, because before flippers, it was a game of chance. It was the same thing as playing, like, high low, basically. Yeah. Like, you had no way, really, of manipulating the movement of the ball, like shake the machine. You could without tilting. I mean, that's what you did. That was how you did it. Even still, the amount of skill it took was minute compared to the skill that could be used once flippers were introduced. Pinball wizardry. And it became a game of skill. Yeah, but before that, like I said, things were popular. Get this, in the early 30s, there were 145 companies making pinball machines. And the field became so competitive and ruthless that by the mid thirty s like five years later, there were 14. Yeah. And most of those were based in Chicago, which became sort of the pinball capital of the world. And I've never been there, but I bet you anything chicago still has a lot more pinball machines than elsewhere. I was trying to think of researching this made me want to go play pinball. Like researching sushi. Maybe we want to go eat sushi. And I was thinking, like, I have no idea where to go to play pinball. We'll go to my brother's house. Does he have one? He's got three. Oh, I love your brother even more now. Dude. He built a whole game room. Of course, because that's what my brother does. What does he have? He has a Tomcat F 14, which is the ripoff of Top Gun. I've seen that one. He said there's a lot of ripoff games for a while, of movies and actual movie. Titan games. Yeah, he has Black Hole, but not the movie. Just another ripoff game. Okay. I would love that one, too. And those are both kind of old school. And then he has Jurassic Park, which is newer, I think. Doesn't it have like, a trex that comes down, like, each your ball? I can't remember. I feel like all three of them, but yeah, and he also kicked this. He took an old video game, like, stand up video game console and removed all the guts. Got a computer screen computer, and hooked it up in there to where you can play all the old school games, those programs they have now. And change the screen vertically so it just looks like a regular arcade game. And you can go up and play Frogger and Space Invaders. Oh, man. Scott, invite me over, please. And it's all free. That's so awesome, man. He's like Ricky Schroeder and Silver Spoons or something. But growing up. Yeah, pretty much. And I think the reason why I don't play more pinball over there is because we're always playing ping pong. Yeah, that's a game of skill. And I love ping pong, but I'll try and get into pinball game. I want to play some pinball so bad. Let's just go out to roswell, dude. Okay, do it right now. And if I collected pivot machines, it would definitely be mid seventy s to mid eighty s. For me, I would think the heyday, yeah, all the bells and whistles and all that. The newfangled bells and whistles, they're fine. That's cool. But I like, not so old that it's like electromechanical, but not so new that it's like nothing but like plasma screens and stuff like that. Well, mine in the middle. Sure. I'm same way. My favorite game of all time, Pinball Wise favorite game ever, galaga. But favorite game pinball Wise was Adams Family. Pinball and then I learned in this article that is the top selling game of all time from 1991. Yeah, I think it was either Bally or Williams put that one out and they sold more than 20,000 units of it. Dude, it's awesome. And it didn't surprise me. I have no affinity for the Adams Family, but it's the best pinball game I've ever played. And when I saw it was number one, I was like, well, of course it is, because it's the best one. You don't like the Adams family? No, I mean, I like it fine, but I didn't play it because of the movie. I played it because it was an awesome pinball game. I got you. And they had one at the mall. Not the mall, the bowling alley near me in Athens. Bowling alley. That's where I could probably go find a pinball machine. Yeah, maybe I could. Or maybe not. Sadly, I'm starting a quest. All right, so tell me it looks good at my brother's house because we can have a scotch. Okay. So anyway, 1947 is when they finally invented the flipper. Dee gotleb company, introduced a game called Humpty Dumpty, and that was where what most people say the first modern game came about. Right. It took the level flippers, all the innovations of the added flippers, and boom, you got pinball. Not pool table pinball. Pretty much. Although the flippers weren't the same. It was in the 1950s. The same person came up with spot bowler, and that was the first modern arrangement of flippers. Right. And they were longer with that introduction, or else a little later on the first flippers they introduced, they were shorter. Yeah. And they didn't face that. They faced in reverse of the way they face now, which is weird. Yeah. They were working it out. Yeah. Beta, pretty much. So it's funny that they introduced flippers in 1947 because 1947, by the time flippers came around, pinball was illegal in most of the major cities in the United States, and have been for several years. I think I had heard this once and forgotten it, but pinball was totally outlawed because they equated it to gambling, because it was not a game of skill. And I guess because you got prizes. Yeah. Mayor LaGuardia, who you remember from the Burlesque podcast, was a bit of a moralist, although he was a wet politician. He was in favor of repealing prohibition. He hated pinball. Hated it. He thought it was a Mafia racket. He thought that it robbed the, quote, pockets of schoolchildren in the forms of nickels and dimes given to them as lunch money. And he got it outlawed in New York. And once it was outlawed, he ordered, like, really dramatic raids. Yeah. Right after Pearl Harbor, he said, you know what we need to do? The Japanese have just bombed us. We need to get rid of these pinball machines. Yeah. And so let's go round them up, like in a raid style. Let's smash them with sledgehammers. Let's dump them in the river. Here's what they did. They dumped them in the river after they smashed them. That's a very New York 1940s thing to do. Exactly. I bet you there's still pinball machines down there. If anyone is brave enough to get into the East River. I don't think they are. No. We should say, also give a shout out to Popular Mechanics, who were working off, in part, a really awesome article. They came up with eleven things you didn't know about pinball history. Yeah. So from the 40s until the mid 1970s, if you wanted to play pinball in New York City and Chicago and La. Most cities in the US, it was illegal. You had to go to a pornography shop, basically, and go behind a curtain and play pimple. Is that that weird? It's the weirdest thing that we've ever said on this show until the mid 1970s. And, like, there were still raids and pinball operators in the jail. Like, me, dude, little five year old Chuck. Yeah. I would have been dropped off at a porn shop to play pinball. Which I'm sure your parents would have been happy to do. Well, they did. And I played pinball. I didn't look at nudity people. Did you really know I was going to say, man, you just blew my mind. No. And get this, the city of Oakland, oakland, California Oaktown, just this past July, overturned an 80 year ban on pinball. Free the pinballers. Yeah, that's it for them. Pinball's ban. People are still playing it like crazy. And apparently the manufacturers realize this as well, because they're still innovating and adding and making new games and machines and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Well, this is after World War II, though, where things really slowed down, obviously, because of the war effort. Big dent was put in pinball manufacturing, too. Yeah, like everything else. And then after the 50s, it took off again and it also became kind of a symbol of rebellious youth in this Popular Mechanics article points out, like, the Fonz played a lot of pinball. I never considered that from the who's? Tommy the Pinball Wizard and Tommy both kind of rebellious, like stick it in your ear, LaGuardia. Yeah. It seems silly now to think about that, but when Tommy came out, it was illegal. So pinball was sort of yeah, I guess it was just the rebels. Yes. You're anti authoritarian if you played pinball. It was just an image of it. Yeah. And then the great Simpsons quote sideshow Bob said, television has ruined more young minds than pinball and Syphilis combined. Right. That one flew right over my head when I heard it the first time. I just thought, oh, that's silly. Pinball. Right. But I didn't think about, like, moral turpitude. Yeah, I didn't get that one either, but I do now. So, luckily, pinball was still widely available, albeit in the backs of pornography shops. And the reason we say luckily is because somewhere along the way, a young man, I think in his early 20s named Roger Sharp, who is a magazine editor, was called upon to save the pinball world at a New York City Council meeting. Yes. They finally said, hey, City Council, can we get a hearing on pinball machines? You guys are being ridiculous. Because it's a bicentennial of this country and we need pinball. It's as American as America gets as pornography. So they said, sure, we'll have a hearing, because their intent was to prove that it was a game of skill and not chance, which was the whole rub in the first place. Yes. They brought in their pinball wizard game of chance is gambling. Sure LaGuardia had a point. Well, sort of. I still don't get it. But this law is obsolete because they added flippers, and now it's a game of skill. But the law was still around. Yeah, basically. So they brought in their pinball wizard, Sharp, and they brought two machines, because if one broke down, they wanted to have a backup. And some jerk councilman, when he went to play the game, said, no, why don't you play the other game? The backup was yeah, the backup game. And Sharp started sweating because he was like, I'm not very good at that game. I've never played it before. Yeah, I'm a master at this one. But he was a pinball wizard, so I believed in him. Yes. I didn't know what happened. Did you see the documentary special When Lit? No. Oh, my God. It has footage of this. It's amazing. An amazing documentary. All about pinball. I mean, all about pinball is not so awesome documentary. I think it's one called Tilt as well. There is that's about a specific moment in history in pinball. I haven't seen that one, but it sounds pretty good, too. Yeah, but c special when lit. Amazing. Got you. NC tilt, too. What's the deal? So Roger Sharp is playing. He's not really impressing anybody, and things are kind of going bad, and he decides to do a bay booth call. He pulls back the plunger, and before he releases it, he goes, I'm going up the middle aisle here. Yeah. And just so you know, if you've never seen a pinball game, you pull the plunger, it shoots the ball up the right hand side through a trough, and then it spits it out at the top. And what he was trying to prove is where I'm going to spit it out and where it's going to start. Its descent back to me is going to be in a very specific place in the center of the board. Not on the left, not on the right. Right up the middle. Yeah. And he did it. And apparently right afterward, the city council was like, okay, we'll repeal it. It's obviously a game of skill. Roger Sharp single handedly. Well, double handedly, because he was using the flippers save pinball from illegality. I wonder if they said, yeah, fine. Good Lord, it's legal. Get this machine out of here. Get this loser out of here. But he is not a loser, because he is currently still the number 536 ranked player in the world. I'm surprised. I thought he went on to be I think at the time he was number one, which is why they chose him. He probably was, but he's been falling ever since. Man. That's another thing in special when lit, there are some really good pinball players. Well, I've got the list. I'll quickly go with the top five. Number one in the world as of today, 2014, August, whatever it is. Keith Elwin of the USA is number one. USA. Yorin ingle Brickston of Sweden is number two. Sweden. Zach Sharp. Recognize that name? That sounds vaguely familiar. Roger sun. Yeah. He's the number three player in the world. That's awesome. Number four. Danielle Celestino Aksiari. What was that? He's Italian. He's number four. Jorgen home is also Swedish. He's number five. There's a Canadian at six, a sweet at seven, and eight through 20, save one are All Americans. Wow. And number 20 is Josh Sharp. So his sons followed in his footsteps. That's great. And are both top 20 ranked players. That's good. And I bet Josh is super jealous. Zach, maybe Josh is also he's like, I want to be a veterinarian, so I'm paying more attention to that kind of thing. Maybe. So Pinball was saved by Roger Sharp. Hooray. And pinball just kept going on and on. Apparently, it had its golden day age, it's widely believed, between 1948 and 1958. But it was also huge in the 70s, huge in the then video games came along and all of a sudden pinball was like, oh. And it started to decline and decline and decline. I think we were down to maybe five major pinball machine producers. And by major, I mean the only ones minor pinball games. No, because it takes a lot of time and effort to manufacture a functioning pinball game. By the 90s, there were just a couple left. Everybody was selling off their pinball divisions. And there was a company called Bally Williams, which were former competitors that had merged. And this is what the documentary Tilt is about. They went to their pinball division and said, hey, you guys are great in the Pinball world, but the pinball world sucks. We want more money out of you guys. What are you going to do? Is that Pinball 2000? Yes, they came up with Pinball 2000. They said, we will give you a chance to save yourselves, figure out what will revive Pinball for the 21st century. And they came up with Pinball 2000? Yeah. It's basically a hybrid of video gaming and Pinball, where you have kind of a standard Pinball set up, but a video screen that's interactive as the backdrop. No, on the playing field, too. So, like holograms pop up on the playing board and run away from the ball and interact with the ball. Yeah. It stinks, though. And no one liked it. Have you played it? I haven't played it, but I saw videos of it and it didn't look like fun and no one liked it. So the thing is, this one article I read pointed out, like, it wasn't given a chance to flourish. Like the idea was great and the fact that they pull it off successfully was really something. Well, they built only two games, right? I think each one had a few thousand production run, but there was Star Wars Episode One, which here's my theory, the reason Pinball 2000 went nowhere. Charge our binks. Yeah. The other one was revenge from Mars. And you can still find those used today. But despite the fact that Pinball 2000 was created, it was okay as far as successes go. Bally Williams pulled the plug, which left one company, Stern. There's a guy named Michael Stern, I believe, who inherited his father's business and became the only people making pinball machines in the world. Still no. Is there a new one now? Yeah, man. Good. Have we been recording this? Two years ago, we would have basically been saying, like, Pinball is dead. It's on its last leg. There's one company making it. They've started to lay off their designers because of the economic crisis. A year now, some of those designers went on, some of those Stern vets went on and founded a company called Jersey Jack. And for the first time in many years, there are more than one pinball manufacturer. There's two. Right. But the competition has caused Stern to go back and rehire. Some of the people they laid off come up with new designs. Oh, yeah. And there's a pinball renaissance, a nascent pinball renaissance, just beginning to bud. That could happen. Well, pinball is definitely sort of an end thing now. If you're super cool and you have some money, then you might have a pinball machine in your house. Like my brother. Right. Apparently, Stern's ratio of home sales to commercial sales has risen from 35% to 60% of their total sales. So the market now isn't for arcades because what are those? The market is for the person who has enough money to buy a pinball machine. I don't want a new one. Yeah, if you want a new one, it's going to cost you. But if you want, like, a vintage one, it's $1,500. Still, that's a decent amount of money. But the Adams family runs less than $5,000. That's the one that you need in the house. Yeah. So I think my brother actually refurbished this. I think I'm right. I think they weren't even working, and he was able to fix them. Very neat. Yeah, I imagine you can get them for way less, because these are, like, fully refurbished, like, polished, ready to go ones. And a lot of them are starting to come from overseas because the demand in vintage collectors items are rising so much. Like 70% of them come from overseas. They're reimporting them back to America. Well, and it's big in Europe, because as evidence from that top ten, two or three of them are European. Sweet. Look at them. So we'll get into how Pinball actually works right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? 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Identity thieves have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, so we've talked a lot about the history of Pinball, which is way more interesting than I thought it would be, but we haven't talked about the game because I assume everybody has played Pinball, but if you haven't, we're going to break it down. Yeah, and actually, it's pretty simple if you really think about it. There are two real components to the game now. Ever since flippers in the ball. Yeah. Everything else is just kind of ornamentation or whatever. But to play Pinball, you need flippers and a ball, because the point of Pinball is to score points using the ball, bouncing off of obstacles and all that stuff. And then to prevent the ball from going down the drain using the flippers. That's right. There you go. Flippers and a ball. That's right. You've got your flippers, typically at the bottom of the playfield, which is what it's called, directly above the drain on both sides. A lot of games you'll see now have other flippers on the upper right and upper left that also do fun things like flip the ball. But a lot of times the ones at the top will flip it into the very special chamber where you can score tons of points. Yeah, we'll get to the scoring here in a minute and you basically want to propel the ball up with your little plunger and then all the bumpers and ramps are there to score your points. And it makes a lot of noise, it's a lot of fun. And that's pinball. Yeah. I mean, that's it for me. This article on how stuff works pointed out, like when you're talking about scoring, which we'll talk about later, doesn't mean anything to people who are playing pinball, most of us, because I'm just trying to keep the ball from going down the drain. Sure. But the way that pinballs arranged, as you get better and better at it, you'll learn that there are all sorts of combinations and tricks and stuff that you can do to really score some points. We'll get to that later on. I get ahead of myself. That's right. The ball itself, if you want to just talk hardware, it's one in 116 inches in diameter, it's steel, and it weighs about 2.8oz and can reach speeds up to 90 miles an hour. When you see that thing shoot out of one of the little chambers, that will come back at you. It's going really fast. Yeah, it is. And that is sometimes it will use magnets underneath the table, too, because since it's a steel ball, you'll sometimes see a gain that has a spinning disk, like a vortex in the center of the table that will start at any given moment. And it can catch your ball and keep your ball there with its magnet just sort of spinning in place, which is no good. Or it could be super good, depending on what you're after. Sometimes, though, they do use a ceramic pinball called the Power Ball, and it is lighter and faster and immune to magnets. So a lot of times when you have multiple ball going on, some of those other balls are ceramic, and that's when things get crazy. So as the ball is going around the table, it's hitting the bumpers, it's hitting the targets, and they're sending messages. Well, if it's post 76 game to the motherboard that's keeping track of your score and all that jazz yeah. And you've only got the three balls. That's a game. Yes, but there are circumstances where you can. Get more, which we'll tell later. So, Chuck, there's also another component. You don't have to have to play pinball, but all pinball games have it now. It's called the black box. And if you look at a pinball table, you've got the field, right? Yeah. The play field, which is the board that has all of the bumpers and the stuff and the flippers and everything on it. And then at a right angle to that coming off of it, you've got what's called the back glass. And connecting the two is called the black box. And this is where all of your electronics and your Solid State stuff goes. Yeah. Your back glass is not only going to have your scoreboard and your information, like, they'll say things like aim for the canyon. They'll give you hints and little tricks along the way. Look out for the T Rex. But it's also to the backlash is where, like, if you're walking through your arcade and it's 1983, that's where you're going to see that's where your attention is going to go. So that's where you see the Playboy models on both sides of Hugh Hefner or Kiss. Looking cool. Yeah. So it's sort of an advertisement, hey, come put your quarters into me. Right. It's shiny, it's colorful. They spend money designing those things, and a lot of those have become art. Now they'll remove them and frame them and hang them on the wall. Which would be wicked cool, I think it would be, but I'd rather have the actual pinball game. Yeah, sure. So, like I said, back in the 70s, they introduced Solid State electronics. Prior to that, all Pimmo machines were electromechanical. And at first when I was researching this, I thought like, well, okay, so Solid State took over everything. That's not the case. Solid State took over basically the back class. Everything else is still electromechanical, or it was up until the very recent times. Although they still might be electromechanical. So when you hit a bumper with your ball and it makes it like bounce and vibrate and you get some points, that's because you set an electrical impulse using an electro mechanical assembly to the motherboard, the Solid State motherboard, that's keeping score. So the motherboard is now keeping score. Now they can use digital sound, so they could add speakers to the back glass and other stuff. But the actual function of the pinball machine while you're playing is still electromechanical. Yeah, that's old school. And there's about a half a mile of wiring in each one. And if you come over to my brothers, he will show you the guts. That's me. He has his rigged where you can pull down the back glass, click under the hood yeah, basically. And just looks like a huge mess of wires. Half a mile of wires. That's a lot. It's pretty crazy. Does he wear, like, a chain wallet when he works on his pinot machine? I don't know. Maybe the playfield itself, which is what everything is on, is tilted at about six to seven deg toward you, and it is made of wood and it's also very old school. At some point, someone makes this a wood base, like cornhole, and it's got holes drilled in it and it's got stuff painted on it and a bunch of layers of finish to keep it, to protect it and to make that ball go. Yeah, but I mean, that's basically it. It's pretty simple. Yeah. Some of the very newer ones, I guess, from the 21st century, replaced the wood playing field with plasma screens. Really? Or LCD screens. Yeah, but kids today, no thanks. But other than that, it's like screws and glue and wood. It's fairly old school and still entertaining. Pinball is challenging. That's why you hate Pinball 2000, huh? It was newfangled. Yeah, totally. Like, hey, let's take something awesome and make it new for everybody. I hate that. It's like taking some classic drink, like you're a cocktail guy. Yeah. Let's add some new oxygenated. Something to the Manhattan you're like. No, Manhattan is perfect. I don't know. Oxygen. Some things are perfect the way they are, and I think pinball is one of them. So, Chuck, you approach the pinball machine, you put your quarters in and everything, and you press the Start button or well, once you press the Start button, the ball should fall into the launch lane, which is at the back of the launch lane is the plunger. Yes. In some of the newer games, there's a solenoid which shoots it for you. Yeah, I've seen other things, like a gun handle, trigger and stuff, instead of the plunger. Very clever. But again, I'm into the only plunger. Sure. One way or another, you're going to launch the ball. The advantage of a solenoid that launches it for you with the press of a button is that if you are playing a game and you're pretty good, and the pinball machine decides it wants to see what kind of a wizard you are, sure it will send more balls into action. The way it does that these days is by using a solenoid. In olden days, before the solenoid, say, the 80s, there's a little man inside. Well, you had to pull the plunger back yourself and that meant you had to take your finger off of a flipper button, which meant, hey, man, you better be quick. I kind of forgot about that or you're dead. Yeah, that's why solenoids, that's the advantage they have. Yeah, I'll take that advancement that passes my bar. Okay, the solenoid is good. So let's talk about actual pinball play after this message. Chuck, what if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. 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Okay, scoring and pinball. Like you said earlier, if you're a regular schmo like us, we're just trying to keep that ball on the table. But if you are a pinball wizard, then that means you know the game within the game and all the combination shots that you're specifically trying to hit in order to rack up the big, big points. This is nuts to me, I have to tell you. I didn't even know that this existed until yeah, I knew, like, that's how poor my pinball playing is. No, I'm not any good either. Is your brother good? So you've seen him? Yeah, he's better than me. So they use this in this article. They use the example of a game called high roller pinball. Yeah. And basically, imagine this. While you're playing high roller, you basically want to knock out some icons that are associated with poker. Once you've hit all the icons with the ball or something like that, so there are tiles that you knock down or whatever. Once you've hit them all, you've unlocked a game within a game, and I think it starts with poker. And all of a sudden, you're playing pinball while you're also playing poker on the back glass. Yeah. So, like, you're trying to hit a specific thing that will give you a specific card in a poker hand, let's say, right? And you're trying to do this with your flipper. It's a game of skill, like we said. Right. But at the same time, you're still playing your pinball game, too, right? Well, I mean, it's part of the game. You'll know, you've got the cards up on the back glass say, all right, I got to hit that bumper to get a king. Got you. So I'm aiming for that king the whole time. Okay, so if your brain hasn't melted yet, prepare for the finish. Once poker is done, there's like four or five other casino games that you play after that, and you play them in succession, and as you win them, you get closer and closer to this special play mode called Casino Frenzy. That's what it's called in the high roller machine. Yeah. That's after you've won all the game, the poker games, right? Yeah. But yeah, all the games, yeah. And so you're playing Casino Frenzy, and that's what's called a wizard Award, where it's like, okay, this kid is good. Now we're going to really let him or her up their points by playing a special round. And all of a sudden, the field is like, flooded with balls, and every bumper you hit is worth, like, hundreds of thousands of points. And it's just scary and terrifying. Yeah. Multi ball is stressful for a guy like me. Same here, man. I just try and keep what happens to me in multiball is I usually lose them all pretty quickly. I can't even hold onto the one because it stimulates me too much. I'm like, what happened? Me too. And I'm like, as long as I've got one, I break even. But with wizard award functions, that's when you start to earn even more points. But imagine having like three, four, five balls on the field, and the computer in the machine is telling you, like, hit this combination and we'll give you like, 20 million points. Yeah. And if you're even in Wizard Award ball, you're a pretty good pinball player, I would imagine. For sure. And that's just the high roller game, but most games have a couple of games within the game that you should look out for, and that's how you get your free game. If you've ever locked up or been super good and they'll tell you on the back glass how much you have to have, like, replay value, 30 million. And that's what you're shooting for because you want to get that free game, not just because it's a quarter or whatever. Right. But because it's like a big award. It's like entering your name in the top ten in Gallagher, right? Yeah. So I didn't understand this. When you get a free game, is that like three free balls or one extra ball? I think it's three. I think it's a full free game. That would make sense. That's why they can and it keeps telling it doesn't, like, reset. Right? Yeah. You can also fall backwards into a free game with something called match. Yeah. I had never heard of this. Every once in a while, the computer will just flash like a random number between 90, I think. Yeah. Multiple of ten. And if the last two digits of your score at that moment happened to match that number, then you win a free game. It's like a little auto game. Yeah. And I think I've gotten a free game that way because I remember getting free games before, but being like, how did I get a free game? I must have hit the match. You like, Just turn into Christopher walking in the dead zone. I saw that not too long ago. That holds up. Yeah, it does. But as far as replay goes, it says that most machines are set, so you have to be in the top 10% to get a replay, and you can get a second replay, but they have it maxed out at 150% of the first. So a double replay is tough. You're Tommy at that point, or your last name is Sharp. Yeah, I guess so. And then tilt. Chuck tilt. Yeah. It's synonymous with pinball. Tilt is where you are being well, basically where you've been punishing the Machine. The Machine says, Enough. Hands off, man. And basically, like we were saying, early pinball machines, the only way you can manipulate them before the flippers was to move the Machine to bump it. So the tilt mechanism has been in place to prevent people from overly cheating by tilting the Machine. It's really old timing contraption, and I guess it's still in use. It's pretty funny how old school it is. Basically, they have, I guess, like a copper wire with a circle on the end, a ring on the end, and dangling in the ring, but not touching. It is like a metal ballast. Right. And it's connected to the Machine. So as long as the ballast is just swinging around freely within the ring, you can tilt as much as you like. Yeah. And a skilled player knows how to tilt without getting caught, right? It's part of the game. Yes. But once you tilt too far and the metal bows touches the copper ring, a current is formed, and all of a sudden, it sends that to the motherboard. And the motherboard says, Tilt, this is your first warning. And apparently most modern games give you two warnings. And then the flipper stopped working, and you lose your ball. Yeah. And that's just losing one ball. If you really get upset, if your ball is stuck, or if you're just having a bad day at the office and you pick up the front of the Machine and slam it down, that's called a slam tilt. And they have these little leaf switches inside the Machine for that. And if they touch each other, that means you have really taken things too far, and that is shut it down. No game. Yeah. Not, we're taking your ball. They're saying, leave the machine. You're not going to win any cigarettes doing that. Exactly. And that's the slam tilt. That's pinball, baby. Yeah. I got nothing else. I don't either. This is very exciting. I'm glad we finally did it. It's been on my list forever, ever since I found out it was illegal. You're like, oh, I got to get into that. But that was, like, a couple of years ago. I feel like, wow. Yeah. When I saw special Winlet. Nice, man. Everybody go see that. Is that on the old Netflix? I believe it is. Tilt definitely is. All right. I think Special Winlet might be too. I'll add that to the former queue, which they had to change because Americans are dumb. What do they call it now? It's not called a list because people are like, what's a Q? Really? Why is it spelled like that? I hadn't noticed that they did that. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I've heard. That's the reason it makes sense to me. I can't verify that, though. Well, if you want to learn more about Pinball, go check out Special Winlet. Go check out Tilt. Check out the Popular Mechanics article we mentioned. Eleven things you didn't know about Pinball history. It's pretty awesome. And of course, check out the article on how stuff works.com. Go to the search bar and type in Pinball and it will bring up this article. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Yeah, this is via Facebook, actually, in regards to our Morgan's podcast, because one of our is it funny, I think it's morgulon, but you are literally the only person on the planet that calls it that's. Fine. Tyler Murphy are one of the generals and the stuff you should know army and Facebook and email friend Pinged, I guess a doctor friend of his name Chris Wells, and was like, hey, dude, check this out. Do you know anything about this? And so he commented on there. I was like, hey, this is a listener mail. Can I use it? And he said yes. So he says he's only come across it twice. In both cases, they brought stuff in telling me it was eggs and bugs. I, along with my med techologist, reviewed it under a microscope, and it was mainly lint and hair follicles. One had some insight that it was not an actual infection and felt relieved. The other was very upset that I suggested otherwise. So he kind of got both ends of the spectrum. Yeah. I would never treat with an anti parasitic med if I didn't think it was a real infection. The risk of causing harm versus fixing anything is too high. Antiparasit meds can have all kinds of unwanted effects, from kidney and liver impairment, to lowering the threshold procedure, to potentially being carcinogenic themselves. For every case of monsters inside me on TLC that goes undiscovered and later is found to truly have a parasitic infection, there are many more where there is no physical evidence of infection because they're simply not one. You feel really crappy as a physician, though, when you have to tell someone that everything they brought into your office is all dust and lint, that there is no physical evidence for their ailments. The most important thing for a clinician to remember is that even if this is all in their head or imagine or however you want to word it, the patient is still experiencing it, which is what we pointed out. Yeah. So you need to try and treat the root cause, whether it be with continued reassurance and second opinion within reason, or cognitive behavioral therapy or other means. And that is Chris Wells, via our buddy Tyler Murphy. Cool. Thanks, guys. Tyler is a teacher, and in the summertime he works at the Big Putt Putt chain. Puttputt? No, it's like the Big Adventure land or what. I can't remember what it's called. Pirate pirates Cove. Is that a chain? I don't know. Sounds like a chain. Anyway, that's what he does. It sounds like fun, man. I could totally do that. It would be fun. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, you guys. Anyone else out there who has any further clarification on any episode we've ever done, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, go check us out at our home on the web stuffieshando.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're 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 of health. Find us at chewy amazonandalopeets.com." | |
How Organ Donation Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-organ-donation-works | Tune in as Josh and Chuck take a detailed look at organ donation -- from the earliest organ transplants to the organ black market -- in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Tune in as Josh and Chuck take a detailed look at organ donation -- from the earliest organ transplants to the organ black market -- in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:52:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=19, tm_min=52, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=12, tm_isdst=0) | 34967795 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuckworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Hi. Who I assume has two two functional kidneys. I do. But I would give one up for you, brother. Wow. Would you really? Well, maybe I think that's through, Chuck, as a living donor. Maybe not. But if I die, then sure. You get up. Thanks, man. What about your liver? Because I'm pretty certain I'm going to need somebody's liver. I don't know that you would want mine either, to be honest. Oh, yeah. That'd be like getting Mickey Mantle's liver. I need a virginal liver, don't, so I can just start over again. Rewash it in vodka. So what are we talking about, Josh? We're talking about organ donation, Chuck. Perfect. Which I find absolutely fascinating. How do you too back in 1954 let me take you back a little bit here. Okay. The first successful living human to human organ donation took place. It was a kidney. Yeah, it was a great story. Kidneys actually remain the most commonly donated and received organs by a long shot. Right. But this is actually a couple of twin brothers, one of whom was dying of chronic nephritis. Yeah. Richard and Ronald Harris. And Richard was the one dying, and Ronald was in good shape. Right. And Ronald said, well, you know what? You're my twin brother, and I don't really want you to die young, so I'm going to give you one of my kidneys. Right. And there have been some other transplants before that. They didn't work out, though. Well, some of them did, but it wasn't live human. Too human. Like, for example, I think the first donation or transplant that ever took place was way back in 1668. Yeah, that's a good one. Where they fused part of a dog's skull under a human's head. Crazy. And that graft worked. We have taken testicles from monkeys and successfully implanted them into humans. Sure. A pig kidney was successfully transplanted into a human vein transplants, and a lamb kidney was put into a recipient in 1923, and that person lived for nine days. But 1954 finds the first time a living person donated an organ to another living person. And it was successful. Right. And the reason why they think was because they're twins, there was a very low chance of rejection. Right. Yeah. And the story is great because Richard, the dying brother, had a moment, a clear moment, where he literally, like the day before, said, don't do this, man. Get out of here right now. And the brother said, no, I'm going to give you my kidney, like it or not. Chump and he did. And it was a great story. Yeah. And they actually both lived to ripe old ages, reproduced. So they fulfilled their destiny as humans. Yes. And since then, Josh, there have been more than a half a million of these organ transplants performed. Right. We've gotten a lot better at it. Yeah. As I was rambling off that list of stuff that took place before 1954, we have gotten exponentially better. In 2003, we successfully transplanted a tongue. Yeah, I saw that. Which I could use a tongue transplant. A slightly thinner tongue would do me a lot better. I think you had a fat tongue. Yeah. And do you remember the what do we do? The face transplant? That woman actually remembers she got her face from a suicide victim. Right. That was in 2005. And in 2006 oh, I know, it's coming. A cadaverous penis was transplanted onto a living human. Yeah. And that man gave it back. Yes. And I love the reason they gave was because of it caused psychological problems between the man and his wife, which I can let your imagination run with that one. Yeah. I would say the same thing would happen in my household. Right. So thanks to a better understanding of how the human body works, of blood type, of the development of antirejection drugs, like Chuck said, we've had about half a million transplant surgeries so far. Right. So Chuck actually is hot and heavy to give out a stat. And this is a very special stat because it's actually most likely going to change by the end of the podcast. Yes. These are ticket away. These are current stats. If you go to the website Unos.org, the United Network for Organsharing, they actually have up to the minute statistics on who needs what and who's giving what and what operations are being performed. And I didn't realize this, but it's up to the minute because earlier in the day, I checked on kidneys and the number actually dropped by three about an hour later on the waiting list. So three people got kidneys in that, like, half hour span. That's so awesome. So I'm just going to read a couple now and then we'll check back in for fun in 20 minutes and see if that's changed at all. Okay, I'm going to write this down too, Chuck, cause we'll never remember it. This is the first time we've ever used a laptop in the studio and a pen usually just us in our mouths. Total, Josh, we got 105, 288, 105,288 people are waiting for organs. Okay. And we'll do kidney because that's the most popular. 83,012 people are waiting for a kidney as of 200 and 03:00 p.m.. All right. And we'll check that in 20 minutes. And hopefully those numbers have gone down. Yeah. Because that will mean that either the people on the waiting list have died or they received a transplant. I guess we could put those two we could compare against one another and make her sure we could surmise that. So, Chuck, what are organs? Yeah, I had a feeling you're going to ask me that. Yeah, Josh, go ahead. No. Okay. Organs are systems of cells, Josh, and tissues. And they all are in our body for a very specific reason, each one. And what I like about the organs is that they are all over equipped, which is what you're looking for in an organ. You don't want, like, the heart to be like, boy, if it beats one beat less, you're really screwed. So our heart actually a 20 year old heart beats, pumps about ten times more than the amount of blood we need. And we have this reserve capacity in all of our organs as young lads and lasses. Right. But as Tom Sheave, who, you know, is my BFF, who wrote this article, he points out that the corneas, when you talk about eye transplants, they're talking about corneal transplants. They actually don't necessarily deteriorate like all the other organs. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So the corneas of 75 year old donor are just as good considering there's not more wear and tear than, say, a 20 year old. Yeah. You could put a 70 year old person's cornea inside of a young person and there would be no difference. Right. But for organs, they deteriorate with age. Well, that's the bad news. Right. So eventually you may need one. Right? Well, yeah, because what happens is, let's say one organ can deteriorate while the rest of your body remains pretty healthy. That's actually best case scenario, as weird as that sounds, because that means you can just swap that sucker out and you'll be fine again. Right. Well, that's in a very ideal utopian world, that's exactly what happens. The problem is there is a lot more people in need of organs than there are organs available. Right? Right. There's a waiting list. Some aren't so bad. I think kidneys go pretty quick. As you were talking about earlier, the longest wait I found was the old heart lung combo. Right. That median wait time was 6.7 years. Wow. It's a long time to wait for a heart and a long if you need it. Yeah, a long time ago. Because nobody goes, I'm probably going to need a heart and a long combo eventually. I'll just put myself on the waiting list now. Right. You need it like the moment you go on to that waiting list and you have to wait 6.7 years until you get it right. Yeah. And that's why the mortality rate while waiting for heart is 15%, which that's not as bad as I would I would think it would be like 90%. I would too. The lungs are 12% and the liver actually is the worst at 13%. Oh, good. Yeah. Sorry. There's two ways you can get organs from a live person or a dead person. Yes. Traditionally, we don't take organs like the heart from a live donor because they would be a dead donor after that. Exactly. You can take things like the liver pancreas uncommonly, but it can be done. A portion of the intestine blood sure. Blood, stem cells, bone marrow, bones and bones yeah. Which giving up a bone. That's really something. Yeah. After that, you just kind of have this floppy arm, but somebody else has a bone. It's pretty nice. You know what I thought was interesting about the kidney deal, like, why you can give up one kidney and still be okay is that most of the times when your kidneys are affected, they are both affected right. At the same time. Right. So it's never going to go down. You'd be like, oh, I wish I still had my healthy kidneys. Exactly. Because they both would have been unhealthy. Yeah. All right, I think we've arrived at the liver. Chuck, this is fascinating to me. It is. Where should we start? Well, let's just start by saying that the liver can grow. It's like the starfish of organ. Yes. It can regenerate itself, which is just frigging amazing. Sure. So, for instance, let's say you wanted to split your liver in half and transplant that into two different people. You could do that. You could. And actually, if you're an adult donor, they can cut off a child sized portion, which is, I think, the same as, like, a child sized meal where you get, like, three chicken nuggets right, and give it to a kid. And Chuck, this is so great. It grows along with the kid. Right. To a full sized liver once again. Yeah. But in step with the kids maturation. Right. That's just mind boggling. Let's say you needed a piece of your liver let's say you needed your liver replaced, and I cut half of my liver off and gave it to you. My liver would eventually grow to full size once again. Yeah. If I live that long. So mine would grow and yours would grow. And the cool thing is, with the liver, you don't even have to take out the old liver. You can just put in the new one. I know. It's like the best organ on the planet. It really is. And our favorite organ, because of the function that it serves. So, Chuck, like I said, you can either be a dead donor or a living donor. A dead donor can donate anything. Right. Including your whole body. Yeah. And your eyes, heart, lung, all that stuff that you can't really take from a living donor. Yes. But there are some exceptions. If you have HIV or disease causing bacteria in your bloodstream or tissue, they're not going to be taking your organs. No. And if you are a practitioner of the Shinto religion, there's not going to be a lot of organ donation going on there either. Right? Yeah. Not only that, but if you are Amish, they might support your donation if there is a certainty, a relative certainty of success. But they're more reluctant if it's less probable of success. Right. And Tom actually mentioned why the Gypsies don't agree with organ donation. They believe that you need your body for the first year to get around the afterlife. Sure. Apparently, after that, you got it down pat and you don't really need it any longer. But he didn't mention shinto. But I looked it up. They believe that the corpse is impure. The body becomes impure after death. So it would be like, here, take this rotting piece of flesh that will save your life, but you're going to be impure while you live. Interesting. So, as a result, in Japan, donation rates are really low compared to the US. Yes. And Jehovah's Witness. We should cover them because we always like to talk about them. They're not opposed to it, but they have one rule, which I thought was interesting. You can donate your organ as long as they drain all of the blood out of the organ first before giving it to someone else. Right. So I guess we're not big on transfusions. I don't think so. That'd be my guess. Yeah. Okay. How do you register chuck? Well, it's pretty easy, actually. In most states. You can do it at the DMV, which I always found interesting. Yeah. You can do it right with there when you're getting your new driver's license. And here in Georgia, actually, we used to have one of the highest donor rates, or I should say, one of the most expansive donor registries in the country. And the reason was when you went to go get your driver's license, as I'm sure you remember, they knocked $7 off of your driver's license like that. So you were an idiot if you didn't sign up. Sure. The problem is there's not supposed to be any kind of compensation whatsoever for being an organ donor. Sure. Even though this was legal under state law, the Georgia Organ Procurement Organization, which will talk about in a minute, they were very hesitant to draw from the Georgia donor list because they weren't sure if the person was just looking for the $7 off or else if they really wanted to be an organ donor. Yeah. So, actually, the contribution rates were very low in comparison of the size of the registry in Georgia right. Until 2005, when they stopped it. They stopped it. I think they actually give you a T shirt, too, that says, I sold my lungs for $7. That's illegal. And all I got was a lousy T shirt. Yeah. No. Under a 1984 law, you can't have any valuable compensation for organ procurement. Right. We'll get to that, too. The whole black market deal. Oh, okay. So, Chuck, if you're a dead donor, how do you donate? There's two ways, right? Sure. Two ways of death. Brain death and cardiac death. Yeah. Is that what you mean? Right, sure. Obviously, cardiac death is a little trickier because you only have a certain amount of time to get the organs from the body. Brain death is a lot easier in one sense, because there could be weeks to find a match and to prepare the organ for donation and get it carried out. But there's a wrinkle there. There's a lot of wrinkles there. Go ahead. Let me say something about cardiac death first. Right. Okay. There are no laws, really, governing organ procurement. It's on a case by case basis, and basically everybody involved in the organ procurement process does their best to walk a very cautious line while harvesting organs to try to save other lives. Right. Yeah. Because there are families involved. Grieving, obviously. Right. With cardiac death. There was a board, I think, out of Harvard in the late 90s that established a five minute wait time from the cessation of a heartbeat. Right. So you take somebody off a life support, wait for the heart to stop beating five minutes after, and while the heart is winding down, you're prepping the patient for surgery. Five minutes after, somebody pronounces the person dead, and they cut them open and take the organs. But in five minutes, the heart is useless pretty much at that point. Right. Some of the other organs, like the liver, the kidneys, maybe the lungs, can survive that five minutes, but the heart is gone. If you have a cardiac death, you have a useless heart, even though the heart might have been perfectly healthy five minutes ago. Right. So there was this doctor in Colorado that said, you know what? There's no law whatsoever that says I have to wait five minutes. This guy did a lot of research and found in the medical literature the longest duration between the cessation of a heartbeat and the spontaneous regeneration of a heartbeat ever recorded was 65 seconds. So he started a 65 2nd rule, okay. Got the pantsuit off of him. Really? It was an unsuccessful lawsuit, and now, all of a sudden, the president has been set, and now there's a 65 2nd rule out there that some people adhere to. Really? That is how organ procurement has been established in the US. Somebody pushes the envelope, they get sued. If the case isn't won by the plaintiff, then you have a new rule. Wow. Isn't that weird? There's, like, zero guidance for organ procurement, except that the person has to be dead. We don't have any real definition for death. Well, that's where brain death gets really tricky. Exactly. Take it, Chuck. Well, you're the expert here. I can't weigh in morally because I don't know what I think. Really? No. I mean, I know what I might believe for myself, but I don't know about establishing guidelines for others. But we need them, though, don't we? Yeah, but I don't want to make those rules. Do you? No. And apparently the federal government doesn't either. Right. Every once in a while, I think Carter assigned a panel to create a white paper on this, and I guess George Bush did right before he left office, because there was one that came out in 2008. Either Bush did right before he left office, or it was like the first thing Obama did when he came into office. Okay, but there was a very recent white paper that came out that said, okay, here's how we feel about brain death. Right? Right. Here's the problem. Back in the Think, we came up with this thing called the ventilator. And with the ventilator, you can keep somebody who, for all intents and purposes, dead. You can keep their organs functioning. Right. So you're masking death. We have no idea what would happen if that ventilator wasn't there. Would the person die? Right. And if the person does die, how long do we have to wait until we say that that person is dead? Right. So the ventilator made it so we could procure organs more easily, and brain death because we can keep them alive. Right. But at the same time, it blurred the line between life and death. Well, now they came out with this recommendation that said brain death is disengagement of no, the end of meaningful engagement with the rest of the world. Right. Which really widen the scope of who exactly is dead. And so when you have a brain dead patient and you procure their organs, what you actually do is you have to run them through this battery of tests where you are shining lights in their pupils. Sure. There's an ice water injection into the ear canal really? To see if you move toward or away from the stimulus. Wow. And there's this battery of tests to establish brain death. And then here's the clincher. They do an apnea test where they take you off the ventilator for two minutes and see what happens. And see what happens. Inevitably, the heartbeat is going to slow down. Right. And then after two minutes, they put the ventilator back on. But that two minutes where your brain was starved of oxygen was enough to create real brain death if you weren't before. Wow. Think about that. This is why they call you supplementary research man, right? That's why that's your superhero code. Can you hear people fast forwarding through to get through this part? It's like josh. Josh, josh. Josh. Okay, so we have this new definition of brain death, and when the second apnea test happens and you declared brain dead, they anesthetize you, they inject you with antiparalytics will you into that hospital room and they harvest your organs. So you actually die from a lack of organs present in your body. Wow. So that's that it's a ghoulish matter. And these people who are in charge of making sure that people donate and keeping the image of organ donation as a gift of life alive have to battle with the fact that it's a very ghoulish process. Right. So who's in charge of this stuff? Thanks for that, by the way. For what? For that whole soap opera spiel. Sure. Anytime, buddy. Yes, josh that would be called an OPO, which is an organ procurement organization, and they are federally designated nonprofits, and they are local all over the country. There's usually one in the central location of the state and then different satellite offices, obviously, because you need to be close by. You can't be hopping all over the country to get these organs, although that happens as well. Right. And they basically are responsible for awareness, recruitment, evaluation, organ removal and transportation. Right. So they're the people that's standing there with a cooler waiting to drop your organ in there and rush it to the recipient. They're also the people that talk to the family generally. Well, sure. So anytime somebody dies, the hospital is legally obligated to notify the organ procurement organization. Right. And this is a good point to bring this up. If you want to be an organ donor, or if you are, you really need to tell your family this stuff. And you should have it all in your living will because things can get a little ugly. For instance, let's say you are from a very strict religious background. Maybe your family doesn't want you cut up. They think that would be a bad thing. But you want it. You got to have that on paper, in writing. Right. And if you have it documented in a lot of cases, even if your family is like, no, we don't want to donate the organs, the organ procurement organization will say, you know what, TS. Sorry. He or she wanted to be an organ donor. And the last thing you want after you die is for your spouse, let's say, to have to mount this campaign against your family. Right. Like a tug of war like that. You got to have it all spelled out nice, Chuck. Sure. So where are we? The United Network of Organ Sharing. That's another group. That's where you got the kidney statistics we're going to go back on and look at. Right? Yeah. They're in Richmond, Virginia, and they are responsible for placing donated organs and maintaining the waiting list, like you just said, and they never close. No. 24 7365, which is how it should be, obviously. We should try calling them right now to see if they're open. No, let's not do that. I'm sure they're open. And then check there's the scientific registry of transplant recipients. Right, yes. The SRTR, and they basically maintain every amount of data you could possibly want on transplants, right. For policy makers and doctors and drug makers and that kind of stuff. Yes. And in 1984, there was one more called the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. And they're just another network that matches people with recipients and has waiting lists, that kind of thing. Right. So this is actually a pretty lean, mean, streamlined machine. The procurement and donation network. It has to be. Right. So, Chuck, you were saying that they can't be hopping all over the country, but they have to sometimes. So what happens with, like, let's say somebody dies in Sacramento and they have the perfect heart that somebody in Tampa needs. What happens? Well, they will put it into a cooler and fly it to what was the destination? Tampa. Tampa. They'd fly it to Tampa. Apparently, like, the hospital in Tampa, those people will go fly to Sacramento, take possession of it, and then fly it back. Unless there's somebody like, let's say somebody in Sacramento needed it and somebody at the Sacramento General Hospital died. Right. That's when that cooler comes in. Have you seen the one that's at the office? We have one here. We have an organ transplant cooler. Really? Yeah. It's pretty cool. Roxanne keeper tab in it, probably. You know what I thought was really cool is if you were on the Oregon donation list as a living donor, you are actually given consideration if you need an organ transplant yourself. Right. And they said that they won't bump you to the top of the list, but they will give that a little bit of extra weight, which I think is that's only right. Did you also see that if you are a living donor and usually your insurance company won't raise your rates after that, but if you move to another insurer or change like plans, they'll hit you with a preexisting condition? Yeah, that's how evil I know. Seriously, you sign up for a listing, I will give someone my kidney as a living human. And the insurance companies are like, oh, well, I might have to charge a little extra for that. Don't you think we should start publicly executing CEOs of insurance companies? It should be part of the healthcare reform package. Right. Of course. We don't mean that. Right. Thanks for the cohes. Sure. So, Chuck, when you're talking about people running around with coolers and all that, it kind of creates this hairy pace, right, in your mind. Yeah, and that's very much true. You have a very short amount of time for an organ to survive. Remember I said even five minutes can kill a heart when it's deprived of oxygen, which it stops beating. Right. What happens when you die, too? The body undergoes all these huge changes that happen almost immediately. Like, there's this parasympathetic flood of chemicals right. Which is, like, kind of fight or flight on steroids. Right. So I guess it's a sympathetic flood. Like, dopamine levels increase 800%. Wow. Epinephrine levels increase 700%. Norepinephrine levels increase 100%. So all these chemicals that are meant to, like, either speed you up or slow you down or just flooding the body, that's why you have to take the drugs, right? Most times. Right? Well, no, this is when you die. So when they're trying to harvest these organs, they're, like, trying to get them out of the body before this flood just damages these things that represent I thought you meant as a recipient that would happen. No, that'd be pretty awesome, though, to have your dopamine levels raised 800%. Right. But it's not as easy as just throwing the new heart in there, either, and sewing you up and say, good luck with your life. No, it's not recipient. No. And there's also some expectation that you lead a very healthy life after that. Sure. You're not supposed to be drinking or smoking or swearing, and you have to stay away from call girls and things like that. Yeah. You shouldn't get a new liver and then, like, dive into the vodka bottle. You're pretty much signing a contract to become Ned Flanders after you get your organ donation. Yeah. I actually just over Christmas, heard of a friend of a friend of a family member that was a candidate for, I think, a liver transplant, and they would not do it because he wouldn't enter rehab. Really? Yeah. Wow. So that's hardcore. Yeah. That guy is dedicated to the booze, isn't it? Yeah, pretty much. And also, if you are a recipient, there's some expectation that you pay for the lodging and travel expenses of the person who donated. Yeah. It's kind of an unwritten rule, from what I understand. Well, it has to be real. It's kind of against the law, really. Well, but it makes sense, though, because if you're let's say you want to donate a kidney to someone that lives across the country and you're spending money off from work and flying out there and putting yourself up, it's going to cost you some dough and a kidney. Yes. You'd have to be a really nice person to be an anonymous living donor. Yeah, that'd be cool. All right. So, Chuck, you want to talk about the black market? Yes. The black market does exist. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. But not surprising. No, but it's pretty interesting. It obviously exists, typically outside of the United States, although there have been some cases inside the United States. And this is what's so sad. Usually it's impoverished nations, and what will happen is there will be a couple of countries involved. You'll take someone out of a really poor country, offer them, like, $5,000 for their kidney, and then the middle man will get $100,000 for that kidney. And it's not like these are done in professional surgical rooms. A lot of times it's the back room, if you know what I mean. Sure. And that's actually exactly what happened in 2003 in South Africa. They were importing people from, I guess, the City of God in Brazil. Yeah. Slums of Brazil. Yeah. And giving them five grand for the kidney, and they turn around selling it for 100K. That's nuts. And where else did it happen? Villagers in India. They weren't getting nearly as good. No, they were getting about $800 for their organs, which is just unbelievable. And at one time, the Israeli organ brokers were obtaining these from Soviet bloc nations and doing the operations in Turkey. And this one guy made a middleman, made about $4 million before he was caught, which is not bad, harvesting organs. Although I. Imagine being an illegal organbroker is a fairly stressful job. Yeah, and it happens in the US. Too. Although customarily, it's an organbroker and a nefarious funeral director who harvested organs before cremation. Did you know this happened? No. I didn't either, and I saw all of 6ft under. Of course you did. Did you see the movie touristas? No, that wasn't very good. That was the deal there, though. Kids are like captured in the jungle. Oh, is it an Eli Roth movie? No, but it was like an Eli Roth movie. Okay. It was, like, hostile, except they were harvesting organs. Got you. Basically, instead of just blind torture. No. And speaking of Teresa, that actually does happen in the world. It's not just old wives tales. Poor Muhammad Legend Saleem Khan. Kidney theft does happen. It really does. Mohamed, what did you say his name was? Saleem Kahn? Yes, he lived in Delhi, India, and he was looking for a day's work and agreed to go to a house under the premise that he would get about $4 a day for performing work, their construction work, all on the up and up so far. Then he's held at gunpoint for several days, along with two other day laborers. They were taken to an operating room, drugged, and they awoke with a horrific pain in their side and minus one kidney. Yeah, and when they took him to the hospital when he went to the hospital, he checked him out, and he had indeed been down one kidney. Not an urban legend. No, that really happened. Although it makes me wonder if the urban legend gave rise to the actual practice. Yeah, maybe so. And, Josh, the one US case that was in here was really interesting, too. Yes. Michael Master Marino is an oral surgeon in New York, and he opened a company called Biomedical Tissue Services with an embalmer, which should have been a real red flag that he partners up with an embalmer. And this was in the year 2000? Not even that long ago. Actually, it was ten years ago. I'm old. For many years, though, they harvested human tissue provided by funeral homes and sold it to research facilities. And one of those bodies belong to who? Alistair Cook. Alistair Cook, famous host of Masterpiece Theater. So he was chopped up and given to unwitting recipients, but they did harvest some of his tissue. Yeah. How about that? It's pretty awesome. So where are we now? I think we're at the point where we check those stats. I have them written down here as of 200 and 03:00. P.m.. What time is it now? Chuck has got to get out of his screen here. Okay. I got to tell you, I'm be disappointed if this number hasn't gone down. I think all of our listeners will be, too. So we started out, Chuck, with a total of 105,288 on the waiting list. Where are we at? 288. Okay. Nothing has changed in 20 minutes with the kidney, we are at 83,012. Well, it would be the same because that was the master stat. So the kidney didn't change either. Let's just hope Jerry didn't put a drumroll in anywhere. Right. But I will say, though, don't be disappointed, because like I said earlier this morning, three people receive kidneys that were in search. That's awesome. Or else they died waiting. Yeah. Let's like to think the other scenario panned out. Are you a donor? I don't remember. I was at one point in time. I went for that $7 off. I did, too, but I think I'm going to go ahead and do it. Yeah, this article inspired me because I'm of the belief that the human body, after you die, is like worm dirt. So I have no problem with donating my entire body or all my organs. None of that. Yeah. Well, if you want to learn more about organ donation, you can read Tomsheet's article on how stuff works.com. You can also check out the what is it, Chuck? The organ procurement network for their side of the story. But I think you should also check out the LifeGuardian Foundation. They have a very much opposing view of organ donations. So such a controversial topic should probably get all of the facts before you make the very important decision of whether or not you're going to be a dead donor. And if you decide that you want to be, like Chuck said, let everybody know. Tell everybody. Tell strangers on the streets. Just anytime you meet a doctor, go, I'm going to be an organ donor. You may want to make the decision with your loved ones as well. Sure. Even though ultimately it is your call, right? So good luck with being a rag doll in the afterlife. Which leads us, of course, to listener mail. Yes, Josh, I am going to call this interesting Kleptomania story from Sarah. Okay. Hi, Josh. Chuck and Jerry. And she even spelled it correctly. Wow. I think that deserves a T shirt, don't you? Oh, actually, she didn't. Sorry. Two Rs. Okay. Close, though. Here's a story that I always think of when I hear anything about Kleptomania. A while ago, I was working in a large independent bookstore that had been a city institution for years. Like any retail establishment, they had experienced about 10% to 20% theft loss a year. Nothing too unusual. However, one day in the late 80s, they received a thick, densely written journal which detailed to the day, hour, moment, weather, condition, etc. For every single book this person ever stole from the bookstore. Well, this guy turned it in. They showed it to us in sales training. It was written in a cramped hand, all pages, front and back, which is really creepy. When you're writing on front and back, you're either really green or you're like a serial killer. Sometimes a clipping or a picture from one of the stolen books was taped to it. So of course the bookstore said maybe we should prosecute, since they confessed basically to stealing over a period of 20 years. Adding up to thousands of dollars is what he's interested. They contacted the people that returned to us, and it turned out the person who wrote in was a son or daughter, a very prominent local family, active in politics and big charities and the like. The kind of family they name wings of hospitals after hoops a seat. So, of course, they didn't want their good name dragged through the mud and apparently settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Money can do that, I guess. That journal was something to behold, though. So that's what Sarah says. That is definitely a mania story. Big time. That's awesome. Yeah. Cool. Well, if anybody has ever sent you a cryptic or disturbing journal and you want to tell us about it, or if you just want to say hi, you can send us an email at stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Summer school's out. 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8a88b924-4a58-11e8-a49f-975e916c1f64 | SYSK Selects: How Black Friday Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-black-friday-works | On the day after Thanksgiving, Americans go kind of crazy for the deep discount sales that kick off the holiday shopping season in stores. So crazy, in fact, at least four people have lost their lives and as many as 63 others have been injured during Black Friday sales. But as profitable as Black Friday is, some retailers are thinking about discontinuing the tradition to find ways to make even more money. Learn all about this bizarre, uniquely American holiday custom in this episode. | On the day after Thanksgiving, Americans go kind of crazy for the deep discount sales that kick off the holiday shopping season in stores. So crazy, in fact, at least four people have lost their lives and as many as 63 others have been injured during Black Friday sales. But as profitable as Black Friday is, some retailers are thinking about discontinuing the tradition to find ways to make even more money. Learn all about this bizarre, uniquely American holiday custom in this episode. | Sat, 24 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=328, tm_isdst=0) | 39099751 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're 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. Hello, everybody. It's me, Josh. And to get you in the holiday spirit I've selected for this week, that's why it's select our episode on Black Friday. Classic episode that I'm hoping you'll enjoy because it's apparently the most deadly time of the year. Get in the Grinchy spirit and listen to us basically demolish the most made up sub holiday ever invented. It's as good as the day it dropped. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and with me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. And that makes the stuff you should know you just checked to make sure Jerry was there. She's very quiet. You literally turned your head and body, right? Yes, she's there. I did the bigfoot thing. I had to turn the whole side of my body to look over my shoulder. That's how you know that was real footage. Well, typically when you know Jerry's here, because you can just smell like miso soup or something emanating from our right side or my right side. Your right side. But it's not emanating from you. It's coming from Jerry. Yeah, she stinks like miso, which is actually a very pleasant smell. Salty and new mommy. That's right. So, Chuck yes? Have you ever been to a Black Friday sale? No. And I want to say h no. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, not for me. That's a decent qualifier, though, because it's not like an average sale. And if you don't go to a Black Friday sale, it's a pretty good reason why is because you're scared. Well, yeah, and I think this is one of those a very divisive topic. You're probably either really into going or it's the last thing on earth you would rather do. I don't know. A lot of people are like, maybe I'll go check out a doorbuster at 03:00 A.m.. I think there are people who do have that kind of idea, but maybe not at 03:00 A.m.. Sure. It's almost like a multifaceted creature, like it is for some people. Like just in the middle of a normal shopping day on the Friday after Thanksgiving, they'll go to a store and it's fine, and there's some sales or whatever, but then hours earlier, these hardcore people who had bathed in the blood of their fellow shoppers well, sadly yeah, we'll see. Had already come through and gotten all the best deals. Yeah. And then there's those of us like us, who are just, like, going out. And I'm not overstating this because people always say literally when they mean figuratively, but it is literally one of the last things I would ever, ever do in my life. Yeah, I can't think of many. I'd rather go to the DMV than go to a door buster. The DMV? Yeah. In between North Korea and South Korea. No, that's the DMZ. Right, okay. I always get this too confused now. I'd rather go take the last ticket from the DMV and have to wait all day, then go to a doorbuster sale. Yeah, no, I don't blame you. All right, so we'll get to more hate spewing about this later. Right. And I should state my opinion. I feel like if this is your thing, that's awesome. Well, true. I'm not, like, cast despergence on people who disparaging remarks. Is dispersed a word? No, it is now, though. You're like your own American dictionary, the new Chuck dictionary. We should make that up. I like it. Yeah, we could have, like, five or six words already. Chuck ism yes, agreed. I'm not saying, like, poopooing people who do it. If you're into it, great, as long as you conduct yourself in a reasonable manner and you don't turn into a monster like others do. Right, but there are obvious criticisms of the day, too, which we'll get into. But I think first, Chuck, we should explain what the, as you would say, h we're talking about to the people who listen to this podcast and don't live in the United States, because Black Friday is pretty much a uniquely American experience. It is, I think, most people probably know. But just very quickly, it is the day after Thanksgiving now, in the United States is known as Black Friday, and we'll get into the pretty interesting history of it. But it's the biggest shopping day of the year. Right. And there are all these crazy specials that they run, and we'll get into that as well. But quite simply, it is the busiest shopping day of the year, day after Thanksgiving. Right. And it's origins while the origin of the term Black Friday goes back kind of a waste, apparently, to the mid 20th century, but the idea of going shopping, starting your Christmas shopping on the day after Thanksgiving actually goes back to the late 19th century, early 20th century, thanks to department stores like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And as a part of those parades, there's no accident. No, it's a Macy's parade. Right, exactly. Yeah. It's still a good parade, though. Have you ever been? No, I haven't. Yes. I've never been to the parade, but a couple of times, Emily and I've gone to the day before when they blow up the oh, yeah. Which is really neat. Very cool. You mean. I have a friend who's actually holding one of the floats of the balloons. Cool this year. Yeah, it's fun to do. Although we did it like, eight or nine years ago, and it was really neat and sort of crowded. And then we did it a couple of years ago, and it is nuts now. Is it? Yeah, it's kind of gone overboard. Got you. The word got out. I think I saw something last year in the news. Yeah. It's not a place to go if you don't like strollers. Let's just say that. Yeah. Strollers with alternating tires. Yeah. But the idea of starting your Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving came from those parades, and they came from those parades because all of those parades, pretty much to a parade, featured Santa Claus. Yeah. And usually at the end, kind of like bringing up the rear, and that means we're kicking it off. That's the official start of the holiday season. That's right. Santa Claus has made his first public appearance. So from the association of those two came holiday shopping the day after Thanksgiving. That was in the late 19th century. In the 50s, they think, or early 60s. Well, the 50s calling the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday came about, but it didn't necessarily have anything to do with shopping by then. It was from factory owners who apparently coined the term. Yeah. And there's also the other competing theory that it was the day that stores would go into the black, meaning start to show profit. Right, but that's not quite right, is it? No, that fallacy. Well. It's a made up fallacy to gloss over the original meaning of Black Friday. And it came out of Philadelphia in the cops and the bus drivers and the city workers who work downtown came up with calling that day Black Friday because apparently tons of out of towners would leave their homes on Thanksgiving. Converge on Philadelphia to watch the Army Navy game on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. But they had a day to kill, so they all started doing their Christmas shopping because there were sales in downtown Philly every year, and the place would be nuts. And this was where Black Friday came from. Apparently, the police department wanted to basically keep people away, so they'd be like, well, you don't want to go to downtown Philly. It's Black Friday. Right. And that was the original reason or origin of the term. Yeah. I see. You saw in here an article from the AP in a sales manager at Gimbals was quoted as saying, that's why bus drivers and cab drivers call today Black Friday. They think in terms of the headaches that it gives them. So I learned something new when I read this. Yeah. And then I had no idea it spread out of Philly. And then years later, the retail lobbies and retailers themselves said, we got to come up with a better origin story for this because we want this to be a day that people want to get out of their house and go shopping. But we should point out, even though it is not the day that companies go into the black, as it were, which, by the way, comes from when they did accounting by hand, you would write in red ink or black ink, depending on if you were ahead with money or behind. Red ink meant you were in the hole. Yeah. Black meant everything's good. Exactly. Even though it does not mean that the holiday shopping season is when stores make up between 20 and 40% of their retail profits. It's a lot. Yeah. I mean, even Emily's small business, like, I don't know about majority, but a large percentage of her yearly sales or the couple of months. Yeah. And it's not just her. Apparently, in 2013, the National Retail Federation is predicting that Americans just in November and December chunk, are you ready for this? Yeah. Americans are going to spend $602,000,000,000 in November and December. That's cray. That's a lot of cash. Yeah. In two months. Yeah. I don't spend like I used to on Christmas. Emily and I sometimes will spend on gifts on each other or do that couple of thing where you go in and just do something nice for your house. And then, like, the adults on my side of the family, we don't exchange gifts anymore. Just dirty looks. Yeah, you exchange dirty looks. Like, my brother and my sister will chip in usually and get my mom something kind of nice or offer her a service. Like last year, we replaced her fireplace with, like, a gas fireplace. Nice. Or build her a garden fence or tile her kitchen, like something like that. Wow. Your mom's got it. Yeah. She's on easy street is what you call that. Yeah. But Emily's family, they all still exchange gifts, so I still have my Christmas gift swapping. Joan satisfied? Nice. Yes. You get your Christmas present on. Yeah. Okay. Chuck so the idea of shopping after Thanksgiving and then Black Friday, that day being called Black Friday, it's been around for a while, and it's a really valuable day. It kicks off that two month period where $602,000,000,000 is going to be spent on stuff. But it was created like Valentine's Day. It was literally created. And then the myth kind of became reality just because they said everyone's going to shop today, it's the busiest day. And it became that. Yeah. It wasn't until 2004, usually the Saturday before Christmas was actually the busiest shopping day of the year, thanks to me. But the retail Federation and all the retailers were like, well, we can't tout that as the busiest shopping day of the year. We want to get people spending over the course of a couple of months, not the Saturday before Christmas. So they basically said Black Friday is the day. And like you said, it just kind of became true just from people saying it over time. I'm surprised that they haven't come up with a catchy name for procrastinators day or something to pump up that last Saturday again or something. Right. Or to keep you from it. So they call it like Shame of the Nation Day, something like that, to make you go do Black Friday. Saturday. Yeah. And there's this website called Black Fridayericivecom. It's actually like, kind of cool if you like nostalgic ads or whatever. Nostalgia going back to 2007, I should say. But it's just like scans of Black Friday print ads from those years, which are kind of neat. If you're totally bored out of your mind, go check out Black Fridayarchive.com. 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 rule up their own sleeves. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. 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. comSK. Squarespace. So Buck Friday became a smashing success. Like 20 04, 20 05. It's a relatively recent thing that became what it is today here in the States, which is an out of control juggernaut shopping and consumeristic frenzy. Right. So it was so successful overnight that the retailers said, well, let's figure out ways to extend this whole week. Yeah. So they came up with Cyber Monday in 2005. Yup. That's pretty recent. And it is the online shopping version of Black Friday. The Monday after Thanksgiving. And that was another thing. They just made up another self fulfilling myth that they said that the workers go back to their computer after Thanksgiving on Monday and they do all of their online shopping. Well, that wasn't really true, but now it is, because the retailer said it was in, the media reported it. And not to be outdone in 2010, American Express invented Small Business Saturday, which is when you go out and support small businesses with your money. Especially ones that take American Express. Exactly. So it's interesting literally creating days to tell people, basically, if you're not shopping today, you're missing out on really good deals. Right, exactly. And the more days the better, as far as retailers are concerned. But there's only so many days after Thanksgiving. So they started to think recently like, well, what if we pushed in the other direction rather from Friday on? What's behind Friday? Oh, yeah, Thanksgiving. We can't touch that. For shame. Well, starting in 2012, they started touching it. Walmart actually opened at 08:00 P.m. On Thanksgiving in 2012, and there was a general strike called that we'll talk about later because of that, because these stores are not supposed to be open on Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is its own day. It's a day of being with family and celebrating and giving things. Up until 2012, it was sacrosanct. Yeah. This year, Macy's and JCPenney for the first time are opening on Thanksgiving, and Sears and Toys R US as well on Thanksgiving evening. And Kmart is opening at 06:00 A.m. On Thanksgiving, basically extending Black Friday through the weekend, 41 hours. That's not a day, that's how long Kmart is going to be open. Black Friday at Kmart lasts 41 hours. Yeah. That's pretty crazy. And at shopping malls, you're going to have some smaller stores doing the same thing. An estimated 20% to 25% will be open at 08:00 P.m. On Thanksgiving Day, and two thirds will open in midnight. So essentially what's happening is Thanksgiving evening is being ruined by retail. Yes. I think the retailers would say, well, we've seen that people start lining up Thanksgiving afternoon, Thanksgiving evening to wait for us to open like that the next morning, so why don't we just open? So I think it's kind of it goes both ways, but I pretty much see where you're coming from. Yeah. Well, this year it's a little trickier, too, because Thanksgiving comes on November 28, which is the latest to spend been in eleven years. Yeah. Is that right? Yes. 2002 weirdly, because they still sort of have to enforce Black Friday. They're actually shortening their own shopping season a little bit this year. Right. Which is probably why some of them are opening on Thanksgiving. That's exactly why it's six days shorter than usual this year. So just by the very existence, by making up Black Friday, they've screwed themselves this year a little bit. They have. By a week. Yeah. Because in other countries, like Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, countries that observe the Christmas holidays like we do in America, meaning everybody gives everybody else presents and things like that, and they spend money. But those countries don't have a Black Friday, a day that officially kicks off the holiday shopping season. Right. Those countries spend more over the course of the holiday season because they have a longer period of time to shop. So without Black Friday in America, the retailers would possibly make more money. So they've definitely painted themselves into a corner by making Black Friday such a thing. And this year it's really kind of pointing out, like, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot here, so what can we do? Well, their solution has been, well, we'll just take over Thanksgiving too, but that's not necessarily sustainable. And there's a lot of people are saying Black Friday is going to go the way of the dinosaur. Yeah. I read an interesting article in the New Yorker this morning, a finance article, I think it was New Yorker. It might have been New York Times, but this financial analyst was basically analyzing how the sales go and sort of saying that it's really not financially the smartest approach to take for shoppers or the retailers for the retailers to offer these huge, deep discounts and sort of blow it out in one day. A better, smarter financial approach would be to elongate the seas shopping season and not even discount things, maybe even raise prices. And his contention is that they're shooting themselves in the foot. Right, but I think he's right. He probably is. But at the same time, if you're one of those people like me, frankly, who went to the mall the day after Halloween and saw that the lights were up, the garland was out, santa's workshop was ready to go after Halloween, November 1. Wow. The place was totally decked out for Christmas with Christmas carols piping through. Yeah, see, that's ridiculous. But that was the great thing about Black Friday. It's like you had a month of just kind of chilling out, everything getting ready between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Then you had Thanksgiving and then the holiday season started. Without Black Friday. It's kind of like this dam that's holding back the holiday season from spilling into basically October. But with retailers figuring out that it's an impedance to them making money, it probably won't start the official season any longer. It'll probably be further back from now on. Yeah. Well, I think we're in I don't know about well, technically, slightly in the minority. In 2013, 53% of the population of American adults said they will shop on Black Friday. Yeah. That puts us in the minority by a bit. Yeah. And in 2011, 152 Americans 152,000,000, but they spent $500 billion. Yeah. 152 really rich American. 152,000,000 shopped on that day for an average of 3 hours at a time, which is not too long. But that's 3 hours is like it's longer than I was ever. But I saw a woman who did 16, though, like a 16 hours stretch of shopping. She better have gotten it all done. At least I hope so. If she shopped for 16 hours and only got like three gifts. Yeah, it's not time well spent. There's also evidence that the Internet is basically knocking on Black Friday's. Door thanksgiving Day is the fastest growing online shopping day, and I think like 70% of the people who said that they're going to shop on Black Friday said they'll do some or most of it online. Right. So the internet is still there for retailers to make money, but the idea of Black Friday in store sales going extinct is probably not going to happen because it's its own thing. Like this one, consumer psychologist or consumer analyst, I think, pointed out that it's a tradition. Number one, now it is. And number two, there's a certain element of sport to it. It's more than just getting a good deal. It's like throwing a fist at somebody while you get a good deal. There's something to it that transcends the whole thing. So we mentioned doorbusters. It's a central part of the cog that is Black Friday, and it goes back in print, believe it or not, to the year 1917 in Anecdotally to 1895, wherein a retailer will basically say, you know what, we have one item, or usually it's a few now, but some really deep, deep and really super great deals on just a few select items. So, like, for example, a good laptop for $180. Yes. Deals like the ipods for half off or TV for $200. Really, like you said, very good discount. But here's the deal. It's a scam, people. It's a bait and switch. It's a bait and switch. They've only got a very limited amount of these select items, which is why the violence happens, which we'll get to in a minute. And then after that, they're hoping you get in there. You don't get that laptop, but you're like, screw it, I'm at Walmart at 05:00 A.m.. I might as well buy some stuff, regular priced or slightly discounted items. And that's how they get you in the store. That's how they get you. It is. And it's true that these items do exist and they are for that deal. They're for that price, I should say. But there's only like ten and in the fine print, it's like one per person. And that deals in stock only. Like you can't get a range check or anything like that? No, but the concept that these deals do exist for those items that are in the store, coupled with whoever physically gets their hands on that item first, gets that deal, leads to doors actually being busted. It's called recipe for disaster. Yeah. All right, so before we get to the dark days and the bad stuff that can happen, truly, let's do a little message break. Okay. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call 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. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look in Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. comSK and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com. Sysksk squarespace. All right, let's go back a little bit to 2008 and probably the well, I was going to say the darkest incident, but I think the Toys R US may be darker. I think this one's darker because the people were involved. Yeah, that's true. All right. 2008 in Valley Stream, Long Island. It was at a Walmart. And it was 05:00 PM. On Thanksgiving. So basically, people there the day before, it wasn't one of those days where it was open on Thanksgiving, so they're to wait until 05:00 a.m.. So at least 12 hours ahead of time, there were about 1000 people already set up there. Some people are camping out in tents. They're waiting. They got their coffee. They're probably slugging some gym beam to warm the belly. And so the police came out and said, you know what, let's set up a buffer zone, a barricade, which worked till about 02:00 A.m. When that was breached. And the cops basically said, we're out of here. This isn't part of our job. Yeah, the crowd had turned angry a little bit after that. One of the store employees had some family members come and they took them out of the line and took them in the store. Not a good idea. Yes, but even if everyone in the crowd would have been cool with it, I don't think everybody in the crowd realized that they were family members of an employee. Sure. So the crowd actually turned like ugly. Yeah. They broke through the barricade and were squeezed against how the stores have the entrance and then that little glass investibule area, and then usually a second entrance to get into the store itself. By this time, there was about 2000 people waiting for the store to open. It was 04:00 a.m., the store is going to open at five, and a couple of hundred were in between this little buffer zone and those front exterior doors and being pressed up, literally crushed to death. And there's this fascinating article in the New Yorker by a guy named John Seabrook called Crushpoint. And it's about not just this incident, but just crushings in general where a crowd crushed somebody. Yeah, we covered that like years ago. It seems like it. Yeah, totally. But anyway, just check out that article. Yeah. People literally yelling, pushed the doors in, chanting this. And just before 05:00, it's a pretty bad scene, and workers in that vestibule area realized that there was a pregnant lady named Lianna Lockley being crushed against the doors. And so they were like, we got to get this lady in here, open the doors enough to squeeze her through. She got in and then the crowd surged forward and it just kind of went downhill from there. And they still did the countdown. Isn't that mind boggling? It's mind boggling that they didn't. Well, first of all, that the cops left. Yes. They said, apparently in a court deposition, that the cops, when they left, said, controlling this crowd is not in our job description. Good luck. Walmart had hired a security force of two for the event. One person hadn't shown up, the other one was inside the store. Not helping. So they got a bunch of their stock guys, their biggest dudes that they could find, and said, come stand as vestibule and help anybody who falls down. Or that's what I would have been liking. Dude, that's not in my job description. Exactly. Well, they didn't say that. And when the doors finally opened after the festive countdown, while these people were being crushed against the front, unbelievable. The doors started to open. And right when they opened, they actually gave way and were literally busted by this wave of humanity. Yeah. And at that point, the employees, their little red Rover line was completely ineffective. Yeah. People are getting knocked down. Some of the workers are getting blown out of the way. Some are jumping on vending machines. It's ridiculous. A couple of them climbed up the Coke machine to get out of the way for safe harbor. One guy who was in the way of the crowd when the doors gave way, this article by John Seabrook puts it that he was blown back. So again, there's a vestibule, there's the outer doors, there's a vestibule, and then there's inner doors, and then there's the store. This guy got blown from the outer doors. All the way through the vestibule, through the inner doors into the store by this wave of people. 2000 people. Yeah. Just coming in all at once, all trying to get their hands on that door buster. Yeah, like an ipod or something. Yeah. So that's not the end of the story, sadly. People are getting crushed. This pregnant woman trips over some old woman. She's on the ground at this point. Pregnant. Yes. Leanna Lockley. Right. In danger of being trampled to death. And then she somehow managed to get to her knees and saw an employee. Do you know how to pronounce his first name? Jim Taymor. Jim Tay Demur. He was assigned to help people in case anyone fell fell down next to her. The doors fell on top of him and 2000 people trampled over those doors and killed him. Yeah, he was trampled to death. He died of asphyxiation being crushed under the door. And he was a stop guy at 06:00 A.m.. 06:00 A.m., he was pronounced dead 1 hour after the festive countdown to let people get in to shop. And that was at the hospital an hour later. So he most likely died on the scene and pretty awful. What's? Crazy chuck, if that store is not bad enough, trampolines are actually really common and somebody might not die. You might not be asphyxiated and he might not have died had he not gotten caught under the door. But people getting knocked down. If you want to see this, just go on to YouTube and type in Black Friday. Not even Black Friday. Trampolines. Just type in Black Friday and you will see tons of compilations of store security footage of people coming in right when the store opens on a Black Friday sale. Just climbing over one another, knocking each other down. Some people help other people up or drag them out of the way or whatever. But just as frequently people just climb over the ones who are down for a sale. It's insane. I seriously encourage everybody to go check out some video of it. Yeah. I can't believe that after this incident that there wasn't a law passed outright Black Friday sales. That is not happening. Well, but it's ridiculous because economists and analysts have proven that you can have like even it's not like they'd lose money. They would probably make more money if they didn't have these blockbuster sales. So it's not like they could say, well, you're keeping me from doing my business. I don't know, I just can't believe they can't outlaw something like this. So that was a pretty horrendous example of a crowd crush and a trampoline. But other things do happen. You mentioned the Toys R US in Palm Desert, California, a couple of years back, right? Yeah, that was in 2008. These two women got in a fist fight and then their husband got into it. And basically, first of all, these two men were carrying guns into a Toys r US for Christmas shop, which is a little weird. And they started a shootout with each other, basically. And not a very skilled one, apparently. I read about it. Like, one guy forgot to cock his gun. Right? The other guy, his didn't work either. So they start chasing each other through the store. Through the store, shooting at each other. Luckily, no one else died. But those two gentlemen shot each other and died. Yeah, they did Toys R US because of their wife's got in a fist fight. Yeah. On Black Friday at a Toys R US during Christmas shopping. I'm surprised no one else. If they're running through store shooting, I think everybody cleared out of their way. Yes. I know. I wouldn't follow them around and be like, hey, guys, what are you doing? Where's the door buster? In 2011, a woman at Los Angeles Walmart pepper sprayed some people in the video games. Initially, the cops saw it. Well, this lady was some Black Friday jerk, which would make her a pretty awful person. Yeah. But apparently the real story is, and she actually got out of it, was that her children were attacked, punched, kicked, thrown to the ground by shoppers trying to get an Xbox from these children. And so she defended her kids by pepper spraying these jerks. Right. And this thing still hasn't been settled. The most recent thing I saw was that a year on. So last year, the cops still hadn't filed charges, so I guess they believed her story. But she shopped anyway after that happened and bought her items. So she pepper sprays a bunch of people, affects 20 people, causes a bit of a trampling pandemonium, and then two horrible things happen after that. One, like you said, the lady took her kids and her items and went to the store and checked out, bought her stuff. Second, the people outside the immediate circle where she pepper sprayed, but still in that little area, stuck around, still tried to get their hands on the sale item. Yeah, they're like, checking out in. Their eyes and nose are watering. Just bring it up. Let me get home. Yes. And then, of course, Chuck, there's the workers as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, no one wants to work on Thanksgiving. And this year, like we said, a lot of retailers are opening on Thanksgiving, and there's really not anything they can do about it if they want to keep their job, which is really sad. And Walmart employees planned a strike, I think, last year in 2012, and it didn't work. Only 26 of the 4200 stores reported striking employees. So for fear of losing their jobs, probably, they had to come to work anyway. Well, Kmart in particular was criticized this year for opening at 06:00 a.m. On Thanksgiving. And Kmart said, these people don't have to work. Like, we're not forcing them to work. And their critics are saying, well, actually, that's not necessarily true. Because you're using part time seasonal employees and there's no federal mandate that those people have to have holidays or time off. So therefore they're in a position where they either work or you can fire them legally. So they kind of do have to work. There's a lot of ugliness on Black Friday. But Chuck, if you are just the average normal person, like my brother in law loves to go Black Friday shopping and he'll go at midnight, go to the doorbuster sales, but he's not crazy. Well, the majority of them don't end in violence because this happens all over the country and these are isolated incidents. So it's not like at every doorbuster sale you're going to get trampled. But there is a risk. There is. And the people you want to look out for apparently there was a study of consumer behavior at Black Friday sales, and it was a legitimate study. Sure. It said that you want to look out for the people who have done a lot of planning because they exhibit the most antisocial behavior, like shoving, pushing, yelling. They've got their plan in place. Exactly. And nothing's going to alter that. And they feel like they've really put the time in and they're not about to lose that doorbuster jerk who's never done it before and just showed up. He just locked into line or whatever. Remember the famous who concert in the 70s where the people were trampled? Yeah, that's in that New Yorker article, too. They got rid of general emission seating after that. Like, why can't they do something about this? I think the law stepped in and said, wait a minute, you can't just open the doors to a concert venue and say, first one in gets front row. Are they still have general admission? Not for big arena shows. Oh, yeah. Well, you know that there was just one door open and like, four others locked and people were getting crushed up against the locked doors, and the people inside who are working at that concert just never opened the doors, even though people were dying. I can't remember what we cover that in, man, it's so vivid in my mind from way early on because we studied the science of crowd surges. I don't know what it was either because this article is not that old. It's just like, no, it definitely wasn't about this. It had to do with something else. But yeah, dirty bad stuff. Or you can take another approach. Yeah, this is a different approach. You could say in the 1990s, an artist named Ted Dave gave birth to what's now called buy nothing day, wherein people are encouraged to not buy anything for 24 hours and to fight the power and consumerism by not showing up at all. And not just fight the power. The guy who created Ted Dave, he's a Vancouver guy who came up with it in the was also not just to stick it to the man, which I can only imagine if nobody bought anything in America on Black Friday, what kind of crippling effect that would have on the economy. Yeah, but he was also saying personally that's a good day to not buy anything and take stock of how much you do. Maybe waste or spend or whatever. Just think about your consumer, your consumerism for one day. Dirty hippie. And during that time, don't buy anything and don't gas up your car the night before. Don't get a bunch of milk the night before. Just be normal. And on one day of the year, don't buy anything and that's buy nothing day. And it's kind of become this big thing. Ever since Adbusters, the people who gave us Occupy Wall Street kind of found out about it and adopted it and took the whole thing worldwide. It's pretty amazing. It is. So if you go to a Black Friday sale and you see a bunch of people dressed as zombies, they're making fun of you. They're making fun of zombie consumers. Same with the people who are just a sheep. And then there's Zenta claws. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll dress up as a sheep. Yeah. And just walk around and buy in people's faces. Yeah. And then if in there I might pick up a laptop. Right. There's also credit card cut up stations. Yeah. Where you can get rid of your credit card and shoe because consumerism. Yeah. And then there's my favorite what is it? The Whirly Gig conga line. Oh, I haven't heard of that. Is that to disrupt shoppers? The whole point is to just kind of serve as a mirror, I think, to people like, look at yourselves. You think I look stupid? You're the one that look stupid. Right? We're not even buying anything. But yeah. So it's kind of a twofold thing. It's one like just kind of reflecting personally sticking it to the man as an individual consumer, like realizing your power in the grand scheme of things is all kind of hinges on you spending your money and if you don't, then you're taking the power back or pointing out to other people just how ridiculous they're being at consumers. As consumers, people probably be like, where'd you get that cheap costume? Right? Exactly. What all is that on? So I've got one last thing I noticed the other day. I had never heard of this before. In China you think we like to shop? Chinese love to shop and they have something that they have created called Singles Day. And it is on November 11, so 1111 the four ones stand for single people. And they're basically like, hey, because in China I think you're encouraged to marry. So this is like, hey, be single. Go out and treat yourself to something online and buy something because it's Singles day and you should celebrate being single. Really? And it's a huge deal. They spent well, this ecommerce platform in China called Alibaba is the one who really got behind it recently. And they spent $5.7 billion on single stay this year, which dwarfs Cyber Monday by three times, almost. Wow. And it's the biggest online shopping day in the world. And in the first six minutes this year, just a couple of weeks ago, they spent $160,000,000 in the first six minutes wow. Online in China. Jeez. Just to celebrate being single. And they're encouraged to shop for themselves, which I don't think we pointed out. A lot of people on Black Friday, when asked, say that they do some of the shopping for themselves. Yeah. Not all gifts. It's like, I want that laptop. I think 47% or 41% of people who said they're going to shop on Black Friday, so they'll do most of the shopping for themselves. I usually do that whenever I go out, like, genuinely Christmas shopping, I'll pick up something for myself. But these people are saying they're mostly shopping for themselves. No, I don't mostly, but I'll just treat myself modest. And I want to say, Chuck, we don't begrudge anybody going to Black Friday sales. If that's your thing. Yes, enjoy it. That's fine. Just act like a human being. Yeah. Don't take anyone's life. No. Don't trample over somebody who's fallen down. And most importantly, have a very nice Thanksgiving. Enjoy the people you're with, whether they're friends, family, old acquaintances, new acquaintances. Take some time to really enjoy this Thanksgiving Day and relax and just be. I agree, my friend. Yeah, it's Thanksgiving. Be with your family. Turn off your smartphone, maybe even wow. Really get crazy and just be in the moment. Yeah. How about that? And we give you permission to shout down anybody who says that tryptophan is what makes you sleepy. That's right. You go ahead and set them straight. Yes. Happy Turkey Day, Americans. And other parts of the world. Whatever you're doing, I hope you're well. Yeah. Nice, Chuck. And Chuck, we should say that, as usual, if everyone wants to send us Happy Thanksgiving wishes, they can tweet to us at Syskpodcast, they can join us on Facebook.com. Stuff you should know, you can. And if you want to know more about Black Friday, you can go to householdwicks.com. I think there's like a Ten Worst Moments in Black Friday History article up there. You can send us an email directly to stuff podcast@housetoforks.com. And as always, you can join us at our very festive and thankful home on the web stuffyouchnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where True crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder. You'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly source ingredients plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | |
121602d0-361f-11ea-91d6-2b3a7ab67794 | Short Stuff: The Death of Billy the Kid | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-death-of-billy-the-kid | Sure, together Young Guns and Young Guns II form an exhaustive biography of Billy the Kid’s life. But did you know they also contain misleading information? Billy the Kid may not have lived to 100 under an alias after all! | Sure, together Young Guns and Young Guns II form an exhaustive biography of Billy the Kid’s life. But did you know they also contain misleading information? Billy the Kid may not have lived to 100 under an alias after all! | Wed, 22 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=204, tm_isdst=0) | 14958396 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're Jeff. And this is short stuff. So let's go. So we're talking today about the death of Billy the Kid, which I thought I learned from a Billy Joel song called The Ballad of Billy the Kid. That seems like an appropriate place to learn it. Great song. But it turns out the Billy Joel stopped at what was to be the hanging of Billy the Kid. And growing up, I thought that's how his story ended. Boy, you were misinformed, buddy. Yeah. I mean, the song literally stops with the town folk in their ken. Like the c came rolling in to watch the hanging of Billy the Kid. Then there's one more chorus, and that's it. Now, that makes me question if whether we really did start the fire. Hey, did you see that video of him playing the piano on the street the other day? And wherever he's from, no island. No, I did see a tweet that mentioned it in a link that I surmised from the headline what had happened. So, yeah, basically it was pretty neat. Someone was throwing out a piano and Billy Joel goes over there and he's playing it and he's like, hey, this is a good piano. It's out of tune, but he's got good action, the pedals work. He said, Somebody should donate this thing. It sounds like he's like Rodney Dangerfield now. Well, he's not too far off. No, it turns out that Billy the Kid. Everything I know about Billy the Kid I learned from young guns. And Billy the Kid didn't die at all. He went on to live to about 100 something years old in New Mexico because he escaped and his death was faked. That's right. Was that Amelia? Was he Billy? Yes. And, man, that was a great movie to me. Billy the Kid is Chris Christopherson from the great Sam Peckenpaw movie. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I never saw that one. Well, there's two versions. See if you can watch the directors cut, because the other one's a mess. Oh, is that right? It's like a Hurricanes episode. Yeah, and funny enough, you mentioned Hurricane Bob Dylan is in that movie and does the soundtrack and score. Who does he play in the movie? Let me guess. The Undertaker? No, something like that. I think he's just like a stranger in town that does a couple of things. It's not a big part. Sam Peckenpaw was a Bob Dylan fan. Sure. He did tons of drugs and was an alcoholic. Sure. But Bob Dylan fan? Yeah, man. All right, so can we get going on this? This is the short stuff. We wasted three and a half minutes. Well, we'll just say this billy the Kid died. That's that that's right. I think we should kind of reverse this a little bit and talk a little bit about Billy the Kid first. Yeah, I agree. Did you know he was a born New Yorker. I did, because I'm kind of into these Old West dudes, and I've researched some of them to certain degrees. And he was born William Henry McCarthy Jr. And if you've heard the name William Bonney, that was a name he went by a lot. Yeah, I think you've heard William Bonnie a lot more probably than McCarty. Yeah, for sure. I actually had never heard Henry McCarthy until today. Yeah. And he was orphaned at 14 and became one of the Lincoln County Regulators. Yeah. And so regulators will sound familiar if one you are a Young Guns fan or if you're a Nate Dog and Warren G fan. Either way, the regulators were kind of a group of hired hands for a guy and hired guns, I believe, two young ones for a guy named Tunstall, I believe, down in Lincoln County, New Mexico. And Tunstall was killed, from what I understand, fairly unfairly. And that kind of set Billy the Kid and his policy of regulators off on a bit of a killing spree. It started what's known as the Lincoln County War. That's right. And during one of those skirmishes, there was some murders that happened. And Pat Garrett, who's a sheriff in New Mexico, played by James Coburn in the Bob Dylan movie, played by Bob Dylan and Young Guns. I haven't seen Young Guns a long time. That was a big college movie for us. I need to see that again. It didn't come out when you were in college? Sure. No. Yeah, I don't think so. Look it up and I'll keep going. All right. I got nothing else to do. Live Corrections so Pat Garrett formed a posse, captured Billy, and that part of the Billy Joel song checks out. And he was sentenced to hang. They captured him at Stinking Springs, New Mexico. Nice. And while he was awaiting his execution, he was kept in it wasn't even a prison. It was a room, a locked room at the Lincoln County Courthouse. I found this article says two. I saw there were five other prisoners. Regardless, there were other prisoners being guarded by some armed men. One of them was an enemy of Billies named Bob Ollinger. And at one point, he took all the rest of the guys over to a hotel across the street to eat. Left Billy there under the charge of Deputy James Bell. Man, these are some great old timey Old West names, aren't they? Oh, yeah. When was young. Guns out. 88. So if you were in college at age 17, then I'm impressed. I said it was a big movie in college. I didn't say it came out in college. I asked you if it came out in college, and you said, oh, yeah. I thought you mean, was it out in college? As if it came out after 1996. Chuck and Josh. I was listening to that, thought that that's what I meant. It came out in high school, but we watched the heck out of it in college. Whatever. I should have said. So James Bell is watching Billy. Billy says, hey, I got to use the bathroom. Can you take me out to the outhouse? He said, I really got to go. He shackled. His arms and legs are shackled. Take him out. Use the bathroom. On the way back in, they're going up the steps, Billy's in front. And the account I read was that he ducked around a blind corner, got his hands out, and then smashed this guy in the head with his arm irons. The guy went, what? Billy pulled his gun from his holster, the other guy holster? Yeah. Of course. Billy didn't have a gun on him. No. Why would they do that? He's like, Why didn't I think you're using that first? They're like, well, he's in handcuffs. Just go ahead and keep his gun on him. And so he pulls the guy's gun on him, and the guy tries to run, and Billy shoots him dead in the back. And so now, roughly, we reached the end of the Billy Joel song, which I think is a good time for an ad break. What do you think? Sure. We'll be right back. Varmints all right, Chuck, we're back, and Billy the Kid has just shot the deputy that's in charge of watching him. Another deputy runs back from the hotel, ollinger. Okay, Olinger. Apparently, he's running, and he hears his name and looks up, and Billy the kids got Ollinger's own rifle on him and shoots him dead like a dog in the street. So, Billy the kids killed two people. Now he's out of his shackles, and he grabs a horse and high tails it out of town for a life on the run that would last about four more months. Yeah, that's the only dispute I have with that account, as it supposedly took him about an hour to get out of his leg shackles with an axe. And I guess no one just came up there. When Ollinger came to find him, billy actually yelled down, look up, old boy, and see what you get. Well, and that's the last words that he heard. Wow. So Billy's on the run at this point, and obviously, Pat Garrett has been his bonnet to go get him again. Well, sure. He's the sheriff of Lincoln County, and Billy the Kid, who's become one of the most notorious bandits in the country, has just escaped out from under his watch. And there's a reward. Well, sure, there's a reward, too. So Pat Garrett had this history of lying in weight and ambushing people and shooting them, whether they were ready to shoot back or not, killing them very frequently. He'd done it before, and he went he'll do it again. He went to go look for Billy the Kid. Like we said, he made his way as an outlaw, like a double outlaw by this point. On the Lamb for a good four months before he was caught up with, I think still in New Mexico in July of 1081. And he apparently was staying at the house or nearby, the house of a friend named Peter Maxwell. And Peter Maxwell had a younger sister that Billy the Kid was sweet on. And Peter Maxwell didn't like the Billy the Kid was sweet on her. And by sweet on her, I mean that they were having extramarital sexual relations. And Peter didn't like that because he was planning on marrying off his sister to a rich land bearing nearby. And Billy the Kid was kind of toying with that possibility. So Peter Maxwell is in this kind of mindset, allegedly, when Pat Garrett shows up. That's right. Garrett shows up. Well, he doesn't show up at night, but eventually night falls. Actually, maybe he did show up because supposedly he found him asleep. Pete Maxwell, that is. And Garrett, very presumptuously, goes into his room and sits down next to him and says, pete, wake up. Wake up. And then he wakes up and he says, Where's that Billy the Kid? And as the story goes and we're going to poke holes at it in a second right then Billy the Kid actually walks into that room, that dog gone room, and has a gun and a knife because he had just went to cut some meat off. He was hungry, I guess, after some he had postcodal hunger pains. Sure. And carved some meat off and was from a yearling, supposedly, and had just eaten a little bit. So he has a knife and a gun and can't really see in the dark and starts going tiana kiannis. Spanish for who is it? Who's there? And Maxwell or, I'm sorry, pat Garrett supposedly recognizes the voice as Billy in the dark and shoots him dead. Yeah, and I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here. Yearling is a young horse. He's after some horse meat to eat. That's right. So this is the death, as far as Pat Garrett said of Billy the Kid. But like we said before, pat Garrett already kind of had developed a reputation of ambushing people, of lying in wait, catching him off guard when they least expected it. And even in this story that he told, this is the official line that Pat Garrett told in the biography he wrote about Billy the Kid. That was how he died. But even that which is kind of on the edges of Fair is disputed, is probably untrue, and that the truth probably involves even more of an ambush and more surprise and even less of Billy the Kid being able to defend himself than that. Yeah, I think the other version is that he was actually ambushed and set up by Maxwell because he didn't like him being with Paulita, his little sister, and basically said, hey, man, it's all going down here. And here's your chance to come over to Fort Sumner and take care of this kid once and for all. And so he did. So and a lot of people say that's how it really went down. He tipped off Pat Garrett. Right? Yeah. And that he, in fact, even changed his age. He was supposedly, like, 18 or 19 when he was shot dead and said, no, he was really 21. So I didn't have this extra judicial killing of some kid. He was a full grown man. And it was just happenstance that he happened to walk in the room where I was sitting there with a loaded gun. Yeah. And the other people, historians think, like, probably Billy the Kid didn't walk in with a gun and a knife looking for some yearling meat. He probably walked in fully unarmed, expecting Pete Maxwell's sister to be waiting for him there and instead pet Garrett and his gun was waiting for him there. So he probably was fully ambushed and killed, murdered, I guess it's the other way to put it. And that's probably how Billy the Kid died. Either way, he died at the other end of Pat Garrett's gun. That much we know about. Right. Even though there are and have been rumors over the years that he was in cahoots with Pat Garrett and he let him escape and that he lived to be a ripe old age. There have been exclamations, there have been DNA tests over the years. Obviously, nothing has ever come back with any sort of conclusion. Young guns seem to be pretty conclusive. I got a little cherry on top too, if you're interested. Let's hear it. You know that very famous picture of Billy the Kid? Sort of one of two, although the second one, they aren't quite sure it's in. But there's that one very famous Pharaoh which is a picture on, like, a metal plate. That photo that pharaoh type. The original plate was bought for $2.3 million by none other than William Coke. Who is that? The Koch brothers. Oh, yeah, I forgot. He's super into, like, Old West stuff, apparently. Yeah, I forgot about that. Well, that's pretty interesting. Quite a cherry on top. I'm glad. Guess what he wants in the end. As for Garrett, he was originally denied the $500 reward. A bunch of the cities felt bad for him and raised $7,000. And then a year later, there was, I think, an injunction or a vote or something where he actually finally got the reward. So in today's dollars, supposedly, if that all checks out, he got about 200 something thousand dollars for killing Billy the Kid. He's like that barista from Starbucks who refused service to that woman who wouldn't wear a mask. Now they're rich, right? Yeah, man. I don't serve anyone coffee without a mask. Save me some money. There you go. We'll start to go fund me for Chuck, everybody. Well, that's it for short stuff, right, Chuck? That's right. Giddy up. Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartradios how Stuff Works. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
428161fe-53a3-11e8-bdec-e7cd751ce47c | SYSK’s Scare Your Socks Off Halloween Spooktacular 2019 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-s-scare-your-socks-off-halloween-spooktacular | Josh and Chuck chose a truly unsettling story by one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time – Philip K Dick. Join the boys as they read “The Hanging Stranger,” complete with scary sound effects by the Extraordinary Jeri! | Josh and Chuck chose a truly unsettling story by one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time – Philip K Dick. Join the boys as they read “The Hanging Stranger,” complete with scary sound effects by the Extraordinary Jeri! | Thu, 31 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=304, tm_isdst=0) | 38919010 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. Happy Halloween. We just wanted to give you guys a heads up that Jerry went all out with this Halloween episode. And there is a moment of surprisingly graphic. Violence is brief and it's quick, but we just wanted to give a heads up to all the people who are sensitive to violence and all the parents. So at any rate, on with the show. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Spooktacular Bryant. I think I would have had something better than that. And there's Jerry over there. She's spooky all year round. So nothing different here. Nothing different. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm ready to get our Halloween read on. It's exciting. This is how many years in a row? Oh, man. I don't know. I think it goes back to something like 2010, maybe. And we don't want to pat ourselves on the back too much. But we have made great efforts, everyone, to keep the Halloween and Christmas episodes ad free at great peril. Oh, yeah. It's kind of like a constant clashing of swords against our shields and saying, back huskies. And we've done a good job with it so far. That's right. So you won't hear any ads on this episode because that really kills the buzz of the mood. You will hear those in our we're doing a shorty Halloween reading. In fact, I think that came out just prior to this one, and we didn't fight that battle. So sorry about that. Yeah. Hopefully that was a nice little warm up for this one, though. Yeah. Just get you primed. And this year, Chuck, we're doing one by an amazing author who hasn't been dead for 150 years, philip K. Dick. That's right. Who wrote to Android stream of electric sheep, which became Blade Runner, a Scanner Darkly, all sorts of amazing stuff. Right. Minority Report, I think. And this one, he also wrote a bunch of short stories. And this one I found was, like, in the public domain. So I said, let's do Philip K. Dick. That's right. He said, heck, yes, let's do. Philip K. Dick. Because we don't want to get sued by the Dick Foundation. No. So we wanted to make sure that everyone knows this is public domain. That's right. So do you want to get started? Yeah. We haven't discussed order or anything. We usually freewheel it. Do you have this thing segmented out or you just want to knock me over the head when I've gotten too far? I think we'll be able to tell, and if not, we'll just edit out the roughness. How about that? Who's going to start? I'll start. All right. Sure. Okay. You ready? I like the story, by the way. I love it. It's good. By the way. This is the Hanging Stranger by Philip K. Dick. At 05:00, Ed Loyce washed up tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the backyard. But for a 40 year old man, he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he'd saved and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself. It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters. Tired and grimfaced women loaded down with bundles and packages. Students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him. He'd arrived just in time to spell the help for dinner go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of Loy's TV Sales and Service. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a uturn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamp post. From the lamp post something was hanging. A shapeless, dark bundle swinging a little with the wind, like a dummy of some sort. Lois rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind. Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square again. He made a Uturn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy, and if it was a display, it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands. It was a body. A human body. That's you, buddy. All right. So, TV salesman, I'm really glad his wife is going to be able to buy that new vase. Sure. I thought that was a weird detail, too, because he's digging out the foundation of his house, which I think is that a red herring? We'll find out if we'll find out. Look at it. Lloyd snapped. Come on out here. Don Ferguson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pinstripe coat with dignity. This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there. See it? Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamp post jutted up against the sky. The post and the bundle swinging from it. There it is. How the hell long has it been there? His voice rose excitedly. What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past. Don Ferguson lit a cigarette slowly. Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there a reason? What kind of a reason? Ferguson shrugged. Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing? How would I know? Jeez. Ferguson's uptight? Yeah, a little uptight. Sure. Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. What's up, boys? There's a body hanging from the lamp post, Lloyd said. I'm going to call the cops. They must know about it, Potter said, or otherwise it wouldn't be there. I got to get back in. Ferguson headed back into the store. Business before pleasure. Lois began to get hysterical. You see it hanging there? A man's body. A dead man. Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee. You mean it's been there all afternoon? Sure. What's the matter? Potter glanced at his watch. Have to run. See you later, Ed. Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk, men and women passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention. Very good, Chuck. That was really good. Yeah. Apparently no one is concerned about this person hanging there but Ed Loyce, which is a little weird, if you think about it. I'm going nuts. Lloyd whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic among the cars, horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green. The man had been middle aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Lloyd had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue. For heaven's sake, Lois muttered. Sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over with revulsion and fear. Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean? And why didn't anybody notice? He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. Watch it. The man greeted. Oh, it's you. Ed nodded dazedly. Hello, Jenkins. What's the matter? The stationary clerk caught Ed's arm. He looks sick. The body there in the park? Sure, Ed. Jenkins led him into the alcove of Lois TV sales and service. Take it easy. Margaret. Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. Something wrong, ed's not feeling well. Lewis yanked himself free. How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake. What's he talking about? Margaret asked nervously. The body. Ed shouted. The body hanging there. More people collected. Is he sick? Is Ed loyce, are you okay yet? The body. Lloyd screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. Let me go. The police. Get the police. Ed. Better get a doctor. He must be sick or drunk. Lewis fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell through a blur. He saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Ferguson inside, talking to a man showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back of the service counter, setting up a new Filco. Lloyd shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmuring around him. Do something. He screamed. Don't stand there. Do something. Something's wrong. Something's happened. Things are going on. The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy set cops moving efficiently toward Lloyds man. No one's listening to Lois. He's also losing his bananas, as they say. I think I would have handled it a little differently. But what would you have done? I don't know. I'm not judging at Lloyds. Okay. All right. All right. So the cops are approaching here. Here we go. Name the cop with the notebook, murmured Lloyd. He mopped his head wearily. Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me back there. Address? The cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Lewis sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep, shuddering breath. First road? That's here in Pikeville? That's right. Lewis pulled himself up with a violent effort. Listen to me. Back there in the square, hanging from the lamp post, where were you today? The cop behind the wheel demanded. Where? Loyce echoed. You weren't in your shop, were you? No. He shook his head. No, I was at home. Down in the basement. In the basement? Digging a new foundation, getting out the dirt to poor cement frame. Why? What has this got to do with was anybody else down there with you? No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school. Voice looked from one heavyset cop to the other. Hope flickered across his face. Wild hope. You mean because I was down there, I missed the explanation? I didn't get in on it like everybody else? After a pause, the cop with the notebook said, that's right. You missed the explanation. Then it's official. The body is supposed to be hanging there. It's supposed to be hanging there for everybody to see. Edhouse grinned weekly. Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. Something like the Ku Klux Klan, some kind of violence communist or fascist taking over. He wiped his face with his breast pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. I'm glad to know it's on the level. It's on the level. The police car was getting near the hall of justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on. I feel better, Lewis said. I was pretty excited there for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand. There's no need to take me in, is there? The two cops said nothing. Very nice. You ready? Yeah. Feeding up. I know you're a tough act to follow, but here I go. I should be back in my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right now. No more trouble. Is there any need of this? Won't take long. The cop behind the wheel interrupted a short process. Only a few minutes. I hope it's short, Loyal muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. I guess I sort of disturbed the piece. Funny, getting excited like that. And Luis yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed, lloyd leaped onto the curb and raced among the people burrowing into the swarming crowds behind him. He heard sounds, shouts, people running. They weren't cops. He'd realize that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for 25 years without getting to know all the cops. They weren't cops, and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Ferguson, Jenkins. None of them knew why it was there. They didn't know, and they didn't care. That was the strange part. Lloyd stuck into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, passed the startled clerks and customers into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting. There was no sound behind him. He had gotten away. I think it's back to you, man. All right. So he made a run for it. He did. And now he's kind of safe for the moment. For the moment, he was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street. At the far end, a streetlight wavered and came on. Men and women stores, neon signs, cars, and to his right, the police station. He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the hall of justice. Barred windows, the police antenna, a great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them. Then Lewis moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance and something else. Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night, a prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky. Weird, I know. Very weird. He listened. Good God. He could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind to shut out the sound. A buzzing, a distant, muted, like a great swarm of bees. Oh, boy. Things are getting bad. It is. Whenever you see a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night, that's not a good sign. All right, go ahead. Lawyer gazed up rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness hanging over City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex, something moved. Flickering shapes, things descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof. Shapes, fluttering shapes from the sky, from the crack of darkness that hung above him. He was seeing them for a long time. Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water. They were landing, coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest and then crawled crab fashion sideways across the roof and into the building. He was sickened and fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him, and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there, groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on. Were there more of them? It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien from some other world, some other dimension, sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe, entering through this gap. Winged insects from another realm of being. That's me hitting the tennis ball bank. This is getting pretty scary. I think so, too. I mean, now we've got winged insect aliens coming from a chasm in the sky onto City Hall. Or do we just have a man losing his mind? That's a really good question, Chuck. Let's explore that further. On the steps of the City Hall, a group of men broke up a few moves toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others. Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them, pseudo men, imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men, like other insects familiar to Earth protective coloration, mimicry. Lloyd pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them. He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many now. At the bus stop stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbering along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom. Lloyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting, and when the bus halted, he boarded it and took a seat in the rear by the door. A moment later, the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street. Lloyds relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces, people going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus. The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man, blue suit, tie. A businessman or a salesman on his way home to his wife and family. Across the aisle, a young woman, perhaps 20, dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap, nylons and heels, red coat and white angora sweater, gazing absently ahead of her. A high school boy in jeans and black jacket. A great triple chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels, her face dim with weariness. Ordinary people, the kind that rode the bus every evening, going home to their families, to dinner. Well, you can make riding the bus home to dinner sounds sinister. Check. Thanks. Nice work. Going home with their minds dead, controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that it appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself too. Except that he had happen to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect. Foolproof. Maybe there were others. Hope flickered. And Lois. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not gotten control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power zone was limited. A few seats down the aisle, a man was watching him. Lloyd broke off his chain of thought. A slender man with dark hair and a small mustache, well dressed, brown suit, shiny shoes, a book between his small hands. He was watching Lloyce, studying him intently. He quickly turned away. Luis tensed. One of them or another they had missed. The man was watching him again. Small, dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them, or one of the things. An alien insect from beyond the bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took his seat. Opposite Voice. The elderly man caught the sharp eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them, a look rich with meaning. Voice got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door, one step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open. Hey. The driver shouted, jamming on his brakes. What the hell? I just wanted to keep reading until I got to say hell. You want to take over? Okay. Lloyd squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides, a residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings behind him. The bright eyed man had leapt up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him. Lloyd sleeped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain in a vast tide of blackness. Desperately he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off. Lloyds groped around. His fingers closed over something, a rock lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man. The bright eyed man with a book. Voice kicked. The man gasped and fell. Voice brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. Stop. For God's sakes. Listen. He struck again. The hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Voice scrambled up and back. The others were there now, all around him. He ran awkwardly down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book. The bright eyed man who had come after him. Had he made a mistake? But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out, away from them, out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his. He really shakes off a possible murder pretty easy. Too late to worry about that. That's in my path. It happened 10 seconds ago. Got to move forward. Ed. Janet? Lois backed away nervously. What is it? What, Ed? Lloyd slammed the door behind him and came into the living room. Pull down the shades, quick. Janet moved toward the window. But do as I say. Who else is here besides you? Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in the room. What happened? You look so strange. Why are you home? Do you like the new face? I bought it with the money we saved on the foundation work. You did? And locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink. He slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room. Listen to me, he said. I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me. Escaped? Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. Whoo? The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured. Out. They started at the top at the City Hall and Police Department. What they did with the real humans. What are you talking about? We've been invaded from some other universe, some other dimension. Their insects mimicry and more power to control our minds. Your mind, my mind. Their entrance is here. I think this is the role you were born to play. Thank you, Janet. Lloyd. Janet. Lloyd. Their entrance is here in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town, except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy. But they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited. They can make mistakes. Janet shook her head. I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane. Insane? No, just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement, I'd be like all the rest of you. Lloyd peered around the window. But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat. My coat? We're getting out of here, out of Pikesville. We've got to help to fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close, but we may make it if we hurry. Come on. He grabbed her arm roughly. Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that. White faced his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat. Where are we going? Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open to have all the highways covered. Of course. But there's a back road to Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it. The old ranch road. Good Lord. It's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it. I know. Ed thrust the map grimly in his coat. That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it? Janet was dazed. Should I keep going? Oh, man. Keep going. The Chevy. I had it filled up yesterday afternoon. Janet moved toward the stairs. Ed. I call the twins. Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far. Come on downstairs, Janet called in a wavering voice. We're going out for a while now. Let me do a different one for Tommy. Now. Tommy's voice came. Hurry up. Ed Bark, get down here, both of you. Tommy appeared at the stairs. I'm just doing my homework. We're starting fractions. Ms. Parker says if we don't get this done, you can forget about fractions. And grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. Where's Jim? He's coming. Jim started slowly down the stairs. What's up, dad? We're going for a ride. A ride? Where? Ed turned to Janet. We'll leave all the lights on and the TV set. Go turn it on. He pushed her toward the set so they'll think we're still he heard the buzz and dropped instantly. The long butcher knife out sickened. He saw it coming down the stairs at him. Wings. A blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse. The thing hurtling at him. Cold, multilensed, inhuman. Eyes, wings, body still clothed in a yellow Tshirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing? A stinger. Lloyd stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank, watching without expression. Lloyd stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down. Something lapsed through his mind, a wall of force, energy. An alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utter alien presence settling over him. And then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug. It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow tshirt, jeans. His son Jimmy. He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely, he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone still, neither of them moving. The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was 10 miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground gullies and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone. Lloyd opened the door. For a brief second, he looked back at his wife and son and he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps. Man, it is really quick to kill and move on. All right. Too late for that. That is move. Yeah. Stab and forget. And forget. Okay. A moment later, he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town. The early morning sunlight was blinding. Lloyd halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled 10 miles on his hands and knees, crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted. But ahead of him lay Oak Grove. He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had gotten out, away from Pikeville. A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house, a young woman watched in wonder. Lloyce reached the road and turned on to it. Ahead of him was a gas station and a drive in. A couple of trucks. Some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string. The white clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. Thank God he caught a hold of the wall. I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing, buzzing and flitting around behind me. What happened? The attendant demanded. You in a wreck. Hold up. Lloyd shook his head. Weirdly. They have the whole town, the City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in about four this morning. I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up. The attendant licked his lips nervously. You're out of your head. I better get a doctor. Give me into Oak Row. Voice gasped. He sank down on the gravel. We've got to get started cleaning them out. Got to get started right away. On to you, Chuckers. He kept a tape recorder going all the time. He talked. When he had finished, the commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face. You don't believe me, Lloyd said. The commissioner offered him a cigarette. Lloyd pushed it impatiently away. Suit yourself. The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. I believe you, he said abruptly. Voice sagged. Thank God. So you got away. The commissioner shook his head. You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million. Voice sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. I have a theory, he murmured. What is it about them, who they are? They take over one area at a time, starting at the top, the highest level of authority, working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control, they go on to the next town. They spread slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time. It's really filling in the blanks here, isn't he? He really is. He's got it all figured out. A long time. Thousands of years. I don't think it's new. Why do you say that? When I was a kid, a picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture. An old print. The enemy gods defeated by Jehovah. Moloch bielzebub moab Balin. Ashtarov chuck. I think you just raised a bunch of demons accidentally. So they were all represented by figures. Lloyd looked up at the commissioner. B Elzabeth was represented as a giant fly. The Commissioner grunted. An old struggle. They've been defeated. The Bible is in account of their defeats. They make gains. But finally they're defeated. Why defeated? They can't get everyone. They didn't get me, and they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world the realization of the danger. The two men on the bus, I think they understood, had escaped like I did. He clenched his fists. I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance. The commissioner nodded. Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control. He turned from the window. Well, Mr. Loyce, you seem to have figured everything out. Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamp post. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there? That would seem simple. The commissioner smiled faintly. Bait? Lloyd stiffened. His heart stopped beating. Bait? What do you mean? To draw you out. Make you declare yourself so they'd know who was under control and who had escaped. Voice recoiled with horror than they expected. Failures, they anticipated. He broke off. They were ready with a trap. And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known. The commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. Come along, Lloyd. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste. Lloyd started slowly to his feet, numbed. And the man? Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger, all muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed. There was a strange look on the commissioner's face as he answered. Maybe, he said softly, you'll understand that too. Come along with me, Mr. Lloyce. He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Lloyd caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort, a telephone pole and a rope. Right this way, the commissioner said, smiling coldly. All right. I think we know what's happening. Take us home. As the sun set, the vice president of the Oak Grove Merchants Bank came up out of the vault through the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner. Good night, the guard said, locking the door after him. Good night, Clarence. Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the layout of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished. At the corner, he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around and froze. From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind. What the hell was it? Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad. He couldn't tell what it was, yet it drew him on, made a move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened and fascinated. And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it. All right. That's The Hanging Stranger by Philip K. Dick. Pretty good. What's your take? Whether he was insane or not, I think the end proves that he was quite sane and that he would just be the next victim. The bank manager? No, Lloyd. Yeah, Lloyd was the next victim. He was part of a chain of bait, so I think he was sane. But he definitely killed another non possessed person and his son with a rock. But I think, though, because he wasn't insane, that his son was a human fly. Really? Like the cramp said. Yeah, because he was not insane. So what he saw was real, which means that him seeing his son flying around trying to sting him was real. All right, what's your take? It was. That what you said. Okay. See, this is why we get along so well, Chuck. I got to see this thing visually. Somebody needs to make this into a short film. It would be a pretty good one, I think. Yeah. And it's public domain. That's right. And, well, thank you very much, everybody. Happy Halloween to you. Hopefully you enjoyed this. Sure, it wasn't fact based. It was a little more fictitious than usual, but it is, after all, Halloween. Yeah. Be safe out there. Yes, for sure. And enjoy your trick or treating and your Halloween parties and bobbing for apples. And happy Halloween to everybody. Go enjoy this, one of the most greatest holidays of all time. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple. Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
The Delightful History of Steam Technology | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-delightful-history-of-steam-technology | One of the coolest things humans have ever figured out is how to use steam as power. It made the Industrial Revolution possible and even today, 88% of America's electricty comes from steam turbines. | One of the coolest things humans have ever figured out is how to use steam as power. It made the Industrial Revolution possible and even today, 88% of America's electricty comes from steam turbines. | Thu, 18 Aug 2016 12:55:43 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=12, tm_min=55, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=231, tm_isdst=0) | 50893045 | 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. There's Jerry over there. There's stuff you should know. What was that? That was a little extra something on top, I guess. A little hot sauce. Yeah. Tulula. So we just got back from our wonderful tour of the United Kingdom in Ireland, and it could not have gone better. Right. And you may be hearing more about this in the future, or we may never speak of it again. That's true, too. Oh, before we go, though, before we go yeah, we're still we're just starting out. Before we get started, I started my own little personal Charles W Chuck Bryant Facebook page. Nice. As a public figure. Yeah, I've got one of those, too. You do? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's largely neglected. I probably pay attention to it. So basically, you say, I have a haunted ghost house that I own. Feel free to walk by every now and then. Click. My house is populated by me and go like, the page. And I'm going to be sharing a little more personal stuff, like my opinion on things and sharing music I like photos of your bare knees. Photos of my knees. Photos of my animals. Nice. Just a little more stuff like that, because I get yelled at now when I do anything. Semi personal stuff you should know. Page. Yeah. I think I'll go and have a mind, too. Yeah. So if you want a piece of me, as gross as that sound, look for Charles W Chuck Bryan on Facebook. And it's going to be a party. It is. That's the logo. I neglect my Facebook page, but I am fairly active on Twitter. Yeah. You got your own Twitter thing. Yeah, it's Josh Clark. Of course it is. Yeah. I do the same thing on that, though. It's like I'm a little more opinionated and share more personal stuff. Yes. We're a lot of the real human beings. Exactly. Need of we don't have to be brand ambassadors. Yeah. We could take our sashes off. All right, so that's all for announcements for me. So, Chuck yes. Have you ever encountered water? Yeah. So you know that there are three states of matter and water is a great demo of these different states, right? Yeah. I encounter every morning when I wash my horse. You should share pictures of you washing your horse on your Facebook page. Great. What's your horse's name? Ganchio. Ganev. Nice, man. There's just a few hundred people who know what you're talking about. That's right. So when you're washing gancho and that nice water is coming down all over his horsey body yes. It is in its liquid state, right? Yes. And when it's in its liquid state, its density is different than when it's in a solid state. That's right. It's more dense than it's solid state. Eg ice or Ie ice. Sorry, but then if you really heated it up and turn it into steam, it would turn into water vapor, right? Yes. Then it's in its gaseous state and it's less dense. That's right. Those molecules could not get further apart. Well, they probably could. So while its density is smaller in ice, it actually takes up less space, right? That's correct. So if you put that water in a space and you froze it, it would shrink inside the space. If you expanded it into water vapor, it would take up more space. That's right. And as it takes up more and more space, it's pressure increases. That's right. And if you could only be clever enough to figure out a way to harness that pressure, my friend, you would have harnessed what's called steam power. That's right. And that is the show for today. And Robert Lamb of Stuff to Blow Your Mind wrote this one. How Steam Technology works on our website. How Stuff Works. Yeah, it's a good one. Robert can write a fine article, that guy, for sure. So let's go back in time a little, in the old way back machine, the steam powered one. Yeah, today it is. So it might take a little longer to get these coal fires burning and sound different, but, Jerry, it's hard at work over there shoveling coal, throwing levers. So let's go back. We're going to need a lot of coal, Jerry, because we're going back all the way to Ad. 75. Shovel faster, Jerry. How about a smile? I was just about to say you'd be a wonderful whip guy for the coal shovelers, but not if you're asking them to smile, because then it turns into a Broadway show. How about a Smile? Yeah. Then the next song is called How About a Smile? Right. And all the cold shovelers. Sing it. Yeah. That's not bad. Actually. I'm picturing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom all of a sudden. Yeah. Were they shoveling coal? No, they were mining. Okay. So I guess in a way, they're shoveling coal, but they were getting it out of the ground. They were extracting it rather than depositing it into a fire. That was all wrong. So let's go back to Ad. 75 and a true hero named Hero, the great mathematician Hero. He was writing books on mechanics. He was thinking a lot about air. And way back he was and way back in 80, 75, he actually conceived of steam as an engine in a way that we'll see came back to roost a bit. Back to roost. Is that the right yeah, it left for a while like a chicken, and then it came back and roosted. Yeah, exactly. He didn't have the technology to pull it off at the time, but what he thought about was a hollow sphere with these bent tubes coming out the side. And then fill that thing with water. Let's say it looks like a football with arms. Fill up that football with water, put it over a fire, and eventually that water is going to boil. It's going to turn into water vapor inside, and it's going to come out those arms, and it's going to spin that little football, and it perfectly thrown spiral, or it's going to go spin around in an axis. Like Curly on his shoulder on the floor from The Three Stooges. Yeah, but it's attached to something right over the fire. Yeah, exactly. So it's spinning. He called that thing an alien pile. And he actually had a number of different ideas and inventions, two theoretical ones using steam. One was a steam powered bird. This would have been about the right time for the Class of the Titans. Remember that little robot steam bird in there? The first movie, you mean? Yeah, the original one with Harry hamlin. Yeah, I mean, that's basically this guy is the one who came up with that. Boy, that medusa really scared me when I was a kid. Same here. And I'd completely avoided that remake because it looks so bad. Yeah, I was thinking about that when I was like, oh, wait, that was in Clash of the Titans. And I thought about the remake. Clash of the Titans. Yeah. Nobody's actually they're not making these movies as like an homage to a great movie. Right. They're doing it because they're like, we don't have any ideas, so we're just going to poke your nostalgia and hopefully get a few bucks out of you and disappoint you and probably ruin the original one for you. That's true. But while I do love nostalgia as evidence in our show on nostalgia, my nostalgia poke button has a cover over it. So when people go to poke it, they just get rebuffed. You should get one of those ones that shock people when they poke it. But I have to raise that cover to allow my button to be pushed. So how does that cover get raised? I have to allow it. I have to want to dive into the pool of nostalgia. You can't just come along and be like, oh, look, another Red Dawn poke button. Does that ever get made? Yeah. Okay, so hero, right? Yeah, hero. Hero comes up with this thing. He was very much limited, and this would be the case for tens of centuries that steam power was theoretically far more advanced than practical material science. Yeah, he was way ahead of his time. Yeah. I mean, steam, the power you can harness from steam is practically unlimited by depending on the materials that can hold the thing. Right. If you have material that can hold infinitely dense amount of steam or infinitely pressurized amount of steam, you could run the world, my friend. But we don't have that. And here, I definitely didn't have it. He basically could just draw it and say, this will be great someday. Yeah, which was great. I mean, that's how things get made. He was just ahead of his time, like, by about 1600 years. Yeah. He was a futurist. Yeah. So, flash forward. We'll rev up the machine again, and we'll put her along to Italy now, and one Giovanni Batista de la Porte of Naples said, you know what? I've got some theories about steam, too, and I think what we can do is actually create a vacuum. So if we take that water, that's steam, and it's in a closed container, it's going to increase pressure in there like we're talking about. Sure. So if we condense it back down to water by cooling it in that same chamber, because they hadn't quite figured out that you should do this separately, which we'll get to, he said, that will decrease pressure, and in theory, it'll create a vacuum. It'll create a pool. Right. They want genius. Yeah, that's great. And the French, of course, said, let's see how we can apply this to cooking. And they did within, I think, about 70 years, a guy named Danny Papan who was not related to Jacques Pepin I wonder where I heard that name, but may have been who is Jacques Pepen? Very famous French chef. Okay. Right. Great guy. I couldn't I thought you were talking about Mario Batali. No, that's Italy. This is France. Right. They basically took this idea and they said, surely there's a way to use this for cooking. And Denise Papan created what is essentially the first pressure cooker. Yes. The name is so great. The digester, or engine for softening bones. Right. It would extract, like, proteins and fats and all that stuff from the bones and leave the bones brittle. So you could turn the bones into bone powder and get all the good stuff from it and cook with that. Right. Yes. What I'm not sure of, though, he ended up attaching a piston, essentially, to it. Why did he do that? As a pressure release valve. Okay. Yeah. All right. That makes sense. Right. So he added, basically, the world's first pressure release valve to the world's first pressure cooker. Yes. The first steam powered piston. Like, he didn't know it yet, but he was laying the groundwork for an engine. Yeah. That's definitely one thing that emerged from researching this, Chuck, is that the history of steam power is definitely built on the backs of earlier people. That's neat. You can trace it all back to one guy who's, like, go forth and make this. Do you know what struck me was I was researching all these great men doing these things, and I thought, how much further would we be along in the world if women all throughout antiquity just could do whatever they wanted as well? Yeah. And contribute themselves. Yeah. Like, they literally cut off half of society and said, you just go do this, and it's valuable to raise families and to cook and clean and do all the things that women were forced to do back then, but they could also do other things, I bet. I mean, they were doing other things. I'm not trying to say that they weren't making advances, but they certainly were. Nobody's taking it that way. They weren't allowed to go into the science labs. No, but you make a good point. If raising a family is an extremely important pursuit, which I think we both agree it is, would society be as far as it is now if men and women had been equally involved in pursuing science and nobody was raising the family? 200 years ago, there's a lady who could have figured out a cure for cancer, but in her family, no. You scrubbed that thing and turned that butter wonder. She just muttered to herself, I hear you. Anyway. And necessity as a mother of invention is the other thing that really came to mind, because all these advancements usually came along because they wanted to do something specifically. Well, almost every time there was an advancement in definitely material science, there was somebody who had invented a new steam thing that was limited by the poor materials available at the time. Right. When the new materials came along, they just immediately used it for this steam invention that had been drummed up 100 years before. Yeah. So just constantly with advancing by leaps and bounds. Now, I think I have just bungled my message so poorly that people are going to say, chuck, there were plenty of women of science in the early days. So to make up for that, we're going to have to do a podcast on the early pioneers of science who are women. Okay, I pledge to do that now. But my message was pure, you know what I'm saying? Sure. Anybody doesn't get that, sometimes they don't talk so good, which is funny, because it's your job. I know, right. All right, so 17th century, we're going forward in time a little bit more. And over in England, where we just got back from, they had a timber crisis because they were advancing, they were building so many things made out of wood, namely ships and, of course, homes and things, and they were in those homes. They need a lot of firewood. Right. So you still needed the wood to build ships and things. Right. They found out, hey, we can use coal for fires at least. Yeah. We're running low on timber, so we need to allocate it smartly. Yeah. So let's use coal, which was great, but to get more coal, you have to dig deeper. And to dig deeper means it's going to be wetter, you're going to hit the water table eventually. And so eventually, this all led to a problem, which was, hey, we're down in this coal mine now, and it's full of water. How can we rectify this? Right? So necessity once again pops up. Everybody just stood around thinking for about 50 years, everything came to a halt, and then finally, there was a woman in the background going, I got to tell you how to do this. This dude named finally, a man spoke up, and everyone listened. That's right. A guy in 1698 named Thomas Savory. He was a military engineer. He had come up with something that he called a miner's friend, which I don't know if that's the best name for it, but maybe 1698 it was. Sure. So his miners friend was basically it's really neat. So it's very tough to describe this stuff from here on out. Every time we describe something, you're going to get lost, so just go look up a diagram of what we're talking about. It helps, and it definitely helps. For sure. It helped me big time. Yeah. Basically what it was was there was a pot of boiling water, and in this pot of boiling water, steam would be created. I mean, an enclosed pot with pipes coming out, but valves keeping it shut. Right? Yeah. And you would create steam, and the steam would be transferred into another chamber with a pipe that was going down to the water that you wanted to get out of the ground. Okay. That's right. Okay. You would introduce steam into this, right. And then you would introduce cold water into that steam filled chamber, and it would suddenly condense the water, create a vacuum, and that vacuum would pump the water out of the ground. Right. Then you had another pipe that would siphon off the water from that chamber. Because there was a non return valve. Once the water came up, it couldn't go back down. Yeah. That was the key. Sure. And then they would pump the water out of that tube, that pipe, and then do the whole process over again. Yeah. And it worked pretty well. But he didn't sell a ton of them to the mining. It didn't become the miners friend like he thought. What it really became was the rich person who wanted to garden friend. Let's pump our swampy estate out, friend. Pretty much. And the reason why is because to run it effectively and safely, you could only get about 25ft of water out. If you're pumping water off a 500 foot mine, that meant you had to have one of these huge setups every 25ft and be pumping up to a reservoir that eventually pumped it up out of the mine. So there's no way you could do that. Plus, every one of these setups had to have people running the valves. Like, all the valves and things were operated manually, and they had a pretty bad reputation for blowing up. This guy wanted to sell it and change the mining industry. He didn't, but he did end up creating a scientific and historical proof of concept. Yeah. Well, you know what? Let's take a break, and we will come back and pick back up with a couple of other brilliant dudes who advanced on those inventions. All right, so 1698, was the miner's friend. I don't know why that's so funny to me. Just about 14 years later, in 1712, there was a blacksmith named Thomas Newcommon and his little buddy John Kelly, who was his assistant. A plumber and glass blower. I get the feeling like everybody back then, blue glass, you just knew what you were doing. Yeah. Make your own window. Like today. What is something everyone can do today? Drive a car. Yeah. Or complain on social media. Sure. Stop posting personal stuff. Yeah. That's the glass blowing of today. Posting on social media. Complaining on it. Sure. I think you might be right. So he was a glass blower and plumber? His assistant was. And they said, you know what, let's create a better system. It's more efficient. It was called the newcomen engine. I guess Cali as an assistant didn't get his name in there. No. I would have lobbied for the new cali or something. Maybe combined the names. It's clever, but newcomer. No, it's my name. You're the assistant. So they took a savory's separation of the boiler and then added Papine's steam driven piston, and all of a sudden they had the newcomen engine. Well, no, they took the boiler and put it combined it together. Right. So you had this piston and it was heated and then cooled. And then heated and cooled. Right. So it was like combined into one. Yes. But it was a piston that was moving up and down, right? Well, yes, but it was a piston that was moving up and down via this thing that looks kind of like a seesaw. Yeah. It was connected to that. Right. And then the other end of that seesaw was the pump. So one end is a piston moving this thing up and down like the seesaw, and the other end is the pump. Yeah. And what it's really doing is it's pulling it down on either side. Yeah. It's not pushing ever. Like one side pulls making one side go up, the other side pulls, making the other side go up. Right. So you've got that steam being generated and it's pushing the piston up. And then you hit it with some cold water and a vacuum is created. That's right. And this thing could go through twelve cycles a minute. Hey, not bad for the daily days. It's true. And it was beyond a proof of concept. Like, this thing actually really worked. You could use it to do all sorts of work with. Yeah, it was in hundreds of mines all over Britain and in Europe. So people were like digging into this thing called the engine for the first time. It's pretty amazing. But what happened was, with everything, these engineers start to say, you know what, let's improve on this. Let's improve the efficiency with the pump, let's improve the cylinders. You get better iron along the way, stronger iron. And this new coming engine is just kind of refined over a period of years right. Just from people tinkering with it. Right. It's working better and better. And there was one guy whose name you'll probably recognize. His name is James Watt. I think he was born in England, but he made his name in Glasgow, Scotland. Yeah. My new favorite country. Yeah, it's a great country. I think his name was James the game changer. What? Yeah. If he was a boxer, that's what he would have been called. Although he took the newcomen engine and changed it back closer to the miner's friend, though, because the new come and combined the boiler with the condenser and he separated them out again. What he figured out was if you just keep the piston hot right. The piston chamber hot and you have a separate condenser, you're going to use less energy keeping the condenser cool and the piston hot. Because one of the dumb things about the new combined engine, and the reason why it took so long to go through these cycles, so where you could only do twelve a minute, was because when it was hot and the steam rose when you hit it with that cold water, it cooled off in a vacuum was created. You had to wait for the thing to heat up again to get the steam. If you had the cool water over here and the steam over here, you would keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool. It was the McDLT. It was. And you could use them to hit the piston as often as you wanted. And it really improved its efficiency. Yeah. Like the engine is really starting to take hold now in home, like an engine should. Yeah. So he partners up with a guy named Matthew Bolton. I'm not sure now, spelled differently than Michael. There's a you in there. Michael is just B-O-L-T-O-N. Right. Well, this guy is the British spelling. Oh. So he could be a distant relative. You never know. I like to think so. Whatever happened to Michael Bolton? Oh, I guarantee he's still touring and making records and stuff like that. They don't go away. They might not be in the international limelight anymore, but they're still doing what they do. There's always a home in Branson, Missouri. Sure. Or Vegas. Yeah. All right. So Wat is partnered up with Bolton. They are making a more fuel efficient engine now with that separate condenser. And this led to two other inventions. One called the Fly Ball Governor and one called the double acting Engine. The Flyball Governor. It's so difficult to understand. Got to look it up. There's videos on YouTube. Yeah. You can't just look up a picture of it. You have to see like an animated version of it. Yeah. And once you see it, it all makes sense. And I want to say I want to give a huge shout out to a site that I found extremely helpful. It's called animatedengines.com, and they have all these graphics of engines, and you can speed up the frames per second or slow it down, and it shows you, like, all the moving parts. Yeah, I saw that, too. You get it. You just get it. But the fireball governor is so we'll confuse you now with words. Well, no, the fireball governor, we're just going to say, just go look it up. But basically, it is a way to automate the opening and closing of valves using the steam that's being produced itself. So what figured out, this thing is making a lot of steam, and a lot of the steam is going to waste. What if I took this waste theme and redirected it to do other stuff like open and closed valves? Yes. That was a huge innovation. They also came up with the double acting engine, where they figured out, like, you don't need to create a vacuum anymore, guys, we can just use steam to make the piston go up and steam to make the piston go down. Double acting engine. Pretty neat. Yeah, those were enormous, enormous changes. Again, that laid a bunch of groundwork. They kicked the thing forward and said, hey, 20 years from now, get your inventors together, because we just came up with some new ideas that you guys need to go build better metal to contain it with. Yeah, and don't forget about us. Yes. James Watt. And I'm the other guy. Exactly. So what this is would set the table for the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, which began in the textile industry. And wool specifically for many years, had been processed by hand. Then they eventually took it down by the river and had a water mill that would in a van by the river. And this water mill, would you all seen how those work if you've been to any still mountain park here. Still has one. Sure. Pretty neat. Basically just using hydro well, let's say hydroelectric, but hydro power sure to spin a wheel. And they figured out, hey, why don't we use steam instead? And Bolton and Watts engine works really well, and people are using it like crazy. But they were so early in the game. They had all these patents that sort of made it hard, like these minds were going broke paying money on these patents to use this technology. Right. What are they called? Royalties. Yeah. And so this other dude comes along, a guy named Richard Trevithick from Cornwall in England. I think it's southwest south. What? Yeah. Known for their game hens. And there's supposedly a great witchcraft museum there I've always wanted to go to, but really, I still have not been able to make it. So they're known for game hens, the Cornish engine, which we're talking about, and a witchcraft museum. Yeah. Not bad. No, that's not bad at all. And corn. Yeah, corn. So he was living in Cornwall and he saw what was going on with all these miners. He said, you know what I'm going to do? Screw those guys in their patents. I'm going to just think of brand new technology that's better, that you don't have to pay royalties on their patents. They said too, on my patent. He had a real bad attitude. Yeah. But he was smart. He was. He actually was super smart. This guy may have pushed theme further ahead than even Watt, and I'd never heard of the guy before. Do you? No. I have the impression he's a national hero in England. Probably so. But he had the great fortune of having some much more improved materials available to him. Sure. So for a long time, people had said, like, man, if we could just get these containing vessels to hold really high pressure, we could do amazing stuff with this. Yes. They knew pressure is what drove the piston. So the more pressure, the better. Right? Yeah. Not only the more pressure, the better, the less initial input you would have to put in with energy. It would be more energy efficient. Right. You could just get right. So Travis had the advantage of having really good, better materials available to them to make this stuff. So he created this Cornish engine, and the Cornish engine used higher pressure. But not only that, it was a compounding engine, meaning that it used the steam in more than one way. Right. So rather than one piston, he's like, why not have four pistons? And one piston is fired, and then some steam from that piston escapes and fires another piston and another, and all of a sudden you're doing four times the work. I'm from Cornwall. It was amazing. Yeah. And there was an American inventor named Oliver Evans who was kind of doing similar things in the United States. And then a guy named Arthur Wolf. I'm sorry, arthur Wolfe is the one that came up with compounding. Oh, right. Yeah. Travis, his main contribution was basically just making it more rock solid, cheaper, lighter, more efficient engine that used high pressure. Yeah. Steam. Wolf. W-O-O-L-F like Virginia Wolf. Not Wolf. Wolf. Wolf. It just seems funny looking. He was a brewery engineer. He made beer. And he's the one that said, yeah, why don't we get all these pistons going? All pistons firing, more pistons, pistons everywhere. Yeah. It just made total sense. Should we take a break? Yes. All right. We got steam coming out of everywhere. Steam engines, they're working, they're turning pistons. And so all of this eventually would lead to use to move things and people around. Yeah. People are like, I'm so tired of walking. My legs are so bad. Can you take the steam technology and make a steampowered car? And apparently people have been working on it for a while. There's some debate over who created the first steam powered vehicle. And supposedly there's a guy named Ferdinand Verbiast. Who's the Verbiage? Ferdinand. He supposedly created a steam car in 1672, but I guess that's up for debate. You could draw a schematic of something, but it doesn't necessarily mean you actually created it, I think is the issue. Yeah, that's true. We have no idea what was actually on the other side of a newcomen steam engine, because none of the diagrams ever mentioned it. It's all about the steam engine itself. They don't talk about, like, the pump, so we don't really know what kind of pumps they were using, that kind of thing. So if we go back, we can't say for certain that this guy did it. It's possible, but I think widely the guy named Nicolas Joseph Kuno nice. Who is a French inventor, obviously created a steam powered vehicle in 1769. But steampowered cars, they went virtually nowhere. That's like when I invented the snowboard, I thought, because evidence by my crayon drawing of the ski board. And then we heard from people that said, sorry, the snowboard was actually before that, even. Right. So whatever. But like you said, I created that in a vacuum. A vacuum created by condensing water vapor. Yeah. So as far as I'm concerned, I did invent the snowboard. Sure. Yeah. You're tapped into the Zeitgeist. People wanted to go really fast on a skateboard down a mountain yeah. While it was snow covered, and you just wanted to deliver on that. And six year old Chuck in stone out in Georgia. I was so cute. You did see the Water Wheel, right? I'd seen my first ski movie. Which one? No, I was just kidding. But those were big back then. Sure. Remember better Off Dead. Sure. That was a ski movie of sorts of part. Someone said something funny on Twitter the other day about I can't remember who it was. Some politician said reminds him of a 80s ski movie villain. It's really good because every ski movie in the 80s had a bad guy. Oh, yeah. It was always the developer looking to build condos at the ski resort. Exactly. All right, so you're right. The car is one thing, but what if we could make something larger? Trevothic actually was kind of key in this. And he said, you know what? We've got these things. They don't call them railroad tracks yet. They just call them rails on the ground. Yeah. And you hook a donkey up to a cart. Yeah. And it's really to help the donkey. Sure. Because they are so stupid they can't walk in a straight line. Really? But all that, too. But if they're pulling a car on rails that have already been laid out on the path they're supposed to follow, they're fine. Just give them a couple of carats and maybe a nice scratch behind the ear and they're okay. Yeah. They were called tram ways. Officially. I was just kidding. So trying to think is like, hey, let's put something steam powered on these tracks. Yeah. Brilliant. And he tried it, he actually came up with something called Trevor Thick portable steam engine, which he called the Puffing Devil. That was his name for it. Nice. And it worked. He did a demonstration where it hauled ten tons of iron for 10 miles. Do you know how huge that is at the time? Sure, yeah. Amazing. Because everything up to that point had been hauled by donkeys. Horsepower. Yeah, literal horsepower. Right. Yeah. Obviously not just donkeys. There were horses, too, but everything was very much localized. I don't think we've said it yet, but steam power was the literal engine for the Industrial Revolution. This is where it all started, for sure. And the way that it started was you could suddenly take timber in this area and move it over to this area, hundreds of miles away, with coal in this area, to power these steam engines over here. Change the course of history. It did. Water turning into water vapor and containing that. It's amazing. It started in England. Yeah, it's just pretty neat. You're pandering. No, it's true, though. Like, over here in America, we're like, yeah, the Industrial Revolution really picked up in the 19th century of America, but its roots are definitely further back. Yeah. This is in. I think I learned that England cannot be flattered with flattery, they know. Don't pander to us, pal. No. All right, so it's 18 eight. You've got what do you call it? The Industrial Revolution? No, the Devil's Puffer. The Puffer Devil. The Puffing Devil. Puffing Devil. Like the Devil's Puffer. Sure. That is it's a minor spread. You got a party. So this is a portable steam engine. He takes it to London, central London, puts it on a circular track and everyone goes, Blimey, what is that? It is of the devil. It's a Puffing Devil. Yeah. And it's amazing. And there was an engineer there named George Stevenson, and a couple of decades after Trevithick, he said, you know what, I'm going to take that and I'm going to like everyone else before saying, I'm going to make it better, more efficient. And all of a sudden, things got so good, they actually opened up what I think is the first town to town railroad line between because they're trying to move coal from Durham to Stockton at a shipping port, and it works so well, they said, all right, let's do this. Let's put in the infrastructure, build what this guy is calling a locomotive track. Sure. And that was, I think, the very first operating locomotive track. And it didn't just carry cargo, it carried 600 passengers, too. Yeah. He said, Why don't we put people on that thing? Right? And they're like, Is this safe? And he's like, no, not at all. Yeah. But I really have a lot to prove, so just pick 600 criminals, who cares? Yeah. Don't sit near the boiler and you'll be fine. So in the meantime, people are still tinkering around with the steam car that didn't go away, but it never took off. No. And the steam locomotive was just this beautiful design. Think about it. So let's go back to all the steam engines. We talked about it's steam moving a piston back and forth. Back and forth. Right. Yeah. Or up and down. Of course. Sure. But in this case it's moving horizontally. The piston is and the piston is attached to a bar that's attached to a wheel. And if you want to get kind of fancy, you can attach several wheels to this bar. And as the piston's moving back and forth, this bar is actually making an ellipse. And as far as the wheels are concerned, they're making circles. And you're moving forward as this is happening. Yeah. And again, go to animatedengine.com and look up a steam locomotive and it's just amazing in its design. Like these people really just got in there and roll up their shirt sleeves and had like coal dust on their faces and really they were doing some real engineering. Oh, yeah. I'm just so impressed with the guys who made this stuff. It was amazing. Yeah. Of course, this is no surprise, but there are I don't know what they call themselves, but there are big time train aficionados that go and just watch trains. Trainoids. They might be called Train Watchers. Even Train Spotters. No. Are you sure? I don't think so. Probably. But the trainees I can't remember where I came across it, but it was in another podcast I was researching and found this whole subculture of people that find these old they watch all kinds of trains, but mainly what really gets them going to get them out of bed in the morning, their miners friend up. Yeah. The promise of an old fashioned steam locomotive that's going through town because they still have them. It's amazing. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, I get why people do it. Sort of like birding. It's a very solitary kind of quiet thing. Yeah. And then that train rumbles by. I understand. I've never been into trains or whatever. I think the steam engine on the steam locomotive is amazing. Yeah. And you like to take trains? Sure. We took a train from Manchester to Edinburgh. Lovely. It was a really nice ride to the English countryside. Yeah. In Scottish. Yes. I couldn't tell the difference. I could. I was like, yeah, we're in Scotland now. I know. Alright, so the steam engine is chugging along. Steven, they called it. So Cool. He was a conductor on locomotion number one. That one was 600 passengers. Yeah. It's just so cool that they named it like Locomotion Number One. This is the very first time they've been done. They are very prestigious. This is just so cool. Right. It's like the first plane flight or something. We need to do one on the Wright brothers. Okay, I'm happy to do that. They're from Ohio. No, sorry. Screw them. I wouldn't even say their name. So chuck yes. The steam locomotive, it was pretty much an out of the gate hit. Some poor people were still working on the steampowered car, but in the meantime, other people were like, what about steamboats? Yeah, let's come up with something like that. And some people have been kicking around the idea for that as well. Apparently, it followed pretty closely the evolution of the steam locomotive, too. Just people building on ideas and people coming with proof of concepts. And it was an American guy named Robert Fulton who created the first steam powered, paddle wheeled boat that showed that it was actually capable of moving up and down rivers. Yeah. There was a guy in England about 40 years earlier named Jonathan Hall who had the first steam powered tugboat, but it didn't work too well because, again, the technology with these newcomer and savory engines just weren't good enough. Right. But it was really Fulton who said, Come aboard. How quaint is this? Yeah. Do you like my cats and cat? Yeah. Traveling up and down the river with a paddleboat. How quaint. They're like, well, we don't have any future things to compare it to, so it's just contemporary to us. Well, in dudes that were professional oresman, we're like, no, I really like the look of this. Exactly. It's wonderful. So Fulton created the first one, but it was a guy named Williams Simmington who gets credit for the first fully steam powered passenger boat. Yeah. The Charlotte Dundas. And Fulton's was the Claremont. What they would do with these sailing ships is they would now outfit them with steam power for when the wind was down. Right. And just to augment the wind. And it worked out great. And in 1819, the Savannah became the very first steam power chip to make a transatlantic crossing. Yes. And apparently this steam power was such a threat to sale makers that a consortium of sale makers lobbied the British government, saying, hey, can you do something? Can you stifle the steam technology? Yeah. Can you shut down this amazing embarrassment? Right. Because we make sales. Yeah. Didn't work. Every time something is automated, like the ATM or something, and people say, people are going to lose jobs. You're looking at history, buddy. That's all history has been, is one advancement that puts people out of work, creating a new industry where people can work. And it's sad in a way, but it's just part of it. It's called moving forward. Yes. Too bad. So sad for the sale industry. Yeah. Sale making industry. But, you know, there's people still recreationally. Sure. Yeah. So now we get the best part, in my opinion. Chuck yeah. I like the locomotive. So the steam turbine, the electricity producing steam powered turbine. Yeah. There's a good argument for that. I love it. Remember how electricity works episodes? I do. So electricity is created when you spin a copper coil inside a magnet right. Yeah. And Michael Faraday created what he called a dynamo, which is basically that. And he said, hey, steam guys of the future, I got an idea for you. Go ahead and come up with a steam powered dynamo. Can you do it? Yeah. And they said about trying to make that happen. Part of the problem, though, is they figured out that with a steam powered piston, which is what all steam power or steam engines powered, where pistons up to that point, you could only do so many cycles of minimums. Yeah. And you need the dynamo going pretty fast to create some electricity or enough to use on an industrial scale. So, this dude named Charles Algernon Parsons, he was British in 1884, he figured out that there was a new type of steel available, and you could create a pretty nice turbine from it. And if you took that turbine and went all the way back to basically hero's original idea, which is spinning. But rather than having the steam spin the actual vessel, you had a vessel creating steam that you're shooting out at the turbine. Yeah. You can spin a dynamo pretty fast. Yes. 18,000 revolutions a minute was his dynamo. And in 1890, jack that was enough to generate electricity, and they installed it forthwidth at the fourth bank's power station. And the rest of Europe said, holy cow, we have electricity. It's amazing. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, something like 88% of the electricity in the United States still today is made through steam. Yeah. Steam turbines. Amazing. 80% worldwide is made through steam turbines. So this guy changed the world along with Faraday. Yeah, of course. And everyone else before. Right. Because everybody's building on the work of everybody else. And all the women who supported those men exactly. Who probably had better ideas. Yeah. We could have come up with this 7800 years ago. So, we mentioned a few times that this was dangerous. Exploding boilers were a problem, man. Even when they figured out safety valves, early safety valves wouldn't work. Actually, later safety valves have proved to not work on occasion, in the case of three mile island, but it got a bad rap in the press, of course, and that probably slowed progress a bit, but progress continued nevertheless. Well, even today, there's boiler explosions. There's a big one at a plant. Dana corporation plant in Tennessee just blew up, like, a significant portion of the plant. And it's not just that. It's, like, throwing hot water out everywhere. That the pressure that can build up in these high pressure systems in these vessels. If the vessel gives when that steam hits the regular atmosphere, it expands. And you have basically, I think I read something like a 10,000 kilogram vessel of water, which is what you would find in, like, a steam locomotive. Yeah. If it blew up, it would blow up with a force equivalent of one ton of TNT. Crazy. Yeah. So it's a big deal if your blower blows up and it all comes down to the safety valves and whether or not they're allowing too much pressure to build up, and then your vessels ability to withstand that added pressure. Yeah. Pretty scary. It is kind of scary, but it's there. Pretty scary. I don't want to be involved in a boiler accident. No, I don't think anyone wants to. All right, we're going to finish, I think, with this, right? Unless you have other stuff no. Beyond supercritical fluid. I do, kind of. All right, we'll finish with that then. But right now, super critical fluid we'll talk about it is earlier when you talked about solid, liquid, and gas, each having their molecule distribution at different densities. Right. Something really strange happens, as Robert points out, when you go through from solid to liquid to gas, and if you heat up that gas enough, those molecules actually eventually are forced back together and it becomes like a liquid again. But it still has the properties of a gas. Yeah. It's kind of like a plasma state or something, almost. It's super critical fluid. Yeah. It has its own name. Right. So when water in particular hits, its critical point is that 705 degrees Fahrenheit and 217 atmospheres. Right. So it's very high temperature, very high pressure. When it goes beyond that point and it starts behaving quite weirdly, you actually can get more steam power out of less initial fossil fuel input. Yes. So it's more efficient when you can heat something to these higher pressures, these super critical pressures, way more. Yeah. So, again, the reason that you can do this is we could have always done it. We could have heated it up to this amount, but we never had the materials to hold it. Now we have the materials to hold it. And they're creating more and more electricity with supercritical steam. Yeah. And here's a little mind blowing fact for you. This water, to create the super critical liquid fluid is heated at such a high pressure that it doesn't even boil. No, it goes right from water to water vapor. Amazing. Yeah. That's fast. And apparently they're figuring out now that you could actually use CO2 instead of water because it has a much lower critical point. It's like 85 deg and 73 atmospheres, which is like nothing. Well, and they're figuring out, wait a minute, we could use a bunch of CO2 in lieu of water vapor and get even more energy out of this from less input. So they're trying to figure out how to use supercritical CO2 to create electricity now to power steam turbines. It's a decent van name, supercritical CO2. Sure. It's not bad. So you got one more Tidbit. That was it. Oh, that was the tidbit? Yeah. Great. Can I go home? Yeah, in just a minute. Since we don't have anything else, if you want to know more about steam power, you can type those words into the search bar@housetofworks.com. Since I said steam power. It's time for listener mail. This is written by one of our jingle writers. Our little jingle bumper. Sure. Yeah. Hey, guys. Just want to appreciate the fact that Sisk gives Joe Schmoez like me the opportunity to feel famous for just a pleading moment whenever I'm listening to an episode. And cut to commercial. I hear one of my little songs. It really takes me by surprise, and I think that sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, I wrote that. Yippee. I'm a stay at home dad. I'm trying to make my name for myself as a stay at home dad, as a versatile graphic artist and film composer. And it's nice to know that at least something of mine is making it out to the masses. And speaking of being a dad, I just finished my first children's ebook. Awesome. Which we're going to plug since he gave us his. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, we plug it anyway. I'm very proud of it. It's called Hector's Song. It's a tale about being who you are, no matter what. It's a great message. Nice. It is a good message. You can get the regular read words on a page, version on Kindle or an enhanced version with narration and music on ibooks. That Jackson into your brain. Yeah, he recommends it for kids zero to six or so. And you can go to his website, which is Elaine Osborne. E-A-L-A-N elon? Probably. Yeah, osborne.com. Or just go to ibooks or Amazon. And thanks again, guys. JMoney and Chucky D. That's right. You guys are the real deal. Thanks, Elon. We appreciate that, man. Yeah, you're the real deal too, man. Writing books and music and stay at home daddy. Yeah, pretty neat. Super neat. If you want to get in touch with us because you submitted a jingle and have now written a book, well, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at S YSK podcast or Joshmclark too. You can hang with us on Facebook.com. Check me and check out on Facebook for the more personal stuff Chuck's needs. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyousteno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
403b41c4-121b-11eb-ba6a-472cf692b034 | Short Stuff: SINA | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-sina | In the 1950s a group dedicated to clothing animals out of a sense or morality gained momentum. “A nude horse is a rude horse!” was their battle cry. | In the 1950s a group dedicated to clothing animals out of a sense or morality gained momentum. “A nude horse is a rude horse!” was their battle cry. | Wed, 01 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=335, tm_isdst=0) | 12046870 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. And as I say, sometimes giddy up. But in this case, it'd be giddy up. You horse with pants on. Yeah, that was smooth as sandpaper. That hurts. Chuck. This is pretty good. You dug this one up. The Society for indecency to naked animals. Sina. That's right. Which is kind of like the finest example of the Stodgy kind of morality that was characteristic of the 1950s. This is the apex of that. That's right. It was a group of people that got together and said, you know what? We can't have any more in our society are these naked animals walking around showing their disgusting parts. We need to put clothing on animals, on anything over four inches tall or six inches long. Our children are at stake. Get the clothes. Yes, they were offended by naked animals, this group, and they wanted to clothe animals. That was their purpose, that was their drive. And at first it was a very little known group. But then, in May of 1959, the president of Sina G. Clifford Pruitt Jr. Appeared on the Today Show, basically explaining what Sina was all about and calling for all animals to be closed. And he said a lot of weird things, not just in this interview, but in multiple interviews that came over the following years where he said things like zoos were peep shows for kids. One of his favorite phrases was, a nude horse is a rude horse, and basically called for support and membership. And after that Today Show appearance in 1959, membership swelled, like, almost overnight. Yes. Believe it or not, there were more than 50,000 people in the United States that said, I agree. We need to get clothing on all animals. Here's some money. There's a woman in Santa Barbara, California, who sent a $40,000 check in the 1950s. This was about $350,000 today to help fund clothing for animals. And they basically said, all right, get involved. Get your community involved. Issue summons to your neighbors. If you see them walking their dog without pants on, you need to give them a summons. They pick it at the White House. They sent letters to President Kennedy that said, you need to get pants on your horses, sir. Cover our horses. Private parts. Yeah, cover those horse penises. I can kind of see that one. Yeah, sure. Have you seen what's it called? I think you should leave. What is that? How do I know that? I can't remember the guy's name. He's hilarious. He's like best friends with Andy Sandberg. Tim something sounds really familiar. Anyway, it's on Netflix, and they have this one kind of fake ad, and it was for a ranch where they bred horses to have very small penises so that men don't have to be ashamed of their own penis size when they ride these horses around the Stewed Ranch. I know that guy. Tim robinson. Yes, exactly. I have not seen that, though. It's wonderful. But I am seeing now that Ad Bryant's husband, Connor O'Malley's on there. Connor listen to stuff you should know at one point and he is one of the great weirdo comedians ever. Yeah, it's like a magnet for weirdo comedians this year. That's pretty funny. So Americans are getting involved. Like I said, they're petitioning the President, they're picketing the White House, and then it culminates in. It feels like it should be 1862 when G. Clifford Prute appears with none other than Walter Cronkite, most trusted newsperson in the country, and he was interviewed on CBS News prime time. He sang the scene as anthem called Wings of Decency with ukulele. And it was a very big deal in sort of the apex of this movement. Can we sing the Wings of Decency sina anthem? You can hi on the wings of sina. We fight for the future now let's clothe every pet and animal, whether dog, cat, horse or cow. G. Clifford proof our president, he works for you and me. So close all your pets and join the March for Worldwide Decency. He's playing this on a ukulele on CBS News with Walter Cronkite interviewing him. G. Clifford Pruke Jr. Is the President of Sina and there's a guy who is operating the camera for CBS News that says, hey, wait a minute, that guy looks awfully familiar, doesn't he, Chuck? That's right. And perhaps here's where we should take our break, right? That's right. Agreed. If you want to know, just listen up to stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. Alright, nice. We're back. Cameraman at CBS News sits up and says, wait a minute, I recognized that guy. And what did he say? He said that's not g. Clifford Pruitt. That man's name is Buck Henry and in the future he's going to be a very famous screenwriter and actor for comedy. That's right. There was no g. Clifford Pruitt. There was no society for indecent sea to naked animals. Well, technically there was. Well, technically there was, but it was just a big put on. It was just a big joke. Yeah, there's a guy named, thank God, Alan Abel, who would go on to become one of America's most famous and prolific and successful hoaxers. And I think he's got half a dozen short stuffs coming down the pike himself. He was just that prolific. But this is the first time America was introduced to Alan Abel and they had been had that for four years. I saw in some places six years. Buck Henry kept up this ruse at the behest of Allen Abel and went on Cronkite, went on the Today Show, went on tons of national interview shows and earnestly professed a need for animals to be closed. So he must not have been known by face at all at that point. Buck Henry? Yeah. No, his crew is just starting out. It's astounding that he was ever recognized at all, even when he was, it was a good three years into the hoax to that cameraman was deep on the independent comedy circuit, I think. Exactly. That's how I take it, for sure. That's pretty great. So, yeah, it was all a hoax, as is many times with hoaxes like this, there is a statement being made, and the statement here was able was really turned off by BBC, the Moral Majority of the United States in the 1950s, and how put off they would be about everything. He said, maybe a good way to take the P out of this thing would be to become one of them. And he said he was inspired by something he saw in Texas in the 1950s. He was driving on a highway and saw, like, traffic was stopped, and everyone was kind of standing around. And when he got out, he saw that traffic had stopped because two cows were having sex in the middle of the highway. And he said he just saw the looks on these people's faces. Some of them were clearly disgusted. Some of them couldn't even bear to look at it and cover their eyes. One woman was angry, and he was just like, what is going on? These cows, they don't know morality. They're just doing what cows do. And these Americans are so stuffy that they're literally upset about this. Right. They're offended by this. Yeah. So he at first tried out some low hanging fruit, and he wrote a letter to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post professing for the first time, sina and its goals and aims as a joke. And he got a rejection letter. But the tone of the rejection letter kind of spurred him to keep going. The editor wrote indignantly that he really disagreed with this and he thought it was a terrible idea. And Alan Abel realized that this guy had failed to take it as a joke, that he thought it was real. And he's like, well, who else can I fool? Let's see where else we can take this. And he went to his friend Buck Henry and said, hey, no one knows what you look like yet or who you are. Will you pose as G. Clifford Prute, the president of Sina? And this was right up Buck Henry's alley. He said, oh, yeah. And they kept this up for four to six years, Chuck. Not secretly, not quietly, as loudly and nationally as they possibly could. They kept this hoax going. Yeah. I get the feeling this had more legs than he ever dreamed it would. Yes. And just decided as any great sort of Andy Kaufman like comedian, to keep rolling with it once it's going, if everyone is fooled. And even after it was exposed in 1964 by Time magazine, people like Walter Cronkite was still really mad. He felt he had been made a fool of. Obviously, it's important to point out that he did not take any of this money. He wasn't grifting people. So that 40 grand, that check was never cashed or anything? Yes. That's a big one. Yes. People will be angry. There's listeners right now, they're like, Wait a minute. This guy stole all this money, right? And he was a comedian. Right. So that never happened. Thankfully, no, but the thing that was most astounding was that they accidentally, inadvertently created a moral movement to clothe animals. Those 50,000 people that joined Sina were earnest. Like, they were passionately supportive of clothing animals because it was indecent to have naked animals running around. A joke became reality, and that is about the best you could possibly hope for from a hoax. That's a cultural criticism. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of clothing on animals at all. I'm not either. Leave the animals alone, everybody. Like, if your dog needs a sweater in the winter or something, that's okay to me, but, like, these people that dress up their animals and take pictures, I don't know, I feel it's not very respectful. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, we dress Momo, but it's just for warmth. Yeah, that's different. Like I said, if your dog needs a sweater or a Thunder buddy, which is what we call the Thunder coats, the vests. What about Thundercats? I don't know anything about ThunderCats. You don't know the ThunderCats. That cartoon from the 80s? I've heard of it, but it was a little after my time. Oh, I could see that. But it was directly in my wheelhouse, and that is one of the all time great. All right, so obviously, since we started talking about ThunderCats, that signals that this episode of Short stuff is over, right? That's right. Before we go, Chuck, I want to say thank you very much to Zachary Crockett and Price anomics the Museum of Hoaxes and Ripley's Believe It or not. Believe It or not for being sources about this. So keep an ear out for Alan Abel short stuffs in the future, because he's got plenty more coming. In the meantime, everybody, 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." | |
What's the deal with carbon trading? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-carbon-trading | In this episode, Josh and Chuck demystify carbon trading, discussing everything from cap-and-trade schemes to carbon credits. | In this episode, Josh and Chuck demystify carbon trading, discussing everything from cap-and-trade schemes to carbon credits. | Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:35:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=22, tm_min=35, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=68, tm_isdst=0) | 31635570 | 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 housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. He's given a little salute. I did. That was good stuff. You should know. Army, sir. Sporting for duty. I need a beard and a cigar. Yes. Chuck, how're you doing? Like Castro. Yeah, okay, thanks. You know way too well. Yes. I'm doing great, Josh. You? I'm great. Chuck on the show. What's your witty set up here? I don't have a witty set up. It's more of a depressing set up. All right, let's hear it. Obama finally conceded that the energy bill that Congress is going to pass under his first year or so of the administration is not going to have a cap and trade segment to it. Now, it was going to the House passed something with it. The Senate's like, no, we're not going to. We just don't want to. We're not going to. It's not that there's anything wrong with it, but we're the Senate, so nothing's ever going to escape. It's like the black hole of legislation. Nothing can escape it. So cap and trade is dead. And that's really sad, as we'll see, because it can be beneficial. Sure. At least in theory. Yes. And as a result, all of these voluntary initiatives, because it was going to be a mandatory cap and trade set up for the United States, a bunch of voluntary stuff, specifically out west, there was a regional cap and trade scheme that was going on or about to go on, and the whole thing was proposed and underwritten by Arizona as its greatest champion. And now that the Senate is like, no, we're not passing this. Arizona is like, oh, by the way, we don't really want to do this. Really? The volunteers are falling apart. There's a bunch of them falling apart. It looks like the only one that's new that hasn't been set up yet still going forward is California, of course. Yeah. Wow, that's disappointing. It is. And do you think we should let everybody in on what cap and trade scheme means? Yes, Josh. We're talking about carbon, and it's basically a way to regulate carbon emissions through a market based much like any market based thing, like the stock market, except it's limiting carbon emissions. So what you do is you set a cap. That's the cap part. Right. Which is the limit of emissions you're allowed to admit as a factory, let's say, and then the trade part comes in because if you don't use all of your emissions credits, let's say, you can bank them or you can trade them and sell them with your factory buddies. Right. Is that a good way to say it? Exactly. It's perfect. Okay. As a matter of fact thank you, Chuck. Brian, everybody. Hello. There's a regional cap and trade scheme up in the Northeast that's been fairly successful so far. The Chicago no, the northeastern states, like in New England, got you among, I think, electrical utilities. And it's voluntary, right? Basically. So you have a body that's governing this, and then they say they set a cap, like you said, right, and they'll just pull the number out of the air. All of the people who are members of this, all the electrical companies that are members of this combined, are allowed to emit 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide next year. Right. And you're just making up that number right, pulling it out of the air. Okay. And then you create these credits that are slices of that trenches. So let's say each tranch is 100. That means there's 1 million credits out there available for everybody, right? And let's say they're distributed evenly. Maybe at first, sure. But then factory A puts out, and there's ten factories, so each one can put out 10 million metric tons of CO2 next year. Okay? And then factory A says, okay, we're accidentally putting out 11 million. Factory B, we noticed that you're on track to put out 8 million. That means you have two extra credits. Right. Can we buy one of those from you? Boom. Done. Done. So these things now have a value of money value, right. And there is a penalty for going over, which should be more than the credit is, right? Right. Otherwise there would be no incentive right. To stay under. Right, yes. Very well said. Yes. So that is a cap and trade scheme and they are in existence. Right. And scheme just sounds negative because the Ponte thing and scheme, they should change the name as a negative connotation. It definitely does. And I can't help but think that there are people out there like, oh, I don't want a cap and trade scheme. I don't really know about it. So, yeah, that's just the word for it, though. It's not bad. There is actually a scheme in Europe that's fairly vital, heavily criticized, but still also it's the first mandatory one, I think, in the world. Right. And it was born out of the Kyoto treaty, right? Yes. The ETS, the European trading scheme, is, like you said, born out of the Kyoto Protocol, which does not tell people, tell participating countries how to participate. They just have to meet the standards. Right. So Europe, the EU came up with the ETS, and it includes 12,000 factories and utilities in 25 different countries. Right. And each member state, I thought was odd, sets its own emissions cap based on the Kyoto Protocol. Right. Which we are not a member of. No, we're not. I'm like the Kyoto protocol. This is the first time I've heard of this thing. That's not true. You've heard okay. Yeah. Although we helped draw it up. Right. The Clinton administration did. Yes. And then it was scuttled right. Before it came into effect in 2005 by the Bush administration right. Because of fears that it would, a, that it wasn't properly put together to begin with, and B, that the financial impact might harm America's economy. Well, plus, also, it was divided countries by annex one and annex two. Annex one being industrialized nations right. And annex two being developing economies. The problem is two of the world's biggest developing economies, india and China, are also two of the world's biggest polluters as far as CO2 emissions goes. And that was one of the problems that the United States had with the Kyoto treaty, is that it didn't put heavy enough sanctions on these developing countries because they're not required to meet the same standard. No. And that makes sense. It does make sense. And there's a certain amount of, hey, we already screwed up the world, but we learned from it. Right. So now you can't build your economy by screwing up the world, because we've already learned the lesson the hard way. Right. Even though we wouldn't be in this mess if we hadn't already screwed up the world. But you can't do the same thing we did. Right. So there's a certain amount of that, but at the same time, there's also a certain amount of, okay, we need to remain competitive in the global marketplace. And one of the things well, the whole point of carbon tax is to make it harder to emit or to make economic sanctions on emissions. So that means that there's an extra cost that American companies have to bear, that companies in operating in China or India don't have to. Right. That's not a carbon tax, though. That's different than carbon trading. Right. No, carbon tax is just straight up. You put your X number of emissions out, you pay X number of dollars on those emissions. Okay. So there is an incentive to reduce your emissions because you're paying a lower tax, but both of them are de facto taxes on pollution. Right. So we were talking about the ETS sorry, the European trading stock. Yeah. You're saying that it was controversial. And one of the reasons is controversial is because the government can allocate kind of it will, it seems like. So preferred industries maybe might get some free credits if they're inching up toward their limit, their cap limit, and basically they call it a permit to pollute. Right. And it exempts. Those industries, those favorite industries are the ones that have the best lobbyists, so that's no good. Like everything, it gets tainted. Right. And it's also there is a market over there. You can buy carbon credits from the ETS just as a speculator. Okay. But it's mandatory, which takes a certain amount of market fluctuations or market base out of the whole thing, the whole equation. Right. The mandatory participation. Yeah. Right. So if you have a voluntary participation trading scheme, cap and trade scheme, you would think that based on Adam Smith's theories, this thing would be flawless. Right. Where would you find such a thing? In the United States? Yes, you would. Since we're not a member of the Kyoto Protocol, I want to call it the Kyoto Protocol. That's what we have here. Now, we didn't participate officially, but I think 130 mayors across the country implemented their own programs in their city that met the similar standards as the Kyoto, which is heartwarming as moose playing in a sprinkler. Yeah, it is, evidently. Yeah. So that's good though, because we're getting with the program anyway. And now, Money, you wrote about the Chicago Climate Exchange, is that right? Yeah. So tell me about that one. So there's a guy named Dr. Richard Sandor, and I believe he's an economist. He's out of Chicago. I know that much. And in 2005, he founded something called the Chicago Climate Exchange. Yeah, the CCX. Right. And it functions exactly like a stock market does. Actually, that's not true. It functions more like a commodities market. So like pork belly futures or oil or gold or something. But what they trade on the Chicago Climate Exchange are carbon credits. Yes, but it's voluntary, but it's still legally binding. Right. When you sign up as a company on CCX, what you're saying is I agree to reduce my carbon emissions by X amount, and if I don't, there's actually a huge penalty for it. Really? Five grand per metric ton. Oh, wow. Yeah, that adds up too. Yeah, it does. Real quick. And it is legally binding. So the CCX can levy these really stiff penalties for people who don't meet their quotas. Now, on the CCX, what they trade are carbon credits. Right. So on any given day, they're like maybe three, $4. I don't know what they're up to these days. I know the ones in Europe, since it's mandatory, they're usually about ten times higher, ten times higher in value than the ones in Chicago. Right. But let's say $4 for 100 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Right. So just like what we were talking about before, a company who is going to emit more can buy these credits so that they don't have to pay these stiff fines, but they have to buy credit, say, from another company who is coming in under. So the other companies provided a financial incentive for lowering their emissions in the form of these credits. Right? Right. And then the company who's going over is being penalized in the form of these credits. Right? Yes. You can also earn more credits, not necessarily just by buying some from somebody else, but by funding projects that actually reduce carbon. Right. Yes. As long as they are verified. Yes. And you can actually do that in the ETS as well. You can earn credits through two Kyoto mechanisms, the Clean Development Mechanism that allows you to help out poor annex Two countries that can't afford their own to reduce their own carbon output. And then joint implementation is when you can partner with other annex One countries. Right. Which I guess that's a good thing, too. Well, yeah. Either way, as long as you're reducing CO2. One of the very distinct aspects of reducing greenhouse gases and CO2 is that no matter where you do it, you're affecting everything. Yeah. So planting trees in, like, say, Sudan or something will ultimately have an effect for the rest of the planet. Right. Yeah. A lot of companies offer that now as part of, like I know certain airlines and airline websites will offer, like, an extra if you want to pay an extra $10 on your ticket, they'll plant ten trees for you in some other country. Right. That's kind of nice, in a way. It is nice. Are you ready to talk about that? Yes. Let me correct myself. The CCX was founded in 2003 and 2005. Yes. And you know what? Let me go ahead and throw out a stat since we're still on CCX. They traded about four years ago, a total of 10.2 million tons of CO2. And then, Chuck, also, the value went from next to nothing a couple of years ago to, I think, as much as $100 million. Right. Carbon offsets. The carbon market itself, I think, generated about $30 billion in 2007. And what we're talking about is something that doesn't exist. It's a reduction. They represent a reduction in CO2. It's sort of hard to wrap your head around that. It definitely is. And actually, it can work. Yes. Right. There's a model that's very similar. Do you remember, Chuck, when we were younger? Acid rain. Oh, yeah. Whatever happened to acid rain? I know the fears of schoolchildren everywhere to go outside, and our skin would, like, melt in the rain. It was the Communists, AIDS, and acid rain. Yeah. The big three. We had really rough childhood, didn't we? Yeah, we did. Yeah. But acid rain, you never hear about it anymore. And the reason why is because the US. Government actually instituted a mandatory cap and trade scheme on methane emissions. Isn't that what it was that caused acid rain? Sulfur dioxide. That's right. So close. Yeah. So the acid rain program, Josh yes. Limits sulfur dioxide that powers plants here in the States, and it has worked to the tune of emissions have dropped 50% below what they were in 1080. Yeah. Not bad. No, not at all. And they did it slightly differently. They put a cap on, they divided it amongst emitters of sulfur dioxide, which I think are, again, electrical plants or power plants are the worst emitters for it. And they said, Here are your allowances, don't go over. And if you do, you're in big trouble. And each year they'd revised the cap lower or maybe every couple of years. And that's the whole point. I don't think we talked about it. The point of a cap and trade scheme is that you don't just put the cap somewhere and leave it there. Yeah. It should go down. It should eventually go down with a moderate pace. Right. Because you don't want to go too far down or else the economy is going to be crippled. Right. You don't want it to be too high up or else there's not going to be any point to it. Yeah, exactly. But you do want to raise it systematically, which is actually lowering it systematically over time. Yes. So, Chuck, have you noticed that the carbon credits we're talking about sound an awful lot like something else called carbon offset? Yes. I said that you and I can go on to the Chicago Climate Exchange and buy carbon, 100 metric tons of carbon if we want. Sure. Like $4, I think a pot. Okay. You can also find a broker and say, I want to buy a carbon offset. And what do you get for that, Chuck? Well, these are pretty popular now. What you get when you buy a carbon offset, let's say Al Gore made the headlines a few years ago, Mr. Green, al Gore, who I love and you do as well. He was under fire because of the amount of energy his large house in Tennessee consumed. Yes. Which was a lot. Yeah. Right after Inconvenient Truth came out, I think Drudge report broke, like his electric bill or something like that. Right. So they kind of held the speed to the fire and he said, no, I purchased wait, that was my Clinton. Good enough. He purchases car. Can you do a gore? Because that's what I do want to hear. I purchased carbon offsets. That was actually really good, Chuck. Nice. So carbon offsets, let's say you could go through a company like Terra Pass, who we'll talk about in a little more detail, and he would invest in renewable energy in other parts of the world. Right. So let's say if he's using 100 credits over what he should be using, he'll buy 100 credits worth of renewable wind energy in Africa. Right. Because make up for what he's using, if you alleviate CO2 emissions anywhere in the world, that has just as good of an effect as home. Sure. Making him carbon neutral, I believe, is the word they like to use. Right, right. So, like, if he calculates that his electricity that he uses annually at his house equals 50 metric tons of CO2 emissions, he will purchase that he can go buy that. Right. So what you do is you go to a broker who sells carbon offsets and takes a cut and they sell them. Right. They sell them for, let's say, $9 a metric ton. Right, okay. I think that's about right, actually. So you say, okay, well, that's great because I only need 200 of these for the year. Yeah, you got to have some coin in your pocket, a little extra spending money. Sure. But for $1,800, you can offset all of the CO2 emissions that your family puts out for a year. It sounds great. It does sound great. And you know what? It can be. We're not poopooing it. But there is another side to the coin, Josh. There definitely is. Anything that sounds too good to be true or let you sit back with your hand down the front of your pants drinking a beer and still somehow alleviating global warming you should be suspicious of. Yes. And a lot of people are, because a lot of times what's happening is, and this is the way I read this article, was that it's not necessarily creating new initiatives. A lot of these initiatives where the money is going, either we're already in place or we're going to be in place anyway. So these firms are making a little extra cash, which they seem to appreciate, but the firms who are undertaking these CO2 emissions reduction program right. They have said, and there are some quotes in the article, they said, I made 16 grand last year and we're glad to get it, but we would have been doing this anyway. Right. That was a farmer who actually created or invested in very high tech machinery that used methane emissions from his cows, manure, to generate electricity for his farm so he could save money. Well, he's actually paid money through investment in this. The problem is this guy was going to do it anyway. Right. It is good that he's being rewarded for it. Sure. But why aren't we seeking out projects that won't get off the ground unless there's investment? Because then that means this farmer was going to do it anyway. And there's another project that wasn't going to happen unless it got this investment. Right. And it doesn't seem like there's a lot of active seeking out of investments. These brokers struck me as somewhat lazy and find stuff that's already there. Yes. And the other little hinky thing is that there's not a lot of transparency going on here, I think. Was this Business Week? Yeah, Business Week got in touch with some of these firms and no one will say, the broker won't say how much of a cut they're getting. They won't necessarily say who they're getting in touch with to help alleviate the carbon reduction. To help manage the carbon reduction. So there's not very much transparency. And that has set off a lot of alarm bells with a lot of nonprofits. Yeah. And it should. There's also the farmer, Daryl Vader is his name is it really Vader d vader vander. Just like carbon offset. Right. Daryl Vader, who has his poop powered electricity farm. Right. Thank you for that because I was about to start stammering. Sorry. The investment that he's getting is $2 out of the $9 per less than $2 per ton. Yeah. That's what he's getting from this firm. So you have terror pass, right? Which is a broker. And then he was set up with Terror Pass through a middleman. So from the $9 that a person's putting in to Terror Pass for that one ton of carbon dioxide, only $2 of it is going to the actual program. Right. And we're not poopooing. Terra, pass here. I mean, they're a San Francisco company that I believe a teacher at Wharton started. And he bikes to work. So he's legitimate he proposed to his students to come up with an idea, and they did, and it's working. They've got, I think, close to 50,000 customers. So I think they're trying to do the right thing. But definitely it would be awesome if there were some new initiatives and not necessarily, hey, we'll give this farmer some dough for this thing he was already doing to begin with. Right. But you can make the point that they are rewarding this guy for going above and beyond when he gets out and right? Yeah. Very true. Did you know that Vales ski Resort yeah, let's talk about that. What's the company called? It is called Veil Resorts. Appropriately enough, they are 100% wind power. Right. Did you know that not one bit of their electricity comes from wind? Yeah. So they're able to claim that they're 100% powered by wind when in fact, they have spent a lot less money buying renewable energy certificates representing the amount of wind generated that they would require to generate all their power. Right. And their PR flack is pretty correct in saying, we're in the resort business, we're not in the power generation business. But the resorts actually did look into powering themselves, their entire resort, with wind power. But they're like, Whoa, that's a lot of money when we can buy these offsets. Right? Right. But there's a guy who actually does wind power, electrical generation. It's called FPL Energy. And he's quoted as saying that voluntary renewable energy certificates like the ones that the Veil Resorts company bought are pure corporate marketing and image management. And that's it. And this guy is actually the one who's on the receiving end, and he's like, this is not right. It doesn't work. Right. So when the boots on the ground are telling you that everything's all screwed up, it usually means something's really screwed up. And again, when you're sitting back just writing money out of your checkbook instead of actually doing something in your own backyard, it's probably not having the same effect, even though on paper it looks like it. Right. Can I tell you another quote? This is from colemas. She's an outreach coordinator at Tufts Climate Initiative, and it's an advocacy group for the environment. And she kind of sums it up. Nature does not fall for accounting schemes. Yes. So that kind of says it all. It allows Hollywood hotshots to feel good about their life by purchasing offsetting, their massive energy consuming lifestyles. And it allows companies like Bell Resorts to say, we're powered all by wind when they're really not actually powered by wind. Right. So I'm at odds because I'm a green guy, and it's good that people are doing things like this and not anything at all, but at the same time, new initiatives. Well, plus, that's what we need. There's also a big debate about exactly who the owners should be on for reducing emissions and emitters. Right, right. Delta Airlines had a little program I don't know if they still do, where for $5.0.50 for domestic flights or $11 for international flights, you could contribute extra. You pay extra in your ticket, and Delta would plant a tree. The question is, Delta is the one that's actually polluting. Yes, you are. You're contributing, but you're buying tickets, hundreds and hundreds of dollars for your ticket. Why isn't Delta putting out any of their money to reduce their emissions or to find ways to reduce emissions or to fund projects that actually reduce emissions? The whole carbon offset thing that these companies are actually using for their own public image are actually being paid for by the company's customers. Yeah. Right. It also looks great. A bit of a show game, right? Yeah. Although I did discover one place, at least one place that you can buy a carbon offset, and it actually has an effect. Where's that? I talked to a guy once down on the corner, Michael Short. I got them right here on my jacket. A guy named Michael Short with a clean air campaign. They actually you can go on to their website, calculate what your car puts out or how much you use in electricity as far as CO2 emissions, and they'll give you, like, X number of tons. Do you want to buy an offset? Okay. And what they do, actually, is they take your money to go buy carbon credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange. Right. And they sit on them, they retire them, they take them off the market, which drives the price on the ones that are in the market, because law of supply and demand got you. The scarce or something is, the more expensive it is. So they're actually in the game, like, buying these carbon credits and taking them away from the actual emitters so it will eventually become more cost effective for these people to take carbon reduction measures. Wow, man. And you know what? It's all paper. It's all in the ether. It is. That's paper. Yeah, it's paper. It's so hard to understand about it, but not really once you wrap your head around it. Yeah. And I'm not even an environmental guy. I just love yeah, you are. You kidding me? No, not really. Folks, Josh headed up the recycling program here at work before he officially had one and took the cans himself every week and allowed the canned thing collector to be at his desk. And you didn't take any credit for that. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. You left out the part where I took the cans to a homeless guy so he could take them in for money. Oh, man. That would have been, like the ultimate cherry on top. It was. Oh, you really did that? Yeah. Wow. Look at you. I think I need to alleviate the shame of being so vain by buying some carbon offsets from the clean air campaign. They should have, like, Karma Offsets just for being, like, a bad person. You could just buy Karma Offsets. I could use some of those. We should start selling them. Yeah, we should. Yeah. We heavily invest ourselves, look for those in the future from Chuck and Josh. Until then, if you want to learn more about carbon trading, type those two words into the handy search bar. HowStuffWorks.com. And it's now time for listener and mail. So everybody grab your carpet square and lay down. Josh, how about a Kiva update first? That's an even better idea. You want to just break it down real quick? For those who don't know? Sure. Kiva.org is a microlending site where you can contribute to investors or entrepreneurs, I should say, in developing countries and in the US. And we have our own team, which you can find at www. Dot. Kiva. Orgteamtofyou shouldnnow, right? And we have a hell of a team, Chuck. We do, dude. We had a goal of $100,000 loan, and we are currently over $88,000 loan. Well through only close to 1800 members on our team. That's fantastic. Which is awesome. But I do know that that is a fraction of our audience. Oh, yeah. So I put the call out to you folks who have said, oh, man, I keep meaning to do Kiva. Just go to Kiva and sign up. It's really fast and it's fun to loan. And $25 increments. $25 increments. My loans are recycling now, actually, so they're going to be due up to reload soon. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Way to go, Chuck. Way to go, Josh. That's a civil update, right? Yeah. All right, so now, listener, ma'am, it's time now for Listening Mail. Yes, Josh. I'm going to call this my family were witchburners. This is from Gwen in Southern California. I'm so glad you guys did the podcast on witchcraft. I've been interested in witchcraft since I was a kid. In fact, it started while researching my family history. I discovered a long line of involvement with the craft. Our family is directly descended from increase in cotton maser. And by the way, if I ever have a son, I'm going to. Name him Increase. Increase Bryant. Yeah. Great name. Or Goody bryant. That's a girl's name. Oh, goody. Short for good wife. Okay, so, if I had twins, I could name an Increase in Goodies. They were both Puritan ministers living in Boston in the 17th century. Cotton, who was the son of Increase, wrote a great deal on the subject of witchcraft, spectral activity, and spectral activity, even directly accused a number of individuals to be witches. He was said to believe he believed we were nearing the last judgment and felt that he himself led the way against the devil's legions. Don't we all feel that way? Yeah. He was clearly wrong. He was personally friends with a few of the judges that presided over the Salem witch trials and urged them to use confession as the greatest evidence. And I'm sure the confession was probably wrung out, beating out of them. He and his father attended one of the final executions at Salem, but Cotton never recanted his position on witchcraft or his involvement with the trials, although his father became more and more vocal with his doubts of spectral activity, most likely because his own wife was threatened and called a witch. This is her family. Dude, is that sinking in? It is. Cotton is pretty famous and somewhat of a legend in the history of witchcraft. When I was younger, I got to visit Salem, and they did reenactments of the trials. Some was cheesy, some of it really cool. I later got to visit the grave of Cotton Mathers at Cobb Hill, where we spoke with and learned a ton from the grave keeper. Strangely enough, on the other side of my mom's family, the Alexander side, we had a female ancestor burned at the stake. Well, so she's really got it. I'm coming from both directions here. Unfortunately, we couldn't find out more about this because the documents are locked up in Ireland. Hopefully, someday I can pick up this investigation, dig up more history. This all led me to study Wiki a lot when I was younger, and you guys did a great job laying it out. So, that is Gwen. While we already said the last name Mathers, and she said the last name still well, she said they picked up an S in the last 100 years. Weird, no? Yeah, because it used to be Mather or Mather. That means that the kid who played Beaver and leave it to Beaver is related, then. Yeah, very Mathers. Maybe he was a witch hunter. Excellent. So. First hand account from Gwen in Southern California. Thank you, Gwen. Appreciate that revelation about your family tree. If you have a story about how the Irish are keeping a stranglehold over information you wish to seek, put it in an email and send it to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the hashtagworks.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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-12-19-sysk-narcissism-final.mp3 | Narcissism: But what about me? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/narcissism-but-what-about-me | This week Josh and Chuck dive into the world of narcissism, one of the most perplexing and disturbing disorders humans can have. Learn all you ever cared to know about people who largely are centered on the self, lack empathy and don't understand what the | This week Josh and Chuck dive into the world of narcissism, one of the most perplexing and disturbing disorders humans can have. Learn all you ever cared to know about people who largely are centered on the self, lack empathy and don't understand what the | Tue, 19 Dec 2017 15:21:57 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=15, tm_min=21, tm_sec=57, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=353, tm_isdst=0) | 57811778 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, before we get started, everyone, this is Chuck, and I am going to be doing my first ever Facebook Live tomorrow at 03:00 P.m. Eastern. I'm very excited about this. I'm going to be talking about Movie Crush. So if you're a fan of that show, come by, talk to me. If you got stuff you should know questions, come by. Talk to me tomorrow, Wednesday afternoon, 03:00 PM. Eastern. That's noon Pacific. I'm going to be live in front of your faces. So come on. Come all. Can't wait to talk to everybody. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, chuck Bryant. And Noel is with us again today. No guest producer Noel. That's right. So this chuck is tuned. I'm going to start whispering every few lines. You know what we should do so everybody knows. A lot of people know. Some people know. A lot of people listen to Stuff You Should Know to fall asleep. Yeah, well, actually, they're probably not asleep yet. We should wait a few minutes to do this. Are you're going to say, start screaming every ten minutes or so? No, nothing like that. We'll just start telling them things in their sleep to tell other people later. Like subliminal stuff. Oh, like subscribe to movie crush. Yeah, that's a good one. Send us a dollar. Yeah, why not make it, too? They have two dollar bills. All right, we'll do that later. We'll insert a Movie Crush subliminal message later for the people who are sleeping. Did you ever get $2 bills as gifts from Wacky relatives? Yes. What is it with that? They'd hand you that card with the $2 bill and their flapping dickie would roll up to their yeah. And they'd say, here's something you shouldn't spend. Like, great. Thanks for nothing. Yeah, I know, it was weird. They're almost like works of art, but novelties. Like X ray specs or something like that. Yeah, we should do a Stuff You Should Know short episode on the two dollar bill. Do we have those? No. Okay. Would that be the inaugural one? Yeah. S-Y-S-K shorts. Okay. Like six minute episodes, like the old days. Okay, we'll get back to that. It'll save us a lot of time every week if we do those. Or maybe yeah, we should just do those and not the deep dives that we've become known for over the past ten years. Sure. And kiss our careers goodbye. Goodbye, careers. Thank you for coming. So, Narcissism, let's get to it. How do you feel about all this? So anytime, Chuck, when you and I are researching one of these things, separately, of course, but when we're researching these, I'm always going, like, the mental health ones. I'm always like, Is this me? Is this describing me? And sometimes they do, and this one is no exception. There are certainly some parts to it, but as we'll see later, I fall more toward one end of the spectrum than another. But either way, I would not say that I'm clinical in any sense of the word. As a narcissist, I'm pretty sure. So yeah. How about you? Did you sit there and think about me while you're researching this too? That sounds like a narcissistic statement. No, I didn't think about myself, if that's what you're really asking. It was because I think I'm probably the opposite of a narcissist. So you just walk around thinking like, I'm just not good enough all the time? No, because as we will learn, many narcissists at their core think that deep down. Well, yeah, that's actually supposed to be one of the defining traits of narcissism, which is kind of surprising for people who don't know about it. Because when you think narcissist, you think just a complete conceited jackass who's just totally self involved and couldn't care less about you and your family and the fact that you've got like a hole being worn in the one sweater you own, they don't care about that. They just want to push you around and take your pocket change. That's a narcissist and a bully, I guess. Yeah. I have had a lot of experience with narcissist in my life, though, so I have a lot to say about it. Probably won't say much of it because of protecting the innocent. You could use, like, pseudonyms. Yeah, I know this narcissist. I've worked with him for a decade. His name is Squash Park. That would work, I think that would protect people. Yeah. I think my definition of narcissism, after reading this especially too, is it's probably less clinical and more experiential for me, which is basically just a general, singular point of view that is only from that person's eyeballs. Like an inability to, like, see anything from anyone else's point of view other than their own and not even recognizing that that's happening. Well, yeah, I think that's kind of part of it, too, is you're so sure you're right and just so confident in your own answers and thoughts and beliefs that it would be basically impossible to see anyone else's perspective. So whatever the opposite, I have a clinical problem with putting myself in other places too much. To a debilitating degree, probably. Yeah. Am I putting that person out? Oh my gosh, did I get in that person's way? Did I do something to upset someone? I wonder if that compliment I gave the checkout click at a grocery store was nice enough. Is that what you do? No, not really. Alright. I think you're just fairly emotionally stable and your personality is pretty stable, too. I don't think you have a lot to worry about either way. Well, maybe not in that small realm of my life. No, I mean, personality wise, you've got a pretty good, solid personality, Chuck. I appreciate that. Yeah, man. You know, one of the things that stuck out to me when I was researching this. This is pretty much a persistent theme with psychology is psychology is the study of how you're failing to fit into society in a good way. Sure. That's the whole point of it, because we've assigned psychology this role of determining what's normal, who's normal, who's not, and then hopefully treating the people who aren't normal. But really, that definition of normalcy comes down to we all live in society, and either you fit in pretty well or you don't fit in. And there's a spectrum in between. And that's what psychology does, is look at all the different ways people have trouble fitting in in a peaceful, quiet, socially acceptable manner. And this is one of them. This is one of the most prominent ones. One of the reasons it is so prominent is because narcissism, the word itself, has almost lost entirely its clinical meaning because it's been so thoroughly hijacked by pop culture, which has been fostered, I have to say, by some psychologists in the field who've used pop culture to point to the idea that narcissism is on the rise or whatever. Right. So it's almost completely lost its meaning. And there's a lot of questions about how meaningful is a diagnosis of narcissism these days. It seems like there is still some agreement that there is what you would consider a personality disorder right. Called narcissistic personality disorder, and that it's exceedingly rare. I saw something like 200,000 people in the United States probably have it. That's really rare, but that there is possibly such a thing as a trait that a person can have what you would call narcissism, which if you're saying, oh, that person is so narcissistic, that's what you would be referring to. And you could conceivably call that a sub clinical level of narcissism. But that's increasingly coming into greater and greater question. Yeah. Like, to me, I think it fully exists on a spectrum. And we'll get to all this because other people, scientists feel like it does as well. But that's for later in the episode. Well, let's do something really radically weird, and let's actually start by defining narcissism. Actually, let's do something even weirder. Chuck, let's start with a nice little dollop of mythology. Okay. You want to? Sure. The story of narcissus, which you're laughing at. Yeah. It's like tattoo. So what do you say? Narcissus. Oh, interesting. You're not the first person to say it like that, though. I have heard narcissus, and I think it's usually British people who say it like that. So I might be getting it from the Indigo Girl song. I don't remember that one. Which one can you sing a little bit? Hammer and a nail, I think. Yes. I don't know the narcissus. There's a line where they say I look a lot like narcissus. Yeah, that's probably where you got it, then. I mean, I'm sure that's where I got it, and probably I'd never heard anyone say it before. Emily sailors, man that's a good idea. Failures, of course. Failures. All right. So Narcissus in the myth was apparently he was a boy that was so beautiful and so good looking. And this is how these myths go. They're always kind of a little hokey, like, this is the child that is so good looking that they will just destroy their lives in the world with their good looks. Sure. And so a prophet named Teresius. Does that sound right? Sure. Okay. I have no issues with that. All right. I said to the parents, you better make sure this kid Narcissus never sees himself, because this can be big trouble. You think he's bad now? Wait until he sees himself. So the parents like, all right, I got you. No mirrors in the house, no shiny brass bobbles, no stainless steel refrigerator, no windows, no nothing in our house that's reflective because we got to keep our son from seeing himself. Yeah. And so I guess they were pretty successful for a while for basically the kids whole life. And as Narcissus or Narcissist men, you've got me going. Now, as he grew older, he was clearly aware of his looks because anybody who fell for him, he'd be like, yeah, you're great, but you're not good enough for me. I'm sorry. Take off hoser was his famous line. And so all the hosers would take off and cry and cry and cry. He knew he was good looking, but he still hadn't seen himself. And one of the hosers that he told to take off was, I think, a wood nymph, right? Sure. Wasn't she or she was some sort yeah, she was a nymph named Echo. And Echo just had it about as bad for Narcissist as a nymph could possibly have it for a good looking boy. And she said, I'm so sad. I'm just going to just lie her and cry. She cried and cried and cried, so much so that she became nothing more than her own voice, which you can still hear if you shout in the mountains. That's where the Echo comes from. So he went on along this path, leaving a trail of ladies in his wake, helplessly heartbroken, until finally and he should have known this was coming, because her name of this goddess was Nemesis. So he should have been steered clear there. Sure. But he finally wronged to Nemesis and broke her heart. And she was like, well, you know what? My name's Nemesis for a reason, and I'm going to punish you, sir. Here, walk with me to this pool and look down upon yourself. Or maybe you're a little bit thirsty. So he went down to get some water, and he was like, hey, look at that fella. And he was in love with himself. Yeah, he fell head over heels in love with himself. But there's a couple of problems with this. This whole story would have gone totally different had Narcissists been like, I'm in love with myself. I'm going to take that self love and turn it into something really great and share that with the world. Right. It's going to be self confidence and productivity and we're going to fit into society just perfectly. Sure. But that's not what happened because it was a superficial love. He was in love with how he looked. Right. Yeah. The problem with that is he could never have himself. It takes a mate, another person. It's another big thing in society, too. Right. You got a couple up. Right. So he was doomed forever to have an unrequited love for himself. And so since the closest he could get was his reflection, he just stayed by that pool forever and ever and ever. Yeah. Looking at himself and turned into a flower. The narcissus flower. Yeah. A jean, quiet flower. Yeah, they're very pretty. It's like a daffodil. A nice daffodil. Yeah. So that's the story of where it came from. Well, now we should define it, because you promised that. So that story is pretty old. I think it's Greek, at least, if not maybe even older than that. But in the 19th century, the Victorians realized that this is a pretty good allegory for a certain type of person. And these type of people today, I guess the classical definition of a narcissist, or a clinical narcissist, is basically somebody whose sense of self importance and sense of entitlement that arises from that sense of self importance is so great and so ridiculously over exaggerated and in a lot of ways unfounded that it leads to a lot of harm in their life. They have a lot of trouble. It's usually pretty easy for them to make new friendships, but they don't last very long. They have trouble accepting criticism, they may lash out, they may be aggressive, they're usually fairly extroverted. Again, this is the classical clinical criteria for a narcissist. Apparently, like you said before, are harboring at their base a real lack of genuine self esteem or real lack of genuine self love. And that lack is so deep and so profound that it's reflected conversely on the outside as just utter and complete arrogance and disregard for other people's feelings. Yes, that is the classical definition or criteria for a narcissist. But as we'll learn, there are actually two sides to that same narcissism coin. Yes. So let's go back to some more of the history there. Like you said, the Victorians, they're all onto this kind of burgeoning, psychoanalysis labeling of things. And in the late 1890s, there was a sexologist named Havlock Ellis. And I really by the way, I hated all these little parenthetical in this article and how stuff works. It's these little parenthetical asides, little judgments that this all they wrote. Like Hablock Ellis. That's his real name. Like Hablock Ellis. I mean, Habalk is an interesting name, but it's not like, unbelievable in it. I know. Can you believe this? Folks. Me. He's not normal. It gets worse. I'll point out all three. Thank you, buddy. I'm glad I'm plotting for you then. Well, what bugs you bugs me, most likely. You know what's great is that's absolutely true when I'm researching. That's why I knew you were thinking of me when researching narcissism because I was thinking of myself too. So Havlock Ellis said that if you masturbate a lot, then you're sort of a narcissist. Or a narcissist like yeah, and you're making the saints cry. That's right. And then others came along who said. Yeah. This is a thing in the early 1900. Like 1911. There was another analyst named Auto Rank who said no snarky comment about that name. Put out a paper that he really kind of dug into narcissism and went beyond the just sexual nature of Havelock Ellis and said. This is just a more generalized definition of someone who is sort of self obsessed. Right. So he took it into a bit of a condition, a personality type, you could say, I think is closer to the door. For sure. Yeah. I don't know if he lack Alice's had anything to do with it, but, you know, like graham crackers were invented to prevent people from masturbating so much. How does that work? It was just totally made up. But it was this part of that whole road to wellville kind of thing. Do you ever see that movie with Anthony Hopkins? I know the movie. I never saw it. Same here. I never saw it either. We should watch it together. All right. But we should also do a whole podcast on that whole late 19th century, like nutrition for life improvement. Okay, we're going to do that episode one. Sure. So after havelock Ellis and auto rank, there was get this guy's name. Sigmund Freud. He comes along after Rank, and I don't think that was the first time. I feel like I've seen their names together before in plenty of other ways. At the very least, they were contemporaries. Because three years after Rank said, you know what? I think this narcissism thing goes beyond people who engage in self abuse a little too often. Freud came along and he hit the nail on the head. I think Freud's going to be like a religious icon in three or five or 1000 years. Oh, yeah, I really think so. I think this guy really got a lot of stuff right in a lot of ways that he stopped getting credit for. And I think the reason why is this Chuck, he is pigeonholed into the compartment of psychology, right. Where I think he was a psychoanalyst, he was a psychologist, but I think more than anything, he was one of the great thinkers who's ever lived. Sure. And I think the idea that you're approaching everything at him or everything he's ever said from the idea that this is a psychologist saying this rather than this is a great thinker who can think or talk about anything has said it kind of makes people miss the mark a little bit on him. That's my prediction. If he had been noted more for his philosophy than his psychology, then I think he'd have a lot more credibility in the world. Well, he came along in terms of narcissism and said, you know what? I think not only is it psychosexual in nature, but I think everybody goes through this phase at some point. But you are only a true narcissist if you don't progress past that phase. Basically, yes. And that's kind of still today. So that was, what, 1914, when he came up with that theory that's basically still pretty well established, so much so that it's not even attributed to Freud anymore. It's just like, yeah, that's human nature. As you age, you enter into a period of self love that you would basically call a narcissistic phase, and then as you get a little older and mellow out, you start to turn your love toward other people in the world in general. And that's part of a natural personality development. Yeah, but it still took a psychoanalyst named Robert Velta, who finally said, this is an actual personality type right, that we should study. And then William excuse me, Wilhelm Reich, parenthetical three Austrians in a row with an exclamation point. So he came along and said that, well, first of all, narcissists are almost always men. And the thinking on that is not true anymore. Although I still think usually men are thought of to be narcissist. Yeah, it's typically considered a male dominated condition. Right? Yeah. And he basically kind of put in words that link between masculinity and this narcissistic aggression that kind of can come along with being a narcissist. Right? He said it's, dude. That was his big contribution. So then along came a woman, a German psychoanalyst named Karen Horney. Go ahead, parenthetical. Finally, a woman. And, yes, that's her real name, too. Okay, thank you, Chuck. And in 1939, Karen Horney should we say the parenthetical every time we say your name? No, it's probably a bad idea. So Karen Horney came along in 1939, and she's like, all right, everybody shut up. I've got this figured out. This article misses it. So she had this idea that people have insecurities, and there are different personality types that deal with their insecurities and with the expansive personality type. There were three subtypes that dealt with their insecurities, and one of those was the narcissist. Right. So narcissism was one way that some people deal with their insecurities, according to her. So I guess her big contribution to it was to point out that narcissism is a defense mechanism, right? Which is a pretty significant breakthrough. Actually. It's people who masturbate too much to actually, it's mostly guys. And no, it's just a development stage, too. Wait a minute, wait a minute. This is how some people reflexively deal with the fact that they don't feel like they measure up deep down inside, which is kind of a mind blowing thing to do, especially if you're not aware of it. Like, it's not like something happens to you when you're a kid and you go, you know what? When I grow up, I'm going to remember all this. But the way I'm going to deal with it is to be totally arrogant and pretend like I think that I'm the greatest thing that ever happened. You just watch. Now I'm going to wait twelve to 15 years and let the clock start ticking now. Yeah. So that was late 1930s, and then the next big breakthrough came in 1960 with Annie Reich, who was Phil home's wife, as it's pointed out. Parenthetically, actually. That one's sort of legit. Yes, sir. Although he could have just used comments. All these parentheses are driving me nuts. Yeah, they are. But this was a big breakthrough because she says, you know what? Not only are people very vulnerable who are narcissists, but I think that vulnerability might come from traumatic experience that they suffered when they were younger. Yeah. From the original source. That's still kind of a thought about thing. Not necessarily a trauma, but a lot of psychologists point to parents as potentially the source for it. Which we'll talk more about later. Yeah. And she also had the idea that narcissists, there is no sort of middle ground. They can't suffer ambiguity. And it's basically I'm either totally successful or I'm a big failure. Right. Which means that they can't handle criticism, which is a huge hallmark of the narcissistic personality disorder. Right. Yeah. So there's another guy who didn't make it in this article, but made a huge contribution, actually, two of them. One was Henry Murray, and back in 1938 he noticed that there was something that he termed a covert narcissist, where most people, when you think of a narcissist, you think overt narcissists, like people who are just completely, obviously publicly in love with themselves. Yeah, but Henry Murray said, no, there's another type I've noticed. I'm going to call them covert narcissist. And they share in common with overt narcissists, this conceit and arrogance, and they value their own needs over other people's needs. So at their core, they are narcissistic. But the way that their narcissism plays out publicly is basically the opposite of an overt narcissist. Rather than being brash and self assured and confident and cocky, they're actually quiet, they're introverted, all of their psychodrama plays out inside and they become anxious. They're very vulnerable, they get very defensive and then back in later on in, the guy named Paul Wink reclassified cover and over into grandiosity exhibitionism. And then vulnerability sensitivity. And the vulnerability sensitivity type of narcissist is basically they're entitled. They feel entitled, but they're also very bitter. Right. Yeah. It's a lot of anxiety, bitterness, defensive, like you said before, introverted. And then one of the keys here, I think is delusions of persecution, which can also be tied into paranoia. So everyone is out to get me, they're coming after me. Why is it always me? That kind of line of thinking. So it's like constant, complete absorption in the self, but rather than absorption and thinking about how awesome you are, you're thinking about how everything like the world's against you. Right. But ultimately the two things that the types share in common is that it all boils down to them. It's always about them one way or another. Yeah, for sure. And that was incredibly insightful, I think, when you send that one over. Yeah. Thank you, everybody. I found that article. You did? Yeah. Finally, a man named John Nehemiah finally coined the term Narcissistic character disorder. And then finally, in 10 00 19 68, Heinz kohot described it as narcissistic personality disorder. And then it would be another twelve years before it would finally make it into the DSM as an actual diagnosed diagnostic description. Right. I think that from the DSM three, right? Yeah. Okay. And Chuck, get this, man. We are like 27 minutes into this episode. We're about to take our first Ad break. That's a new record. Yeah. So we'll be right back. We're going to talk about me while you guys listen to these ads. But you can think about me. Okay, man. So you said that it finally made it into the DSM in correct. And it is a specified personality disorder. I don't remember how many there are, but in the DSM, this last go round, which was 2011, I think, for the DSM five. Do you remember all the press that got, when they were putting the DSM, the actual term for his Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychological Association's Bible, basically. Right, yes. Where every psychologist and psychiatrist in all the land has this thing, and they're going through this saying, oh, this person has this and this. So they actually qualify for this. So I can bill insurance for this and prescribe medication for this, and it's all legit. This is what the DSM does. It's the Bible for psychologists. And there's a huge struggle in about 20 10, 20 11 between people who said, dude, these personality disorders, they're too strict. You either have it or you don't. And people, especially in terms of personality, just don't exist like that. We exist on spectrum. There's different dimensions. And we've talked about it before, I think, in the Personality Inventory episode. But the viewpoint that enjoys the widest appreciation these days in the psychology community is the big five traits. The ocean or canoe traits like openness or openness to new experiences or extraversion, these kind of things. And when you take these different personality traits, you get a clearer picture of people, and you can also take those traits and basically apply them to dysfunction of personality. And you can say, well, you've got these dysfunctions and we need to work on this rather than you've got these five dysfunctions, which means you automatically qualify for a narcissistic personality disorder. So narcissistic personality disorder and narcissism almost didn't make it into the DSM five, but the people who are struggling for the big five trades to take over lost the battle, and it stayed the same, just the way it's been since 1980. And we'll talk about it more later, but there's a lot of questions about whether it's legitimate. But the criteria, if you allow me, Chuck, the DSM criteria for narcissistic personality disorder are these. You would have to have a grandiose sense of self importance. It's pretty straightforward. You're preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love. What else you got that? Yes. Number three believes that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by or should associate with other special people. Yeah. Right. This kind of like, narcissist spurring all the hosers, right? Right. You require excessive admiration. Right. Which means that you want compliments. You fish for compliments. And flattery really gets you places with a narcissist, too. Yeah. You have a high sense of entitlement. You're interpersonally, exploitive. This is a big one. Number seven, you lack empathy whether you're not able to or you're not willing to. Right. And then you're often envious of others, or you think that other people are envious of you. Again, this whole kind of reverts back to you thinking about how it's always about you and that other people are walking around thinking about you at any given point in time. Right. And then finally, well, you're arrogant and you're kind of a jerk. Right. And there you go. You put it together, and that's the narcissist. And I think maybe five of nine qualify for a definitive narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. Yeah. What makes a person a narcissist is sort of a conundrum at this point. It's one of those things where in this article kind of points it out in a good way, where nature and nurture are so mixed up that we don't really know what can make someone a narcissist. Certainly. Almost assuredly, it's a little bit of both, probably like most things. But you could have parents that are and especially nowadays with parenting, is like your child is the unique snowflake and you're the most special person on the planet, and you are the most perfect little angel, kind of feeding a child that as they grow up, which is a more recent parenting technique. Yeah. Get this, man. I read an article called how the Self Esteem Craze Took Over America. Yeah. I posted it on my website. Are you seriousclark.com? That I do reading lists, which is just like, cool articles that I've read, and it's on there. But they traced us back to one book that came out in 1991 called The Lovables in the Kingdom of Self Esteem, a children's book. And they said this was the. Source. This thing took off and ended up in basically classroom curriculum, and it raised this whole generation to have more self esteem than any other generation has been raised on before. Yeah. Not to knock self esteem, though. No, not at all. I think that there is a general thought among some people that it has crossed the line between self esteem and entitlement. Yeah, there you go. And that is a huge debate because a lot of people on the other side say, actually, you're just being a crutch of the old person who's aging and losing touch with what the world is doing these days. Yes, I think that's just fascinating to me. But we'll talk more about that later. But parents are widely implicated right, as possibly the source of this. Yeah, for sure. Like Jean Twin, she's one of the champions of narcissism. She co wrote a book with another researcher from the University of Georgia named W. Keith Campbell, and it was called The Narcissism Epidemic, which became more than just a book title. It was basically a term that made the rounds from 2008 to even today. You can find it. It seems to have hit the high water mark back around 20, 10, 11, 12, maybe. Yes. But they created this avalanche of discussion and press and talk and Gene Twin, one of her hallmarks is to find support for her theory outside of the lab and more in pop culture. So one of the ways that she suggested that her theory is right, that narcissism is indeed on the rise among millennials, is that children are given much less common names than they were before. Yeah, I thought that was interesting, that whole thing where you name your kid Apple Martini and you're the only one in the world named Apple Martini. There's an apple tini in my class, but I'm apple Martini. Right. That is what a special little child you are. Right. There should be no other apple martini. Yes. I think the stat they came up with was that in the 1880s, 40% of boys received one of the ten most common names. Today, fewer than 10% do. Yeah, I mean, I thought that was a little hanky to say. Well, in the 1880s, everyone was named Jack and John and William. Right. It's just completely that's anecdotal evidence, basically, that's trivia. That's not science. It's a trivia total is what it is. And that's part of the problem with all this. So the idea that you can label an entire generation as narcissists by saying narcissism is on the rise and then that in turn explains selfies in Facebook to the older people, that it's actually a deficiency that these kids have. It's not me getting older, it's the kids. Right. And now it's being proven by science that's created this whole huge national conversation that's definitely taken narcissism very far out of the research realm and into just complete armchair pop psychology. Well, here's some more pop psychology for you from me. Okay. Because I see, well, I don't know, I'm not going to make any judgment on today's millennials and how narcissistic they are. I think that's fair. But I have seen narcissism, rampant narcissism in our parents'generation. Oh, yeah. What was that generation, I guess baby boomers. Yeah, that's right, the baby boomers. They were just special in every single way, shape or form, remember? Yeah, but that's the thing. I have seen it firsthand with that generation where but it's not like, oh, I'm into selfies and stuff like that. It manifests itself in a completely different way. Or I'll get on the phone with my kid and talk for 45 minutes about myself without once ever asking how they're doing. So we should say here we're doing the same thing to the older generation, though, that they're doing to younger generations, too. Right. So maybe the point is narcissism isn't on the rise or on the decline at all. It's just always been there for a certain amount of people. Well, yes, there's a lot of evidence that that is absolutely true, Chuck. Like, for example, there was a really large study, like 37,000 something people, which were apparently a pretty good representation of American adults, right? Yeah. So it's a good study population. And they ask them to self report the instances of narcissism that they'd had throughout their life, and they basically scored whether these people had experienced any, basically, bouts of narcissistic personality disorder or some sort of clinical narcissism. Right. And they found that the younger you were, the more prone you were to have reported being narcissistic. And so a lot of people point to that and say, See, it's on the rise with the younger generation. The older generation wasn't like that. And the other people who are critics of that say, when you get older, one of the hallmarks of getting older is completely forgetting all the stuff you went through to get to that point in your life yeah. Or how you are currently. Right. That's another way to put it, too. So there's a big problem with the idea of just having people self report whether they were narcissistic back in their lives. But people who do say, okay, even if that was legitimate, they're forgetting. People are forgetting that everybody goes through a narcissistic phase in their life and that, yes, if you go younger and you start asking people about it while they're in their narcissistic phase, they're going to be more likely to report it than people who have forgotten because their narcissistic phase was decades ago. Right. Or the notion. And we'll get into the treatment a little bit more with seeing a psychologist or a therapist. But one of the hallmarks of a narcissist is to go to a therapist for a little while, maybe for depression or something else, which can be comorbid, and they dig down and get to the root of it, and they're like, actually, you're a narcissist. And that's where all this stuff is coming from. And that's when the narcissist goes, this is nuts. I'm out of here. I'm not going to continue my therapy. You don't know what you're talking about. Right. Which is a huge problem. Apparently, if you are a narcissist and you do, you are one of the very few that end up in therapy. You're there for some other reason. You're not like oh, I'm a narcissist. I need help. What's this weird anxiety I've got dealing with all the time? Or why am I depressed? Or why am I flying off the handle at work? And HR sent me here so they will get to therapy. But even the ones that do get there apparently tend to wash out pretty quickly because part and parcel with therapy is accepting criticism or other perspectives that you may have some things to work on. And once you start hitting that segment of therapy, the narcissist is probably going to say, you're an idiot and I'm out of here. I can't be associating with you. You went to Yale, not Harvard. Right. Like you said, surprising. It's surprising if they're in there to begin with because part of being a narcissist is on one hand, or at least in one kind of narcissist, is, I got no problems. Why do I need to go to a therapist? Everything's great. I don't give a crap what anyone thinks about me. Right. It's all good, bro. Right. So there's some inherent problems with treating narcissism. I read a really interesting article in the Harvard Business Review, and it was basically advice to mentors about how to mentor a narcissist. And it did a really good job of explaining some of the problems that you'll have at work being a narcissist, on the one hand. And apparently studies have found that narcissists tend to congregate or aggregate toward the top of the food chain or the bottom of the food chain in corporate organizations. Yes. Which is interesting. Yeah. And I would guess that would mostly be whether it was covert or overt narcissist, I'm not sure. But in a lot of ways, being a narcissist, your personality traits can be valued or prized at a company if you're in sales and you have limitless confidence and if you don't make a sale because that guy was an idiot, not because you didn't do a very good job. So you're just right onto the next guy to sell to the next person. That's highly valuable. Right. But eventually somebody's going to criticize you, a coworker or something like that. It's going to hit you the wrong way. You're not going to take it very well because you're going to know that they're right. But your response to that kind of thing is not to go chew it over process, whether you actually agree with it, whether they're right or not. And then if you decide that they are to take that as advice and become a better person from it. That's not your Mo. As a person with narcissistic personality disorder, you're going to bite the other person's head off. You're going to create a conflict at work that probably has to be smoothed over by multiple parties. Or maybe you'll end up fired or demoted or who knows? So it can go both ways, and it usually goes both ways within a career or a job for a person with clinical narcissism. Yeah, to put it mildly. You're lacking in interpersonal skills, for sure. So as far as the science behind it, there's like the hard science, there's not a ton. But they did this one study I thought was pretty interesting is they looked at people in the old MRI machine in Berlin and at least people that they thought had narcissistic personality disorder, and they found that the cerebral cortex of these people were significantly thinner than normal. And that's where we foster empathy. So there definitely could be something to that. And then that other study I thought was interesting was, and this is kind of along the lines of treatment, was they sat people down, narcissists and showed them videos of what was it? Videos of just things going wrong with people. Sad documentaries. Yes, sad documentaries. So my brother's keeper is what they watched. Oh, really? No. Okay, that's good. Oh, man, what's that one documentary? The saddest thing I've ever seen? Great Gardens, thin Blue Line, Vernon, Florida. No, you're just naming documentaries now. I know you. Which one? Oh, I can't remember. It was the one about the one about a murder. It was just devastating. I can't remember. Oh, dear Zachary. Oh, God, man. Holy cow. I could barely get through that thing. Yeah, it was as bad as it gets because it was real. Yeah, which most documentaries are. So they showed Dear Zachary to people, to narcissist, and they measure their heart rate, and apparently the empathetic response, your heart rate will go up. And they were just flatlined. Well, not flatlined because they were just have their normal heart rate going. And then they showed them I don't know if it's the same one, but they showed them another documentary where they just coached them and said, hey, what if this were you? Put yourself in their shoes and all of a sudden it changed and their heart rate increased. So the question was, like, is it that easy? Is merely suggesting to a narcissist, hey, why don't you think of it from another point of view? So the question is, are they unable or unwilling to do so? Well, I think that's the case with anyone who lacks empathy. Like, even in our psychopath episode, we talked about the potential ability for psychopaths to empathize. They just have to be told, you should empathize now. Right. It's not an automatic thing for people who lack empathy. Fake empathy, though. That's the difference, isn't it? I don't remember. I think they were able to rationalize why they would be able to rationalize the outcome of empathy. Like, oh, that person wouldn't want that to happen to them. I should probably stop rooting on the bad thing. Right? I guess this is a little different than that. Okay, I'll turn on my empathy now. Yes, you're right. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. Well, let's take a break and well, we'll talk a little bit more about narcissism after this. Okay. We're back, Chuck, and as you promised, we're going to talk a little more about narcissists. There was this one thing I thought was fairly interesting in our own article where it talked about evolutionary psychology. They did a 2004 study with modeling techniques, computer modeling, where they looked at facial, whether or not couples look like each other when they hook up. Like that Conan O'Brien segment. I don't remember. They just take two celebrities and put together that was the best if they made it or something like that. Yeah. So what they did find was that they saw a correlation, at least what they called assorted of mating, where basically you seek those who look like you, which I thought was fairly interesting. They thought that could tie in a little bit with narcissism. Maybe it has a biological basis. Yeah, exactly. And that would actually tie into the idea that we hit our narcissistic peak during our reproductive years, and then it waned as we age and age out of reproductiveness. Right. Yeah. So maybe it is kind of correlated to it. And then if your synapses just fuse a little too much, you can become narcissistic to a clinical degree. Who knows? Yeah. No one knows. That's the point. So that's the problem with this field of research is no one knows. But people are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder every day. Nobody can agree on the prevalence. Our article says 7.7% of men in the US. 4.8% of women. That washes out to 6.2% average among the genders. Yeah, I saw 1%. I also saw 200,000, which is way less than 1% in the US. Right. No one has any idea what the prevalence is, and they're not sure why. There's a couple of proposals for why. One is that the narcissistic personality disorder criteria that we went over places a lot of emphasis on that overt type of narcissist. Right. And undervalues the overt there is the covert type. Right. So it's possible that there are way more narcissists out there than would be caught by the NPD criteria and the DSM. Right. Yeah. It's just so tough with personality disorders that, to me clearly exists on a spectrum to kind of pin down anything they have. The online test you can take. I took it myself because I was curious. Sure. I scored an eleven out of 40. Oh, that's not very narcissistic. No, I was a little disappointed. I was hoping to be in the single digits. I did not take the test? Yeah. I imagine you were thinking about me when you took it, so I just left it at that. Do you think I was talking about you because I'm a narcissist? Okay. No, that you were thinking about me while you were taking the test. No, I didn't think about you. I was answering for myself. And eleven out of 40, I thought, was I can't remember. I mean, it broke it down. It showed averages and stuff like that, and then it showed you where you were more likely or where your subtrates like, out of those eleven, let's say seven of those out of the eleven was a specific subtrate. So that was sort of helpful, but I just looked at it and maybe I should work on that stuff. Right. Get down into the single digits. Yeah. You're going to try to get your test score down? Sure. Check it out, man. Keep me posted, will you? Personal growth. There's another inventory you can take. I'm trying to find the name of it, which is kind of gets the covert type out in the open. It's called the Maladaptive Covert Narcissism scale. So there were 40 questions on the MPD Personality Inventory. Yeah. This one's like 23, and you give it a score between one and five. Whereas with the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, you choose between basically opposite pairs of statements. Right. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't quite opposite. Sometimes they're a little trickier, and there were some that repeated in different ways. I'm like, I see what you're doing there. Right. You can't use psychology on me. Yeah. But it was also when I see things like this, I think if you're taking this and you know what it is, and you are a narcissist, you are probably not going to be very honest either. Part of being the narcissist is like, no, I'm not going to admit that. Yes. If it's a defense mechanism, you wouldn't really be capable of it. Yeah, I thought it was interesting. It would crumble your ego. That's right. One of the reasons why all of this is up for debate still, and why we're having so much fun with it this afternoon, is because there's been no definitive study that really looks at a true representative sample of, say, teenagers in America to determine a baseline to compare today's teams up against. Right? Yeah. There have been studies, so the college kids all around the US have been given for years and years and years. Now the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. And they're usually psychology students. So that's usually a select group from an already select group from the population, which is college students. So you're not really looking at a representative sample of all teens in America at the time. But from that select group of select group, they found that personality among some different colleges, personality narcissistic personality traits apparently has risen by about two questions from the late 80s till the mid two thousand s. Yeah. And then other people are like, no, that's all wrong. First of all, you guys are comparing tests from different colleges in different areas. That's terrible. What we need is somebody to get together all of the teenagers in America or a huge representative sample of them, say, just give it out to all high schools in the United States to take on one day and start that, do it now and then start using that as your baseline for 2030 years out. Then we can actually say whether narcissism is increasing. Right, right. The closest thing they've got is that thing that they've been giving to high school kids since the 70s. It's great. It has the best, the more, you know, type name. It's called monitoring the future. Yeah, I love it. That sounds like such a great US. Government test for high school students. But it's from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and apparently it's an annual survey of 50,000 high school students. And it doesn't directly measure narcissism, but it measures parts of a personality dimensions related to it. Right. Like self esteem, egoism, individualism. And what they found is that self esteem actually all of those factors are basically exactly the same in 2006 as they were in. Apparently that would undermine the idea that narcissus is on the rise. But if somebody tells you narcissus is on the rise, next time they say that, you say, how do you know? Tell them Josh sent you. Well, yeah, I mean, there are people that say like, it's an epidemic and other because of social media mainly and selfies and instagram and I just I don't know, man. I think that's something when I've witnessed people taking selfies, like a dozen of them trying to get it just right and making the face out and doing all that. Yeah. It's not pretty to see. It's not and I see that and I think is that narcissism or is that just I don't know. To me it's a personality trait that any and all of us have. And under the right circumstances, it can be brought out easier for some than others. But our society has changed enough so that it is far more socially acceptable and even socially encouraged through social media to do those kinds of things. Right, yeah. I don't think that that necessarily translates automatically to a rise in narcissism. I think it's just a change in society. Some people are like those people have always been around. They're just more visible because they're doing it at the public pool now or in a bar. Right. Whereas in the 50s they would have been laughed out of that bar or out of that pool had they done that, but they were still around. It just wasn't socially acceptable for them to do stuff like that. Yeah. And I guess I think I'm having a hard time but in the words but I think I think that true. Narcissism is a lot deeper than that. And that can just be like, hey, I think I'm really hot and I like to take pictures of myself, but maybe I'm also very empathetic and have great interpersonal skills and I see other people's point of view a lot, but I'm super stuck up. I don't think just because you take a lot of selfies or you're obsessed with social media means you're narcissistic. I think it goes way narcissism goes way deeper than that. And it's like a tunnel vision where you are only seeing things from your own point of view. I mean, that's part of it. And then I think the other part of it too is, yeah, maybe millennials do have over inflated self esteem or maybe they're this wonderful generation that's actually really dedicated to changing the world for a positive view. The problem is when you start to paint the whole generation with a single brush. And that's been done with narcissism, which I think really undermines the value of the term. Yeah, for sure. So there's plenty more to talk about. If you want to learn more about narcissism, you can just dive into the Internet and find out what your local blogger thinks about it. I guarantee you they've written about it. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this one sad horny bunnies. This all makes sense in a second. I have no idea what this one is. During the recent flu show guys, you explained that it was Iowa dock Richard Schope who first isolated the flu virus. That was likely the achievement that made him famous, but not the reason why. My family knows of his work. We live in the twin cities. Shout out to the twin cities where we've seen many rabbits with a horrifying disease. It causes them to grow what appear to be horns, sometimes just one or two, occasionally half a dozen or more. And though the growths are often right where an animal would have horns, sometimes they sprout from near rabbit's mouth or eyes, making survival pretty challenging. A few years ago, when we investigated this creepy rabbit illness, we learned it was Richard Schope who first isolated and identified the virus it causes. It now called the papilloma virus. SPV is similar to some papilloma viruses in humans, which can lead to fun things like genital warts or cervical cancer. In fact, thanks to the work of show other researchers and these spooky looking rabbits, we have medical successes like the HPV vaccine. It is not critical to my life, this information, but certainly makes it more interesting. And that's why I'm always listening to stuff you should know. And that is from Jane Neemeyer in the Twin Cities. Nice. And did you look it up? I did. And if you want to see heartbreaking photos bunnies with horns coming out of their face, just look up Show papillomavirus rabbits. And it is so sad because there's nothing cuter on the planet, almost in a bunny rabbit and you see these things you're like, man, what did you do to deserve funny? It's the worst. Well, thanks a lot. What was the name of the author? Jane. Jane. Thanks a lot, Jane. Appreciate that. Thanks for bringing us down. If you want to bring us down like Jane did, you could tweet to us at Syscast through Joshua Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook.com stuffyshonowcharleswchuckbryant, you can send us an email stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. 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." | |
c3fc0fd2-5460-11e8-b38c-67bbf97a6de1 | SYSK Selects: How Bonsai Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-bonsai-works | For thousands of years people have been taking normal trees and forcing them into miniature. Learn all about the history and art of this strangely engrossing pastime in this classic episode. | For thousands of years people have been taking normal trees and forcing them into miniature. Learn all about the history and art of this strangely engrossing pastime in this classic episode. | Sat, 08 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=39, tm_isdst=0) | 53850361 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. Welcome to a Saturday selects episode. Charles W. Chuck Bryant here. And this is my week to pick, and I'm going with how Bonsai works. We love those little trees. We love the Karate Kid. All those things. Wrap up th up. Make Bonsai. May 16, 2016, is when we first recorded this, and I think Josh and I both promised to get into Bonsai since then. Speaking for myself, I have not. But you never know. I did get tiny scissors for my nose hair, so maybe I'll use those. Check it out right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. I've decided to talk about 85% speed right now. Oh, yeah. How's it going? Well, you know, there's some weirdos that listen to us on double speed. Well, they just hurry up and get to the point, you idiot. Yeah, because busy lives, they can't listen to 40 minutes of content straight. It's funny when somebody tweets to us or takes time to write an email, say, like, I love your podcast, but I'm really displeased with the tangents you go on. Sure. You seem to talk about a lot of stuff that's unrelated. Can you stop doing that? And I always think I don't think 70 should know this for you, buddy. If you're being driven crazy by that, then, well, sure, yeah. Like, we would welcome you to stay. Sure. But the tangents, they're part of the fabric of the show at this point. They're the glue, like it or not. I think the whole thing would be decidedly less enjoyable if we were just, like, vomiting backs up. Yeah. Just business like. Yeah. Or maybe after 850 shows, we should just completely change how we do it. Yeah. There you go. That's a great idea. Yeah. Hey, before we get started, though, we do want to thank Sam from Gypsons Malort. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Sam. We mentioned the unique Chicago brand lakour on our PR show, right? Live in Chicago. Because you tried it before the show. Yeah, well, I tried it a few times. I got you. As John Hodgman said, it tastes like pencil shavings and heartbreak his descriptor. But Sam Hart is talking about Crown Royal. I was like, Wait a minute. They talked about Malort and I didn't send them anything. Yeah. Attention, all of their distillers in America. You can get in on this, too. Yeah. If the makers of Plymouth Jin or Leopold's Gin or Knob Creek or Pappy van Winkle, st. George's, they're a great distillery out of San Francisco. Yeah. Pappy Van Winkle. Wow. That's the stuff that gets hijacked and sold for $20,000 on the Internet. Yes. So I'm just throwing it out there. I'm picking it back up, bringing it back here, throwing it again. We're happy to drink your booze and talk about it ad nauseam. You know what else we're happy to talk about Big Boy. What's that? Bonsai. Yes. Which you I don't know if I was saying it wrong, but right before we press recorded, you said, it's not bonsai, it's bonsai. And I was like, what's the difference? It's not bonsai. Oh, with a Z. Right. That means heads up. Right. Bonsai. Or bonsai with an S. Right? It basically means plant in tiny container. Yeah. Those are the cute toy trees that Mr. Miyagi are made of plastic. It depends. Target has some. They definitely have plastic ones. If you search bonsai, it's one of the things that comes up immediately. Fake trees. I think it's called, like Nearly Real Boy for Nearly Natural, something like that. And it does not look nearly natural. It's like near beer. You ever heard people call non alcoholic beer near beer? Yeah, I think it's kind of funny. You probably shouldn't tell a story. So with bonsai, Chuck, we're talking like you said, little toy trees. And yeah, there's plenty of fake bonsai out there, but they're just kind of it's the same thing as fake flowers. Well, it sort of flies in the face of what's special about bonsai, which is that it's a living work of art. Right? It does. And a lot of people are like, well, that's just a weird freakish tree that you've been abusing for the last several decades. Some people actually do criticize ponti because really? Yeah, it's like docking a dog's tail. It's nothing like that, but depending on how you feel about plants, it's the same thing. You're looking at something that's natural and literally bending it to your will. So there's an antipuning movement going on around the world. Maybe. I don't know if I would go that far to say it, but if you are invested in bonsai, if you do appreciate bonsai, part of the whole point of bonsai is you are taking you're creating a tableau that is a living depiction of nature. Yes. Rather than a painting, you're creating a living version of basically a painting. Well, sculpture. Living sculpture. Yeah. That's even better. Like, you could make it out of Sculpy clay. You could, but then you've totally missed the point of buying. Well, that'd be fun too, but it's something different, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So we're going to talk about how to bonsai, I have to say. Is that a verb as well? It is now. Okay. Jerry is cracking up this episode she's reading. I got you. What is the guy from Cracks name? Alfred Newman's. Like, kind of, yeah. He had like this blonde counterpart. Is that still around? Because they're sort of a different thing than they would totally. Yeah. There's this great story behind Crack. Like, crack was around for decades and it just got left to languish. Right. And I guess some fan came along and was like, hey, I noticed you're basically just waiting around for crack to die. Can I have a stab at it a crack at it? I specifically didn't say that, but yes. And they're like, whatever, kid. Go ahead. And the guy basically resurrected Cracked in his basement. Nice. Brought it back from the dead. Now it's, like, huge. Well, they just sold for a boatload of money. Oh, yeah. Good for them. I hope it went to that dude who resurrected it. I do, too. That's great. I don't remember how we got onto Cracked. Jerry was laughing. Oh, she was reading cracked. Yes. Right. So back to bonsai. Like I said, we're going to talk about how to bonsai, which, like I said, is a verb. Now, let's talk about the history of it first. Yeah. Like many things in the world, and especially many things that you might associate with Japan, it started earlier in China before it made its way to Japan, and in China, it was called well, in Japan, did you already say what it literally means? I think you did, yeah. It means plant in a tray. Yeah, plant in a tray. In China, it was punsai, which means tray plant. Not too far off. No. And if you go all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, there is evidence on tomb paintings that they have these little prune trees and shallow pots. Yeah, it's just like part of the painting in the tomb. It's not, like, featured. It's just part of it kind of depicting regular life. They're like, okay, well, at least by 706 Ce. That there were people doing ponzai in China. That's ponzi. Yeah, right. It may go back even further than that. There's a legend that an emperor, around about 2006 BCE. Wanted his entire empire, China, recreated a miniature in his backyard. And they think they suspect that it's possible that that may have given rise to pontsai. That makes sense. Yeah. Like, we got to make tiny trees now because the emperor wants a toy. Yeah. But then either through trade or through gifts, exchanges of state departments and stuff like that, japan does what it always did, and it got its hands on something and then took it to the nth degree and perfected it and made it awesome. That's what Japan does. That's what they do. There's an ancient Japanese scroll that I found not literally in my backyard, in your attic that I found on the Internet. And it says, this is around the Kamakura period, which was 1185 to 1333. And it says, to appreciate and find pleasure and curiously, curved potted trees is to love deformity, which I thought was interesting. And the article I read said we don't know whether it is positive or negative. Right. Yeah, I think it means positive. Maybe the writer was passive aggressive. Maybe. I thought it was a pretty interesting quote, though. Yeah, for sure. Because, again, you're training trees to be little freaks of nature, basically. Yeah. And like a lot of other works of art at the time, it starts out with, like, monks and Buddhists, and then eventually it becomes, like, part of the rich elite and then eventually works its way to the common folk. Right. So by the, I think, the 13th, 15th, 16th century, it had become, like a pretty well established hobby in Japan. I got the impression that it wasn't necessarily thought of as an art form until the west saw it for the first time. So in the 17th century, Japan was getting really tired of Westerners trying to convert them to Christianity and basically exploiting them in unfair trade practices. They said. You know what? Westerners get out. We are isolating ourselves. We're closing ourselves off the trade with the west, except for a few Dutch and Spaniards and then the Chinese, everybody else go away. And they stayed like that for a couple of hundred years. And I believe it was Millard Filmore who sent Matthew Perry Chandler Bing over there with the squadron of Navy freighters and huge cannons and guns, saying, you're going to trade with us? He said, could you guys be any cooler? You have all kinds of cool stuff. That's my Chandler. So Japan opened up basically at the barrel of America's guns. Yeah. We should do a show on that. We've talked about it enough. It's really interesting, the isolationist period. Yeah. What went on there then? Bonsai. A lot of goldfish tending. Nice. Remember Mr. Burns'famous quote those sandalwearing goldfish tenders? I don't remember that. It's good, though. But as far as coming to the west, there were a couple of big fairs where it kind of exploded. The Paris World Exhibition of 1878 and the London Exhibition of 19 nine, where, of course, people in the west just probably flipped for it. Yeah. Because it's so cool. Yeah, it is. Oh, man. Researching this, every time I would come across a new term for, like, a style or something, I go look it up. And I ended up spending a half an hour just looking at Bonsai pictures. Yeah, me, too. It's really engrossing. Yeah. I was going to be like, all right, I'm doing this. I definitely am. But I'm going to wait. For what? Old age? So, like, three or four years from now? Yeah, I think I'm going to get into it. Yes. I think it's just for me. I've got too much going on right now to do. But it's going to be a great retirement pastime for me. Yeah. I could see myself really, like, spending days and days I can see it. Caring for these little guys. Oh, yeah. And I like tiny things and miniatures. Oh, you're going to love Bonsai. Yeah. Like the little tiny Tabasco bottles that you get in room service and stuff like that. Plus, you're crazy for it. Your doll houses that you've built. My doll houses? Yeah. I don't know. Have you ever read the Dollhouse? The Heinrich Gibson place? Yeah, sure. Great. All right, well, I guess we should talk about some of those styles then, huh? Well, you want to take a break first? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. Okay, Josh, you mentioned styles, and I did the same thing you did, buddy. I went and looked at pictures, and I put little marks next to my favorite ones, like earmarked. What I'm going to try and emulate in the future, I'm very curious if we're going to do the same one. All right, you start. So upright ChocOn, it's the most formal, traditional style where it is basically it emulates a strong, healthy, upright, growing tree. Yeah. I love that we take this ancient, amazing art form and the most formal style we go. Yeah, but I agree. Didn't delight me. Again, what you're doing is emulating nature, but you're doing it in miniature. And part of bonsai is using, like, tricks of the eye, force, perspective, that kind of stuff. And the upright, the chokan style, does that by tapering the trunk so it's much wider at the bottom than it is at the top to kind of give you the idea that you're looking up toward a very tall tree. Yeah. And we'll sprinkle in bits of the sort of philosophical art behind it. But the idea is that you sort of imagine a scene in your head and then you try and make it look like that. Maybe it's something from your past. Maybe it's a great tree you saw one time on a vacation, but just something that makes you feel good. Right. You're usually not like, let me just make some crazy, weird looking thing. Right? Because I'm drunk, I'm going to make that tree that was next to the place where my friend got hit and killed on his bike. No. It's all about harmony. Yes. That would be the opposite of bonsai. Yes, that's right. So moving on to another style, which I did not put a check mark next to, but it's okay. My yogi. I like this one. It's okay. It's a little like the chokon. It's the informal upright. Okay. So a little more style, maybe. Yeah. So the chokana is very formal, very straight. The Moyogi is overall, the shape is upright. Yes. But it can bend and twist to get to that point. You see what I'm saying? Sure. It's neat. Yeah, I think it's neat. I wouldn't mind doing a moyoki at some point in the future, but it definitely won't be the first one I try. Alright. It's down the list a bit. Yeah. It is the slanting shakan or Shaka khan or Fukanagashi. Fukunagashi, yeah. Nice. Is that good? Yeah, these are pretty cool, I have to say. That has the leaning trunk at a 45 degree angle and the branches follow the angle of the trunk. Yeah. They're parallel to it, right? Yes. Basically parallel. Essentially. Right. So they're neat looking. Yeah. And that trunk is slanted in reference to the pot. The lip of the pot. Right? Yeah. That 45 degrees right. Yes. And we should say we haven't said it. So we're talking mostly about the trees and that's what gets the most attention. But classically and at its heart, bonsai is a balance. It's a harmony between the plant and the pot. Like when you're talking about bonsai, the pot is included in that. It's part of it. The sculpture itself almost agreed. And also with that slanting style, supposedly, even though I saw many examples to the contrary. The first branch is supposed to go opposite of the angle of the trunk to provide balance. Right. I think that's in the Chagan style. Oh, really? It goes the opposite. Got you. Alright, Chuck. Next cascade. Pretty neat. And you just lit up like a Christmas tree. Is this yours? So the semi cascade, the Hank guy is mine. That's the one I'm going to try first. All right, well, go ahead and describe it then. So basically and you need a deeper pot. So most pots for bonsai are shallow. This you need like a pretty deep pot for because the plant is basically mostly overhanging it's outside and hanging down from the pot. That's a full on cascade. And these are meant to really emulate like a tree that's just barely hanging on and like a rocky outcrop on a mountain. Interesting. And so the cascade is full on. Like basically the whole plant is below the lip of the pot. Yes. The semi cascade is where con King guy. Right, yeah. Where there's a substantial amount of the plant is still in the pot, but it's growing over and down the side some. That's right. Or really off to the side windswept is semi cascade, I think is another term for it. Yeah. Now I'm trying to apply psychology to why that's your favorite. Just the look of it, just aesthetically speaking. I think it's great. Next up we have the literati or the Bonjin or bonjini bungingi. Bunging. Yeah. I think that's way better. Probably one of those. You think? I would ask my wife. Sure. We should just have you me in here with like a ruler smashing knuckles. No, this is the one that really focuses on perspective. So the idea here is that you're looking from below to a tree that is above. Like if you're at the base of a mountain looking up okay. Then you tailor the tree to make it look as if and we should also mention that you should look at eye level is traditionally where when you talk about perspective, if you're standing 4ft above it right. That's different. You should look at bonsai eye level. Yeah. That's why they're so frequently displayed at eye level. That's right. And there's also probably worth mentioning here that there's a definite front and a definite back to a bonsai. We'll get into that. This one is one of my favorites. Broom. Yes, we are at the broom. So is this the one that you marked the hoki doti yes. Okay. And you might look it up, people, and say, interesting. Not the most flashy tree, but there's something about it, man. It has this really full kind of half dome with just a single trunk jutting up. Yeah. It's just beautiful. To me, it's like it takes the shape of an idealized, like, maple or oak tree. Yeah. It reminded me of like a grand oak. Yeah. I wouldn't call you flashy. You've never been known to wear, like, ID bracelets or pinky rings. I don't know what either one of those things are. You know what a pinky ring is? No. Yes, you do. I don't know what you're talking about. A pinky ring. A man's pinky ring. I know what a man is. Okay. I'll show you later. Next up is my absolute favorite by far, the landscape. It's when you create your little miniature scene. It's like a shadow box, which I used to love doing those when I was a kid. My oldest sister was into this years and years ago. She would make more like English gardens, kind of a miniature. I love that. You know what? Like those gazing balls. She would make like a tiny one of those the focal point of the place. Yeah. So this is when you have your little nature scene. You got moss, you got little rocks. You may even have a water feature. And it's just I don't know, man. Ever since I was a kid, I love little things like that. So is that the first one you're going to try? Well, I think I would probably have to work up to that. Okay. You're not going to just do water features right out of the gate? No, but I might. I built my own fountain once. It's not that hard. You just need a pump. Nice. Actually, China is still into banzai, but this is the stuff that they practice called penguin. Oh, really? Yeah. Very landscape oriented. Yeah. I might even put a little, like a camping thing, a little fire ring. Oh, that'd be great. With some little guys with their acoustic guitars. Right. And then Jason Voorhees is standing off to the side just watching them maybe root over or route on rock. This is the one I thought was going to be your favorite. Yeah. So what's the deal here? You could definitely combine this one with something like cascade or windswept. It's where you train the roots of the tree to grow around or on top of a rock. It's pretty neat. So it looks like it is really clinging to a mountainside. Yeah. And what they're trying to do in a lot of these cases is give the appearance of, like, an old tree. Something has been around for many years when in fact it may be a tree that's like a year old, but it looks like some ancient oak or something. Yeah. And we'll talk about some of the techniques for doing that later, but that is largely, it seems like the initial point you're trying to make it look like an old tree, or you're creating a tree that you intend to live for a few hundred years and get old. The oldest one they have in DC. Like, 400 years old. It's not even close. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, that one's cool. You want to talk about that? Sure. So there's a white pine at the National Bonsai and Pinching, the museum in DC. And it's almost 400 years old, but also, notably, it survived a pretty big event, the bombing of Shima. Yeah. And then it was given as a gift from Japan to the US. Why? I don't know. I guess they were like, don't ever do that again. Yeah. Take this thing to remind you. Think twice. Right. So there are many older ones in that. That's what you're saying? Yeah, there's one in a museum in Spain. It's a ficus. It's like a thousand years old. Wow. There's another one that's like a thousand there's a couple that are 800 years old. And the idea is that many times these are passed within your family, correct? Yeah, yeah. Very frequently they'll be handed down as heirlooms. Right. That's awesome. Now, some of the disparity between ages where they're like that one doesn't really count. It may have been, like, a thousand year old ficus that somebody found out in the wild and collected and has been Bondying for 20 years. Right. So this one, I have the impression, has been bond eyed and in the same family for, like, six or seven generations, so it's been, like, tended to. So it may have been kind of old when it was collected, but it's been bonsai for hundreds of years. Amazing. All right, to finish up the last category, which I think is pretty cool, multiform or ecada or SOCAN or kabu dachi. And that is when you have the illusion that you have more than one tree, but it's really just one tree. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So it looks like it's generally jutting out from the bottom, obviously, of the root structure up, and it looks like a couple of trees. Yeah, but it's a single tree. Some people cheat and put several trees in there. Well, you can do that. Right. Your own little forest. I guess so. But isn't that then really the landscape, the psychiatry, maybe, I think, what, are the bonsai police going to come knocking on your door? Yeah, you don't want to mess with those guys. No, you don't. They'll ignore you. All right, let's talk a little bit about what kind of plants you can use, because I did not know this. I thought there was a special kind of tree that everybody used to make a bonsai, but in fact, it could be a tree that out in the wild, is 30ft tall. I had no idea. I thought they were little miniature trees. It just grew up to be like a foot tall. Yeah, apparently that's like a common misconception. I saw that during research a couple of times. The whole key is you are dwarfing a tree and you're doing that by keeping it in a small container and keeping its roots trimmed back so that it comes to basically go against its natural processes and just stay small in miniature. But yeah, basically any plant can be bonsai crazy. It is. And what I didn't realize is that most bonsai is meant to be outdoors. I didn't either. I thought it was strictly indoor. Yeah, and there are indoor varieties. Like, you can take indoor plants or plants that do well indoors and make them bonsai. And it's becoming more of a thing. But for the most part, if you're doing especially something with like a pine or a deciduous tree or a juniper, those are outdoor plants and your bonsai is meant to stay outdoors, except if you bring it in and use it as a centerpiece or something once in a while. Yeah. And for those trees, it makes a point in here that they have a natural yearly cycle that will be disrupted if you keep it indoors. So you may have to overwinter it to a certain degree, but you're also going to want to take these out in the winter some. Right, but it also says that it's not like a grown tree that's covered in mulch and like super deep rooted. Right. So you can't just leave it out all winter now. And if you do, you would want to leave it in like a cold frame or a greenhouse, something like that, where it's going to survive. Or you could also protect it with a bunch of mulch, too, if you leave it outside. But yeah, it does follow a lot of its natural processes. Right. So if you're doing like a fruiting tree or a flowering tree, as long as it's healthy and happy, it's going to bear fruit, there's going to be flowers. Pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool. But you are simulating nature in that the roots are being kept shallow and trimmed. So you have to take that into consideration by protecting it from cold and for making sure it has a lot of water too. Yeah. We'll get into the specifics of care here in a minute, but you said you can pretty much use any tree. Ideally what you want to use is something, some sort of tree or shrub that have small leaves or needles and that can get super dense. So you just have sort of more material to work with for your art form. Right. How's that? I think it's wonderful. And it all starts with the roots, right? Yeah. So when you're looking for a specimen, you can just go to your local nursery. Some people grow stuff from seed. You can also take cuttings and grow them in like rooting hormone or something like that. If you start from seed that's like that's dedication. Sure. And I will also say that if you start with a kit that has a bonsai already sort of shaped for you, that's fine. I'm not going to knock it too much because you might not have time and you might still want to tinker with it. That's a good point. But I would recommend to get your full experience and maybe start with a cutting that you kind of grow as your own little baby. Right. Or you can go to like, a nursery or something like that and just say, I would like to buy this plant, and I'm going to turn it into a bonsai. True. That definitely counts as well. So a really good one to start with that I found is juniper. Most junipers, they grow as ground covers, so they stay fairly low to the ground normally. So they do well being miniaturized. They're also pretty hardy plants, from what I understand. Right. And they grow really well in any temperate climate, relatively temperate climate. So you go to a nursery and you want to kind of go already with the style in mind that you're going to go with. Whether it's broom or whether it's wind swept or semi cascade or whatever. Because then you'll be able to kind of narrow down the plant that you want to buy because it's already going to you're almost seeing it in there. Like how sculptors say that they look at a piece of marble and they're just chipping away what was already in there all along. It's very similar with bonsai as well. You go in, you find the plant that kind of suits your needs a little bit, and then you dig down, and you want to find the first roots that come off of the trunk. And that's what's called the crown, right? That's right. And as long as those are pretty healthy looking and intact, it's probably a pretty good bet that you can turn that thing into a bonsai. That's right. And you should remember, too, that the more you want to alter the tree, the probably younger and smaller it should be to begin with. Right. Because you can only do so much. You can't take a tree that's like, stick straight and be like, all right, now I want it to cascade all the way back down. Yeah, you might be able to, but it would take decades to get it to grow like that. I would say you'd have to be a bonsai master yeah. In order to do that again, like Mr. Miyagi. But these exposed roots, it's going to give the appearance if you want to have that age look like it's an ancient tree, maybe. Ancient trees usually have these great big roots that you see sort of on top of the ground. Right, exactly. So that's a neat thing you can do with your bonsai. Plus, also what's great when you dig down to those top routes. That form the crown where the trunk ends and the real roots begin. There's going to be plenty of feeder roots above that, and you're actually going to want to trim those away, but it gives what was once a pretty short plant suddenly has a trunk now. And you're like, oh, okay, wow. I see where this is coming from. It's starting to take shape just right out of the gate. Yeah. And what you're doing, we'll talk about pruning in a bit, but how you're shaping this is with wire, either with, like, aluminum or copper wiring that you can leave on to bend the tree to your will to, like, a year. But you want to be careful and not make it too tight because it can actually cut into the tree, which you don't want at all. And so you keep an eye on your wiring. And the idea is that, again, with harmony, you don't want branches, a mess of branches obscuring one another. You want each branch to have sort of its own personality. Exactly. Yeah. So you want to talk about how to start a bonsai? Let's okay. So you go in, you find your plan, and by the way, we're going to kind of give you a step by step. I found a really good website called Bonsaiforbegners.com, and they have a really good written, even though there's lots of misspelled words, but just it's really understandable is for the number four. It's like fore. Oh, no. Bonsai for beginners. Well, yeah, I don't remember if it is the number four. I don't think it is. Okay, just look it up. Sure. And if it's somebody from New Zealand writing, you found the right one. But they basically have a great step by step of how to do it. All right, so you want to buy a tree. A good time of the year to do this is to go in the spring when the growing cycle begins, and go to your nursery. And like you said, you're looking for whatever tree that fits your mind's eye of what you eventually want. And it says in here to start with your scene and work toward that. I think I would be more inclined to sort of free form a little bit over the years. Okay. Which I'm sure is fine. I'm going to be the bad boy of the bonsai world, aren't you? Maybe so. You never know what I'm going to do next. Exhibitions. Wearing, like, a motorcycle jacket, possibly. So the price is going to vary depending on what kind of tree you're getting. And of course, I looked up the kit. They can be $50 to a couple of $100, depending on the kind of tree and how finished looking it is. Right. Or you can go spend ten to 20 on, say, like a juniper. There are plenty of bonsai tools that you can buy. The Internet will be happy to take your money for that, but you can also make do with other stuff, like florist wire. You can get the copper wire you need from probably a hardware store. Yeah. Pliers scissors. Scissors. Smaller the better. Those little first grade scissors. Exactly. Round in. Right. And then you also going to want, like, a root rake, which you can just bend a fork and bam, you got a root rake. Boom. So you've got your plant, or where you're saying it's a juniper, you're going to dig down. You're going to basically take it out, put it on the table in front of you. You want a spray bottle of water. You take a shot of socky. Right. Get started, traditionally. Exactly. You go and then you get started. So you take the dirt off of the top layer all the way down to the crown. And again, there's a bunch of feeder roots, which you want to trim from the trunk itself. And then you take a look at the roots, like you scrape the dirt away, and you really look at the root structure and you say, I got to get rid of a lot of this. Yeah. And you should already have your pot at this point, by the way. Right. Because the first step is the potting. Right. And I've seen people usually, especially beginners, make the mistake when they're first creating a bonsai that they go real small with the pot. Sure. You're going to go through a couple of pots in the first few years, so they say, don't be afraid to use a big pot. As a matter of fact, you should probably use a bigger pot than you think you should for its first pots. Eventually, three or four years down the road, you're going to finally come to that one pot that this thing stays in for the rest of its life, and you're going to repot it every couple of years, but you're going to repot it in the same pot. Yeah. You're going to be at a flea market, and there's going to be a golden light shining around this one pot, and you're going to say, that thing is $20, and James Brown is going to be like, do you save a lot? And then you'll talk them down to $14, and then up to 17, and then you meet at the middle of 15. Nice. And then you've got your pot. That'll be a great day. All right. So you're at the roots, I think. Yeah. So when you trim the roots away I was really surprised by this. You want to trim about two thirds of the roots present on your plant when you buy it. Yeah. It even says in here, this seems extreme, but don't fret. No. And the roots, you really want to go after the bigger ones, the more established ones. You want to leave some at the top at that crown. But especially if you're dealing with a tree and it has a tap root, that root that goes, like, straight down. That's actually not as much for watering as it is for stability. And you don't need it in your tiny little shallow pot. So you want to get rid of roots like that. Yes. You've got your pot. You want to put a little thin layer of gravel for drainage. Yeah. And that's another big thing. Your pot has to have drainage holes. Good ones. Yeah. Well, you're the lawn watering expert. You don't want a quarter inch of water over it just standing. All right, so you've got your gravel down there, you've trimmed your roots, and you need your soil mixture. Yeah. This is a big one. It's a big one. And there are different schools of thought on what kind of soil it says in here equal parts sand, peat, and loam. Yeah, I guess that's like a general generic go to Bunsi. But you want soil specific to your tree. Right. Like, if you have a juniper, that's going to probably be different soil than what, like, an olive tree needs. Yeah. And so you just need to find out about the plant that you're bonsaiing and find out what kind of soil it likes, how much water it needs, what kind of nutrients it takes, and what kind of sunlight it needs, especially that's right. Big one. So you stick that sucker in there, you've got your trimmed roots, and you want to spread them out really evenly toward the edges of the pot of the container. Right. Just all throughout the container. You want the roots going down. Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned you should run a wire up through the drainage hole to support the tree initially. Yes. This is a big one. And this wire, it's going to support the tree. But also if you're going to bend the tree, so you're doing a cascade or a semi cascade or anything like that, you're a loopy. Loop, exactly. You're going to use that wire to train it around the trunk and then bend the wire, and it's going to bend the poor plant with it, and you're going to leave it on there for like a month or so at least. But you want to keep a really close eye on it because the tree will start to grow around it, and it will be forever scarred. And as far as bonsai is concerned, you just ruined your plants. So you want to keep a close eye on it. You want to make it tight, but you want to make it tight enough so that when you bend it, it's going to bend the tree with it. Right. But not so tight that it bites into or damages the tree. That's right. And you want to keep a really close eye on it to make sure the tree doesn't grow. And then when it's done, after a month, maybe longer this article says up to a year, but I didn't see that anywhere else. You want to clip it away, like you're not going to unwind it, or else you're probably just going to break your bonds off. Right. And hopefully your tree won't go and pop back into place. And if it does, you just have to redo it again. Patience, my friend. Patience. That's right. They say in the article, patience is the best tool that you can have in your arsenal. So you get the wire sticking up through the drainage hole now. That's right. And as far as the soil, you want to tap it and kind of shake the pot around to remove the air pockets, firm it around the base of the tree. But you don't want it so packed in that the water's got to go through and drain all the way through and out. Right. Well, you want well draining soil. One thing I saw was three parts potting soil to one part, like miniature gravel, basically. So the soil is going to drain. Well, apparently you do want it kind of packed because that tree does not have stability with its roots. So it's going to rely on the dirt more than it normally would. Yeah. Especially around the trunk. Right. But yeah, you want to shake it to get the air pockets out, for sure. That's right. A lot of people also put additional gravel on top to keep the dirt in place when it's watered. I like that. Yeah. And it looks nice, too. So you don't want to do that and then go throw it out in the full sun all day long in July. What you want to do is start it in a shady spot for about a week and let it get used to being shorter rooted and in a weird new container and let it accept the fact that, I know I'm going to be small. This is going to hurt. I'm going to be small. I'm never going to be a big daddy. Once it gets over that and accepts its fate and it says, you know what, I actually like this because I'm going to be a beautiful work of art and get lots of care and attention. Now you can move me into the sun a little bit at a time. A couple of hours at a time, maybe. Yeah. Sir, ma'am. Thank you, master. And then a couple of hours in the morning, and then before you know it, you can have that bad boy out there. Like weathering, all kinds of weathering. The weather, normal weather. Yeah. Like it normally would. Yeah. And your plan is going to tell you whether it's happy or not happy. I think with Bonsai in particular, you're going to notice, like, every little change in your plant. Sure. Because you're really concentrating on it and focusing on it. And all the rest of your plants are going to hate you. Yeah. You're going to be like, Remember me? Your spider plant is going to be, like, growing around your throat just closing off your airway. Yes. So watch out for your spider plant. Agreed. And I should say one more thing, Chuck. When you first pot your plant, the first watering, you should basically take it in, like, a tray or a pan or a bucket of water and submerge it to the soil level and just let it sit there. Are you sure? Yeah. All right. This is what I've seen. Don't like clunk it in there. Slowly submerge it in there, and that water is going to make sure that every root gets its water, and it's going to fill in any air pockets that are in there. So it's really going to basically solidify your soil and pack it in and just get it ready. Very nice. Pretty neat, right? Super neat. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about bonsai care and shaping, which is where the money is. So, Chuck, you got your bonsai. Yes. You've moved it back onto the sunlight. It's basically accepted its fate as a smaller version of itself. Yeah. You've named it, right? Right now, yeah. Allen. Okay. Mine is Roy. So Allen and Roy, the bonsai twins, are hanging out outside. When you first pot it, you can also prepare the limbs, too, where you're basically trimming the limbs back. So remember, there's a front and a back to it, right? Yeah. Which you should establish and stick to. Right. Typically with bonsai, in traditional bonsai, the first limb is about a third of the way up from the dirt, and it's going to jut out to the right. Okay. Second one is going to jut out the opposite direction, but it's not going to be even with the other one. It's going to be another about third of the way up. Okay. You rarely want limbs even with one another. It's called a bar. That's unsightly. Exactly. So the next one juts out the opposite direction, and then the third one is about another third of the way up, and that juts out towards the back. Right. So it gives the impression of distance, of perspective and bowling and growing out the back balance and harmony. And you do this by you can take that same wire, different lighter wire, depending on the size of the limb and bend them in the ways that you want. But more often than not, you're going to be creating these illusions or this pattern by trimming your bonsai. And like you said, this is where the money is. This is where when you think of bonsai, this is what I think of little Japanese people like trimming the limbs off of tiny plants. Yeah. And it's again, you're striving to make it look like something larger that you would find in nature. Sure, you could get super weird in avantgarde with your form and your shape, but in general, traditionally, you want it to take a form that you would find out in the wild somewhere just on a smaller scale. But that's the effect of wind, of sun, of weird weather, of poor soil, of just the weirder looking the tree out in nature, basically, the harder the life it's had. And you're trying to recreate that through nurturing. Pretty counterintuitive. But if you just stop and think about what you're looking at in nature that you're trying to emulate, you'll probably figure out different ways to do it. And if you haven't figured it out, somebody's probably been doing it for 1000 years already and you can go get yourself a book or look on the Internet to find a technique. Yeah, so like you said, with the wind, like the real tree and real life that's on the mountaintop, the wind is trying to kill it. Right. And it's leaning out over the edge of the cliff like, oh man, my days are numbered. But you nurture that in your own bonsai and you emulate that and it's I don't know, I like the idea of it for some reason. It's like a tribute almost. Yeah. It's an homage to that tree that's hanging on by a root. Yeah. When it comes to light, you want to rotate it around. You don't want it getting the same side exposure to sunlight every single day. You want to rotate it around. You want to keep an eye out for bugs and insects. Yeah, for sure. And again, you're paying attention to your bonsai more than your other plants. So you're going to notice, like if it suddenly has an insect infestation. Yeah, little larvae, what they call spittlebugs, black or red dots of mites. It says you can brush these away. I imagine you could smash them with a framing hammer if you wanted after you brush them off. But I bet in the Japanese bonsai tradition, you're probably brushing them away with a little paintbrush, right? Like you go hit the spider plant. Hey, spiders are okay, man. They eat the little bugs for you. Oh, the spider plant. Oh, the spider plant. Yeah. Well, you got to watch out for that thing. It's trying to kill you and your whole family. Exactly. So that's where you need to funnel your spittle bugs. Watering is another big one too. Depending on how hot it is outside, you may end up needing to water your bonsai like two times a day. Which means if you're into bonsai, you probably don't leave your house very much. You most likely want to water your bonsai every day depending on, again, the plant. But most bonsai needs watering every single day and twice on hot days. Yeah. And what you don't want is as you're paying attention to it, you don't want a soggy boggy base where the soil is. That's a really bad sign. That means you probably didn't put down enough gravel on the bottom or your soil mix doesn't have enough gravel or whatever mixed in to make it drain quickly. That's right. Because it's tough to overwater a well draining potted plant of any type, including bonsai. True. You're probably going to be doing more pruning early on in the life of the bonsai. And once it has that general shape that you like, that's when you're doing just the subtle changes that probably mean a lot to you. But other friends that come over at happy hour, they'll just say, hey, nice tree there's, ponzi. Yeah, you got an ice. And they don't realize that all the maker is broken. They don't realize all the subtle little you might clip away one half of an inch of a branch to you that makes it just perfect that other people would probably not even notice. Yeah. That's why it's your bonsai. That's right, Josh. That's why I was thinking about it. Like giving the gift of a bonsai to somebody that you've tended to for years and years and years. That's a significant gift. Yeah. And here's my daughter. Yeah, right. Well, not really, but you know what I mean. You can marry this plant. You love it so much, why don't you marry it? You're also going to keep up with the fertilizer. Again, this is almost such a generic overview in some places that I feel bad even saying it, but just go find out what the plant that you're raising needs normally, and do that, do that. But again, you have to bear in mind that it's slightly different because you're keeping it in miniature. It doesn't have its normal root system, it needs more water than usual, and probably because you're watering it so much, the nutrients in the soil are going to leach out much more quickly. So you need to fertilize it more than you would just if you were growing it normally in a container. Right, right. So since you're fertilizing something more, usually the rule of thumb is you want to fertilize something weekly. Weekly. So we A-K-L-Y weekly sure. That way you're constantly replenishing the nutrients in the soil, but you're not going to burn or scorch the roots with like a chemical burn by over feeding it. Yeah. And again, you pointed out earlier, but I think it bears in mind repeating, the key is repotting and trimming those roots every couple of years. And like you said, once you find the pot at the flea market that you fell in love with, you can keep it in that pot forever, as long as it's the one you want to stay with. And you can do what you want, or give it as a gift, or give it as a gift. But as you keep trimming these roots back, it's going to stay that size. If you forget about it, if you're a hoarder and you're drunk and you pass out for ten years, you're going to wake up with a twelve foot oak tree in your living room. Yeah. That's the story of Peppy Van Winkle. Yes, I guess that is true, isn't it? Because basically, once it becomes established to the shape you want it, you're just basically pruning it back here there, keeping it trimmed. And then when you repott it every couple of years, the whole point is to keep the root system in check, huh? Yeah. So if you didn't do that, it would die is what it would do, because nobody water. There'd be so many roots in a pot that doesn't fit them, it would probably look cool. It'd be growing over it, maybe. And that's basic stuff that we've been talking about. But there is a lot of advanced things you can do, too. And one of those is, like, again, training it to grow over rocks. So, like, when you potted the bonsai, you would want a bonsai with really long roots so that when you're potting it, you would actually place it on a rock and then wire the roots in place to let them start to establish in the pot and things like that. There's something called gin, which is basically this is really neat. I bet you saw it. Did you see a lot of bonsai that had, like, dead wood exposed? Yeah. Okay. So jin is where, at the top of the trunk or at the ends of limbs, deadwood is exposed to just really play up how old this thing is supposed to be or actually is. Right. There's something called shari, which is deadwood on the trunk below. Cool. And then there's something called sabomiki, and that's like you actually get in there and peel away the bark drill into the trunk and carve holes into it. Carve, like, a gap into it to create the illusion that it was scarred from, like, a lightning stripe. Wow. And you got to be really careful doing that because you can very easily kill your bonsai, but if you do it right, it'll grow back and scar around it. And you'll have a pretty interesting looking tree. So that's not recommended for beginners. I would not think so. I think you'd kill a lot of plants doing that that way. And again, people have been trying this stuff for a couple of thousand years now, so there's a lot of different stuff you can do in a lot of different resources out there. Nice. Yeah. Go to your local Japan town and say, Teach me. Yeah. And you know what? If the movie Try to Get Lost in Translation is true, then if you're a pretty American girl, you can wander into any Japanese ceremony, and they will just accept you with open arms. Yeah. That's what they're known for. Yes, probably so. Right? To a certain degree, sure. Hunching out a jerk. Oh, yeah. Like, what did she walk into? Was hers origami or was that Fonsai? I don't know. I don't remember. Was it a wedding? No. Scarlett Johansson walked out. There these Japanese women doing some either bonsai or origami or something. And they were like, oh, well, come on in and let me show you our ancient ways. Yeah, I don't remember that part. Yeah, it was neat. It is a great movie. I like that movie a lot, too. Isn't the legend around it that Bill Murray is actually playing himself? Like it's based on experience Sofia Coppola had? Yes. I bet it's not too far off. And so, like, Giovanni Ribisi is Spike Jones. Charlie Johansson is Sofia Coppola. Anna Ferris is Cameron Diaz. That one dude is Justin Timberlake. And so this actually supposedly happens, but then everyone says, well, who's Bill Murray playing? Allegedly, Bill Murray is playing himself. That makes sense. We'll never know what he whispers at the end either, which I love. That's a great movie. I forgot about that one. Make it Santori time. Yeah. She's a part of my 100% Club. Sofia Copa. What is that? The directors who I made nothing but great movies. I think I've only seen that and the Virgin suicides. Great movie. What else has she made? She did the Bling ring recently. Never saw it. Really? Good. Really? Don't be turned off by the title. Yes. Because I have been. And she did the one with Steven Dorf. Oh, I can't remember where he's the actor just sort of hold up in the Chateau Marmont before with his daughter. No. Before Sunrise? No. Before tomorrow? No. And she did the one the Marie Antoinette movie with Kirsten Dunst. It was fantastic. I never saw that one either. Yeah, they're all great. I think she's top notch. I'll check them out. If you want to know more about Bonsai or Sofia Coppola, you can type those words in the search bar@hostofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yes. I'm going to call this tornado miss. Already? That thing just came out today. I know, man. And you know what? I hope everyone is all right because there are tornadoes, like kind of all over the place. Yeah, I heard Oklahoma is Kansas. Man. Hey, guys, love the show. You mentioned tornado missed episode that I bet you would get an email from a civil engineer. And here I am. Just wanted to share an interesting fact about designing wind resistant buildings. I remember the day of the 2008 downtown Atlanta tornado you mentioned because it was actually the last day of classes at Georgia Tech before I went home to Florida for spring break. Ironically, I just learned in one of my classes that one reason most skyscrapers are not the same basic shape from top to bottom is to alleviate pressure from wind. In the same class, professor had mentioned that one of the absolute worst structural designs for a skyscraper is a perfect cylinder, which is what our Peach Tree plaza is that had the windows up for so long. It's a cylinder. The wind whips all around and ends up hitting the entire face of the building as a giant wall of force rather than hitting the building at different places over time. Not ideal for a glass tube of a building. Anyway, I thought you guys would find that interesting. You are the best thing to come out of Athens in my Georgia Tech opinion. Oh, wow. I see where that was going to keep up the good work. And that is from Scooter. Shelvin. Thanks a lot, Scooter. Scooter shelbyn, I don't know about the best thing to come out of Athens. There's a couple of bands and beers and coffees and football players. So Scooters take. All right. Thank you, Scooter. If you want to give us high praise like Scooter did, we're always down with that. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can post cool stuff on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can find us on Instagram at Syscap. For real. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web. Stuff You Should Know. Stuff you should know is production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Load the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
4575d888-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-17986449b4be | Short Stuff: Unspent Campaign Money | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-unspent-campaign-money | Have you ever wondered what happens to all those campaign donations when a political campaign goes belly up? Or, even worse, is in debt! Wonder no more! | Have you ever wondered what happens to all those campaign donations when a political campaign goes belly up? Or, even worse, is in debt! Wonder no more! | Wed, 03 Apr 2019 13:20:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=13, tm_min=20, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=93, tm_isdst=0) | 10681484 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. So this is short stuff from stuff you should know. Short edition about campaign money. I think we dabbled around this topic before, but this is a little shorty question answered. Yeah. Based on how stuff works article. We should call out. But I've always kind of wondered this but didn't realize I'd wondered it because I think if I had actually wondered it, I would have just gone and researched it and found out the answer. But it was like, in the back of my head, like one of those questions I didn't know I wanted to know the answer to until I saw the question. You know what I mean? Well, yeah, and I know that I've donated to political campaigns and then never said, hey, wait a minute. You lost. Did you spend my money? Right. But it didn't cross your mind? I know you never said it, but did you ever think, like, did my money get spent? I just assumed that it got spent 5 seconds after I hit the click button. You know? I think that's frequently the case. But it is possible every once in a while that a candidate becomes so popular and raises so much money, but then that popularity and that war chest of campaign money is disproportionate to their actual chance of becoming the nominee for the party. Case in point was Jeb Bush in the 2016 election. Oh, Jeb. He raced a lot of dough and did not I'm not sure if there's an equation for money spent and chances of winning, which supposedly is he bucked that trend. He really did. I think he raised something like $152,000,000, $152,000,000, which was far and away the most of all the Republican nominees that primary season and did not get it. And that is really unusual. But the reason we're mentioning this is because he had so much money, he got caught with some left over. And that's fine. That's not the end of the world. But it does raise that question. If you have millions and millions of dollars of campaign contributions and you didn't make it to the general election, what happens to all that money? Yeah. And it kind of depends. And when you say being caught, that doesn't mean that he did anything wrong aside from, I guess, doing everything wrong to not win. But it's not like he was caught doing something bad. He lost early enough to where there were millions and millions and millions of dollars left over. And what happens that money kind of depends on where it comes from. Right. So now that the Supreme Court has completely ruined democracy with the Citizens United case, there are two main groups that can be funneling money toward a particular candidate's candidacy. There's the candidate, him or herself in their campaign, and then there's also Super PACs political action committees, and there used to be political action committees, but now they're on steroids because they can raise unlimited funds and spend unlimited funds to help a candidate. So long as the Super Pac and the candidate aren't coordinating how that money is spent, they're just there to support the candidate. Ideally, on paper, I should say. Yeah. And earlier when I said if I gave as just an independent schmo money to a candidate, it is probably likely that that money is burned through pretty quickly. These personal contributions, I get the idea that they kind of spin that stuff because and it points out in this article, it's like kind of now or never. If it's not like you're holding on to that stuff for a rainy day, you're trying to win an election. And one way to do that is by spending tons of dough. So that's called like cash on hand. Right? That's when you chuck wrote a check to Jeb Bush and said, Go Jeb in, like, the memo. And Jeb's campaign went and cashed that money and put it in their account. That's cash on hand. Yeah, they burned through that very frequently. But there's also, like, a constant flow of money coming in over time, and their campaign may stop as that money is still coming in. So the question remains, like, what does Jeb Bush's campaign do with that? And there's actual rules for what they can do and can't do with it. Really, the main rule is that after Jeb Bush drops out of the race or doesn't get chosen as the party's nominee for the general election, he doesn't get to just be like, thanks for the $100 million jumps. I'm going to go buy a yacht. That's basically the only rule that the FEC has. Well, one of a few rules, but that's the big one. Yes. No yachts. Right? The no yachts clause. Yeah. Basically, you can't spend anything on your personal expenses. Right. Why don't we take a break and we're going to come back and talk about some other FEC rules right after this. All right. So you can't spend that stuff on yourself. You can't say, like, Jeez, raise all this money. I'd love to pay off my mortgage while I'm at it. That's kind of like, the main thing. There are things you can do. They're called permissible uses. You can donate that money to charity, which would be kind of nice, I think. Sure. Especially if it's like a nice charity everybody can get behind, like the savepoppies.org or something like that. Yeah, exactly. This is the one I don't quite get because we pull from two sources. One says you can just donate it to another candidate, but I think that's limited to $2,000 if it's just a personal donation. But can you transfer everything to, like, a pack? I believe so. I think the thing that was wrong here is that the person from OpenSecrets.org didn't say they can give it to another candidate up to two grand. They can give the whole thing to the party, or yeah, they can transfer it to a super Pac. So the candidate can apparently take that money and give it to a super Pac, but a super Pac can't give their money to a candidate. But the impression that I have is that the super Pac would have to spend that money on that candidate either in a future election or if the candidate also is like, well, I'm just going to run for Senate instead, that super Pac could fund that candidates campaigns no matter what kind of election they were running for. Right. And it's also highly likely that there's an understanding that if a pack or super Pac donates a ton of money and that candidate loses and is out, especially if they're out early on, then there's like a, hey, you give that back to us now. Yeah. Especially with the super PEC, because super pecs, from the impression I have from researching this, are basically like, a handful of extraordinarily wealthy billionaires who are saying, yeah, this is our guy. We want to back this person for their presidential campaign, and then if it doesn't work, they get their money back eventually. That was unspent. That happened with Rick Perry. I think he had, like, $13 million in unspent funds, which that was his super Pac. And the reason that they knew that he didn't even make it to the primaries. And the big disparity between Rick Perry's campaign and super Pac was that he couldn't raise more than, like, a million, a million and a half dollars. His campaign couldn't, which is bad news for your campaign. His pack raised a bunch of money because there were a couple of billionaires in Dallas who are basically funding the pack. So when it came down to the wheels hitting the pavement and Rick Perry's campaign couldn't raise that kind of money, he knew it was time to get out, and his super Pac contributors got their money back. And then how I was talking about people spending a lot of times a candidate will actually be in debt. So not only do they spend, scott Walker is a good example of this Wisconsin governor. When he dropped out in September 2015, he had a million dollars in debts. So he burned through that money. So it's not like there was anyone there was no money to return. Yeah, and that's the thing, man. So you can be in debt. Your campaign can be in debt. And if you're wealthy, that's okay. There's ways for you to make that money back to retire that debt. You can create fundraisers over time, but that's really difficult to get people to contribute to your campaign that's already lost so that you can retire debt. But if you're not wealthy, you might have taken out, like, personal loans along the way from banks. And that means that you, the candidate, have personal loan obligations for the rest of your life from this campaign that was unsuccessful. So it can be really nerve wracking to run for office and not win or not become the nominee, because if you are in debt, you can get caught with that and it gets written off. Anything over $250,000 that you loan to your campaign gets written off as a donation. It's gone forever after 20 days after the election. Yes. And in the case of like a Donald Trump or I guess rather anyone in the first term of what they hope is going to be a two term affair, if you just got all this money raised and then you didn't spend it, your campaign is still an entity. It's still an ongoing entity. It's not like they dissolve that while you're in office and then you have to restart at the end of your term. Again, he just basically, like anyone would keep that money in the coffers for the second terms campaign. So that's what happens to the unspent money. It just evaporates if you really want to think about it. And thank you for joining us on Short Stuff. We'll see see you next time. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | |
How Mirrors Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mirrors-work | Whether using polished metal surfaces or clear glass, human beings have enjoyed admiring their reflections for centuries. In this episode, Josh and Chuck reflect on the types, mind-melting physics, superstitions and rather interesting history of mirrors. | Whether using polished metal surfaces or clear glass, human beings have enjoyed admiring their reflections for centuries. In this episode, Josh and Chuck reflect on the types, mind-melting physics, superstitions and rather interesting history of mirrors. | Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:14:32 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=19, tm_min=14, tm_sec=32, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=257, tm_isdst=0) | 25775762 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. W. Chuck Bryant. We're about to talk about mirrors. Nice set up to sync, huh? How are you? Were you in the mirrors growing up? Now that we said, I did it succinctly we're going to just blow, like, three minutes, right? No, I was asking you if you were in the mirror. Are you in the mirrors growing up? Yeah. I mean, doesn't every kid go through a phase where they're very obsessed with their looks and mirrors and things? Yeah. I was into myself. I wasn't in the mirrors. They were just a means to an end, you know? Yeah, but I was reading this and I kind of was just thinking myself and remembering laughing about I remember being, like, 15 and stopping to look at mirrors anytime there was one to see what it looked like. Yes. And now I just break them. I've forgotten all about that phase of my life, though, until you brought it up. I remember that. Yeah. It's nice to be able to not look at a mirror. Like, some days all go out after getting ready in the morning and I have no idea what I actually look like. But I'm so and this is this cross pollination with an earlier podcast. I suffered from body dysmorphic disorder so badly that I don't really know what I look like. Anyway, what do you think you look like? I think I look a bit like the top seller from Taxidermia. What's that? It's not pleasant. Okay, well, you don't, my friend. I don't even know what he looks like, but I can tell you don't look like him. I appreciate that. Chuck. Chuck, do you want to hear what I had in store? Like, I could not come up with an intro for this. Let's hear it. Webster's defines mirrors. I'm kidding. I was going to say something equally bad, though. It was going to be something along the lines with mirrors are ubiquitous. I've seen at least six of them today. Wow. They weren't always that way, though, Chuck. Well, it says in the article here that full length mirrors have only been around 400 years. That didn't seem right. It's not right. Oh, really? No. There is a type of full length mirror that has been around for about 400 years. Full length mirrors, as far as I know, are mirrors capable of reflecting a full image of a person have been around since about the first century Ad. Actually. Wow. And mirrors us using polished surfaces to see our own reflection has been around since about 6000 BC. Holy cow. Yes. The earliest ones were found in Anatolia, Turkey. Wow. And they're polished subsidian. Yeah. It's a volcanic glass. Yeah. So it's dark, it's interesting, but it still produces the best reflection, I guess, at the time. At the time. Yeah. You got to go with what we have to work with. Right? Well, yeah, but then after that, it led them to, like, silver and bronze and copper polished reflections, basically. And, Chuck, I don't know if you've ever held a hunk of copper or bronze. I haven't. Silver? I have. Okay. It's heavy. Yeah, it's real heavy. Right. So this actually limited the size of mirrors for centuries. Right? Yeah. And they were just kind of decorative at first, too, right? I think so. And you also had to be extremely rich to own one of these. Sure. Right. And then around, I think, the middle ages, we became capable of making glass, and all of a sudden, it was like mirror technology just takes a huge leap forward. Well, true, but not super forward, because the sand was pretty impure back then, they used to make the glass. So I think they said in the article, it wasn't until, like, the Renaissance that it kind of really started becoming a little more polished, if you will. Terrible. And then the Venetians are who really, with the glass and everything, they just took and ran with it. Well, even still, if you successfully made a mirror, it was probably extremely expensive as well, because they were so rare. The process of manufacturing a mirror very infrequently produced a usable mirror. What you're doing was adhering melted, molten metal onto glass, which almost always broke the glass. Sure. So when it didn't, I'm sure you're just like, oh, my God, it's the first one in seven years. Right. But when I was reading this article, I didn't really think about it. That's what a mirror is, isn't it? I've even seen the back of mirrors and been like others, like, metal looks like spray painted on the back. That's exactly right. And that was a process. What's it called? Silvering. Yeah. That was invented by a guy named Justice Van Leebig, and in 1835, he figured out how to spray a very thin layer of silver or aluminum on the back or on one side of a glass. And they're my friend, you have the modern mirror. Yeah. Now, I think they make it now by heating aluminum in a vacuum in kind of much the same way or different methods, but the same concept. Right. Go ahead. Well, I wanted to say, when you were talking about the Renaissance, the Venetians, I guess they had the secret of mirrors under wraps, like the masons. Very much so. And if you were a mirror maker and it got out that you had told someone how to make mirrors, you were frequently killed. Right? Yeah. Trade secret. But when mirrors were introduced, when good mirrors were introduced, not polished obsidian, things changed a little bit, especially with art. Right. Yeah. I never really considered that, but it spawned something that would become a hallmark of the art world, which is the self portrait. Right. Before that, you couldn't draw yourself because you could not see yourself. That's exactly right. And you could, but I mean, you're going to use like, maybe a pond or a piece of polished metal or something like that. Imagine, like, going out and looking at a pond and going back and sitting down now, as opposed to having a mirror there. Yeah. Really simplified it. It's also not coincidental that good mirrors came about at the same time that linear perspective was introduced into art. What? Yeah. There's a guy named Philippe Brunelleschi. Philippe Brunelleschi. Nice, Chuck. Thank you for doing that. And he, I guess, discovered linear perspective because I think it's one of the things that was always there. We just stumbled upon it through mirrors. Oh, really? That's how we figured it out. Yeah, because if you look at the mirror, all of a sudden, linear perspective really comes into focus, if you will. Well, and then scientists said, hey, we could use these to make, like, reflecting telescopes. And that was what year was that was a long time ago. The first reflecting telescope was invented by a guy named James Bradley in 1721. Just off the top of my head. Very well done. And the mirrors were also used by a very famous scientist, early scientist named Archimedes, supposedly. Yeah. I wrote an article on Archimedes death ray. Oh, did you write that? Yeah. Did you ever read it? I did a while ago. Just out of interest. How about that? Thanks a lot, man. Sure. Did you see in it? I can't remember. It was one of the Ivy League schools. They tried to set things on fire with the system of mirrors. That architecture. MIT did. That's who it was. And they succeeded. Yes. And the mythbusters claimed it was busted. Like they set a small fire, but I think they busted it because they said it wasn't enough to sink a ship. But MIT, they caused quite a fire on that boat. Sure. And of course they had. I mean, I saw this set up online today. It was pretty massive. I don't know if Archimedes had that kind of technology or at least that many mirrors at its disposal, or maybe he did. And plus, I think they used pretty good mirrors, too. Yeah, well, it was legend, though. They don't know if the Archimedes thing is true. Right. We know that he invented the water screw, and that saved countless lives. What's that? It's a way to deliver water from the ground, top side. Oh, really? Yeah. Cool. You have to check it out. Smart dude. So, Chuck, we now know the comprehensive broad strokes of the history of mirrors, right? Yes. Let's talk about mirror physics. We work for houses force.com, which means we're pretty much obligated to discuss the physics of whatever we're talking about anytime it applies. Right? That's true. And mirrors are definitely one of those times. Yes. So, Chuck, take it away. Well, I can cover the first part because it makes sense to me. The law of reflection. Josh says that when you bounce array of light off a surface, it bounces back off in a certain way. And the angle of incidence is when it comes in, the angle of reflection, when it bounces off, and it matches. So what they pointed out in the article, which makes sense to me, is, like, at sunset, the sun is very low on the horizon, so it bounces off at a low angle or approaches the water at a low angle, like at a lake, let's say. Then it bounces off of that lake at the same low angle, like right into your face. Right. But it seems brighter. If the sun's overhead, though, the sunlight is coming down under the lake, and it's reflecting back up, basically over your head, you're looking at a horizontal angle, pretty much. Right. And this is happening on a vertical angle. Yeah. That's why you'll get, like, more glare at a sunrise or a sunset scenario. Right. And what you're saying, the angle of incidents equals the angle of reflection. Right, indeed. If a beam of light is shot at a 90 degree angle or no, let's say 80 degree angle, it's going to bounce off at an opposite 80 degree angle. Right. So both are at 80 degrees. But if you look at the whole thing, the incidence and the reflection, it's going to cover 160 deg, right? Yes. Right. All right. So that's the first part that explains how light reacts with reflection, and that's with a smooth surface with most things, like, say, look at my hand, man. Take a look at these hands. Yes. The light that's bouncing off of them, what's giving us the ability to see these huge, awesome hands? They're not huge, are they? Are they smaller than average size? No, they're bigger than mine. I got small hands. I wouldn't say you have small hands. Let's see. Those are totally normal. I don't have hair on the back of my hands either. I've got hair on my first knuckles. Yeah. Robin Williams what's allowing us to see our hands right now and judge their size and scale is what's called diffuse reflection, which the light that's coming off of all these light bulbs right now are hitting all these different areas, these different surfaces on my hands, and it's bouncing off, it's being scattered. Right. The mirror, the highly reflective surface, what we have is called specular reflection. And that is where it's pretty close to the law of reflection, where the angles coming in at one or the lights coming in at one angle and coming off at the same degree in the opposite direction. Right. Which is why we're allowed to see ourselves in a piece of glass with metal on the back. And what this creates when you're looking at yourself is called the virtual image. Right. I found it fascinating. Yeah, me too. And it's a little brain melty for me, of course. But at the same time, you realize, like, well, you've grown up around mirrors the whole time, and no one has any real concept of how they work. Right. We just take for granted that they do work, but you don't really give much thought to how they're working. Right? Yeah. Like the Venus effect. Did you read about that? Yeah. Explain that. Because this is where when we talk about actually the Venus effect is two different things, and both of them kind of melt my brain, the left and right being reversed, which is not actually true. And then the Venus effect. So let's talk about both of those. Okay. Well, the Venus effect basically just shows how little we can grasp or how little we grasp mirrors and how they work. If you look at paintings of the Venus de Milo or Venus the goddess, almost always she's holding a hand mirror, and in the painting, you can see her face in the mirror, but she's looking at herself in the mirror. Right. And her face is painted in the mirror for the benefit of the viewer. But you take for granted that she's viewing herself when, in actuality, if you could see Venus's face in the mirror, she wouldn't be able to see herself. She'd see you in the mirror right. Because of that angle or the law of reflection. Yeah. And that's the only way I finally understood that was when I remembered, like in my film set days, when you shoot a person looking in a mirror, they don't see themselves in the mirror clearly because you would see the camera behind them. So the mirror is angled, and it looks like they're looking at themselves in printing, but they're not seeing themselves. It's pretty cool. Right. So that makes sense to me now. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. Okay. The other thing you were saying is left and right. Yeah. It's not actually left and right. Yeah. This one was a little brain melty, but I think I finally got it, too. Okay. So consider that what you're seeing isn't actually your reflection, but another version of yourself in the mirror world. Right. If you look at it that way, then the mirror represents the halfway point. It's always halfway between you and your virtual self. Right. Because your virtual self, the image of yourself in the mirror, is always twice it's always two times away from you with the mirror representing the halfway point. Right. So you're 2ft from the mirror, and your virtual self is another 2ft away from you. Right. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. And the left and right thing isn't really left and right. It's really front and back that's right. That are reversed. Again, think of yourself as the virtual image. Yes. You walk into the mirror world. You go another 2ft away from where you're just standing. So you're now you're 4ft away from where you're standing and turn around. Right. Which is weird because it actually gives the virtual image something of its own identity, doesn't it? It does. It's a little creepy. Yeah. So when you're looking at a mirror, it's not a reflection of you from the mirror's perspective. It's like the one example they gave was if you wrote something on a piece of paper and then held that paper up to the light and looked at it from the back, it would appear backwards. Right. But it's not. Right. You're just behind it. Yes. Crazy man, isn't it? It's pretty interesting stuff. And I gotta say two things. When you mentioned doing mirrors, I said to myself, really? And then when we told Jerry what we were doing this on, she was like, really? Yeah, but I think it's much more interesting than I originally thought. Well, again, it's like the butterfly swings. We just have to know that if we're going to understand absolutely everything that's going on in the world, which is our mission. Yes. Should we talk about curved mirrors now? Yes. Because we're talking about virtual images. There's actually a way to project a real image where this thing isn't in the mirror, it's outside of the mirror, but it's not really there. It's a projected image. And that uses concave mirrors. You might be familiar with holograms. Yes. Right. Is that the same concept? There's concave mirrors and actually, if you want to see a really cool example of a hologram produced by a set of concave and flat mirrors, you should type in Mirage in YouTube and look for the one that's lower case, just Mirage. And it's a little piggy and it's pretty cool. The demonstration that this guy does. Oh, really? Yeah. Check that out. But, Chuck, there's concave and convex, right? Yeah. Convex is the one that curves outward and it reflects at a wider angle near the edges in the center. So things are actually smaller and you can cover more areas. So that's why they'll use those. They'll stick them on, like, your passenger mirrors, so you can see more area around your car. Right. And it also notes objects are smaller than they appear or closer than they appear. Right. Objects are smaller than they appear, but they are smaller than they appear. But that doesn't matter. It's whether they're in your backseat or not. Yeah. And they actually have been rumors over the years that department stores put convex mirrors, slightly convex mirrors, in their changing rooms to make you appear taller and thinner in the clothing that you try on. Remember that seinfeld where Elaine buys that dress and she figured out if they had a skinny mirror? And I think Barneys or Bloomingdale. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah. I don't know. I think that's probably urban legend, but who knows? Chuck, the other one, like we said, was concave. Converging. We use those for holograms. They also use it to light the Olympic torch. Yeah, I didn't realize that either. I think that's a nod to archimedes, too. Probably. So you're probably a little more acquainted with convex mirrors. No concave mirrors for, like, shaving or those horrible mirrors that show your hair in detail. Those are awful. They really are. Don't ever look in those non reversing mirror, which really is pretty simple. It's just two mirrors perpendicular to each other. Right? Yeah. And the deal is with that they meet at the angle, and so you technically can see a non reverse image, but you've got that line running down the center of you. Right. They don't make, like, a flat, single, non reversing mirror. No, they don't. I think it's physically impossible. Yeah. It's not like they don't make it like they're not interested. It just can't be done. But what's funny is there's a guy named John Derby who has a patent in 1887, when he was alive, he had a patent for a non reversing mirror by sticking two mirrors together. I could get a patent for that. I could fill out the patent application for that. You could? Yeah. It's like, take mirror A and stick it perpendicular to mirror B right there. Give me my patent. Well, but then John Derby's family would come after you. Hopefully, it ran out by now. Just for simpleness Joshua mirrors as seen in every cop Shakedown movie ever made. Yes. This is fascinating, chuck, how does a two way mirror work? Well, it's really pretty easy. It's the same concept of the mirror, but it's a very thin it's very much a lighter reflection. The material they use and the coated side, when it faces the lit room, some of the light reflects and some goes into the dark room behind it. So basically, like, you know, you can only see one way right. Because of the light mainly. Right. So it's just like, very thin reflective surface where if you turn on lights in both rooms, you'd be able to see through that reflective surface. Right. Yeah. It's all about the lighting. Yeah. And that's a movie. There's several movie mirror things that are done in every movie, and that's one of them. With a cop movie, inevitably, the person getting questioned will always walk right up and be staring into the face of the person on the other side that they can't see. Right. And then the other favorite of mine, which one of the SNL shorts ape was the classic horror movie scene where you look in the medicine cabinet in the mirror, and then you open the medicine cabinet and then you close it and the dude is right behind you. Yeah. That's a classic. It is. Again on YouTube, I think there's a montage, like a four minute, 20 minutes montage of that being used over and over hundreds of times. Dude. And it still gets people. Yeah, but now the whole spin is to do that, and then there's not someone there, and then they'll turn around and that's where they are or something. Yeah, just jerking the audience around. That's in there, too. Oh, it is? Yeah. It's not just people closing. There's someone saying there's ones where they're not standing there. I love those movie conventions that are the other one, too, is it doesn't have to do with mirrors, but the scene where someone is searching for the files and the person's office after dark and they're coming up the steps and they open the door and you're like, they're pinched. And then they open the door and the person is gone and there's like a window open. Right. And it's just like the curtains hundreds and hundreds of times is still done, yet I'm still like, oh, my gosh, here they come. What about Poltergeist? That great. Classic mirror scene where the guy kicking at that little blister and ends up pulling his whole face off. Yeah. That's pretty creepy. Yeah, classic. Thank you, Toby Hooper. Did he make that? Yeah, I got this. Right. He'll produce it, right? That's right. I always think he directed that. What else, Chuck? Well, there's some superstitions around mirrors. In folklore, summoning Bloody Mary by saying her name three times in the mirror. Or Candy man if you're candy mirror. Yeah. A little more recent. That's a good one. Breaking a mirror supposedly bad luck for seven years because they believe that the soul regenerates every seven years. Yeah. That explains it, doesn't it? Yeah. And that's why vampires have no soul. That's why they can't see themselves in mirrors. And a couple of I haven't heard of are if you give birth and look in a mirror too, soon afterward, you will see ghostly faces peek out from behind the reflection. Right. I've never heard that one of you. No. I had heard of soothing Shiva, though. Yeah. What's the deal with that one? Well, if you're Jewish and somebody dies, part of the morning processes to cover all the mirrors in the house say that in the Talmud. Shut up, Chuck. Also, we have gotten conflicting information about whether or not it is taboo among Judaism to be cremated. Did you notice? Yeah. And I'll stand behind what we found, which was that reformed Jews will do it, but it's still not, like, encouraged. But it is actually forbidden in the actual Jewish text. Right. So there fine. Is that it? I think that's about it. Oh, New Year's Eve. Right? Yeah. I hadn't heard of this one either. If you go up to a mirror on New Year's Eve with a candle in your hand and you say the name of a dead person, probably a dead loved one in a loud voice, their face should appear in the mirror. Never heard that. And this is my favorite one, the ancient Chinese mythology. You know how you see weird movement in, like, the corner of a mirror every once in a while? Have you ever noticed that? Sure. I just figured it was like your mind playing tricks on you. I'm sure it is. Unless you're Chinese, pal. Then what it is are the Mirror people, the Mirror Kingdom. There's a group of opposites who live in the Mirror Kingdom and they are sworn to do battle with us. Really? Yeah. And if this were north mythology, we'd lose. Creepy. And we may lose in this case, too, but they are in, I guess, a magical slumber. But when we catch little weird unexplained movement in the corners of mirrors, this is these people stirring in their sleep, waiting to wake up and kill us all in our sleep. I'll remember that next time I see something in the corner of my eye. No. So that's it for me. That's it. I mean, that is it. Nothing else. There is literally nothing else to say about mirrors. No. And if you think that there is, we defy you to go to housetopworks.com and type mirrors into the search bar. Pal. Daria pal. Listener mail time. Listener mail. Josh, this is a little cool organization that we want to support here. And how long you been smoke free, buddy? It's over four months now. Crazy, isn't it? So proud. Thanks. Hi, Chuck and Josh. I travel outside the city every weekend, listen to your podcast and always share my new knowledge with friends. Needless to say, I'm the Friday night smartypants and I rather like it. While I'm writing, I want to promote the New York City Walk to beat lung cancer. I am one of the head chairpersons at 28 years old. I never thought I would share anything, but I love my new responsibility as I'm making a huge difference to an underdog cause. How could cancer being an underdog, Josh? Is that question. I don't know. I think it's pretty bad. When you hear someone has lung cancer, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably, did he or she smoke? It never fails. It is a valid question. Funding for lung cancer is completely dwarfed by other cancers that are nearly as fatal and is completely due to the stigma of a smoker's disease. I get turned away by sponsors and media all the time because no one wants to support a disease that is so preventable. But the thing is, it isn't. People who get LC secondhand for no reason at all, it happens all the time. Why don't people ask those with skin cancer if they wore sunscreen? Or people who have heart attacks if they ate? Well, it's just silly. But looking at the numbers, it just doesn't add up. So here's what we're going to do. Jess, since you were the chair, there's an event in New York City, new York City. It's called the walk to prevent. I'm sorry. The walk to beat lung cancer. Lung cancer. And it is October 24, 2010, in Battery Park. And if you would like to take part in this Walk to Beat Lung Cancer, jess would really appreciate it. You can go to our website, www. Dot longevity. See what they did there. Orgnycwalk. That is L-U-N-G-E-V-I-T-Y orgnynycwalk or twitter. You can follow this and get information at walknumber. Four lung cancer all one word. Or facebook at walk to beat lung cancer. And Jess would appreciate your participation. So our New York City buddies that we met while we were there, spread the word and get out and walk. Yeah. That's awesome. And if you're one of those people who poopoos lung cancer or helping battle lung cancer, maybe it's time you took a long look in the mirror, because you could be a jerk. If you have any kind of organization like Chuck and I to give a shout out to, we consider those on a case by case basis. Don't we, Chuck? We sure do. It definitely doesn't help or it definitely doesn't hurt to grease the wheels, you know what I mean? And we're not talking about cash prizes. No, we can't legally do that, can we? No, you can tell us about your organization in an email to send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want morehouseduffworks? Check out our blog on the houseofworks.com homepage, brought to you by the reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
c5e3ebf8-5460-11e8-b38c-fb42b2b00581 | Selects: How Tipping Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-tipping-works | Tipping is commonly expected in some places, such as U.S. restaurants. Yet this practice varies across cultures. Join trivia gurus (and former waiters) Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they take a closer look at the history, practice and controversy surrounding tipping. | Tipping is commonly expected in some places, such as U.S. restaurants. Yet this practice varies across cultures. Join trivia gurus (and former waiters) Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they take a closer look at the history, practice and controversy surrounding tipping. | Sat, 25 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=359, tm_isdst=0) | 49463039 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global bank who wanted to crunch billions of transactions against thousands of compliance controls? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data, and now you can supercharge your audit system with AI. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your City Advantage Platinum Select card so you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage miles. Actually, you earned Advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the City Advantage Platinum Select card. Learn more at Citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Hi, everybody. Chuck here. We're going back in time to March 22, 2012, on this Saturday Select episode to tell you how to tip people. Oh, boy. If you don't know how to tip, then this episode will kind of explain that to you. It is from 2012, so I hope you did the right thing. I know we talked about tipping well, but I am tipping even more these days, especially in our recent situation during the lockdown, when so many people in the industries that rely on tips have not been able to work for tips, and they have been hit hard. So I got to tell you, I'm throwing down as much money their way as I can afford, as should you. So do the right thing, everyone. Tip big if you can, and listen to this episode on how tipping works. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know of the podcast. You ever waited tables? I did. No. It's awful. How long did you do it? I did it off, and not for many years, but, man, I was bad. Yeah, I waited tables for many years as well in several different states and many different kinds of restaurants. So I have a pretty wide range of experience with being tipped. How are you doing? Great. How are you? Are you trying to hurry us along? Here's a tip from me to you. You're clear that OJ. Guy, pal. O. J. Simpson. Yeah, from Dave Letterman top ten from the nineties. Something about tipping, and one of them was like, here's the tips. You're clear of that. OJ. Fell up, pal. I'm glad we're staying relevant, as always. I'm not trying to move it along. I just thought since you said you didn't have an intro, I would document a little bit of my history as a waiter. He did great, man. Remember what's his name? The guy from Scrubs and Garden State. For some reason, I always think he was perfect at being that waiter. Zach Braff. Yeah. For some reason, it was just like whenever I think of waiters and then I think of La. I think of that character, the scene at the beginning and the end of it. I think that was really based on his experience as a waiter, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. He wore a lot of eyeliner in the early 2000s. Guyliner. What that's called? You never heard that phrase? No. Skyliner. Yeah. So tipping josh, you've been pushing this one for a while, and it never got done for various reasons. And I'm glad we got around to it, because this will be one that people it's ubiquitous, and we'll get tons and tons of email about this. I guarantee it. Yeah. And it's going to be helpful because in several points, we tell you to go to TripAdvisor to look up tipping customs. Yeah, that's helpful. Well, it's hard to cover tipping customs because they're different everywhere, and for each job and it gets so overwhelming, you just have to end up saying, hey, if you're going to this country, look it up. Or apparently you need to go through life like Jimmy Conway and Goodfellows and tip absolutely every single person you see your mechanic. Did you see that? Did you know you're supposed to tip your mechanic ten to $20 or more for jobs over $500? It's like, hey, thanks for overcharging me and exploiting my ignorance of my car and how it functions. Here's an extra $20, you're mechanic. Yeah. Well, you know what? Since you brought that up, I saw an ABC 2020 questionnaire is tipping out of control? Oh, yeah. And 86% of people say it is. I disagree. You don't think it's out of control? After reading this, I was like, Man, I'm way cheaper than I realized. And this is just a question I thought was interesting. What services bother you the most that you were obliged to tip? 30% of people said bathroom attendance. Oh, I don't tip them. That's at the top of my list. I don't want a bathroom attendant. Well, yeah, I can get my services well. It makes me want to not wash my hands. It makes me just want to get out of there. Yeah. Take out food. Tipping 29%, it irks people to pay for. Like when you get a takeout order, like when you go there and they just turn around and get your food and hand it to you in a bag. Yes. Like when you call it in, you don't tip them. I do. Do you really? Yeah. Okay. What else? Salons. Yes. 21% of people don't like tipping the salon because women say it's just endless because you got to tip your colorists and the people who wash your hair. I could see that. And then 20% the tip jars at coffeehouses. I rarely patronize those as well. Coffee houses or tip jars? Tip jars at coffeehouse coffee houses. Okay. And the reason being is I'm sure I will be taken to task for this. I don't think people in coffee houses are paid the tipped wage. They're not. I might as well walk around with the tip jar and ask people to give me their change. I'll even wear a change belt. How about that? Just to make it easier on you. Well, why would you even have a tip jar there if you're not getting paid the tipped wage? That brings up a big point, because that is a big controversy. People at Starbucks start out at about $850 to $9 an hour. What is that? It's a minimum wage. That's above the minimum wage. Just I think 725 is the minimum wage. Now, the tipped the Fair Standards and Labor Act, the minimum federal hourly wage for tipped employees is 213. Yes. Yes. Those people, although usually get more tipped. No, it doesn't necessarily. No. Well, most states have their own, and it's more than 213. I didn't get that. Most the pinnacle is Colorado, and they have, like, a minimum tipped wage of 413 an hour. And that's what everybody's like. Wow, colorado is really killing it. I know. Here in Georgia, it's the federal minimum. And there's a group called Fairyeats.org that's dedicated to shaming restaurants that just adhere to that by celebrating restaurants that pay their employees more than the minimum tipped wage. Well, you're supposed to make up the difference as a restaurant from what employees claim to the IRS and they're tipped money. If that doesn't equal minimum wage, then the restauranteur is supposed to make up that difference in wages. I would wager that that does not happen. Well, I would wager that not many tipped employees are reporting all of their tips either. That's true, too. So it's kind of like and then both just kind of storm away. Disgruntled. Right. But you don't tip McDonald's. No, you don't tip it. And for the same reason I don't tip people at coffee houses, because it's the same thing. You are putting my order in right. Into a cash register or a cash register computing machine, and you're turning around and grabbing my coffee or my fries or whatever. Right. And I'm not demeaning or diminishing that job whatsoever. I'm very happy that you're doing that because I really want that. And you're standing between me and the fries. Right. So hand them over. I'll give you this money, but you make like a 950 an hour. Maybe you got health benefits. Yes. At Starbucks. Right. So in my opinion, we can either entirely do away with tipping by raising everybody to at least the minimum wage. And while we're at it, let's also maybe double the minimum wage because it's laughable still, right? Sure. And just do away with tipping. Just go totally Japan. Or we need to really make it clear who's depending on tips and who's not. And these jokers at coffee houses need to get rid of the tip jar, and they need to stop calling it karma, which I think we went over, and they call karma karma jar or whatever. Yeah. That's passive aggressive. Guilty. You think? Yeah. All right, that was our intro, tipping. So let's talk about where this often violently exploited act came from. Chuck, go ahead. Well, I feel like I was on a rant. I was, too. Just checking. Okay, well, let's see. Tipping, they think, has its origins in about the 16th century in Europe, where if you went and visited a friend, a relative, a colleague, you went to their house, you would often tip their servants, especially if you got really drunk and toiled yourself and they cleaned you up, you might be like, here's a couple of pieces of gold, let's just keep this between you and me. And they would and over time, it became much less of a way to show your appreciation as something that was expected and depended on. Right. Yeah. Once you start kind of giving money into a customary manner, people start to include that in their budgets. Right. Yeah. So they think that that's possibly where the custom came from. Right. Yeah. I don't even think that this acronym thing is even valid at all. No. And it's not valid. There's a guy named Steve Dublanca who's written books on tipping. He's got some pretty good research down. You want to say the acronym tip to ensure with an I promptness. Right. But there's no way now, because, number one, acronyms didn't really come into use until the 19th, 20th. Yeah. They weren't using acronyms in the 16th century, and the word tip itself has been around for long before that. And like you said, it shouldn't be tip insure with an I, it should be insured with an E. Yeah. So there's a lot wrong with that. What they think is that tipping originally came from this kind of word among thieves, which is how we use it today. Like, you tip somebody off, basically to give something. Right, right. And it was just basically common thieves slang. But then the act of tipping itself also came from either the servants, from tipping servants, or it grew out of giving money to somebody who worked at the bar to buy their own drink as well. Get a drink for yourself on me. Yes. And in fact, the word tip in Slavic languages translates roughly to drinking money. I like that one. The word for tip in French is poor beer porboir, which means for drinking. Right. And basically everywhere else, except in English, the word tip means drinking money. Right. So that's probably where tipping came from. I like that origin here. I'm having a good time, I had a few drinks. Go by yourself one. Exactly. It's just spreading the joy. Or I'm at my buddy's house, and I've drank until I soiled myself. I don't use the money for cleaning me up last night. I appreciate it. I don't know about the train spotting origin of tipping. This is probably where tipping came from and a little more history, if you don't mind, Chuck. Sure. You can pretty much pinpoint how tipping became accustomed in the United States because it was all a rage in Europe. It was not caught on here in the US. Even though a lot of wealthy Americans were traveling to Europe and coming back and tipping, people were like, what are you doing? Like, sure, give me your money, but I'm not going to do the same thing. Until the Pullman rail car company figured out that they could grossly underpay their porters by publicizing that they relied on tips to survive. And basically the polling company cut almost $3 million in the late 19th century. That's a lot of money from their payroll by basically relying on their customers good hearts to take care of their porters for them. When you think about it in those terms, it is sort of a dirty business. It's like, hey, we don't want to pay our employees. They're serving you, so you pay them. But, like, you're the one reaping all the reward of the $5 cup of coffee. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? Yes. And a lot of restaurants or a lot of people on the restaurant side of this debate say, well, if we start raising their wages to the minimum wage or even double the tip wage, we're going to go under. And apparently some studies have found that that's actually not the case, that they can come out on top because restaurant owners spend so much money on training through turnover, because the wages are so low that people just hop from job to job wherever they can get the most tips. If you can offer a higher stable wage, you're going to have much less turnover, and ultimately, in the long run, you may come out on top as a restaurant owner. So interesting. Possibly that's one side. You know who pays the customer? Yeah, us, the middle class. You pay the $5 for the cup of coffee, which the company gets. They don't have to pay. Well, they do pay their employees minimum wage, but that ain't much. And then they get the little tip on top of that, and you end up paying 650 for your cup of coffee. You know what? Now that you're bringing this up, you and I were at Caribou, and they have I love Caribou coffee, right? But they had this promo where it was like beans for the troops or something like that. And it was like, hey, go ahead and buy this $15 pound of coffee, and we'll send them to the troops. And we asked if they were selling them at a discount, like if the caribou was doing anything. They were like, no, this is a regular price. And we're like, so wait a minute, you're exploiting Americans affinity and affection for the troops as a way to beef up your unground bean sales. That was disgusting, if you ask me. It happens. That's gross. The board meeting is the gross part. Where that's decided. Yeah, you know, where we can really rack it. Right. All right. I knew this would be a lightning rod. This is just us, man. Imagine the emails are going to get oh, boy. Well, since you brought it up, it is a lightning rod, period. If you go on the Internet and you start looking about tipping, you will find two camps. People that work for tips, that are outraged that people don't want to tip or they under tip, and then people that say it is out of control. You go on a vacation, you stay in a hotel and eat at restaurants. You're Jimmy Conway. But again, I was reading this. I'm like, oh, man. Do other people tip all these people? Because I feel like a real jerk in some of these cases. I do, and I end up feeling like a sucker. And then you know what I thought? I was like, well, I never carried cash. It's all plastic, so surely plastic leading to a decline in tipping. I did a search for that. No, all I could find was that most people carry plastic and a little bit of currency for tips. I'm like, oh, man, I really have to get on the ball here. 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 partnered 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. The world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha Shard, the Martha Stewart chardonnay that's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha steard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, Martha Shard is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish. Framed by a distinctly sweet oat character, martha Shard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowd pleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha 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. They've actually done a lot of studying about tips. Yeah. Why do we do this? Yes. The psychology tipping, as it were. Well, one is out of guilt. Yeah. Wasn't that one of the reasons? Yeah. Supposedly, if you think about tipping, the whole idea is that you're doing it out of gratitude, like, you did a really good job, and I want to make sure that you have this extra little go buy yourself something nice on me, or I want to ensure, because I come back to you that I will get that same service when I come back. Right. So really what they're finding is that it's guilt and fear. Like, you know, that people rely on these tips, and part of your role as customer in some circumstances is to pay these people their salary that they're depending on. Or you're afraid that they're going to pee in your soup, and you're basically saying, here's some money. Please don't pee in my soup. Right. And they say, all right, that's going to do it. That takes care of the no pea soup levy. Yeah, but the tip comes after the soup. Yeah, but you may be back there again. Okay. Right. Yes. The center for Hospitality at Cornell University, they've done some research there, and I thought this was fairly interesting. They found the US. Leads the world in being neurotic and being extroverted. And those are two traits that lead to big tips because you're neurotic, so you feel like, of course I have to leave. You know, anyone who's ever seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm tip episode, that's like tipping neuroticism, and it's finest portrayed. You want to tip as much as your friend. You don't want to under tip just you don't want to over tip. You want to tip just the right amount. I don't mind over tipping, especially when it's like, really good service. I'm happy to over tip, and I prefer to err on the side of overtipping. Right. For sure. Extroverts are outgoing social folks, and they see it as an incentive to get a little extra attention, like make a big show about me. Right. Party of Benjamin, party of four. Benjamin Franklin, party of four. I never heard that. Yes. Yummy's. Got a story about this one, dude. Wow. You don't tell it. Well, that was pretty much it. She and her boyfriend at the time and his friend were at this restaurant, and the guy actually said, Franklin, party of four. And she said it worked. She couldn't believe it. She was like, I felt bad about the guy we were with and the guy who took the money, but she said it was good. Interesting. Good meal. I've never greased a palm for, like, a table. I haven't either. That's a good move, though. I wish. I'd like to do that. It is. But really, it's kind of like, man, you give up a lot of any claim to the 99%, even if you don't make that much money, if you're walking around doing stuff like that, you know? Speaking of, did you see the Internet meme going around about the 99% tipper? Yes. Which apparently is totally unfounded. No, I think it's sort of unfounded. I thought he was a 1% tipper. He's a 1% tipper because he is part of the 1%. And from what I understood, the tip was real, but what he wrote on there was fabricated. Or they didn't even know for sure he was a banker. Then the whole thing is fabricated. Yeah, I did see that, though, by the way. I mean, this is breaking news is, like, yesterday, four weeks ago. So can we go back to some of the interesting studies about how you get good tips? This is Josh and Chuck's. If you're a waiter or a waitron, here are our tips for you to increase your tips in your restaurant. This isn't just us and our observations. No. Again, Cornell's put a lot of thought and energy into it, I believe. Yeah, they did real research. There's been a lot of studies about how and why we tip. One of them is touching. Like, if you are a server and you touch your customer, you will increase your tip. Lonely, horny men, men and women of all ages will increase their tip with just a brief touch on the shoulder. Yeah. From 11.8% to 14.8%. I, however, do not like to be touched. I don't either. I'm glad you said that. Waiter touched me the other day, and I was just like, what are you doing? It didn't freak me out. It's not something I don't know you. You don't know me. Yeah. Let's just keep our hands to ourselves, okay? Right. And then we'll see where your tip goes. Did his tip go down? No, of course not. I should have punished him severely. Oh, God, dude, you have that power in your hands. I have so much former waiter guilt. I tip 20% on bad service as long as I do. As long as you have the right attitude, that makes the biggest difference. If you're like, oh, yeah, really sorry. And it was bad service, and you say, I'm sorry, guys, I let you down the night, unless you're being manipulative by doing that, and you really just couldn't have cared less. You phoned it in, and then you said, oh, really sorry. I can, too. Yeah. Intentions go a long way with me. All right, squatting. And this was my big move when I was a waiter, because you're a squatter at the nice restaurant I worked at. It was my big move. I would kneel down next to the table. A lot of times you get that eye contact going on, and your tips are going to go up from 14.9% to 17.5%. Okay. I would also like to add a caveat to this, however, if you actually get into the booth or take a seat at the table, you've crossed the line. I used to do that at mexicali, though, but that was a college atmosphere, and that would be acceptable at certain times, even in college at Mexican. No, that was over the line. No, it was fun. Girls drinking margaritas, I would sit down and flirt with your tip go up. Yeah. And occasionally I would get a phone number out of it in free margarita. Well, I work there. I got all the free margaritas. I want them. I didn't realize they gave free margaritas to employees in Mexico. Well, they didn't officially. Oh, got you. You weren't supposed to have them while you were working either. Those were the old days. Giving candy to your customer will jump your tip up from 15.1 to 17.8%. Giving two pieces of candy, one initially and one spontaneously, like, here, have another. Jumped it from 19% to 21.6%. So long as you didn't end it with jumps. I'm sorry. That jumped it to 23% when it was the spontaneous sector fees. Right. Chumps 23% by being like, oh, well, you know what? Here, take two. And we're talking, like, the starlight peppermints here, okay? There's not like Godiva chocolate. Exactly. Yes. Thank you for rescuing me, because I almost had snickers. That'd be nice, too. I had a waitress recently gave Emily and I the pin that she gave us to sign the bill with, because I'm a big pin, guys. So is Emily. And as far as having the perfect pen and I signed things like, oh, my God, I feel this pin. And it was a combination of the pin on that slimy paper that they give you, and it was amazing. And Emily said something, and she was like, I agree. I keep them in my car. I love them so much. Go ahead and keep that one. And how much of a tip did you leave her? I left her my pen. I'm kidding. Yeah, sure. I tipped her more. 50%. No. 70? No. It's always like 2025. So the highest you go is 25? Yeah, I mean, I go 20 and I round up no matter what. I noticed, especially before the well, I guess it would have been even after the economic collapse, the global catastrophe that we're in the midst of still, that it was moving very clearly toward 20% across the board. 20% was the new 15%. Right. And then the economic meltdown happened, and all of a sudden now it's back to 15% and 20% if you're doing good. Oh, really? It seems like yeah. Am I wrong? Am I just fantasizing here. No, I think it used to be ten. Then it was like twelve, then 15, and then 20, and then yeah, you're right. With the economic crisis, I did read articles that people said, our tips are going down, but it's a collective movement. You know what I'm saying? Like, you can be the nice guy in tip 20 all the time or whatever. Right. But you're also kind of pushing everybody else forward by doing that. Yeah, I also do the deal too, where you go out with certain people. What does that mean? I've got like, eight different homes. I don't want to call out any person or even oh, you're talking about a specific buddy of yours? No, not buddy. Could be family members. Could be certain friends. When someone picks up the tab, I always do the thing where I look to make sure that they're properly compensated. And on the way, I was like, oh, I got to use a bathroom. I'll go put more money in there. Oh, you're an underminer. Yeah, because certain people man, I wish I could say I had a friend whose father was a very rich dude and he was a bad tipper, and it embarrassed the crud out of me when we would go to these nice places and he would pick up the tab and leave, like, eight to percent, ten tip. And so I always knew to bring cash to leave in the thing. Jared Hesse's. Dad, no. 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. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? 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Please drink responsibly. All right, so that's it. How to increase your tips. Tell them it's sunny outside. Yeah. The psychology of weather strikes again. Where the study was conducted. Where? In a windowless room, right? Yeah. If the waiter describes it as being rainy out, the tips were something like 19%, which isn't too bad. Yeah, but if the waiter was like, oh, it's so sunny and beautiful out, then tips average 24%. So squat at the table, touch them on the shoulder, give them candy, give them candy. And then all of a sudden, you've got two pieces of candy. And give good service. And then tell them it's sunny outside and you will be rolling in the door. It makes, like a million dollars a table. Thank you, Slater. And tip on the original amount, by the way. That's a waiter thing. It's a big one. If you got coupons or you do the Scout Mob thing, be aware that you should tip on the original amount. You kind of have to. It's not the waiter's fault you had a coupon. Yeah. I mean, that is really bad if you don't know that at this point, especially with how ubiquitous those deals are getting these days. Sure. But Chuck, on the other hand, you can make a pretty strong argument that if you order $100 bottle of wine, do you tip 20% on that? If so, why? Yes. Why? I like some nice wine, and that is a bone of contention that I swallow and I just still tip on the total amount. Okay, but, yeah, you're right. Let's say just order a bottle of wine, like minimally. We're just going to go have a bottle of wine one night because we ate dinner somewhere else. Or maybe we go to have dessert somewhere. Okay, sure. And we get a nice bottle of pork. Okay. And it's like $80. You guys drink a whole bottle of port? Well, no, of course not. Let's say with a group or whatever, we drink a whole bottle of port. A group of what? Like 20. You're drinking a whole bottle? Drink a glass of port and there's like five glasses in a bottle that small. So it's like a regular wine glass. What do you drink? Brandy. Like that? No, because that's liquor. Pork is wine. No, brandy is a type of wine. Anyway, do you feel like Homer Simpson when he was babysitting Mr. Burns house, when he pours himself like, a whole snifter of brandy and drinks the whole thing in one gulp and then just falls right over? My friend Timmy's wife one time asked for a bourbon on the rocks at her house and she bought me like, 7oz of bourbon on the rocks. I was like, what are you trying to do to me? That's awesome. No, but ports not you're not supposed to have a little it's not like Sambuca. I mean, pork is like a regular guy's wine. Right. I'm mistaken then, because every place I go, they pour your regular glass. No, it's a little tiny. It's like a cordial wine glass. No, I promise. All right, you're going to be wrong regardless. You drink expensive wine and how much do you tip? Well, the 20%, but it does cross my mind, like, oh, man, I'm giving this guy like, $14 for bringing me a bottle of wine. It's a good point, and I think even the average server would grudgingly agree. Okay, all right, maybe not 15% on this one. But it's not just the waiter that you want to tip in the restaurant. Surprise, surprise. Depending on where you go, you need to be prepared to tip a lot of people. Yeah. The person who seats you, maybe if it's a really nice place. The mature d. If the Matrid goes out of his way to get you a very nice table or you feel like he or she is doing something very just kind of above and beyond, you might want to slip from $15 to $20. That's a lot. Also, if the Somalia comes over to your table and tells you a bit about the wines, especially if you solicited this advice. Yeah. In reading this article, I realized that I have stiffed at least one Somalia in my life, and now I understand why he's looking at me weird. When he finished, you want to give them anywhere from ten to $20, depending on how in depth the recommendation is. And usually when you're talking tips, at least in this article that we're working from, how stuff works.com, there's a high and a low, right? And basically the discrepancy is based on just how much effort this person is putting into it, how much enthusiasm, but just how much out of the way of their normal duties are they going. So here's my deal, dude. I don't want a big show. I want genuine good service and to be left alone because the tip won't go down, because I just have the guilt. But you can go down in my mind if you're just too, like, just too much. Don't work too hard, don't give me a big show. Apparently they can do whatever they want to and they're still going to get the same amount of money. You know what, Chuck? You know where you would do well, then? Where? Buffets. At a buffet you serve yourself and you just leave your plate and it mysteriously vanishes. But that's a person behind the kidnapping of that plate, and you want to leave them about 10% is the recommendation. So you want to leave them buffet? I don't go to buffets, but yeah, you don't go to buffets? No. I don't understand the existence of cafeterias. Since there are buffets, it's the same exact thing, except buffets are all you can eat. Yeah. And cafeteria is like, here's a little ramekin of the same thing. You can have ten helpings of if you want for the same price. Well, you don't see a lot of cafeterias anymore. You do? Yeah. There's at least as many cafeterias as there are buffets. Oh, no. Yeah, I think the Chinese food restaurants have made that a null and void comment. The Chinese food buffet. Okay. All right. So they exist outside of this realm. I'm talking more like country cooking buffets. Yeah, there's almost one for one. All right. And by the way, most nicer restaurants pull their tips. Like in Mexico, it was every man for himself. The bus boy didn't get tips or actually, we kind of bust our own tables. Yeah, but most restaurants will pull their tips, and it's usually not a matre d at that point. It's just the host or hostess. They'll get a cut. And like, bartender, the bartender and the bus boy dishwasher, dishwasher, they'll all get a cut. So just remember that. But some places it's every man for himself, too. If speaking of bartenders, you are at a bar, I usually tip a buck a drink for the first few drinks. That's what I do. Unless it's like a complex, complicated drink, which I tend to prefer. Sure. It will be like, a percentage of the bill if there's any muddling going on. Yeah, once you start muddling, I'm like, all right, here's some extra money. Yes. I don't tip on the bill because we usually just say, give us six PBRS for my friends, and I'll then tip a bucket. Even if the beer is a dollar, I'll give a dollar. That's very nice of you, because it's like, what am I going to fish around for $0.15? That's just ridiculous. Yeah, but we're rich. We're high rollers. You're tipping a buck for a dollar. Beer Chuck? Yeah. Wow. The podcasting business, cafes and coffee houses. I think we've kind of covered that. We did. I tend to tip out of guilt there, but I don't go to a lot of coffee shops because I don't drink a lot of coffee. I look those guys in the eyes while I'm not tipping them. Do you know what the worst is? Checking out the grocery store and they're like, would you like to give a dollar to whatever foundation? That's 50 50 for me, depending on my mood. Really? Yeah. I should do it every time, but yeah. And that's sad that helping out kids with muscular dystrophy is equated to tipping. Well, it's not, but yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Holiday tipping, which was a big part of that Curb your Enthusiasm episode. When do you do this? When you have money? I think it's generally for people that have a little more money and they live in places where they know the service people helping out. Yeah, like the guy the country club and the guy this and that. But you can deliver your newspaper or your garbage collector, your newspaper delivery person. You can tip your mailman. My brother used to, when he worked at the movie theaters, would give every holidays, he would give out movie tickets that he stole from work. Yeah. To like, the mailman and to the garbage person and stuff like that. $15 to $25, they say, for your garbage collector, your dog walker, your nanny, your cleaning service. They save any of those one week's pay. I save a lot of money every year by not having those people. So I have to tip them. Yeah. Manicurist. You have manicurists? Supposed to tip them. Do. And you know the way around this. Go to different manicurists every time. You're not a common enough customer that you feel like you need to tip them. At the holiday hairdressers, women, obviously, the ones who are probably spending the big bucks at the hairdresser, they say 25 to 100. And this is for the holidays. You understand it's not each visit. This is hey, it's Christmas. You also have to tip them each visit. I get a $14 haircut, I tip $6. What? Well, because what am I going to give them? $19. Wow. Or $2. Okay. That just seems really cheap to me to say, like, thanks for the great haircut. That's going to last me three months. Here's eight. I tip my haircut lady all over the place. What do you tip her? I kisses and hugs and stuff like that. You may cut your hair. Yes. Hotels. This is something that I have just recently learned. I didn't know you're supposed to tip the made service. I knew that. But I thought that was something from maybe the that's how I comforted myself by not tipping the maids. But, yeah, apparently we're supposed to be doing that a lot. One to $10 per night, depending on the mess you make. I am extremely clean, and I clean up before I leave the hotel. It depends on if they change you, if you soiled yourself the night before. Bellhops, a dollar per bag. If it's bulky and large or heavy and awkward. Maybe a little bit more of that. Yes. More than a buck. That one I totally get. Still don't do it because I frequently don't use bellhops. I do it myself, but I hate that when they force you to walk you into the room and show you around and stuff. I would much rather just carry my own bag. Just give me my keycard. Again with a big show. I don't want a big show. Right. Well, apparently, though, remember that one study found that bellhops who do make a big show of things by showing people how to operate the thermostat and the TV and opening the drapes and offering to fill the ice bucket, they almost doubled their average tip. But I wonder if it was people who are like, here's some money, just please go away. Which is one of the origins of tipping, too. Remember throwing money for passage? Concierge five to $10, depending on how helpful remember when we were at the Pittsburgh Fairmont and our buddy Chad gave the concierge like, $10 for a wreck, and it turned out to be a bad recommendation and he was all mad and he wanted his money back. What was the recommendation? I didn't go. I was eating Indian food by myself in my room the whole time. It was for a restaurant that was either closed or it was just a bad tip. Oh, really? And he was like, did he get his money back? No, of course not. I'll bet he did not stop complaining about it, but he kept going and going, and I didn't know until recently. You're supposed to tip the concierge. Yeah, I'm a dummy. I didn't know that. Well, I mean, they help you out, depending I thought they were well, how much help they are. Concierge, and I've never had one do this for me. I've never really needed the services of concierge. But concierge can really go to town on making your life easy. So they can make your reservation. They can get you tickets to a show, sure, all sorts of things. They can buy your kid a toy if you're staying at a nice enough place. Oh, and you're busy or whatever. Yeah, shopping, that kind of thing. I can find your shopper. You know what? In the spirit of keeping the tradition of facts alive, I made that last part up, but it seems like a safe assumption by joy. Yeah, oh, sure they would. Okay. Doorman. Tip your doorman. If they hail a taxi, tip them a buck. A lot of them aren't allowed to accept tips, so don't be surprised if they hand it back. Really? Yeah. All right. Deliveries. This is a big one for me. I get Chinese food delivery. It's about the only delivery I get. Oh, yeah. Maybe the occasional pizza. Where do you order from? I order from a place indicator. Chinese food place. Is it good? Yeah, it's good, but they take forever. Yeah. So that'll cut down on a tip with me. Well, especially if I'm really hungry when I order. Yeah, we've learned to order before. We're hungry from this place. It's smart. Like Tuesday. Yeah, exactly. They say to tip two to $5 on your food delivery to your home, depending on the weather, the amount of danger, depending on the neighborhood you live in. Yeah, my neighborhood is dangerous. I was not talking about your neighborhood. It's really not that bad. Flower deliveries. One to $10, depending on the arrangement. I spent a little time as a flower delivery person, and I can tell you that most people don't tip their flower delivery guy, even though they're bringing this bit of sunshine into your life. I assume that goes for fruit delivery, too, with those silly fruit displays. Unless, ironically, you're dressed like a piece of fruit while you're delivering it, then the tips just start pouring out. Yeah. Furniture delivery, like, large things. I can tell you I did that as well. Very large furniture. Among the heaviest darn bars you can possibly conceive of a fabric, and no one tips you. If you delivered to the home of, like, someone aged 65 or older, there was about a 60% chance they were going to tip you. Anybody below that was like, hey, thanks for coming. Don't get hit by a car on your way out. See, my history with tipping with the elderly is they don't tip as much. It depends. It depends on the industry you're in. Yeah. Restaurant. Because tipping, I think, used to be a lot more ubiquitous than it is now. Right? Yeah. So, like a furniture delivery. That's why the older generation, I would get a tip from them more frequently, because there was a time when you tipped everybody like that. Our generation wasn't raised like that. Right. I mean, do you tip the furniture delivery guy? I pick up my own furniture buddy. Okay, but you probably wouldn't tip. But, like, the mover, let's say, like, the people who help you move. I think it's expected. You pay the big, huge moving costs. Exactly. And you tip the guy on top of that. And I've got a lot of self reflection. Skycap. I took $5 a bag for Skycap. I must be a sucker, because it says in here, $2 a bag. Very good. What's next? Shuttle drivers at the airport? I didn't know you're supposed to tip them. You're not. This is all made up. No, it's not. Cabbie in New York, they make it very easy on you now. Yeah. You just put in the percentage you want in the little computer and it'll add it to your credit card, which is great. Yeah. Valet. If I like you, which is frequent, you get $2. If I don't like you, you can get as little as $0. I try to get two. I feel bad, though, when I don't have it, and I'm just like, oh, man. And sometimes I'll say, Can I go get my own card if you don't have any cash? Yes, I'll say, that too. And they say, no, we'll go get it. And I'll fart in it. No, they will. Oh, they will? Yeah. I'll soil myself in your car. Mechanic. I had no idea. This is why it's made up. You don't tip your mechanic. What are they talking about? I had no idea. I think this is from The Gentleman's Guide to Life. The tip your mechanic. Ten to $20 for any job over $500. I had no idea. Gas station attendance, like they exist anymore. Yeah. Well, New Jersey, Oregon or wherever, if they voluntarily check your fluids, meaning the ones in your car, you should tip them one to $2. Is it Oregon? Do you have to get your gas pump? I remember in New Jersey I think I even told you this, my girlfriend had never pumped her gas. She was, like, 32. Oh, yeah, you did tell me that. Yeah. Our friend Van Nostril, he lives in Washington, which is nearby Oregon, so he probably knows about that. We should ask him. Yeah. So international tipping, it's way too much to go over. And we hate to cop out, but you really do need to go online because there's tons of information. When you go to visit a country, it's all different. Look it up before you go so you don't look like a schmuck. Yeah. There are a couple of rules of thumb you should, like you said, familiarize yourself. Not knowing the value of the currency is not an excuse. Right. And don't use US. Currency. Yeah. Here's a couple of American dollars for you, Mr. Costa. Rican. Don't disrupt your GDP. Yeah, that's cop out. That's BS. Convert it and give them their currents. Yeah. Because they have to go to an exchange place and everybody has a cameo in their neighborhood. Right. Or I guess some countries, I think, like Puerto Rico and stuff, they can use American dollars. It's because it's an American territory. Well, no, I think even, like, Jamaica and a lot of these places close to the US. In the Caribbean. Got you. I think they can use American dollars as well, so it's not so obnoxious. Can we go over some people who you don't have to tip? Which I was very relieved to hear. Some of these. Is there anyone that you don't have to tip besides fast food restaurant owners. You're not supposed to tip salon owners. Basically, any owner of an establishment, you don't tip unless they're the ones providing the service to you. Food delivery is under $30. I don't know what that is. That doesn't make any sense to me. Here's my favorite. I was so glad to know that I can go ahead and stop tipping flight attendants. You don't have to tip flight attendance. Did you know that? I did not know anyone would do that. Bus drivers, theater ushers. You have to tip shuttle drivers, but you're not supposed to tip bus drivers. Yes. This place is crazy. That's what I'm saying. The rules are so like, you don't tip McDonald's, but you do tip the coffee person. Even though you can get a coffee at McDonald's salespeople, you don't tip them. And employees at fast food restaurants, airline flight attendants. I can't believe someone actually wrote down that you don't have to tip them. So there's a lot of federal stuff going on right now, my friend. Oh, yeah. There's something up. So the federal tipped minimum wage has been the same since 1991? 213. It's at 213 an hour because of inflation. The whole concept was created in 1966 because of inflation. It's never been less valuable than it is right now relative to the cost of living. I believe it. Yeah. So it's a big deal for people who make their living in service industries before Congress. Right now, there's HR. 31, the Working for adequate gains for Employment and Services or the wages act. Congress is so clever. But basically it would tie the federal tip minimum wage to 60% of the federal minimum wage. So every time there's a hike, there would also be a hike in the federal tip minimum wage. And that act would raise it right now to 435 an hour, which is double what they're making, but still way below just over half of the federal minimum wage. And if you want to go join a group that lobbies on behalf of people who should make a decent wage in the service industry, you can check out Faireats.org. Faireats.org. And that, buddy, is a local group. Oh, really? They're Atlanta based. A lot of restaurants here. I have a list, Josh, of best and worst celebrity tippers. Oh, nice. Yes. This is very TMZ, although it wasn't from TMZ. And I hesitate to even read these because take it with a grain of salt. A lot of these stories I don't know for true, and I'm not going to get into the stories, but you'll be pleased to know that our ghostbusters, Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray are legendary. Good tippers. Awesome. You would think. Drew Barrymore, great tipper. I could see that. Russell Crowe kind of surprised me. Apparently he's a really good tipper. I would not have guessed that. And the whole smashing your face with the phone incident was out of character for him. Wait, I thought he like, got in fights all the time. I don't know. Drew Carey. Good tipper. Hulk Hogan. Charlie Sheen. Yeah, I bet Charlie Sheen leaves more than just money as tips. Yeah. David Beckham, johnny Depp, apparently. Really good tipper. That's awesome. And then I cross referenced the list of worst tippers on because there's all sorts of sites where people where you can go as a waitron and say so and so came in my restaurant last night and they did X, Y and Z. Right. So I did cross reference some of these. Mick Jagger, The Rock, bill Cosby was on every list, I'm sad to say. I am not the least bit surprised. Kirsten Dunst, weird. Madonna. Tiger woods was on every list. Usher, Brittany Spears and Jeremy Pivot was on every list. Sean Penn. Really? Yeah. David Byrne. Dude, this is so disappointing. If it's true, david Byrne of the Talking Heads is considered one of the worst tippers ever, because apparently he does not tip, period. Like, stupid chimney. Oh, yeah. I don't tip. There are two episodes in a row that feature Reservoir Dogs. Michael Moore, supposedly what? Wait a minute, wait a minute. If this is true, Michael Moore, and you are a friend of Michael Moore, who listens to stuff you should know, please play this for him. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir. Ashamed. It said once, less than $20 on a $450 bill. And see all these, though? I say take with a grain of salt, though, because it could just be the ones just not had any money. Maybe the server was a big Republican jerk that he didn't like because it is Michael Moore. Yeah. Remember that part? Did you see? Capitalism a love story. Yes. And he's like, hey, I'm looking for some advice. And one of the traders is like, Stop making movies. Oh, really? It was awesome. All right, so I'm not going to embarrass any more of these people. Like Molly Ringwald and Ricky Lakewire. I see Ricky Lake being really worried about her finances. And Rachel Ray, she was on a bunch of the sites, too. They said she's cheap. I could see her being cheap, too. You know what? I'm not surprised by all them don't be cheap people. I mean, you make tons of money, spread it around, and I'm no socialist, but come on, just bring a little joy into someone's life like Bill Murray does. Yeah, but not Bill Cosby. Be more like Bill Murray, not like Bill Cosby. Okay. Correct. Yes. All right, that's our big takeaway. So that's it for our list of most hated celebrities. If you want to learn more about that, you can type tipping into the search bar@howstofworks.com. Right? That's right. That's T-I-P-P-I-N-G. Which is what? That's like a palindrome or something? Almost. Didn't it? Close. Let's see. I said search barhowtofworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one Dueling vikings call it that. Then from a dude from Viking land, he says, okay. Hi, guys. I just finished listening to the Dueling podcast. I thought I'd share a bit on how they were handled in Nordic countries back when they were pillaging the rest of Europe and berserke at every opportunity. Despite the outward appearance of being crazy axe wielding pirates, the Vikings preferred to keep things civil on the home front. Thus, the concept of home gang was created. A home is a small island, and gang means to go. So when two parties were at odds over an insult, a woman or property, they would go to a tiny island or the tip of the peninsula or some similar isolated area to duke it out Viking style. They would take a three by three meter square of oxide, spread it on the ground, and stake each corner and rope between them, much like a modern boxing ring. Each home gunner typically wielded an axe or a heavy sword and had with him three wooden shields. The challenging party I'm sorry, the challenged party would have first strike, and they would then proceed, taking turns to hammer away at each other's shield broken shields being replaced with the two spares along the way. And the first man struck bodily would typically be considered the loser. Thanks for the hundreds of hours of entertaining knowledge, and keep being the awesome dude you are. Your friend in bikingland, is that Minnesota? J-A-N-N-I-K. No, I don't think it's in Minnesota. That's pretty cool, Janik. I think it is. J-A-N-N-I-K Yanik. We'll go with that. Okay. Thanks a lot. Yannick from Minnesota. And if you want to know about Vikings and you haven't heard it already, go listen to our How Vikings Work podcast. Oh, that was a good one. Very neat. Yeah. Talk about berserkers. Let's see. Oh, if you have a good tipping story, we want to hear it. You can tweet to us at Syscap. You can join us on Facebook@facebook.com stuffychnow. You can send us an email, the stuffpodcast, the housesteports.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.com. Stuffyhadnow 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@halopeet.com. Hey, it's Delilah. We can all use a hug now and again. I wish I could deliver them all in person, but since that's not possible, my daily podcast, hey, It's Delilah. Is the next best thing. It will wrap you in ten to 15 minutes of happy, heartwarming, hopeful radio content every Monday through Friday at whatever time of day you need. It the most find. Hey, it's Delilah. And get your radio hug." | |
ab97a908-3620-11ea-924d-a7148763217c | Short Stuff: Streisand Effect | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-streisand-effect | What does Barbra Streisand have to do with the internet? Listen and learn! | What does Barbra Streisand have to do with the internet? Listen and learn! | Wed, 09 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=253, tm_isdst=0) | 13623424 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Babs. This is Short Stuff. Let's go. Babs. Yeah, we talked about this at some point, the Streisand Effect, wherein when you try to cover something up online, all you do is draw more attention to it. Yeah. And it blows up in your face, aka backfires Barbara. Yeah, but I mean, Barbara Streisand isn't the first person to have something blow up in her face or backfire when she tried to censor anything. And yet she got saddled with this term. I think it's just a little bit of Internet justice. Maybe, but at the very least, we should probably give a little background on what Barbara did to try to censor something in the first place on the Internet that drew the ire that ended up getting her saddled with this. Wait a minute. That was way too long for a short stuff, Chuck. Let's edit this out and start over. So, in 2003, Babs sued a photographer. His name is Kenneth Adelman because she said, I want you to delete this photo that you took from the sky that has my Malibu estate in it. She said, Will you delete it? And he said, well, first of all, I'm not paparazzo. I was doing an online project tracking erosion on the coastline. Your house happens to be in it and this big environmental issue, and she says, Well, I don't care. I'm going to sue you for $50 million. $50 million? This guy is not Sheldon Adelson. It's Kenneth Adelman. He doesn't have $50 million. And she wasn't laying out in the nude. It was just her house. Right. And again, it was part of this erosion project. So when it got out pretty quickly that Barbara Streisand was suing some guy for $50 million, it got picked up by the news, and a lot of attention was drawn to this previously fully overlooked thing, which was the photo of her house on the Malibu coastline. I believe it had been downloaded six times in the entire history of that photograph's existence, and two of those times were by her lawyer. But I think the number jumped up quite a bit after word got out about the lawsuit. Is that not correct, Chuck? Yeah, the strike in effect happened, and it was downloaded close to a half inch million times in the next month after this lawsuit came out. And it prompted a blogger from Dirt Tech named Michael maznik text to what did I say? Dirt Tech. Dirt Tech. That's the Hillbilly version. He labeled the Strisend Effect, and it kind of took hold. Yeah, it did, because it's catchy, and everybody likes Barbara Streisand, but there's also something about her that everybody doesn't like, too. You know Emily loves her. There's nothing she doesn't like. Really? No. She's a big fan of Babs. That Christmas record plays on repeated Christmas record. Have you ever heard well, I'm sure that the answer to this is. Yes. Have you ever heard that her duet with Barry Gibbs? Oh, sure. Those are great. Okay. Yeah, they're about as good as a duet gift. And Barbara Streisand is great on her own. But I just think personally, I get the impression that she's always been the kind who would sue just an average person for $50 million. You know what I mean? You've never heard her take on Jingle Bells? I don't think so, which is bizarre because I've been on this planet for 43 years, and I thought I'd heard every Christmas song ever created around the world 50 million times. Oh, you would know it. She changes it up a lot. Oh, I got to hear this. It's jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle all the way hay. What? Yes, Chuck. You just literally changed my life. Yeah, just go listen to it after this. You'll get a kick out of it. All right? I definitely will. You're probably going to want to throw your sound system out the window. Or you might think it's the best thing ever. It's one of the two. Okay, maybe I'll just keep vacillating back and forth. All right, so Streisand effect happens. She gets labeled or gets named after her, and there have actually been studies on this kind of thing since then. There was one in China in 2018 that found out that their attempts as a country to block access to Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites that people may not have been interested in had they not tried to block it, prompted millions of people to download VP and software just so they could get access to these sites. So it's the whole idea of the forbidden fruit. It's like that Chief Wiggum telling Ralph to stay out of his forbidden closet of mystery. Why are you so fascinated with whatever's in my forbidden closet of mystery? That's definitely part of it. It's like, if you're saying, no, you're not allowed to see this, you're basically saying, do everything you can to see what I'm trying to keep you from seeing. And just like how Streisand's house photo had only been downloaded six times prior to the lawsuit and then went up to 4200 times right after, it's just part and parcel with it if you leave it alone. I don't know about China and news of democracies and what democracies are doing. That might be an exception, but typically, if you leave whatever you're trying to censor alone, apparently that will attract less attention to it than saying, like, you're not allowed to hear this. This is censored. Yeah. I mean, it's also the conundrum that every parent faces every day that their kid grows up is, like, everything from curse words like not making a big deal about it to whatever they're watching and stuff like that. It's like, well, maybe if we don't make a big deal out of it, it's not going to be a big deal. Yes, there is a giant bird, and he's yellow and he loves you, but you cannot see him. You're not allowed to watch that. All right, we're going to take a break and come back and talk about a few other versions of the streisand effect over the years right after this. So I just want to point out, if you're not going to laugh at my jokes today, I'll laugh at my own jokes. I'll be taking over. Yeah, the big bird joke was a good one. All right, so there's a pair of researchers, sue Curry Jensen and Brian Martin, and together they kind of created this paper partially on the streizan effect. And they gave some other examples. Like, in addition to Barbara Streisand and China banning Twitter and Facebook, some other groups have famously tried to censor things and it's blown up in their face. One of them was I don't remember where we talked about it before, but the McLibel case, we definitely have mentioned it before. Yes, this was McDonald's in the 90s. They sued a couple of volunteers from London greenpeace because they had put out a pamphlet called what's wrong with McDonald's? And this is a street pamphlet. It wasn't even online. I mean, it may have been at some point, but this is the 90s. So you know how pamphlets it's not like that goes wide? They were just pamphlets until they got sued and the British press got a hold of it, called it, like you said, McLibel. And it became the longest running civil trial in the history of Britain. And they lost that one, too, so they didn't get the message, I guess. When was Streisands? Was that in the 80s? No, Streisands was 2003. Because it was an early internet project. Yeah. This preceded Barber Streisand. So she didn't take a note from McDonald's. Maybe don't bring the lawsuit. No, because I mean, the fact that it was the longest running civil trial, the press stays interested in that kind of thing. So pretty frequently they would interview the plaintiffs of the defendants in the case, and they would just give them this big microphone to talk about all the horrible things McDonald's was doing. It was a bad move on McDonald's part, for sure. There was also one as far as food goes, a schoolgirl in Scotland named Martha Payne, who was nine at the time, back in 2012. And she sounds like one of the cooler nine year olds I've ever heard of. She had a food blog, but her food blog was about how terrible the food was at her school in her cafeteria. And so she would take pictures of her school lunch and post a picture on her blog and talk about the food and all that. And I guess Jamie Oliver, who is a well known food guy and food communicator, if there is such a thing. Sure, yeah. So Jamie Oliver tweeted about it, and there was a bunch of traffic to her blog and the local school board said, oh, we can't have this. She's going to make us look dumb, so let's just ban her from taking photos in school of her food. Yeah, that didn't work out. That blew up in their face as well, because then what you end up being accused of is like squashing the voice of a child. Kind of like what happened recently here in Georgia when that high school girl took a picture of her crowded school without masks and they suspended her for like a day. And then we're like, never mind. I guess we shouldn't try and squash health whistleblowers in high school, right? How's that valentine sound? Yeah. So they let her back in school, too. They did. It was rough. Just the very idea that they suspended her for that is really disappointing. What's even more disappointing, though, is that the two researchers I mentioned earlier, they basically said there's some really great famous cases about this streisand effect happening. But way more often than not, the sensors who are working to sensor things they do, they sensor and the stress and effect doesn't happen. It's much more the exception than the rule. And that even when there is a strike on effect to it, there's kind of a playbook, what they call outrage management, that's used to kind of keep the public outcry against whatever was discovered or the censorship that was discovered in order manageable, I guess, which hence the name. Yeah, it's pretty scuzzy to see what they do, but it's sort of right out of the playbook that you would expect. It sounds very familiar, doesn't it? Yeah, very burnesian. And plus, it's just the kind of thing you see all the time. They try and do a cover up or they devalue the target, or they basically lie about it and reinterpret it. Another one is to use official channels to give an appearance of justice, right? And then intimidate people. So they gave in this article, Jansen and Martin gave an example of the Nazis and their euthanasia, making air quotes everybody program of people with disabilities, and that they used all five methods of that. They hid the program from the public. That's number one. They stigmatized people with disabilities as a burden for society. That's devaluing the target. They lied about the event, so that's reinterpreting it. Anybody who had a question like a parent of the victim, that kind of thing, they would just out and out say, oh no, they died of this other disease, or from natural causes or something. They also intimidated parents who would not back down into saying, hey, do you want to lose the rest of your kids? No. Well, then be quiet. And then they also allowed for formal complaints to be levied, but of course they never went anywhere. So it gave the appearance of using official channels for justice. So leave it to the Nazis to check off all five of those scuzzy boxes. Stupid Nazis. Yeah, I think one of my favorite cases was when Al Franken, previous to being a senator, wrote that book, lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them a Fair and Balanced Look at the right. And Fox News took him to court and says, Wait a minute. That's our term, fair and balanced. That's intellectual property. And the judge said, no, those are just two words that are pretty commonly used. You don't own them. And Al Franken, I imagine as soon as he heard that Fox News was suing him, was like, hit the roof. And was like, sweet. Because all I did was bring just tons and tons of press to his new book that was being launched. Yeah, and I guess it shot right onto the bestseller list right after that, too. So maybe Fox News will come and sue us because of our book. Maybe we should change the title. The stuff you should Know An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting, fair and balanced things. Yeah. Can you believe this title? And then maybe we can get taken to court and get a lot of publicity out of it. That'd be wonderful. Or, Chuck, if everybody just went and bought our book, which you can preorder now anywhere books are available that would have the same effect without us having to go through the problem of being sued. That'd be great, too. Or having to go back and re title the thing. You got anything else? I don't have anything else. Beautiful segue, by the way. Nice plug. And since we don't have anything else and we're down to plugs short, stuff is out. 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/2017-08-08-sysk-motivational-speakers-final.mp3 | Do motivational speakers motivate people? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/do-motivational-speakers-motivate-people | There are all kinds of motivational speakers, from people who have overcome incredible hardships to those who hold pep-rally style events in stadiums. But do these speakers actually help anyone? Science can't prove it out, but people who take part swear b | There are all kinds of motivational speakers, from people who have overcome incredible hardships to those who hold pep-rally style events in stadiums. But do these speakers actually help anyone? Science can't prove it out, but people who take part swear b | Tue, 08 Aug 2017 13:16:58 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=13, tm_min=16, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=220, tm_isdst=0) | 48074176 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. So this is Stuff You Should Know, and we're here to say that you you can do it. You can do it. You can accomplish those goals. You can get that tour bet. Shoot for the stars. Engage your passion. Ignite your fury. Ignite your fury. Sure. That's my new one. I'm trying to get everybody I want to go to your motivational seminar. Ignite Your Fury. It's called Igniting Fury with Josh Clark. That's pretty good. I know what Aaron Cooper is doing this week. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good, man. I'm feeling kind of pumped. Took some vitamin B twelve today. I'm ready to go. Yeah. As you notice, I cut all that dumb hair off. Yeah, it looks good. I like it both ways. Yeah. Chuck 2.0 got too hot. Is the real expensive. Yeah, that'll do it. And literally just drove to the place and said, all right, take it off. Mine, as you know, as well, has gotten kind of longish, and I've got, like, that 6th grade skater cut tip where I'm just kind of flipping it. Yeah. Just twisting my head suddenly to the side to get the hair out of my face. Yeah. I think that was another reason I cut mine, too. There was too much focus on it, personal focus, because it was, like, from you, you mean? Yeah, just like management and having to do things to it and get it right. And I was just like, it's been so many years since I've had to focus on my hair. You have to go buy a whole new bottle of Mane and tail. It felt dumb, I think. Yeah. I was like, I'm going back to Chuck. One point. Good for you, man. Welcome back to Fight Club. Thank you. Let me see your fingernail. All right. Does look acceptable. What do you think about this topic? I thought that the end would never come. What, like, researching it? Yeah. I guess we know how we both feel about this, then. It's not even dude, I have to say, I got switched mid research. The tone of my research changed because of ANSI Besser. Here's the thing. This is my personal opinion. I'll give it at the front, and you can decide whether to listen to the rest of the episode or not. Okay. The motivational speaking is so flimsy and jelly. Like, the whole feeling, it's so unscientifically based, so prone to hucksterism in a lot of cases that I just I didn't even want to research it. I was just like, I hate this stuff so much, and then part ways, but I was doing my due diligence. I'm a professional, as you know. Yeah, but partway through, I was reading in the House of Four article about Nancy Besser, and so I went onto her site and did some more research on her, and I read her, I think, about me or her mission or something like that, I was like, Actually, I don't disagree with anything this lady just said. That's great. Good for her. Good for where she came from, good for what she's trying to do if she wants to make some money doing it, awesome. Yeah. So saying that it definitely changed course. It pulled me back from the brink, which I think was really needed because I was really kind of like I was crop circle in it, you know what I mean? Yes. And she brought me back, and I appreciate that to her, and I'd like to find out how I can mail her some money. All right. You want to know my opinion? Let's go like this. We're going to front load the opinions and then talk about them more. All throughout my deal is this if you have a really great story to tell about your life. Because maybe you overcome some great adversities. Maybe you're a quadriplegic or maybe you are a POW or had a lifethreatening illness. Or if you had any general major life hardships that you overcame and are. Like. Killing it in life. And you have a great story to tell that is sincere and you can go up there and make some dough inspiring people. Then awesome. Yes. If you are just really good at holding a pep rally and you don't have any big story in your life other than the fact that you were like, hey, I'm kind of good at this, and I think I can make some dough, and I've met these celebrities and I met these famous people, and they think I'm cool. I have two feelings about that. One is if people are genuinely being helped, I'm not going to jump their young, then that's great. I think that's good for you to say. But I look at that other scene with a very wary eye because it wreaks everything from taking advantage of people to sometimes it even sounded like Scientology. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of religious overtones to the whole thing, and it would be like, well, buy this book and then buy this one, and then come to the seminar and then buy this thing. And it had all the markings of, like, a pyramid scheme almost. So I was like you. I'm kind of all over the place with it. And I think that's kind of the deal with motivational speaking is it takes many forms from an inspirational person who has a great life story to someone who is just like, hey, I can hold a pep rally as good as the next guy. Right. I'll charge somebody three grand to listen to that, to, hey, here's a financial seminar where you can get rich. Right. Just give us a bunch of money first. Yeah. So it's really all over the map because not that it should be regulated, but it's just such a kind of like the Wild West as far as what you can be as a motivational speaker. Yeah. And I think also one of the reasons why it's tough for us to nail down our feelings about it one way or the other, or why we have multiple feelings. Because inherently there's nothing in and of itself wrong with making an effort to motivate other people to be a better version of themselves. Right. Yes. But that can be that neutral thing or maybe even positive thing can be exploited depending on the context that's used it. Right, yeah. There's a really good example of that. There's a book called Who Moved My Cheese? And it's like 90 pages, big print, lots of illustrations, so it's a quick read. I love the title, but the whole thing is there's a maze and there used to be cheese in this one place, and these two humans, Ham and Haw, are just all up in arms. That their cheese is there anymore. What a tragedy. Who could have possibly done this? And then these two mice I can't remember what the mice the mice is I can't remember what the mice. Yeah, that's right. The mice's names are. But they see that their cheese is gone, they run off to find cheese elsewhere. Right. So the mice are the heroes of the story where the humans are dumb and it's because the humans are allowing themselves to become victims. There's, like, some certain themes in there that's true. Like, yes, it's not necessarily a good idea to focus on why this issue came about. Just solve the problem and move on. But who moved my cheese? Is very commonly a book that's purchased by employers when they're going through a downsizing and they're saying to their employers or their employees, like, hey, you need to give us a smile. Don't start asking why your job was downsized. Just read this book and try to be happy. So this thing that could be good is being exploited in a very negative manner to exonerate people who are making decisions that are negatively impacting people's lives. There it is in a nutshell. There's the good and the bad. Yeah. I will say this, I like fictional motivational speakers much more, whether it was Matt Foley, which is mentioned in this article, of course. Great Chris Farley character. He gets three paragraphs. Yeah, that was overdoing it a bit. But definitely one of the more classic SNL characters. My other favorite is from Magnolia. Frank T. J. Mackey. The Tom Cruise. Oh, yeah. That was one of Tom Cruise's best characters. Yeah. And I think so ironic that he played that character in many ways. I almost get the impression that it was like, who directed that? Was it Paul Thomas Anderson that, in a way, casting Cruz was toying with them a little bit? Or Paul Thomas. Anderson wanted him to face himself. Maybe. Or maybe he gave him the script and like, literally every day on set, after he finished Cruise would look around, say, you making fun of me here. You're not making fun of me, are you? No, Tom, it's terrific. You're the best, Tom. All right. You're not making fun of me. Right? Anyway, that character was specifically about picking up women in bars and having sex with them. That was sort of a different type of thing, but it was motivational. It was so we mentioned different kinds of people who do this. There are people like Matt Long, who is a motivational speaker because he had a 20 ton bus hit him while he was on a bicycle, was in the hospital for five months, had about 40 operations, and then finally overcame that to run the New York City Marathon. So people like that, you will often see that have an amazing hardship, like I said, that they have overcome and maybe did like a small speaking engagement and said people really connected to this, and I think I really helped folks. So can I sign up with a company that's going to book gigs for me? Right, and I can make some real dough and you really can. I mean, there are people out there who support themselves just from motivational speaking. I think there's probably far more who aspire to that. But it is entirely possible to become a motivational speaker with representation, and that's how you make your living. Yeah. And you know what? I don't think we've ever talked about this on the show, but stuff you should know, we actually don't do motivational gigs, but we've done some corporate speaking on occasion. We have specifically told the people who are agents are booking it that we are not motivational speakers, correct? Never to book us as such, and that we are not experts. But we're glad to come talk to your company, by the way. Yeah, how about that? I mean, you just let the cat out of the bag. He changed our lives for the better, Chuck. But long story short, because of this, we have talked and spoken with a number of agencies and representatives who act as the liaison between a company or a corporation or a group and the speaker. And so we've kind of got a little bit of an inside view on kind of what this professional public speaking is all about, right? And one of the things that we kind of do our thing and we're not the best for people to sell because we're not like, we can do this and we're vivacious and we have get up on stage and just rally people. We're kind of like we kind of do one thing. So if you want us to do that, we can do it. Yeah. So it's sort of a narrower field, but it's niche. It is very niche. But if you think you have a neck and this one woman in here who's the one that said that she was always sort of the cheerleader in her group. Nancy Besser? Was that Besser? Yes. Yeah. She was like I kind of always was just this person in life. And my friends I would motivate my friends and my family and stuff. So if you have that kind of vivacious personality and you can get up on stage in front of people and you have a good story to tell that's sincere, then it might be something that you should look into. Right. That's another reason why I like Nancy bester, too. She's the only one in this article who admits that. Yeah, anybody can do it. It's a certain type of skill set, but not something you would have to be born with. Like, anybody can figure it out. Well, and I think a lot of professional motivational speakers would probably be like, no, this is not for you. Well, yeah. Matt Long, the elite athlete, says, like, no, not everybody could do it. Oh, he did? Yeah, he said, well, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. So, no, that was his answer to can anybody do it? I would say my sense of humor, especially as stuff you should know goes, is pretty self deprecating. Sure. But I say this totally honestly, that if we can do it, we're proof that anybody can do this. Yeah. We didn't have any experience getting on stage in front of people. We learned it. Again, we're not up there doing motivational speaking. No, but we're up there doing public speaking in front of groups who don't know us. That's the key. Now, the next level, of course, is whether you can arouse positive emotions in the people out there listening to you. And that, I think, takes a decent amount of practice. But there are techniques and there are methods that you can figure out, and all you have to do is a little bit of research. All you would have to research, really, is if you look up, like, how to be a motivational speaker, that is going to leave you a heartache. But if you look up sensible things like how do you motivate people, how do you give a dynamite presentation, all of these things. It's all the same stuff. It's just the thing that makes motivational speaking different is the through line is inspiration. You have an inspirational story. You're telling people that they can have a better life themselves, that it's in there, in them. That's really the big difference between motivational speaking and any other type of public speaking. Yeah. I wonder if that guy who said that wonder if in his thing, he goes, you can come over any adversity except public speaking. Motivational speaking. Don't try that. Right. Anything else you could probably do, though, the competition is picking up. All right, well, let's take a break here. It's a good start. Okay, good. And we will motivate you to come back and listen more. Ready for this? All right, psychology wise, people have been psychologists have been studying motivation for many, many years, and what motivates people. And there's a dude named Abraham, Harold Maslow, and in the 1940s, he came up with something a little pyramid called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is fairly interesting if you look at it. It's a pyramid. We're down at the bottom. I think it's been revised over the years. No, that's the food pyramid you're thinking of. No, this has been revised a little bit. Okay. At the bottom, there are 12345 levels, and at the bottom, you have physiological needs like food and water, shelter, shelter, warmth. Right. Above that, you have safety needs, security and safety in life. Above that, you have belongingness and love, which are friends, and intimate esteem. Goes above that prestige, feeling of accomplishment. And then finally, at the very top of the pyramid, people should stop using pyramids because that's just got a bad name. Now, achieving one's full potential self actualization. Right. And so the idea is that you've divided these needs up into groups, where once you have fulfilled these basic needs, you will become stronger, and you will basically satisfy those lower called lower level deficit needs, and then you can progress onto these higher needs until you reach that final level self actualization. Right. You can take issue and people have with Maslow's Hierarchy, for sure. A literal reading of it would say that homeless people are incapable of having friendships or caring about one another because they're lacking in a lower need, which is shelter and housing. But overall, it does seem to be pretty widely regarded. Well regarded, yeah. Most like it doesn't take into account social factors. Let's put it this way. It sounds like something developed in the 1940s. Right. And it's pretty elementary. It's not very complex, but it has formed the basis of a lot of psychology, for sure. It is pretty much the standard for motivational theory, from what I understand. Yeah. And it definitely forms a lot of the basis for motivational speaking and the motivational speaking industry and the crux of what motivational speakers base their motivation on. Right. So like you said, you have this Maslow's Theory, but regarded whether or not it's been around for a long time and is the basis for how to motivate people. And people speakers use this in their own way. They have their own take on how they want to use it or whether they use it. And in Besser's case, she actually went to school. She went to graduate school and studied conflict resolution and emotional intelligence, which I think gives her a leg up as far as being schooled, at least, and things she talks about how empathy is very important, and she's at least studied on it. Right. Which is more than you can say for a lot of you interviewed Tony Robbins at one point for us, for our blog. I did. You remember that? I did. Yeah. Seven years ago. I was part of I don't know, there were, like, four or five other people on the phone. It was a conference interview. Let's be honest. We were made to do this. Yes, very much so. It was in the evening. There was something else going on. I think a birthday party I had to step away from. But it was right before his TV show Breakthrough with Tony Robbins came out. Do you remember that show? I do. Very short lived. Yeah, it was extremely short lived. But they were selling Super Bowl price commercials for that thing. Yeah, that's how much the ad spots were going for on this. It was a huge event, and it flopped very quickly, which I think surprised everybody, because Tony Robbins, he's huge, man. He's enormous. Yeah. One of the stats, the 4 million people he reaches from 100 countries has a net worth of about $480,000,000 through his books and speeches and services. Yes, and he's been at it for a very long time. A lot of people think that he started the motivational speaking industry. He definitely did not. I read a pretty interesting article that suggested that Ralph Waldo Emerson was America's first motivational speaker. Really? Could make sense. I've seen it go back even further than that. There's a lady named Mary Baker eddie who ended up founding the Christian Science, I guess. Church. Yeah, I've heard of her. She got together with a guy named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If that's not a mid 19th century name, I don't know what is. Right? Yeah. Or a new hipster Brooklyn kids name. Yes, it is now. And they came together and created what's known as the New Thought Movement, which is basically said that if you think positively, good things will happen. Which now this is such a widespread thought, and that forms as much the basis of motivational speaking as maslow's hierarchy. The idea that if you think positively, you're going to have an actual effect on fate, on destiny, on the universe, on your own future. Right. But that makes zero sense whatsoever, logically. And it finds its roots back in these two people coming together. So that actually probably was the basis of the motivational speaking industry, and it continued on here. There there were some luminaries that pop up between the New Thought Movement and Tony Robbins. You've got, like, Dale Carnegie, who wrote how to Make Friends and Influence People, one of the greatestselling self help books of all time, and really introduced the concept of self help to the masses. Dale Carnegie did. He's an interesting dude. And then you've got guys like Napoleon Hill who wrote think and grow rich. I believe that sounds like something on The Simpsons, like a fake self help book. It really was. And there's actually, Chuck, a really good article on Gizmodo called The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill the Greatest Self Help Scammer of All Time. And you know how you like those long form articles. This one's, as long as it gets right. It's basically like a mini book. So the mid 20th century, you got people popping up, and then 1988, a young man named Anthony Robbins created an infomercial for his personal power program. You remember that infomercial? I do. And I looked into a little bit, because I realized I was like, I don't even know his deal. I know he wasn't a POW. I wonder what his story was. You're like, okay, check that box off. And from what I could find and I didn't do a deep dive, but from what I could find, he worked for a motivational speaker. And I think it was just like, hey, I can do this. Is that the deal? Yes. Okay. From what I understand and he was absolutely right. He did it. He's a cottage industry under himself. Ronnie Robinson. Oh, for sure. That personal power infomercial, by the way, in the first three years that it was out, 100 million people saw it in America alone. Yeah. So he became like a juggernaut. I became a pop culture thing. Remember, he was in shallow hal. Oh, yeah. He's actually the MacGuffin for the whole movie. Meeting Tony Robbins in an elevator is what sets the whole plot of the movie off. Is that what a MacGuffin is? I don't remember seeing that movie, to be honest. I know the movie, but I don't think I saw it. But, no, as far as film industry parlance goes, a MacGuffin is the thing that helps the plot along. Right? Yeah. A macuffin is something and then movie a device or something that triggers the plot. So I think in that case, you're correct. Okay. I'm using it correctly, by goodness. Yes. Tony Robinson by the time he came out with his show breakthrough in 2010, everybody just assumed it would be huge, and it was not. For some reason. I still don't understand why. But if you watch that first episode, it's basically him going around and motivating people who have enormous challenges up against them. And the first episode, still to this day, I just kind of like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe they did this. He went and met up with a guy who was quadriplegic, I believe, and he had become quadriplegic after jumping headfirst into a swimming pool, I think, at his wedding reception, and became paralyzed and obviously quite depressed as a result and had lost his job, and his life had really just taken a huge turn downward. And Tony Robbins showed up to help the guy, and he wanted to help them by inspiring him. And the way that he inspired him was to take him up in an airplane and push him out. That's right. Do you remember he pushed a man, a quadriplegic man, out of an airplane with a parachute on and said, like, skydive, or something like that. It was one of the craziest things anyone's ever done. On TV, and I'm including up to present day. Right? Yeah. So breakthrough of Tony Robbins flop. But that was probably just, like, a blip on that dude's radar. It did nothing to his personal brand as far as dragging it down. No, and I don't want to sound like I'm bashing the guy, because he helps a lot of people that buy into it, and apparently it's very philanthropic in many ways, so that's good. Right? Sure. Of course. But he also is a firewalker. This is something I did not know in his Unleashed the Power Within program that he does live. He gets thousands of people to walk across hot coals. He's got an Oprah Winfrey to walk across hot coals and fire walking. It's a real thing. If you look at it scientifically, what's going on is coals are not a very good conductor of heat. Right. So it takes about a second to actually feel that heat. And if you walk at a good clip, it's about a half a second. So what you're doing is not really and I don't think he's saying there's some danger you're overcoming. I think in his case, you're overcoming a fear and taking part in a group activity, and that's where the benefit is, like, staring at those coals and doing it. I don't think he's saying, like, look, it's magic because of me. You're not getting burned. I don't know. I think the premise of his firewalking thing at these conferences is to show people that they can overcome even physical problems like hot coals on their feet by using their mind. I thought it was more like the fear. Okay. No, I think in reality, that's what's going on, but I believe, from what I understand, that it's being presented that you can say something like yes or Cool Moth, and you're using your mind to overcome the dilemma of the hot posed by the hot coals on your feet. Okay, fair enough. It all kind of went wrong in Dallas, though, in 2016. There was an event there where 30 to 40 people were evaluated. I think five people were taken to the hospital with burn injuries, and his spokesperson, Jennifer Connolly, said, you know what? Only five people out of 7000 requested examination beyond what we had on site to examine people, and everyone had a great time, basically. I have to say, statistically speaking, she makes an excellent point. Well, sure. And there's actually somebody in this article what's her name? Wiseman. Irene Wiseman. Yeah. Who really kind of put it well, she seems to be somebody who goes to these things. She definitely goes to Robbins conferences, but she also seems to understand what's going on at them, rather than maybe buying into a lock, stock, and barrel. Right. And from what I've seen, someone like her, someone who approaches a motivational speaking conference with her own set of judgments and values about it and is able to take that message and adjust it so that it works for her, rather than trying to take everything from the person wholesale and putting it on to you so that you're basically magically changed. Those people have the greatest chance of succeeding at whatever they're being motivated to do. Yeah, but basically, she puts the firewalk like this. She was saying, like, the real magic is that there were 10,500 people waiting their turn to walk over these colds. Sure. And everyone was exuberant and calm and happy. Nobody was irritated or hurry up or anything like that. It was a neat communal feeling, waiting in line to go do the firewalk. And she did the firewalk. She said it was cool or whatever, but it was more about the camaraderie in the community that developed in line waiting for the firewalk. For her, it's a pep rally. It definitely is. And I think if you ask Tony Robbins, maybe he'll come onto the show and talk to us about it sometime. Okay. If you ask Tony Robins, I would guess that he would concede that. Yes. You could interpret his conferences as a Pepper Alley. Oh, I bet he concedes nothing. I don't know. You know, I want to say something, Chuck. Okay. I hold the skeptic community to account for not giving more ink to the motivational speaking industry. Yes. I didn't see a lot, and I specifically looked from skeptic sites. Yeah, me, too. And it's almost not there. So that has two things. One, that skeptics either think that it is fine right. That's one. Or they think it's so ridiculous that it's not even worth writing about, which I don't think that's the case, because skeptics write about some pretty ridiculous stuff. Well, I looked at this one article. I don't know if you saw it from the guy who walked out of a conference attorney Robbins conference. Did you see that one? No, I didn't. This guy was, by all accounts, from what he said, someone who should be into it. He's like, I wasn't there to bust him. I'm not a skeptic. He's like, I have read some of his books. I'm a fan. I'm into it. And he walked out, and he just had a very, like, just a very leveled, critical eye on the presentation. Not like this guy is this and this. He was just like, you know what? He repeated himself too much, and he name dropped too much, and he kind of had some bad segues and non sequiturs, and he just looked at it sort of from a critical eye of a public speaker and was kind of like he's kind of phoning it in these days. It was Tony Robbins himself that he walked out on. Yeah. And he was just like, I left. I just found that I wasn't really getting anything out of it. And he didn't go there to poopoo the guy. Like I said, he was a fan, so he just kind of, like, ditched the. Capris and start doing a better presentation. Was his take gotcha the capris? Tony Robbins wears capri pants. He sure does. Does he really like the ones with the drawstrings at the bottom and the cargo pockets? Yeah. No. Does he really? I've not seen that. All right, well, let's take a break and let Josh ponder that, and we'll come back and finish up this stuff right after this. All right. So Tony Robbins isn't the only person out there that's made a ton of money doing this. They want to pick on him? No, we should save a ton of money. His six day conference. I think it's called Date with Destiny this year. Last year. Okay, so the Irene Wiseman said there were 10,500 people there. The tickets were about $4,000 a piece. That's $42 million they grossed for a six day conference. He should call that conference. Credit cards on fire. Yeah. I read an article, I think, in Forbes about the Chinese motivational speaking industry, and there's this one person who's, like, who's going to sign up for my other classes, and some people came to the front, and a ring of people with wireless credit card machines formed around them. Oh, my God. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. One of us, man, that's creepy. So Tony Robbins isn't the only person out there who's done this over the years. Many people, I think didn't it say there was something, like, close to 500 registered motivational speakers in the US. Alone? I think, like, six something was it? Yeah. But very famously, a man named Jack Canfield wrote a book called Chicken Soup for the Soul, and this is an amazing record. He holds the Guinness Record for having seven books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. Yeah. That's unbelievable. Did you know they wrote one for Chicken Soup for the Prisoner's Soul? They wrote one for people in prison. I did not know that. And also, did you know Ashton coocher is trying to bring chicken soup for the soul to Netflix the Cooch? As what, a documentary? I have no idea. That's all I saw. Or is he starring his chicken soup? He's starring his noodle. I poke a lot of fun at the couch, but he seems like a pretty sincere guy. Sure. No, I don't know. I've learned to just try to shy away from, like, saying something about people on air, people I don't know. I don't know him. He's a celebrity. That's all I know about him. And even if I did know more about him, that's not the whole picture. So I have no idea what he's like as a person. Okay. Just based on knowing people. It's probably likeliest that. He is a good person. Okay. Wayne Dyer, another famous author no longer with us, wrote a book called Your Erroneous Zones. And a lot of these people, seems like, started out as book writers. That used to be the best way to get started. Now, I think the best way to get started is to just start speaking and then write your books based on your successes there. You want to do that almost simultaneously, too, because one of the things you do if you're a motivational speaker is mentioned. By the way, I've got even more insights that are going to help you out, and my books are available for sale right outside. Yeah, that's when it reeks of Scientology to me. It's like you can unlock more discoveries by buying more things, but, yeah, all of them do that. Like, you're a fool. If you're a motivational speaker who doesn't have a book for sale at your conference, you're doing it wrong. Right. As far as the industry would be concerned, I think that in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean that you are a huxter. But there are plenty of them in the industry that are hucksters because all they're doing is selling their book or their class or their something. Their motivational speech is actually just a sales pitch. Right. That's the huxers, and there are plenty of them in the industry. Yes. We talk about get motivated. Yes, we should. This is a seminar series that was started in 2002 by a guy named Peter Lowe. And in the article I read, he is described as the son of a missionary who, along with his ex wife Tamara, who is a self help book author who writes Christian Rap, started something that a series called GetMotivated that is filling up stadiums that at one point no longer, but at one point was in business with TD Ameritrade. Yeah. I think they started with a legitimate motivational speaker conference and then over time said, hey, you know what? We could get somebody in here to underwrite a lot of this, and they can basically put ads in amongst the motivational speakers. Yeah. So they partnered up with TD Ameritrade with this product they had called Invest Tools, and they're no longer in business together. But get motivated. Still out there. I'm not sure if they're partnering with anyone or not. No. They have a new owner called Wealth Rock that has their own investing classes that they now sell exclusively, I think are the only things that are sold at the Get Motivated conferences. Okay, so here's the long and short of it. What they do is they charge very little money. It's not like you have to pay thousands of dollars, like a Tony Robbins live event, but you pay, like, $5 or something and say, hey, I can go hear Colin Powell speak or Terry Bradshaw or who else do they have? Laura Bush or Giuliani? And who wouldn't go hear speeches by them for $5 besides me? And then you go and you, I guess Colin Powell. You would? Sure. For $5, I'd go see Colin Powell for $5 if he spoke in my living room. How's that? Let's make it happen, america. That's a riff. On an old joke my dad used to say, which was when he wanted to denigrate a performer, he would say, I wouldn't go see them if they were playing in my backyard. I've heard that before, too. That's such a 70s dad thing. Oh, totally. So anyway, you would go and you would listen to these motivational speeches and then what's going on is they're selling a financial product basically. Right. And again, it's like you've got actual like Colin Powell is not like and by the way, if I mentioned how great TD Ameritrade's investment tools are, they've helped me out a lot. He just made a boatload of money to go speak. Exactly. And he's giving like a real motivational speech. Right. And then after Colin Powell, you have some guy come up and say, hey, who wants a Corvette? And they flash a picture of the Corvette and everybody raises their hand. He's like, you can have a Corvette too, with invest tools or whatever. Right. So the criticism of this is that these people are super pumped and ready to just do anything because they're feeling really good thanks to Colin Powell's speech. And then now they're getting this sales pitch that's being wedged in between these motivational speakers. So of course they're signing up for this and maybe without really fully understanding what's going on. On the other side, the TD Ameritrade people say, how are you going to do a hard sell to 20,000 people in the stadium? You can't. That's ridiculous to say that these people had a hard sales pitch leveled against them. The point is that people who went thinking they were going to a motivational speaking event, a conference, and it turns out the whole thing was just a TD Ameritrade ad to get them to give them their money for these investment tools that may or may not help them actually make money from that point on. Well, yeah. In 2009, investors agreed to pay $3 million to settle allegations from the SEC that it let instructors mislead students and it's thinking they could make extraordinary profits and to claim they were expert option traders when their income was really coming from selling the courses. Yes. Apparently one of the instructors said, like, the returns were guaranteed. Yeah, you cannot do that. And apparently you're also not supposed to say what percentage return you can offer. And they apparently said 17%, which is just ridiculous. And these are options that we're talking about. These are not like stock trades where you can do a little research and figure out stock trades and you're not necessarily swimming with sharks. These were options. Options are extremely complex and difficult and they cost more to trade than a stock trade does. And you're much more apt to lose money because you don't understand what you're doing. There's a lot more factors involved in whether you make money off of investing in options or not. So this is like they're going to people who are paying to see Colin Powell and Laura Bush speak because they admire them, and then they're getting sold these supposedly classes on investing in very sophisticated financial tools. You shouldn't do that. You know who their lineup is now? Who? I went to Get Motivated website and, like, did you say that they had their own product now? Yeah. Wealth Rock is the owner, I believe, spelled R-A-W-K. Their current line up right now for this next door is Kevin O'Leary, mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. Okay. One of the Duck Dynasty dudes. All right. You know his name? Larry King. Really? Yeah. Okay. A woman named Manjit Minhas, who I believe I looked into her briefly. She's started breweries and wineries in Canada and made a lot of money and then finally rounding it out. Edward Snowden. Sounds a good one, man. That's quite, I'm sure. Edward Snowden. I want to be in the green room with Edward Snowden and the Duck Dynasty guy. Well, you're joking about Edward Snowden. Oh, no, dude, that's for real. No. Yes. No, it's not. Yes, it is. What? And under his thing, it says what does it say? It says entrepreneur below one and said Duck Dynasty star below him it says whistleblower. No. Edward Snowden is doing this conference? Yes. Well, I'm going I got to hear this. Yeah. Wow. Strange times. It is strange times. I got to say. I like what Wealth Rock is doing these days. In 2005, there was an investigative journalist named Steve Selerna who wrote a book called Sham, which stands for Self Help and Actualization movement called Shaman how the Selfhelp Movement Made America Helpless. And he kind of peeled back he didn't hold any punches. Right. And he kind of peeled back the thin layer on this industry and basically said, there's no science behind this techniques. There's no evidence that this stuff is effective at all. It could be just coincidence or people maybe are not helped by this industry at all. Right. And he was saying, like, just the law of averages. It says that if enough people try it, some of them are going to be helped, and they may even be helped just by other things or by things other than whatever the motivational speaker was telling them to do. But it will be attributed to the motivational speaker. And if you get some people who are willing to give testimonials, then that just helps feed the beast, basically. Right. And if you're not helped, then the common line is you're not buying in like you'd need to. Yeah, this is where it gets insidious to me. Yeah. It's a built in self defense, I guess, deflection mechanism for the motivational speaking industry, which is, yeah, you're not enough of a believer. You don't have enough passion. You're not trying hard enough. You're the problem. You're failing. You're the loser. You're committed to losing. That's another one, too, and that's despicable to me. If you are deflecting blame from yourself and your own shoddy product, that's not actually helping people onto somebody who is really looking for help because they don't think that they have the real strength in themselves to overcome the adversity they face. I'm holding it back, man. Yes, but you said that. Great article. Three reasons why most motivational speakers are dead wrong. And that was one of the things that this author did you have his name? He is Hoffman. His name is Bobby Hoffman. Bob B-H-D. Yeah, that was one of the things he brought up, is that it's undebunkable, basically, because they can always just put it back on the person. Right. You just shouldn't do that. Yeah. It's not good at all. So I guess in a nutshell, apparently in a nutshell was a Dale Carnegie thing, but in a nutshell, the motivational speaking industry can be good and can be bad, depending. Yeah. And I know we spend a lot of time in retrospect now, slamming it all, but like I said, good for you. If you do have a legitimate, sincere hardship overcoming a hardship life story to tell and that helps people out and you can make a buck doing it, then I think that's awesome. Yeah. And again, if you're somebody who's looking to be motivated by a motivational speaker, if what somebody is saying makes a lot of sense to you, it feels right. You feel good. Listening to them, reading their books, hearing what they have to say, more power to you. I don't knock that at all. No. Just tread lightly and go into it with an intelligent eye. There you go. I don't want to see anyone get duped, you know? No. Okay. That was our public service for the week. Goodness. If you want to learn more about motivational speaking, type those words in the search bar howstep works.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Ghost fishing. Follow up from Anthony in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hey, guys, just finished Ghost fishing and glad you covered this really important topic. I'm an environmental scientist who studies fish and water in North Carolina and have worked in this field all over the country. While the commercial fishing industry is extremely detrimental to marine life, recreational fishing causes a lot of fish to die and fresh water because of littering from it. And this is something I never really thought about as a seldom fishermen, many fishermen and women throw little excess bits of line while tying knots on the ground or in the water while they're fishing. This monofilament goes into the waterways, and if you look into the gut of many fish, turtles, birds, and other life associated with water, you almost always find this fishing line in hooks stuck in the various biota or the biota being stuck in the gear. I would highly recommend fishermen and women, let's just say fisher. People. Yes, fisher. Kings, Fisher Kings, to make sure they put this extra line in their pocket to dispose of later, or use an environmentally friendly nylon line if they can find it. This monofilament line just does not break down over time like the nylon does. Just wanted to share this with you all. Many people are unaware of the harm they can do without meaning to these little bits of line, and I hope it can help people be more aware while they're fishing. Good advice. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. From Charlotte. I never really thought about that my own self. And that's wrong. Yeah. Good going, Anthony. Much appreciated. If you want to get in touch with us, like Anthony did, and give us a heads up on something we love, those you can tweet to us at siskpodcast or Joshamclark. You can join us on Facebook at facebook. Comstuffyshow. Orcharleswchuckbright you can send us an email with stuffpodcasts howiststofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoucheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
How the March on Washington Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-march-on-washington-worked | 1963 was a huge year of conflict and progress for the American Civil Rights Movement and the March On Washington was the high water mark of that eventful year. Join Josh and Chuck as they get into the story behind the story we learned in school. | 1963 was a huge year of conflict and progress for the American Civil Rights Movement and the March On Washington was the high water mark of that eventful year. Join Josh and Chuck as they get into the story behind the story we learned in school. | Tue, 20 Jan 2015 15:16:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=15, tm_min=16, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=20, tm_isdst=0) | 41406542 | 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's over there. So it's stuff you should know. Hey. Hey. How's it going? It's going good. It's not going so good for me. I'm having trouble loading up important pages here, important tabs on my computer. Oh, yeah. I don't know what the deal is. Isn't that Riveting podcasting? It sure is. It's like cereal the second season. Yeah. Well, Josh's tabs open. What's the deal with Josh's computer? The tab loaded, everybody. By the way, thank you for your concern. So you feel good about this one? Yeah, I do. It was, again, one of those topics that I knew somewhat about, probably as the average person, but digging into it, you really forget how polished and glossy history can become and how not necessarily, like, grittier or anything, but just definitely more complex and complicated and intricate than the final story ends up being. Yeah. Details, they matter. No person exists in a vacuum, basically. Yeah. And coincidentally, or maybe Kismetly we asked Jerry, we were like, hey, can we have this released right around the King holiday? And she said, Dude, it happens to be scheduled. Yeah. Before she even knew what it was going to be like, this episode fell into that slot. It's the spirit of Dr. King. How about that? Sort of like our marijuana episode being the 420th release, which was a complete accident. Completely happenstance. So this is like that, but cooler, right? Yeah, because it's historical and it's important. Yes, this is important. History, you know what I'm saying? Not like the invention of Silly Putty. Well, I've been really been getting into here in my middle age, the civil rights movement in history and learning about that stuff, I think maybe to make up for my ancestry in the Deep South. Man, you know what's weird is, like, I hear that more than ever, just the events of 2014, really. It's not like my eyes were shut or anything or I was just unaware, but I've become more and more disenchanted and dispirited by the heritage that I have as well. It's just that kind of studied obliviousness that the powers that we have about the plights of the people who aren't in power has really started to get to me more and more. Yeah. And I've had talks about this with a bunch of people, and the consensus I've come to is I can't be ashamed of anything here in 2015. I mean, you didn't do anything. Personally. I didn't do anything. And I don't know anything specific about my family other than they were white people living in rural Mississippi since the dawn of time. Mississippi. I don't think they were the ones knocking on doors trying to encourage black people to vote right now. I don't think they were the standouts. What can you do but just try and be a good person? To educate yourself and learn from it. Yeah. And make the Bryant name move forward in a different direction. I think that's great. Yeah. Good job, Chuck. So, anyway, I've been getting into it. I've been reading a lot of stuff about it and saw that play in New York I think I mentioned with Brian Cranston. Oh, the LBJ play. Yeah. Which really kind of got me reading a bunch of because a lot of stuff I didn't learn in school at all. They don't teach you that much in school? Not as much as you think. No. It's a torrent of information. It's a trickle at best. Yes. Or like you said, it's like a very kind of one day glossy affair. Right. Which we're about to do right now. Right. Well, we're going to flush it out a little more. Yeah. And I have to say, this article, for being a three page article on how stuff works, it's pretty good. I don't recognize the author, but there's a lot of beef in here. Yeah. Some good detail. So we're talking today about the March on Washington, which took place on August 28, I believe, 1963. Yeah. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is the official full name. Yeah. Which a lot of people don't realize that and that's kind of a big deal, that it has jobs and freedom, because that title actually represents the marriage of two separate black civil rights movements yeah. Agendas married together under this common banner, which was, at the time, kind of a big deal because there was a lot of rivalry among the different civil rights groups and their agendas, and to be able to come together, that was kind of huge. Yeah. And when I first heard about rivalries among those groups, I get a little disenchanted. But then when you start thinking about the task in front of them, if you assemble a group of suppressed people, everyone's going to have their own idea about the best way to move forward and to get something done. Right. And so, of course, there are going to be rivalries between these groups because they all felt their path forward was the righteous one. Yes. And not even necessarily righteous, but right. Effective. On the one hand, you have, say, A. Philip Randolph yeah. Man who was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Yeah. I looked into this. Well, tell me about it. Well, I didn't even know what a Pullman porter was because I'm a modern kind of guy. But these were the people, essentially butlers and maids who worked on sleeping trains. Right. Sleeping cars. And George Pullman in Chicago, the Pullman company, invented the sleeping train in the 1880s. And a Philip Randolph. He was born in 1889. He was 74 years old when the March on Washington took place. Yeah. He was not a young guy, but he'd been at it for decades already, for decades, as a civil rights crusader. And so basically what the deal was was George Pullman hired black Americans to work as maids and butlers on these trains. And it really sort of entrenched that master servant relationship even further. And even though the black community said, these are really pretty good jobs, actually, because even though the pay wasn't that great, it was a steady job. You got to travel. So it was sort of looked upon as an elite job until they started to sort of look at the details. We were like, wait a minute. We don't have job security or salary kind of stinks. We have to pay for our own uniforms and food and lodging. And so they got in touch with a philip Randolph in 1925. He organized the union. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Right. And eventually, even though they refused to negotiate with them, they were able to get that union. In 1937, the polling company signed a labor agreement with them, got them a lot more rights as workers. But that's just one of the many things that he did. He was big into unions and organizing things. Right. And especially seeing to it that the black population got the same kind of fair treatment as the white population. And you said that he became president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. Yeah. So think about fighting. First of all, you're a unionizer which back in that day, you could be gunned down by the state militia. Yeah, he's a socialist. It definitely was. Definitely this is all basically left movement, all of this. The March on Washington was and if you consider at the time, this is the Jim Crow era. So he's fighting for workers rights, and then even more difficulty, he's fighting for black workers rights. Yeah. So this guy was a tough cookie and a smart one, too. Yeah. Martin Luther King called him the Dean of Negro Leaders, and he was 40 years older than King. So he was really revered in the black community, for sure, but rightly. So, I mean, like, he'd earned his chops. Right. And the March on Washington that came about in 1963 was actually the second one that Randolph proposed. He was the one that said we should have this March on Washington. We'll get to that. But in 1941, he also started to organize the same march, and it was for crusading for jobs, for black workers to end discrimination among federal hiring, government and defense hiring and federal agencies. Yeah. Basically, FDR's New Deal was not, I mean, so favorable for black Americans. Like, it did a lot for the country, but they were still sort of ignored. Sure. And pretty much barred from getting federal jobs and defense jobs. So FDR saw the writing on the wall, basically, with the you don't want to call the threat of a march because it just sounds like militaristic. It was the threat of a march. And so he signed, issued executive order. The Fair Employment Practices Committee was created, and 2 million black Americans were employed by the defense industry by 1944, which is great. But 1946, the FePc was disbanded and dissolved. So the temporary win a temporary win, but a win nonetheless. And they did not have that march because of that executive order. Right. I mean, imagine the credibility that Randolph got just immediately from that. He got the president to create an executive order based on something he was organizing. So that definitely catapulted his status. But he also learned, like, oh, this is a pretty effective tool. This isn't the big gun you want to bring out every time somebody pulls a piece shooter on you. Right. But when stuff really becomes intractable, march on Washington is not such a bad idea. No, not a bad idea. You don't even necessarily have to do it. Yeah. So he was kind of recruited to head this up by the Negro American Labor Council, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And so he wrote a letter to Secretary Stewart Udall in May of 1062. He was the Department of Interior and basically said, can we get our permits, like the official request? And they got nervous immediately because he said, we want to stop at the Lincoln Memorial and finish it up there. They're like, well, rerouting traffic is going to be tough. Why don't we send you here instead? And they were pretty adamant about sticking to that route. And so they granted him the permits, which was the first sign to Kennedy, because Kennedy wasn't like, Great, let's do this. He was nervous about it, too. Yeah. And it was a big deal. You mentioned what's called the Big Six. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That was Martin Luther King's Atlanta based group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was led at the time by Representative John Lewis, our Representative Lewis, who is still a firebrand in Congress, who was 23 at the time and gave a speech at the March, the Conference on Racial Equality, which is known as Core, the National Urban League and the NAACP. All of these groups got together and we already said that there are rivalries among them. But not only was it a big deal that these groups that were fighting for civil rights, like voting rights and the end of segregation and civil rights, but they got together with a Philip Randolph's movement for economic justice. And rather than become confused or muddled or whatever, like, remember Occupy Wall Street, but they have, like, 10 million different demands, a lot of people were worried that joining these things together would do the same thing. It didn't. It actually broadened it, and it brought a lot of strength to the whole thing. And it all came down to a black feminist named Anna Arnold Hedgeman. She brought King and Randolph together and said, you guys need to make this happen. It will make this march a million times better. Right. I don't think that's a quote, but basically it's what she said. And as a result, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was what the result was. Yeah. And bringing Martin Luther King on was certainly a masterstroke because this article describes the proposition as tepid to begin with. Right. But the stage was set for August 28. And right after this message break, we'll get to a little bit of how mainstream media feared this march. Right after this, mainstream media probably thought this was a great idea and all of Washington probably rallied around this. Right. They couldn't wait. Everybody made those needlepoint samplers that said, welcome, marching black people to our streets. They rolled out the red carpet. That is not true. This is our facetious voice. Yeah. Mainstream media actually was in fear and they ran stories about this devolving into a riot. And Kennedy said, let's call this off. And they said, no. And liquor stores closed and bars closed and stores boarded up their windows. And in the end, none of that happened. Of course. It was very peaceful and amazingly, really well organized. Like, I've read quotes where the organizers themselves said that the peacefulness and dignity of the whole thing exceeded even their expectations. Yes. That's awesome. Yeah. It was a colossally successful thing. And one of the reasons why there was such an amount of nervousness was not necessarily just because there were a quarter of a million people marching in Washington all at once for civil rights, but this thing took place and it's considered the pinnacle, the high watermark of 1963, which was an enormous year. The Birmingham campaign was going on down in Alabama. Children were marching in the streets of Birmingham and police dogs were attacking them and they were being hit with fire hoses. People were being clubbed in the street by volcano and his police force and it was being captured on TV. So, like, the American psyche was really being affected by the civil rights movement right now. And there was a lot of momentum behind the people who were leading the civil rights movement, especially Martin Luther King, who proved his own chops by being jailed in Birmingham for protesting. And he was kept in isolation for, like, eight days, I think. Wow. I wasn't able to talk to anybody, I think, including his lawyer. Finally, his wife, Coretta Scott King, got in touch with JFK and said, you got to do something because I don't know what they're going to do to my husband in jail. Yeah, he's lucky he survived that, to be honest. Right. Well, it took the President to order the city of Birmingham to free him for him to get out. Yes. But it was a big deal. By the time this thing came about, by the time it was even announced, like, 1963 was a huge watershed year already yeah. And I don't think we pointed out, like, ten to 20% they estimate were white folks joining in for the rally. And I don't know about percentages, but I do know that a lot of Jewish people were really involved in the civil rights movement as volunteers, helping to push that forward because they knew a thing or two about persecution. So I think they identified with the plight of the American black people. And so, like, Jewish folks from the Northeast, basically, a lot of them came down south, a lot of students, to volunteer for not only this, but just the voter rights going door to door. We'll do a more in depth one about voters rights maybe one day. But I know the two I think two of the guys basically were murdered because they were going door to door trying to help black people register to vote. Yeah. I don't know their names, but I've heard about them before, too. I mean, murdered by the local police. They just shot them on the side of the road, basically. Yeah. I think in 1963 there was a group of students that were going to Birmingham. It was like the center of the universe as far as the civil rights struggle in the US is going. Yeah. And again, Bonner, the head of the police department, gave his police department the whole thing the day off so that there was nobody to protect these students that were going to protest in Birmingham. Have a hard time talking about this stuff, but consider this is the stage that we're setting. This is the state of the country. There's, like, on television, you can see black kids being attacked by police dogs in your country, in Washington, DC. If you live there, you're worried that the same stuff is going to go on on your streets. There's, like, a lot of turmoil going on. Yes. Two months before this happened, edgar Ebbers was shot in his driveway and killed in Jackson, Mississippi, after coming home from going door to door and encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote. And a white supremacist name I don't feel like reading his name. Dela Beckwith. Byron Dela Beckwith basically pulled up and shot him in the back with a rifle. Got not acquitted, but there were two hung juries by all white male jurors and he remained free until 1994, when they finally came back and retried him as an old man. I remember that found him guilty and he spent, like, the last six years of his life in prison before he died. But he was just human trash because he remained steadfastly white supremacist till the end, was not sorry. His son followed in his footsteps and was just an ugly human being. I think James Woods played him in a movie. Was that who he played? I'm pretty sure it was James Woods. Yeah. He's pretty slimy. Not in real life, but he can do the job. He can do slimy, but yeah. So this is two months previous that Medgrams was killed. So it was a supercharged time and people were nervous for good reason. Yes. And to our white supremacist listeners, if you're at all offended by Chuck's characters, don't even bother emailing us. I don't think we have we don't care at all what you have to say. We have enlightened listeners. I think so too. Sure. So, 1963, huge deer. They announced in June that they're going to carry out this march in August. And like you said, JFK was like, no, please don't do that. And they said, you know what, Mr. President, you have proven yourself is not very reliable trying to get the Civil Rights Act through Congress. It was just languishing there. And the black civil rights leaders were like, Brown versus Board of Education. Happened in 1955, I believe. Desegregated schools. Yeah, officially in 1963, there were plenty of schools that still weren't desegregated. All of these things that they had been fighting for incrementally, bit by bit, every battle that they'd won were still not necessarily being fulfilled. And Kennedy didn't really seem to care that much. So when he asked them as president not to do the march, they basically said, you don't really have any clout with us right now, so we're going to do this. And they did, and they announced it in June and they marched in August. And the reason they were able to do that was thanks almost entirely to a guy named Bayard Rustin. Yeah, he's my new hero. I love this guy. There's a documentary on him, actually. It's called Brother Outsider. Yeah, I was going to watch it today, but I didn't have time. Is it on the internet? I only saw it on DVD. Oh, I don't know. Yes, I look for it. You could probably get clips, I bet. Piece it together on you. Trailer. Yeah. This guy, man, you talk about outsiders, and this is in 1963 was openly gay. He walked through the cane. He was black for fun. Was it really that's the impression I had from this. Like he didn't have an injury? No, he just had flair. I don't know if he was an actual Quaker. His grandmother was a Quaker and he followed in her footsteps or was at least informed by her religion and was also, I think, a socialist. Most of these people were, if not like, self identified socialists, carried out a lot of or held onto a lot of socialist ideals like workers rights, like the power of labor and the right of labor to unionize and organize and the basic value of a human being. Yeah. As far as outsiders go, though, you could have just stopped at openly gay in 1963, much less everything else. Plus, he apparently had a knack for art collecting. He had an eye for buying or finding art on the cheap. That turned out to be like really great. Well, he was a Renaissance man. He used to quote poetry, and he was the guy to organize this thing because apparently his skills at bringing people together were legendary. And also, Chuck, probably the thing that is most remarkable about Bayard Ruston, as far as the lasting legacy goes, was that he met Martin Luther King in the early fifty s, the early to mid fifty s, I think. And at the time, MLK had not fully embraced the idea of complete nonviolent protest and resistance. He was still guarded by armed guards and that kind of stuff. Right. It was Rustin Bayard who brought this thought of nonviolent protests and talked Dr. King and really embracing it 100%. That's awesome. It was this guy. Well, he did a great job. In just two months, he was able to completely organize this thing from soup to nuts, coach all the volunteers, teach everyone how to have a nonviolent protest, basically of this size, because it's not just like, hey, don't be violent, like they may have encountered violence. And how to respond to that in a nonviolent way was super important. He created a twelve page manual for bus captains, apparently handled everything from where to park to how to park to where the bathrooms are. And then maybe most importantly, he was responsible for putting together the run of show and getting these very large egos enough time per person to where they all felt like they were cared for. Right. Because even though they all had the same goal, these were people who have big egos. You can't get in a position like that if you don't have some sort of ego. Sure. And you want your time at the podium. There were singers, speakers, public prayers, and he was able to navigate those ego waters very well. Yeah. So, Chuck, we'll talk a little bit more about Rustin Baird and what he did and then talk about the actual march itself. Yeah. Right after this. So, Chuck, we were talking about Rust and Baird and the job he did, putting this whole thing together, but as well as he organized it, as well as it was pulled off, even before it went down, there was a lot of criticism of it, especially from the farthest, I guess, fringes of the civil rights movement. Yeah. What was the guy who followed John Lewis in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? Stokie Carmichael. Yes. He was a huge outspoken critic. He was a huge outspoken critic of the march. Basically, he said, this is not nearly radical enough. This is the watered down, middle class, sanitized version of the real civil rights movement, and I'm not going to have anything to do with it. Yeah. Malcolm X going to denounce it as well and called it the Farce on Washington and told his fellow Nation of Islam members, don't go. Even though he did go, I don't think he necessarily went in support. I think he was probably just checking things out. Right. Yeah, but he didn't, like, join anyone on stage. He was still denouncing it. Right. This is a real criticism of this, that it's as radical as the white establishment thinks this agenda is. You're asking to not be discriminated at the polls. Guys like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X are saying you need to go further than this if you're going to use something this big, you need to really carry out a bigger agenda. And one of the things that added fuel to their arguments was the news that John Lewis, who again was 23 and the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had had his speech watered down by some of the other leaders. Yeah, not just other leaders, but like, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, DC. Basically, the speech was circulated to a bunch of different people and everyone came back and said, you know, you need to tone this down. You can't call out Kennedy quite so plainly because he said Kennedy's Act, the Civil Rights Act, was too little, too late. And then his most famous quote that was, I guess just deleted pretty much was, we want to march through the south, through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did. We will pursue our own scorched earth policy. There's a hyphen after that in a nonviolent way. Oh, did he say that? Yeah, but even still there's a hyphen. And then like, oh, yeah, in a nonviolent way. Yeah. So they basically held a caucus and they all got together and he said that he was still very proud and it was a very strong speech. Right. And I think everyone has a good point on the best way to move forward, but for the kind of press this thing was getting, and at the time, they were probably wise to sanitize it a little bit for Middle America. Well, yeah, just to reach more people. I mean, if you think about it, though, for better or for worse, john Lewis, once his post was taken over by Stokely Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee eventually changed its name to take out the nonviolent and was replaced with National, I think. And it just kept getting more and more militant. And Stokely Carmichael wrote black power. He also coined the term. But the militant Black Power movement wasn't trying to and we should do an episode just on that. Yeah, totally. They weren't trying to make themselves palatable for white Middle America. They were trying to take over their position however they needed to. I agree with you. I just don't think the March on Washington sitting back with this much hindsight sure. Would have had the impact that it did, necessarily had that much more militant tone to it. Oh, totally. I mean, their goal is progress, not to, like, scare white Americans watching this on television, which is exactly what would have happened. Sure. But that's a pickle, though. There are definitely two different ways to achieve an end. And is the sanitized, watered down version that's palatable to white middle America I know. Is that the best way? Or ultimately, you get to a point where you're like, is this really making things go anywhere? Right? Is this really just kind of allowing more of the same? Well and how hard it must be to temper your anger and frustration and tamp that stuff down to try and reach more people. Right. To me, that makes it even more brave and courageous. Yeah. Well, MLK actually addressed that a little bit in his speech where he basically says, like, if you're sitting there thinking like, the black people are going to just we're blowing off steam right now and things will cool off, so I don't really have to do anything. He says, you're in for a rude awakening, because if things don't change, we're going to take it back to the street and we're we're going to get even worse. Like, this is the nice version. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So we are at the event, and what civil rights event in the 1960s would have been complete without a bunch of white liberal celebrities joining in? Thank God for them. So, of course, you had Marlin Brando and Charlton Heston, which I don't know if it surprises me or not. Charlton Heston. Yes. Maybe he wasn't just across the board one way politically. Maybe he just happened to be walking around DC at the time. Or maybe he championed civil rights and he loved his guns. I don't know enough about him. He could do both. I just remember seeing him being berated by Michael Moore on Bowling for Columbine and then, of course, Plan of the Apes. But I don't really know that much about him as much as, like, I don't know, as passionate as I feel about guns and things. I feel equally passionate about badgering old folks. Yeah. Really? And I felt kind of bad for him. Michael Moore took a lot of guesses. Just like an old dude that you're yelling at in his dream. Not just old, like senile. Yeah. In his home. Yeah. But we can laugh about it now. Bob Dylan, of course, was one of the performers. Joe Bias. Peter paul mary. Yeah. Pre electric Bob Dylan. And then we had some famous black stalwarts like Sydney Poetie and Harry Belafonte and Josephine Baker. My Haleya Jackson saying. Yeah. And I mentioned James Garner was there. Yes. Which is pretty cool. I remember when he died, they mentioned that he's like a big crusader for civil rights. That's awesome. He was one of the few that really put in the leg work. It wasn't just lip service. He was rockford dude. Yeah. It was all about the legwork. Yes. He would drive around the country running away from getting beat up in his gold Camaro. Yeah. So the show opened up, basically with I think Joan BIEZ opened up with the Song of Freedom. And then let us sing along of We Shall Overcome And then Peter, Paul and Mary awkwardly covered bob Dylan I know Dylan sitting right there with their version of Blowing in the Wind. And then Dylan followed up with Toothpaste commercial. Remember that? From Mighty Wind? Oh, yeah, that was funny. And then Dylan followed them with his new song about the murder of Medgir Evers, called Only Upon in their game. Lasted 19 minutes. Is that a joke? Yeah. Okay. Dylan had some long songs. Yeah, it may have been. What else? Contralto. Anderson sang the Negro spiritual. He's got the whole world in his hands. It's a great tune. And Mahalia Jackson, I think, closed things right before King's speech. I've been bucked and I've been scorned. So they had people fired up, basically, with great entertainment, meaningful entertainment. And the stage was set for the MCs, Aussie Davis and Ruby D to introduce Martin Luther King for his now famous speech, which, at the time, at least they say in this article, it wasn't the end all, be all. But over time, it has gained more and more steam. It's like sort of the watershed moment. Right. Life magazine covered the March on Washington and the issue that followed the march didn't have MLK on the cover. It had bayard ruston and a Philip Randolph. Yeah, it's pretty awesome, actually. And, I mean, that's how a lot of people viewed the march for a very long time. I mean, it was a Philip Randolph idea. Bayard rust and planned it. MLK led a ton of star power to it. And by signing on, a lot of other people signed on, too. But it wasn't until and I've seen this elsewhere, it's not this article alone, but supposedly it wasn't until MLK was assassinated that a lot of people that had formerly been just kind of sympathetic or whatever like, really came to adopt his viewpoint. And tragically, his death propelled the Civil rights movement forward. Sure. And one of the byproducts of that was that the speech came to become what the March on Washington was. But for the five years after the march until MLK was assassinated, that wasn't really the case. Yeah. And the main thrust of the speech, even though it's remembered now well, if you've never listened to the whole thing, you should do that, by the way. But it's best remembered for the famous quote I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. The main thrust of the script, though, was the script. The speech which was scripted was the bad check that America had written basically with the quote instead of honoring the sacred obligation, america has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked insufficient funds. And apparently, after this bit about the bad check and basically saying that you promised everyone freedom, and you're not giving everyone freedom. Mahalia Jackson behind him, one of his friends said, Tell him about the dream. And that's when he improvised that section at the end, which was so powerful that he improvised it. But it is something he had used in sermons previous. Right, but he was riffing during the speech at that point. Pretty much quite a riff. I've ripped off. I ain't riff like that. You know what I'm saying? And so after that, they met with Kennedy and Johnson, and Kennedy was going to get the votes lined up to get the Civil Rights Act passed, but was shot and killed, as we all know. Yeah. And so then that fell to Johnson, which is what that play that Cranston is in covers is from basically the moment he took office and the whole rigmarole was trying to get the Civil Rights Act passed through. Yeah, but I think Kennedy I don't think he was against it. I think he was just a politician above all else. Right. And cared only about being a politician that gets reelected. Well, apparently he went through a little bit of a transformation. He wasn't adamantly opposed. He wasn't a segregationist, but he certainly wasn't like a black civil rights crusader. He wasn't Bobby Kennedy. Yeah, I think he was also there was a certain amount of ineffectiveness with Congress or whatever, where LBJ would just beat you at the switch until you voted the way he wanted you to. He just wouldn't leave you alone. He just kind of did what he said if he wanted something done, which is how he managed to get the Voting Rights Act passed. Yeah. He had a hard time, though. They should make a movie version of that play, I think, to get it out to more people, maybe. It was really fascinating. It was kind of like Lincoln the movie wasn't like, here's Lincoln's life. It's like, here's a really important part of Lincoln's life. Well, here's the act of trying to get the amendment passed. They probably will if it was that good. They will. Yeah. I haven't seen Selma yet. Have you seen that? No, I haven't. Dying to see that. Yes. It's supposed to be really good. LBJ gets the Voting Rights Act passed. The Civil Rights Act passed. And also, I didn't mention this anywhere, and I didn't really see it elsewhere, but the Great Society, the War on poverty, came about in, like, 1964, 65. And I'm pretty sure that all of those things, the passage of all those things were a direct result of the march on Washington for jobs and freedom. Oh, really? Yeah. That march got those things pushed through. It didn't hurt that Kennedy was assassinated. LBJ definitely played on that to get Congress to pass through, because he even called the passage of those acts of fitting tribute to JFK. Yeah, but that show of agreement of a quarter of a million people, black and white and Jewish, and I'm sure they were, like, chicano people there. That's what they called them back then. Sure it wasn't just black people showing up in DC, going to the trouble of driving from all over the country to get to DC to March to say, this is what we want. That had a huge effect, a direct impact on this legislation, change totally, all kinds of minorities jumping on board, for sure. It's a beautiful thing. And since those acts were passed, there's been no more racism in the United States. No, that was it. It ended right then. When LBJ signed those. Everything was cheery after that. Still a long way to go, people to your heart still being facetious here. And we would love to close the show by playing the entirety of that speech, but I looked it up today to see if it was in the public domain, and surprisingly, it is not. It is owned by the King family. So where can you go listen to it, then? Well, I've listened to it on YouTube, and I posted it on our Facebook page last year. On YouTube? Oh, yeah. So I don't know if they just don't police it as much, but I know they have gone to court a few times doing CBS USA Today. Apparently, they are not against educators that have used the speech. But King himself obtained the rights one month after he gave the speech, and a lot of people, in fact, historians, have come out and said, you know what? You should release this. You're making a big mistake. It can only help the cause to get it out to more and more years in full, because it's one thing to read it, it's another thing to hear it. And they have declined so far, so we'll see what happens in the future. Oddly enough, EMI Publishing, along with the King family, owns the publishing copyrights, which was sold off to Sony. So the Sony Corporation technically now partially owns have a Dream Speed, which is such a weird ending. Progress. Yeah. We can play Snippet, though, for sure. Oh, we can? Yeah, we should end with a Snippet. All right, well, if you want to get do you have a listener mail then, or should we just do the Snippet? I do have a listener mail. Then we'll do the snippet. Okay. All right, well, if you want to know more about the March on Washington, you should check out, actually an article in Descent magazine called The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington from Spring 2013. It's online. It's pretty great. And then also, don't forget to check out our own article on HowStuffWorks.com just type that in the search bar and it will bring us up. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this from Chris about Jim Henson. Hey, guys, I really wanted to express my appreciation for yesterday's episode. I'm a huge fan of Henson, so on any ordinary day, it would have been great to hear the two of you cover such an amazing person. However, it came at a time when I really needed a positive distraction. Tuesday was one of the most difficult days of my life. I had to have my dog put to sleep. Jupiter was 13 and a half years old. She'd been with me since she was a puppy. She was my best friend, and imagining life without her is difficult. So Monday and Tuesday were full of tears, and your show really helped take my mind off the sadness. I've been a fan for years and realized this morning that I listened to you guys for the first time while walking Jupiter. So you've accompanied some mini walk since I'm a huge fan of Jim Henson, as I said, managed New England's only year round nonprofit puppet theater, the Puppet Showplace Theater, for four years before moving to DC to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts degree in nonfiction filmmaking. My thesis project, which I'm currently in pre production on, utilizes puppets to introduce kids to history. It's kind of cool. It's called footnotes. A documentary. See what he did there? Yes, you can find a description@documentary.com. The thesis is partially funded by the Mr. Rogers Memorial scholarship, which is provided by the Television Academy Foundation. I encourage you to consider Fred Rogers as a future episode topic, because, like Henson, he was such a talented guy, often marginalized by society. I totally love to do one of Mr. Rogers. Sure. I really enjoyed the show. Yeah, man. I really enjoyed the show and appreciate what you guys do. One day in the future, your talents may be recognized by a couple of knuckleheads with the podcast. So I think he called us knuckleheads. Yeah. And hope that someone covered us one day. There's a little bit of weird backhanded compliment there. So that's from Chris Higgins. And email with Chris today. Very sorry to hear about Jupiter, and best of luck with documentary.com people can go and check that out for puppets. Sure. Especially punny named puppets. That's right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us to let us know that we're knuckleheads or for whatever reason, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffychenko.com. And now, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last." | ||
How Antiques Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-antiques-work | At what point does something become an antique? Could that old piece of furniture in the attic be worth millions of dollars? Join Josh and Chuck as they break down all the Stuff You Should Know about antiques. | At what point does something become an antique? Could that old piece of furniture in the attic be worth millions of dollars? Join Josh and Chuck as they break down all the Stuff You Should Know about antiques. | Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:46:44 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=19, tm_min=46, tm_sec=44, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=6, tm_isdst=0) | 32977466 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, fatigue citiques. Hey. And welcome to the podcast. Yes, it's about antiques on Josh Clark, there's a very eager, strangely eager charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast, the 100 year old podcast at least makes us an antique. Oh, yeah. So you can tell, though, from the hair in my ears that I'm getting up there. Yeah. No hair. Ear hair. That's the joke about men, right, is that hair leaves the places you want it and accumulates where you don't want. So, Chuck, you know how you think about certain things and you come across like a concept, like antiques? You're collecting and buying and selling of old stuff? That's my definition, but I think it's pretty much dead on. Sure. And you think this has always been around, and you stop and think, no, that's probably not true. So, when did it start? And I am very gratified to say, we know when the popular obsession with antiques began. Isn't that weird? I didn't know this until I read this, and it actually ties in with the other one we're recording today. I know volcanoes. So here's a little piece of trivia for you that will eventually appear in a quiz. How are Antiques and the Volcanoes podcast related? Strange clue herculaneum and Pompeii mount Vesuvius binds these two, right? Yeah. So tell them about it, Chuckers. Well, there was a big old eruption in 79 Ad of Vesuvius, and it pretty much buried Pompeii and the sister city Herculenium between about 20ft of junk of ash. We'll get to that in the vault, which is not that's a bad thing for all the people there, but it's a bad thing to preserve screaming, but it preserves them dying screaming. I used to be so obsessed with that, with Pompeii, with Nash, anything I could get my hands on. It's like, look at that skeleton crawling toward the sea. Look at this guy was caught in a boat. Really awesome. Yeah. I loved it. So many years after that, Charles III of Spain and early 1700 said, hey, let's go dig this stuff up and see what we can find. And it turns out they found a bunch of well preserved antiques, and they became like, wow, old stuff is cool, right? So, these two entire cities were basically frozen in time and protected from looters, and they started bringing these treasures up, and it actually sparked the neoclassical period movement, I guess, in Europe, and that was like, the antiques, right? And then in America, it's worldwide antiques, or at least Western popularity of antiques, right? Yeah. What about American, right? We can actually trace the moment when Americans get interested in antiques, too. I love this. Very cool. Once again, 1776. America is a young budding country. 100 years later, we celebrate our first little centennial in Philadelphia. And they said, hey, you know what? We've got a hundred years worth of stuff we've been making, and let's showcase this. And all of a sudden, people were like the same thing, like, wow, this is kind of cool. I like this old stuff that we've got. That's exactly right. And that sparked an interest in early American furniture, I think, to start with. Right. Yeah. I'm going to start buying it, and I'm going to start collecting it. And it became a commodity. Right. So the 18.76 expedition was what sparked an interest in antiques in the US. We're going to focus mostly on American antiques, and by mostly, I mean exclusively. Right. A little Europe thrown in. Okay, so not exclusively, but mostly was. Right. But if you are an antique collector today, and you are a very puritanical one could say antique collector, you're probably going to say that anything prior to 1830 in America and probably anywhere is an antique. Anything after it's kind of up in the air. And the reason being is, around 1830, the industrial Revolution started. People stopped using dovetailed joints that they saw by hand or whittled down by hand and using wooden pegs and started using machines. Well, not stopped, but yeah. Well, it fell for mass manufacturing. Exactly. So this advent of mass manufacturing led to a huge boom in production coupled with this new interest post, like 1876 in early American furniture. And so a revival of these styles. Right. Yeah. So you have mass manufacturing and a revival of interest in early American styles, meaning that you have a lot of reproduction furniture being produced. Yeah. But reproduction furniture, what you want is the real deal. Right. Which is period. So period is something made in the style of the period, in the age. In that age. Like Queen Anne? Surendale. Not Queen Anne reproduction or Chippendale reproduction, which, by the way, is the sexiest furniture period in American history, if you ask me. Those little cuffs and nothing but. Yeah. All I picture when I hear that is Swayze Farley. What a classic one. Hepplewhite sheraton Duncan five, just to name a few. Yes. Of our heroes. This is a big one. And I'm sure if you're really into this, you could be like, Dunkin Five. Yes. I go for Duncan Hines. Yeah. Duncan Chic. Remember that guy? It sounds really familiar. He's a singer. He had a song. Which one? I can't remember. He's a one hit guy. Okay. Well, Chuck? Yes. If you are getting into antiques, right. You probably already know all this stuff. Way into it. Are you really? No. Okay. I'm into walking around antique flea markets, but I don't know what I'm doing. I just like, tooling around and poking things. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think Billy Bob Thornton wrote possibly one of the greatest lines in the history of film when he said something about he made Dwight Yokom saying slingblade that he can barely drink a glass of water around a piece of antique furniture so awful and so funny in that movie at the same time. It's a good line. I like walking around antique places, too. I don't like encountering antique wheelchairs or antique medical equipment. Oh, I love that stuff. It's so freaky. Well, I don't use it. You really shouldn't. Probably not sterile any longer. Yeah. Okay, so let's say that you are not completely versed in antiques and what to look for. We're going to give you a brief primer here, and since we are owned by Discovery Communications, aka the Discovery Channel parent company, we get to draw from the company well and talk to people once in a while who have shows on Discovery. Specifically in this one, a guy named Paul Brown who heads up a show called Auction Kings. Right. Yeah. He owns a gallery, 63, which is literally just up the road a piece from us on Roswell Road. Yeah. I'm going to have to visit them. And he is an auction king. I've seen it myself with my own eyes. And we talked to him, actually. So he's going to come in a little bit here or there. When you hear someone that sounds like they're on the telephone and it's not us, that'll be Paul, right? Yeah. We'll team up a little better than that, but that's a good rule of thumb, I think, for this one. Certainly. But what Paul says and what it expresses in this article, how antiques work, is that the first way to differentiate a real antique, a period piece, from a reproduction piece and kind of get an idea of how much value this thing is going to hold ultimately is just by looking it over. Yes. The first, best thing you can do is take a really good, hard look at it, right? Yes. So what are some of the things we're looking for? Well, just at first glance, I would say overall condition, like what kind of shape it's in. And this is not to determine whether it's real or fake, if you're assuming it's a real antique, because apparently high quality fakes, don't be afraid of that because it's pretty rare to pass one off. To try and pass one off. Right. Although Paul said in an interview that he just came across one. Right. Like he had gotten off a call with a buddy who informed him that something he was thinking about or somebody was trying to sell to him was in fact a fake fabric a like right before we interviewed him. So he said it does happen. It's very uncommon, especially with furniture, too. Sure. It's so difficult to do this. So what you're really looking for is not necessarily a counterfeit, but a reproduction. Right? Exactly. So here are a couple of tips that Paul gave us. Right. A cursory glance will tell a lot of tales. I mean, even to an inexperienced eye, if you open up the drawers and you see their nails or holding it together rather than dovetails and mortise and tenon joints. And you know, it's probably of later manufacturer evenly cut nails were not even made until this century. Not this century, 20th century. Most nails were handmade. And so if you got a lot of evenly cut nails because they were driven in there with a nail gun, that's a big tip off. So there's a couple of things to look for. Right? Yeah. I mean, craftsmanship, how it was put together, they're still craftsman today, doing things in the old school way. But by and large, when you look at the joints and the tools that might leave marks, hardware used like nails, like Paul said. Yes. So that's what you're going to look for to determine if it was probably a reproduction or not. And then what the stuff is made out of is actually going to leave a lot of clues to specifically with furniture, the wood used is very important. Right? Yeah. So, for example, Chuck, you've got like walnut was very popular with Queen Anne, which apparently ran from the early 18th century to about 1750 when Chippendale took over. Right, yes. We know so much about the wood used and antique furniture. It's amazing. Mahogany came into fashion after that. Right. And then cherry, which is sort of like mahogany, it's just a little paler, very strong and abundant here in the old US of A. Yes. So that was pretty popular as well. Oak has always been popular. Yeah. Oak was especially popular among Europeans before the beginning of the 18th century, and then it had some renewed popularity in America around 1900. I personally don't go for oak that much. I like either really pale, blonde maple. Do I hate blonde? Do you really like maple? Pale. I don't like blonde wood. It reminds me of Ikea. Yeah. I think it's one of the reasons I like that look, like minimal and it's really cold outside. And then, Chuck, there's also pine. Right. Poor pine. Pine is, let's just go ahead and say it, it's the poor person's wood. When you're manufacturing furniture, your country folk, your rural, you just want a chair to sit in. Maybe you're really good at making a chair. So 100 and 5200 years later, somebody wants to pay top dollar for that. But for the most part, pine is used for the undersides, the backing, the drawers, insides of a piece of furniture. Right, yeah. But wood floors, actually harder pine floors, that's what we have in our house. Those are like a fined apparently there's a guy down in Florida, apparently there's a logging operation in like the 19th century in Florida, and they would fell this pine and floated down the river to the sawmill. And every once in a while something would be it was so dense, it would just sink. And it happened a lot, and they just leave them. But for some reason the composition of the water. I think it was like this brackish combination of seeing fresh water, somehow preserved these trees, these huge trees. And there's a company that brings these things up and salvages this 19th century hart pine and sells it for, like, top dollar lumber. Yeah, we have had this exact conversation before. It was a while ago, though. Which potato? It was a long time ago, but it bears saying. I think I think I'm going insane because it's so cool. It's like, why are you laughing? I know, but I like pine, so that's why I said poor pine. Okay. Plywood and particle board. That's a dead giveaway that it's not an antique. Don't be stupid. As are staples. We should mention staples are a hallmark of 20th century manufacturer. Exactly. Condition of the wood. You should look at that. Wood shrinks. Yeah. So it shrinks, and it leaves a lot of clues. Right. So the bottom of a drawer in a really good construction is kind of slatted in. So as it shrinks, it's not going to be flush any longer. And not only will that shrinkage be a dead giveaway, but that portion of the shrunken part, the now exposed part, should be lighter in color than the stuff that's been exposed to underwear for the last 200 years. Underwear. Yeah. Also, they used to use pegs a lot of times to assemble furniture. So if the pegs have worked themselves out a little bit, that's probably a good sign that there's been some shrinkage going on in the underwear drawer. In the underwear drawer. What else? We talked about pegs? Dovetail joints. I think Paul mentioned dovetail joints and mortise and tenon joints are really a hallmark of early craftsmanship. So you look for those tools. Hand sanding is going to look different than machine sanding. Yes. As is a hand saw rather than the perfect straight edge of a sawmill saw. You can actually, if you know what you're doing, you can kind of roughly date, like, the age of your piece of furniture by the smallmarks, right? Yeah. So you're going to want to look at the back of a chair or the drawer. It's an inconspicuous area that they probably didn't bother to sand. If there are straight, irregular marks that's pre 1830. If there's straight even marks, that means that it was around 1830. Saw mills were cutting these straight even marks, perfectly straight. And then circular marks came in about 1850 when the industrial revolution was really starting to take off. And people are like, our furniture doesn't have to be square anymore. Yeah. You know what really took me in this one was when I read this sentence. Nails were originally made forged individually. Does that really hit home, you think? How many nails it takes to build a structure? And the blacksmith had to make every nail one at a time. That's why the blacksmith was usually the man to go crazy. The on rest of the town and kill everyone in their sleep. Yeah. With something made of heavy metal, probably. That's what I would use. Where are we here buying them? You want to talk about buying antiques? Yeah. And we should probably say that if you're in the antiques, especially if you're really in antiques, you're probably doing at least partially for profit. Right? Yeah. Hoping to maybe make a little money off of it. Well, Paul pointed out that you should only buy something if you like it. Excellent point. I thought that was a great point. Usually you think it's worth something as well. Right. And we asked him about value. Like, how does an antique get valued? And here's what he said. For me, worth is what you can get somebody to pay for it on a given day, not what an insurance company or museum or a quote expert says it's worth. So the biggest factor is supply and demand. How many people in the audience want it? I bring something up that five people want, it's going to bring more than somebody might have thought it was worth. If it comes out and only one person wants it or nobody wants it, then it's going to bring less. But the reality is that's what it was worth that day in this building. So it's just kind of a fluid dynamic is a real funny thing. It's like trying to nail Jello. So that was Paul once again. Josh, could you tell he was on the phone. He was on the phone. If you don't know anything and you want to learn something about antiques, here's some advice from housetofworks.com to start buying things willy nilly now go to a museum, because museums are a great place to you're going to know it's real, it's authenticated by pro. It's probably going to be grouped by either the manufacturer of the period, so you get, like, a really specific view of what you're looking at it, and then probably be identified by the maker, and you might have a dose in there that has some cool history. So it's a really good place to learn about this stuff. Yeah. There's usually somebody there. You can say, what does this mean? Or why is that there? And they go move along. Yeah. And then the next thing you know, that chair is not there any longer because you just expose it as a fraud. Much like the Brewster Chair, right? Yes. Have you heard about this? Do I talk about another podcast or something? No. That's known as the greatest hoax of all time. Greatest antique hoax of all time. Greatest antique furniture hoax of all time. Let's get specific here. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Well, think about it. It's a chair. Surely there are other antique hoaxes. This is the ali. This is the OJ. Simpson trial of antiques. So the Ford Museum was taken by a chair that was supposedly created by pilgrims from the Massachusetts bay Colony, right? Yeah, but they weren't taken by the chair. They were taken by Lamontein. Armand Lamont. He sounds like a fake furniture guy. He sounds like a forager Armand Lamontein. Yeah. Faked the Brewster chair just to see if he could fool the experts. And he did. Yeah, which apparently is quite popular and especially was in the 70s. Hoaxes all over the place. Have you seen efforts for fake? No. Okay. Our buddy recommended this movie. It's the Orson Wells documentary on art forgery. Okay. So we saw it, right? You mean I watched it. Oh, really? It's very was this TV show interesting? No, it's The Who's I thought you were talking about the Dorset Most TV show when he had Burnt Reynolds on. No, but it's in a similar style. It's really edited very strangely. But the content of it is Clifford Irving, the guy who faked the biography of Howard Hughes also wrote a biography on a great art forger named Elmir. And Elmir is like this guy who's like, I just do this to show that all the experts are idiots and I've never signed anything, and I toss everything. And his biographer, who actually turns out to be a hoax himself, clifford Irving is like, that. It's not true. That guy is fraudulent and he's making money off of it. But it makes a good point that you said in the museum. You're going to be able to probably rely on it being legitimate. Sure. That's where you can really learn. The point of this movie is that's not necessarily true. I mean, like, if you can pass something by the experts, then it's legitimate in just about everyone's eyes. And that apparently is fairly rampant in the art world. Yeah. Well, the Brewster chair that they put it through an X ray and they were all of a sudden they were like Lamonte. Yeah. Lamontein had said, like, I faked a chair a couple of decades ago and you bought it. Somebody bought it. Now they use that chair, though, as an example of how to not be duped, I guess. What does Oprah call that? A learning moment or a teaching moment? Yeah, I think something like that. So if you have learned a few things here and you do want to buy antiques, where should you go? Well, you said the museums, and then you're ready to buy anywhere. If you go to a small town in America and you close your eyes and just start walking forward and don't get hit by a car going around the square. You're going to run into an antique store. Yes. And depending on the size of the shop, if it's like a smaller shop, then that means probably that the shop owner picked out all the antiques because it's things that they like and things that they think will sell or like a flea market. They'll usually have little booths and you can rent out your own little booth and sell stuff. So you'll probably get like, a big, wide variety there. That's right. Where else? Well, auctions, if you want to add a little zing to your antiques or your antique buying experience. Right. The auction is very much like an experience. And you get to buy stuff, too. Right. And we talked to Paul about this. We'll bring him back in a second. But if you want to really kind of hone your haggling skills or just kind of know your limits, you could start off in a small store and just go basically abuse the store owner and then honor go to a couple of auctions and bada bing, you might be ready, but this is what you're in for. It's not nearly as scary as we've been made to believe, apparently. What, auction? Yeah. Listen to Paul Chuck. The auction can be, by its nature, almost maybe Hollywood did it or I don't know what happened exactly, but a lot of people are intimidated by the auction process. What I always encourage people to do is come in early, may come in the week before, and take a look around, preview, take some measurements, kick the tire, so to speak. Open the drawer, see if they're dovetails, see if you're potentially buying what you think you're potentially buying. Ask questions, because we're always here to answer them. And if I don't know, I'll say I don't know. But if I do know, I'm happy to share and say, so is my staff. And then as the auction day approaches, you come in, get settled in, and kind of watch it, kind of get a feel for it. It's a rhythmic thing, and each auction is dynamic and fluid. It's almost organic, the way it kind of grows. And you say, okay, these things are going high. Those things are going low. Kind of watch it a little bit. And then just don't be intimidated to bid. Don't let it get to your head. Just kind of play the game. It's like going to the casino, sort of. You kind of get a rush out of it. It's fine. So that was some good advice. They'll usually have a display period where you can go check it out up close before the auction. That's right. And if you've never been to an auction, it can get caught up in it. Have you ever been to an auction of any kind? Silent auction at a church at very low pressure? I mean, one where the guys doing the whole thing catalogs. I've been to those before. Did you buy for each catalog in kid you not? Did you buy a cow? Yeah, I'm just a fan. If you want to check it out beforehand, know exactly what you want, what you're willing to pay, and don't get caught up in the auction fever, because as Paul pointed out, and as anyone knows, something is worth what someone is going to pay for it. And if you got all these people bidding on it's just like ebay. It's the same thing. I never understood the ebay. People in auctions for like, a week and on day one they start throwing bids in. Yeah, I've never understood that either. Well, sellers love it because it just drives up the price. Right. But as a buyer, it doesn't make money. None at all. On ebay. I go in the last second and a half, my first bid. Right. And we also talked to Paul about what you should buy or if there's something in your home. And he was saying, like, it's very surprising how something that seems like it would never sell or something you take is ordinary commonplace, because you grew up around it and it's now in your home and you walk past it every day. That suddenly takes on value when a guy like him creates a market by taking a seller and putting them together and putting his stuff in front of buyers. Right, so you're absolutely right. I mean, things do have value, even if they don't seem like they have value. And for sure, you can make some dough at an auction or you can spend a bunch of dough at an auction. You can also do an Internet auction, which requires a tremendous amount of faith. Yeah, I mean, ebay has their little rules of you got to be on the up and up, but you can really kind of do anything on there if you want. There's antique shows that are like this weekend in North Georgia, there's a show in the Georgia Mountain Fairgrounds. It's a big deal. Everyone brings their stuff in, kickbacks from them once a year. And I just made it up. And obviously, estate sales keep your eyes peeled in the newspaper and Craigslist and stuff for estate sales, you get some good finds. The cool thing about estate sales, especially if you find an estate sale and the sign for it is on, like, a piece of poster board with black Sharpie, that means it's a yard sale. That means that, well, there could be some really great stuff there and it's being sold by people who don't know anything. Yeah, that's true. And there's probably no reserve price, which is the minimum bid that will be accepted. So, yeah, state sales can be treasure troves, especially if you like stuff that smell like the elderly. Right? Can we say that? I think so. Mothballs. Yeah. If you're checking things out at these places, look for a signature of the maker to help authenticate it. That's kind of a dead giveaway. If you see, like, a brand on furniture, like, on the underside or on glassware and ceramics is usually on the bottom. What else? Well, yeah, that's a good point, that there should be a signature there because the only difference really, between a reproduction and a counterfeit is the stamp of the craftsman. Right. The mark of the craftsman saying, like, I made this in 1995. I'm not trying to pass it off as something made in 1895. Yeah, well, sometimes there's other documentation, too, that someone will include. Like, this is a photo of my great great grandmother with this chest of drawers or chiprobe holding a Confederate pistol. Right. It's included in the will from and there's a letter from my great grandfather to my great grandmother about the Shiff robe. And I'm going to give you all this saying, bust up that Shiff robe to help document that it is, in fact, worth something. Yes. And if you have that much documentation, you're in flame, because apparently being able to prove Providence, especially famous providence, can apparently just drive the price up. There's a story in this article about a person who attended the 2002 Tucson Antiques Roadshow event and showed up with a first phase chiefs blanket, which is rare enough. This thing was appraised at $350 to $500,000, but the person said that it once belonged to Kick Carson, but couldn't prove it. Right. But had he or she proved it, then it would have increased the value by another 150 grand just because Carson slept in it for a while. Right. Pretty sweet. Yeah. I look at a lot of Craigslist guitars. I'm not in the market, but I always just look. And there's always every day there's always some dude that has a really cheap cruddy guitar, and he's like, it was signed by the Kip Winger, and there's just this scrawl and Sharpie on it, and they're asking, like, $500 for $100 guitar. I pay for that with Kip Winger. Winger. Yeah. Maybe Don docking, too. What else can you look for, Josh? If you have a CT scan in your house or an X ray machine right. Or infrared analysis or ultraviolet analysis, you can do it that way? Yes. If you're so lucky to have those kind of things in your house, in your home or your medical clinic, or look at the antique dealer. If they're on the up and up, they're probably a member of one of the professional associations. And then also, if you follow Paul Brown's advice and buy what you like, and you're pretty much buying for yourself, then you may end up using your antiques, displaying it, keeping it out in the open in your normal house. And if you do that, you're going to want to keep up with it, right? Oh, sure. So if you have an antique clock, you're going to want to wind it regularly. If you have a rug or blanket or something like that, maybe up on the walls better place than on the floor. Yeah, right. Yeah. And then other kind of more fragile stuff, like books, sheet music, manuscripts. You want to store these upright out of the sun. We want to make sure there's no newspaper pressing between them. Highly acidic. Bad for an antique book. Probably not in the basement or the attic. You want a good neutral temperature. Yeah. Your books want to be in the same climate you're in. Yeah. Did you like that? I did. That's a T shirt right there. Photographs you should store in their own individual envelope and then that envelope in a box don't like out of the sun. Yeah. Don't stick them all together and put a brick on top of them. They're going to end up being a gooey mess. It's not a good way to store your photos. And you're also going to want to buy a nice pair of cotton gloves when you start collecting antique photographs of any kind, whether it's glass or metal. DeGuere type. If you're into Matthew Brady or being a mime, remember The Brady Bunch where it turned out that Matthew Brady was related to Mr. Brady and they showed like, a picture of the Auger type of Abraham Lincoln in the background as Mike Brady? Yeah. It was a good one. I do remember that. This is like the second Chris Farley reference. Yeah. Did the Chip and Dale thing, and then you remember when he attacked Scorsese. Remember? Yeah. You got anything else? That it for auctions and antiques and that kind of thing? I think it is. We want to give a hearty thanks to Paul Brown. Congratulations and good luck. It's nice to see another Atlanta boy making good. That's right. And we're going to drop by Gallery 63 one day, maybe get a picture made with him. How about that? He invited us, so it wouldn't be like stalking. Sure. And check out Auction Kings. Obviously, if you want to learn more about antiques, you can type the word antiques or antiquities as it's also called. Antiques is slang for antiquities. You know that. Is it? Yeah. You can type in the search bar@housetoprick.com. The dusty old search bar in need of polishing found in our attic. Right. Yes. That's what I'm trying out. How does it work? I think it's great. That brings up then listen or mail. I'm going to call this polyamory. A polyamorous, young lady. Yeah. Hello. From a polyamorous. Yeah. Hi, guys. Today I was feverishly sewing tiny pieces of silk together and cursing myself for attempting such an elaborate Christmas gift for my sister when why would anyone want multiple spouses started playing. I put down my thumbnail and listen even more intently than usual. For I myself and a polyamorous. I'm a 21 year old female living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which I believe is in America's. Hat. I've flown over that place. I have two partners, Jesse and KumarOn. Three and two years, respectively. Jesse and I live together. We all happen to be humanitarian atheist. Jesse and Kum have been friends since well before I met either of them, but they do not have a physical relationship together. Both of them are able to pursue relationships with other people. And I have had a lady friend in the last three years to boot as well to minimize the risk of STIs. We maintain a fluid bond and no one has intercourse with someone outside the bond without an STI test, jealousy has never been an issue. For some reason, Jesse actually encouraged me to start dating Kumb. And when Jesse was dating his lady friend, I was really pleased and excited. All of our parents know we are out to our coworkers and friends. I have no desire to get married, but I know of many polyamorous families who do or are. I would say the benefits of polyamory, for us at least, is a 20 something family with no children. Boils down to more more people to love, more people to be loved by, more sources of support, more ideas, more perspective, more Christmas gifts, and most importantly, more people to gun down zombies and left for dead. Is that one of the safe places? One of the safe areas in the zombie apocalypse? Saskatan. Yeah, I'm sure. Okay. Three shotguns are better than two. Sure. I would also like to point out that living community where everyone has sexual access, quote, unquote, to everyone else, is relatively rare in polyamory. More commonly, it's just three or four person relationships, or, quote unquote, open relationships, or even primary and secondary relationships. So that and tertiary is from Lydia. Well, thanks a lot. Lydia is very nice to have that little peek into your life. Thank you. Up there. Plus, also she left out in Saskatoon. It gets really cold up there. Yeah, real cold. I imagine a three person snuggle is pretty warm. It's like three dog nights. Do you know that's where that came from? The Aborigines in Australia. On a particularly cold night, they would sleep with three dogs around them. Three dog night is a really cold night. And that's where the bank got their name? Yes. Okay. If you have any cool, interesting stories, we didn't really touch on it. But if you have any cool stories about something that was found in your attic or in your neighbor's attic that turned out to be really valuable and cool, we want to hear about it. And in the meantime, here's a little watching homework for you. Everyone goes through the Red Violin. Probably the coolest auction movie of all time. You've seen it? No. Oh, Chuck. You got it. Send the queue. Okay. Anyway, send us your cool stories. Put it in an email, SPECT on the bottom, and send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The housetofworks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
How Horseshoes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-horseshoes-work | That laziest of backyard games, horseshoes, is also a very ancient one, developed by people following Greek armies more than 2,000 years ago. Since then, the game of horseshoes hasn't evolved too much, which would indicate that it has reached perfection. | That laziest of backyard games, horseshoes, is also a very ancient one, developed by people following Greek armies more than 2,000 years ago. Since then, the game of horseshoes hasn't evolved too much, which would indicate that it has reached perfection. | Tue, 06 Aug 2013 14:37:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=14, tm_min=37, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=218, tm_isdst=0) | 28987212 | audio/mpeg | "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 all 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 picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum Select Card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Tuckers. Bryant. Did I say that last time? My name like that? Yeah. I don't know. You might have just said, I don't know, I wonder. We'll find out. How's it going? It's going great. We just learned something neat. Guest producer Noel to our right. Yeah, hang on. You're left bar podcast today is on horseshoes. He took that as a college course called Backyard Games at Augusta State. Yeah, a real college course. And he said botchie, right? Yes, horseshoes and badminton. Was it badminton? I thought we couldn't determine Edmonton. And then possibly long darts. Okay, so hey, college credit. Which, I don't know, I guess you'd have to apply to the FTC, maybe to get lawn arts as a college. Kind of like how you'd have to apply to the DEA to get some MDMA to carry out some sort of on campus study. Some sort of study you'd have to launder illegal, man. Yeah, big time. Do you remember those things? They were like the kids left. Big time illegal. There's a task force schedule one backyard game, I think. I bet you could buy them on ebay and stuff. Well, you could probably buy them on Silk Road. I was just about to say you got to go in the deep web to get lawns. I played that when I was a kid, though. Man, we had long darn. I was smart enough to not kill myself or anybody else with them. It's funny looking back, how dangerous it was. Yeah, that was kind of like the end of that wave, because at the time and like, for a decade or two before that, probably longer, it was like you could get electrocuted by your toaster pretty easily. Like your humidifier there was a 90% chance it's going to catch fire. While you're asleep. Remember the hydrochloric acid slipping slides? Yeah, right. Those are awful. Yeah, and they designed them like that so they would be obsolete very quickly. The acid would burn them much more quickly. And view two. Unfortunately, yeah. So do you have a great set up for this thrilling podcast to come? I'm hungry. So this will explain this set up. Have you ever heard of a horseshoe sandwich? No, I haven't. It is a local delicacy out of Springfield, Illinois, and it dates back to the early 20th century. Okay. It's for a full size portion. It's two pieces of Texas toast. Love Texas toast. Nice. Hamburger patty or ham? Love both ham and hamburger. Well, then you probably like them together. Yeah. On each Texas toast slice. Okay. Put them next to each other. It's open face. Sure. Cover the whole thing with fries. Love it. And then top it all with cheese sauce. Just like nacho cheese sauce. I'm sure there's people out there who use cheese was, but from what I understand from my research, it's more like a Welsh rarebit sauce. Okay, so like cheese with other stuff, that makes it Welsh rarebit sauce. But it's a horseshoe sandwich. Sign me up. In doing research for horseshoes, that was one of the most interesting things I could come up with. Again, I'm hungry, so it really jumped out at me. Yeah, why do they call it that? I didn't see. Because it's the size of a horseshoe. I don't know. It looked to be the size of a horse. Okay, maybe the shoes underneath well, maybe calling it the horse sandwich was untoward. So they just horseshoe queued it up. Right? Yeah, I'll bet that's exactly what it was. Well, anyway, shout out to Springfield, Illinois. Right. Home of the horseshoe sandwich. Yeah. And the cardiovascular disease. Okay, so I know how you feel about horseshoes. I actually love to play horseshoes. Okay, I know how you feel about talking about playing horseshoes. That's super exciting. I find it's an interesting thing. All right. It's fun. You actually do get a bit of exercise, especially if you play competitively, my friend. You can burn as much if you're an average Joe as 150 calories an hour playing horseshoes. You can work off a hard boiled egg an hour. Yeah, or $100 of a horseshoe sandwich. Hey, and if you're planning in the backyard, maybe you have eaten some deviled eggs at picnic, because horseshoes and picnics go together like ants and picnics. That's exactly right. I actually love horseshoes. I got a set a few years ago when my buddy Justin had a 4 July party and we set it up in his backyard and played. And now he kept them and haven't played since. What's the deal? Well, I mean, he just left him at his house. You need to go get them. Those are yours. Yeah, but I don't have actually, I do have an area, but no one comes and hangs out in my backyard. Basically everybody hangs out at Justin's. Yeah. Emily and I would play horseshoes together, but it's more fun with a group. Well, sir and that's one way you could play individually with two people or with pairs. Yeah. And it says in the article you can play solo, but if you're playing horseshoe spikes, that is sad. Yeah. That is a sad day for you. It is. So, Chuck, let's talk about the origin of the horseshoe itself, of the shoe. I got a little info on it. Not the game, the shoe. The shoe. Okay. So if you see a horse in the wild running, it's probably running for its life. Horses naturally don't like to run very much. Of course not. Their feet get sore. That's why they don't run very much. So right when humans said, hey, I'm going to ride that thing, they figured out we need to put something on its feet because little feet get sore. And I don't want to hurt this horse. I'm trying to get it to run probably in the Asian steps about 1000 years. Well, about 2000 years ago. Okay. They started putting like, booties on their horses. That's cute. Like herbs and something to soften the blow of the ground. Right. By the turn of that millennium, the first or second century Ad. People were putting booties, leather booties, which the ancient Romans, I believe, called hippo sandals. They basically put sandals on their horses. Finally, everybody realized all this was idiotic. And you need to put metal on a horse. Right. And by 1000 a d like nailing metal horseshoes to the bottom of a horse's hoof was very common practice. Well, does that not hurt? No, because if you have your fingernail past your quick, if you nail the nail through that past the quick, not below the quick, but anything that grows out past the quick that doesn't have any nerve endings in it. Right. Yeah. So no, it's very similar to that. It's like a huge thick fingernail for the horse. That's what a hoof is. So it hurts them to walk on these, but it doesn't hurt to have people drive nails into them? Yes. Okay. Depending on how long the nail is. Now, you could easily use a nail that's too long and drive it right into the horse's foot, which would be very painful. But as long as the nail is short enough, you're just driving it into something that has no nerve endings and it prevents that foot that's on the other end, the inside of the hoof from becoming sore, from walking. Okay. Okay. So you want to use nails that aren't too long, which is why there's this very specific trade called a ferrier. Who knows what they're doing with trimming horses, hose, shoeing horses, that kind of thing. And there's actually a patron saints of Saint Allegius. Yes. He said to have come across a horse that was ailing, remove the horse's leg, shoot it, and then put the horse's leg back on, and the horse's leg falling after that. Sounds like pocus magic to me. Right. Somewhere along the way, somebody figured out that a horseshoe makes for a pretty great stand in for a discus if you bend it to close it. Yeah, like the ancient Greeks, maybe. Yeah, they were into it. Thanks for sitting through that intro. I saw a little blood come out of your ear. Yes. Greeks and Romans apparently played horseshoes, and it became a popular thing in the United States, like after the Revolutionary War, and I guess it just caught on. Well, hey, let's throw these things. So the ancient Greeks were into discus throwing. Yeah. But you had to be wealthy or part of the military to have a discus. If you were poor, you had access to horseshoes. And if you bent the horse shoes to close them up and threw them like a discus, you had something called kyots. And then one of them landed accidentally on a metal stake and they went, I bet you can't do that again. Right. I think they just got lazy and grew tired of bending the horseshoes. They're like well, as to the horseshoes as they are. Yeah. And horseshoes is an ancient game. It's an ancient game and it's played all over the world. It's not just for suburban American backyards, south Africa, Israel, Italy, to name a few. Yes, I bet it's played the worldwide. And just here in North America, apparently 15 million people play. Not necessarily competitive, but like Justin. Yeah. Steal your horseshoes and play with them. And that is according to the National Horseshoe Pitchers Association, or NHPA. And like every sport, there is an official governing body. And they set the rules. They host tournaments. I imagine they sell T shirts and hats. There's also a rock star. Who? His name is Alan Francis. I thought you meant a real rock star. He's like the rock star before shooting. Like, what's his deal? He's just super great. Yeah, there's apparently no sports figure in all of sports who dominates more than he does. I'm not kidding. This guy listen, he's the most dominant sportsman in the world. Yeah. Okay. He has won 14 of the last 17 men's world championships at the NHPA championships. So what's his name? Alan Francis from Defiance, Ohio. So when people say, like, he's the Michael Jordan of horseshoes, what they should say is, Michael Jordan is the Alan Francis of basketball. Right. They really should. This guy has which we'll get into. But you throw a horseshoe and what you want to do is throw a ringer. Yeah, sure. He's got a 90% average. 90%. Nine times out of ten when he throws these things. It's a ringer. Not in count. It's a ringer. No one walking the earth has a ringer percentage like that. That is amazed. If you want to learn more about Alan Fried. By the way, read Perfection in the Horseshoe Pit from New York by Josh Clark. He wrote a book about them. That is sweet. It's cool. I think it's cool that there's a guy out there. It's like, unbeatable. Yes. I'm pretty good at horseshoes. This guy would wipe the floor with you. Well, of course he would. He's the best athlete in the history of humanity. Of sport. But all I'm saying is I'm pretty good at horseshoes, and I assume it's because I pitched softball. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I think it's probably got something similar. Motion. Yeah, they are similar. And I'm athletic. I'm not one of those people that gets a horseshoe and throws it behind them or over on the picnic table or anything like that. That's good. So that means it's your spectator friendly horseshoe thrower. That's right, sir. 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, only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining realworld skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K Twelve compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. All right, so let's get into this. Pitching is what you call throwing the shoe is about twice the size of a regular horseshoe. First of all, it's not like a little horseshoe. You pitch to see who goes first. Closest to the state goes first. And we need to say right off the bat that there are real rules and there are house rules, right? I'm always a house rules guy. Yeah. So you play by Justin's rules. Well, we codetermine the rules since I bought the kit. Okay, I got you. But if you went to, say, Jake Gyllenhaal's house and he was playing horseshoes and you would play by his rules, you wouldn't be like, according to my rule. No, I'd say Jake, first of all, what kind of name is Dylan Hall? And then I'd say, secondly, what are your house rules? Because I will abide I respect the house rules. Okay, cool. But since we bought the kit together, then we made up our own rules. Basically, I just wanted to make sure that's what you're saying. That's what I figured. And that's one of the points of a game like horseshoes is you can play and make up your own rules. It's no big deal. But we're going to tell you how to play a real game if you're into that as well. Yes. According to the NHPA. Right. So you pitch to see who goes first. The object, if you don't know this by now, is to throw your horseshoe and have it ring the metal stake that is driven into the ground that we'll tell you about in a second. If you didn't know that already, raise your hand so we can send someone to come lay on top of you until you pass out from unconsciousness. Exactly. Games are made up of innings. You play in pairs and you throw two horseshoes. You throw both your horseshoes, and then the next dude or dudette throws their horse shoes. You don't alternate one on one unless you want to per. House rules. House rules. And now there are some details to these rules that I wasn't aware of. Like, you have to pitch both shoes in 30 seconds. Chess. Yeah. In the park. Yeah. But if you're taking longer than that, what are you doing? Are you measuring the air? You're just like drinking beer and talking to people who are watching, like get your head in the game. Exactly. That's what that rule does. That's what I say. Yeah. All right, so I guess we should go over the court and all that stuff of, like, regulation. So if you get your horse shoes, you at least know how to set it up. Well, hold on. What's the end of the game? So if we're playing one another yes. We're both pitching toward the same stake. Yes. You pitch your two in 30 seconds. I pitched my two in 30 seconds. And that's an inning. Yeah. And there's no set number of innings, but normally people will play until you get to 40 points. Yeah, I've seen the common backyard horseshoes. You play to 21. But I think a regulation tournament, you're going to play to 40. And it depends. Also, saw like, Philly rules and stuff like this. Yeah. People get local. You get a punch in the stomach. Yes, exactly. It's called a court where you play. And if you want to play horseshoes in your backyard, you need to have like a level wide open area. You don't want to play it on a hill. And there's actually a lot of schematics online if you want to build your own horseshoe court. All right, so let's go over the basics of the court though. It's 46ft long by 6ft wide. Yes. You've got two pitching platforms, which is where you throw from each 6ft square and you're supposed to have protective backboards. I've never seen that. I guess it doesn't tumble on and hit the guy at the beer cake, but I usually just dig a pit like the chuck. House rules once again. So what is it then? How do you lay out where the end of the box is? There's really not an end of the box for the Chuck house. I got you. You're either ringing it, you're leaning it or you're closest to the pin or closest to the steak. I guess all the schematics I've seen are like man, it is a defined rock. Yeah, like bocci. It's a real deal. Right. So you've got two stakes. They are iron rods about 36 inches long, one inch wide, and they are sticking toward each other at roughly a twelve degree angle, about halfway in. This is about halfway. I would think that would be like really specific, like how many inches above ground. Yeah, I would think so too, but I didn't find that. Apparently you're also supposed to stake it 4ft from the back of the box, but 2ft from the front of the box. Okay. All right, that makes sense. Okay. Chop up the soil or sand if you really want to go the extra mile. Yeah, you should. If you're going to build yourself a horseshoe pit, get some sand. You've got foul lines at 27 ft and 37ft from each steak and that determines where you're going to throw from. They say adult men pitch from 37 in ladies and old people and kids pitch from 27 or shorter. The sexist and ageist. Agreed. I say pitch from wherever you feel comfortable. Yeah. House rules. And they say the backyard games are similar, but it's usually not. Like it's either like sand or asphalt pits or something. Whatever you can accommodate if you don't have that many feet. Like make it shorter. Right. But then you have to handicap your score. Really? Yeah. Okay. My house rules are very unforgiving. That's why I never play horse shoes with you anymore. Yes. All right, let's talk about pitching then. Okay. You want me to? Yes. How do you pitch a shoe? What are the two methods? Well, first let's talk about the anatomy of a shoe. Let's not forget that horse shoes are derived from actual horse shoes which were put on horses hooves. So if you're holding a horseshoe so the two prongs are at the bottom. What's at the top? Then is called the toe. The open space, the opposite the toe. That's the heel. And then the two, I guess, parts at the end that kick inward towards the heel. These are called caulks. Right? Yeah. And I would have it's backwards in my head. But then when you think about how it sits on a horse's foot, it makes sense. Exactly. But I would think the heel would be the part you hold, but it's not, it's the reverse. Right. Because how it sits on a horse's foot. Yeah, exactly. Now, if you want to throw a we're going to teach you right now how to pitch a horseshoe two ways. Yeah. And you got shanks, too. I don't think we mentioned that. Those are the arms. Yeah, that's right. So you've got the toe shanks coming down each side. The heel. The heel. And then the things that kick in are called the caulks. Yeah, the heel cocks. The heel caulks. Right. All right. So if you want to carry out what's called a single flip pitch, this is probably the easiest. That's me. Is this you? Sure this is the easiest. But Alan Francis does this, too. And from what I'm finding, a lot of pro or really good horseshoe pitchers use this single flip pitch. So what you do is you grab the thing using your thumb and your index finger, or your thumb and your index and middle finger, you squeeze the toe between that. So you've got the horseshoe level with the ground, horizontally level with the ground above it, and you bring your arm back like a pendulum. You raise it up again, you swing it back and forth until you can feel it. And you got to do it within 15 seconds because you got another one to pitch. Yeah, but right when that thing feels right, you let it go when it hits eye level with you. Yeah, roughly. Whatever feels comfortable. But I level is recommended. Right. You want to send it in an arc about six to 8ft into the air. And you can in this method, the thing might turn 360 degrees once. It's why it's called a single flip method. But more often than not, if you're a pro, you're shoe does not turn at all. It follows the arc, but it stays flat the whole way. And then right before it gets to the stake, the heel caulks drop and hit that steak and wring around it. Yeah. And everybody goes, take a sip of corn whiskey and they carry off on your shoulders. That is the flip pitch. The single flip pitch. More advanced players. And they say that this is an easier way to get ringers if you can master this, if you spend enough years mastering the quarter turn. Right. I'm sorry, the one and one quarter turn. Not the quarter turn. And there's other ones. This is like three quarter turns. One and three quarter turns. Sure. This is the standard other one. Yeah. For one and a quarter turn, you hold the horseshoe by the shank, so the opening is to the left of your grip if you're right handed, opposite if you're a lefty. Obviously. Yeah. You swing your arm back and forth like a pendulum, just like you were going to do with the flip pitch. And then I get that you let it go lower. Is that right? Yeah. Usually when it hits like, your thigh area okay. Which I think would give it a higher arc is the difference. Right, or a sharper arc. Yeah. But you want to keep that shoe level to the ground instead of flipping it. It's turning a quarter until it meets the stake. Obviously your goal there with the turn is to meet the stake with the I was about to call them prongs cox after we just went over all that. The cox facing the steak. Right. And then you've got yourself a ringer. Everyone drinks corn whiskey and raises their glass that's right. For more corn whiskey to be poured into it. So if you get close, you get no points. Right. Because close doesn't count in horse shoes. Clothes only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Is that where that comes from? It does. I was being coy. Yes. Obviously, you get points by being close. That's where the action comes from. Yeah. It's called an encounter. So let's say you and I just both thrown yeah. That's one inning. We're going to go score our inning. Yeah. Let's say I threw one wild because I've had a lot of corn whiskey from all the ringers I threw previous to this round this evening before I got there to witness it. Oh. I'm just saying, like you're lying about how many rings you threw. I get there. You're like, earlier I threw twelve ringers. That's why I'm drunk. So I throw one and it's out of the court. Yeah, that's out. That's a dead shoe. It doesn't count. Yeah. Not a dead ringer. No, but there are such things. We'll explain that in a second. But I did throw one and it hit the ring and it spun around and we're doing the all count or count all scoring, which means that I get three points. That's greater than three points. It's the highest you can score. Okay. Single pitch. You threw a ringer, too, and you threw yours on top of mine. You got three points for that one. Yeah. And then your second ringer, it stayed in, and not only did it stay in, it fell and is leaning now vertically up against the stake. It's not around it, but it's just up against it. It's called a leaner. That's worth one point. I think that should be two points. It depends. Some people do score at two points. Chuck house rules is two. I've seen videos. That that's one. Yes. I think this is just my opinion. I think it should be three two and one, not three one and one. It makes sense. And the one that I think under your house rules counts as one point no matter what, everybody counts as one point is one that lands within six inches of the steak. Yeah, well, how we play is you just measure with another horseshoe and if it is within the length of the two cocks right. That's what we measure. I don't know if that's six inches or not, but that's what we use. That makes sense. Yeah. So three, two and one or three one and one, depending on how you're scoring. That's the count all method. Yes. I don't get this other method. Okay, I'll explain it to you. It doesn't make sense to me. It does. It took me many times and I actually had to watch a video to get it. It's complex, but it's not really okay. It's just sometimes the rules of games are hard to write down, to get across in writing. Agreed. So the other method of scoring is called cancelation. Right. And so in cancelation rules, that one that I threw out, that's out. It doesn't count either way. Yeah, sure. Remember I threw that ringer. Yeah, you threw that ringer on top of mine that canceled out my ringer, which made my ringer and your ringer. They canceled one another out. See, that's what I don't get. What's the point? That same thing as both of us getting three, both of us getting zero. Okay, it's true. But does that just keep the score down or something? It does. I think also, if you're really good, you know how to cancel other people's points out in addition to scoring yourself. But yes, it does. I think it extends the game, too. Really? Because cancelation, that keeps the points down. And if you're trying to get to 40 points, that's a long game. Yeah, but that one that you threw that's leaning I didn't throw one like that. So there's not one for you to cancel out mine, which means you get your points, whether two points if you're playing at your house or one point if you're playing at a tournament. I get it. So cancelation is just if you do something that's the same as somebody else, they cancel one another out. And then if there's something that's like yours is closer than mine, that you get that one point. Okay. It makes sense, I guess, in a way. And then I like to score points, so I would just give everyone points, right? Yeah, that's the thing. In cancellation points, I'm not going to win any points because if yours is closer, even if mine is within six inches of the steak and yours is within six inches, if yours is closer, you're the one who gets the point. I don't. So it's all like I'm getting all the points in this ending that's you, I got you. But yeah, that makes for a long game. I would. Guess. Although if you have people who are just throwing ringer ring, or ringer true, a game would probably go by, like, in a blink of an eye. So cancelation rules are probably for people who are really good at horseshoes. Yeah, and I've also seen where a lot of times you played a one by two. I don't know, is that the official rule or is that house rule? I didn't see that anywhere. I saw first person to get to 40. Okay, that may be a house rule or a local thing. Yeah, but I'm always a win by two. It sounds a lot like what you're describing is volleyball play to 21, win by two. That's ping pong, too, right? Maybe. So I think we happened upon a magical rule that permeates almost all games, backyard or otherwise. Fun stuff. That's it, man. Do you have anything else? No, as much as I tried. Be careful. Yeah, and if you have lawn darts, turn them into your local government, because you're not supposed to have those. Yeah, they're hoarding those for the apocalypse. Those are going to be valuable one day. Yeah. Message break? Not yet. All right, if you want to learn more about horseshoes, or if you just need a handy print out of these rules for your own home horseshoe Court, just type horseshoes in the search bar housetofworks.com and it's all right there for you. And since I said horseshoes, now, it's time for message break. Hey, summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah, whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music. That's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah, from the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, host Selena Erkart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today, 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. And now it's time for listener mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this Burning Man correction. Okay? Because we've never been. We didn't get it. All right. That was a tough one. We've never been to CERN either, but we still talk about a large Hadron collider. Yeah, but we learned with listener mail that burners take their burning seriously. Okay, let's hear about it. And I feel terrible because I don't have her name, and I apologize about that anonymous burner, but here it is. Ms. Burner. Hey, Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I was so excited when I saw you did a podcast on Burning Man. I couldn't wait to listen. I went to Burning Man five times wow. From 2000 to 2005. So she knows what she's talking about. I didn't know if you all would get it since you've never been, but you nailed it. You made me laugh out loud a number of times. Some people get all serious about it and pretend that it's not all about sex and drugs. But just let me tell you, sex and drugs are a huge part of it. That place wouldn't exist without hallucinogenics. I have seen police there, and that's the one thing you got wrong. I have a friend who was actually arrested for drugs there. Oh, man. So there's definitely a police presence. The man is everywhere. I just wanted to add also, even though it's not a music festival per se, you can really catch some great acts there on the down low. We saw Paul Oakenfold there in 2000 when he was one of the world's top DJs. There was no advertising, just word of mouth that he was there. We rocked up to see him spin an amazing set to about 300 people. It's pretty cool, man. Yeah. Very intimate. It's a big name. Another cool brush was with music legend Perry Ferrell. We saw him dancing at Sunrise and asked him to come over to our place to eat cheese and crackers with us, and he did. He's a really nice guy and really high. And in the Burning Man spirit, there was no sense of them being famous people or being anything other than just part of the city like the rest of us. All are equal on the fire. That's cool. And maybe it's good I don't have her name. Yeah, she just disappeared into the fire exactly like a mirage. So we appreciate that correction, and thank you for the kudos. Yeah, thank you very much. We appreciate that. If you want to correct us on something we got wrong, we always love those. Thank you for everyone who has ever written in to correct us. You can tweet to us at Syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushouldnow. You can send us a correction via email stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can go check out our website, our home on the web stuffystonenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by State Farm. 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 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 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." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-10-31-sysk-halloween-2017-final.mp3 | SYSK's 2017 Super Spooktacular! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysks-2017-super-spooktacular | In this year's super scary Halloween episode, Chuck and Josh read two great works of horror fiction: Gifts, by our very own Ed Grabianowski, and the classic The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. | In this year's super scary Halloween episode, Chuck and Josh read two great works of horror fiction: Gifts, by our very own Ed Grabianowski, and the classic The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. | Tue, 31 Oct 2017 13:57:07 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=13, tm_min=57, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=304, tm_isdst=0) | 55868429 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, and welcome to the podcal. We need to come up with those spooky Simpsons names. You know what they do for Treehouse of Horror every year. All right, we just have never done that. But I guess this year again. Still, I'm just Josh Clark and you're just Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry the murderous Ghoul. Roland. No. You're Josh Spooky. Clark. And I'm Chuck. He's right behind you. Bryant nice. That's good stuff, man. Thanks for swooping in there. Sure. So this is our Halloween special, which we do every year these days. For those of you who aren't familiar but who like horror fiction, prepare to be delighted. Yeah. What we do is we get together every year and we should point out this is one of two ad free episodes we do every year, along with the Christmas Holiday Spectacular. And we fight for this every year because it would really ruin the vibe of a good, spooky story if we took a commercial break, right? Yes. But it's our gift to you. That's right. So what we do is we read it used to be one story. Sometimes we've fan sourced stories, which was yeah, we had a whole horror fiction contest, which we'll never do again. No, it was a lot of work, but it yielded some pretty great stuff. Yeah. And I think last year we did the little two sentence fan submitted things and that was kind of neat. But this year we're going old school and just reading two straight up horror fiction stories, one of which was written expressly for us for this episode by our favorite writer, Ed Grabinowski. That's right. And we have a little update to last year's story. So Ed wrote us a story last year called Extraneous Invoc, which was great and terrifying. It was so terrifying, in fact, Chuck, that over in the UK, a producer of films got in touch with Ed and said, hey, mate, I want to turn that story into a movie. What do you say? And he said, I'm not your mate. But sure, yeah. And it's happening. I mean, how about that? Yeah. They set up a website for it called Thebetween Film. That's the name of the movie is Thebetween. And now, in the post.com bubble days, you can call your website anything. So, again, it's Thebetween Film, and it'll give you some information on the story. There's even a link to last year's Halloween episode. So if you want to go listen to it, go to that site and find it. And they set up a crowdfunding project to help fund the project. And if you kick in, you can get things like, obviously, The Movie, when they complete it. Sure. You can get signed scripts, even a credit in the movie. There's a lot of stuff you can get that they're offering. And the Movie slated to come out February 14, 2018, as it stands. Right. Wow, man, that's great. It's really on track to go. So things are coming up for The Grabster, and he gave us another great story that I would be surprised if it doesn't get turned into a movie eventually as well. Yeah, I guess that producer said, I love the story, but that title's got to go. Yeah, no one knows how to say that. We're just going to call it The Between. No. Cool title. But The Between is definitely a little more marketable, I think, in today's modern world than Latin. Yeah, we ought to get a kickback on that, huh? You know, I didn't bring it up. I was hoping he would, but he hasn't so far. No, we're happy to be de facto executive producers. Yeah, we could also be facto, though, if they give us credits in the film. Maybe a special thanks at the end. Yeah, like that money. Like I owe my life to these guys. Alright, well, you ready to read his newest one? The Grabster's newest story? That's right. It is called Gifs, not GIFFs. Right. That's a good creepy TS. Thank you. So we're going to start, and Jerry, as ever, is going to pull out all the stops and add all the bells and whistles to scare the bejesus out of you while we're reading this. So without further ado, here's gifts by The Grabster. I'm here about the housekeeping job. I'm Marissa. I called earlier. I reached out to shake the man's hand, but he kept his face on the paperwork. He was shuffling, holding out an upraised index finger in my direction. I returned my hand to my side. Finally, he stacked the papers and looked up at me. You'll want to speak to my wife, Ben. She's handling those arrangements. She's gone to the market, but should be back any moment. If you'd like to wait, there's a sitting room at the top of the stairs. He nodded briskly and moved on to some other town. A wide staircase of dark varnished wood led to an upstairs hallway running to my left and right. The ornate wallpaper was striped by alternating shafts of shadow and sunlight coming through open doors, except at one end of the hall. There the doors were closed and the hallway unfolded in shadow. Directly ahead of me was an open archway leading to the sitting room, a sunlit chamber with a fireplace, a number of wellcrafted but time worn leather chairs, a row of bookshelves stacked with volume, and a small table set up for a game of chess. A young boy, roughly six years old, was sitting in one of the chairs, a large book spread out in his lap. He looked up as I entered. Hello, he said. Are you a guest? No. I told him I've come about the housekeeping job. Do you mind a little company? I've got to wait for your mother. Okay. Smile, Brighton. It'll be good to have someone to help again. Mom gets stressed when she has to do it. All herself, along with the shopping and everything. My name is Robert, but everyone calls me Bobby. My name is Marissa. What's that you're reading, Bobby? He tilted the book up so I could see the title, the sign on Rosie's Door. What's it about? A girl who becomes someone else and takes her friends on adventures. I had an adventure this week. Do you want to see what I found? Without waiting for me to answer, he hopped off the chair, setting the book down behind him, and ran past me through the archway into the hall on his short legs. Don't follow him. I turned to follow, seeing him head off down the brighter half of the corridor. It's in my room, he called out and disappeared into one of the open doorways. By the time I got there, he was crawling underneath the bed. It was clearly his room, decorated with racing cars and cartoon characters. He emerged clutching what appeared to be a pillow. I had a dream the other night that I was in the dark, and no matter where I crawled around, I couldn't get out of the dark. It was cool inside wherever I was, but so dark, so black, I couldn't see anything. When I woke up, I was holding this. He held the pillow out to me. It was oddly shaped, more narrow than the usual pillow, and it was made of white satin with a satin ruffle around the edge. I took it and held it up, humoring the child's tall tail, but I noticed the pillow was stained in the center, a yellowish brown mark in a rough oval shape. That's when I realized what it was. It was a pillow from a burial casket. Bobby, where did you get this? I tried to keep from sounding alarmed when I woke for my dream. I was lying on top of it, holding it with both arms. He gave it to me. I heard footsteps coming down the hall behind me and turned to see a small framed woman with graying black hair striding toward me. I handed the pillow back to Bobby. Ms. Laventis? She said. Yes. I stuck out my hand again, this time getting a soft handshake in return. Bobby's been showing me around. I looked back at the child, who sat on the edge of his bed, smiling, the pillow nowhere to be seen. All right. I don't like the sounds of Bobby. No. Not with his little burial casket stained pillow. No. Or his short, stubby legs, which is creepy all by itself. I got the job. That's great. My husband didn't exactly sound joyful at the news. To be honest, neither did I. Working at Shipton Grange Hotel for the summer was a necessity and something of a hardship. The hotel was 200 miles away from our home, and I'd only be able to afford the train back to visit once or twice a week in the four months I'd be working there. But times are hard for everyone, and most had it harder than us. Still, knowing this meant I'd be apart from John for the entire summer tempered my enthusiasm, and I could hear in his voice, even over the phone line, more relief and weariness than glee. We sure need it's. A nice place. Old kind of fussy. Mrs Taggart is nice. And the young boy, Bobby is I paused, about to say he's a bit odd, but it felt like gossiping about a child, so I told John. He's very inquisitive, but it wasn't what I meant. It's a lot for you to do this, John said. It will help in the long run. It's hard to be a part, though. I love you, Mayor. I smiled, looking out the window at the tidy gardens in front of Shift and Grange, dissolving into shadows as twilight set in. I love you too, John. I'm glad you got that sappy part. Yeah. Don't worry about Bobby. Mrs Taggert was walking me through the hotel, showing me what my duties would include and which room I'd be staying in on the ground floor near the kitchen. She stopped, awkwardly placing a hand at my elbow. His imagination is unusual at times, but he's a kind boy. He really is. Which was true, I think. He never showed me the funeral pillow again, and Bobby would often appear around a corner at the doorway of a room I was cleaning, clutching something odd he was so eager to show me and didn't seem to have other friends, so I let him linger around while I worked. In truth, he was more pleasant company than either of his parents, whom I found stiff and formal. They rarely spoke to me at all about anything not directly related to my job. This was under my hat when I took it off this morning, Bobby said one afternoon. He held out a small pile of coins, worn and blackened with age Latin writing, barely legible on the faces. Those must be terribly valuable, I said. Oh, I can't sell them. His face is very serious. Mr. Sorrow says they're mine to keep. Children have their flights of fancy and imaginary friends, especially a child free to roam in old estate like Shipped and Grange. But when Bobby said that name, I felt something on the back of my neck, like a kiss that barely grazes the skin. Your Sorrow? My voice was just a whisper. Yes. Bobby grinned. He's very tall. We were in Room 33, which was named The Uttermost End being the last room at the end of the longest third floor corridor. The light was always bad in that room. The whole section of corridor had a dim, greenish quality to it. It wasn't simply that the light was insufficient, but rather that it felt incorrect. The shadows fell at the wrong angles in the sun when seeing reflecting on a window pane or a crystal decanter appeared as a dull orange hole bored into the sky as we spoke. Bobby's shadow seemed to stretch to reach across the room. As if to unfold me. He closed a small fist around the coins and ran off. The deep, disconcerting shadows remained. I remade the bed covers quickly and hurried to leave. No one had stayed in the uttermost end in the time I've been working at Shifting Grange. Maybe it's because they called it the uttermost end. Not the best name for a room. You'll like it? The lighting is incorrect. Even Mary and Joseph would have been like that's. Okay, we'll go out into the manger. You just keep that room as well. I don't like the sound of Mr. Sorrow either, by the way. I woke up with hands on my throat this morning, John said. Ice cold. What, did someone break in? There was no one there. It must have been a nightmare. My heart was racing, though. I'd imagine so. Check the windows around the house before bed tonight, then. Just to humor me. I will. I think I'll sleep like a stone tonight. We've fallen behind on orders at the plant and machine for went down again. I'm pulling my hair out. John hung up the phone on his end and I listened to the silence on the line for a while, the whisper of currents and the echoes of a thousand voices. Later that week I was cleaning the main dining room, bobby playing at the table behind me with some wooden army man he'd found in the attic. The clatter of his toys had fallen silent, but I didn't notice until Mrs. Pegger walked in. She looked at me then. Her gaze moved behind me, her eyes widening. Bobby, she hissed quietly. I turned to see Bobby standing very close behind me, clutching in his hand a gleaming steel blade. Is that from the kitchen? Mrs. Taggart said. Bobby's face turned. Stolen. No. He dropped the knife clinging to the floor and ran from the room. Mrs. Taggart collected the blade, turning it over in her hands. It appeared to be finally made, though, for a dark stain. She carried it straight out to the trash bins in the rear yard. That boy ain't right. No, that's a turning point right there. In mid summer, the weather grew hot and close, but shade trees and thick walls kept the old estate quite cool. John and I still spoke on the phone every night, and I planned to return home for a weekend in just two weeks. It was nearly all I could think about. At night I would lie in bed, waiting for sleep, trying to slow my breathing, taking in the sugarsweet smell from the elder shrubs growing all around the open window. I'd often awaken hours later, staring into the blind darkness of a strange room in a strange town and feel the weight of loneliness settle on my chest like a stone. In those moments, soft fingers of shadow would trace my jawline and collarbone with the familiarity of a lover. And I spoke to voices I could barely hear. One evening, after completing my work for the day, I found Bobby rolling a small rubber ball slowly up and down the upstairs hallway. Would you like to play catch? I said. His face lit up with the light, and he took up a position 10 meters down the hall from me. It's Canadian. We rolled and bounced the ball back and forth for some time, bobby letting out the first really genuine laughter I'd heard from him. My back was to the long, dim expanse of the corridor leading to the uttermost end. But I hadn't really thought about it until the door to one of the other rooms just behind me slowly opened. I saw it swing open from the corner of my eye. Room 27, the prince's chamber. I watched the gaping doorway for a moment. When no one emerged, I called out Mrs. Taggart. There was no reply, but Bobby giggled behind me and the ball rolled slowly past me. Coming to a stop in front of Room 27, I crept forward to retrieve it, crouching to pick up the ball. As I stooped in front of the empty, darkened room, I was engulfed in a frigid chill. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and returned to Bobby. With my right hand, I tossed the ball. When I pulled my left hand from my pocket, I realized I was holding something. It was a pair of scissors. The orange plastic handle had been melted and blackened by a fire. The blades were clean and sharp. I'd never seen them before. The next day, I was cleaning the dust from beneath one of the guest beds. I like how it brings us along on the cleaning. Oh, yeah. Just to keep us up to date. The next day, I was cleaning the dust from beneath one of the guest beds and as I reached for the rag, I'd sat down. Something else materialized in my hand. I don't mean to say that I reached out and grasped an object. I mean that my empty hand, suddenly and inexplicably, had something in it. It had a dry papery feel. And drawing my hand out from under the bed I saw that it was an old scrap of newspaper. There was no date on it as the top edge was torn and nothing on it seemed to be of any significant advertisements for a furniture shop and an article about a winter storm. In the center of the paper, a hole had been torn through. Looking more closely, I could see that it was actually a bite mark. Someone had chewed through the center of a piece of old newspaper. Mr. Star is giving gifts to you now, miss Marissa. It was Bobby in the doorway, dark circles under his eyes. He stood and watched me for an uncomfortably long time. I threw the newspaper away. Oh, boy, I'm getting creeped out here. Just one more week until I can see you again. I know. I really can't wait. I've got a nice dinner plan and we can walk down by the sarset like we used to. The water is so green this time of year. There was the joy that had been missing from John's voice earlier in the summer and I'll confess, it made my heart swell to hear it. That sounds wonderful. Are things getting better at the factory? A bit. I'm not sleeping well, though, John said. I guess it's just that the house feels empty without you here. I'm consistently awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling of someone lying in the bed beside me. But of course, there's no one there. Someone will be there soon enough. I was trying to be reassuring, but it came out wrong. Me, I mean. John laughed. Of course you. Yeah. You better hope it's her. Right, John? Of course it's you. All right. He sounds fully convinced. All right. You want me to bring it home? I was awakened by a scream. Mrs. Taggart was wailing and I ran toward the sound, groggy from sleep and stumbling over furniture in the darkness. She was in Bobby's room. The bed was empty and she was crouched halfway out the open window. Bobby. She cried out into the night. I stood there halfway through the door, stunned. The window opened via a hand crank, the handle detached for safety and the socket was too high for Bobby to reach in any case. Mr. Taggart ran past me down the corridor and I followed him downstairs into the cool night air. Bobby was crumpled on the lawn, his right leg folded under him, his face bloody. But he was alive. He'll be all right. Mr. Taggart called up to his wife, who was still sobbing in the window. Call for the doctor. Then Mrs. Taggert shrieked, glaring at me across the wide lawn. At that moment, I noticed something in my hand. The hand crank for the window. I stammered and dropped it. I was sound asleep, I swear. I ran back into the house for the phone, not thinking clearly, not knowing what to do. So I rang John. I needed to hear his voice, Mayor. He sounded sleepy. John, something horrible happened. Bobby fell out the window. But I had the crank to open it in my hand. I don't know how it got there, but I was asleep. John. I was asleep. Calm down, love. Take a breath and explain it again. I don't really understand. John's voice was cut off by a sharp hitch in his breath, a sort of short cough. John, are you there? The only sound over the phone line was a soft, wet whistling repeated in a slow, rhythmic pattern. I felt something in my hand just then, something warm, like my fingers were wrapped in hair, a heavy weight dangling below on the phone. The whistling sound faded to a low gurgle, and I screamed and I screamed while something hot and wet splashed onto my legs and ran down my feet. But I refused to look down. I refused to see what it was in my hand. And the voice on the phone was familiar and cold. It was not John. And I just screamed. Wow. Boom. Holy cow. That is how it's done if you're a horror writer. Somewhere in Canada, a microphone was just dropped. Nice. Way to go, grabster. That was good stuff, Daddy. That's a good one. I think that would make, at the very least, a wonderful short film. Agreed. That's going to be a tough one to follow. It's going to take a literal horror classic to follow that one. And we'll get to that right after our eight minute commercial break. Hey, we're back. Yes. We should set this one up a little bit. It's called The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and it is one of our classic old stories that we used to do some of these in 1892, published first in New England magazine, and this can only be considered early work of feminist literature. And what it really is, clearly is a statement on the treatment of women at the time. Oh, yeah, for sure. Clearly. And it must have been when was it originally published? 1892. This is very brave to have published this, because super brave. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is definitely almost poking fun at the status quo between men and women at the time by making her character just so fully bought into it that she's not even really questioning it at first while she's questioning it, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, for sure. She's questioning the details, but not the structure that is giving rise to the details. Yeah. And she's clearly not too shy about making her statement. You don't have to read between too many lines. Right? I like it. Edit, too. Good story. And I believe this one has been made into a movie on Netflix, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure I saw the Yellow wallpaper on Netflix. Yeah. All right. The Yellow Wallpaper. Here we go. It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity. That would be asking too much of fate. Still, I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it, else why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? It's sort of a mouthful, huh? It really is. It's a late 19th century mouthful. No one rents this place. Right. John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience in faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. John is a physician, and perhaps I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind. Perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see, he does not believe I am sick. And what can one do if a physician of high standing and one's own husband assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing to matter with one but temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency? What is one to do? My brother is also a physician and also of high standing, and he says the same thing. So I take phosphates or phosphates, whichever it is, and tonics and journeys and air and exercise. And I'm absolutely forbidden to work until I am well again. By the way, she put work in quotation marks, which I think was quite balsy at the time. Yeah, little cynical for 1892. Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work with excitement and change would do me good. But what is one to do? I did write for a while, in spite of them. But it does exhaust me a good deal having to be so sly about it or else be met with heavy opposition. I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition. And I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house, the most beautiful place. It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite 3 miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people. There is a delicious garden. I never saw such a garden. Large and shady, full of box bordered paths and lined with long grape covered arbors with seats under them. There were greenhouses, too, but they're all broken now. There was some legal trouble, I believe. Something about the heirs and cohesirs. Anyhow, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care. There is something strange about the house. I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlit evening. But he said what I felt was a draught and shut the window. I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to the nervous condition. But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self control. So I take pains to control myself before him, at least, and that makes me very tired. I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window. In such pretty, old fashioned chintz hangings. But John would not hear of it. He said there was only one window and not room for two beds. Nice touch. And no near room for him if he took another. He is very careful and loving and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a scheduled prescription for each hour in the day. He takes all care from me, so I feel basically ungrateful not to value it more. He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. Your exercise depends on your strength of, my dear, he said. Good luck. Like that. And Joe food is somewhat on your appetite, but air you can absorb all the time. So we took the nursery at the top of the house. It was a big airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look always an air and sunshine galore. It was a nursery first, and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys school had used it. It is stripped off the paper and great patches all around the head of my bed about as far as I can reach and in a great place on the other side of the room, low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye and following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study. And when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide, plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting, a smouldering, unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly, sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it. I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long. There comes John. I must put this away. He hates to have me write a word. All right. Not bad. It sounds to me early on like this lady is already a prisoner in this room. A prisoner in her life. Maybe even Chuck, you could say. I think so. John strikes me he's one of those doctors. It's like just breathe into this bag for a bit and you'll be fine. Don't question me, or I'll have you surgically murdered. All right, take it away. We've been here two weeks and I haven't felt like writing before since that first day. I'm sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery and there's nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength. John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I'm glad my case is. Not serious. But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies me. Of course. It is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way. I'm meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am, a comparative burden already. Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able to dress and entertain and order things. It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby such a dear baby. And yet I cannot be with him. It makes me so nervous. I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughed at me so about this wallpaper. At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead and then the barred windows and then the gate at the head of the stairs, and so on. You know, this place is doing you good, he said. And really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for three months rental. Then let us go downstairs, I said. There's such pretty rooms there. Then he took me in his arms and he called me a blessed little goose. And he said he would go down to the cellar if I wished and have it whitewashed into the bargain. But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things. It is an airy and comfortable room as anyone need wish. And of course I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim. I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper. Out of one window I can see the garden those mysterious, deep shaded arbors, the riotous old fashioned flowers and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy that I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors. But John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancy and that I ought to use my will in good sense to check the tendency. So I try. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find I get pretty tired when I try. It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work when I get really well. John says we will ask cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit but he says he would assume put fireworks in my pillowcases to let me have those stimulating people about now. I wish I would get well faster but I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had. There's a recurrent spot where the pattern walls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes that stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness up and down in sideways they crawl and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn't match and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before and we all know how much expression they have. I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store. I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to have. And there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend. He used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe. The furniture in this room is no worse than in Harmonious, however for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out and no wonder. I never saw such ravages as the children have made here. The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spot and it stickth closer than a brother. They must have had perseverance as well as hatred. Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered. The plaster itself is dug out here or there and this great heavy bed, which is all we found in the room looks as if it has been through the wars. But I don't mind it a bit, only the paper. There comes John's sister, such a dear girl as she is and so careful of me. I must not let her find me writing. She's a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick. But I can write when she is out and see her. A long way off from these windows there is one that commands the road a lovely, shaded, winding road and one that just looks all over the country. A lovely country too, full of elms and velvet meadows. This wallpaper has a kind of sub pattern in a different shade, particularly irritating one but you can only see it in certain lights and not clearly then, but in the places where it isn't faded. Where the sun is just so I can see a strange, provoking formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. There's sister on the stairs. You ever call Yumi a blessed little goose? Yeah, every day. I couldn't believe the lady. Took the words right out of my mouth. How does that go over? It doesn't go over well. I have chin splints from it. All right. So the lady is here. We now have learned that her sister in law is the housekeeper and nanny of her baby. That she doesn't see it's right and she's in this room going a little nuts, was she? Well, to begin with, who knows? Well, I don't know. I think the fact that she's saying like I've always considered furniture capable of moving and possessing a personality. Yeah. I don't know if you'd call that nuts, but maybe she has an imagination. The groundwork is there. Here we go. Well, the 4 July is over. The people are gone, and I am tired out. John did put fireworks in my pillowcase. Just kidding. The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me some good to see a little company. So we just had Mother and Nellie and the children down for a week. Of course, I didn't do a thing. Jenny sees to everything now, but it tired me all the same. John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me over to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so. That is to say, a 19th century man. Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far. I don't feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything. And I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous. I cry at nothing and cry most of the time. Of course, I don't when John is here or anybody else but when I am alone, and I'm alone a good deal. Just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases. And Jenny is good and lets me alone when I want her to. So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane sit on the porch under the roses and lie down up here a good deal. I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind. So I lie here on this great immovable bed. It is nailed down, I believe, and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start will say at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched. And I determined for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion. I know a little of the principle of design and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation or alternation or repetition or symmetry or anything else that I've ever heard of. It is repeated, of course, by the breadth but not otherwise looked at in one way each breath sands alone. The bloated curves and flourishes a kind of debased Romanesque with delirium trimmings go waddling up and down in isolated columns of patuity. But on the other hand they connect diagonally and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting ways of optic horror like a lot of wallowing, seaweeds and full chase. The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so. And I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of it's going in that direction. They have used a horizontal breath for a freeze and that adds wonderfully to the confusion. There is one end of the room where it is almost intact and there, when the cross lights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it I can almost fancy radiation after all. The interminable grotesques seem to form around a common center and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap, I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it's absurd but I must say what I feel and think in some way it is such a relief. But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. Half the time now I am awfully lazy and lie down ever so much. John says I mustn't lose my strength and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat. Dear John, he loves me very dearly and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest, reasonable talk with him the other day and tell him how I wish you would let me go and make a visit to cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn't able to go nor able to stand it after I got there. And I did not make out a very good case for myself for I was crying before I had finished. It's getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness, I suppose. And dear John gathered me up in his arms and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed and sat by me and read to me till it tired. My poor little goose head. Sorry. I feel terrible for this lady, I do. And it just clearly is suffering from massive depression. Yeah, for sure. And Anne on top of that. She's being locked in a room that's driving her nuts by her husband. Yeah, I think that's the problem here. He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had and that I must take care of myself for his sake and keep well, he says. Yeah, because it's all about John, right? Right. Get better for me. Why can't you just get better? He says. No one but myself can help me out of it. That I must use my will and self control and not let any silly fancies run away with me. There is one comfort. The baby is well and happy and does not have to occupy this nursery with that horrid wallpaper. If we had not used it, that blessed child would have what a fortunate escape. Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds. I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here. After all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see. Of course, I never mention it to them anymore. I am too wise. But I keep watch of it all the same. There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me or ever will. Behind that outside pattern. The dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder. I begin to think I wish John would take me away from here. It is so hard to talk to John about my case because he is so wise, because he loves me so. But I tried. Last night it was moonlight. The moon shines in all around, just as the sun does. I hate to see it sometimes. It creeps so slowly and always comes in by one window or another. John was asleep and I hated to waken him. So I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper until I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern just as if she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move. When I came back, John was awake. What is it, little girl? He said. Don't go walking about like that. You'll get cold. I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I was really not gaining here and that I wished he would take me away. Why, darling? Said he, our lease will be up in three weeks and I can't see how to leave before the repairs are not done at home. And I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course, if you're in any danger, I could and would. But you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know you are gaining flesh and color. Your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about you. I don't weigh a bit more, said I, nor as much and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away. Bless her little heart, said he with a big hug, she shall be as sick as she pleases. But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep and talk about it in the morning. And you won't go away? I asked gloomily. How can I, dear? It's only three weeks more, and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jeannie is getting the house ready. Really, dear, you are better in body. Perhaps, I began, and then stop short where he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word. My darling, I beg of you for my sake and for our child's sake as well as of your own, that you will never for one instant let the idea enter your mind. There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so? Of course, I said no more on that score. And we went to sleep. Before long he thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately. On a pattern like this. By daylight there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law that is constant, irritant to a normal mind. Color is hideous enough and unreliable enough and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway and following, it turns back a somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down and tramples you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a Florida Arabesque reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools budding and sprouting and endless convolutions. Why, that is something like it that is sometimes there is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots in through the east window. I always watch for that first long straight ray. It changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it. That is why I always watch it by moonlight. The moon shines in all night when there is a moon. I wouldn't know it was the same paper at night in any kind of light in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all, by moonlight. It becomes bars the outside pattern, I mean. And the woman behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind that dim sub pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour. I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me and just eat all I can. Indeed, he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal is a very bad habit, I'm convinced. For, you see, I don't sleep, and that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake. Oh, no. The fact is, I'm getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jenny has an inexplicable look. It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis. Perhaps it is the paper, all right. She's coming to her senses, right? I don't know if you would call that a scientific hypothesis, but yeah, she seems to be like oh, I mean about John. Right? Okay. Yes, agreed. This, quote position unquote. All right. I've watched John when he did not know I was looking and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses. And I've caught him several times looking at the paper, and Jenny too. I caught Jenny with her hand on it once. She didn't know I was in the room. And when I asked her, in a quiet, very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper, she turned around as if she had been caught stealing and looked quite angry and asked me why I should frighten her so. Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched and she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's. And she wished we would be more careful. Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself. Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see. I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better and more quiet than I was. John is so pleased to see me improved. He laughed a little the other day and said I seem to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper. I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper. He would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away. I don't want to leave now until I found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough. I'm feeling ever so much better. I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch the developments. But I sleep a good deal in the daytime. In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing. There are always new shoots on the fungus and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I've tried conscientiously it is the strangest yellow that wallpaper. It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw. Not the beautiful ones, like buttercups, but old, foul, bad yellow things. There is something else about that paper. The smell. I noticed it the moment we came in the room. But with so much air and sun, it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining room, skulking in the parlour, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair even when I go to ride. If I turn my head suddenly and surprise it, there is that smell. Such a peculiar odor, too. I spent hours in trying to analyze it to find what it smells like. It is not bad at first, and very gentle but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather, it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me. At first I thought seriously of burning the house to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper. A yellow smell. There's a very funny mark on the wall, low down near the motherboard. A streak that runs around the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture except the bed. A long, straight, even smooch. What are these? Smooches? I think she means like smear. Smudge? Okay, smudge. I think. Old timey smudge. I'm going to bring that back. It goes behind every piece of furniture except the bed. A long, straight, even smooch. As if it had been rubbed over and over. I wonder how it was done and who did it and what they did it for. Round and round and round. Round and round and round. It makes me dizzy. I really have discovered something at last through watching so much at night when it changes so I have finally found out the front pattern does move. And no wonder the woman behind shakes it. Sometimes I think there are great many women behind and sometimes only one. And she crawls around fast and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots, she keeps still and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she's all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern. It strangles. So I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down and makes their eyes white. If those heads were covered or taken off, it would not be half so bad. I think that woman gets out in the daytime and I'll tell you why. Privately, I've seen her. I can see her out of every one of my windows. It is the same woman I know, for she is always creeping and most women do not creep by daylight. True. That is very true. Except little Gooses. I see her on that long road under the tree creeping along. When a carriage come, she hides under the BlackBerry vines. I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be out creeping by daylight. I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John suspects something at once. And John is so queer now that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room. Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself. I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once but turn as fast as I can. I can only see out of one at a time. And though I always see her she may be able to creep faster than I can turn. I've watched her sometimes away off in the open country creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind. If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the Underwood. I mean to try it little by little. I found out another funny thing, but I can't tell at this time does not do to trust people so much. There are only two more days to get this paper off and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes. And I heard him ask Jenny a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give. She said I slept a good deal in the daytime. John knows I don't sleep very well at night for all I'm so quiet. He asked me all sorts of questions too and pretended to be very loving and kind as if I couldn't see through him. Still, I don't wonder he EXO sleeping under this paper for three months. It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jenny are secretly affected by it. All right, take us home, brother. Taken at home. Come on, poor lady. Let's go. Hurrah. This is the last day, but it is enough, Jon to stay in town overnight and won't be out until this evening. Jenny wanted to sleep with me, this fly thing but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone. That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit. As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook. I shook and she pulled. And before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper a strip about as high as my head and half around the room and then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it today. We go away tomorrow and they are moving all of my furniture down again to leave things as they were before. Jenny looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing. She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself but I must not get tired. How she betrayed herself that time. But I am here and no person touches the paper but me, not alive. She tried to get me out of the room. It was too patent. But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could and not to wake me, even for dinner. I would call when I woke. So now she is gone and the servants are gone and the things are gone and there is nothing left with that great bedstead nailed down with the canvas mattress we found on it. We shall sleep downstairs tonight and take the boat home tomorrow. I quite enjoy the room now, but it is bare again. How those children did tear about here. The bed set is fairly gnawed, but I must get to work. I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in. Tell John come. I want to astonish him. I've got a rope up here that even Jenny did not find. If that woman does get out and tries to get away, I can tie her. But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on. This bed will not move. I tried to lift it and push it until I was lame. And then I got so angry I bit off a little piece in one corner, but it hurt my teeth. Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it. All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growth just shriek with derision. And I'm getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out the window would be an admirable exercise but the bars are too strong to even try. Besides, I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued. I don't like to look out the windows even. There are so many of those creeping women and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did. But I am securely fastened down by my well hidden rope. You don't get me out into the road there. I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes at night, and that is hard. It is. So pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please. I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jenny asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall so I cannot lose my way. Why, there's John at the door. It is no use, young man. You can't open it. How? He does call him Pound now he's crying for an axe. It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door. John dear, said I in the gentleman's voice, the key is down by the front steps under a plantain leaf. That silenced him for a few moments. Then he said very quietly indeed, open the door, my darling. I can't, said I. The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf. And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see. And he got it, of course. And he came in, he stopped short by the door. What is the matter? He cried. For God's sake, what are you doing? I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. I've got out at last, said in spite of you and Jane, and I pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back now. Why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, that I had to creep over him every time. Alrighty, that was a good story. Creeping. She became part of the wallpaper. Yeah. And I love how Madam Perkins just switched suddenly where your brain is like, wait, what happened? And then it starts to sink in. It's great stuff. Yeah, very creepy and quite a feminist statement. Like I said, you don't have to read between many lines on that one. No. Yeah. Being held behind bars. Yeah. Well, happy Halloween, everybody. Thanks for joining us. We hope you like this one. Yeah, and this one is released right on Halloween, which is always nice. It is perfect, as they say. So until the next episode. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at joshmclark and Syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstob. Chuck Bryant. You can send us a spooky email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Com." | |
2112a49a-121b-11eb-85ed-e3fa80c919be | Short Stuff: Chinatowns | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-chinatowns | If you live in a major city in the USA, you probably have a Chinatown. Listen in and learn all about these unique cultural staples today. | If you live in a major city in the USA, you probably have a Chinatown. Listen in and learn all about these unique cultural staples today. | Wed, 09 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=160, tm_isdst=0) | 13212564 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. Giddy up. Let's go, little sailors. Sail on toward the short stuff now. Yeah, this is about Chinatown towns, and I found this to be very interesting because I love a good Chinatown or a good Japan town. Okay. I like ethnic groupings. I love Korea town. I used to live near Korea town in La. Actually, I was in little Armenia, technically was my neighborhood. But I like groupings of ethnicities. I think it's cool. I think it's something that people might naturally do. But in the case of Chinatowns, it's not only something that can help immigrants as they come into the country and did from the very beginning, but sadly, the dark side is they were a necessity because of racial exclusion and to protect themselves and seek refuge among their own. Because for many years in this country, some might say there's anti Asian bias that continues today in the wake of COVID. And by some might say, I mean, it's fairly obvious because of what's going on, very sadly. But for many, many years in this country, there was a very much anti Chinese immigrant feeling going on. A lot of it had to do with good old fashioned Americans thought that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs. And Chinese immigrants did come to this country en masse, starting in the Chinese immigrants came in the 1850s alone. Yeah, that's quite a bit. They were drawn to the United States. Pretty understandably, because all of a sudden, america was this land of opportunity, and the western expansion was producing a lot of railroad jobs. There was a gold rush in California at the time. Apparently the lumber mills and the lumber industry in the Pacific northwest was really getting going, and so it attracted a tremendous amount of Chinese people. And at first I get the impression, I think, from this is this the how stuff works article you got? Indeed. It basically makes the point that at first, the influx of Chinese immigrants in the mid 19th century was tolerated, if not just, if not welcome, it was fine. And then as they started to show up in greater and greater numbers faster and faster, then the xenophobia really kicked in. And like you said, they were basically like, you go over here and you stay together. And this is a really great example of Chinese immigrants making lemon chicken out of lemons and creating these really vibrant, really interesting communities that almost is like, well, can we come eat over in your little enclave that we forced you guys to make? And that's where those Chinatowns came from. It's a pretty cool example of something good coming out of something bad. Yeah. The first formerly recognized Chinatown was in San Francisco, and this was in the 1850s, and it was called little Canton at the time because most of the immigrants in that area at the time were from what was known as canton and southeastern China. Today it's known as, I would say Guangzhou, but I'm sure that's wrong. What is it? Guangzhou. I looked up. Really? Yes. It's a new day and stuff. You should know history. Looking at pronunciation in 1853, I think, is when they first actually said the word Chinatown in the newspaper. And it was about a twelve block area. 22,000 Chinese immigrants, so many people. By the end of the 1880s, and at the time, because of the page law from 1875 that prevented Chinese men from bringing their wives and kids, there was a ratio of 20 men to every woman in Chinatown because either single men only were coming over, or men left their families behind to come over. Right. 22,000 people living in, I guess, San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1880s and a twelve block district, and only 2200 of them were women. That's nuts, dude. Yeah, but I guess America started to ease its immigration laws, especially against Chinese immigrants, after world war II. It took quite a while. And so finally, women, wives, daughters, moms started coming over. And I get the impression that the character and the complexion of Chinatowns in the United States started to change. They became a little more family oriented. Yeah. And if you've ever been to a Chinatown, you have probably seen what's known as a piphang, which is those beautiful decorated gateway arches that sort of lead you into the district. The business districts are usually defined by a few different well, there's tons of Chinese owned businesses. Obviously. They very early on, were involved in shoemaking laundry service, cigar production, and they serve Chinese people, they serve white people. And in those days, the organizations that serve the actual immigrants in Chinatown were broken down into social organizations, district and family organizations, which were further broken down into, like, what region basically you came from and then what's known as tongs. These are brotherhoods that they would provide housing and jobs or legal services for people just arriving into the community. Yeah, because that was one of the greatest functions and first functions of Chinatown in the United States was it was a place where if you were a Chinese immigrant, that's where you went and the community would help take care of you. Right. That's a pretty great thing to have when you're newly arrived in a new country. I think so, too. Should we take a break? I think go to the dark side. Yeah, exactly. Let's do that. All right, we'll be right back. All right. So like I was saying, Chuck, at first, the American sentiment toward newly arriving Chinese immigrants was at least tolerant, and then it quickly turned to xenophobia. And one of the problems with having a lot of people of the same ethnicity all living in one place is it's an easy target for outraged xenophobic white mobs to attack and burn down and beat people up in there. And that's what happened a lot in the late 19th and early 20th century in Chinatowns around the United States. Anytime there was a problem and it was blamed on Chinese people, there was probably a violent attack on Chinatown. It just seemed to be par for the course. Yeah. There was one in 1871 in Los Angeles where a white mob lynched 17 Chinese men and boys, and the governor at the time, John Bigler, said, we need more restrictions on these Chinese immigrants coming in. So the local government wasn't doing them any favors at all. I think in 1882 is when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. It was called the Chinese Exclusion Act. For God's sake, Chuck. Yeah. And this is one of America's very first restrictive immigration laws. Yeah. And it basically said, if you are already here as a Chinese immigrant, you're not going to be able to become a naturalized citizen. We're not going to kick you out, but don't count on becoming an American, and if you're not here already, stay out. We're not letting any more Chinese people into the country. That was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And like I was saying, it wasn't until World War II that they started to relax those restrictions. So restrictions against Chinese immigration were pretty tight for about 60 years, at least. Yeah. And there was a lot of anti Chinese journalism going on. I think they started to try and purposely spread the word and say, that Chinatown. You don't want to go to Chinatown if you're a white person and do business with them. There's a lot of crime there. It's dirty and diseased there. I think during the bubonic plague pandemic of the early 20th century, I think the Chinatown in Honolulu was actually destroyed, and the one in San Francisco was totally cordoned off. Yeah. As much of a target as Chinatowns were, it was even worse for people who lived outside of China towns. Like, they were even, I guess, easier to get at. There was no safety in numbers or anything like that. Right. So over time, I think the violence, the antiasian violence of the early 20th century subsided, and there was a kind of, like, enforced, threatened peace that kind of broke out. And Chinatowns kind of went to being like they went back to being, like this exotic place, but a place where you could, as a white person or nona Asian American, could travel to and go eat in the restaurants or use the businesses, that kind of thing. By mid to late 20th century yeah. There are roughly 50 Chinatowns in the United States today. Most major cities have a Chinatown. Atlanta doesn't have a Chinatown chinatown. But we have an area in Atlanta called Beaufort Highway, and it's a street. And this road is well known for just having a bunch of groups of ethnicities sorted together. So there'll be an area where there's a lot of Chinese business there's a Chinese mall I just actually went over the other day to the North China Eatery and got like 100 dumplings to go to Freeze. Nice. Because they actually sell them. They sell buns and dumplings frozen. Not wholesale, but just bulk. Sure. So it's delicious stuff, but all kinds of ethnicities. There's Filipino area, there's Mexican area, top notch Vietnamese food, man. It's just do yourself a favor. If you ever go to Atlanta, just sort of ask where Buford Highway is and go eat. You're not going to go wrong. But not a true Chinatown like you would think of, unfortunately, in Atlanta. But Portland, DC, honolulu, Seattle, Chicago, Philly, houston, New York, obviously houston, Texas, as a Chinatown. And now because of gentrification, a lot of these Chinatowns are threatened. Obviously in cities like San Francisco where everything is becoming gentrified, chinatowns are starting to shift to the suburbs a little more. And Monterey Park, California, was dubbed the first suburban Chinatown and became majority Asian American in the 1990s. Yeah, for those residents who are staying, a lot of the second generation are like, I don't really want to live in the middle of the city any longer. I want to go have a bigger house or whatever. Like you said, they're moving to the suburbs. But for the ones who are staying, like, the cost of living in the city is sky high compared to the suburbs. I don't care what city you're in. So that's a big problem. Gentrification is forcing out the ones who do want to stay. And so there's a push among second and third and more generation Chinese Americans to say, hey, we need to make sure that these places are protected culturally. We need to keep the white people out or anything like that. But we need to make sure that they just don't get over developed or anything like that. They maintain their original character to a large degree, right. At the very least. No Tech Bros. None. Which is ironic that San Francisco's Chinatown is still the most vibrant and flourishing Chinatown in the United States. It's the OG, and it's still going strong. Yes. I think DC's. Chinatown only has 300 Chinese people living there now. Well, actually, that was in 2015. So unless that's risen, it may be even less. Yes, that's like a 10th of what it was in 1970. Yeah. So visit a Chinatown. Everyone go to Chinatown in New York City and bring cash. A lot of these places, dim sum places, will only take cash. That's my little travel tip for you. And eat some dim sum and some soup dumplings. Very nice. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, we're going to go eat some dim sum. So 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." | |
41169fdc-53a3-11e8-bdec-b34102bcdcd2 | The Great Finger in the Wendy’s Chili Caper | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-great-finger-in-the-wendy-s-chili-caper | In 2005 a woman named Anna Alaya discovered a length of human finger – nail and all – in her Wendy’s chili. Her cries of disgust would set off a media firestorm, a criminal investigation and a prison sentence for her and her husband. | In 2005 a woman named Anna Alaya discovered a length of human finger – nail and all – in her Wendy’s chili. Her cries of disgust would set off a media firestorm, a criminal investigation and a prison sentence for her and her husband. | Thu, 10 Jan 2019 16:20:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=16, tm_min=20, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=10, tm_isdst=0) | 42316792 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. And this is the stuff you should know Chili Caper, edition, edition. Corporate Investigations, las Vegas, San Jose, Chile. Yeah. And that means we get to use our special investigator nicknames. Seattle Clark, Portland Bryant. In San Francisco. Jerry Rowland. That's not bad. I would have chosen Tawny. Kate in for me. Yeah, that was a very ham fisted way to set up an in show mention of our three shows next week. Oh, yeah. It was actually lost on me, Chuck. Next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It's apparently lost on the Pacific Northwest. No one's coming. Next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we will be in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco on January 15, 16th and 17th at the More Theater, Revolution Hall and the Castro for Sketch Fest. And you have an end of the world live Friday night in San Francisco. And I have a movie crush live on Saturday afternoon in San Francisco. I also have a Brooklyn end of the world one two on the 24th, just FYI. Hey, let's not get carried away here, okay? All right. But those are the shows we have coming up, everyone, so come on out. There's still great tickets left at all three of these venues and all five probably. I'm not sold out for movie crush. No, I'm not either. Especially those into the world of Movie Crush shows. Your best chance to hang out and talk to us personally because they are more intimate venues. Like I wear a negligee. Well, Busy Phillips is there, so I'm going to have on my dinner jacket. Oh, very nice. Trying to impress her with my tuxedo, right? She's not impressive. Tuxedo and jeans. It's a look. So get all the information@sysklive.com or for the sketchfest shows, just go to the Sfkechfest site and come out and support us, everyone, and shake our hand. Pat us on the back or spit on our shoes. Don't do that. Don't do that. Spit between our shoes. Just make it close. If you really hate us, spit between our shoes. There you go. That's going to end up on a T shirt, I have a feeling. All right, let's talk about chile fingers. All right, so back in 2005, actually, let's get in the way back machine. Go watch this thing go down. Way back machine, just for this short distance. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you can walk to 2005. This is actually kind of great, though, because when you're 48, almost to go back 13 years, I want to go. So all of a sudden I'm 35, which I thought was old, but, man, I'd love to be 35. Right now. I'm pretty happy with 42, I've got to say. I'm not quite happy with the kind of catchers mitt that my face is turning into. But everything else I'm pretty glad about. Yeah, just wait. Okay. Happens. Oh, no. You're staring down the barrel of 50, and you're going, jeez, I only got, like, 15 more good years left. That is so not true. Don't you know? Fifty s the new thirty five. You know what's funny is all the people in this Wendy's in San Jose we just showed up at are looking at it's like, what are these guys talking about? I know. They're like, Get your super bar order underway. Yeah. They're like, Why don't you guys just be quiet and listen to Chambawamba like everybody else is right now? I don't think they had Superb in 2005. That was more like the but still what was it? Superbar. Yeah. You don't remember that? No. Wendy's and the super bar, which was this weird combination of tacos and pasta and salad and baked potatoes. And baked potatoes. Just like, whatever you want. I forgot all about that, man. What a good idea. Yeah, the Superb was a weird, weird thing, but I hate it. So there is no super bar anymore. But there is if you look over, there is a woman named Anna or Anna Ayala, and she is sitting with her in laws, her mother in law, her father in law, or brother in law, maybe a couple of other people. And she is about to bite down into a bite of Wendy's chili that she has just ordered at the San Jose Wendy's downtown San Jose Wendy's, I believe, on March 22, 2005. Yeah. She's in her late 30s. It's cold in San Jose. She's from Las Vegas, so she's not used to this. So she's from San Jose originally, but she's moved to Vegas a couple of years ago. Well, sure. She has lived in Las Vegas lately and has been warming in the sun there. Right. And is like, I don't like this cold. I'm going to order some chili. Because that windy's chili is so, so good. It's meaty and warm, as it puts it. That's right. And so she sits down, she's eating this thing, and then all of a sudden, look at her. She's upset, Josh. She's gone berserk. Everybody at the table has got their hands up, like, whoa. Settled down. And she's just pointed at her chili, her chili cup, which she's reached the bottom of. And she's saying that there's a finger in her chili that she just bit into a finger. Yeah. She looks like she's about to puke. I didn't see her vomit. I didn't either. But in court later, she would say she did, so maybe we can be key witnesses. Right? She's going up to the counter demanding. I think she just said to one of the cashiers, who did you kill to get this finger? Which is a weird thing to say. Yes. She's yelling at everyone else in the restaurant with chili, saying, don't eat that. Yeah, that's finger chili. That's right. Finger chili no one wants. Cha, cha cha. She's starting to try to start a chant, I believe, and there's only one guy that's still eating. And he said, yeah, I ordered the finger chili, right? He said, I think you got mine. So she's freaking out. Things are starting to go down. There's a hubbub in the restaurant. Everyone's got she has everyone's attention. She's saying that she just found a finger in her chili. The people at the counter are incredulous. They're kind of poking at it a little bit. They're saying, I think it's a vegetable, or whatever. It looks like a carrot to me, lady. Right? A very pale carrot with a fingernail on it. And it's the fingernail, really that does the trick. After this point, it becomes clear to everyone in the Wendy's that there is a finger that this woman just found in her chili. There's a fingernail on it. It's about an inch and a half of a finger from the tip to, well, about an inch and a half down, and she just bit down on it, and she found it in her chili. So the Wendy's employees react swiftly. They dump out all the chili. They call the police. The police come by and they say, well, this is a health department kind of thing, really. And the police leave, and the Wendy's employees call the owners of the franchise, JeM Management, and they say, don't do anything in that finger. Put it in the freezer, and we'll be there in the morning. And at this point, Anna Alia leaves. Or Anna Ayala. This is going to be very difficult because I want to say alaya, she leaves. Her families, her family members are taking pictures of the location, and a huge national story has just begun. By 10:00 that night this happened about seven by 10:00 on the local news, there's an unconfirmed report of a woman who found a finger in her chili at Wendy's. And Dave Thomas gets indigestion immediately. Well, he's been dead a few years, so that'd be phenomenal. I thought he was alive then. He died in 2002. Okay, well, he's rolling over in his grave, but by this time, he'd really kind of made Wendy's, like a really loved and respected restaurant because everybody thought Dave Thomas was so great. Well, yeah. And are we out of the way back machine? Are we done play acting? I was serious, but yes, we are. Well, you were seriously play acting. You were Laurence Olivier. Maybe I was delusional. I thought we were in that window. Almost immediately, word starts to spread on the news, obviously, and as you might well imagine, the Wendy's restaurant chain, especially in the area, in the Bay Area near San Jose, it really starts to take a business hit, as you would imagine. People are not like, oh, they found a finger in some Wendy's chili. That really reminds me how much I love Wendy's chili. Let's go out and get a hot cup. Right. Because they are sort of famous for their chili. Oh, yeah. If you want chili at a fast food restaurant, you're going to Wendy's, because you're not going to find it anywhere else. They really planted their flag in the chili market. Yeah, the old anws had pretty good chili. Oh, yeah. But you wanted that on a dog. Sure. Of course, the Midwest still very famous for their Skyline Chili, which is delicious. I guess that would be fast food. Yes. I think they actually have skyline chili restaurants. Yeah. Which is good. It's quite good. It is. But if you're going to go just about anywhere in the US. If you have a hankering for chile, you're going to go to Wendy's. But like you said, sales started to plummet. And not just like chili sales. All Wendy's sales started to take a hit, especially in the Bay Area, like you said, especially in the western United States. People were just kind of grossed out by this whole idea. But like I said, the cops had shown up and decided it was a health inspector or a health department jam. They didn't really have anything to do with it. So the next morning, the owners of the franchise, the county health inspector, they showed up. I think they contacted Wendy's communications department, and the gears were starting to move. There was something that they had to deal with, and that was basically threefold. It was really two fold as far as Wendy's was concerned at first, but the third one crept in pretty quickly. Whose finger was this? Sure. How did the finger get into the chili? And then after that, who was this woman who found the finger in her chili? So Wendy's really started to focus on the first two, because one thing, the way that this whole thing played out, the cops were very hands off at first. They felt this was a health department issue, a public health issue, and not a police issue, and basically said, you need to go figure this out yourself, Wendy's. And so Wendy's had to do a lot of extra legwork that they probably wouldn't have had to do had the cops decided immediately that it was a criminal issue. But in the cops defense, it didn't appear immediately to be a criminal issue. It appeared to be like, a woman found a finger in her chili at Wendy's, and that's gross. So go figure it out, Wendy's. Yeah. I also bet there was, like, one guy who literally ate, went to that specific Wendy's to get chili the next day and was like, dude, that's the last place you're going to find a finger in your chili now, right? Yeah. There's no way it would happen again. What are the chances? Yeah. Like, flying on an airline right after they have a crash. He's like, you go to Burger King, you're going to get a finger. They're going to purposely give you a finger, man. Don't be naive. All right. So, did you introduce Police Chief Rob Davis yet? Not yet. All right, so this is a guy, san Jose police chief that would ultimately lead this investigation. Later on, though, after Wendy's did a lot of the initial leg work for him yes. He would lead the investigation, and he basically was like, I got to find out who this lady is, because, Wendy's, they're operating on the down low here. And apparently this case is taught in classes now about how to handle a crisis as a corporation. Yeah, I've seen it criticized. I've also seen it held up as an example of what to do, too. Well, I mean, here's what Wendy's can and can't do. What they can do is quietly throw a lot of money at this investigation on their own, and then publicly, what they can't do is start to go after this lady and be too sort of dismissive of this finger. There's no way lady this lady's nut. She's whatever. She's after money. Like, you can't do that. As a public facing company, you have to be doing all your due diligence, sort of quietly. And they really were. They really were. So how about this, dude? Let's take a break, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about the investigation that Wendy started. How about that? All right, Chuck. All right, Chuck. So, like you said, Wendy's can't just be like, that lady is a liar. There's no way that's our finger they had to basically operate in the background. They couldn't appear like they were obstructing the police investigation. They couldn't appear like they were smearing. Anna Ayala. Especially because the early reports were very sympathetic to this woman, too. Everybody's very grossed out by this. Sure. But at the same time, they had to deal with this issue, and they had to get to the bottom of whose finger this was and where the finger came from. Yeah. And so the obvious first place to start is the restaurant itself. The employees there. The very obvious first place to start is to see if anyone was missing a finger. Sure. And that's what they did. They said, Show us your hands. Yeah. Everyone looked at everyone's fingers. They were all there, and they went, all right, so far, so good. They would eventually put everyone on staff through a polygraph test, which they all passed, obviously. Then they would go to up the supply chain to see if this thing might have because these things happen. Yes. Rarely they do, though. Well, I found five other cases of fingers in fast food that were legitimate. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. So it happens up the supply chain. There can be an industrial accident that leaves a finger in a bag of lettuce, greens or something, and that might eventually find its way to a Wendy's Superbar. Oh, my God. It doesn't have been much. I wouldn't be too freaked out. I'm still freaked out. We'll go over those at the end but they're going up the supply chain. They're really doing their due diligence. They can't find they offer a reward at first of 50 grand, later 100 grand. So they set up a hotline for tips. But they're basically, as time is going on, becoming more and more confident that they did not have a finger in that chili by their own fault. They traced the chili ingredients to seven different suppliers and they got documentation from all seven suppliers that nobody at their companies had suffered any kind of finger injury at any recent time. And also, like you said, no one at any of the nearby stores had suffered any finger injury, let alone an amputation. And so Wendy's was like, this didn't come from us. This didn't come from inside our store. And they kind of ran a simultaneous forensic investigation as well. They hired a woman named Dr. Lynn Bates, who is the CEO of a company called Alteca out of Manhattan, Kansas. And if you are looking for evidence or study of a body part that was found in food, you go to Dr. Lynn, Sbaitz and Alteca because they engage in forensic food microscopy. That's what they do. Their bread and butter is studying body parts found in food. And she's been doing it since 1986. So Wendy's went to her and said, here is a piece of this finger. Was this finger cooked in this chilly? Whose finger is it? She's like, I can't tell you whose finger it is, but I can tell you that there is no indication that this finger was cooked for 3 hours in Chile at 170 degrees. It just wasn't. So that combined with no Wendy's employer or suppliers, employers missing a finger that told Wendy's everything they need to know that they were being defrauded. Yeah. And you would think, just grab a fingerprint, police force. They weren't able to. They said if they had found a hand that they might could literally look and compare fingerprints. But they didn't get a good enough print off it to do a legitimate database search. Right. They just had to sit around and wait for that hand to show up. Because that thing had been cooking in chili for 3 hours. It had not been cooked in chili for 3 hours at any rate. So Wendy's knew what was going on. Now they had to go to the cops and say, we're being defrauded. Not only did they have the search for the missing finger investigation internally, and they hired Lynn Bates to do forensic work on the finger itself, they also hired a detective to start looking around at Anna Ayala. And the detective turned up some very interesting stuff about her. Yeah, he was like, wait a minute, this woman has filed at least 13 civil lawsuits, some against major corporations. And he probably could have stopped there and Wendy's would have just been like dave Thomas from the grave would have said stay there. She's no good. That's a good Dave Thomas. Impressive. I think he would have said that she should still get the benefit of the doubt. I don't know, man. When someone has a pattern of litigious behaviors like this, well, maybe he finished with prove me wrong one. There were a couple of notable ones that it's sort of frustratingly hard to find information. She claimed that she won a $30,000 settlement from El Polio Loco for medical bills from her daughter getting sick from salmonella. El Polio Loco has always been on record saying never happened. We did not give that lady a dime. Right? GM. She sued GM because the front wheel of her car came off and there was an accident. And that suit was dismissed with prejudice. When she fired, her lawyer was a no show in court. Oh, is that what that means? No, with prejudice means you can't bring it back. Okay. So she can't say, well, I didn't show up and my lawyer was bad, so let's do this again. Okay, I got you. So basically, it was dead in the water. So she sued a former employer for sexual harassment. I'm not even going to comment on that one because I have no idea. That could very well have been legitimate. That one struck me as possibly legitimate, but she dropped it, right? She loitered up immediately with the chili finger and everything. Made Chief Rob Davis very suspicious. And then this guy that lived with her family named Ken Bono, or Bono. What did you say? Bono. I've been saying Bono. It hasn't even occurred to me it could be Bono. Maybe it's related to Bono. Ken bono? Because the cops are starting to ask questions at this point. They do official investigations. They search her house. She claims that they held a gun to her head, ransacked her home and abused her daughter, which is quite a charge for a finger chilly house investigation. There's a picture of her and her daughter in the driveway talking to a reporter. And her daughter's got, like, her arm and a sling, but like the kind of sling you just go buy at the drugstore. Yeah. So this was a guy who lived bono lived with their family, and when he's being investigated by the cops, he said that this finger came from our aunt, our deceased aunt. It's her finger, which is a weird thing to say, especially because Anna Ayala said, all of my ants are alive. I don't know what this guy is talking about. Even though he lives in my house. Yes. Was he trying to get money? I don't know how far I can't figure out. I couldn't find much on that guy. I don't know what the deal was. I also just saw references to a rumor that the media had been reporting on that it was her dead aunt's finger. So I didn't see how it came from him or what he was trying to do with that. But that was a thing. But that was just kind of like a little side thread that I think also made the cops a little more suspicious, too. That's just a weird thing to say, even jokingly. Yeah. But they did actually get while it didn't lead to whose finger it was, that tip line did yield some stuff at first, right? Yeah. So like you said, Wendy set up a hotline that you could call in, and what they were looking for specifically, ostensibly, was whose finger it was. That's what they wanted, information. The owner of the finger. But they were taking any and all tips that people called in, and they started out offering 50 grand, as you said, they later up to 100 grand. And it started to yield some tips, like, pretty much off the bat, I think the San Jose police and Wendy's is funneling this information to the cops as it comes in. Like a good tips come in, but two very early on came in from what the San Jose police said, there were two different people who supposedly did not know each other, who told very similar stories about how Anna Ayala had told them that she was fleecing Wendy's, that all of this was just a fraud for money, to extort money from Wendy's in a lawsuit. So that, combined with all the evidence that Wendy's had gathered that the finger had not come from inside their store, all of an eyelid background, all of that put together, really turned the tide not just on a police investigation, but also on the media against Donna Ayala. And she had started this. She had created a huge media circus around this issue. She went on Good Morning America and I could not find it. I think good Morning America just took the video down. They probably just burned it because she just went on and lied through her teeth about what had happened and just pointed at Wendy's and said, these guys screwed up, and this is the most disgusting thing that could happen to somebody. And I'm torn up inside about it. And they should pay on national news about a week after the incident. Yes. So like you said, this is all playing out pretty quickly. It's all over the news. It's all over late night talk show comedy. Just bad joke after bad joke coming out of jail in his mouth. I won't even repeat the one that had included I like the Letterman one. Did you see Letterman's? What was this? She'd been spotted going back at Wendy's and ordering chili again because she was going back to collect all five. That's good. Yeah. You got to give it up for letting me. What was Leno something about them? The chili now comes with fingernail clippers beside the fingernail clippers, and that really just encapsulates the difference between those two men. It does. Although they have their joke writers, but still the love of cars. I think is also a big differentiator. I don't think Letterman really cares about cars. Shout out to Brian, Kylie and Rob Kuttner. Shout out to the mid 90s Letterman Book of Top Ten list that helped shape me as a human being. Brian and Rob are Conan O'Brien's monologue joke writers and have been for many, many years. Did I tell you? You mean I went to see Conan O'Brien live with Ron Funches and a couple of other people. Oh, so good. And we actually turned out we were sitting next to a member of the systic Army throughout the show. Oh, no way. Yeah. He was like, Are you Josh and Yumi? We were like, yeah, he was a good guy, good kid. Yummy, I'm yummy. But that's not Josh. Right. He's like, well, that's weird. I'm suspicious now. All right, where were we? All right. It's all over the news. This is all playing out very fast, but the dragnet is sort of closing in thanks to Wendy's investigations, thanks to the cops getting involved, and Ms. Ayala is starting to feel the heat, and like, anyone who and I think the cats out of the bag now. Right. I think it would just put the finger in the chili. Yeah. Any time someone does something like that, it seems like two things happen. They brag to their friends because they're dummies to begin with, and then that net starts to close and it all starts to fall apart. Right. So her response this is a pretty human response. She basically said once the media spotlight went from sympathetic to her to, wait a minute, who are you again? And how do you explain this thing and that thing and all this? She was like, Never mind. Yeah, it's basically what she said. She said, you know, I can't handle this media spotlight or anything anymore, so I'm just going to drop my lawsuit against Wendy's. We'll just forget all about this. Wendy said, no, we're not going to just forget all about this. No, of course not. Let's take a break, shall we? Yeah, we're going to take a break shortly. When Anna Ayala was like, okay, I'm just going to drop the lawsuit and this will go away, there had to only have been maybe one and a quarter percent of her brain that thought that was actually going to work, that was actually going to go away. She seems like streetwise and savvy enough to me that she knew it probably wasn't just going to go away. That was nothing but hope. Right. I guess I'm curious about that. Yeah. I don't know, man. But the more that they poke into her private life, then you learn that she and her husband James Placincia, had and this was hard to get information on, too, from what I can tell, is they sold a trailer park trailer that did not belong to them. Yes. For $11,000 she did. Specifically. I don't know that he was involved. He may have even owned the trailer. But regardless, she did not own the trailer. Sold it to a woman for $11,000. And later on, the woman and her children were evicted from the trailer that they thought they owned. That they didn't own. Yes. They also learned that her husband, I guess, from her previous marriage, owed a lot of money and child support. And so things are starting to fall into place to where they're like, this lady is always making up stories and suing companies. She's always looking for that get rich angle. Her husband owes a ton of money. Four hundred k. And so this is all sorting. They're starting to finger her, if you will, for this crime. It's the worst parts ever. I thought we were going to make it through this, but now I've even been saying tip line about fingers, ignoring it. I know you did, but okay. All right. It's done. It's out there. So they finally, like you said, even though she was like, oh, let's just forget about it, they're like, no, we can't do that. And then they enters a lady that just kind of and it didn't end up having the hugest impact on the case itself, but it is worth mentioning this woman named Sandy Alman. This is a little strange. So this is a woman who owned exotic cats, big cats. Leopards, jaguars, tigers, I think. Is that how we're seeing jaguars now? Jaguar? Yeah. Britt says it on the commercial. Is it a year in sales event up in here? Yeah. The jaguar x twelve. So this lady owns these big cats. This is not too far from Vegas, where she lives in Param, Nevada, I guess. Or is it on the California side? Do you know? I think it's Nevada. Okay. I don't know, actually, now that you mentioned it. And she eventually, I guess, has to get rid of these cats and calls in a rescue group that does things like this. They're like, we're a wild animal orphanage, and you're a dumb dumb who bought all these animals you shouldn't have had. So now we will deal with it. And during this transfer of animals, she is attacked by a spotted leopard, and it bites off her finger. Yeah. And she comes forward and says, I think that is my finger. No, I think actually a person who is at the Wildlife Rescue at the time was the one who called the tip line with that one. Oh, I thought because she wanted to take a DNA test and everything. Oh, I didn't see that. Okay. All right, cool. So she's the one who called and said, that's my finger. Well, she wanted I don't know if she literally picked up the phone and called, but she got involved such that she wanted to take a DNA test to find out if that was her finger. Got you. Okay, cool. Well, yes, because she had said that the last time. She'd seen it. It was on ice in the emergency room. So I guess she wasn't the sentimental type who's like, I want my finger back. Would you? Oh, yeah. Floated in some formaldehyde. Yummy. Would probably have that thing gilded and wear it around her neck. Yeah. I'd be like, that's my finger on UBI's neck. Check it out. The whole thing was just a red herring, though. A blind alley. Right. Like, it went nowhere. No, it was not her finger. No. There were some other tips that came in about the finger. The Mexican authorities, I guess, just over the border, got involved because it was rumored that an incident with a ranch hand losing a finger in Mexico had been the source of the finger, even as Anna Ayala, who, by the way, that whole tip about the trailer sale, the trailer scam that came in from Wendy's Hotline as well. Oh, really? By this time, I believe it was day 22. Now I'm sorry, it was day 32, I believe. About a month after the incident originally happened, anna Ayala and Jamie Polencia Plezencia, her husband, were both arrested in Las Vegas him for the child support payments, failure to pay child support her for that trailer scam. And so while they're on ice in Las Vegas, wendy's is still conducting this investigation. San Jose are still conducting this investigation. And they've got them. They have them on this other stuff, but I guess they just kind of kept them from running, and that's why they arrested them, knowing that they were eventually going to build the case. I'm not sure, but that's exactly what happened, because I think about 52 days after she walked into that Wendy's and put the finger in the chilling and took that bite, they charged them for grand theft for basically defrauding Wendy's. Yeah. And at this point, as far as the police were concerned, they're like, we don't even need to know whose finger this is at this point. Right. That's really immaterial. But Wendy's, they still have a public relations crisis going on, and they're like, we really would like to find out where this finger came from. Just so, like, as many facts out there as possible will really help us restore our good name. Right. If we can actually pinpoint whose finger this is and exactly how this happened and let everybody know what went on. Yeah. So that's when they upped the reward from 50,000 to 100,000, right? That's right. And that's when they hit the jackpot, which is, ironically, they got two callers on the $100,000 line. Go head collar. You're on the $100,000 chilly finger line. Right. And then for the next 30 seconds, like, hello? Am I on? Can you hear me? Yes, you're on. Go ahead. Am. I live right now. Two people call. One, to this day, as far as I can tell, has remained anonymous. The other one was a guy named Mike Casey. And Mike Casey owned a company called Lamb Asphalt out of Las Vegas, Nevada. And he happened to be the employer of Jamie Plazencia. That's right. And he said, it's weird because you arrested one of my employees, one of my longtime employees, for the scam. And I also have another employee named Brian Rossiter who lost a finger not too long ago. And I think they might be connected. I think that might be Brian Rossiter's finger. And that's how the whole thing finally came crashing down. Because they got a hold of Brian Rossiter, they gave him a DNA test, they matched it to the DNA taken from the finger, and they said, it's Brian Rossiter's finger. Brian Rossiter worked with Jamie Plazencia, was married to Ana Ayala, found a finger in her chili, IPSO facto, something's rotten in Denmark. And that's how it stands. Yeah. And it's even a little weirder when you find out the details. So brian is at work. Someone slams the tailgate of the truck on his hand, cuts an inch and a half off of his finger. Can you imagine? Cuts off his finger. And it's funny, too, because Ed points out, instead of, like, driving to the hospital, which is what any normal person would have done, he had owed placencia some money. Placentia. And this is a man, a husband of a woman, who seems like they're both always looking to scam somebody. They're looking for the angle. He sees this finger, and he goes, hey, you owe me money. Some people say it was $50. We don't know for sure. I saw 100 almost everywhere. Okay, so let's say it's 100, okay? He's like, you give me that finger, and we'll just call it square. And not only that, my friend, but if you ever hear about this finger in the news, keep it quiet, and I will give you a quarter of a million dollars at some point in the future. Yeah, that's what they call the carrot and the other carrot. Yeah. So he said, Just drip some blood on this roof shingle, and that will be our contract. Right. It's a sign ex with your stub. Your bloody stub. Oh, this old use roof shingle. Actually, I saw that he did go to the hospital and came back to the work site with his amputated finger, and that's what Jamie presents. He was like, hey, I'm sure he did. What are you going to do with that? Any sense at all? Yeah. That he would just be like, Wait a minute. Brian Rosseter gives him his finger, and that's where the whole thing began just a couple of months before, right? Yeah. And I think didn't Rosseter himself also call the tip line? I didn't see that anywhere. Okay. I heard he called the tip line himself because he knew at this point he was getting no money out of the scam. So he thought, Let me try and get this 100 grand at least. Right? And Wendy's never would cop to whether or not he got any tip line money. Right. And so Mike Casey, the guy who from everything, it seems he was innocent of this, he just happened to put two and two together because he knew the guys. He said originally, hey, my asphalt company maintains the lots of a few Wendy's around here, and they've always been good to me, so I wanted to help out. That was an article in May. An article in September is Mike Casey saying, you know, Wendy's never paid me that money for the hotline, so I don't know if he ever got it, but from what I saw, he was going to have to split it with the one other anonymous caller. I don't know if that was Brian Rosseter or not. Maybe Brian Rossiter was scared that Jamie Plentycio might do something if he found out that he had tipped them off or what. But supposedly Mike Casey and this anonymous caller were going to split that 100 grand. So whether Wendy's actually pay that money or not, that remains to be seen. I don't know. I didn't see that anywhere. Well, in the end, Ayala and her husband, she got sentenced to nine years. He got sentenced to twelve because I think they piled on him for the probably child support. Right. Or was it the trailer scam? Yeah, he got three and a third years for the child support thing. Okay. I don't know how long he actually served. I think she only served about four of that nine. She later revealed some more details, including that she did cook the finger. Apparently it wasn't a raw finger, nor though, was it cooked in 170 degree chili for 3 hours. Right. But it was cooked a little bit. I think she just literally probably put it in a pan and was thinking like, oh, wait a minute, I bet they didn't think I would think of this. Right. And cooked up the finger a little bit. One thing that she didn't think of though, Chuck, was she didn't bite the finger. And they found out pretty quickly through forensic investigation that there was no bite in the finger, nor did she throw up in the restaurant like she said she did, because there were people in the restaurant. They were like, no, she didn't bomb it that I saw. And employees were like, no, she didn't throw up that I saw. Her fatherinlaw and motherinlaw both said that they saw her throw up, but yeah, there was no evidence of vomit anywhere in the bathroom or around her table or anything. Yeah. And they did a pretty bad job. Yes, they did. I was going to use a nasty word to characterize it, but it's a family show. Well, these are the worst kind of people, man. These litigious just like, work for your money, man. Going around suing corporations. I know. So mad. Wendy supposedly lost $2.5 million in Verifiable. Lost money. They had to cut people's hours. This is another thing that kind of gets left off a lot. They had to cut the hours of the employees in the Bay Area in particular because there was such little foot traffic coming through their stores. So when they were convicted and sentenced, jamie Plentycia and Anna Ayala were sentenced to pay back 170,000 plus dollars in lost wages to the Wendy's employees. Oh. And they were also ordered to pay $500,000 to Je management who own the Wendy's, and then like another substantial amount to Wendy's if they ever profited from the crime. Man, bad people. She was banned from Wendy's, which I don't know how you enforce that. Yeah, I was wondering that myself, actually. It seems like I don't know if there's every Wendy has a picture of her or something like that. I know it's sports stadiums. They do that when people are banned. And that is a little more enforceable because you can literally just have everyone be aware of that person. That's like checking tickets and things. But how can you keep someone from coming into any Wendy's anywhere? I don't know. They can try. At least they can send a message by saying, you can't come here any longer. Arby's two fingers. 2004 2012. No. Coles Frozen Custard in Wilmington, North Carolina. Finger 2005. PGI Friday's hamburger had a finger in 2006. Wow. And those are all verified and they found it was in the supply chain. Like someone lost a finger and it got mixed in and it's very, just very unfortunate. Sure there was quiet settlements on those. I'm sure too. That's bizarre. I had no idea that that happened. I thought it was almost always either a case of mistaken identity or a hoax. I didn't realize that actually really happened. Yeah, well, that's the Wendy's chili finger caper. If you ever wanted to know about it, now you do. And we're glad that you do. We're glad we're the ones that told you. If you want to know more about it, go read contemporary articles at the time. It's awesome just to see something like that unfold. It's so cool. And since I said that, it's time for the listener mail. And hey, shout out to Wendy's. I'm sure. I don't know if they like people still talking about this or not, but they did not put a finger in anyone's chili. Yeah, good point to make that clear. Good point. I'm going to tell this Adidas puma. Hey, guys. Just finished listening to the feud between Audi and Rudy Dosler. Wanted to say I really enjoyed it. My dad is actually from Hartzogenara. We were in Adidas family through and through. And my godmother aunt, helga worked for Adidas as an administrative assistant for years. In addition to this, I almost jumped out of my seat when you mentioned the mayor of Herzog. You spoke of Dr. Garman hawker and how he ReFED a soccer match wearing one Adidasu and one Puma. My uncle Hans was the mayor right before Hawker was. Oh, cool. Yeah, I knew you wouldn't be referring to him because he wouldn't have been caught dead in even one puma because of my aunt's work at the opposing shop. I didn't wear puma gear myself until I was grown and could buy it myself. And my entire German family called me a traitor. And this was in the early 2000s, so the attention is still real. I'm sure it was lighthearted. At least I hope it was okay. In any case, I just want to let you know your research was spot on. Really love hearing about something I knew a little bit about. By the way, I also use your show in my classroom teaching 12th grade government in civics, and the kids love it. Nice. So shout out to Jennifer Wesner. Gazeo at Thompson stations. Tennessee, your senior government class. Well, thank you, Ms. Gaizho. And class, that's probably not pronounced right. Gaucho? I have no idea. Gaucho Ganev. Yeah, gancho genev. That's what it is. If you want to get in touch with us to say hi about an old episode or for whatever reason, you can go on to Stuffyshotknow.com, check out our social media links, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housedeepworks.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 tops 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/2018-03-15-sysk-e-cigarettes-final.mp3 | Is Vaping Really Bad For You? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-vaping-really-bad-for-you | E-cigs, vapes, whatever you call them they have been touted as a safer alternative to tobacco and even a way for people to quit smoking. But recent studies have found that perhaps they’re not so harmless after all. So who’s right? | E-cigs, vapes, whatever you call them they have been touted as a safer alternative to tobacco and even a way for people to quit smoking. But recent studies have found that perhaps they’re not so harmless after all. So who’s right? | Thu, 15 Mar 2018 20:58:58 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=20, tm_min=58, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=74, tm_isdst=0) | 39433694 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, Colorado. The state's so nice. We're playing there twice. That's right. Two days in a row. Chuck, we added a second show to our Gothic Theatre tour. That's right. We're gonna be there June 7 and June 28. Now, the 28th is sold out. Out. But one of those weird cases where you go see the first show, you were actually late buying tickets. Right. We're also going to be in Boston April 4, DC april 5. We're going to be in St. Louis on May 22 and Cleveland on May 23. And then, of course, we're going to wrap this summer up on June 27 28th at the Gothic Theater in Colorado. So go to sysklive.com for all of your information and ticket needs, welcome to Stuff You Should Know from Housetopworks.com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry smoking rolling over there. She's just a cloud chaser. Is that what they call smokers? Dude, I looked up terminology vape terminology cloud chaser. Really? Because I wanted to punish myself. And that's apparently I don't know, that's what this website says. That sounds like the kind of thing somebody who wears, like, a flannel shirt tied around their waist would call somebody who vapes. Yeah. Oh, no, these are vapors who puff fat clouds. You've seen those people with just ridiculous amounts of smoke or not even smoke. Whatever it is. Whatever it is is the right thing to say, Chuck, because no one's quite sure. Yeah. So we're talking electronic cigarettes. E cigarettes. If you go to the FDA website, they're called electronic nicotine delivery systems. People don't call them e cigarettes anymore, do they? Or do they? I don't know. I felt so square researching this because it's such an ever evolving thing. You have to be, like, right in the thick of it to know. I saw e sigs a lot. Oh, really? Still today? Well, by the media, yeah, I think they just call it vaping. Right, okay, so vapes. Vapes vapors. Right. You see it more and more sure. These days, the kids which is kind of a problem. The kids seem to be enjoying this. Although I can't say anything because I was thinking about this. I'm like, gosh, teenagers are trying this. And I was like I was 14 when I started smoking tobacco every day for 20 years. Like, probably Marlboro Reds or something. Yes, indeed, Marlboro Reds. Although when you're that young and you ride up on your bike to the convenience store to buy cigarettes, you'll take whatever you can get. Yeah. But it strikes me as absolutely nuts when now that I don't smoke anymore. The idea of, like, teenagers smoking, it's just weird. But some people kind of have this idea that it's wrong headed to compare e sigs or vapes, who knows what they're called, with Rsigs with regular sigs or non vape sigs. Right. And that you could make a case that it's possible it's fine that teenagers are doing this. Really? Some might say, or at the very least, they might say, if I had to choose a teenager smoking e cigarette or tobacco, I would always choose the ecigarette. Yeah. And I think that's one of the main points that we're going to hammer home throughout this whole thing, is that it is still sort of the wild, wild west. And that's one of the big issues, is that no one really knows the deal. A lot of times with what's in here, how it's reacting in the body, the manufacturers. I mean, we're all just kind of guessing right now for sure, for a couple of reasons. One, they're so new, but two, here in the united states, it wasn't until 2016 that the FDA gained regulatory control over these things before it was like they could put anything into the ejuice who knows what it's actually called that you're smoking. And you would have no idea what's in there. There was no regulation whatsoever until 2016. So, yeah, it is like you said, the wild, wild west still they're still figuring this out. And depending on what country you're in, they're either a great way to quit smoking tobacco or to smoke instead of smoking tobacco, or they're just as bad as cigarettes, if not worse. In some respects, yes. Or they're a gateway to a kid who may not have even started smoking cigarettes. But try this, because it tastes like peaches and cream, right? And then they get hooked on the nicotine. I remember when joe camel came out in the they were like, you can't have this cartoon camel hawking cigarettes because you're clearly targeting kids. Well, at least he never had peaches and cream flavor. Which, by the way, I was looking at ingredients in tobacco because now in the united states, cigarette companies have to list the ingredients on their website, because that's what all smokers do, is go to the website to see what they're smoking. What's in this? Let me see. High fructose corn syrup is in cigarettes. That doesn't surprise me. It doesn't. If you stop and think about it. But if you stop one more time to think about it, you're like, that stuff is everywhere. Yeah. So e c. Yeah. They were invented by a pharmacist in china named han lake, who I believe his father died of lung cancer from smoking. That's what I saw. And I don't know if that was the impetus to create this or not, but he did patent the device in 2003. And as soon as I read that, I was like, man, I bet this guy is a gazillionaire. You want to hear something very surprising? He is not the first person to patent an ecigarette. Well, I'm not sure how much his net worth is, but he's still currently kind of battling for rights to make money and stuff while west, wild west. So back in the mid sixty s, a man named Herbert A. Gilbert inventor's name if I've ever heard one. Yeah, he patented something that is basically an ecigarette. And then apparently even further back than that, in the 1920s, someone patented a vaporizer pen, not necessarily for cigarette, but they were human spirit papers. It's my grandmother's soul. Here's the deal. We haven't even said what it is yet. I figured everyone knows because it seems to be ubiquitous these days. But an ecigarette, it's a battery powered device, usually. Sometimes it can look like a cigarette, even lights up on the end, but I don't see a lot of those anymore. No, it's kind of an early thing, I think, so just to make you feel more like you were smoking, but now they just look like little pins with a cartridge, and it converts that liquid nicotine into a vapor that you inhale. So you're not actually burning nicotine? No, there's no smoke. Even though it looks like smoke that's I don't even know what you call it. Vapor. It's vapor inhalation depending on what's in the stuff that you're inhaling or vaporizing fat clouds. Fat clouds, right. But yeah, that's it. You hit the nail on the head. The combustion isn't involved. Right. Those little coils in there that get heated up by the battery bring the vapor or the liquid up to its boiling point, converting it to vapor, and then that's what you inhale. And since there's no combustion, you're not getting all the extra stuff that you get when you smoke tobacco, like tar. Well, there is no tobacco in here. There isn't. And that's a really big point that even in articles about the difference between tobacco and e cigarettes, they call this stuff interchangeably, like tobacco. These are not tobacco. Tobacco is a plant that contains nicotine that we have learned over the centuries to smoke as a delivery system for that nicotine. The problem is, there's a lot of other stuff, bad stuff that come from inhaling that tobacco. It's not necessarily the nicotine itself, although it is a highly addictive drug when inhaled. The point of ecigarettes, at least one of the points, is that you can still get that nicotine without the tobacco it's separated from the tobacco, put in this other solution that you heat up without combustion and inhale, and then birds just kind of chirp around your head, and you're suddenly dressed like Snow White when you say what was in the e juice? And we'll talk about all this. I'm just teasing ahead, but is nicotine even bad for you if you're not burning it from tobacco? Is nicotine itself? Yeah, because that one dude, I think, from the these articles you sent, said people come for nicotine, but they die from tar. Yeah. Michael Russell, he was a South African scientist who basically was the guy who changed the way we viewed cigarettes. Like, up to that point, it was a psychological habit, smoking was and he said, no, actually, we're addicted to nicotine and it's a physiological addiction. Yes. So that you've heard that like and that came from there's this really great article, if not a little one sided, in Rolling Stone in 2013 by David Amstin. It's a tough one to say, but he talked about that guy, right. And that guy out of that whole thing, this big push to get people to quit smoking, then focused on nicotine as an addictive drug. And you had to smoke tobacco to get your addictive drug, and the tobacco is going to kill you. So just quit smoking altogether. Yeah. Apparently nicotine is not addictive unless you inhale it. So whether you're inhaling it in water vapor or tobacco yes. It is an addictive drug. Right. So back to the device itself. There are many kinds you can get out there. Some of them are just sort of long and thin like a ballpoint pin. And there is no button or device just simply inhaling it, putting your mouth on the tip and inhaling it will activate it. Other ones have little buttons on them that you push to activate the system. That consists of three parts, which is that rechargeable battery. And when you think of a rechargeable lithium battery, you think of a little tiny thing that's the main body of these pins, the battery. Then you have a little cartridge or the vaporization chamber. No, sorry, those are different things. Vaporization chamber is where the party takes place, and the cartridge is where the liquid is stored. Right. So it's the vaporization chamber has the atomizer in it. And that's the thing that has the heating coils that heat up the ejuice. Yeah, the heating coils, which I just saw this today, they might be a problem as well. I saw that as well. And that's part of the wild, wild west thing. They're testing the juice, the Joest the Jew right. To see if that's dangerous. But now I just saw a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They said that these coils are burning. These metal coils are producing like lead, chromium, manganese, and or nickel. That's part of the device itself that is now being heated and mixed with the vape. Yes. Toxic metals. You don't want that stuff in your that's the stuff in cigarettes that people want to get rid of. Right. And part of the problem, I also saw another study that found that some of those toxic metals are in concentrations as high as cigarettes, if not higher. Yeah, right. Because it can vary, I think, depending on your device. Yes. And they found also in that same study that it seemed that the amounts were higher in frequently changed atomizers. I want peaches and cream today, but later today I want oreo. Right. And if you're changing out your atomizer, the new head, a fresh head, seems to leach more toxic chemicals, and then it stops after a period of time. Got you. Not the cartridge. No, not the cartridge. The atomizer with the coils. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah, so you don't want that stuff. Part of the reason you're inhaling nicotine is because it delivers it right to your brain, basically from your lungs. It's a really efficient delivery system. So you want to cut down on the additional stuff that's being delivered right to your brain, like lead, because you take a big, long pull off e cig. It's got a bunch of lead in it. There goes ten IQ points. See you later. The cartridges. This liquid that's in there is nicotine, and the delivery system is usually propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin. We'll get to all this. Yeah. We're jumping ahead of ourselves. Yes. That is what it's made of. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we're going to go puff some fat clouds. Be back right after this. So is that really what some people call it? Fat clouds? I've seen people make fun of people by saying that. Okay, so I think it has been said. All right. Vapors, they take a lot of grief from people. Well, they push boundaries a lot, yes. But the whole culture is kind of like ripe for ridicule, satirization and ridicule, I think, by people who don't do it. Is that fair to say? It seems that way. Like there's got to be a Portlandia sketch about sidewalk vapors, don't you think? So here's the thing with the cartridges, though, is not all of them even have nicotine sometimes, and I don't get this at all. I don't get it either, but sometimes people just vape flavor. That is stupid. That is a stupid thing to do. Because consider this. It's bad enough if you're doing this to get nicotine, right? Right. You're a drug addict if you're doing this to get nicotine. So, yeah, you're probably going to get some toxic metals, and that may or may not mean a lot to you. It may mean enough for you to quit. It may not mean anything to you, and just keep on keeping on. Right. If you're huffing toxic metals just to get a strawberry flavor, you're a dummy. And just stop doing that immediately. Well, but what if that is what you do in place of this bad smoking habit you had? Well, then you should learn more about what you're inhaling because you're not smoking the nicotine because of your worried what it's going to do to your health. So just stop altogether. Go get some dumbed on lollipops. Dumb dumb. Well, no, that's clearly and there are some studies that we'll get to later that pretty recent ones that have tested people who smoke and vape, because that's sort of one of the problems that sometimes people do both because they want to get that nicotine hit, but they're at a party where you can't smoke or whatever, right. That's like the worst case scenario that you're doing both. Yeah. That you're using it to smoke more frequently. Right. Because you're smoking in places where you can't normally smoke tobacco. Right. So, like I said, we'll get to that test. But they tested people who do both, people who do one, and people who do none. And of course, doing nothing is the best case scenario. Yeah. And I want to go back a couple of steps. I don't mean to be all holier than thou. I certainly don't think I'm any better than anybody who smokes just because I quit. With the benefit of hindsight, now that I don't smoke, it's tough not to just be like, Stop smoking. You're going to thank yourself. I know you want to. There are very few smokers out there who are dyed in the wool cigarette smokers who are like, man, I love smoking. Still, 20 years on, they'd probably want to quit, which is the sad thing. Yeah. So I'm sorry, everybody, if I came off it's older than that. It says in here, and I don't know how accurate this still is, but it says the cartridges last about as long as a pack of cigarettes. I don't know if that's still accurate because there are so many different kinds of tanks and cartridges you can get these days. I think it generally does, though, because they sell them at a certain price point, and I think it's comparable, depending on where you live, to a pack of cigarettes. Like a pack of New York $12 cigarettes, I think. But that's if you buy the cartridges, use them up and then buy another cartridge, you can also buy a vaporizer that has a refillable cartridge that always stays on, and you just refill it yourself because you're a thrifty person. Yeah, that would be like, I guess, kind of like rolling your own cigarettes. It would be. You probably get a little more bang for your buck there, right? You definitely do. But you look cool. Do you? No, I don't know. You look European. It's a pain, though. I went through a cigarette rolling phase. But you want a cigarette right then, man, I got to wait 45 seconds until I get this thing. Just right now, I just ripped the paper and I have to start over. A cigarette? Yeah. When I was young and dumb, see, I wasn't a smoker smoker. I would just smoke occasionally, which always bugs smokers. And when I did my big Europe trip fresh out of college, I just thought it was the coolest thing to roll up my drum. Cigarette drum. Okay. Walking around in Paris. Yeah. Check me out, Frenchies. What a dumb. Dumb again. Did you have a Beret on, at least? No, I smoked that, too. So you used to roll? I had it on day one, but I smoked it. Nice. All right. So we might as well get into some of these health studies and concerns, like we said, over and over. One of the big problems is we certainly don't know about long term health effects. No, it's too new and are just learning about some of the short term effects. Well, the thing is, it's too new to know about Ecigarettes specifically. But from these early tests that are coming back, we know a lot about some of the chemicals that are showing up in these tests. And some of them are like, whoa, Nelly, you do not want that in your brain. Right? There's one in particular. Some of these, you can just tell from the names of them. They're just terrible. But acryla nitrile, I believe it's acryla nitrile. Yeah, I think I nailed it even without even looking at it. It is a very toxic poison that's used in the creation of acrylic fibers, I think maybe even some rubber. It's a plastic, something you want to burn and inhale. Yeah, well, the problem is it is metabolizing your body into cyanide. So that's just one example of some of the stuff they're finding in the bloodstream of people who smoke e cigarettes. And again, it's too soon to say what kind of effects these are having, but these chemicals have been documented for so many decades now that when they pop up, we can say basically automatically, you shouldn't be doing that to yourself. And I think part of the big problem is the regulatory issues. It's finally under the FDA's wing, right, as of 2016. Yeah. But they're still so new, they're not even making official statements yet, are they? Or are they? So here's the thing. This is a very bizarre thing, Chuck. They now regulate these things like tobacco, but it's not tobacco in the US. Yes. So if you buy a vape pen or vapor cartridge or something like that and it has nicotine in it, it's to the FDA, you're buying a pack of cigarettes to an e cig user, that would drive you crazy, because you might be smoking e cigarettes. Because you don't smoke tobacco. Because tobacco is something that's very bad for you. Supposedly, ecigarettes are a better alternative to that. To the FDA. They're the exact same thing. Right? I mean, I get their complaint because they can say, listen, you can buy nicotine patches in nicotine gum and it doesn't have health warnings on there. Right. And that's all we're doing is ingesting nicotine. We're not burning tobacco. Just like someone who choose nicotine gum isn't burning tobacco. Right. So why? It's because they look like cigarettes and you puff fat clouds. Yeah. And that's the thing that David Amstone says in this. Is that's really the big distinction? Like, if you're using it to quit smoking, it's the same thing as nicotine gum, and you can just go buy that over the counter right, with no warnings on the box at all. But here there are warnings. It is treated like tobacco. And he says it's probably because ecigarettes aren't designed as a medical device. They're designed for enjoyment, too. They have, like, the dual use. And America has a long history of saying, oh, you enjoy this thing. Well, let's try and squash that. Right? Exactly. Yeah. But what's the big deal to them, though, really? Okay. If it's regulated like tobacco, it's not keeping them from smoking. Oh, the Ecigarette users? Well, yeah, it doesn't prevent them from doing anything. Is it because you have to be 18 or something? I don't know. I think there seems to be a bit of a culture war going on between Ecigarette users and manufacturers, too, and the anti tobacco warriors that were very successful. Get this from the there was a drop from, I think 40% of Americans smoked in, like, 1960. 518 percent smoke as of 2015, or 16. Pretty amazing. It's a great drop in numbers. It's actually not that big of a drop because the population kept growing. Sure. So it was really just an 8 million American drop. But it shows this social trend of people saying, we don't smoke anymore. Smoking are losers. Right, yeah. So that was the result of years, decades of government PSAs, and the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association, the Lung Association, all getting together and just pumping and drumming it into the heads of Americans that smoking is stupid. It's a betrayal to your family, it's a waste of money. You're killing yourself, you're affecting the insurance industry. You're crippling America with your stupid habit. And it worked. Now, if e cigarettes are okay, they have to walk that back some. And the people who are still trying to get America to be, like, totally smoke free, like, we're not about to do that. But they don't, though, that's that confusion between burning tobacco and ingesting nicotine. Like you would gum, right, because it's a stigma. Because it looks like a cigarette. Partially. But also remember that nicotine is most addictive when it's inhaled. When you chew it as a gum or get it through a patch, it's supposedly not addictive at all. It's only when you inhale it that it's addictive. So they're also saying, like, this is a drug and people are doing drugs, so it should be regulated. But then other people say, well, caffeine is a drug, why don't we regulate that? And Starbucks is like, Shut your mouth. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about that Rolling Stone article and a very interesting study from a few years ago right after this. All right, so in that Rolling Stone magazine, there was a very big time study that came out of Britain in August 2015 that they called the Landmark Review of e cigs, and they said, quote, around 95% safer than smoking. Which is a bold statement. It is. And I went and looked today to see how much that's changed. They have doubled and tripled down on that number. If you go onto the UK's government Health Service, the NHS site, they say it's about 95% safer than smoking. Still, I saw 97% somewhere. And this is like the Royal College of Surgeons saying this. So it's very much touted as an alternative to tobacco or safer alternative to tobacco. So here's the deal, though. It seems like people in this article, even that take issue with a 95% number, say it may not be 95%, but it is certainly better than burning tar into your loans. Well, yeah, those are the Americans, though. The Americans are saying, like, we're never going to say it's 95% safer, but apparently most public health people in America say it's almost certainly safer than cigarettes. Like you said, just that combustion alone creates some really bad stuff that you're not going to get from vapor just because there's no combustion just by. That alone would make ecigarettes safer than tobacco. But the question is, I think a lot of people have this idea that, oh, I can just totally vape to my heart's content, right? It's healthy even like it's like huffing vitamin C or something like that. That doesn't seem to be the case from recent research. Yeah, and it says, too, here that and this may be because of the American propaganda machine, but said 84% of smokers believed E cigs were safer in 2010, and just three years later, that dropped to 63%. Yeah, and there was another stat, I think. I don't know if it was in that or another article, but they said that something like a third of former E cig smokers said they went back to tobacco because they were worried about the health dangers of ecigarettes. Now, that's a problem. It's ridiculous. The people who are saying, like, no e cigs are safer than tobacco, and what you're talking about at base are nicotine addicts, right? So tout this nicotine delivery system, over this nicotine delivery system, if it's even a little healthier, right? And America is saying, absolutely not. We're not doing that. In our eyes, they're one and the same, tobacco and e cigarettes. So some people are saying, well, there's blood on your hands, the blood of 480,000 Americans who die from smoking every year from smoking tobacco. Right. That's the stakes to all this. But nicotine itself, and this is in that Rolling Stone article, too, is super interesting. Did we do one on nicotine or just I know we did quite a few on smoking. We do one on caffeine back in the day. Yeah, but nicotine is interesting in that it is apparently, if it's not smoked and if you remove it from that cigarette, then it's fairly benign as the substance itself, although addictive as far as what it does to the body. But the weird thing is that it doesn't do the same thing. It's sort of like this little magic and that's why people smoke, probably. This little magic thing. If you need to feel up and your body wants to feel up a cigarette can make you feel up, but if you want to chill out and relax, it can also do that. Right. So it has some pharmacological magic yeah. To it, which makes it useful. But it's also, again, as that article was pointing out, it's been stigmatized ever since the change in paradigm of what smoking is came about, and nicotine got targeted. So let's talk about some of the things that have been found, because one of the big problems, also a big objection to just allowing e cigarettes smoked anywhere people vaping wherever they want is that, one, we don't know very much about it, but two, if we say, okay, maybe smoking is not so bad. If you're not actually smoking, you're just vaping. Right. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it is on par with, like, drinking or coffee or whatever. And teens start to take this up, and they are. They are. The problem is a lot of people say, well, okay, we're turning our teens into nicotine addicts. I have a problem with that. But what if this whole vaping thing goes away and we've got all these teenage nicotine addicts? Do you really think they're not going to just start smoking cigarettes after that? Right. Or just do that anyway? Right. Apparently that's not necessarily happening. That teens who are I feel like such an old guy saying the word teens. Try saying tweens. Tweens feel really old. Oh, that feels terrible. That teens and tweens. Yes. When they are trying this, they're trying it. Most of them are deciding it's not for them, and they're not going on to tobacco, actually. Well, you're right, because they did a study the CDC did one that ecigarette tripled in the past year among middle and high school students. But then you poke into the study and it doesn't differentiate at all between someone who just tried it once waiting for the school bus and a kid who really took it up. Right. It's so funny. That depressing that after all these years, there are still such bad studies. Well, bad reporting. Wow. That too on the studies, I saw that the CDC says that ecigarette smoking is down 2015 to 2016. 16% of teenagers had smoked or vaped in the last 30 days. In 2015, it was down to 11.3% in 2016. And apparently smoking tobacco is holding steady at 8%, but, like, 7% smoke cigars, which is hilarious. I remember that cartoon, baby, that was like a bank robber who smokes cigars on the Bugs Bunny. Yeah on the Bugs bunny you know, the tweens love that. I did see on some weird link researching all this. That very sad kid. I think he was, like, Indonesian. That was a two year old smoker. Oh, no, it was a follow up. He doesn't smoke now. Okay. But then he had a lot of weight gain, but it seems like now he's doing okay. All right. I hated that people laughed and thought. That was funny. Oh, it was disturbing. It was completely disturbing. Yeah, like a baby. Yeah. He could barely hold his head up and he was smoking. I know. And here we are laughing, but not from that. Sure. It's laughing at how I said baby. Exactly. So where are the chemicals coming from then? If they're not smoking tobacco, what's the problem? Well, I mean, some of it is from the flavoring. Right? The flavoring. Yeah, like 75% of the this is a Harvard study. 75% of the flavored e six contain that. I think that's when you said diacetyl, that was a different one. Oh, that's the popcorn flavor. Right. Popcorn long. Yeah, butter flavored. And that was we're not saying it tastes like that, but it is a chemical used in artificial butter. And back in the early two thousand s, that was when he heard the term popcorn. Right. Well, actually, they do use it as a buttery flavor whenever you have a buttery flavored, e SIG or vape. Right. So what did you call it? Diacidal popcorn. Yeah, diacidal popcorn long. Like you said, it came from the early 2000s, where people who worked in microwave popcorn plants were coming down with this irreversible scarring of the lungs and a cough they couldn't kick. And it was from this molecule? From inhaling the molecule. Well, it turns out the amount of diacidol that's found in even cigarettes, let alone ecigarettes, is not nearly enough to give you popcorn long. Right. But like you said, it's a bad reporting that doesn't keep someone like our own beloved Mother Jones even from saying headlines like flavored e six, maybe worse than nicotine. I saw also that some other fruity flavors in a recent study found that fruity flavors tended to be particularly toxic. And I can't remember what the chemical was. And then cinnamon, vanilla, and buttery all had bad reactions with white blood cells that they think might promote lung tissue damage in the long run. It just seems so gross to me. So that's why if you're not smoking with nicotine and you're still inhaling all these chemicals for nothing, I'm going to double down, you're dummy. Well. The FDA. And this is a big deal. In April. I think this is a couple of years ago. They released these regulations. One of which said that in order to get it passed through each SKU is what it's called in the biz. Not just this business. But if you have a retail shop. Like every little thing he sells called a skew. Each SKU had to be approved. And that means every single flavor is a different skew. And the dude did the math, and he was like, we have 240 SKUs, $100 an hour, 5 million per SKU. And he's like, billions of dollars, basically, to get all these stupid flavors approved right. Now that the FDA has come in. Right? Yeah. And what this guy was saying was, we have spent decades trying to get the tobacco companies strip the power from them. And now that Ecigarettes are a thing and now they're being regulated, you just gutted out the independent businesses, which left Big Tobacco this huge vacuum to come in and be like, okay, here are your Ecigarettes courtesy of US. Big Tobacco. Are they doing that already? Been screwing you over for decades. Yeah. So they're making E six now. Yeah. I believe Altria, who makes Marlboro, came out with the Mark Ten almost immediately. Really? Once they hit the US in 2007 or eight. I'm surprised Big Tobacco hasn't gotten in on the cannabis thing. I can't believe they're not, because cannabis vaping is a big thing now, too. Yeah, well, that guy in the Rolling Stone article was saying, like a lot of his colleagues are being like, forget nicotine, I'm going over to cannabis. It's less regulated. Really? Basically. I'm paraphrasing here. That's funny, though. You got anything else? Well, just that last study, we never finally said the results. At UCSF Division of Adolescent Medicine, they tested 67 teens who vape compared to 16 who vape and smoke and 20 who did not do either. And of course they found out that if you do both, it's a lot higher. If you vape, it's still high. If you don't do anything, then you're fine. Right. It's kind of a nodu study, apparently. Also, depending on what chemicals like formaldehyde can really come out of the flavorings or the vegetable glycerin or the propylene glycol, I think, or reactions between these things. But it's also very temperature dependent. At higher temperatures they can create some really toxic stuff, but at lower temperatures, you can inhale the same stuff and those chemicals are not created. But if you're blowing fat clouds, you're probably at a higher temperature. Is that how they do that? Yeah. So you are probably getting the worst of the worst chemicals that your cartridge has to offer. Yeah. I think a lot of those pins, you can vary the temp depending on what you want to get out of it, right? Yeah. After like, a certain price point, I would guess. Yeah. And then lastly, one other thing. That whole jazz about how you're just exhaling water vapor, that is almost certainly not the case. So you're exhaling some of those chemicals yeah. Right into your cubicle neighbor's face. I mean, at the very least, it's not like, oh, we should be able to do this in movie theaters and restaurants because it's not smoke. Right. It's still obnoxious. Sure. You look like a dope. Yeah. With that flannel tied around your waist. Boy. We're going to hear from Vapors. They're going to be mad. If you want to know more about vaping, read about this. Don't go take it up. That was another problem that people are saying is if it's touted as harmless or whatever, people might be like, well, I was putting off smoking because I didn't want to die, but maybe I'll try this vaping thing. Right? Don't do that. Just go read about it, figure out what you think about it, and then don't vape or smoke, says I. In the meantime, it's time for listening. Now, let me call this Sea Monkey follow up. Oh, yeah, good. We love that episode. That's a great one. Hey, guys, just listen to sea monkeys. The young reporter with a local newspaper. I interviewed Yolanda at her home in Brian's Road, Maryland. That was the widow of the inventor of sea monkeys, right? She wrote a children's book, and I was doing a story about it. It was about animals, by the way, not sea monkeys. I remember her giving me a giant bottle of Ebb and water and the best vegan pumpkin chocolate chip cookies ever. Sounds good. She was a devoted animal lover and one of those people who would feed wildlife and deer that wandered onto her property, leading them to overrun the surrounding neighborhood. She also filled me in on the sea monkey saga and gave me a T shirt and other Sea monkey merchandise. I gave the sea monkeys and tank to my friend, who kept them alive on her office desk for years. There are always rumors about von Braun Hut having a Nazi flag displayed on their house, but he was long dead by the time I met Yolanda. The house was Shabby, but the runes I saw had a comfortable vibe. Shabby. Comfy. And she was very kind to me, and you couldn't help but feel sorry for her. I love the podcast. Sarah. Thanks a lot, Sarah. That's pretty good. I love follow ups like that, where it's like, hey, this thing you talked about, here's an extra little peak that you didn't know. That's right. Peak. So if you want to give us a peek, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua Clark and S-Y-S-K podcast. I also have a website called Russeriusclark.com. You can get to Chuck on Facebook@facebookcom. Charleswchuckbryt there's also a stuffyoushenko Facebook page you can send all of us, including Jerry, and email to sufpodcasthouseofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Webstyteo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstyle 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." | |
4561417a-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-5bb3d5bb88ba | Short Stuff: Black Loyalists | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-black-loyalists | The Black Loyalists were a group of Colonial slaves who fought for their freedom alongside the British. Learn all about this nearly forgotten group in today's Short Stuff. | The Black Loyalists were a group of Colonial slaves who fought for their freedom alongside the British. Learn all about this nearly forgotten group in today's Short Stuff. | Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:48:09 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=15, tm_min=48, tm_sec=9, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=58, tm_isdst=0) | 12461983 | audio/mpeg | "Hey there. Hi again. This is Josh. There's Chuck, there's Jerry. You put us together, you give us like a twelve minute time limit, maybe less. It's short stuff, the podcast. That's a short term version of Stuff You Should Know, which is also podcast, but it's a longer version of short stuff. I guess you could say that's. Right. And as per tradition, you started off the show by saying, hey there, ho there. Right. You want to talk about black loyalists? I do. Man. So you pick this one. Hats off to you. Try cornered hat with a big old Yankee Doodle feather off to you, because I'd never heard anything about this, and I majored in history, colonial history, and I didn't even pick up on this one. Yeah. So we did a regular long form episode for Black History Month on Tuskegee Airman, and now we're doing a shorty version for the Black loyalists for Black History Month, and it goes a little something like this. A one and a two. So the black loyalist Chuck yes. Are in a very much overlooked group in American history, and they were African Americans, or I guess African slaves who lived in the colonies, some of whom were free, too, but mostly were slaves that ended up fighting for Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War. Yeah. So it's important to kind of set the stage here what's going on in 1776. African slaves, we're all over the place and well, not all over the place, but basically east of the Mississippi River at this point, or am I wrong about that? No, you're right. I was going to support you, like a lot of people think. Well, yes, slavery was just Southern in the colony. Slavery was everywhere, and slaves made up 20% of the population. In some states, they were more concentrated than in other states, and I think they might have never been in Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, I'm not sure. But you could find states in the north as well as the south at the time, for sure, because the south was a lot of the commerce was based on the plantation model. Obviously, a lot more slaves in the south, to the tune of, like, 40% in Virginia. South Carolina was 60% slaves, but even up in Boston, slaves made up 20% of the population. Right. So before the war for Independence even started, there was an effort by the British to get American slaves on their side and basically say, hey, be a loyalist and take up arms against your plantation owner, and we will grant you freedom. Yeah. Not only are we going to grant you freedom, we're going to give you some land after we kick the Rebels butts. Yeah. There was the British royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, said this was sort of the first Emancipation Proclamation where he said, you guys can be free. Take up arms against your oppressors, because they were looking for people to fight. Like, every time this happened a couple of times it's because they needed men to fight on their side. I wish it was just some altruistic move, but it was like, we need feet on the ground with guns. Right. That first proclamation by Dunmore was, I guess, proclaimed before the Declaration of Independence was ever signed. While 75 yeah. This is while the rebellion is just starting up. And it's kind of isolated and sporadic. And there was an armed rebellion in Virginia that Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, was trying to put down. And so that's why he said, you come fight for us. Rise up against your plantation owners. And what are the guys who, like, the overseers? You rise up against these guys, the rebels, we will give you your freedom. And, I mean, at this point, it's not even clear that the colonies are going to form an armed, organized revolt like the Revolutionary War. So it just seemed like this was a rebellion, a local rebellion that needed putting down. Yeah. And they even, I believe, between about 8020 slaves and servants, indentured servants, fled their plantations, took up arms. There was one regiment named Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment which had on their uniform the insignia Liberty to Slaves. It's pretty cool. And this was, like I said, the first big mass emancipation close to 100 years before Abraham Lincoln signed the official Emancipation Proclamation. Yeah. And what was cool about it was the slaves who took up the British offer were not just, like, fighting for their own freedom. They were fighting to free the slaves who were left behind. It was pretty cool. I had not heard about the Ethiopian regiment before but as the American Revolution goes into full swing and by think, 1779 when the tide is turning against the British the British released a second Emancipation Proclamation and said, hey, if you just leave and come over to British held territory, you'll be free. You don't even have to fight. Yeah, this is a cool idea because this basically was like, they think they can get more people to do that if they don't think they have to fight. And what it does is it leaks all these workers from the plantations. And then in order to guard their plantations now the plantation owners had to use people that would have been fighting in the war to stay at home and guard that plantation. So it was known as the economic warfare, basically. Right. Which is pretty smart. And for the African slaves who took them up on their offer there was a win win for them. So I think a total of 12,000 African descended slaves fought for the British during the Revolutionary War. And at the end of the war, which the American colonies won there was a problem because it wasn't like the Brits were like, all right, fine, we're going home. There was a negotiated treaty. Like, there was an end to hostilities. It was like a formal war. And in formal wars, things come up. Things happen in war that need to be settled. After the war, one of the main points of contention was the status of the African slaves who had defected or just gone over to the British side and said, hey, we're here to fight. What was to be done with them? And the Brits could have very easily been like, haha, suckers, we're not going to keep our word on any of this. But they didn't do that. They didn't keep their word on all of it, but they kept their word on some of it. And let's just take a quick break, Chuck, and we'll come back and fill everybody in on the rest of the details. All right, so when we left, the war is over. George Washington is negotiated to have us. Property returned, which included these enslaved Africans. And on the other side, you have a commander in chief named Guy Carlton who said, well, we gave our word and negotiated these certificates of freedom for these loyalists, but here's what we're going to do. Everyone, we think you need to leave the country, and we think you should go to Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada that we rule. And I'm sure they were like Nova Scotia. This is not what I signed up for, but they went there anyway. And the late 18th century, 40,000 loyalists, both white and black, went to Nova Scotia, including more than 1200 slaves of these white loyalists. And all of a sudden, Nova Scotia was like, we don't have resources for all these people. It's called Nova Scarcity at the time, which I'm guessing you knew. Yes. So this is kind of a big problem, Chuck, because the population of Nova Scotia at the time was what, like maybe twelve or something, 13,000 people, and all of a sudden, 40,000 showed up. Yeah. And when that happens, just common economics means that you have a really big labor supply and probably not nearly enough demand. And so when that happens, people start to fight with one another. Yeah, like you would imagine, even in Nova Scotia, these new arrivals were kind of kicked to the back of the line, and things got tense. Finally, at one point, there was a black creature named David George, baptized a white woman, and that sparked what people basically say is the first race riot in North America in 1784. Yes, the Shelbourne riot. The whites showed up, and they beat David George pretty bad. They went through the Shelbourne settlement, which is largely African, freed slaves, and literally pulled their houses over, just trashed the place. And this riot went on for months. And it sounds pretty familiar, you're selling your labor for too cheap and stealing our jobs, so we're going to take all of our angst out on you. So the riot was finally put down when troops came in from Halifax, the capital of Nova scotia and restored order. But by this point, the black Loyalists who had been promised not just freedom, but Rumor Land and are now ending up in Nova Scotia, where things are really tense. They're like, We've got to get the Crown to do something about this. So they sent a guy named Thomas Peters to go petition the Crown in London or Parliament, at least one of them, and say, hey, can we get our land now? We did everything we were asked of, and he didn't get anywhere with the Crown at least. No. They said, well, we've got another idea. We've got this area in West Africa, in Sierra Leone, and what we think is a good idea is to make this like a sanctuary for you folks, and we can send you over there, and it will be great. You're going to love it. That's the best place for freed slaves to be back in Africa. It became basically in 1792 when 15 ships sailed from Halifax harbor the very first voyage of the back to Africa movement. And there were some that stayed back in Nova Scotia, and they settled a place called Birch Town, named after Samuel Birch, but a lot of them left and went to Sierra Leone, and that was sort of the ending of that story. The cool thing is, you can still trace there are 20,000 black people living in Nova today, and you can trace a lot of those back to these black Loyalists. Yeah. There's one guy that shows up in this article named Jason Farmer. He's a 9th generation descendant of a black Loyalist named Jupiter. Farmer and Jupiter married a woman named Venus, if you can believe that, and his family has been living in Birchtown for about 230 years. Yeah, it's pretty cool. He works at the Black Loyalist Heritage Center and Historical Site, and he said a lot of people in Nova Scotia, even descendants, don't even realize that this is their history. And so when I tell the story, he said, it's pretty powerful stuff. Yeah. Well, good pick, Chuck. I'm glad we did this one. Yeah. If you want to know more about black Loyalists, go check it out on the Internet and send us an email. In the meantime, the stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1217602025134sysk-torture-manual.mp3 | Is there a torture manual? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-there-a-torture-manual | In May of 2007, the US military found drawings believed to be part of an Al-Qaida torture manual. However, the seminal manuals on torture are believed to be the work of the CIA. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about torture manuals. | In May of 2007, the US military found drawings believed to be part of an Al-Qaida torture manual. However, the seminal manuals on torture are believed to be the work of the CIA. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about torture manuals. | Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:08:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=13, tm_min=8, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=221, tm_isdst=0) | 7303230 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. What if you were an apparel company facing an avalanche of demand, so you called IBM to automate your It infrastructure, and now your ecommerce platform can handle spikes and orders? Let's create It systems that roll up their own fleece. 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 housetarthworkscom. 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. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer. Here@houseoffords.com with me is my fellow staff writer, Charles W. Bryant. How are you, Jack? I'm doing well, Josh. You seem not yourself today, and I have a feeling it may have something to do with our subject matter. Subject matter, exactly. Torture, which is not fun. You know, at first, torture before I wrote this article, torture seemed like this kind of amorphous blob. It happened to poor SAPS in other countries. The more I started researching is there a torture manual? I did, actually several articles on torture. It became very real. And it is a really serious, somber subject, and it happens to a lot of people, actually, sadly, still today it is. But you have to do your research. It's not the kind of thing that it's not talked about. No. You don't want it all over the evening news. No, definitely not. It doesn't go well with dinner at all. But it does happen. And the things that do happen are very serious. In the introduction, I mentioned May 2007 raid on a Baghdad house, and it looked like a normal house from the outside. Inside, they found an Al Qaeda torture manual. Right. And it had these basically how to drawings of how to remove an eyeball with a drill, how to squeeze a person to death by putting their head in the vice or using a hot clothes iron on the chest. Right. And they also found the instruments of torture, like a house of horrors, blowtorches and drills and all the stuff you needed to carry out these things. Yeah, that's pretty scary. So it really kind of raised our eyebrows around here when that story broke and kind of got us looking into this, and from some research, we found out that torture manuals are not all that uncommon in the world. Scarily enough. And there's pretty much the two seminal manuals on torture were both written by the American CIA. You know about this? Yeah, a little bit. They did most of this, in fairness, in the 1950s. Right. The research, the initial research, yeah. They basically were trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Right. And I think what they found and what's kind of roundly accepted in the torture community is that psychological torture is really what gets people talking. Right. Physical torture doesn't work. Right. Because if you're physically torturing someone, they'll say anything just to keep the clamps off of their nipples. Exactly. It produces unreliable data. You come with somebody with the car battery, they're going to tell you whatever that you want to hear. But yeah, the first edition came out in 1963 after at least a decade of the CIA spiking one another's drinks with LSD parties. Right. Yeah. In that sense. They also apparently used to experiment on unsuspecting john's in San Francisco brothels. Right. The good old days. Yeah. Pretty much when the CIA could do absolutely anything it wanted. So they did all these tests. They tested on civilians, they tested on our own military, they tested on people who were captured and took all this experience and actually wrote it down. And you had the Kubark manual. Right. Which is a torture manual. It is, that's exactly right. It tells you what to do, what not to do, why you shouldn't do it, why you should do it. And Kubark is the code word for the CIA in Vietnam. Okay. I was going to ask you if that was someone's name or yeah, it was the code name used for the CIA in Vietnam, and that's pretty much when it first came into use. That was the first edition. The second edition was pretty much the culmination of 20 years of using Kubark and finding tweaking the original material based on results from what they get from the prisoners. The information I would assume. Right. Yeah. I mean, you can test and test and test, but when you use something in the field, you're going to really find out what works and what doesn't. Right. So that culminated in the Human resource exploitation manual. That's a fun read. That one was from 20 years after Kubart came out. And it's very much based along the same lines. Basically, the rule of thumb is, well, you don't turn the screws on thumbs. Physical torture is not good psychological works. Right. Which means, like, maybe cranking heavy Metal music really loud, 24/7 blindfolding and a waterboarding was an issue not too long ago. And still is, apparently. I know Congress finds waterboarding very distasteful. In researching this, I found that time and time again, congress gets wind of some scandal and holds hearings and outlaws torture, and then the CIA goes, okay, we're not going to do it. Except for these 14 guys who are given special. And right now there's 14 people who are authorized in the CIA to use waterboarding as an interrogation technique. So they'll say that we don't want to torture anymore, but we really want to torture these guys before we outlaw it. Right. And I can see part of me sees the value in using torture. I'm a utilitarian in many ways where killing one person to save 1000 just makes sense. Right. But at the same time, there's a real gray area. Like when you start, it's tough to stop it. Where do you draw the line? Right. And how do you separate yourself from the enemy? Exactly. Yeah. You'd be as yourself and as a democracy, we kind of have to set an example for everybody else. I believe that's true. Well, we just barely scratched the surface. There are several torture articles, but the one we're talking about is there a torture manual, and you can read all of them on howstep works.com. And hang tight to find out what article makes one of our colleagues in crawl right after this, Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket? Or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera? But thankfully, we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. So, Chuck, you want to tell them what article it is and what colleague? Yes, the colleague is our fellow staff writer Jonathan Strickland. And the article is how entomophagy works. Yes. The eating of bugs. Cuisine. Yes. Mr. Strickland, who is, like Chuck said, one of our fellow writers, is also a fellow podcaster. You can find his podcast Tech Stuff, also on itunes. Good luck with that. But anytime that's on the homepage, his skin kind of crawled. He freaked out a little bit. Maybe hides under his desk more than usual, right? Yeah. You see a spider crawl across the floor and Stricklands up on his desk. Yeah, it's pretty bad. He has a weak constitution. We have fun with him every April Fools Day or every Tuesday, whatever. So if you want to know about the eating of bugs, read How Entomophagy Works and how Stuff Works.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@houseworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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've 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." | |
a7d746c2-361e-11ea-938d-87c65fe91ae4 | Short Stuff: The Pledge of Allegiance | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-pledge-of-allegiance | The American Pledge of Allegiance is much more interesting than you might think. Give us 12 minutes and we'll fill you in. | The American Pledge of Allegiance is much more interesting than you might think. Give us 12 minutes and we'll fill you in. | Wed, 18 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=78, tm_isdst=0) | 13277780 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. Just as it should be. Short stuff. Let's go. Do you remember the Pledge of Allegiance by heart? I do. I was at a city council meeting the other day, and as you do yeah. I was like, oh, I'm a little rusty. It's been a while. I know, I did the same thing. I went to say it in my head and I was like, I think I'm getting some of these words wrong, but this is about the Pledge of Allegiance. I think we should I'll just read it real quick so everyone knows what we're talking about. This is what we do in our country. Everybody, every morning when we wake up, when you wake up, the loudspeaker in everyone's house commands you to rise and say the Pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under, who under God indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Everybody. That was the most bizarre rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance I've ever heard in my life. That's right. And as it turns out, as we will see, the Pledge of Allegiance was a marketing tool. It was really an add on for sales for a little magazine called The Youth Companion, which just is not a good name for a magazine. I know it's not, but that sounds so Nazi. It does. It sounds blandly, menacing, somehow. Right. But it was edited by a guy who was the opposite of blandly medicine, a guy named Francis Bellamy. Yeah, he was an assistant editor at the time, and his last name might sound familiar. His cousin Edward Bellamy wrote a very famous utopian novel called Looking Backward. And Looking Backward was basically about how by the year 2000, inequality will have been done away with and people won't work, will retire at 45 and have a life of leisure, and things are just going to be a lot better than they are now. And one of the ways that they were going to get better, according to Edward Bellamy and his cousin Francis, who's the main character in this story, is through Christian socialist values. And so Francis Bellamy was a Christian socialist. What's that, Josh? It's a socialist who is a Christian. That's right. It was a group of people who said, you know what? We can get an equitable society. We can go further as a people through Christian values and being Christlike, who we can all agree was probably a socialist. Oh, most decidedly. Everybody knows that. So at the time, this is the 1890s, when our story really is set, there was a huge influx of immigrants in the United States, and it's very much like it is today. There was a lot of division over. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Are they going to take over our jobs? Are they going to drive wages down. It was a time of great change for the United States. There was a huge amount of inequality, just like there is today. I don't want to say a mirror image of our time, but there are a lot of similarities. And so Francis Bellamy was like, I believe that having immigrants is a good thing, but I also believe that they should become members of America. They should become Americanized. And one of the ways members of America, one of the ways he thought that that would be a good way to carry that out is to basically inculcate their children in school. In public schools. Yeah. Start them early. It's an old trick. Oldest trick in the book. Yes, it really is. This is not like radical, innovative thinking. No, get it going with the kids and you got them. This was a big deal, though, because precivil war, there wasn't some big, huge public school system. It was post Civil War, 1870s and 80s, when you really started getting the ramp up in public schools. And the idea that, hey, we've got all these kids trapped all day long. Yeah, we can do whatever we want. We can. We can do whatever we want, and we can make them good citizens as well as educating them, and we can do it all. Hey, I read this article years back. I don't remember when, but it basically said that the public school system, I guess starting about this time, was training kids for the sole purpose of going to work in factories. Oh, really? Like mindless, busy work, sitting still and quiet for 8 hours. Yes. That was ultimately what they were teaching kids to do. I was like, wow. That was an eye opening thing to read. Wow. So sorry to blow your mind like that, Chuck, but round about this time, the Columbian Exposition was about to happen. And we know that by its other name, the World's Fair of Chicago in 1893. That's right. It marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus's first new world journey. And so the Youth Companion, the magazine that we've mentioned, and Bellamy, they said, hey, we can really get involved in this thing, and we can really ramp up the Patriotism if we team up with some civic groups and we can sell a lot of American flags, we can get a lot of new subscribers to our magazine. We can make some serious coin. Yeah. Make some big money, basically. And so we're going to print a program, a patriotic program for these schools all over the country that kids can recite on this date on October 20, 1892, which was the big celebration day nationally for the Columbian celebration. And they said, Bellamy, you go write this thing. Go put something together. Yeah. And he did. He came up with plays, patriotic songs, ways to honor I don't know what the word I'm looking for is. I don't know. I guess profiles of civil war heroes. Okay, just typical patriotic American stuff. But one of the things, just one of these things that were part of this big whole program and wasn't meant to be some standout thing like it became was a Pledge of Allegiance. And it was kind of like the one that we have today, but a stripped down version. And we will really get into it right after this message. All right, so it's 1892, right? Got this big celebration going on honoring the great, great Christopher Columbus, who did everything the right way. Exactly. Love that guy. Everyone does. And there was already a Pledge of Allegiance in 1885, we should mention, which came about for the very first Flag Day celebration. Poor George T. Balk or Balk from birth. What was that name? Yeah, yeah. It was never going to work out for him. He actually wrote the First Pledge of Allegiance. And in some schools they were doing this, and it said, I give my heart and my hand to my country. One country, one language, one flag. Not bad. The whole thing almost reads like a yawn. Yeah. No, it didn't. Bellamy could have just republished this, but he's like, I can do better. He said he called it childish. Yeah, he did. So he wrote his own pledge, a new Pledge of Allegiance, and it said, I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. In 1892, all of the schools that got this program recited this, I guess, all at once, is kind of like a predecessor to Hands Across America or something like that. And Bellamy said he was pretty proud of it, but apparently he was going to add liberty, equality, fraternity at the end. Like the French slogan. The French Republic slogan basically has too fanciful. So he just left it as is. That's right. And he also, chuck recommended a way to salute the flag during the Pledge of a Lead, too, didn't he? He sure did. There's no other way to describe the Bellamy salute other than a Nazi salute. An upside down Nazi salute. Yeah. But this was way before that came about, so obviously there was no Nazi salute. There were no Nazis. No, but apparently so just imagine the Nazi salute, but rather than your palm down, your palm is up, kind of like almost like you're like a backup dancer, like giving it to the lead dancer at the front. But then you got to do both hands and start them at your waist and bring them up right as you sing. Have you ever seen that Dream Hand video? No. I'll send it to you. You're going to love it. It's like an instructional dance video for Upward bound kids, and I'll just send it to you. But anyway, so it wasn't until 1943 that we ditched the upside down Nazi salute to the flag. Until 1943? Well, post war people were doing that actually not post war. Perry war. I think 1923, though, was when they had the first revision to the not lyric. But I guess you could sing it. Sure. At the National Flag Conference. Delegates there said, that my flag. They said, you know, this little vague, and we don't want anyone thinking that immigrants are talking about their home country's flag. Right. So they changed it to the Flag of the United States. Then I think about a year after that, tagged on of America, just so everyone knew what was going on. Yeah. And so everybody went bonkers for this. Pretty much out of the gate, school started reciting it. Like we said, they were reciting the other pledge before now they picked up this new one, and in 1898, New York became the first state to make reciting the pledge in schools compulsory. Which is a whole different jam than everyone just saying the pledge. Is part of this owed to Christopher Columbus? Sure. Right. And so very quickly after that, especially around World War One, at the beginning of the US's involvement, more and more states started requiring compulsory pledges in schools, too. That's right. And it's no coincidence that those aligned with moments of political and certainly warlike upheaval in this country. Yes. And then we got to mention Under God, because I think you noticed it never said that up until this point in the podcast, except at the beginning when I read it. Right. That didn't come about until 1954. Isn't that crazy? I know. Eisenhower. The Knights of Columbus said, you know what, Dwight? Maybe you should throw Under God in there. And he did. And they said I think the quote was, they felt that schools in the United States were under threat of infiltration by Godless communists, so let's just throw that in there. And I wonder if they're going to further change it to highly divisible instead of indivisible. So divisible. Yes. There have been a couple of Supreme Court cases about it, too, Chuck. When states passed it as compulsory. Now it's compulsory, typically for teachers to lead the pledge, but not for students. That's not how it always was until 1943. Students were compelled to say the pledge as well. But then in 1943, in the case West Virginia Board of Education versus Barnett, which involves some Jehovah's Witness children who were like, I'm not supposed to be doing this. It's a religious thing. Students were finally, the Supreme Court said, no, you can't force anyone to say the pledge. That's right. So that's it for the Pledge of Allegiance. Yeah. Good stuff. Thanks to Dave Ruse, our old pal there. This is hot off the presses. This is going to be on the House of Perks website. Yeah. So go check it out at households. 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. Favorite shows." | |
4224450a-53a3-11e8-bdec-bbb5c1c64fce | Solar Power: The Future or What? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/solar-power-the-future-or-what | We’ve been promised solar energy for a while now – where is it? Turns out, it’s been quietly and steadily growing across the world. And with a few breakthroughs, we just may be able to say goodbye to fossil fuels. Learn about sun-based energy in this episode. | We’ve been promised solar energy for a while now – where is it? Turns out, it’s been quietly and steadily growing across the world. And with a few breakthroughs, we just may be able to say goodbye to fossil fuels. Learn about sun-based energy in this episode. | Tue, 13 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=225, tm_isdst=0) | 59032639 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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. Hello, Maine in Greater New England. Hello. We're coming to see you guys in Portland, and we can't wait. We would love to see you there. Yes, we'll be at the State Theater on August 30, and if you're interested, you can get tickets and information@sysclive.com. Throw some lobster at us. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. The sun is shining, her collars are popped, tongues of our shoes are hanging out, and it smells really nice in here. That's right. Which must mean one thing. Chuck, it's time to talk some stuff you should know. Shiz. Can I say that? Sure. All right, good. Well, I just did, didn't I? You did. So we are actually talking about solar power today, and I'm a little psyched about this one because I was putting this thing together over months. Dude, you would think solar power is such a hot, sexy topic, that there would be just reams and reams of just stuff to research. And there is, but it's all really wonky and really technical, and there's a lot of stuff that contradicts other stuff. And I got this feeling of dread researching this, that the cheerleaders and champions of solar power are losing their resolve to an extent. They'll still sell you a solar panel. They'll still tell you solar is great, and I know that they truly believe that. But I think that they are worried that it's not taking off like they expected it to. But then let me just caveat that with one other thing, and then we'll get started, and I'll be quiet for the rest of the podcast. If you look at the numbers and the figures, solar has quietly made a name for itself and established itself, at least in the United States, to an astounding degree. So I'm not quite sure what I'm picking up on when I get the sense that they're worried. Because if you look at it, it's actually doing really, really well and growing all the time. Let's discuss solar power. Yes. Power from the sun converted into electricity. Right. So you can say, screw you, power company, or pay me, power company. Yeah, you can say, take this power bill and shove it. So the sun this is pretty neat here. At the beginning of this that you put together here, the sun's rays give off about 1000 watts of energy per square meter. So if you pull the camera back a bit and you look at Texas, let's say a lot of sun in Texas, a lot of land in Texas. There's a lot of stuff in Texas. There really is, but not much stuff. No, that's true. I was going to say, the good thing about Texas is you could completely cover it with solar rays and no one but the people who live in Texas would have a problem with it. Oh, boy. All right, so if you look at a landmass that's as big as Texas, they receive a little under 700 terawatts over the course of 1 hour at noon on a sunny day. 700 kw. Yeah, it sounds like a lot, but is it a lot? Who knows? Who could possibly know? If you want to compare that, you're being coy. In that same hour, the total amount of human mage energy production on planet Earth, and this is all energy production that you could possibly dream of, is 17.7 terawatts compared to 700 kw. That's 40 times less than what the sun delivered to Texas in just that hour. Yeah, right. And the Union of Concerned Scientists happened in group. Who I love. They say that 18 days of sunshine that hits across the entire Earth contains the same amount of energy stored in the entirety of the planet's reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. If you dug up and burned every bit of coal, oil and natural gas, it would only produce as much energy as 18 days worth of global sunlight. That's astounding. Yeah. And these are facts that have 50 caveats beneath each of them, which we're going to talk about, but it is a prime example and I think just a good way to kind of indicate just how much potential energy there is coming from the sun every day. Yeah. And just to point out the obvious, the great thing about solar is there is no greenhouse gas emissions. When you use solar electricity, it's just clean energy and it's free because it's from the sun. That's right. And before you start typing yeah, but what about you cost a lot to make these things are made of silicon. And then before you do that, we were going to talk about all that stuff, but Josh very clearly said, once you have these things set up, that's when the real benefit comes. Yes. And if I hadn't said it, I was going to eventually. Well, now you basically said it. Like when they're working, when they're active, they're not using fossil fuels. Thank you, Chuck. All right, so let's go back in time a bit, because if you think solar power, you think, well, this stuff was invented in the 1970s. Not so you have to go all the way back to 1839, believe it or not, when a French physicist named Alexandra Edmond Josh says, this man, I practiced it a million times, I think bequarillar. Yeah. It's a tough word. Yes, it is. There's a couple of extra consonants in there that shouldn't be there. That's right. So this dude, he is the one that first demonstrated the photovoltaic effect, which is basically the ability of a solar cell to turn sun into electricity all the way back in 1839. Right. But no one knew exactly how this worked. They just knew that it worked. He was burned at the stake later on for his black magic. Right. So just about 40 years later, there's a guy named Charles Fritz, and he, in the 1880s, built the world's first rooftop solar array, coincidentally, just a year after Edison launched the world's first coal fire power plant. But the early solar array was terribly inefficient. It didn't do very much. It could basically power I don't even know what it could power. A mousetrap. How about that? Sure. Which doesn't even need electricity. That's how little power that this thing produced. But it definitely demonstrated that it was possible to generate an electrical current from sunlight in a way that it was a proof of concept, basically saying, just give it, like, 90 years and we'll understand this better. Yeah. And who was that? That was Fritz. Charlie Fritz? Yes. Fritz was a good guy, but he was no Einstein. No Einstein. It would take Einstein, that is, to really explain how this all worked in 19 five, because he had a knack for doing that. I'm not sure if people realize that he was a good explainer, maybe the original explainer. Well, he would put it in terms that you could really understand for sure. Consider the sandwich. Imagine the sandwich is the sun, and then it just go from there, and you'd be like, I understand what he's saying. Yes. And if you think Einstein oh, yeah, he won a bunch of Nobel Prizes for relativity. Not so he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for explaining the photo electric effect. He didn't win for relativity? No, I didn't know that. Holy cow. What is that? Unless I'm wrong, and if I am, I'm going to have a lot of egg on my face. That's all right. We'll cook it off with some good old solar electricity. Gross. It is gross. But also, so is the idea of cooked egg in your beard. So, Bell Labs in 1954, if you want to talk about the modern PV cell. That was in 1954. And thanks to the US government, really, in the US military, they funded a lot of this early research, because if you've ever looked at a picture of Skylab or any of our great satellites, you'll notice that they all have these big solar wings. Yeah, they're solar powered. It was because of US government research in the 50s that we were able to develop those. I think they launched the first solar powered satellite in 58, and then just six years later, they launched the first solar powered satellite whose solar panels could track the sun, which is still a pretty whiz bang thing to have for your solar array. And this is amazing. So the US government invested it in the earliest research, and everything was going along really smoothly. But one of the things that's always been a problem for solar is oil. And natural gas and coal are just so cheap, and our infrastructure is set up to burn those things and get electricity for them. So solar has always been an upstart. But at one point in 1973, oil was not very cheap all of a sudden, because of the OPEC embargo that created the energy crisis, that made it really unchap. So much so that the United States looked around and said, we need to find other sources of energy. And they really looked really hard at solar. And it actually gave solar technology a big old boost. Yeah. And that boost came by way of offering tax credits for the first time in the United States for businesses. And residents said, hey, if you want to put in solar power and they still do this today, we'll give you some tax credits. It'll make it a lot cheaper for you. Yes, there has been, I guess we could call it the solar battle at the White House since 1979. Jimmy Carter very famously had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat water for them and for the pools and for the kitchen and stuff like that. Sure. And Reagan had them taken down in 86. So there are a couple of stories about how this went down. The cynic will say Reagan, as a statement, had them taken down even though they're working fine, because he was all for the fossil fuel industry. And it was a very symbolic gesture. Right. Other people will say that's not what happened at all. The roof needed repair, that the solar panels were on, and they took down the solar panels to repair the roof. And then the White House officially says they did not put them back because it would be very unwise based on cost, as a direct quote. So that's the party line right? Now, I've never heard that one. That sounds like a new Gingrich yarn, if you ask me. Well, that's the direct quote. George W. Bush put solar power back into the White house. He what? Say what? Yeah. I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah. He put solar for the water heaters for the White House pool and then put solar panels on top of the roof of the grounds and maintenance building. Okay. To help out there. He did not have them on top of the actual White House, but he had solar power installed at various places around the White House. This was w or HW. This is W. Okay. Wow. That's really surprising. Yeah. Carters, for his part, one of his he has two on display. One of them is at the Smithsonian, and one of them is right here in Atlanta at the Carter Center. You can go look at one of those solar panels. There's also, like a museum of science in China that got their hands on one. It's on display in China, too. Oh, yeah. Which makes sense because after the US government kind of turned its back on solar, china came along and said, oh, we'll take that ball, and ran with it. Sure. Going back to Reagan, though, I don't want to let them out too easy with this. The fact that they just said it was unwise based on costs. Because he gutted the Department of Energy's renewable energy research and development budgets. Like, totally gutted them. And he eliminated the tax breaks for wind and solar. I'm not sure for how long. For a million years, I would guess no, because they're back. And it was Obama who came back and very publicly installed solar panels back on the roof of the White House. And of course, the first thing I thought was that Trump probably went in there and smashed him with a sledgehammer on his first day in office. But apparently they're still there. They're still there. Still there and still working. He didn't take them down. Wow. So one of the other things that the government did to help solar along during the Carter era was to offer tax breaks, like you were saying, but because of the really, really high cost of installing a solar electric system, it was basically viewed as a sweetheart deal tax break for the rich. That's how the first solar tax credits were viewed, because solar was so expensive. So they were a little bit before their time. But over the course of those ensuing years, from the early 80s onward to today, because we've had breakthroughs in technology, of manufacturing, of creating new kinds of semiconductors, of making traditional kinds more cheaply, the price of solar has dropped 88% in the past decade. Yeah, it's really to the point now where it's I mean, I looked at some of the prices and I was like, you know what? That's now, I think, fairly affordable for most kind of middle class Americans if they want to put in solar power, because eventually it's going to pay for itself. That's the whole idea. Either you're trying to get cheaper bills and have it pay for itself over the years, which it's going to happen regardless. Or you're someone with some money that just wants to do the right thing by the environment and get off the grid as much as possible. Yeah, it's just that upfront cost. Not the cost over the life of the set up. It's the upfront cost. But there are things like energy saver, renewable energy mortgage, home loans, basically, you can take out. They have really special good financing and rates and stuff like that. There's a lot of things you can do that we'll talk about to get around that upfront cost. But you hit the nail on the head. And it's really worth saying again, you can expect your solar electrical home system to pay for itself over the lifetime of the setup. Yeah, we'll talk more about price later, but just poking around like it's sort of an average US. Household. You can plunk down about 15 grand to cover 100% of your electricity needs, I think after the tax credit, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, is that right? And again, there are so many factors where you live, how much energy you use, how big your house is, the weather, where you are. So this is a big, broad statement, but if you're just looking for a general range, it's not like it costs 50 or $60,000 anymore to do this, right? So you want to take a break and then come back and talk about what actually is going on in those solar cells? Heck yeah. Let's do it. Chuck, what if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yes. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code S YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace.com S. Okay, dude. So there are three ways as far as humans are aware of right now, that you can get energy from the sun. You can get it by converting it into electricity. Correct. What we're going to talk about, basically, you can turn it into chemical energy. Boring. Which is far out, though. It's like storing energy in the bonds of molecules, like through artificial photosynthesis. That's pretty cool. Sneeze and then you can also convert it into heat. But when you're talking about solar energy, most people think of the solar into electricity, which is called photovoltaic energy. And that's basically what we're going to be talking about. Yeah. Like when you drive through a neighborhood and you see those shiny panels on a roof and think, my God, those are ugly, man. It's true. We'll get to that, too. So that's what we're talking about, these photovoltaic cells. They are made up of semiconductors materials called semiconductors. And these days and we'll talk in a SEC about how this might be changing in the future, but about 90% of all these solar cells these days are using silicon as the semiconductor. Right. Silicon is a crystal, which means that it has a really tight atomic composition. It's extraordinarily stable, which is kind of a thing because you'd want a somewhat unstable arrangement of atoms or else you won't get this electricity to work. Yeah. Can't be too stiff. No, you can't flow. That's exactly right. The flow of electricity, basically, but with the reason why they use silicon is because it is a semiconductor, which means that it gives you a large measure of control over where that electricity flows and how it flows. So rather than just using pure silicon, which will allow you to direct the control of electricity, but won't produce any electricity, they actually dope it with other materials to produce two different types of silicon film, NType and ptype. That's right. So for the N type, which stands for negative, they're going to dope it and I love that word in this case sure. With phosphorus that has five electrons, it's going to bind to the silicon that has four electrons. And so that leaves you I can even do this kind of simple math with one free one extra electron leftover just dangling out there like it's wearing shorts that are way too short. Yeah. It's looking for a place to go, basically. Sure. The way I sort of saw this was like a couple of apartments next to each other. One has an empty room and one has an extra roommate. Okay. That's a great one. So the other type is this P type. The positive, it's doped with boron, has three electrons. And so this is the other apartment. This is the one it's going to bind with silicon, and it leaves that unused bond open. So that's where you have your extra space, where the electron can go. Right. So when you take N type silicon film and ptype silicon film and you put them up against one another, you have a situation where that extra electron wants to flow to the other side and fill the unused bond, because, again, the universe is always moving toward homeostasis, right? Yeah. That roommate is like, hey, you got an extra room. Can I come crash in there? Yeah. And they say, Wait, we need somebody to get you off of the couch. And in this case, that somebody is sunlight, because sunlight is made up of photons, which are energy carriers of the electromagnetic spectrum. And when they hit this doped silicon, they come bursting into the room and they kick that lazy electron into the other apartment where there's an open bedroom and everything is filled very nicely. That's right. So this electron flow, these electrons moving around and flowing in this single direction I don't think we said that yet. It only flows in one direction. Electricity does. Well, it does in this way in this case. Yeah, that's the basis. This electron flow is the basis of electricity. And what they do is they put these metal contacts on the top and the bottom of the cell, and then you can direct that electron flow out of the cell to be used as electricity in your home. Yeah, that's a solar cell in a nutshell. And the solar cell is the basic unit of the what you think of when you think of like a solar panel or whatever, it's that one little square, and that square is connected to other squares, and they form what's called a module. And when you put like a nice little frame around it and put it on a stand or whatever, you have yourself a solar panel. When you have a bunch of solar panels together in a group all working together, that's a solar array. So technically, when you point at someone's roof and you say, look at that solar panel, you're saying, look at that solar array. And now you can correct that person from the back seat, and they'll make you get out of the car. Did people say that, look at that solar array? In my universe, I would think people would more say, look at those solar panels. Well, then that would make sense. I had to set it up so it didn't make any sense. So someone would swoop in. Incorrect. So the person who knows what it's really called hangs around with complete morons who say things like, look at that solar panel when they see a group of solar panels. All right, now I got you. We're talking about morons here, right? So it sounds simple, and it is kind of simple, and it's complexity that makes no sense at all. But it's a little more complicated because, like we said, electricity in this case is only flowing in one direction, which means it creates a direct current. And that's a problem because if we talked about in the Bone Wars episode, about the what they called not the power wars, the current wars, the war of current. That's right. DC did not win. So we have to convert that DC current to AC current. So what these solar panels need is something called an inverter. Yeah. And the inverter is basically like the brains of the whole set up. And there used to be a big problem with inverters. They were very clunky, and you would basically have one inverter for an entire solar array. And the solar inverter would kind of modulate the amount of electricity that was going through it out to the house or the circuit panel, and it would base whatever it was doing on whatever the lowest common denominator of the whole array was giving it. Right. So if you had one dirty solar cell or there was a cloud going over just one solar panel out of, like, 20, the inverter was basically delivering electricity based on that one cloudy panel or that one dirty cell. That's not the case anymore. Yeah. Not very smart, was it? It really wasn't. The solar industry wised up, and they said, we can do better than this. And they came up with what are called micro inverters. And now a micro inverter is responsible for either one panel or just a single cell. And so that one cell could be dirty or cloudy at any given point, but it's not going to drag down the whole thing because there's all these other inverters that are running the show on their own, too. How can you go to clean these things? Did you see that? I didn't, but I did see that they were virtually maintenance free. Oh, really? Yeah, that's what I saw. All right, so let's talk about powering a house. And just like four years ago, 2015, and these are pretty good numbers 800,000 houses and businesses in the United States had solar panels. And that's not to say they were 100% dependent on them, but they were at least doing some of the work. Right, which is not bad. And like you said, once it's up and running, not much maintenance going on. And you're looking at probably and the number they often throw out is just for 20 years. You can expect this thing to work like a charm. Yeah, 20 years is the low end. I saw the average is about 25 years. When you buy a solar set up, that you can just put it up there and be like, oh, this is great. I don't even need to think about this anymore. But if you do want to invest in this, if you're like, okay, I can swing this. I want to contribute. I'm going to go solar. There are some steps you want to take to kind of wisen yourself up so that when you deal with the installer. You'll know what you're talking about. One of the first things you want to do is to do an energy audit on your energy consumption, which is basically figuring out how much electricity you use in your house at any given time. Probably you want to figure out what your peak is and then just kind of plan for that. See, what I don't get is, like, you can look at your power bill and tell that you need to do a separate audit outside of that. Well, the reason why it's good to do a separate audit outside of that is you can identify areas where you can improve things. It's kind of like, no, you don't have to do it, but you could do an energy audit. And when you do, you can be like, oh, I think if I added insulation to the attic, it would cover energy consumption by like 30%. Yeah, I've heard it. This is a much larger thing, right? Yeah. It's kind of like if taking on the project of getting solar installed on your home wasn't a big enough headache for you, add this to it, you know what I'm saying? But it's a good definitely you will find some places where you can cut your energy consumption. That's the benefit of an energy audit. And this just happens to be a good time to do it. Yeah. And the other thing you have to decide as you're pricing this out and you can call a company, they will come out these days and basically tell you what you need if you get a good, highly recommended company. And apparently some of the smaller companies are much more highly recommended than the larger companies, from what I read online. But they will come out and say the question they're going to say is, and this is really the most important thing for you to decide is what percentage of your household energy do you want to come from solar? And if you're like 100%, then they'll say, okay, well, here's what you need. If you say, you know what, if I can cover I don't have much roof space, I'm happy with covering 50% of my power usage, then they'll say, all right, well, then let's work within your system, or you may not have a choice unless you it all depends on your roof and the way it's sloped and the way it's faced and all that stuff, right? Yeah. There's a lot of considerations, and again, the person you hired to do this is going to be able to provide you with all this information and ask all the right questions. But if you want to know what you're talking about going into it, you can find out kind of about how much electricity you could expect a solar array on your roof to produce down to your actual house. Like, there's all sorts of solar potential maps online. Yeah. And Calculators, they make it kind of. Really easy on you these days. It's easy. And let's just be honest, Chuck, it's fun too, because it will show you how much money you will actually not only how much you'll save over the course of the lifetime of the solar array, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast the thing will pay for itself. It's pretty cool to do, but you'll have an idea of this thing is going to pay for itself in eight years, or this thing is going to pay for itself in 25 years. And that will largely depend on where you live in the country. But everything I saw, from everywhere, from Union of Concerned Scientists to energy gov, is that everywhere in the United States, you can expect your solar array to pay for itself eventually over its own life. Yes, it might take a little longer in Seattle than in Phoenix. Right. But that's how things go. You got better music in Seattle and better food. Well, sure, maybe the food's a wash. You got the music, though, for sure. Sorry. Phoenix, we love you. Yeah, sorry. Last of the Meat Puppets. So I talked about the angle of these panels and the angle of your roof. It's called the angle of inclination is how you have to set these. If you have all the money in the world and nowhere to spend it, you can actually get systems that have motors that will move and follow. These panels will follow the sun across the sky, stay in perfect stay at the perfect angle of inclination. That is super expensive, though. It is. That's the technology I was talking about from 1964 that they had figured out for satellite. Yeah, it is, but yeah, it is still kind of expensive. What I've seen, though, is rather than invest in figuring out how to make those kinds of set ups cheaper, they figured out how to catch more diffuse sunlight. The kind that gets scattered by clouds. Yeah, that makes sense on a solar panel. So you don't necessarily have to have it the kind that tracks the sunlight. And you can still get as much electricity as you're going to need to power your house basically, no matter where you are in the country, just from the solar panels that they make these days. Yeah. So ideally, your array is going to be pointing true south. That's not to say if your roof is set up in such a way that it doesn't point true south, you can't have solar because like you said, they've come a long way over the years with how they can collect the sunlight. But if you're facing true south and you're at a good angle, that's as close to the area that you're in, as close to the latitude as possible. Right. You don't have a lot of trees around and no big buildings, then you're a really good candidate to provide energy for your house. We should say also that's if you're in the Northern hemisphere, we have listeners in the Southern hemisphere. Yeah, that's true. So I would say if you're in Australia, you would want it to face true north. But everybody knows that the sun is so ridiculously hot in Australia that you don't even need solar panels. It just powers everything just blazing down on everyone. You can bury your solar panels underground in Australia. Still work better than here. It's like, you can scrape me the sun. The other thing is, weather is never predictable, but what you're going to do is look at the data in your area, look at average monthly sunlight and stuff like that, take into account rainfall, and in the end, you want to design because you want power all the time. If you're going 100% sure, you want to design for your worst month, sort of like well, not really. I was about to say, just like those initial inverters, you're only as strong as your weakest member. Right. But you want to take into account, let's say it rains every single day in a month. You lose your job, your dog dies. The absolute worst month, right? So then they might say, all right, throw on an extra panel for your dog, right? You'll be just fine. Right. So if you're all hyped up about this, we just kind of open the can of worms. There's a lot more to take into account. But again, just hire somebody, reputable, do your research, and they should be able to guide you through this process a lot more than we can. But I do strongly advise going on and figuring out you need to know what you need to know kind of thing. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. And earlier you mentioned that these things were ugly, and for a long time they were the bane of existence of a lot of people in certain neighborhoods. Some homeowners associations still won't allow them, but they've gotten better looking overtime. They've gotten closer to the roofline, a little bit more attractive. And I think, in my opinion, this is just me speculating. Just the perception has changed. And now when you see them, you don't think, oh my gosh, look at an ugly thing on the roof. You think, well, those are solar panels, and it might not blend in perfectly with the roof, but there's a big benefit as well. You don't even think, like, hippies live there anymore. No, normal people live there. Normals. There are also solar roof tiles that are really starting to come along with Tesla versions. Yeah, they're nuts. They're super durable. They're very pretty. I don't own any because they're extremely expensive. But if they can get the cost down to anything approaching like a normal size roof, it's just like, game over, man. That's it. Game over, man. Exactly. Each one of these tiles is like a solar cell or a solar panel, and it's a whole roof's worth of them. They're super durable, but they also cost about five to ten times the amount of a normal roof these days. Which is just going to pay for itself. Yes. I mean, if you're spending, I don't know, twelve to 15 grand on a roof, and you have to spend up to 150,000 for that roof to be solar, that's a lot of dough. I saw like, 200 in one case, but yeah, somewhere between 100 to 200 for a new roof. Yeah, but the people that are doing this are very well heeled, who want to be able to brag about their solar roof, quite frankly. Sure. Yeah. And if they're doing that and they're generating solar for their house, more power to them. That's fine. Sure. Tesla needs to get that price down quite a bit. Come on, Tesla. Hurry up, Tesla. So we need to talk a little bit about efficiency. How much of the sun's energy we can convert into electricity? Is that efficiency? And way back when they first started this stuff in the 19th century, it was not even 1%. So it was mainly just like, hey, look what we can do now a little bit. Now it's at 98%. Oh, my God. Not true. It's about 25% now. It's not as much as I would have thought when I started doing this research. And you can't ever get to 100%, I think they said at the very max these days, because of energy loss and conversion and stuff, the tip top upper limit is about 87% that we could ever get. That's like the physical limit for conversion. Yeah, but 25%, I mean, it's fun. It's not like the sunlight you don't use fills up landfills, you know what I'm saying? For sure. But there's a lot of room for improvement between that current 25% and that 87% winter. Right. And we're actually starting to make those kind of gains. One of the ways to do it is to make solar panels cheaper. So even if they are just at 25% efficiency, if the process of making them is cheaper, you can put more solar panels up and the average person can afford it. That's one way to go. A better way to go is to focus on making those materials as ridiculously efficient as possible. And they found a promising new material called perovskyte. I think that's how you say it. Yeah, it's kind of a clunky word. It really is. And I think it was discovered by Russians or Soviets back in the day. It really does. But one of the things about perovskite, this mineral, is that it is really efficient when it comes to the blue end of the spectrum, the blue to ultraviolet, highenergy photons that come streaming through. Normally, those kind of photons are too energetic to interact with the phosphorus or the boron that silicon is doped with. So it just passes through and it's like completely wasted high energy light. The parovskyte actually interacts with those way more efficiently. The problem is it doesn't really interact with the lower energy stuff that silicon does. So the highest efficiency solar cells that you can get are typically made with silicon and perovskype put together. So it captures as much stuff as you can hope for. And these are starting to creep up into the high 20s, low 30s range. And as perovsky manufacturing gets easier and easier, we should be able to expect to see solar panels that are 32% efficient, which is a lot. That extra 7%. That's a huge difference. Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned the reason that we're trying to make this move to provide Skype anyway is because it's cheaper. You can make it cheaper than the silicon ones. Right, that's true. So one day, hopefully, they could be all propsky because they're developing stuff that's going to capture more of what the silicon can capture. Isn't that right? Yeah, it would be wonderful if they figure out how to tinker with perovsky so that they don't need the silicon at all. Because there are a lot of problems with silicon, which we'll talk about. Right. So I mentioned earlier in the show about selling your Pay me power company, and that wasn't a joke. In fact, I didn't even know this was a thing until shamefully, like five years ago when I learned that if you produce more energy with your system than you use, you can actually not everywhere, but in many places. Now you can sell that back to the power company. And not only are you not paying, in fact, we talked about this in one of the episodes. It might have been the sun or the Bill Gates renewable energy episode. That's what it was. Yeah, I remember. But I knew we talked about grids and stuff like that and now that's where it was. Man. Good call. I think so. But they will cut you a check, which is pretty amazing. And here's the best part, even to me, I was like, well, do I want a check from Georgia Power for, whatever, $19 a month? Yes, I sort of do. But what I would really rather do is pass that forward. Pay it forward, like they say. And there are places that have programs where if you have excess solar energy, you can send that to the power grid and then apply the leftover as a credit to the bill of a family in need, which is awesome. It is pretty awesome. Everybody comes out super great. Yeah. I wonder what the money I mean, that's the one thing I don't know. How much more are you making? Is it a check for $19 or is it like $300 a month? I don't know. And it would definitely depend on a couple of things. How much electricity costs in your area sure. And how much your utility company pays for buyback electricity. And then also how much you're over producing, too. Yeah, there's a bunch of factors, but I'm just kind of curious if it's like a lot of money or is it a lot of money? I really, honestly don't know. But every little bit counts if you're a family in need, right? Absolutely. So there's another thing that would be great. If you have all this excess solar energy, it's really sunny out. If you could somehow capture it to use it later during nighttime or on a cloudy day or something like that. A lot of people have said, well, that'd be great. They just make a solar electric home system. Perfect. Let's build batteries that do that. And so there are home batteries that are meant to be connected to solar outfits. Like Tesla makes one of those two, LG makes one, MercedesBenz makes one. It's a home battery. The problem is that they are also really expensive on the order of five, six, seven grand. And so if you're spending twelve grand on your solar array and you spend an extra six grand on your home battery, you just spend an extra 50% of the cost of your solar array to back up your home with solar electricity when the sun is not shining as much. That's a huge, enormous added expense. Yes. And the one thing I was because like you, I think my interest got peaked a little bit for my own house. Man, this is really appealing to me now, here in my late forty s, I could buy a system that'll see me through to my death, probably. I don't know about that. By the time it starts breaking down, I'll be long gone. Let's hope not. And my first thought was, you know, we get a lot of brownouts and blackouts and power outages. For some reason in my neighborhood, it just happens a lot. It seems like every rainstorm, certainly anytime there's snow, is it brown out where the power is almost out, but it comes back and then almost out? Yes. I think it just sort of flickers. I wish they'd call it something else. It sounds so gross. The brown out sounds gross. Yeah, it does. It sounds gross. Gray out. How about a gray out? Let's call it that. Right? Are you thinking about like a butt hole? Yeah. Poop or something? Like poop just squeezing out of your electrical outlets or something like that. That sounds like a very archibalung thing to say. Like, I'm going to go upstairs and have a brown out. Yes, it does. Dropping the Browns off at the Super Bowl. Right? Okay, I get you the only way the Browns could make it to the Super Bowl. Oh man. Yeah. Texas and Ohio, super happy with you today. So my first thought was like, oh man, I get on solar and there's a blackout going on. Because we went out. I think I talked about this on one episode when we had the big snowstorm a couple of years ago. We were out for three and a half days. That's unconscionable. Yeah, I mean, it was a long time to be without electricity to the point where it was like, all right, I'm a little bit worried about my family, right. So I thought, man, I'll get solar and all those suckers will be without power and I'll have power. That is not the case unless if you're storing on a battery, you can do that. But during a power outage, there's something called islanding. It's very dangerous. It's basically when you're pumping electricity back into the power lines that all the Georgia Power thinks and the linemen are dead. So they're going to work on these and you're still pumping power back into it. They can't have that. So your power goes out as well. It'll kill a lineman for sure. But if you have a battery backup, you're fine. As you said, that's where you're getting your juice from. But your solar system is going to disconnect you from the grid to keep that from happening. But there's actually that happens elsewhere, Chuck. If people have a generator, some people will plug the generator into an outlet in their house and reverse the flow of electricity from the generator throughout their house, which can create Islanding as well. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of a thing now is a lot of new houses have whole house generators built in. Sure. And as soon as the power cuts off, that thing automatically fires up. Right. But this is like a portable generator that they're plugging in reverse into their home wiring. It's not a good idea for anyone. Yes. I mean, there are safe ways to do it. That is not one of them. That's not one of them. Should we take another break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll take one final break, everyone, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the downsides because there are some to solar power. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. 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I want to say there's one other type of battery I found. It's a mechanical battery where your solar power system uses all that excess power to power a pump that pumps water up to a raised area. And then at night or on a cloudy day when you need the extra electricity, it releases that water to spin over a turbine, which creates an electrical current. Isn't that awesome? You got a little power plant in your house, basically. Yeah, you do. And it's green, too. It's hydroelectric. Solar powered hydroelectric battery is what that is. Pretty amazing. So we mentioned silicon not being great. It's obvious that to create and this is an argument a lot of times against electric cars and hybrid vehicles. We all like to drive them and stuff, but there is a greenhouse effect when it comes to making the stuff. Mining these materials is not great. It is very environmentally, very harsh on the environment, and I don't think anyone makes any bones about that. Transporting all this stuff going to burn a lot of fossil fuels. Manufacturing all this stuff burns fossil fuels. But like you said earlier, that is true. But once that process is finished, that's it. No more greenhouse gases forever. Right? And some people will double down at this point and be like, whoa. Creating solar cells is actually really harmful because it requires the production of something called nitrogen trifluoride, which is a greenhouse gas that's 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. That's a lot bad stuff. And when you work into the idea that you have a whole house battery that's made of cadmium, lead, nickel, all of which have to be mined and which has to be replaced every, say, ten years, your solar array seems much, much less green. And these are all very legitimate arguments. They're not incorrect at all, but they're also current limitations, and they're all surrounding production and transportation and all that stuff can be worked out. And when that stuff gets worked out, you still have solar producing clean energy with green or with fossil fuels. Even if you worked all that stuff out, when you deploy them and actually create electricity from them, they're still going to produce greenhouse gasses. So solar will always have that advantage, and it just has a bunch of kind of front loaded obstacles that need to be overcome through breakthroughs in the short term. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's no contest in the end, especially if you're talking about the life of the solar system, considering like 25 years, let's say over the 25 years of burning coal and natural gas is just not even close. Yeah. And I mean, like, if you start getting more and more solar involved in transportation, then you knock out those greenhouse gases for transporting solar panels from place to place because it's solar powering. The transportation, too. There's a lot of stuff we can do that we just haven't quite figured out how to do yet. But it's not physically impossible to overcome them. Yeah. And there's also people that say, hey, the entire country could run on solar and wind. Some people say maybe not. Other people say no, it totally could. But there are a lot of big obstacles when you talk about converting a nationwide system from a fossil fuel system to renewables. It's not easy. And frankly, it will probably never happen on that scale. Maybe I'm cynical. I think it's cynical. I think if we look at 150 years in the future, maybe even 175 even, I would say it's entirely possible I could see it. Well, that would require and if you do the math, that's about right. That would require several generations of people dying out sure. Who would fight this tooth and nail to their grave. Right. Certain people who would have to die out first. Yeah, but there are a lot of real obstacles to this. I mean, our infrastructure just is not built for this. Like, we would have to completely rewrite how we do things. Yeah. So the infrastructure is set up in a centralized manner where you have a power plant and that power plant is built wherever, and you burn coal or whatever and create steam, which turns into a turbine, that creates electricity, and that electricity goes out to the area that power plant serves. That's not how renewables like solar or wind work. They have to be built where the wind or the sunlight is. And so you have to build a bunch of them wherever you can. And then those things all have to be connected. So it's a decentralized way that you have to connect them together to the current grid, which means running a lot more transmission lines from these new solar arrays that you're going to build wherever to connect them to deliver that electricity throughout the country. Yeah. And there are fluctuations in the weather. We already talked about you're sort of at the behest of what your weather is giving you. And we're not saying when the wind doesn't blow, your lights go off, believe me, but it does have an effect. And so you have to compensate for this stuff. And compensating for this stuff on a national grid is expensive. And I don't even think we've quite figured out how that's going to work yet, have we? No, there's some proposals. One is to basically create batteries, like just use the same solution that people have for their houses. We just need to take that excess stuff and store it for use when the sun isn't shining. They figured out that for an electrical storage system to store 12 hours worth of electricity for the US. Electrical grid would cost more than $2.5 trillion. That's quite a bit. Other people are saying, no, we just have to get better at more efficient long distance transmission line. That's what we talked about in that Bill Gates episode. One of the things was that smart grid where we can easily shuffle solar, that's generated in Scottsdale up to Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine, for that matter. Yeah. Everywhere in the United States at some point. There's a lot of sunshine going on right at once. And you can send that to places I know we're picking on Portland and Seattle again, but if you can produce in Phoenix and send it to Portland, that's great. And, I mean, let's be honest here. $2.5 trillion is a lot of cheese. Sure. But I saw somewhere someone point out that there is an estimate that to fully convert over the US. Electrical grid to solar only would be about $4 trillion, which, again, is a lot of money. But in the grand scheme of things, and when you really think about what that investment is going towards right. It's not that much. And frankly, it's kind of doable if there's a political will to do it. Yeah, I get you another solution would be for every house to have its own solar ready, every car to have its own solar power. That's what I'm banking more on. It's like more and more people doing this to the point where it's not part of the infrastructure of the grid, but still making a big dent. But that's going to be the hardest sell because you just completely eliminated all of the power companies, and they're not exactly known as lightweights when it comes to things like lobbying. That's true. And you look at the subsidies going on now, and that's really clear. Who's better at lobbying? Federal subsidies for power companies who produce solar are about $533,000,000 compared to $32 billion for natural gas alone in 2016. Right. That's just tax breaks and subsidies for investing in deploying that kind of energy. Yeah. And solar still is pretty expensive per megawatt hour compared to, like you said, fossil fuels are just cheap still. They really are. And here's the problem, too, Chuck. There's a conundrum where when you deploy a lot of solar electricity in a utility, it actually tends to depress wholesale electrical prices across the board. So a company has an incentive to not deploy solar because they can charge more for electrical produced from coal and other fossil fuels like they normally do. That's right. But if you put one in your house, you're not only paying for your own electric or whatever, you're subsidizing your own electrical bill. You possibly are getting money back or helping a family in need. And it's also an investment in your house. It actually increases the value of your home, because unless someone just hates them and wants to regain it up and yank them off the roof when they come in there, it's going to be a selling point. You're like, hey, moving to this house, they've already paid for it, and you don't have a power bill. Yeah. There was a study from the Lawrence Berkeley national Lab that found that solar setup increased the value of a house in America by about 15 grand. Right. So when I said they've already paid for it, what I really mean is they're passing that on to you. Exactly. They passed the cost onto you. True. You got anything else? I got nothing else, man. I'm going to legit look into this. Let me know how it goes, man. I'm really interested. I have a dude out. Like, I don't think we could do our whole house, but we have this one roof in particular now that can't see from the street. You can only see it from one place in the house, and I think it faces south. And I have to measure the panels, but I could probably fit, like, eight panels up there. That's not enough for my whole house. Hey, whatever a little bit works, that could power my Frankenstein experiments. Right? Exactly. You're bringing inanimate matter back to life. That's right. One other thing, Chuck. There's a big obstacle that's facing us worldwide, and that is that we haven't figured out how to get solar energy from the oceans collected over the ocean to the rest of the world, which is going to be a big challenge. But if we could figure that out, problem solved. Just build a solar array the size of Texas, maybe over the great Pacific garbage patch. And there we go. I feel like I've seen research into that and maybe not the oceans, but like, solar blankets over water. No. Am I making that up? I mean, I'm sure that you could have them in coastal areas or whatever, but that means you couldn't swim in those coastal areas, which is going to depress the value of the real estate there. So I would guess we would want them, like, really far offshore. But how do you get that electricity back to where it's needed on land? That's the question, I think. Yeah. Just throw a big floating solar blanket over an offshore oil rig and just plug it in. Just plug it in. Yes. Here you go. Solving problems solved. If you want to know more about solar, go check it out. See if you can maybe swing it for your house. And if so, let us know about it. We want to hear that. And Chuck will keep you updated, too, won't you? Sure. And since I said Chuck will keep you updated, friends, that means it's time for listener mail. Oh, no, sir. I know. You're being coy because to your right and Jerry's chair is Alexander Williams. And not Jerry. No, jerry's standing over there. This is all getting weird. It is getting a little weird. We're playing musical chairs and Jerry's the loser. That's now Jerry's net for the loser. What we've done, though, today is ask Alex Williams, one of our colleagues and pals here in the office, to come in. And we don't do this much, but when we really love a show and someone sits 14ft from us, well, and they do something really special. I mean, this is special stuff we're talking about. Well, that's why I said we really love it. Okay, we ask him in, and here he is to talk about your great show, Ephemeral. What? A comfortable chair. Sherry I can see what a great chair is. That Frank. This is Frank. Wow. He's sitting on Frank. That's right. So, welcome, Alex. We wanted to have you here to kind of tell everybody about your show because we love your show and we could talk about it all day, but we thought it'd be better if you came in and kind of told the folks, like, the thought behind Ephemeral and what prompted you to do it and what they can expect from it. So go. Okay. It's a podcast about artifacts. Right. The stuff that gets left behind and trying to illuminate maybe dark or sort of forgotten corners of history by when we have them, by playing the artifacts. It's an audio show. So specifically we started with ideas of, like, tape and film and video, but then sometimes you get into areas where there's just really no artifacts or artifacts that don't really translate into the audio medium. And then so you experiment a little bit. The series itself, it's ten episodes plus a trailer. Right. That was the first season. Yeah. The trailer itself stands on its own, I think you've said before. I hope so. Yeah. It's an eight minute little story about we'll call it like my first there was no podcast then my first radio show that I loose connection of thoughts that I would make on my parents answering machine. That was my fully produced first show, at least that I remember. And so in each episode, you kind of find a recovered or formerly lost, just kind of overlooked piece and then kind of dissect it and explain it and talk about, like, its place in the universe. Right. And I think one of the episodes was about kind of a long lost, original TV network. Right. The Dumont Television Network. Yeah. Right. You guys ever heard of Dumont? I had not, no. In the golden age of television, there's four TV networks ABC, CBS, NBC also with us today. Sure. All big radio companies beforehand. I mean, big, huge brands. And Dumont was a television manufacturer that got into the broadcasting game at the very beginning. They were the fourth network when there was only four. They were only around for, I think, just a little over a decade, and something like 200 broadcasts have been almost completely lost because things just weren't recorded then. There was no real way to record live television. What they would do is they'd make something called a Kinescope, which should take a TV screen, and you film it with your film camera, and then you have a real it looks terrible. And the only reason they make that is so they could send it off to you're in California and your affiliates not connected to New York, DC, Philadelphia, et cetera, on the coaxial cable. And so then they'd show it once in California, and then they would trash that thing or tape over it or film over it because there was no reruns thing. Right. It was weird because of it. So the little snippets that we have of it left, the few Kinescopes that got saved, it's something like 300 somewhat complete broadcast. They're mostly held by individual collectors, and a few are in institutions like the Museum of TV and Radio in New York. Nice. That's awesome. You also covered one of the topics that we've covered in the past about the Collier Brothers, which was very cool. And I think this one of my favorite things about the show is it's so wide ranging. It's like the best episodes of this American Life or 99% Invisible as far as your approach goes. And that's why I think I loved it from the beginning. You were in the Collier Brothers episode very briefly. I know you did a walk by, I did a line reading. We'll just leave it at that. It'll be an Easter egg for listeners. So all ten episodes plus the trailer out, they're available now. Wherever you get your podcast, right? Indeed. You have a second season coming? Second season? We did our first recording for yesterday. Nice. Yeah. How's it going? So far, so good. I got a lot of reading to do, man. Right on. We'll get to it. We won't keep you any longer, but thank you for coming by. And if you want to check out Ephemeral, everybody, you can go check it out on what? The I Heart Radio app apple podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, go check it out now. All of those things, someone asked me to put it on an old tape for them, but I haven't done that yet. That would be a cool way to get it. Thanks for coming by, Alex. Thanks for having me on, guys. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Alex did, you can just drop by the Studio JK instead, go on to Stuffyshotknow.com, check out our social links, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show, you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands? Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. 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 paper, boy. Or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing Hooza. 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 obsession. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit Hulucom for plan details." | |
How Tipping Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-tipping-works | Tipping is commonly expected in some places, such as U.S. restaurants. Yet this practice varies across cultures. Join trivia gurus (and former waiters) Josh and Chuck as they take a closer look at the history, practice and controversy surrounding tipping. | Tipping is commonly expected in some places, such as U.S. restaurants. Yet this practice varies across cultures. Join trivia gurus (and former waiters) Josh and Chuck as they take a closer look at the history, practice and controversy surrounding tipping. | Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:22:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=16, tm_min=22, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=82, tm_isdst=0) | 48344571 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Tucker. Brian. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. You ever waited tables? I did know. It's awful. How long did you do it? I did. It awfully. Not for many years, but man, I was yeah, I waited tables for many years as well, in several different states and many different kinds of restaurants. So I have a pretty wide range of experience with being tipped. How are you doing? Great. How are you? Are you trying to hurry this along? Here's a tip for me to you. You're clear that OJ. Guy pal. O. J. Simpson. Yeah. There's from Dave Letterman top ten from the 90s, something about tipping. And one of them was like, here's the tips. You're clear of that. OJ. Fella pal. I'm glad we're staying relevant, as always. I'm not trying to move it along. I just thought since you said you didn't have an intro, I would document a little bit of my history as a waiter. You did great, man. Remember what's his name? The guy from Scrubs and Garden State. For some reason, I always think he was perfect at being that waiter. Zach Breath. Yeah. For some reason, it was just like whenever I think of waiters and then I think of La. I think of that scene character, the scene at the beginning and the end of it. I think that was really based on his experience as a waiter. I'm not mistaken. Yeah. He wore a lot of eyeliner in the early 2000s. Guyliner that's called you never heard that phrase? No. Skyliner. Yeah. So tipping, Josh, you've been pushing this one for a while, and it never got done for various reasons. And I'm glad we got around to it, because this will be one that people it's ubiquitous, and we'll get tons and tons of email about this. I guarantee it. Yeah. And it's going to be helpful because in several points, we tell you to go to TripAdvisor to look up tipping systems, so that's helpful. Well, it's hard to cover tipping customs because they're different everywhere and for each job and it gets so overwhelming, you just have to end up saying, hey, if you're going to this country, look it up. Or apparently you need to go through life like Jimmy Conway and Goodfellas and tip absolutely every single person you see. Yeah. Your mechanic. Did you see that? Did you know you're supposed to tip your mechanic ten to $20 or more for jobs over $500? It's like, hey, thanks for overcharging me and exploiting my ignorance of my car and how it functions. Here's an extra $20. Your mechanic. Yeah. Well, you know what? Since you brought that up, I saw an ABC 2020 questionnaire is Tipping out of control? Oh, yeah. And 86% of people say it is. I disagree. You don't think it's out of control? After reading this, I was like, man, I'm way cheaper than I realized. And this is just a question I thought was interesting. What services bother you the most that you were obliged to tip? 30% of people said bathroom attendance. Oh, I don't tip them. That's at the top of my list. I don't want a bathroom attendant. Well, yeah, I can get my own services. Well, it makes me want to not wash my hands. It makes me just want to get out of there. Yes. Take out food tipping 29%. It hurts people to pay for it. Like when you get a takeout order, like when you go there and they just turn around and get your food and hand it to you in a bag. Yeah, like when you call it in, you don't tip them. I do. Do you really? Yeah. Okay, what else? Salons. Yes. 21% of people don't like tipping the salon because women say it's just endless because you got to tip your colors and the people who wash your hands. I can see that. And then 20% the tip jars at coffee houses. I rarely patronize those as well. Coffee houses or tip charge tip charts, copy houses. And the reason being is, I'm sure I will be taken to task for this. I don't think people in coffee houses are paid the tipped wage. They're not. I looked it up. I might as well walk around with the tip jar and ask people to give me their change. I'll even wear a change belt. How about that? Just to make it easier on you. Well, why would you even have a tip jar there if you're not getting paid the tipped wage? That brings up a big point, because that is a big controversy. People at Starbucks start out at about $850 to $9 an hour. What is that? That's minimum wage. That's above the minimum wage. Just I think 725 is the minimum wage. Now, the tipped the Fair standards and Labor Act, the minimum federal hourly wage for tipped employees is 213. Yes. Those people, although, usually get tipped. Not necessarily. Well, most states have their own, and it's more than 213. I didn't get that. Most states, the pinnacle is Colorado, and they have, like, a minimum tipped wage of 413 an hour. And that's what everybody's like, wow, Colorado is really killing it. Right? I know. Here in Georgia, it's the federal minimum, and there's a group called Faireats.org that's dedicated to shaming restaurants that just adhere to that by celebrating restaurants that pay their employees more than the minimum tipped wage. Well, you're supposed to make up the difference as a restaurant from what employees claim to the IRS and their tipped money. If that doesn't equal minimum wage, then the restauranteur is supposed to make up that difference in wages. I would wager that that does not happen. Well, I would wager that not many tipped employees are reporting all of their tips either. That's true, too. So it's kind of like you have to and then both just kind of storm away. Disgruntled. Right. But you don't tip McDonald's. No, you don't tip it. And for the same reason I don't tip people at coffee houses, because it's the same thing. You are putting my order in right. Into a cash register or cash register computing machine, and you're turning around and grabbing my coffee or my fries or whatever. Right. And I'm not demeaning or diminishing that job whatsoever. I'm very happy that you're doing that because I really want that. And you're standing between me and the fries. Right. So hand them over. I'll give you this money, but you make like a 950 an hour, maybe. You got health benefits yes. At Starbucks. Right. So in my opinion, we can either entirely do away with tipping by raising everybody to at least the minimum wage, and while read it, let's also maybe double the minimum wage because it's laughable still, right? Sure. And just do away with tipping. Just go totally Japan. Or we need to really make it clear who's depending on tips and who's not. And these jokers at coffee houses need to get rid of the tip jar, and they need to stop calling it karma, which I think we went over. And the karma jar or whatever. Yeah. That's passive aggressive. Guilty. You think? Yeah. All right, that was our intro. Good time tipping. So let's talk about where this often violently exploited act came from. Chuck, go ahead. Well, I feel like I was on a rant. I was, too. Just joking. Okay, well, let's see. Tipping, they think, has its origins in about the 16th century in Europe, where if you went and visited a friend or relative or colleague, you went to their house, you would often tip their servants, especially if you got really drunk and toiled yourself and they cleaned you up, you might be like, here's a couple of pieces of gold, let's just keep this between you and me. And they would and over time, it became much less of a way to show your appreciation as something that was expected and depended on. Right. Yeah. Once you start kind of giving money into a customary manner, people start to include that in their budgets. Right. Yeah. So they think that that's possibly where the custom came from. Right. Yeah. I don't even think this acronym thing is even valid at all. No. And it's not valid. There's a guy named Steve Dublinica who's written books on tipping. He's got some pretty good research down. You want to say the acronym tip to ensure with an I promptness. Right. But there's no way. No, because, number one, acronyms didn't really come into use until the 1920s. Yes. They weren't using acronyms in the 16th century. And the word tip itself has been around for long before that. And like you said, it shouldn't be tip insure with an I. It should be insure with an E. Yeah, there's a lot wrong with that. What they think is that tipping originally came from this kind of word among thieves, which is how we use it today. Like, you tip somebody off, basically to give something. Right, right. And it was just basically common thieves slang. But then the act of tipping itself also came from either the servants, from tipping servants, or it grew out of giving money to somebody who worked at the bar to buy their own drink as well. Get a drink for yourself on me. Yeah. And in fact, the word tip in Slavic languages translates roughly to drinking money. I like that one. The word for tip in French is poor. Poor boire, which means poor drinking. Right. And basically everywhere else, except in English, the word tip means drinking money. Right. So that's probably where tipping came from. I like that origin here. I'm having a good time, I had a few drinks. Go buy yourself one. Exactly. It's just spreading the joy. Or I'm at my buddy's house and I've drank until I soiled myself. I don't know. Here's some money for cleaning me up last night. I appreciate it. I don't know about the train spotting origin of tipping. So this is probably where tipping came from. And a little more history, if you don't mind, Chuck. Sure. You can pretty much pinpoint how tipping became accustomed in the United States because it was all the rage in Europe. It was not caught on here in the US. Even though a lot of wealthy Americans were traveling to Europe and coming back and tipping, people were like, what are you doing? Like, sure, give me your money, but I'm not going to do the same thing until the Pullman company, the Pullman rail car company figured out that they could grossly underpay their porters by publicizing that they relied on tips to survive. And basically the Pullman company cut almost $3 million in late 19th century. That was a lot of money from their payroll by basically relying on their customers good hearts to take care of their partners for them. When you think about it in those terms, it is sort of a dirty business. It's like, hey, we don't want to pay our employees. They're serving you, so you pay them. But you're the one reaping all the reward of the $5 cup of coffee. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And a lot of restaurants, or a lot of people on the restaurant side of this debate say, well, if we start raising their wages to the minimum wage or even double the tip wage, we're going to go under. And apparently some studies have found that that's actually not the case, that they can come out on top because restaurant owners spend so much money on training through turnover, because the wages are so low that people just hop from job to job wherever they can get the most tips. If you can offer a higher stable wage, you're going to have much less turnover. And ultimately, in the long run, you may come out on top as a restaurant owner. So interesting. Possibly that's one side, you know who pays the customer? Yeah, us, the middle class. You pay the $5 for the cup of coffee, which the company gets. They don't have to pay. Well, they do pay their employees minimum wage, but that ain't much. And then they get the little tip on top of that, and you end up paying 650 for your cup of coffee. You know what? Now that you're bringing this up, you and I were at Caribou, and they have I love Caribou coffee, right? But they had this promo where it was like, beans for the troops, or something like that. And it was like, hey, go ahead and buy this $15 pound of coffee, and we'll send them to the troops. And we asked if they were selling them at a discount, like if the caribou was doing anything. They were like, no, it's a regular price. And we're like, So wait a minute. You're exploiting Americans affinity and affection for the troops as a way to beef up your unground bean sales? That was disgusting, if you ask me. It happens. That's gross. That board meeting is the gross part where that's decided, you know, where we can really racket. Right? All right. I knew this would be a lightning rod. This is just us, man. I imagine the emails are going to get, oh, boy. Well, since you brought it up, it is a lightning rod, period. If you go on the Internet and you start looking about tipping, you will find two camps. People that work for tips, that are outraged that people don't want to tip, or they under tip, and then people that say it is out of control. You go on a vacation, you stay in a hotel and need a restaurant, you're Jimmy Conway. But again, I was reading this. I'm like, oh, man. Do other people tip all these people? Because I feel like a real jerk in some of these cases. I do, and I end up feeling like a sucker. And then you know what I thought? I was like, Well, I never carry cash. It's all plastic. So surely plastic leading to a decline in tipping. I did a search for that. No, all I could find was that most people carry plastic and a little bit of currency for tips. I'm like, oh, man, I really have to get on the ball here. All right. They've actually done a lot of studying about tips. Yeah. Why do we do this? What's the psychology? Tipping, as it were? Well, one is out of guilt. Wasn't that one of the reasons? Yeah, supposedly, if you think about tipping, the whole idea is that you're doing it out of gratitude, like, you did a really good job, and I want to make sure that you have this extra little go buy yourself something nice on me, or I want to ensure, because I come back to you, that I will get that same service when I come back. Right. So really what they're finding is that it's guilt and fear. Like, you know, that people rely on these tips, and part of your role as customer in some circumstances is to pay these people their salary that they're depending on. Or you're afraid that they're going to pee in your soup, and you're basically saying, here's some money. Please don't pee in my soup. Right. And they say, all right, that's going to do it. That takes care of the no P soup. Levy yeah, but the tip comes after the soup. Yeah, but you may be back there again. Okay. Right. Yes. The center for Hospitality at Cornell University, they've done some research there, and I thought this is fairly interesting. They found the US. Leads the world in being neurotic and being extroverted, and those are two traits that lead to big tips because you're neurotic. So you feel like, of course I have to leave. Anyone who's ever seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm tip episode, that's like tipping neuroticism at its finest portrayed. You want to tip as much as your friend. You don't want to under tip just you don't want to over tip. You want to tip just the right amount. I don't mind over tipping, especially when it's like, really good service. I'm happy to over tip, and I prefer to err on the side of over tipping. Right. For sure. Extroverts are outgoing social folks, and they see it as an incentive to get a little extra attention, like make a big show about me. Right. Party of four. Benjamin Franklin, party of four. Never heard that. Yummy's. Got a story about this one, dude. Wow. You want to tell it? Well, that was pretty much it. She and her boyfriend at the time and his friend were at this restaurant, and the guy actually said, Franklin, party of four, and she said it worked. She couldn't believe it. She was like, I felt bad about the guy we were with and the guy who took the money, but it was good meal. I've never greased a palm for, like, a table. I haven't either. That's a good move, though. I wish. I'd like to do that. It is. But really, it's kind of like, man, you give up a lot of any claim to the 99%, even if you don't make that much money if you're walking around doing stuff like that. Speaking of, did you see the Internet meme going around about the 99% tipper? Yes. Which apparently is totally unfounded. No, I think it's sort of unfounded. I thought he was a 1% tipper. He's a 1% tipper because he is part of the 1%, and from what I understood the tip was real, but what he wrote on there was fabricated. Or that they didn't even know for sure he was a banker. Then the whole thing is fabricated. Yeah, I did see that, though, by the way. I mean, this is breaking news is, like, yesterday, four weeks ago. So can we go back to some of the interesting studies about how you get good tips? This is Josh and Chuck's. If you're a waiter or a waitress, here are our tips for you to increase your tips in your restaurant. This isn't just us and our observations. Again, Cornell's put a lot of thought and energy into it. I believe they did real research. There's been a lot of studies about how and why we tip. One of them is touching. Like, if you are a server and you touch your customer, you will increase your tip. And it's not just lonely. Horny men. Men and women of all ages will increase their tip with just a brief touch on the shoulder yeah. From 11.8% to 14.8%. I, however, do not like to be touched. I don't either. I'm glad you said that. The waiter touched me the other day, and I was just like, what are you doing? It didn't freak me out. It's not something else. I don't know you. You don't know me. Yeah. Let's just keep our hands to ourselves, okay? Right. And then we'll see where your tip goes. Did his tip go down? No, of course not. I should have punished him severely. Oh, God, dude, you have that power in your head. I have so much former waiter guilt. I tip 20% on bad service as long as I do. As long as you have the right attitude, that makes the biggest difference. If you're like, oh, yeah, really sorry. And it was bad service, and you say, I'm sorry, guys, I let you down the night, unless you're being manipulative by doing that, and you really just couldn't have cared less. You phoned it in, and then you said, oh, really sorry. I can too. Yeah. Intentions go a long way with me. All right. Squatting. And this was my big move when I was a waiter, because you're a squatter at the nice restaurant I worked at. It was my big move. I would kneel down next to the table. A lot of times you get that eye contact going on, and your tips are going to go up from 14.9% to 17.5%. Okay. I would also like to add a caveat to this, however, if you actually get into the booth or take a seat at the table, you've crossed the line. Well, I used to do that at mexicali, though, but that was a college atmosphere, and that would be acceptable at certain times, even in college at Mexico? No, that was over the line. No, it was fun. Girls drinking margaritas. I would sit down and flirt. Would your tip go up yeah. And occasionally I would get a phone number out of it in free margarita. Well, I work there. I got all the free margaritas I wanted. I didn't realize they gave free margaritas to employees in Mexico. Well, they didn't officially. Oh, got you. You weren't supposed to have them while you were working either. Those were the old days. Giving candy to your customer will jump your tip up from 15.1 to 17.8. Giving two pieces of candy, one initially and one spontaneously, like, Here, have another. Jumped it from 19% to 21.6%. So long as you didn't end it with chumps. I'm sorry, that jumped it to 23% when it was the spontaneous section fees. Right. Chumps 23% by being like, oh, well, you know what? Here, take two. And we're talking like, the starlight peppermints here. Okay. There's not like, God of chocolate. Exactly, yes. Thank you for rescuing me, because I almost had snickers. That'd be nice, too. I had a waitress recently give Emily and I the Pin that she gave us to sign the bill with because I'm a big pin guy, so it's Emily, and as far as having the perfect pin and I sign things like, oh, my God, I feel this Pin. And it was a combination of the pen on that slimy paper that they give you, and it was amazing. And Emily said something and she was like, I agree. I keep them in my car so much. Go ahead and keep that one. And how much of a tip did you leave her? I left her my pin. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, sure, I tipped her more 50% 70. No, it's always like 2025. So the highest you go is 25? Yeah, I mean, I go 20 and I round up no matter what. I noticed, especially before the well, I guess it would have been even after the economic collapse, the global catastrophe that we're in the midst of still, that it was moving very clearly toward 20% across the board. 20% was the new 15%. Right. And then the economic meltdown happened, and all of a sudden now it's back to 15% and 20% if you're doing good. Oh, really? It seems like yeah. Am I wrong? Am I just fantasizing here. No, I think it used to be ten, then it was like twelve, then 15, and then 20, and then yeah, you're right. With the economic crisis, I did read articles that people said, our tips are going down, but it's a collective movement, you know what I'm saying? Like, you can be the nice guy and tip 20 all the time or whatever. Right. But you're also kind of pushing everybody else forward by doing that. Yeah, I also do the deal, too, where you go out with certain people. What does that mean? I've got, like, eight different homes. I don't want to call out any person or even oh, are you talking about a specific buddy of yours? No buddy could be family members, could be certain friends. When someone picks up the tab, I always do the thing where I look to make sure that they're properly compensated. And on the way, I was like, oh, I got to use a bathroom. I'll go put more money in there. Oh, you're an underminer, huh? Yeah, because certain people oh, man, I wish I could say I had a friend whose father was a very rich dude, and he was a bad tipper and embarrassed the crud out of me when we would go to these nice places and he would pick up the tab and leave, like, an eight to 10% tip. And so I always knew to bring cash to leave in the thing. Jared Hess's dad, no. All right, so that's it. How to increase your tips. Oh. Tell them it's sunny outside. Yeah. The psychology of weather strikes again. Where the study was conducted. Where? In a windowless room, right? Yeah. If the waiter describes it as being rainy out, the tips were something like 19%, which isn't too bad. Yeah. But if the waiter is like, oh, it's so sunny and beautiful out, then tips average 24%. So squat at the table, touch them on the shoulder, give them candy. Give them candy. And then all of a sudden, you've got two pieces of candy and give good service. And then tell them it's sunny outside, and you will be rolling in the desk. Who makes, like, a million dollars a table. Thank you, Slater. And tip on the original amount, by the way. That's a waiter thing. It's a big one. If you got coupons or you do the Scout Mob thing, be aware that you should tip on the original amount. You kind of have to. It's not the waiter's fault you had a coupon. Yeah. I mean, that is really bad if you don't know that at this point, especially with how ubiquitous those deals are getting these days. Sure. But, Chuck, on the other hand, you can make a pretty strong argument that if you order $100 bottle of wine, tip 20% on that. So why? Yeah, why? I like some nice wine, and that is a bone of contention that I swallow, and I just still tip on the total amount. Okay. But, yeah, you're right. Let's say just order a bottle of wine meaningfully. We're just going to go have a bottle of wine one night because we ate dinner somewhere else. Or maybe we go to have dessert somewhere. Okay, sure. And we get a nice bottle of port. Okay. And it's like, $80. You guys drink a whole bottle of pork? Well, no, of course not. Let's say with a Group or whatever, we drink a whole bottle of port. A group of what? Like 20. You're drinking a whole bottle of drinking a glass of port. And there's, like, five glasses in a bottle that small. Oh, it's like a regular wine glass. What do you drink brandy like that? No, because that's liquor poured as wine. No brandi is a type of wine anyway. You're like Homer Simpson when he was babysitting Mr. Burns house, when he pours himself, like, a whole sniff or brandy and drinks the whole thing in gulp and then just falls right over. My friend Jimmy's wife one time asked for a bourbon on the rocks at her house, and she bought me, like, 7oz of bourbon on the rocks. I was like, what are you trying to do to me? That's awesome. No, but Porch, you're not supposed to have the little it's not like sambuca. I mean, Porch is like a regular glass of wine. Right. I'm mistaken then, because every place I go, they pour your regular glass. No, it's a little tiny it's like a cordial wine glass. No, I promise. All right, you're going to be wrong regardless. You drink expensive wine, and how much do you tip? Well, the 20%, but it does cross my mind, like, man, I'm giving this guy, like, $14 for bringing me a bottle of wine. It's a good point, and I think even the average server would grudgingly agree. Okay, all right, maybe not 15% on this one, but it's not just the waiter that you want to tip in the restaurant. Surprise, surprise. Depending on where you go, you need to be prepared to tip a lot of people. Yeah. The person who sees you, maybe if it's a really nice place, if the Matrid goes out of his way to get you a very nice table, or you feel like he or she is doing something very just kind of above and beyond, you might want to slip from $15 to $20. That's a lot. Also, if the Somalia comes over to your table and tells you a bit about the wines, especially if you solicited this advice. Yeah. In reading this article, I realized that I have stiffed at least one Somalia in my life, and now I understand why he's looking at me weird. When he finished, you want to give them anywhere from ten to $20, depending on how in depth the recommendation is. And usually when you're talking tips, at least in this article, that we're working from how stuff works.com, there's a high and a low, right? Yes. And basically the discrepancy is based on just how much effort this person is putting into it, how much enthusiasm out of the way of their normal duties are they going, see, here's my deal, dude. I don't want a big show. I want genuine, good service and to be left alone because the tip won't go down, because I just have the guilt. But you can go down in my mind if you're just too, like, just too much. Don't work too hard, don't give me a big show. Apparently, they can do whatever they want to and they're still going to get the same amount of money. You know what, Chuck? You know where you would do well, then where? Buffets. At a buffet. You serve yourself and you just leave your plate and it mysteriously vanishes. Yeah, but that's a person behind the kidnapping of that plate. And you want to leave them about 10% is the recommendation. So you want to leave them your buffet? I don't go to buffets, but yeah, you don't go to buffets. No. I don't understand the existence of cafeterias. Since there's buffets, it's the same exact thing, except buffets are all you can eat. Yeah. And cafeteria is like, here's a little ramekin of the same thing. You can have ten helpings of if you want for the same price. Well, you don't see a lot of cafeterias anymore. You do? Yeah. There's at least as many cafeterias as there are buffets. Oh, no. Yeah, I think the Chinese food restaurants have made that a null and void comment. The Chinese food buffet. Okay. All right. So they exist outside of this realm. I'm talking more like country cooking buffets. Yeah. There's almost one for one. All right. And by the way, most nicer restaurants pull their tips. Like in Mexico, it was every man for himself. The bus boy didn't get tips. Actually, we kind of bust our own tables. Yeah, but most restaurants will pull their tips, and it's usually not a matrix at that point. It's just the host or hostess. They'll get a cut and like, bartender the bartender and the busboy dishwasher. Dishwasher. Yeah. They'll all get a cut, so just remember that. But some places it's every man for himself, too. If speaking of bartenders, you are at a bar, I usually tip a bucket drink for the first few drinks. That's what I do. Unless it's like a complex, complicated drink, which I tend to prefer. Sure. It will be like a percentage of the bill if there's any muddling going on. Yes. Once you start muddling, I'm like, all right, here's some extra money. Yeah. I don't tip on the bill because we usually just say, give us six PBRS for my friends, and I'll then tip a bucket. Even if the beer is a dollar, I'll give a dollar. That's very nice of you, because it's like, what am I going to fish around for $0.15? That's just ridiculous. Yeah, but we're rich. We're high rollers. You're tipping a buck for a dollar beer Chuck. Yeah. Wow. The podcasting business cafes and coffee houses. I think we've kind of covered that. We did. I tend to tip out of guilt there, but I don't go to a lot of coffee shops because I don't drink a lot of coffee. Do you really? See, I look those guys in the eyes while I'm not tipping them. Do you know what the worst is? Checking out the grocery store and they're like, would you like to give a dollar to whatever foundation? That's 50 50 for me, depending on my mood. Really? Yeah. I mean, like, I should do it every time. And that's sad that helping out kids with muscular dystrophy is equated to tipping. Well, it's not, but yeah, I know what you mean. Holiday tipping, which was a big part of that Curb your Enthusiasm episode. When do you do this? When you have money? I think it's generally for people that have a little more money, and they live in places where they know the service people helping? Yes. Like the guy, the country club and the guy this and that. But you can deliver your newspaper or your garbage collector, your newspaper delivery person. You can tip your mailman. My brother used to, when he worked at the movie theaters, would give every holidays, he would give out movie tickets that is sold from work. Yeah. To, like, the mailman into the garbage person and stuff like that. $15 to $25, they say, for your garbage collector, your dog walker, your nanny, your cleaning service. They save any of this one week's pay. I save a lot of money every year by not having those people. So I have to tip them. Yeah. Manicurist. Manicurists supposed to tip them. Do and you know the way around this? Go to different manicures every time so that you're not a common enough customer that you feel like you need to tip them at the holiday. Hairdressers women, obviously, the ones who are probably spending the big bucks at the hairdresser, they say 25 to 100. And this is for the holidays. You understand? It's not each visit. This is hey, it's Christmas. You also have to tip them each visit. I get a $14 haircut. I tip $6. What? Well, because what am I going to give them? $19. Wow. Or $2. Okay. That just seems really cheap to me to say, like, thanks for the great haircut. That's going to last me three months here's eight quarters. I tip my haircut lady all over the place. What do you tip her? Kisses and hugs and stuff like that. You mean cut your hair? Yeah. Hotels. This is something that I have just recently learned. I didn't know you're supposed to tip the made service. I knew that, but I thought that was something from maybe the that's how I comforted myself by not tipping the maids. But yeah, apparently we're supposed to be doing that a lot. One to $10 per night, depending on the mess you make. I am extremely clean, and I clean up before I leave the hotel. It depends on if they change you, if you soiled yourself the night before. Bellhops, a dollar per bag. If it's bulky and large or heavy and awkward. Maybe a little bit more of that. Yeah, more than a buck. That one I totally get. Still don't do it because I frequently don't use bellhops. I do it myself, but I hate that when they force you to walk you into the room and show you around and stuff. I would much rather just carry my own bag. Just give me my key card. Again with a big show. I don't want a big show. Right. Well, apparently, though, remember that one study found that bellhops who do make a big show of things by showing people how to operate the thermostat and the TV and opening the drapes and offering to fill the ice bucket. They almost doubled their average tip. But I wonder if it was people who are like, here's some money, just please go away. Which is one of the origins of tipping, too. Remember throwing money for sure passage concierge five dollars to ten dollars, depending on how helpful remember when we were at the Pittsburgh Fairmont and our buddy Chad gave the concierge like, $10 for a wreck, and it turned out to be a bad recommendation, and he was on man, he wanted his money back. What was the recommendation? I didn't go. I was eating Indian food by myself in my room the whole time. It was for a restaurant that was either closed or it was just a bad tip. Oh, really? And he was like, did he get his money back? No, of course not. I'll bet he did not. Stop complaining about it. He kept going and going, and I didn't know until recently. You're supposed to tip the concierge. Yeah, I'm a dummy. I didn't know that. Well, I mean, they help you out, depending I thought they were how much help they are. Concierge, and I've never had one do this for me. I've never really needed the services of Concierge. But Concierge can really go to town on making your life easy. Oh, they can make your reservation. They can get you tickets to a show. Sure. All sorts of things. They can buy your kid a toy if you're staying at a nice enough place. Oh, and you're busy or whatever. Yeah, shopping. That can see if you can find your shopper. You know what? In the spirit of keeping the tradition of facts alive, I made that last part up, but it seems like a safe assumption by joy. Yeah. Oh, sure they would. Okay. Doorman. Tip your doorman. If they hail a taxi, tip them a buck. A lot of them aren't allowed to accept tips, so don't be surprised if they hand it back. Really? Yeah. All right. Deliveries. This is a big one for me. I get Chinese food delivery. It's about the only delivery I get. Oh, yeah. Maybe the occasional pizza. Where do you order from? I order from a place. Indicator of Chinese food place. Is it good? Yeah, it's good, but they take forever. Yeah. See that'll cut down on the tip with me. Well, especially if I'm really hungry when I order. Yeah, we've learned to order before. We're hungry from this place. That's smart. Like Tuesday. Yeah, exactly. They say to tip two to $5 on your food delivery to your home, depending on the weather. The amount of danger depending on the neighborhood you live in. Yeah, my neighborhood is dangerous. I was not talking about your neighborhood. It's really not that bad. Flower deliveries. One to $10, depending on the arrangement. I spent a little time as a flower delivery person. I can tell you that most people don't tip their flour delivery guy, even though they're bringing this bit of sunshine into your life. I assume that goes for fruit delivery, too, with those silly fruit displays. Unless, ironically, you're dressed like a piece of fruit while you're delivering it, then the tips just start pouring out. Yeah. Furniture delivery, like large things. I can tell you I did that as well. Very large furniture. Among the heaviest darnoirs you can possibly conceive of or fabric. No one tips you. If you delivered to the home of someone age 65 or older, there was about a 60% chance they were going to tip you. Anybody below that was like, hey, thanks for coming. Don't get hit by a car on your way out. See, my history with tipping with the elderly is they don't tip as much. It depends. It depends on the industry you're in. Yeah. Restaurant. Because tipping, I think it used to be a lot more ubiquitous than it is now. Right. You see? Yeah. So, like, a furniture delivery that's why the older generation, I would get a tip from them more frequently, because there was a time when you tipped everybody like that. Our generation wasn't raised like that. Right. I mean, do you tip the furniture delivery guy? I pick up my own furniture, buddy. Okay, but you probably wouldn't. But, like, the mover, let's say, like, the people who help you move, I think it's expected. You pay the big, huge moving costs. Exactly. And you tip the guys on top of that. I've got a lot of self reflection. Skycap. I tip $5 a bag for Skycap. I must be a sucker, because it says in here, $2 a bag. Very good. What's next? Shuttle drivers at the airport? I didn't know you're supposed to tip them. You're not. This is all made up. No, it's not. Cabbie in New York, they make it very easy on you now. Yeah. You just put in the percentage you want in the little computer, and it'll add it to your credit card, which is great. Yeah. Valet if I like you, which is frequent, you get $2. If I don't like you, you can get as little as $0. I try to get two. I feel bad, though, when I don't have it, and I'm just like, man. And sometimes they'll say, Can I go get my own card? You don't have any cash. Yeah, I'll say that, too. And they say, no, we'll go get it. There was and I'll fart in it. No, they will. Oh, they will? Yeah. I'll soil myself in your car. Mechanic I had no idea. This is why it's made up. You don't tip your mechanic. What are they talking about? I had no idea. I think this is from The Gentleman's Guide to Life, the 1942 edition. Tip your mechanic ten to $20 for any job over $500. I had no idea gas station attendance, like they exist anymore. Yeah, well, Oregon or wherever, if they voluntarily check your fluids, meaning the ones in your car, you should tip them one to $2. Is it Oregon? Do you have to get your gas pump? I remember in New Jersey I think I've even told you this, my girlfriend had never pumped her gas. She was, like 30ft. Oh, yeah, you did tell me that. Yes. Our friend Van Nostril, he lives in Washington, which is nearby Oregon, so he probably knows about that. We should ask him. Yeah. So international tipping, it's way too much to go over. And we hate to cop out, but you really do need to go online because there's tons of information. When you go to visit a country, it's all different. Look it up before you go so you don't look like a schmuck. Yeah. There are a couple of rules of thumb you should, like you said, familiarize yourself. Not knowing the value of the currency is not an excuse. Right. And don't use US. Currency. Yeah. Here's a couple of American dollars for you, Mr. Costa. Rican. Don't disrupt your GDP. Yeah, that's cop out. That's BS. Convert it and give them their current. Yeah, because they have to go to an exchange place and everybody has a cameo in their neighborhood. Right. Or I guess some countries, I think, like Puerto Rico and stuff. Like, they can use American dollars because it's in American territory. Well, no, I think even, like, Jamaica and a lot of these places close to the US. In the Caribbean. Got you. I think they can use American dollars as well, so it's not so obnoxious. Can we go over some people who you don't have to tip, which I was very relieved to hear. Some of these. Is there anyone that you don't have to tip besides fast food restaurant owners? You're not supposed to tip salon owners. Basically, any owner of an establishment, you don't tip unless they're the ones providing the service to you. Food delivery is under $30. I don't know what that is. That doesn't make any sense to me. Here's my favorite. I was so glad to know that I can go ahead and stop tipping flight attendants. You don't have to tip flight attendants. Did you know that? I did not know anyone would do that. Bus drivers, theater ushers. You have to tip shuttle drivers, but you're not supposed to tip bus drivers. Yes. This place is crazy. That's what I'm saying. The rules are so, like, you don't tip McDonald's, but you do tip the coffee person. Even though you can get a coffee at McDonald's salespeople, you don't tip them. And employees at fast food restaurants, airline flight attendants. I can't believe someone actually wrote down that. You don't have to tip them. So there's a lot of federal stuff going on right now, my friend. Oh, yeah, there's something up. So the federal tipped minimum wage has been the same since 1991. 213. It's at 213 an hour because of inflation. That whole concept was created in 1966 because of inflation. It's never been less valuable than it is right now relative to the cost of living. I believe it. Yeah. So it's a big deal for people who make their living in service industries before Congress right now, there's HR 31, the Working for Adequate Gains for Employment and Services or the Wages Act. Congress is so clever, but basically it would tie the federal tip minimum wage to 60% of the federal minimum wage. So every time there's a hike, it would also be a hike in the federal tip minimum wage. And that act would raise it right now to 435 an hour, which is double what they're making, but still way below just over half of the federal minimum wage. And if you want to go join a group that lobbies on behalf of people who should make a decent wage in the service industry, you can check out Faireats.org Faireats.org. And that, Buddy, is a local group. Oh, really? They're Atlanta based. A lot of restaurants here. I have a list, Josh, of best and worst celebrity tippers. Oh, nice. Yes. This is very TMZ, although it wasn't from TMZ. And I hesitate to even read these because take it with a grain of salt. A lot of these stories I don't know for true, and I'm not going to get into the stories, but you'll be pleased to know that our ghostbusters, Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray are legendary. Good tippers. Awesome. You would think. Drew Barrymore. Great tipper. I can see that. Russell Crowe kind of surprised me. Tipper. Apparently, he's a really good tipper. I would not have guessed that. And the whole smashing your face with a phone intimate was out of character for him. Wait, I thought he, like, got him fights all the time. I don't know. Drew Carey. Good tipper. Hulk Hogan. Charlie Sheen. Yeah, I'll bet Charlie Sheen leaves more than just money as tips. Yeah. David Beckham, johnny Depp, apparently. Really good tipper. That's awesome. And then I cross referenced the list of worst tippers on because there's all sorts of sites where people where you can go as a waitron and say so and so came in my restaurant last night, and they did X, Y and Z. Right. So I did cross reference some of these. Mick Jagger, The Rock. Bill Cosby was on every list, I'm sad to say. I am not the least bit surprised. Kirsten Dunst, Weird Madonna. Tiger woods was on every list. Usher, Britney Spears and Jeremy Pivot was on every list. Sean Penn. Really? Yeah. David Byrne. Dude, this is so disappointing. If it's true, david Byrne of the Talking Heads is considered one of the worst tippers ever, because apparently he does not tip, period. It's like stupid chimney. Oh, yeah. I don't tip. There are two episodes in a row that featured Reservoir Dogs. Michael Moore supposedly what? Wait a minute, wait a minute. If this is true, Michael Moore, and you are a friend of Michael Moore, who listens and stuff, you should know, please play this for him. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir. Ashamed. It said once left less than $20 on a 450 $50 bill. And see all these, though I say take with a grain of salt, though, because it could just be the ones be the ones just not had any money. Maybe the server was a big Republican jerk that he didn't like. Because it is Michael Moore. Yeah. Remember that part? Did you see? Capitalism a love story. Yes. And he's like, hey, I'm looking for some advice. And one of the traders is like, Stop making movies. Oh, really? It was awesome. All right, so I'm not going to embarrass any more of these people. Like Molly Ringwald and Ricky Lake. Yeah, I see Ricky Lake being really worried about her finances. And Rachel Ray, she was on a bunch of the sites, too. They said she's cheap. I could see her being cheap, too. You know what? I'm not surprised by all them don't be cheap people. I mean, you make tons of money, spread it around, and I'm no socialist, but come on, just bring a little joy into someone's life like Bill Murray does. Yeah, but not Bill Cosby. Be more like Bill Murray. Not like Bill Cosby. Okay. Correct. Yes. All right, that's our big takeaway. That's it for our list of most hated celebrities. If you want to learn more about that, you can type tipping into the search bar. Howstop works.com, right? That's right. That's T-I-P-P-I-N-G. Which is what? It's like a palindrome or something? Almost, isn't it? Close. Let's see. I said search barhowstuffworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh I'm going to call this one Dueling Vikings. Call it that, then from a dude from Viking land. He says, okay. Hi, guys. I just finished listening to the Dueling podcast. I thought I'd share a bit on how they were handled in Nordic countries back when they were pillaging the rest of Europe and berserking at every opportunity. Despite the outward appearance of being crazy, axe wielding pirates, the Vikings prefer to keep things civil on the home front. Thus, the concept of home gang was created. A home is a small island, and gang means to go. So when two parties were at odds over an insult, a woman or property, they would go to a tiny island or the tip of a peninsula or some similar isolated area to duke it out Viking style. They would take a three by three meter square of oxide, spread it on the ground and stake each corner and rope between them much like a modern boxing ring. Each home Gungar typically wielded an axe or a heavy sword and had with him three wooden shields. The challenge party would have first strike and they would then proceed taking turns to hammer away at each other's shield broken shields being replaced with the two spares along the way. And the first man struck bodily would typically be considered the loser. Thanks for the hundreds of hours of entertaining knowledge and keep being the awesome dude you are. Your friend in Viking land. The K. Is that Minnesota? J-A-N-N-I-K. No, I don't think it's in Minnesota. That's pretty cool, Yannick. I think it is. J-A-N-N-I-K yannick. We'll go with that. Okay. Thanks a lot. Yannick from Minnesota. And if you want to know about Vikings and you haven't heard it already, go listen to our How Vikings work podcast. Oh, that was a good one. Very neat. Yeah, talk about berserkers. Let's see. Oh, if you have a good tipping story, we want to hear it. You can tweet to us at syscapodcast. You can join us on Facebook@facebook.com stepyshenknow. You can also join us on kiva at kiva. Orgteamsuffystoe to help us finish out the million dollar march. Right? Yeah, I mean we are right there, right now, very close. And you can send us a good old fashioned email at stuffpodcast@discovery.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. 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." | ||
How No-fly Zones Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-no-fly-zones-work | They have become such a ubiquitous tool used by the UN and NATO to intervene in international crises, that it seems like no-fly zones have been around forever. But it was only the 1990s that the first one was enacted and they've only be used twice more si | They have become such a ubiquitous tool used by the UN and NATO to intervene in international crises, that it seems like no-fly zones have been around forever. But it was only the 1990s that the first one was enacted and they've only be used twice more si | Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:15:07 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=20, tm_min=15, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=87, tm_isdst=0) | 24731135 | 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 you were a global bank who wanted to crunch billions of transactions against thousands of compliance controls? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and now you can supercharge your audit system with AI. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibmcom. Welcome to stuff you should know from Housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's mad as heck and he's not going to take it anymore. I said heck. I revised the classic movie quote into heck. Yeah, network, man. Have you seen that recently? I've never seen it. It was on Netflix streaming and I hadn't misled and passed it up. Well, you should watch it again because you'll watch it now and go, man, when was this made? So far ahead of its time. Oh, really? As far as how things are in the media, like coma? Yeah, but when you watch Network, back then, people said things like, how ridiculous stuff like this can never happen. Oh, I see. It's prescient, right? Very much so. Yeah. I'll have to watch it then. Yeah, it's a good one. What's that? Aaron Sorkin show. I don't like Erin. Sorkin NewsHour. Yeah, it just stinks. Is that what it's called? NewsHour. Newsroom. Newsroom. Yeah. I didn't care for it other than the fact that it stars guest starred Mr. Paul Schneider, who's one of my boys. So sometimes people accuse the show being preachy. What do you think? I'm not a smoking guy, so he's a little wordy for me. I like West Swing. I didn't watch it. You never watched West Wing? Not one episode. I guarantee you, you would like it. You think? I hate to say this, but it was like his masterpiece from the beginning. I'm not kidding, Chuck. I'm telling you, this is somebody who didn't like Studio 60, who doesn't like Newsroom. West Wing from beginning to end was just really great. I'll try it, but I swear, the way that guy writes, I'm always just like nobody talks. I'm with you. I'm totally with you. But this cast of characters, the characters that he wrote, the actors, they pulled it off. I've never seen it. Give it a shot. Paul Schneider is not on it. I'm coming to your house this afternoon and we're going to watch them. So I guess that's the segue for no fly zone. Not a bad set up because this is political and presidential. I have something actually, I have a bit of an intro. Okay, well, let's hear it. You've heard of the Wright Brothers? Dayton's Pride Orville and Wilbur Wright? Oh, yeah. Conjoined twins. Yes. No, they weren't. No. Okay. But they did fly they did build the first airplane yes, that flew. And they flew it out at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And after they had that flight actually, I think before they undertook that flight, while they were still in the development stage, they went to the United States government and said, hey, War Department, you want in on this action? Not once, not twice, but twice did the War Department turn the Wright Brothers down. Say, what good are planes in warfare? Exactly. Luckily, there was a very smart person heading the Post Office department who said, okay, maybe you shouldn't drop bricks out of airplanes on people's heads, but we could use this to deliver the mail. Martin Van Austrian right. To heck with the auto gyro. We're going to start using this Wright Brothers plane to deliver mail. And for three years, the only aircraft that were in service under the United States government was for delivering mail. And then a postal carrier as a pilot accidentally dropped a mail bomb and they went, wow, that's a good idea. That works very well. Yeah. It didn't take very long for the War Department to be like, oh, okay, maybe we should use this. And by 1914, the aviation section of the Signal Court was set up, and all of a sudden, planes were militarized. Within just years of their invention, they were being used to murder people. Yeah. And this article points out, in 1000, 937, spanish Fastest dropped a bunch of bombs on the town of Guadenika. \u00a3100,000 of explosives killed 1600 people. Yeah. Well, not only was it the explosive, people were running out of town, and they were gunning them down for millions. Yeah. So that's what fascists do. As outrageous and horrible as that is, it was definitely the beginning of what would be a long romance in warfare with the plane. Yeah. You had the Red Baron, eddie Rickenbacher. Yeah. It's a very long, bloody history associated with planes and war. When the Fastest in Spain used planes to take out a lot of civilians, the world was appropriately disgusted. Sure wasn't a whole lot that could be done. It actually wasn't until the very early 1990s that people figured out a way to use planes to thwart planes from being used against civilian populations by their own government. Yes. I thought no Fly Zones had been around long before that, so this was very eye opening. I had no idea that it was when they first did this. Right. No fly zones are new. They've only been used three times. Yes. I didn't know that either. Like, it just seems like there's something that they just commonly do. Yeah. But it's kind of a big deal. The issue of no Fly Zone and the reason why is because what you're doing is intervening in a sovereign nation undermining the power of the ruler of that nation, choosing sides in a way. You're saying, at the very least, I'm not going to let you to slaughter these civilians. I'm not going to cast my lot one way or the other, really, but I'm going to protect the civilians, and it takes a United Nations mandate to even get started. That's right. So you want to talk about the first one? Yes. Let's hearken back to the spring of 1991. I'm in college drinking a lot of beer. I first discovered beer. I was drinking a lot of beer, too, and I wasn't in college. Well, I'm just kidding. I was talking about there. So 1991, I remember sitting around and watching the stuff on CNN for the first time, like being interested in politics, really? For the first time. Oh, yeah. That's kind of when I got into stuff like that. Well, that was the first war that was really televised. I mean, Vietnam was, but this is the first one that had 24 hours coverage was the first Gulf War, and it was spectacular to watch. It was pretty enthralling, especially when you're 20 years old and you're sitting around with your friends drinking beer. Yeah. Look at that. Safe in Athens, Georgia. Yeah. So what happened? There was a guy named Saddam Hussein. He was not doing very nice things to the people in Kuwait. Well put. And the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq was encouraged by American radio broadcast to revolt, like, take a stand. And so they did. And Saddam Hussein sent gunships with napalm and chemical weapons and helicopters because that's what you do. That's what he does when you have a civilian population that's unhappy with your rule. Yeah. And so they fled, basically hundreds of thousands of them. Kurdish civilians fled and sort of got wedged there at the Turkish border. Yes. Because the Turks were like, yeah, we feel for you, but stay there. Yeah. Don't cross over here. They didn't have food and water. And HW. Bush president George H. W. Bush and allies in Europe said, you know what? Oh, boy, I don't know what to do here, because we kind of encourage these people to do this, and now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. But we really don't think we should invade and remove Saddam Hussein, like, with all of our might. Yeah, let's give it another 1012 years. Exactly. Or we could go to the UN in 91 and say, hey, how about passing a resolution against this guy? Right. Which they did. They said, okay, we're going to deliver humanitarian aid to these Kurds who are trapped along the Turkish border, and Hussein, if you do anything to interfere, we're going to bomb you. We're going to take on your guys that you send to interfere at the very least. Right. And not only that, we're establishing a safe zone for these people. It's above the 36th parallel. And if you send any planes over there, we're going to take them on. So this is what we're going to call a no fly zone. It was the first one, and Saddam Hussein went, no fly zone? I've never heard of such a thing. That's stupid. And the UN said that's because it's brand new. Jerk. Right? And he's like, oh, I'm the first one. He went firsty. So they did this. And then in 1992, a second no fly zone south of the 32nd Parallel was established to protect the Shiite Muslims who also rose up under the encouragement of the United States. If you're interested in this kind of thing, check out Three Kings. Great. There was a lot to do about that. It was after the uprisings had started and also after the time the United States didn't support them. Remember the one scene where when the guy made Marqu drink the oil? Yeah, that was hardcore, man. I thought it was a little over the ham fisted of David O'Russell. Yeah, you don't like that guy? You got problems with him? No, I like Three Kings a lot. Okay. What else has he done that I've seen So Reliance Playbook he didn't like? I thought it was okay. Yeah, see, you don't love him, but I like Three Kings a lot. I thought that was a good movie. Yeah, me too. So no fly zone is going on. Saddam Hussein violates said no fly zone. He's like, yeah, well, what's going to happen? Let me send some jets up there. And we responded by, or the coalition, I should say responded by shooting down these aircraft or destroying just military targets on the ground. Because that's, as we found out, one of the parts of a no fly zone to be effective is to also bomb like radar equipment on the ground that can get jets up in the air and guide them. Disable their force can also find your jets. So you want to disable their force, like you said, but you also want to protect your own force. The thing was, this is very new. The UN was a little squeamish at the idea of undermining, again, a sovereign ruler, a jerk, everyone agreed, but still a sovereign ruler and kind of one of the stabilizing forces of the Middle East, whether the US. Liked it or not. So they just kind of said, yeah, protect these people. But just really you got to take it all in a case by case basis. Can't be the least bit aggressive. You have to be completely reactive. And even then, maybe we should just kind of chase them out of the novice rather than shoot them down right. Over time. After Sordi after Sore, after Sordi, they started just by attrition wearing down Hussein's defenses and his air force? Yeah, just because he kept sending them in, we kept shooting them down until 2003 when we went in and full force and took out Saddam Hussein. Right. The northern part and the southern part of Iraq was off limits to Saddam Hussein for twelve years. His own country, there is a wide swath in the middle that he could move around in, but anything else, he wasn't allowed. Okay, so that's the first use of the no fly zone ever. Right. In the early 1990s, when Yugoslavia broke up, NATO forces said, all right, how about another no fly zone? We're going to authorize this one. It's 1993 over the breakaway region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was called Operation Deny Flight, which is terrible. Little on the nose. I want to talk about on the nose. David Russell named Said mission, and it was going to block Bosnian Serbs who controlled all the military aircraft in that region right. And who were using it against all of their neighbors that they were going to war against. Specifically the Muslims. Serbian Muslims. Right. Yeah. In a big way. Yeah. So I guess NATO undertook that no fly zone. Yeah. That was number two. Yes. And that was a little more aggressive. I believe they went after they'd learned from about eight years of the Iraqi no fly zone that you really kind of have to go after military installations and anything that can be used to violate the no fly zone, and maybe even go a little step further as punishment. Like, not only are we going to shoot down your plane, we're going to maybe blow up your base and pants you right in front of everyone. Right. That was the second no fly zone. Yeah. The third was even more aggressive against Qaddafi just a couple of years ago, in 2011. That's right. And it lasted about six months, I believe. Oh, yeah. It was extremely effective. Yeah. Well, that's because they authorized, quote, all necessary measures to protect the Libyan civilians. And that meant a lot of bombs being dropped. Right. A lot of cruise missiles taking out bases on land. This one was named by Angley. It was called Operation Odyssey. Dawn. It was the result of a UN Security Council resolution, 1973, which is confusing because it was carried out in 2011. That's right. But basically it said, you guys, we think Qaddafi is totally nut. So and he's going to kill a lot of his own people, go in there and declare all of Libya no fly zone. And NATO said, okay, let's do it. Right. So US and British led NATO coalition kind of took the reins that's right. And turned the 680,000 square mile country, which is about 1.7 million km\u00b2, into a no fly zone. All of Libya was a no fly zone. 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. Okay, friends, so imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have afflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Aflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover, so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let 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, so since this is a new thing, as this article says, playbook there's not like an exact way that these go into effect. It sort of depends on what you're dealing with, what countries you're dealing with. But the first thing that you have to do, according to chapter seven, article 42 of the UN charter is get the 15 member UN Security Council on board. Right? Which sounds easy, but it's not necessarily, because you have five permanent members. The UK. France, the US. China and Russia. And China and Russia love to veto anything that the US, the UK and France are all about, which is good. It's called a balance of power. But specifically with Libya, France, Russia and China, they were against it, but they were persuaded to abstain from the vote because all it takes is one permanent member nation on the Security Council of veto and it's done. Yeah. I wonder what that persuasion entails. I don't know. Looking the other way on human rights violations? Maybe? I have no idea. But I'm sure it wasn't just as easy as, hey, you mind sitting this one out. Sure, no problem, right? I'm drunk anyway. The UN resolution for the Libyan no fly zone, it's a pretty good example of how this kind of thing can work. So no flights in Libyan airspace bans all flying unless it's a humanitarian mission, carrying food or water or getting out foreign nationals who are in bad places. Yeah, you're allowed to do that. Other than that, no fly. No fly. And you don't just shoot down any plane on site? No. When you're patrolling the no fly zone, if a plane is flying in Libyan airspace, you want to first figure out if it was there accidentally or if it's hostile. And if it's hostile, you go back to the ground and say, hey, man, can I shoot this thing down? Yeah, well, first you got to figure out who's doing the shooting. You got to set it all up, who's going to be enforcing all this. I was just jumping ahead. Okay. Yeah. You got to figure out who's in charge of the operation. Basically, in the case of Libya, it was NATO. And then you established the rules of engagement, which partially has to do with, hey, do we shoot first and ask questions later? Do we check passports? How's this going to work? Right. And like you said in Libya, it was pretty aggressive. The first thing that happened on day one was the US. And I believe the UK sailed warships off the coast of Libya and started shooting missiles into Libya's interior, knocking out military installations, radar installation, as much as the Libyan military, or at least Air Force, could be destroyed. 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Boom. Yeah. Each one precisely shot. That's right. And I love the article says the goal is to shape the battle space in quotes. Yeah, big time. So after this, they send in the drone surveillance aircraft to check things out, see what's going on. Did you get the impression the US. Is kind of showing off a little bit? We've got some missiles we can use, and then afterward, we'll send in our unmanned drones and make sure everything's bombed. And then after that, we're going to send in radar jamming equipment, just in case you have anything left on the ground. Right. We'll take care of that, too. Yeah. That was the first, like, two days. Yeah. And Godafi, his Air Force was they called them vintage jets in this article. And in that case, vintage is not a good thing. It's from the it's old gear, basically. It's vintage, not retro. That's right. So it was effective. It worked. Even beyond the fact that the jets were vintage and we crippled his radar system, his Air Force military installations, there was still a lot of shoulder launched rockets in Libya. An estimated 600 to 1500. I believe that, like, during this time, qaddafi was handing out to people who were on his side. Yes. And Saddam Hussein famously offered a bounty on any aircraft shut down of like, 14 grand, which I thought, why not 15, you know? Yeah, that was a weird number. I wonder if that makes like, a significant round number in Iraqi money. Maybe. So a lot of denari. Yes. Thank you. You shouldn't invest in those, by the way. That's a big scam. Invest in denari? Yeah. Have you heard of people doing that? No. It's a thing where people buy up Iraqi denari and thinking they're going to hit it big one day. You shouldn't do that. Why? Well, it's just you do a lot of research and it's sort of one of those scams. Yeah. So, like, if you bought denari from a legitimate currency broker, it's still not a good investment. No. I know someone who did it. Oh, no. Yes. Is it possible it's going to come back in ten years? I doubt it. Is it going to go Euro? I don't know, but yeah, that's just a sidebar. Okay, that was a nice one. Save your money, folks. So we were talking about the possibility that a NATO jet or any jet patrolling a no fly zone could get shot down by some dude on the ground. Yeah. It hasn't happened. No, but it could. It had to be one lucky shot. It raises one of the concerns, actually. It has happened. It hasn't happened when somebody on the ground, but it raises a concern, a risk that we're sending in people again into a sovereign nation sure. That maybe he has to deal with his own problems and we're putting our people in danger for that. Most people, I think, myself included, side on the idea of going in and protecting civilians from certain slaughters. Sure. But I do agree that there is a risk as well. And Scott McGrady. You remember him? Oh, yeah, Owen Wilson. Yeah. During the Balkan war, during that no fly zone, he was shot down, I guess by a Serbian plane. It was a surface to air missile, but okay, so somebody has shot down somebody from the ground. Well, I don't know if it was a person. Okay, well, he was shot down patrolling a no fly zone, and he was in very big trouble for a little while. Had he not been quite the survivalist, who knows what would have happened? Because the Serbs were hot on this trail and he spent six days evading them. Yeah, he did a really good job. And hero. He ate ants and lived on collected rainwater and avoided the bad guys and eventually got through a radio signal Jean Hackman picked up. Gene Hackman was like, we're going to get you out of there. Yeah. Uncommon Valor. What you're referencing. Gene Hackman was in the Owen Wilson movie, too. Was he really? I'm pretty sure he was the one that was in charge of saving him. Oh, man. Well, he's always going in and saving. Sure. In Uncommon Valor, it was his son who was a Vietnam POW, right? Yeah. Randall Texcov. Yes. What was his name in it? I don't remember. That movie came out at a great time for me. That's the perfect age. He wore, like, a live grenade around his back, remember? Yeah. That's the second time we talked about uncommon valor in, like, two months. When was the other one? I remember. I don't remember. I do remember talking about probably what happens if the Earth stops spinning. Yeah, probably. So you got anything else? I guess we had the opportunity to really invade Libya, and President Obama said, you know what, let's not do that. Let's not do the regime change game. Well, a lot of people are like, we shouldn't be there in the first place. Right. A lot of other people are like, this is a half measure. If you're going to go do that and just wipe out somebody's military, you might as well do a ground invasion and take over and top all the regime. Like you said, Obama was like, no, let's give it a shot. And he was proven right in Libya, at least. Yeah. Because even if you take out their air defenses and their air offenses, I guess they still have way better weaponry and stuff on the ground than these uprising forces do. Right. And it worked in Libya. It didn't necessarily work in the Balkans. A lot of people point to the slaughter at Srebrenica. Oh, yeah. 7000 Muslim boy and men were killed by the Bosnians who are being tried for war crimes because of it. But the Nofly Zone didn't do anything to prevent it. That's right. So, I mean, is it effective? It can be. I say that we don't have a large enough body of work to study from here. We need to get some more going, get some more iPhones. Yeah, I remember how creepy it was after 911 when all the planes were shut down. Remember that? Oh, yeah. It was just so odd. You don't realize how used to the sounds and the chemtrails. We did an episode on that Chemtrails. We did we Sells. You know what I mean? Okay, I guess that's about it, right? Yeah. If you want to learn more about no Fly Zones, you can type no Fly Zone into the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And before we get the listener mail, let's do a word from our sponsor. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Okay, friends, so imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have Afflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Aflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Afflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover, so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Afflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let Afflac stand in the gap. To help you to learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit Aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. All right. Listen to Melton. Yeah. Okay. Josh. I'm going to call this pushy. Kid gets his way. Okay. Which I try not to do, but everybody loves it when pushing kids get their way. This is a shout out for a teacher. This is Jack. And Jack and I had been emailing each other, and he said, by the way, I think I told you in the past about my civics teacher that Listens to the show. This week, we have a special project in this class is to make a podcast about one of the Supreme Court cases we've been studying for. Some hints. We listen to tidbits of your show. And my teacher and I just grinned from ear to ear at each other like a really funny inside joke, because they're, like, the only two in the classroom. Got you. I plan for my pseudonym to be either Chuck or even Chuckers, if you would allow. I give you permission, sir. Okay. He says he sees himself as a younger version of me, which is frightening. That's nice. Although the actual content of the show is more like this American Life because we are required to have Collins. Do they? I don't know. I don't think so, either. I will always think to myself that I'm sitting there in your little studio, if you can give my spectacular teacher, Mr. Christoph, a shout out, that would be mind boggling, stupendously, incredible. But I understand if you can't. Mr. Christoph. Yes. Mr. Kristoff civics teacher. And I said, sure, Jack, I'll do that. And then he emailed again from Washington, DC. And said, I hate to seem demanding, Jack, but if you could also mention Mrs. Christopher, because I have her for math, and I don't want to make her feel left out. So if it's too late, I get it. I can't complain. This might be the best day of my life after all. Have a nice long weekend. And that is Jack outside Washington, DC. And Mr. And Mrs. Kristoff, good job listening to the show, and we thank you for using it in your classroom. Yes. Thank you. To the Mr. And Mrs. Christopher. Thank you for shaping your mind. We appreciate that. Shout out and way to go, Jack. You're a cool dude. If you have a shout out you want us to give, Chuck is in on those pretty frequently. Sometimes you can tweet to us at s yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffytionnow, send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and go to our website, stuffyouhudnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.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, you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo elevate at Pepco Pet Supplies, plus and Select Neighborhoods pet stores." | ||
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215463602995sysk-jack-ripper-artist.mp3 | How Ripperology Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ripperology-works | The unsolved murder spree of Jack the Ripper has captivated generations of amateur investigators, each with their own theory of the killer's identity. Learn more about one particularly thought-provoking suspect in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | The unsolved murder spree of Jack the Ripper has captivated generations of amateur investigators, each with their own theory of the killer's identity. Learn more about one particularly thought-provoking suspect in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:11:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=18, tm_min=11, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=192, tm_isdst=0) | 5684887 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Brought to you by consumerGuide Automotive. We make carbine easier. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer. Here@housetuffworks.com with me is my trusty editorix, the intrepid Candace Gibson. How are you, Candice? I'm fabulous, Josh. Well, I hope you are feeling intrepid right now. We're about to enter some grisly territory. Let's talk about Jack the Ripper, shall we? Indeed. Okay, so, specifically, could Jack the Ripper have been an artist, the artist formerly known as Jack the Ripper, aka. One Walter Sicker, a British impressionist painter. He would have been 28 around the time of the famous Ripper murders, also called the Canonical Murders. These took place back in 1888, from August 31, November 9, just to set the scene for you. And it would have been more than just doves crying in that dank and depraved East End of London and the White Chapel district. It would have been the sound of prostitutes. More specifically, his prey of choice was the alcoholic, drunk, middle aged, and unattractive prostitute. It's the unattractive part that really gets you. It's bad enough as it is, but unattractive, too. Now, the problem is, Jack the Ripper has never caught, and as such, a kind of field of amateur investigation called Ripperology has grown up over the centuries of people who dedicate their time trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was. Right? Right. And over the years, police departments in London, too, have fingered about 170 suspects in the case, but no one's ever been definitively convicted of the crime. And back in 2002, someone who wasn't even a real ribrologist sort of took a stab at the case, no pun intended. And that was crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. And she was the one who named Walter Sickert, and she had some hard evidence and some sort of, I don't know, loosely based evidence. And the loosely based evidence was sort of relevant to her interpretation of Cigarettes art? No, actually, yeah. She considered some of cigarettes paintings confessional, like, he had actually painted or used the murdered prostitutes that he murdered as models for some of his paintings and that he was either taunting police or getting this off his chest through these paintings. Or he could have been super authentic because he was taught under the school of American painter James Whistler, who recommended that secret paint from life. So if you wanted to paint dead prostitutes, it only made sense, yet awesome first. What better way to do it than that? Actually, in a 1988 FBI psychological profile of Jack the Ripper, one of the points, they concluded was that the Ripper probably would have either gotten some of his rage out in between murders by drawing pictures of brutalized women or writing fantasy stories about brutalizing women. So Sticker kind of fits that bill. But really, one of the problems with basing your theory on art is that art is so widely open to interpretation, especially Impressionism. Yeah. And that's what's kind of wild about this point of Cornwell's argument. The painting that she was using as her most damning evidence was called The Camden Town Murder. And this featured a man sitting on the edge of a bed, and while he's dressed, there's a woman in bed who's naked and ostensibly dead. And she was saying, look, this is it. This is the ultimate tantamount confession. But another critic pointed out that the painting has an alternate title, and that is What Shall We Do for Rent? Right, so the murderer and murdered woman go to a desperate couple down on their luck just with the change of the timing. Right. Very curiosity. I'm such a critic. She didn't base her theory entirely on her interpretation of secrets art, though she actually, with her vast millions, purchased some paintings to try to find clues and actually tore one apart, which the curator of the Royal Academy in London later called monstrously stupid. Publicly, that action. But she also had some hard evidence. Yes, she has an empty DNA in her bag. Mitochondrial DNA. And the glitch with this is that mitochondrial DNA only comes from our mother's lineage. So it's discounting your father's input into you, essentially. So using that to confirm the identity of someone is only half right. And it turns out it left about 50,000 people in London at that time who could have produced a match. Strangely, though, one of them was Walter Sickert. And the way she found a match was she compared some Sicker DNA with DNA samples taken from the Ripper letters. Now, from the time of the murders till about 1960, hundreds of letters came in, ostensibly written by Jack the Ripper. Most Ripper. I just don't think he wrote any of them. But Cornwall found that Sickert had written one or two of them. Now, she kind of jumped to a conclusion, saying that, in her opinion, that meant he was the Ripper. But a Ripper all just kind of put it into perspective, thanking Cornwall for all of her hard work and research, improving that Walter Sickert was indeed one of the people who wrote fraudulent Jack the Ripper letters. Well, that was rather tongue in cheek. And if you want to learn more about this case, there's so much more to learn. Check out. Could Jack the Ripper have been an artist on howstepworkscom? For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseepworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts@housework.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?" | |
SYSK Selects: How Magic Mushrooms Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-magic-mushrooms-work | In this week's SYSK Select episode, for thousands of years, humans have used hallucinogenic mushrooms for spiritual reasons. Today, however, having them can get you thrown in prison. How do magic mushrooms do what they do? Can they help the mentally ill? | In this week's SYSK Select episode, for thousands of years, humans have used hallucinogenic mushrooms for spiritual reasons. Today, however, having them can get you thrown in prison. How do magic mushrooms do what they do? Can they help the mentally ill? | Sat, 20 May 2017 13:45:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=13, tm_min=45, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=140, tm_isdst=0) | 48467472 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, its Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects episode, I picked How Magic Mushrooms Work, which came out in 2012. I think we're just kind of starting to dip our toe into controversial virtual topics, maybe. Who knows? And I think I remember us being worried we were going to get in trouble for it. Well, we didn't, so here it is again. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles W. Chuck, Bryant with me. And this is the far out podcast stuff you should know. That's right, we were kicking off this is our first show we're recording in 2012, and Josh thought, let's kick it off with the little Almond brothers and get psychedelic. Exactly. That's what you think of when you think psychedelia. Well, call them. They were known for having mushrooms on their album covers and t shirts, and it was a very common thing. Those are peaches mushrooms all over the place. Okay. Yeah. But generally no, of course, you think of like, the Grateful Dead, jefferson Airplane. Yeah. The 13th Floor Elevators. Yeah. Quicksilver Messenger Service, mobi Grape, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Chocolate Watch fan. Jimi Hendrix, of course. Who. Yeah. So, Chuck, you're familiar with psychedelia? Rock and roll. Of course. Are you familiar with psychedelia as far as psychedelics are concerned? I know you are. And do you want to know how I know you are? Because we podcasted on it. That's exactly right. LSD and CIA. What else? It seems like we psychedelic treatmental illness. That's right. That was a big one. That kind of overlaps with some of this. We're going to lay a lot of the blame of all the lost research, decades of it, at the feet of Timothy Leary, the man who ruined everything and what we're talking about pardon my sniffles, by the way. I'm not sick mentally. I'm not allowing myself to think of me as sick. I have sniffles. That's what I did. I was like, no, I'm not sick. I'm just not going to let it happen. And look at you, you look fantastic. No, it was just a few days. I think if I would have wallowed in it, it would have been more than a week. Yeah. I'm not letting myself I hit it hard, man. Like tons of fluids and emergency and airborne and fruits. That was fine. Okay. You'll be great. Airborne, you know, that's like wholly discredited. It's the same thing as emergency. Pretty much. It's just like vitamins and stuff. Okay, all right. But it doesn't keep you from getting sick. I think that's how it's discredited. But it'll help you out in a vitamin anyway. All right. Some college. Because it's like get to the mushrooms. Exactly. So let's get to the mushrooms. Chuck, dokie dokie. Chuck. Josh, I've got no real intro other than I think we should talk about the history of mushrooms first. Okay. What do you think? I think that sounds great. Apparently there's a lot of debate over how long people have been using magic mushrooms. As far as religious rituals, recreationally, who knows? But the supposition is that it goes back thousands and thousands of years. For example, there's a cave painting in Algeria that's 9000 years old that supposedly depicts mushrooms. There's another one in Spain that's 6000 years old that depicts mushrooms. Sure. And it makes a lot of sense that when you think of Native American tribes, american tribes, Mesoamerican tribes. These people have customarily eaten magic mushrooms all the time. Right. Well, that's what one camp says. Hey, they've been used in religious rights for thousands of years in Central America and Northern Africa. Like you said, what's the rub? But then there's another camp that says, hey, you can't prove that you're just seeing what you want to see when you look at that Kpanning or that Almond Brothers cover. And just because there's a mushroom on the wall doesn't mean that they ate magic mushrooms. What did the Aztecs have? How do you pronounce it? I don't know. I've never been good at pronouncing Aztec, but I can take a stab at it if you'd like me to. Sure. Teenauthal. Right. They call it the flesh of the gods. And they use the substance. We know that. We just don't know what it was. But a lot of people think that it might have been, quote unquote, magic mushrooms. Right. They also made statues of it, that kind of thing. Yeah. And you generally only do that back in the day if it's a very revered substance. Right. They don't make a statue of just like, whatever. No. If we can speak in likelihoods, we know there were mushrooms where we assume that there were these mushrooms growing wild like they are today. Sure. In these areas that these people were hunters and gatherers and foragers so likely tried these mushrooms. If they did try these mushrooms, they probably wigged out. Right. Isn't that the clinical term? I think they call it a trip. Okay. Man, they tripped and probably started incorporating it into their caveart like teenagers do today. Sure. On their book cover, on their notebooks. It has been confirmed in contemporary tribes in Central America, including the Mazek, the MIXTECH, the Nahua and the Zapotec. So all the texts are way into it. Yeah. At least these days. So if they eat it these days, I would say chances are they probably ate it back in the day as well. Right. Okay. So as far as the west is concerned, I'm sorry, it's not just Middle America. Mesoamerica, Northern Africa and Spain. You mean like a middle America? Like Ohio and Mexico. Right. It's not just Kansas. That's all mushrooms. The Sami. Have you heard of the Sami people? No. So they're finished. They're like indigenous Finnish tribes. bureauc clearly has Sami in her, like her look. Right? I like that look. Yeah. Well, you'd like to saw me cool looking. They love mushrooms so much that they are known to drink the urine of reindeer that have just recently ingested mushrooms. Really? Yeah. There's an art installation, and I think Berlin recently, of this guy who had a bunch of magic mushrooms and this pen, a bunch of reindeer in them, and he was having the reindeer eat the mushrooms and then collecting their urine and storing it. Well, my question to him is why would he go about it that way if he has some magic mushrooms? Did it like, increase the potency or something like that? I don't know. You'd probably be better off asking a sami person than him. Sure. I don't know if it's like that coffee we failed to mention that's fed to like, ferrets and they poop it out, the coffee beans. Right? Exactly. And then they roast that into coffee. It's status. Yeah. So anyway, people have probably been eating magic mushrooms for a long time, but among Westerners, it was totally unthought of. Unheard of? Unknown. Until the 50s. Right? Yeah. In 1955. A writer well, he's a mycologist who studies mushrooms. His name was R. Gordon Wesson, and he traveled to Mexico a lot back in the 50s, searching out mushrooms. Not for magic mushroom purposes, but he was just into mushrooms. Right. And he participated in a ritual there that he and his wife did together. Well, not at first, actually. Did you read the article? No. It's really good. You should read it sometime. He took a colleague down there first. Later on, he took his wife and daughter, and she was like 18, so he was like, sure, she's old enough, and they all tripped on these mushrooms. But I'd like to read a selection, if I may. Okay. Allen is his friend, by the way. Is that Allenheim? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Alan and I were determined to resist any effects that they might have to observe better the events of the night. But our resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms. Alan felt cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A few minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, gordon, I'm seeing things. I told him not to worry. I was too. We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were open or closed. They emerged from the center of our field of vision, opening up as they came now rushing it now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They began with art motifs. Motifs fractals is another one. Motifs angling, such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper, or the drawing board of an architect. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. And then he goes on to describe all sorts of things, including seeing not an imperfect view of ordinary life, but the archetypes, the platonic ideas that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. So he was tripping hard. It sounds like it, yeah. And that's unusual that he says that he saw something in a chariot, because mushrooms and LSD, although they're hallucinogens, they don't cause actual hallucinations. They tend to just mess with distort things that are already there. Exactly. I have an answer for that because I thought the same thing. He did it in darkness. Okay. On drugs or not, if you go and sit in a dark room long enough, you're going to start seeing things in your mind's eye, and I think that's what was going on. He's such an arguyden. Watson apologist. He's pretty moved, though. And he wrote this article in life, and the editor picked up the title seeking the magic mushroom. Yeah, that's where the name came from. A life magazine editor in coined the term magic mushroom after that little trip wasson and haim recruited Albert Hoffman, who was the chemist who created isolated LSD. Yeah. And said, hey, man, we know what you're into. Take these mushrooms and figure out what's going on with them. And he did, and he isolated the active ingredient. What is it? It's a tryptomine, which is an alkaloid. Thank you. It's actually related to tryptophan. Okay. The turkey stuff. Yeah. It happens to you on turkey. But the tryptumine, the two are psilocybin and psilocin. So psilocin, that's the metabolite of psilocybin. Okay. Psilocybin is the active ingredient, the tryptomine found in mushrooms. And then when you ingest it, your body breaks down the psilocybin into psilocybin. And they're starting to come to realize that psilocybin is probably the culprit behind everything. Oh, really? Yeah. Before we move on, I want to point out in the article, he did it quite a few times in Mexico, and then he said later on, just to test to see if it was part of just the communal experience of being there, he went back to New York city and took some, and he said it was even better in New York city. Also, he disproved that. He's like, I love New York. Yeah. Okay. Albert Hoffman, isolates psilocybin. And Sandos, who we worked for, who also started mass producing LST, started mass producing psilocybin as well. And psychological psychiatry community got his hands on it and started studying it. We'll talk about some of the studies later. But as early as the 60s, they realized that obsessive disorders could be treated with psilocybin until they shut it down. They totally shut it down. Psilocybin magic mushrooms. Any of the psilocybin mushrooms are schedule one drug, which is kind of unusual because study after study has shown that mushrooms aren't habit forming or addictive and that they kind of do have a lot of medical uses, which, again, we'll talk about in a little bit. But let's talk about the mushrooms and cells. Chuck, they are a plant, a mineral, fungus or an animal. They're an animal. Okay. They're a fungus. And it means it grows from a spore. And each little mushroom in the case of psilocybin mushrooms has anywhere from zero two to 4% psilocybin. It's a very small amount. Yeah, it sounds like it. And the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2003 did a survey, and they found that about 8% of adults over 26, which to me makes this an invalid study already. Right. If they didn't include 20 to 25. Right. 8% have tried it at some point I saw, like, teenagers, something like around 8%, but it was hallucinogens other than LSD. Oh, really? Which includes, like, PCP and stuff like that. Really seems kind of weird to lump us together, but in Europe, the prevalence is probably higher between zero 3% and 14.1% of use at least once in the person's lifetime. Between zero three and 14? Yeah, it's pretty wild. I just call it 14. Okay. And then for some reason, the Czech Republic and Slovakia report the highest use among teenagers of magic mushrooms. Not sure why. Interesting. Yeah, that's a nice place to be. I was about to bag on it and say, you do it too, but it's lovely. Yeah. Or maybe that's why they're doing it, because it is lovely, because New York City is the best. Timothy Leary we've failed to mention, but of course, obviously he sunk his teeth into it, literally. And like you said earlier, like all things, he kind of killed the psychedelic movement in a way as he was actually creating it by making it a hippie burnout thing. Well, he definitely delegitimized it. I mean, there are a lot of people who are studying LSD and psilocybin and Abigain, all those, to see how they can help people with mental illness. And Lee was like, no, man, let's just completely screw the establishment with this stuff. Well, and he's the one who established the whole set and setting thing, right. Which is still in use today, including in this article from Houseoffworks.com. Set and setting are defined in here. Do you want to talk about it? Well, this is the trip, as they call it. The mushroom trip is very dependent on set and setting. The frame of mind that you have going into it, where you are the setting. Obviously, if it's some kind of stressful, highly organized thing, like if you're in school or you're like in a train station and somebody's like, you're going to miss your train, you're going to miss your train, it's probably not a good idea. Or if you're hanging out with friends and you're camping or you're doing something there where you have no stress involved and you have the right outlook going in. Timothy Leary says that's what you want as far as going into this whole thing. Right. Set as mindset and setting is your environment. Also, studies have found that even what are called drug naive people can have a positive experience on psilocybin mushrooms if what's about to happen to them is explain to them ahead of time. That's a big part of it, too, is knowing what you're getting into, going into it. Well, and that's a big part of these studies we're going to talk about later on was these people are all coached ahead of time by people. They call them their guides, is what they are. Shame shaman? No, they're research assistants who have had previous experience with psychotropics. Got you. But they would explain to them what they're about to get into, and that would obviously help them along as they're going in. But they do mention the guide thing in here. In this article. They say that a lot of people, because you can have a bad trip, which the only thing you can do there is to ride it out. Obviously, you can't turn off the effects, which is a very important thing to note. It doesn't go away. No, it doesn't. Although supposedly in the emergency room, they usually prescribe sedatives, and that really supposedly helps a bad trip. Yeah, I'm sure it does. But they say in the article here, new users are often advised to have an experienced friend guide them through the experience. Like? Did you see Flirting With Disaster? Yeah. Lily Tomlin, they accidentally dose the cop and she was like, Allen. I was like, she's a great guy. He'll be fine. Yeah. And then she just kind of coaches him through the thing. I was looking up movies that have mushrooms in them, and I was having a lot of altered states. Well, this was LSD. Yeah. Okay. But I guess that's a good time to mention that LSD and psilocybin mushrooms are very similar in the effect. Although they say that mushrooms are generally milder and don't last as long, their chemical composition is very similar. Do you know how similar? I think there's, like, one hydroxy. Really? That's different. But they're pretty close. Very close, yes. When they made LSD, did they try to synthesize psilocybin? Was that the way they were after? No, because they didn't know that psilocybin existed until after LSD had been suicide. Interesting, because he did LSD in psilocybin. Quite a coincidence, isn't it? Yeah. So do you know what's going on in the brain? Do you know what the whole secret is behind magic mushrooms? Central nervous system. There's some kind of inhibits something, right? No, it does the opposite. It's an agonist, which I came to realize that agony means that you feel everything. I'm in agony means you're feeling everything. An agonist binds to a receptor in your brain that releases a neurotransmitter, and in this case, psilocybin, or silosin, binds to serotonin receptors. Of course it does. And says release the serotonin. Right. And your synapses are flooded with serotonin. And that's what gives what clinical researchers basically call the sensation of just being overwhelmed by sensation. Interesting. Yeah. It's all serotonin, man. Although there is evidence that it affects your dopamine receptors, but not directly. Like, indirectly, which would kind of give you a sense of euphoria. Right. So, Josh, some of the side effects when someone is taking mushrooms include dizziness and nausea, muscle weakness, loss of appetite, and numbness. Sometimes there could be vomiting. Sometimes anecdotally experts have said that inducing vomiting is a way to cease the nausea. When you're experiencing nausea in a mushroom trip. Yeah. And so they're not considered to be addictive. And you can build up a tolerance really quick. Yeah. It says here in the article that, like, for example, taking mushrooms two days in a row is going to make the effects of them on the second day far less pronounced, I guess. Yeah. And one of the guys in these studies too, I believe, takes them for cluster headaches and he's taking them so much that they don't have psycho hallucinogenic properties anymore. It's just like medicine for him. Weird. Yeah. Really gross. Fungal medicine. No, I think he might take a pill. Okay. I'm not sure though. Tolerance also, you can build up a cross tolerance. So, like, if you took a bunch of mushrooms one day and then the next day took mescaline or LSD, those effects would be dampened as well. And I think it has to do with the fact that it's your serotonin. Right. But if you do that, that means a lot of other things as well about you. It does, yes. I don't know what oh, you know what? Okay. You have a T shirt that has an Almond Brothers album cover on. It means you're hippy. A dirty, dirty, smelly hippie. So, Chuck, some of the other effects of tripping on shrooms is euphoria or dysphoria and also sometimes a very rapid shift between the two. Basically being really happy and then being terrified. Right. And then depersonalization, which is the sense that you are not yourself or you belong to somebody else, or you lose your sense of self and then derealisation, which is the sense that you are in a dream or that, man, this isn't real. Nothing is real, that kind of thing. The passage of time is often distorted, whether it's like, have we been talking about this for 5 hours or five minutes? Or the other way around. I think it can go either way. I found a study that showed it basically tested, that it gave people psilocybin and then did time interval tests and found really two to 3 seconds is about the most that a person can successfully achieve these tests. Oh, really? Yeah, like, beyond 3 seconds, they start to get really bad at it. And they also found the person's tapping preference, which I guess is like, if you're just sitting there tapping your fingers what your preference is. And it's slower when you're on mushroom. Oh, really? And like you said that you don't actually hallucinate. Like, you're not going to be sitting there and see pink elephants dancing across the room. But if there's a painting of a pink elephant, it might appear as if the elephant were breathing or moving or shifting, or if you hear something like a song or running water or a creek or something like that, you might hear other things within that sound. Yes. But not completely imagine them. Right. So one of the things we were talking about was that sure, mushrooms have been around for thousands of years, growing wild like they do today, and that's where a lot of people get their mushrooms, apparently, is just foraging it for them. One of the big problems is that while there are a lot of mushrooms in the genocilicide, which we probably should have mentioned earlier, there's the big spoiler. All the mushrooms are in the same genus. There's a lot that look like them, too, and that might grow in similar places that will shut down your kidneys. Yeah. So you have to be very careful when you're foraging for fresh wild mushrooms, if you're into that kind of thing, which neither Chuck nor I suggest should be done. Yeah. We're not endorsing this. No, I'm just saying, like, this is in the article. Yeah. I thought that was implicit, but it's probably a good time to see away. Yeah. In the article, they also point out that even experienced mushroom hunters have made mistakes out there in the dark, in the field, among the cows. So yeah, it can be toxic. It's not a good idea to just go picking mushrooms growing in a cow pie. And also that holds true for if you're looking for truffles or edible mushrooms yeah. You want to kind of know what you're doing. One way to tell what kind of mushroom you're looking at is to create a spore print, which apparently you take a piece of paper and you take the cap of the mushroom. There's a stem and a cap, and in the genocula side, most of them are fairly small, so the cap is about one inch tall. The stem is about three inches tall, generally, but you take the cap and you place it gill side down. If you've ever looked at the underside of a mushroom, there's the gills. They're just so weird looking. Little powdery gills. Powder is the spores. Yeah. You press the gills down on the paper, and it should leave an imprint of the spores. And if you know what you're doing, you can identify more easily or more closely the kind of mushroom you're dealing with. So we said that there's, like, dozens of species, I think, of psilocybin mushrooms. Yeah, there's tons of them. A couple of really popular ones, though, as far as congestion goes, are the psilocyb cubensis. It's one of the most common ones. It's a little larger. As far as magic mushrooms go. It's got a golden cap. I'm sorry, it's called the golden cap or Mexican mushroom, the street name. That's the one that our Gordon wasser probably. Was, yeah. Probably in Mexico. Yeah. And it's got usually a reddish brown cap, white or yellowish stem. And here's an important thing when it's bruised or crushed, it can turn blue, and a lot of people will say, hey, that's how you know it's a magic mushroom if it turns blue when you crush it. And that's not true, because there are toxic varieties that do the same thing. So that's a good way to get yourself in trouble. It's also coprophilic, which means that it grows in poop. Yeah. Moist environments, very humid environments. And hot. Yeah. Like South Georgia, let's say, or Florida, which apparently I didn't look to see, but as of February 2009 at least, is the only state in the Union where it isn't illegal to, I guess, pick or possess fresh psilocyb mushrooms. Fresh as in non dried out. Right. Yeah, that's true. Or it was two years ago. I was going to say. Is it still do? You know? I don't know. When they say the reasoning is that, hey, it grows in the wild, people pick mushrooms and might pick them by accident. So we don't want to send you to prison if something's an accident. Plus, the Rainbow family is in Oklahoma, and we don't want to screw up their jam. One of the other more popular ones is the Siloside semi lanciada. Nice, Chuck. Or the Liberty Cap. And it also is found in damp, grassy fields populated by cattle. But it doesn't grow directly on the dung. Right. And it's a little pointy cat like yellow and brown, and it's smaller than the golden cap. Mexican. Right. And then I guess one of the big three is P Bayocystis or the Blue Bell or Bottle cap. So, Chuck, if one were disposed to take mushrooms, what, according to the article, would the person do? Well, what are people who are taking mushrooms doing with them? We talked about foraging. That's one way you can buy them, which is illegal, and we don't recommend it. Obviously, it's illegal even to have spores, which is surprising because spores don't actually contain psilocybin, which is what's outlawed. It's a weird loophole. Right. But it's not a loophole. What's the opposite of a loophole? The donut part. The munchkin. Okay. That's the donut hole, is the munchkin. I'm familiar with munchkins, believe me. Okay. And then you can grow your own, obviously. But if you're looking to buy this kind of thing in the United States, they sell it much like marijuana, in ounces and quarter ounces. And 8oz I know the 8th is defined in this. It's 3.5 grams in this article. This is the craziest article on the site. Has to be. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Yeah, because at one point who wrote this? Shayna Freeman. Shayna talks about the ones on the Gulf Coast give you a mellower high, but the Thai mushrooms give you a much more intense high. Right. It's crazy. It is. And when they dry out, which is when most people have them, they're dried out, they will lose some of their psychotropic properties in the drying process, but they retain these properties I don't know about indefinitely, but for years. Yeah. Well, because you're not just drying them, I think you have to freeze dry them or you have to dry them. There's like a certain way to dry them. I think that kind of locks in everything locks in the flavor, the gross. Which apparently is very unfortunate. Some mushrooms have a reported flowery taste that sounds awful sour or bitter. So it's not very fun. Which means that a lot of people do crazy stuff with their mushrooms to make them more palatable. Chocolates mushroom chocolates is one soaking their mushrooms and liquor like tequila, rum, just basically grinding them up and putting them into capsules. So you don't taste anything at all? Yeah, like a mushroom pill or making mushroom tea, which supposedly if you cook or brew mushrooms, it supposedly doesn't have an effect on the potency. Yeah, the experience the user has. And it reportedly comes on quicker as well. And anecdotally people have even been known to eat the slimy remains of the tea. Gross. That's what I think everything about mushrooms are. Gross but slimy. I don't like mushrooms, regular mushrooms. I know they supposedly don't have much of a taste and they're putting foods for texture, but I don't like the texture. The whole thing grosses me out. Right. So about 1 gram of dried mushrooms is apparently a very small dose. 4 grams is a medium dose for an adult. I read medium to large and I guess one P cubensis, the Mexican mushroom dried is about one decent size one. And when these 1 gram or 4 grams or whatever the dose is taken is ingested apparently within 20 minutes. If you take it orally, 20 to 30 minutes, you start to experience symptoms and they last for something like 6 hours depending on the potency, I guess. Well, yeah, that's what you've taken. That's what Shana Freeman says in this article. There are differences between from mushroom to mushroom, from person to person. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's not like Sandoz is making this stuff anymore. Right. So we mention foraging. Right. We mention buying off the street, neither of which we recommend. No. Again, this is all highly illegal. I mean, a schedule one drug will get you a severe prison sentence. You might as well be caught with heroin. Sure. Or cocaine or PCP. Like as bad as it gets, it's not going to be caught with this. Just because you can go out in the cow field and find some doesn't mean you should take it lightly. You're right. No, this is huge, man. That's a huge prison sentence. Very good. It's like a life ruining prison sentence. It is very. Although I guess probably just about any prison sentence is fairly life ruining. But this is like double life ruining. That's huge. Mycology. You can actually grow these things. And that's what some people do. Some cultivators do. This is also. Extremely illegal. Very much illegal. Even so, we're going to tell you how to do it because this is stuff you should know. Okay. Okay. Yes. Well, it's stuff that some people should know. Well, I guess at the very least, it's part of explaining everything. It's on our website. Yeah. Jerry's just in there cracking. You have to have a spore because that's the first thing you need for the mushroom to grow. Spore grows onto one mushroom, but a mushroom can have thousands and thousands of spores right. On the underside. The little powdery stuff that we're talking about. And remember we talked about taking spore prints for identification? Those same spore prints are often what you get in the mail when you mail order mushroom kits. Right. You can't just throw these spores in the ground. They have to be hydrated with clean water, meaning distilled water. And you can even buy syringes that are filled prefilled with spores and sterile water from suppliers if you don't want to make your own. Right. So you remember in the Earthworm episode, we talked about Duff? Yeah. That organic light sponge, organic material. You have to make your own version of Duff using brown flower vermiculite, which is the little white pebbly stuff in, like, potting soil and water, and you just kind of mix it together and it creates Duff, a fluffy kind of spongy layer. And I think rice flour, too, because I think wheat flour, I think it might mold easier or something. Okay. I might be wrong. And you create what's called the substrate cake, which is great. It's a great growing medium for mushrooms. Yeah. It's like your soil, right? Pretty much. And you put this little substrate cake in a can, like a jar, right? Yeah. Canning jar. And then you put the canning jar in the canning bath or pressure cooker, which sterilizes the insides. That's right. And then, I guess, you inject the spores. If you have, like, a syringe with the spores in it, you inject it into the jar. Yeah. Poke some holes in the lid, and then that eventually will grow kind of a white ropey growth called mycelium. Yeah. It's got to be at a very steady, humid environment, about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, 23 Celsius, and within about a week, like you said, you get the mycelium. And then if you get mold and stuff like that, that means it wasn't a good environment. But eventually, once it's covered mycelium, you're going to put that into a plastic container for fruiting under the right humid, warm conditions, and grow mushrooms. And each little cake can grow a lot of mushrooms. Yeah. Like a thousand or 100. Yeah. Not at once, obviously. No. They grow in waves, supposedly. And you harvest and then more come and you harvest and more come over the course of a month is where you get your mushrooms from the cake. Again, very illegal to buy any of this stuff or to engage in growing any of the stuff, and let's talk about that. Chuck I think it's hot time we got to the law part of it. Like we said, mushrooms, since I think 1970, are a schedule one drug, and like we said, schedule one drugs are defined as drugs that are highly addictive and have no medical use, which is kind of weird to put mushrooms in there, but they are in there. I don't think you can argue that with the DEA that comes and busts on your door to break up your mushroom growing operation, that, hey, man, these things are not addictive, and there's all sorts of medical uses for them, although it probably won't be the DNA with mushrooms. With DEA, probably going to be what? Did I say DNA? Did I really? It's not going to be the DEA either. You're freaking out. I know. It is likely not going to be the DEA either, because it's probably going to be a state. Although is there state DEA or there's something like that on the state level? Yeah. Each state has a Bureau of Investigation that I think kind of acts like the state DEA. But unless you have some big large operation going on, it's probably not going to be a federal crime. It's probably going to be a state crime. Right. And time was you could order kits like the ones we described on the Internet, over through the mail. If you do that now, you are going to get in a lot of trouble. The DEA probably will come to your house or intercepted or both. And that's been the case since 2003. For the state, it's been illegal. But apparently they started cracking down on kits not that long ago. In 2003, in Great Britain, in 2005, it was still legal to have mushrooms. Fresh mushrooms. Yeah. But that's not the case any longer. And then in Amsterdam, even Amsterdam, I was surprised to learn of this. In 2001, they outlawed dried mushrooms. Yes. And then in 2008, they outlawed fresh mushrooms. So you can't have any mushrooms in the Netherlands, but in Mexico, they do have exceptions for indigenous peoples and being used in ceremonies and such. We do in the United States as well, but not necessarily for psilocybed mushrooms. More for I think peyote is the one that's got the big exception. Oh, really? Yeah. The Native American church is allowed to use peyote. So Josh, we said that for many years, about 35 years or so, it was shut down, as far as research goes, as potential medical benefits, since I don't know when they said, you can again. But I know in 2006, Johnson Hopkins started a long term research study along with some other places. But Johns Hopkins really has headed this up, and they found out a lot of really interesting things, like you said, OCD and some eating disorders. Some compulsive eating disorders. Yeah. So basically any compulsion. Yeah. They found that in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. It was written that study, well, not proved, indicated that for a period of about four to 24 hours, they remained symptom free for that period, and sometimes it was even for days. And that they said that there is no treatment that eases the symptoms as fast because it's pretty much immediate of the compulsive disorder. Yeah. I would imagine you have a compulsion, or your compulsion is exacerbated by a lack of serotonin. You take mushrooms and all of a sudden your brain is flooded with serotonin. Cluster headaches. Yes. This one is interesting. I read about this as well. Cluster headaches are pretty much the worst pain you can have in your head. They liken it to childbirth without anesthesia. And in England. This is in the Guardian that I read this. There are about 6000 people in England that suffer these attacks, sometimes daily, with no more than a couple of weeks remission. It's called the cluster period with the remission. Or like these periods where you have them. Right? Yeah. Cluster period. Apparently psilocybin helps us out a lot. This one guy, Richard Alif, says that he's tried conventional treatments and everything his whole life, and the only thing that brought him relief was the magic mushrooms. And even by some longer periods of remission between attacks. Yeah. So there's another treatment there's also whenever you hear of mushrooms or psychedelics or hallucinogens in general, like the whole idea of religious epiphany or feeling like you're a one with the universe or something. A mystical experience. Right. Early on in the west study of mushrooms, this is kind of noted. And there is this famous study in 1963 where they gave psilocybin to a group of divinity students and sent them to church. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. And they, of course, reported like all sorts of wonderful mystical feelings and connections with God and religion and just enlightenment, basically, is what they reported. Which is not that surprising because I think you could have called that one right. Sure. But what's very surprising is that 25 years later, they surveyed the participants again and the people who had received psilocybin reported a greater number of positive life changes than people who hadn't been given psilocybin, like the controls, who got in placebo instead. Well, that's what Johns Hopkins has found so far, too. They did a study on 18 adults, it's just one of them. And 94% said that it was one of the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives. 40% said it was a single most meaningful experience. And then they interviewed them again a year later and found that they still felt that way and had these changes in empathy, greater understanding of people, less judgment. And their family members even noticed that they were calmer, happier and kinder. Because Griffith, Doctor Griffith is the guy leading this, he thinks that they found the sweet spot, which is just enough to get you to that place but not so much that it could have an adverse effect. Right now. I got one more, too, if you're up for it. I am. Man WebMD. This is just a couple of months ago WebMD conducting psilocybin studies. No, they were just reporting on johns Hopkins again, which is party central, I guess. Personality in humans is generally pretty fixed after the age of 30, they say. And it takes something like a job change or a big move or a death in the family or divorce, like something really big to affect your personality in any meaningful way. Generally, unless you take mushrooms once, really is what they found. Openness decreases across decades very slightly, and people generally become rich and less creative. But the 52 adults who volunteered to eat psilocybin from the ages of 24 to 64, 57% had transcendent mystical experiences while taking the drug. And they said, measurable increases in openness, which is one of five key parts of your personality, and it did not affect the other four parts, which is interesting, which is neuroticism extraversion agreeableness and conscientiousness, but apparently it makes people more open and creative. What's crazy to me is looking at the studies and what they're doing in the studies, they found that I think, like, two milligrams or five milligrams, some ridiculously large amount of psilocybin injected intravenously through an IV drip was, like, too much. Patients started reporting that the experiences were a little overwhelming and terrifying. Could you imagine some poor SAP in a hospital room getting, like, three milligrams of psilocybin delivered intravenously? That's not set in setting. And there's also there's been a lot of cats, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, cats, I think I said rats, mice, cats really love it, though, that have been given psilocybin over the course of time in the name of research or eating it in the wild, I imagine. Well, have you ever seen the bear, the documentary that follows the two bears? No, the bear eats mushrooms. Oh, really? And they have this big scene where it's like, just tripping and flowers are blooming and the sky is just moving with the stars and everything. And we were looking closely. You mean I were checking it out last night. It's clearly a person dressed as a bear tripping. So we went and did a little research. We're like, this is a documentary, right? And, yeah, they had somebody dress up as a bear for that part, but the actual bear did actually eat mushrooms. The director was taking a lot of artistic life. But you have to imagine what's it like for an animal. Like, how can we even tell? Apparently mice. Mice show that they're hallucinating through head twitches. And then monkeys who have been taught to self inject psilocybin tend to zone out fixed staring is what that's called. Or they'll grasp at unseen object. Can you imagine some poor monkey doing that? I can. Okay. To be fair, too, that the WebMD report. 60% said they had this transcendent mystical experiences, but a lot of people also had bad trips, had herring, belts of fear and anxiety. So we're not saying it's like, take mushrooms and everything's great for your life, right? They found that it can go one of two ways. Yeah. Good or bad. Yes. I guess there's probably no such thing as a neutral mushroom experience. I don't think so. I think it's going to affect you profoundly in one way or the other. Yeah. If you want to know. You got anything else? I got nothing else, sir. If you want to know more about mushrooms, you can read this article on the site. This crazy article on the site how magic Mushrooms work. By typing that into the search bar@howstopeworks.com, that means that it is time for listener mail. And I think we proved that we can cover other stuff like this. We will find out if we get in a lot of trouble for this one. Whether we can cover stuff like this or not, that's a big part of the world and we're out to explain everything. Exactly. Not just flowers and bluebirds. We have to cover the dark underbelly as well. Joe all right, I'm going to call this from Max. Okay. Longtime listener, first time emailer. I've sent email lots of times, but just not to you guys. Max is a funny guy. I've listened to the show religiously at work, but since I was laid off in May, I'd fallen far behind hustling to get that dollar left. Little time for lengthy dissections on cheesemaking arts or why we get zits. I posted the details of my sad, unemployed syscalist experience on Twitter, and you guys retweeted it to your adoring throngs. You did that? Yes. It's nice. I got many well wishers, a couple of people who asked for my CV. What does it stand for? Curriculum Byte. Really? I've never heard that. I've seen it on your resume. Yeah, but I just never knew exactly what it stood for. Now you do. It's like the WC. When you walk in. There the water closet. You're going to find a toilet? Yeah, because it's a water closet. But they even call the toilet the water closet. It's not even just the room. It refers also to the toilet for some reason, which makes no sense to me. It's a closet. There's water. Where was I? I got many well wishes. A couple asked for my CV and several new followers I got out of this recipe. People actually following this back with you? Not much came with that alone, but it was awesome that you guys did that for me. Really cheered me up when that job search had been in vain for such a long while. So I wanted to send you dudes a heads up that after four lengthy interviews with the same company I've been hired. I was vetted more thoroughly than Sarah Palin. It's an office gig in a nice neighborhood about ten minutes from my home, which is a real perk. It's hard to come by here in the San Francisco Bay area. I'll be making more money than ever before working with a friend of mine. And now I had plenty of time to catch up on your fine program. So hazard to that. That is awesome. Thanks for your help, dudes. If I ever find myself in Atlanta where you find yourself? By the bay. I owe you many beers. And that is Max in Martinez, California, who you can follow at Wicked Machine if you're so interested. That's awesome. And I guess he'll be tweeting about his great new job, working with his buddy, sleeping late, rolling in dough. That's not good for Max. Thanks a lot, Max, for writing. And I was wondering, actually, like a week or so ago how he was doing. But yeah, like, right away somebody was like, hey, send me your CV. It's your curriculum. By tape. People are going to be every unemployed person on the planet now. It's going to say, Josh, help. We'll retweet them. Apparently it doesn't do a whole lot, but we'll give it a shot if you want to, I guess. Let us know that you're unemployed on Twitter. You can tweet to us at saskpodcast. You can go hang out with us on Facebook, indeed, facebook. Comstuffyshow. Or you can send us a good old fashioned email at stuffpodcast at HowStuff works.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetophers.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-05-18-sysk-auroras-final.mp3 | How the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-aurora-borealis-and-aurora-australis-work | It wasn't too long ago that humans thought the polar lights were signs from the afterlife. Thanks to a 19th century Norwegian, we now understand that they are a fascinating interplay with Earth's magnetic field and wind from the sun. | It wasn't too long ago that humans thought the polar lights were signs from the afterlife. Thanks to a 19th century Norwegian, we now understand that they are a fascinating interplay with Earth's magnetic field and wind from the sun. | Thu, 18 May 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=138, tm_isdst=0) | 41004822 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship. And it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum Select Card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage Miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more@city.com adventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck, Bryant and Jerry's over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast we want to give before we get started. A big congratulations to our newest colleagues, Emily and Bridgett, with the official relaunch of stuff mom never told you. Yeah, Chuck, they just debuted last week, I believe, and they come out Wednesdays and Fridays. Yeah. Monday, Tuesday well, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. The four of us have you covered. Yeah, it's true. Do we have any shows that come out on Monday? We do. All right, well, Jerry's nodding, so that means we've got you covered every day of the week. Let's just say that nice how stuff works way. Yeah. Anyway, just congratulations to them. That's awesome. I know that they've been running classic episodes while they were down and getting restarted, and it's no small thing to come in and take a show over, but they're doing an awesome job and are both great broadcasters, and I'm in support of them. Yeah, how's that? That's my official position. I know that sounded weirdly political. Yeah. Good luck and best wishes to Bridget and Emily. So you guys go check it out. Wednesdays and Fridays. Anywhere you get podcasts, you can get stuff mom never told you. Yes, and I apologize for my voice. Oh, yeah. What's up with your voice, man? I've just had this upper respiratory thing that won't go away. Now, that stinks. And so unless I'm constantly wetting my throat, it gets weirdly deep and cracky. So are you paying a lot more than usual? Well, I'm drinking a lot of water I'm peeing a lot, but I would literally have to drink between every sentence to keep it silky smooth. So do you want to record today? No, I'm fine. I'm not in pain, but I just don't want anyone's ears to be in pain. Have you heard of oh, man. Now that I say it, I realize I don't know the name of the brand, but you know those, like, cough drops that are actually like candy, but they market them as cough drops? The cherry flavored ones? Ricolas. No, I mean, like, they're literal candy ranchers. No, but it's basically the most delicious Jolly Rancher you've ever had. It lacks the sour. It's all sweet. So it's green. Apple? No, they're red. I can't remember what they're called. People are screaming at their phones, their tablet, or computers right now. Settle down, everybody. Yes, Chuck. And I agree with you. This is maybe the worst intro we've ever done. Jerry does, too. So let's get to it, shall we? Yes. So we're talking auroras today. Yeah. And generally we're talking about the two most famous auroras. And I say too, because I don't want to short change the aurora australis. No, it definitely does get short changed, though. Totally. Did you come upon why? I came upon the explanation a couple of times about why. Yeah. I didn't, but I'm going to have a guess. Okay, let's have it. Is it not quite as magnificent? No. Are there not as many people there? Yes. Okay. There you go. There's less land around the south Pole as there is around the north pole. I should say the magnetic south and north Pole, so there's fewer eyes to see it. So the grandeur of it is less obvious to as many people. But yeah, that's why the northern lights get all the top billing. Plus, no one ever named a strain of weed after the aurora australis. I thought about that, too. Southern Lights. What is that? I bet you there's one. There's a boy is in there. Like a head shop in Atlanta called Southern Lights. I think it's a bookstore. Oh, got it. Wink wink. Oh, yeah. Where you can buy Rush and Spice books. I don't understand. I'm just kidding. I see. Is that like a code for something? Well, I thought you were giving me the code. No. I sell books, Chuck. I think it's a real bookstore. Gardening books. This is the most confused I've ever been on this show. Like, we're on a cell phone and have to keep things straight up. Right. All right, let's get back to it. I don't want to confuse you. So auroras because I want to make sure that you comes through okay. Yeah, there are two. And apparently until very recently, it was assumed because people couldn't see them at the same time, but it was assumed that the northern lights that you are seeing, the aurora borealis, if you could simultaneously see the aurora Australis, you would be seeing a mirror image of one another, and they recently found out that that's absolutely not true at all. They finally got someone down there to look. Some poor SAP had to run, right? He's like, no, it's way too different. It's not the same. I don't exactly know how they do it. They must have observed it from space, but they saw they are convinced now that it's not a mirror image any longer. But it's not that surprising that they're just now kind of figuring that out, because it wasn't until too terribly long ago that people thought the aurora was things like a giant campfire on the other side of the ocean being reflected in the sky, or the sun's rays peeking up from under the Earth, where it was day, when it was night, where you were. There's been a lot of explanations, some of them goofier than others. But it wasn't until, I think, the 19th century that we really figured out what was going on. And it was due to Norway, appropriately enough, because Norway is a good place to see the northern lights. Yeah, I mean, they've been around, obviously, since there have been people to watch them since ancient times, people have been observing them. But like you said, when you're talking about indigenous peoples and Vikings and things, they had a more limited understanding of science, so they had all these fanciful descriptions of what they might be. But are you talking about the first person to use the term? Are you talking about no, actually, I jumped past him, and he definitely deserves pop. So let's talk about him. Yeah. Pierre Gasindi or Galileo and Galileo Galilei, apparently around the same time, both witnessed the September 12, 1961 display, and both kind of put it in their own words, how wonderful it was. But it wasn't until I believe you were talking about 1895 physicist name Christian Berkeley in Norway. Yeah, I think it was 1661 what did I say? 19 one. Yes. Okay. Yeah, they saw it on the same night. Right. And they both went out, and I don't think they were having a conversation, and then both ran out to write it down. It seems like they simultaneously came up with this idea at the same time from seeing it on the same date. Is that correct? Yeah, I think they both saw the same fantastic display on the same night, but they both came up with the same idea to name it Aurora Borealis. Well, that I don't know. It just says they share credit, which to me means they probably don't know. Right, and would just feel bad giving it to one of them. Yeah, because history is riddled with that kind of thing where everybody says, oh, no, it was really Alexander Graham Bell and Elijah Gray. There's definitely no winner in that. Or maybe one of them said, I say aurora. You say and he went Borealis. And they had got a little champ going. It was like a Beastie voice concert. Yeah, exactly. So what was the Norwegian scientist? Kristian Berkeley. So they were already called the Northern Lights from at least the Renaissance on, or I guess that would be pre Renaissance. Didn't Galileo help kick off the Renaissance? I think he cut the ribbon. Christian Burkeland. He was the one who came up with the modern interpretation of what auroras are. Yeah, he was pretty bright, too. I agree. I don't know if he just pulled this one out of his head or what, but he decided that what the auroras are. Aurora. Apparently, you put an ae on the end, and that's how you pluralize it. Sure. When he figured out that they have something to do with electrons in outer space interacting with the magnetosphere around Earth. Yeah. And it turns out he was absolutely right. Yeah. He recreated this in a vacuum chamber successfully, but he wasn't 100% right. I think he said that, and we'll get to this later. But the aurora borealis and auroras in general have a characteristic shape, which is an oval ring. And he did not know this at the time because he thought that these electrons were coming from the sun, which is not quite true. No, it's not. It's a little more complex than that. His interpretation of the whole thing was pretty seemed to be correct. And you actually run into it here, there. I saw it on a couple of pretty respectable sites that were basically giving the Berkeley and interpretation of aurora phenomenon, but it turns out there's an extra step in there that he didn't account for. Yeah. So do you want to talk about the magnetosphere real quick? Well, I think quickly that we should shout out one more researcher. Okay. And this was 1964. There was a grad student in Japan name? Well, you always take our Japanese you want to do that one? Shin ichi aka. Sofu very nice. Thank you. And he actually, in 1964, saw these photos, examined them closely, and noticed that they were rings. And I believe that he was the first one to say, hey, these things are oval. I think he actually predicted them that they would be oval mathematically without even observing them. Oh. And then once we started going into space and looking at amazing from satellites, they said yes. Aka sofa was right through math, dude. He was like, no, it'll be a ring. And it turns out he's right. So what you're seeing with the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights are actually connections toward ovals that go around the North Pole and the South Pole. Correct. And what it is again, it's highly charged particles from outer space interacting with the magnetosphere. Yeah. So you're ready to talk about the magnetosphere? Sure. This is kind of astounding to me. We're not entirely certain why the Earth has a magnetic field, from what I can tell. Did you know that? Yeah, I mean, they have their idea, but yeah, they're not positive. Right. That sounds me. Supposedly from the rotation of molten iron in the outer core inside the Earth that generates this electrical field that surrounds the Earth. The magnetosphere. Yeah, that's the current hypothesis. It's probably right. But the fact that we don't know exactly what creates the magnetosphere around the Earth, it's just weird to me. Yeah, I'm with you there with this whatever is causing it. We know that there's a magnetic shield, basically, around Earth that is probably caused by that iron rotating inside the Earth. And this magnetic shield help preserve Earth. Like, we would not be here if the magnetosphere wasn't there. The atmosphere probably wouldn't be around Earth if the magnetosphere wasn't there. It protects us from bursts of radiation, of highly charged ions and particles that are blasted out from the sun and are just traveling throughout the solar system from other stars. And we're bombarded. Earth is bombarded by this stuff constantly, and the magnetosphere acts to actually deflect most of it. A lot of it. Well, there's your why, even at how. Because we need it. Right? Yeah. We need the magnetosphere. We do. So we've got this thing surrounding us, and it's great. It keeps us alive, but it also creates the basis for aurora. Yes. All right, so how this happens, it sounds kind of complicated, but it's really not. When you look at it, like you said, the sun is like this big ball of gas that constantly spits out and burps out all kinds of things in the form of energy and radiation and what's called solar wind, solar flares, coronal mass ejections. And we talked about all of this in various episodes, but notably our terrible episode on the sun, our legendary episode, anything that has anything remotely do with the sun is usually a poor episode for us. And like you said, most of the time, these things get deflected, but sometimes some of this stuff gets trapped in the magnetosphere. Right. This stuff that's being spit out from the sun, a lot of it's plasma. Right. Which is the fourth state of matter. Yeah. And that's like highly charged particles that hit the magnetosphere. And when they hit the magnetosphere, they basically transfer their current to the magnetosphere. They produce an electrical charge in it. That's right. And all kinds of fun stuff happens once that happens. Well, this is where the birkland interpretation basically kind of starts to diverge. Right. So Berkeley's idea was those particles travel through the magnetic or down the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, and they directly create the aurora. Yeah. If you could see the magnetic field around the Earth, it would have a big, long, wispy tail, sort of like it would sort of look like a comet surrounding the Earth. Right. And these magnetic lines, it travels, once it hits those field lines, it goes along that path on the northern and southern poles. Right down that tail. The reason that it has that tail on the one side, it's squished and it's about six to eight Earth radii outside of the Earth, in between the Earth and the sun, but it's being pressed up against the Earth. It's being squished on the sunside on the night side. That tail is being formed, and apparently that's extraordinarily long. It goes well past the moon, something like up to 1000 Earth radii past the Earth on the other side. Right. But if there wasn't solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere just formed, I think it's natural shape and there was no pressure from the solar wind on it. What you would see if you were looking at it from outer space is so the Earth is a dipole magnet. You got the positive and the negative one on each pole, right? Yes. It would look like the Earth's magnetosphere would look like an eight on its side to where the top of the eight was coming off the left side of the Earth. And the bottom of the 8th would be coming off of the right side there. And where they came together would be Earth's magnetic poles. And where the magnetosphere comes in contact with the Earth at the poles are what are called the polar cusp. And apparently this is basically a direct pipeline, a funnel for particles to go right toward the poles. And that's why particles tend to accumulate or the Northern lights tend to accumulate and be seen every night at the poles in rings because they're being funneled there by the magnetosphere. Yeah, it's like when in the original Star Wars A New Hope, when Luke fires at the end toward the Death Star and he gets sucked in that little hole that's like the polar cusp of the Death Star. That is a great analogy. So let's take a break, shall we? I'm hanging on here by my fingernails and I need to regain myself. I think they call this a cliffhanger. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange and the multiverse of badness new episodes of Marvel Studios Ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, The Series and Zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US. Based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, so we're back to describe the second part of how this works. Yes, and more. So, when this charge, it's cutting across this magnetic field, following those lines. It's actually called the magneto Tale. I can't believe they actually named it. That's really great. And like you said from the beginning, it generates this electric current, and as it goes, it generates more and more current. It's just sort of building up current until it hits the ionosphere. Right. So here's this really important step, right. And Berkeley knew this. He guessed this, but we'll explain what he got wrong after we explain what's right. How about that? Yes. So when these particles charge the magnetosphere, there are particles that are already trapped in the magnetosphere already, right? Yes. And when solar winds and plasma and these highly charged particles hit the magnetosphere and electrify it, it kind of shakes loose these trap particles, right? Yeah. Well, these trap particles are ions, meaning they have either an extra electron or they're missing an electron. But either way, they're not neutral. They have a charge, positive or negative charge. And those things go careening through the magnetosphere toward Earth, down through the atmosphere. And when they hit the atmosphere, they start interacting with some of the atoms and molecules, specifically oxygen and nitrogen, in the Earth's atmosphere. And when they do, baby, they release photons. That's right. And that outer region, the ionosphere, is where most of that oxygen and nitrogen is. And you're right. They get together and have a little bit of a party. They exchange some energy with one another, get to know one another a little bit. And that absorption of energy by the oxygen and nitrogen ions, it gets those electrons it gets their electrons excited. Right. So the oxygen and nitrogen, they have electrons orbiting them, right. But they're just in this low level orbit. It's like a whatever kind of energy. Right. It's a party that hasn't started yet. It is. This is kind of hanging out. Maybe the pizza hasn't arrived yet, that kind of thing. So when the ions arrive, though, they're bringing the pizza and then some. They're bringing the Northern lights with them. Right. And they get the party started. Those electrons in the lower orbit suddenly move up to a larger orbit further out. And when that happens, energy has been gained, right? Yeah. That's called a high energy orbital. Okay. So when that happens, it's basically destined to come back to its lower energy orbit. Right. The party's got to end at some point. They get tired, they need to go home, the sun is coming up, that kind of thing. So either by changes in the vacuum state or because of the application of an external electrical field, that orbit, that electron goes back to its original lower orbit. And when it does, since it's gained energy, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere. And it goes somewhere by the production or the emission, I should say, of a photon, a packet of light. So light is emitted when that electron goes back down to its lower orbit after the party is over. That's right. And because oxygen ions radiate red and yellow light, nitrogen ions radiate red, blue and violet light, depending on where you are, this can happen at different, I guess, different altitudes. Blue and violet, generally less than 72 miles, 120 km. Green is going to be 72 to 108 miles, 100 and 2280 kilometers, and then red more than 108 miles, which is about 180 km. So that accounts for the different colors. If you look up, or if you've ever been lucky enough to see one of the auroras, either the Australia or Borealis, you're going to see my favorite is the green. But you're going to see all kinds of blue, green, violet and red lights. Well, and apparently the green just confounded scientists because they're like, wait, yeah, oxygen radiates red and yellow light. That's great. Nitrogen is red, blue and violet. Got that. But where is this green coming from? They couldn't link it to any particular atom or molecule, and then they realized that it has to do with the rarefied air in the upper upper atmosphere, that the conditions found up there are not going to be found anywhere else on Earth. And that actually it is oxygen atoms and oxygen molecules producing the green. You just wouldn't see it anywhere else but specifically up in the upper atmosphere. Yeah. Well, it's oxygen and nitrogen doesn't have something to do with it. I saw it was just oxygen emitting the green. Okay. Yes. Nitrogen produces some of the other colors. Got you. Yeah. So if you're watching these, if you're one of the people, they vary in brightness right now, and actually for a while now, we've been in a pretty low what's it called? The solar cycle. Yeah. We've been in a kind of a bummer of a solar cycle for a while now. And these auroras haven't been nearly as spectacular as they have been in years past because of that. Yeah, I think they peaked in 2012. But even that was a solar maximum. That when it peaked and it started to decline. So solar cycle happens every eleven years, and we're starting up our 23rd one now, but this past one, the 22nd one, was like the lowest in a century. It was the weakest one in a century. Yeah, the weakest maximum, even. But even still weren't there. Couldn't you see northern lights once in a while? Like fairly far south a few years back? I don't remember. You could see it at times. You can see them in the southern United States, but I don't remember seeing them ever. I don't either. And supposedly there was a date in either 1987 or 1989 where they were visible from Cuba. Wow, they were that far south. That might be as far south as has ever been recorded, actually. But normally you can see them the closer to the poles you are. So specifically in the North Pole or South Pole, the Arctic or Antarctica, you can see them basically every night. There are specific conditions to where they're more brilliant than others. Right. So if you're looking for what did you say? If people watch them, they put them into categories one through four. Yeah, I didn't say that yet, but yeah, zero up through four from barely can see it to holy cow. That's amazing. Right? So if you're looking for the holy cow, that's amazing. For you would go looking on a moonless night where there's no clouds, where it's super cold and maybe October or February or March. Yeah, I saw it. Also, winter is the best time to see in winter in the north and winter in the south. Yeah. All right, I'll buy that. Yeah. I thought that was weird that there's any confusion on that, because there's like whole tourist industries that have grown up around us. Oh, maybe that's how they're trying to get you. It's December, but you should still come. It's great. All right. You just come back in December, too. So, northern Norway, Alaska, obviously you're going to get some pretty good stuff, southern Alaska, like you said, as you go south, it's going to diminish a little bit, but I would imagine southern Alaska, you're still getting a pretty good show, right? Don't you think? Yeah, sometimes you could see them, and I think this would probably be on par with southern Alaska at the worst feeling I'm going to get a bunch of emails, geography. But you can sometimes see them in Scotland, even. Okay. I believe that maybe the northern UK, you could conceivably see them once in a while, but I got the impression that Scotland is more regular than, say, over here in the northern United States. Yeah, I think it says here Scotland and the UK, maybe one to ten times a month, and then the US and Canada near the border, maybe just a couple to three or four times a year. Right, okay. I've never seen him. Have you? No. And it says once or twice a century, you might see them in the southern United States. So if it happened in the late 80s, we missed our shot, my friend. Which is weird because I would have been in Toledo. Maybe I was sleeping. It just seems like something that my mom would have woken me up for. Yeah. It doesn't stand out to me as like, science teachers would have probably said something, but right. Remember Haley's comment when that came through? Everybody talking about yeah, I guess maybe it could have caught everybody by surprise. I don't know about that. I think this is pretty predictable. Right? I don't know that that's true. What? That is predictable? Yeah. Well, I think the conditions they know the conditions where they will be the best, but maybe, like the weather, you can't predict those conditions. Right, okay. Yeah. I saw somewhere something like they can predict them within a few hours. Oh, wow. That's not enough time to get to Norway. No, it's not from Georgia. So the scale of zero to four, like we were saying, and the people that enthusiasts that watch these, they actually can help contribute to science because there's not always someone, like you said, it's just a few hours notice. There's not always a scientist there when you need them. So these enthusiasts, they record things. They record data to turn in, like the time, the date, the colors, the latitude, and some might even make a little sketch of what they're seeing. And that really goes a long way to helping the scientists out and helping them understand what our magnetic field is doing right now. Right. And the scientists are like, we didn't ask for a sketchbook. We really appreciate the extra touch. Watercolor is nice. Maybe put like a mint in the envelope, too, and mail it off. It'd be nice. Why not? Scientists love mints. Apparently. Also, Chuck, something that was in this article is that there are aurora. Auroras? There are auroras on other planets, too. Yeah, I kind of wondered about that before I started researching, because, like, solar flares and winds don't just go toward Earth and other planets have magnetic fields. So surely this happens elsewhere. And it does. They've seen it on Jupiter. Saturn. Yeah. Jupiter and Saturn. All right. But surely the point is, if you have a magnetic field around a planet and an atmosphere around a planet that has ionic gases, and anytime there's a solar flare that can reach it and create an electrical current in that magnetosphere, then you have all the conditions right. For an aurora. I guess the colors will be different, though, on Jupiter and Saturn, right? Because of different yes. That'd be awesome to see. Hydrogen and helium in their case. So I'm not sure. Oh, man. That would be that's chartreuse and brown. A brown aurora. Maybe not the best. So you want to take another break and then finish up? Yes, I. Have to wet down again. Okay. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios, Doctor Strange and the multiverse of badness new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, The Series, and zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. 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. So, Chuck, we didn't say a lot of the auroras that you see, they form basically different shapes. Like, it can come in different well, different shapes around the poles. You've got the ovals, the rings. But there's other shapes they can take, too. And some of the more famous ones look like ribbons or curtains that kind of go basically from one horizon all the way to the other overhead. And they go in kind of this wavy river pattern, but then the light stands upward into the atmosphere. But that's got to be something to see. Yeah. I mean, after researching this, I really have a hankering to go see this in person one day, so I did, too, and I still do. But I came across an article in The Independent, and it was written by one of the Independent travel writers, and they said that going to see the Northern Lights was the most disappointing travel experience they have ever had in their entire life. She said that part of it had to do with the tour they went on. She said it sucked. It was a terrible tour. Ronnie, worst tour guide ever in the Yelp review. Well, supposedly they called them a Northern Lights chase, but the chase consisted of sitting in their host living room, and then every once in a while, someone would go to the window to see if the Northern Lights were out or not. And then they'd sit back down. That was the case. She said that there are that's a dumb thing to call it, right? It's not like it's just over there. We just need to get a fast enough truck, and apparently there are those kind of operations. And that's what she thought she was getting. So she was had on the one hand. But she said the actual Northern Lights that she saw were kind of grayish and looked a lot like a contrail. Right. Or maybe even cigarette smoke in the sky, kind of fog at night. And then she realized Ronnie was just smoking. It wasn't until she saw the picture that the host took of them, which requires a long exposure, like ten to 14 seconds. That's when the colors and all the amazingness comes out. So everything you've seen in the pictures is from the long exposure. And apparently in person, it's very rare that you see something that looks like the pictures. That looks very much different in real life, apparently. Isn't that disappointing? That's a huge bummer, but you just saved me, like, ten grand, right? No. So that is really disappointing. That's a long exposure effect. Yes. As far as the Independent writer says, she said once she saw the picture, she was like, oh, yeah, it's a photo that we're seeing. She said, in real life, they don't look like that. So the article, you can read it yourself. Why? Seeing the Northern Lights was the most disappointing travel experience of my life. It was in the Independent well, I'm going to change my wish then. I don't want to pay to go on some dumb chase. I just want to happen upon them on a regular trip somewhere. There you go. That I'm already happy with. Yeah, like Icelanders. Actually, she makes the same exact point. She said the rest of the trip was awesome. I think she was in Norway. And she said that just everything else about it was one of the best trips she's ever been on. It was the Northern Lights themselves that specifically stunk. And if you make that part of your tour, but not the whole reason you're going, you probably wouldn't be disappointed to visit the far north of Norway. Well, because I'm sure that's great on its own. You know? That's what she was saying. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I'm scrolling through the pictures now. It's amazing. I thought that's what it looks like, right? That's what everybody thinks, apparently, and sometimes I guess it does. But you are extraordinarily lucky if you see the Northern Lights and it looks like that in person, from what this lady is saying. Well, plus, if you go on one of those there's nothing worse than feeling duped into spending a lot of money on a tour. Yeah, it's a dude's house. Yeah. I'd like to see video that would be more telling. Yup. Can't just expose it like that with video, can you not? Well, I mean, you can open up the exposure to get the video to look right, but it won't be just like it's not like opening the exposure on moving traffic at night with a photograph and you'll see the dragging of the tail lights and stuff like that. Right. Like it won't create some weird effect. I wonder if you use a high speed filter. It would do it. Or do you want low speed? High speed filter? Obviously, I'm a professional photographer. Should we talk a little bit about the sound? Yeah, definitely. It makes a farting noise, which is really interesting. Yeah, it kind of smells too. That would make it all more fun, at least. No, but there have long been people that swore that it makes a sound. And not everyone, because apparently someone actually found this out. It's a sound that only some people can hear sometimes. Yeah. And the conditions have to be super ripe for it. And there's very specific ones. And there's this one poor guy, his name was Uto K Lane. He's Finnish, I believe. He's an acoustician. Is that right? Yeah, from Finland who was on a camping trip. And I think 2000 and the northern lights were just going off and going crazy. And he said he could hear like popping and crackling sounds. And everyone said, well, that's because you were drunk. And he's like, no, I know for a fact I heard this. So he spent like the next 15 years basically trying to capture the sounds of the aurora borealis. And he finally was successful, apparently in 2011. Yeah. And his whole deal was well, when he was with his friends, first of all, he said they had to be like completely still. It's not such a noise that they're having a conversation and they were like, oh, what's that like? They had to be dead silent. They had to not move in order to hear it. And then even within his group, some people couldn't hear it at all because it was just very low intensity. Right. But he's, like you said, been chasing that buzz ever since. And finally, I think he figured out the conditions first. Right. Or did he do that? Did he back it in afterward? He put two and two together. So we went out and he captured it one night. Right. The sounds. And then he went and looked up, I guess, the weather service report for that local area, and he figured out that what he had been sitting under is called a thermal inversion layer, where kind of warm, at least compared to the air beneath it on the ground, warm air is kind of trapping the cold air below it. And as long as the conditions are super still and it's very cold, they're going to stay separate. Right? Yeah. It's got to be clear, calm and cold. Right. So it won't just be just in a regular aurora. Like, you have to have a sub set of conditions to get this crackle noise exactly right. So in the warm air layer, a lot of electrons become charged and the cold air below it and opposite charge builds. Right. So you have this electrical charge just waiting to go off and turn into a current, and apparently it's the aurora above it that causes the charge to actually turn into a current. Yeah. He was pretty surprised at first because he didn't just point a microphone. He had this array so he could triangulate exactly where the sound was coming from and it was just 230ft above him with the sound. Right. And he was I don't know what the finished expression for holy crap. Is it's Oyvi? I don't think so. But that's what he said. And he was like, this is weird, this is so low. And that's when he came up with this theory. And does it check out fully? Everybody said, sure, why not? That's probably right. Yeah. The very least came up with definitive proof that this was the sound coming from it, but yeah, the fact that it was just overhead in the thermal inversion layer explained how you could conceivably hear the northern lights. Amazing. Yeah, pretty amazing. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I'm just disappointed now. Yeah, for real. I'm disappointed in the northern lights and our episode on the Northern Lights. No. Yes. Man, the sun. Any time the sun comes into play, it's a curse, a pox on us. If you want to know more about the northern lights, go see them yourself. And if you have seen them in person and know us to be incorrect, let us know because we would like our dreams back. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. Or Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Stuff You Should Know. Or Charles to be Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofports.com. And as always, I started this one early, which goes to show again, worst episode ever. It's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this. Well, it's just a nice email. Hey, guys. Been a fan since 2010, when I was a freshman in college. I don't think I've ever written in now. This entire time, I've been an evangelist, but to no avail. That all changed a few months ago. I convinced the love of my life, Meredith, to give you guys a shot. And now she is hooked, too. She's an outstanding woman and mother and has courageously struck out alone for a job offer she couldn't refuse. So now we live 400 miles apart. Having your podcast to talk about keeps conversation alive on days when we are feeling a bit down. No, it's nice. In addition, I will also listen to you guys on the long car rides to visit her as a way to distract myself from my own excitement about getting to see her again. And it helps the time pass faster. I know it's not the first time someone has written to tell you the same thing, and I promise I would never be that listener. But I get it now. And when you find a true love, you just cannot help yourself. Sometimes this does get the coveted shout out. Tell Meredith to keep up the good work. And happy Mother's Day. Keep up the good work, guys. You were the first podcast I ever listened to. You and still my favorite. Sleep well tonight knowing that you are fostering love and real human connections out here in podcast land. That is a great email. That was nice. That is from Sam Martin in Omaha. He's a medical student and a bar trivia master. Thanks to us, he said nice. Well, thanks a lot, Sam. Yes, Sam and Meredith. Thanks a lot, Meredith, for giving us a shot. We're glad it paid off. It reminds me of me and you, me doing long distance for a while. It can really suck. I remember that. You guys got through that like a champ, though. We did. Like two champs. Yeah, we patted each other on the back. If you want to get in touch with us, you already know how because I said it prematurely. And in the meantime, you can hang out with us. It's stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseteporks.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 want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo elevate as petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | |
How did language evolve? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-did-language-evolve | "
Sure animals talk in their own way, with chirps and grunts and the like, but only humans can form words. It is this, some evolutionary psychologists contend, that is what truly separates us from the rest of the species on the planet. But why us?" | "
Sure animals talk in their own way, with chirps and grunts and the like, but only humans can form words. It is this, some evolutionary psychologists contend, that is what truly separates us from the rest of the species on the planet. But why us?" | Tue, 01 May 2012 16:31:02 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=16, tm_min=31, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=122, tm_isdst=0) | 26882374 | 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. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always. As is Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know. Is your seat okay, Frank? The chair is letting me down again. Yeah, he'll do that. Sure. He recently fell in with a bag crowd. Yeah, I do, too, from the way he's making me sit. Yeah. So I'll just lean forward. He's become unreliable. Who is it that messes with him? I don't know. Somebody who has no idea how to sit in a chair properly. That's what you need to get next. Not just your own mic cover, but your own chair. Yeah, I think it's a strickland guy from Tech stuff. It'd be very cool if you had it lower down from the ceiling, like it was stored up there, and it hang like the sort of damocles over everybody else's head while they were recording. I love that. We'll look into that. All right. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever heard of a little place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Yeah, sure. Good school. Okay. Eggheads. So MIT is, like the hotbed, the center of the linguistics field, among many other fields. I didn't know that. Yeah. Noam, Chomsky is there. That makes sense, then. And there's another guy whose name escapes me right now, but he recently made some headlines because he, I guess, got a grant and had his house wired with fisheye cameras. Awesome. In every room with really high tech audio equipment, too. And from the moment his newborn son came home to the age of five, this guy recorded 90,000 hours. Wow. The whole five years of this kid's life in an effort to see how language acquisition develops in children. That's pretty cool. In this child, specifically. It is very cool. There's a really clumsily titled Fast Company article called MIT Scientists captures 90,000 hours of video of his son's first words, comma, graphs it's. The editor was like, I'm going home. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, there's some video and some audio clips in there where you can hear, like, this condensed, like, over five years, over, like, a six month period or something like that. Like the kids going from Gaga to Water. You can hear it, like, evolve. Interesting. Did they learn anything from that? I don't know if they have quite yet. And plus, this is one child. Yeah, sure. But it's at the very least, very interesting. But the idea that you can learn something about the evolution of language and human beings from language acquisition and children is hotly contested idea. It is. You wrote what I think is a very fine article. Thanks. You did a good job with this. How did language evolve? It was a shorty you're talking about, though, not how we acquire language skills as kids, but as a species. How did humans acquire language. Because we're the only ones that can say things like this. But you go to great links to point out that we're not the only ones that communicate. True. I wouldn't say great links. Those sort of a clumsy and it was like two or three sentences. Sure. Animals communicate well. No, it is very true. I think it was a good thing to start off with, because the humans can often be very homocentric. True. Yeah. So you say birch chirp porpoises go. Right. They are communicating. We're the only ones who can verbalize that's. Right? Yes. We talk word, and we don't know Exactly How this evolved for sure, because there's a problem when it comes to things like evolution, there's not a ton of evidence. A lot of times I know. Like, hard evidence. I read this one guy's paper. There's a lot of papers on this. Yeah. First of all, I want you to just be very quiet. You hear that off in the distance, the explosion. We're standing in the midst of a minefield. Linguistics is a minefield. And they love linguistics. People really love language. And talking about it and putting down people who disagree with them. Yeah. So we should tread lightly here. We should. But one guy's paper that I read today, some university paper, he said that ideally, if we're going to study something like these neurological changes that happen in the brain, we would have a large number of petrified, whole brains representing lots of species over lots of time. Right. But we don't have that. No, unfortunately. They're big gaps. Yeah. Even not taking into account gaps, we don't have fossilized brains. The closest thing we have Is fossilized skull, which we can analyze and be like, well, there is kind of room for a big enough brain, maybe for language. Yeah. What's that called? Cranial indocasting. Nice. I think so. That's a good term for it. And people won't even know If I'm wrong. What they do have a little bit of evidence on is that the shape of our vocal track wasn't until about 100,000 years ago, wasn't even able to make the vocalizations of the modern speech sounds. So it wasn't even possible, although that doesn't necessarily mean There wasn't language, because it just could have been a much more primitive version of what evolved of grunts. Yeah, exactly. And I did see someone, even though I saw this as poo poo by most people, some people think that spoken language evolved from sign language. And that our modern gestures Are a holdover from that, which I thought was interesting. But most people go, no, that's not true. I ran into another one. And what you're talking about for everybody listening. Is called a proto language. And evidence of a proto language Supports one theory, which we'll talk about in a minute. But one idea for a proto language is that we started talking using anamona PIA really? Which would make snap, crackle, and pop like, the oldest word on Earth. Well, I guess we should probably get into it now. There are basically two competing theories for how we acquire language as a species, right? Yeah. And I like both of them. I noticed at the end, you're like, why can't we all just get along as far as linguistics goes? Because I'm not a linguist, and so I'm not going to sit here and poopoo and argue because I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough about it. Okay. But the first, Josh, is that we adapted to survive, so we learn how to speak. Right. And this is the simplest way to say it. The example I gave in here is and then we'll talk about who are the leaders in this whole category that believe this, but tuktuk's hunting on the range, on the planes, on the savannah, and tooktook thunder scares away the deer, so Tuktuk goes hungry. Right. So then later on, Tuktuk has already maybe learned to grunt about, like, the deer being nearby to his buddy, who is his friend. Did we ever name a friend? Morty. Morty. Yeah. So he's already learned how to tell Morty that deer are nearby, so shut up. Right. Because Morty talks a few months. Definitely. So now, all of a sudden, he learns that thunder and bad weather might scare deer away, so he goes hungry. So he learned, now I've got to learn what bad weather looks like coming in and how to tell Morty, hey, pick up the pace, dude, because bad weather is coming, and we don't want to go hungry again. So that was just one of the stepping stones in evolving speech. Right. And it's kind of like the idea behind it is that the speech evolved out of the combinations of these things, like you're saying. Yeah. So you put them together, and all of a sudden that makes a lot of sense. I'm able to describe some larger portion of the world around us. Yeah. In a sense got more complex. The language had to, like, as they learn more things right. Like, we settled down, and agriculture would have had, like, a huge impact on something like that. Yeah. And keeping children alive, apparently, like, once we settled in villages. A lot of people think that language really took a leap forward because we had to keep the species alive by protecting the kids, I guess also the idea that you could warn somebody about something right? Sure. That isn't necessarily just something you could point at. Right. And be like, let's get out of here, through gesture, something maybe further away, something that you couldn't see. Right. Then that would lead directly to a trait that led to survival, which is the whole basis of natural selection. Exactly. Which means that people who could do that would be able to go reproduce, and that trait would survive and be passed along. And I imagine reproduction and all needed its own language as well. Right. Hey, mama. Although in quest for fire, it pretty much just happened. I haven't seen that in so long. I think that was the first movie I ever saw in Showtime. Yeah. There wasn't a lot of words going on. It was like, the ladies are down by the river bending over, filling up water buckets or water pods. Okay. And man comes along and just takes care of business. Got you. Yeah. Is that an ancient phrase, takes care of business? TCB. Yeah. So I remember Quest for Fire and another movie were out on Showtime at about the same time. This movie is called Caveman and it starred Ringo Star. Is that his picture? That is in this article, yeah. Don't you like my caption? Yeah. I couldn't tell just by looking at it, but yeah, the caption, I think, is what gave it away. These were the old days where I would, like, the highlight of my week was writing really clever picture captions to articles. I would go home and say, look at this one, Emily. It's pretty good. Someone might get this joke. So there's a production still from Caveman of Ringo Star standing there, and the caption is this caveman gets by with a little help from his friend beautiful guest producer Matt. Yeah. So that's adaptation theory that basically we figured out that we could survive better and more robustly by talking to one another. And language evolved in fits and starts through there. Right? Yeah. Who's. Gradually, I should say. Gradually. Yes. And that's Steven Pinker, who's a great dude. Yeah. Pinker and Bloom in their paper natural Language and Natural Selection. I mean, there are a lot of people who agree with them and have written the book on this since then. Yeah. Or several books. Yeah. It's very dense subject. Makes my mind melt a little bit. And Pinker and Blue basically say, this is the case. It makes sense. This is just standard Darwinian natural selection. What's the problem? I don't have a problem with it. Why doesn't everybody just get on board? Well, because there's another competing theory, and there are all sorts of sub theories, but these are the two big daddies, and this is Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. And they think that it was a spandrel. Right. Or an acceptation. So you know what a spandrel is? Well, in biology or for real in architecture. Yeah. Please explain. Okay. Well, Steven J. Gould coined the term spandrel, as you point out in the article. And it's just perfect, actually, in this application, because the spandrel, architecturally speaking, is this triangular area that inevitably is created when you put two arch domes next to one another at right angles. And it looks like if you're looking at it looks like purposeful design, like ornamentation sure. But it's actually a byproduct you can't get around. And that's what a spandrel is as far as gold is concerned. It's the product of another evolutionary process. Right? Yeah. And language supposedly was, as far as gold and chomsky are concerned, just kind of came about as a result of other stuff, specifically tool making. Yeah. Darwin calls it pre adaptation and later became acceptation. Which one do you like more, pre adaptation or acceptation? Acceptation is a little hard to say, so I'm going to go preappitation. It sounds so, like, important to us. But a quick example of that, and this is the one most often cited, is that there's a theory out there that bird feathers were originally meant to keep birds warm and flying came about after that as spandrel. Makes sense. Sure. What's the problem? Exactly. So you said that our brains adapted to where they got larger, to where we could make tools and things. Right. And language came about because of the result of that. And this isn't just kind of I mean, it's not like they're like, well, we can run, so we can talk. There are specific areas of the brain that are associated with both tool making and tool use and language. Right. And there's actually two. There's Broca's area and there's Vironki's area. Yeah. And brokers area is named after a French neurosurgeon named Paul Broka. And in 1861, he described a patient named Tan. Tan wasn't the guy's real name. No one knew his real name. Was He Tan? The only syllable he could pronounce that he could form was Tan. Okay. They're like, well, that's your name, pal. And after he died, Broker opened up his skull and looked at his brain and found a huge lesion on the area now named Brokers Area. Okay. And that's come to be associated with speech production. The weird thing about Tan is he could understand spoken language. If you're like tan, you look kind of tan. I think maybe you should stay out of the sun. He could not stay out of the sun. There wasn't anything wrong with him other than he could not produce speech. Glad that he was really kicked off with his name then. If all he can say is Tan, they're like, we'll just call you Tan, and said he was probably like, no, right, yeah, it's Ignatius. Anything but Tan. Yeah. I imagine the guy probably was, like, half mad by the time he died, out of frustration. Well, stroke patients, my grandfather had a stroke and tried to speak in his head. He was saying words, it would come out as gobbledygook, and he would get really frustrated. It was very sad. So now that was your grandfather. Yeah. So what it sounds like your grandfather had a problem with was his were Nicki's Area. Yeah. And that was named after a German neurosurgeon who found that his patients, who could speak, but they weren't making any sense, had lesions on the area now known as Nikki's area. So if you put the two together, brokers Area, which is involved in speech production, and we're in nikki's area, which is involved with speech comprehension. Language comprehension. You have normally talking people like us. Yes. And we ferkey's area. I think it was ricky we're nicki's area and broke his area. And the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes of the brain physically connected for the first time in homo habilis or habilis. So, wait, what was it? What's that call where you examine goals to see if there's probably some brain there? I believe that is called cranial endocasting. Nice. I think so. They think that this would make a lot of sense if homo habilis was the first one to talk, because they also often associate homo habilis as the first one to use tools. Right. This is in question, I found oh, really? Recently, it's come under question that possibly the oldest tools, the old one tools, which are like scrapers, hammers, brain crushers. Right. Basically just stone tools that are used to skin meat off a bone. They're like 2.3 million years old. They think that they might be slightly older than homo habilis. Wow. Then the other problem with linking language and humans and homo habilis is we're not 100% sure we're on habilis same tree. Oh, really? Yeah. But nonetheless, homo habilis does have the cute nickname a handyman. I've never heard that either. Because he's supposedly the first tool users. That makes sense. Yeah. It's better than bob the builder. Yeah. But there's still that link right there between tool use and language. Right. Which they think is makes him and her much more advanced than the australia pithecus who came before homobilis. Right. So the whole reason why this is important is because they're trying to nail down where language first came about. Right. And if you subscribe to gould and chomsky, all of a sudden it was there and people were talking to each other. Yeah. It was like one mutation happened, and then all of a sudden, people were able to speak. Yeah. And they were like, oh, man, I've been wanting to get some stuff off my chest for generations. Right. If you listen to pinker and bloom or you know what? I feel bad for bloom. If you listen to bloom and pinker. Sure, we know about that, don't we? Yeah. If you listen to bloom and pinker, then it took a very long time for language to evolve gradually by putting combinations together. The thing is, gould, before he died, said, you know what? There is not nearly enough time for language to evolve. Right. And what's more, if there was some sort of gradual evolution of language, then chimps should show some sort of propensity toward language. Well, they do, though. They do. But apparently not in any way that any linguist who's saying would call actual language the beginnings of language. Right. It's communication, but not actual language. Right. Like you mentioned at the beginning of the article. Sure, but bloom and pinker point out, so chimps and humans diverged about 6 million years ago. Right. That's 300,000 generations for language to evolve. That's plenty of time. They say. Sure. And Gould from beyond the grave says, no, it's not. He did. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, what Pinker actually said about that in his defense was, look at the HIRAX, H-Y-R-A-X because people say, well, we share 98% of the DNA. The HIRAX shares 98% of the DNA with the African elephant. And if you look at a hierarchy, it looks like a large rat. Oh, yeah. Looks nothing like an elephant. So he's like, Just because you share all that DNA doesn't mean that you're going to evolve the exact same way. Yeah. So that makes sense. Yeah. And some people pose, and I sort of agree that they're not mutually exclusive. Yes. You don't have to have one without the other. It may have been acceptation, and then from that point, it may have very much been a matter of natural selection, because the better you weren't communicating, the better you were at surviving. Right. I like that idea. I do, too. I don't think that, though, if you put Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky in the same room, that they would be like, you know, this works together. Sure. I think they're tracing it back to the origin point, the moment where it began. Either it began to evolve or it just appeared as a result of an incredibly sophisticated machine that just started performing another function as a result of its sophistication. And it's all kind of conjecture anyway, but there's still support. There's support for different ones, like brain plasticity neuroplasticity. The fact that our brains can be restructured and reorganized supports the idea that language evolved gradually. Right. And it just started to build and build and build. And possibly that's how our brains became larger, the chicken and the egg thing. But people also say, like, if large brain equals things like speech, then why don't, like, whales? And things like that with much larger brains have things like speech? That's another great argument, too. And the mirror neurons kind of lends support to the idea that it's just a spandrel of brain function, because tool making and speech both use the same areas. Right. Yeah. And then both toolmaking lights up when you watch somebody use tools and when you're using tools yourself in the broker's area. Interesting. Yeah. Our old friends and mirror neurons. Yeah. They're back. You got anything else? I bet you do. There's a lot of scribbling over there. Oh, yeah. So one of Chomsky's big points is that grammar language is innate, which makes it biological, not cultural. Okay. Is universal grammar, which is, like he always says, that if a Martian anthropologist came down and studied all human languages, he would reasonably conclude that all of that information is based on an internal structure rather than culture, basically. And the key to universal grammar, supposedly is recursion, which is like me saying, I'm going to go to the store, the one down the street, the one that has the really good hot dogs. I'll be back in a little bit. It's adding phrases within phrases. Right. There's no other communication in any animal species that would include this, which makes that human. And supposedly all human languages contain recursion, except there's a challenger now called Paraha. It's Amazonian. There's like 500 people who speak it. Really? 501, including the one MIT trained linguist who studied it for 30 years and is the only one who knows it who's now saying this thing. They don't have recursion. So universal grammar is wrong, therefore Chomsky's whole thing is wrong. It's a pretty cool article on Chronicle of Higher Education. It's worth reading. Called Angry Words. Are they trying to save that language? That's a big deal right now. It's disappearing languages. I think these people are as far as I got from the article, they seem like they are fine. There's not that many of them, but they're not being encroached upon any further. I think they're protected. Interesting. They're just kind of living out their existence and doing their thing. Actually, Nomchomsky is in the bushes behind them with the bloat. That's all I got. That's good stuff. This could have been like 10 hours long. Yeah, easy for linguists out there. They're like, oh, what a broad overview. That's exactly what this is. If you want to learn more and you want to see this picture of Ringo Starr dressed as a caveman, you should read the article written by one Charles W. Bryant called How Did Language Evolve? Type that into the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And it will bring it up. And I said, search bar. So it's time for listening. Josh, I'm going to call this we saved another life, apparently again. Hey, guys. And Jerry, we'll say, hey, Matt. Since Matt's here today. Yeah. Hey, Matt. I thought I would tell you a little about how your podcast has quite literally saved and changed my life. I'm 17 and live in a small town of Galesburg, Illinois, but consider myself a citizen of the world from when I was six months young. Ten years after Ghostbusters. Nice. Exactly. My family and I have traveled back and forth from Illinois to Barcelona, Spain every two years. Cool. This last time back in the US. I fell in love with your podcast and have listened almost religiously every morning for almost three years. Then one day my faith was solidified while listening and walking my dog cheaply across the street. I should probably see away. This guy is really hitting all the points here. Walking with headphones is a dangerous thing. If one of you died because of a headphone walking incident, I would never forgive myself. Back to the story. A car was unbeknownst to me, hurtling down the street at me. I started crossing when all of a sudden buzz. How flies. Work had just begun. Remember the loud buzz? It really flipped me out, and I jumped backwards just as the car flew by me. Oh, no, it was from the fly. Remember? Help me. Oh, that's right. Yeah. And he said that scared him enough to jump back and didn't even see the car. Wow. So we saved this dude. And cheapie, which is pretty exciting. That was a while ago, but recently, actually two days ago. You have changed the course of the rest of my life. After listening to the Sauna and Viking podcasts, I have fallen in love with Scandinavia. So much so that I'm going to be a foreign exchange student in Finland for the entirety of next year. That's awesome. So we inspired Noah to go to Finland because of the Sauna and Viking cast. Enjoy the looting. So much love and many thanks. And that's from Noah. F f nice. Noah Fenster Finkelstein. That's his name now. It is things that I know. We're glad you're alive. We hope you have a very good time in Finland. And we're glad chiefs doing well too. I bet no one never comes back, like, in a sinister way. No. I bet he loves it so much that he got you. I'm here. Nice. Until winter hits, we always love hearing how we've saved your life or enriched your life or something like that. We want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Facebook.com Stepheno. And you can email us directly, just between us and like, five other people who are included on the email at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House department staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
42d26590-53a3-11e8-bdec-ab2a88e87e39 | Are broken arrows a problem? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-broken-arrows-a-problem | Are broken arrows are a problem? After all, they are incidents and accidents involving nuclear warheads. Like, sometimes they go missing. But it hasn't happened much since the 50s and 60s. OR HAS IT? Learn all about them today. | Are broken arrows are a problem? After all, they are incidents and accidents involving nuclear warheads. Like, sometimes they go missing. But it hasn't happened much since the 50s and 60s. OR HAS IT? Learn all about them today. | Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=365, tm_isdst=0) | 47311387 | audio/mpeg | "San Francisco. We're coming to see you soon. Yeah, we're going to be there on Saturday, January 18, Chuck. And since it's San Francisco, we're going to be wearing nothing but appropriately placed clumps of rice errone. That is the San Francisco trip treat. Yes, and we're the San Francisco Treat, too, whenever we're in town. So everybody should come see us. That's right. It's part of sketchfest. As always, we love performing there. You can go to Sysclive.com for details or sfschfest.com. And if you're around Sunday night, you can come see me do Movie Crush live in a very small, fun venue where you can shake my hand. Very nice. So come see us, everybody. You won't regret it. We're pretty sure that's correct. 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 Bright, and there's guest producer Lowell over there. And that makes this stuff you should know. Featuring Chuck The, John Travolta and me as Christian Slater. Why do I always got to beat Travolta? Lowell is Frank Whaley. Was he in that? Yep. He had the great line. Are you ready for it? Sure. I don't know what's scarier. Losing a nuclear bomb. He didn't say this with this much reservation. He really delivered the line. He also didn't comment on his own line while he was giving it. Okay. Or that it happened so often. There's a name for it. Yeah, that's a good line. It's a great line. It's a long, clumsy line, but he delivered it really well. You know, I don't know that I ever saw Broken Arrow. Oh, I didn't either. I was just alive in the was cognizant of it. Yeah. I thought at first you were talking about Saturday Night Fever with Christian Slater. Sure. No, I wasn't. Do you remember we talked about Saturday Night Fever? It must have been in the disco episode where it turns out that the article it was based on was just totally fabricated. Remember? That's right. That's such a great soundtrack, Ma'am. Maybe one of the all time best. It's great. Yeah. But we're here to talk about Broken Arrows. And I got this idea this was one of my commissions, was because I had someone on Movie Crush. Then we did, Doctor Strangelove. Nice. The great, great movie from Stanley Kubrick, which factors into this stuff some. And he brought in a stack of papers and just said, Here for your desk. And it was a list of all the Broken Arrow incidents. Wow. And there were a lot more than 30 of them, so I don't know if what all was included. We'll get into some of the terminology of what kind of falls under the banner of a broken arrow. Well, we should just go and tell everyone what a broken arrow is. Yeah, we should. As defined by the Department of Defense and a little bit from the air. Force is an accident involving a nuclear weapon or warhead or nuclear component or an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that could result in accidental or unauthorized launching. Firing. What else? Detonation. Yeah. Jettison theming. Them. Damage to them, accidentally dropping them. And, I mean, I've got to say, I don't know what's worse accidentally dropping a nuclear bomb or that it happens so frequently there's a name for it. Thank you, Mr. Whaley. Sure. You can go to your trailer now. That's a broken arrow. And if you've seen that movie Broken Arrow, it's about Christian Slater foiling John Travolta after he steals a nuclear bomb. That's actually technically not a broken arrow, from what we know. That's called an empty quiver, which works with the broken arrow. But I thought it had to do with a stolen nuclear bomb, which led me to think, like, hey, man, we've basically already done this one. We did. How easy is it to steal a nuclear bomb? Remember that? Right. Okay. This is really very much different. This is basically when a US military personnel screws up big time as far as a nuclear bomb is concerned, or is there some terrible accident with a nuclear bomb. But it's not something that's going to lead to war. Right. It's not like an accidental launch of a nuclear weapon against the Soviet Union back in the Cold War. It's dropping a nuclear bomb on your toe. That's a broken arrow, basically, yeah. And I always thought broken Arrow I was wrong. I thought it kind of only meant that you lose a nuclear warhead somehow. Well, that's what Travolta's lies. I know. He's the father of lies. That's what he teaches us. Yeah. We've been misled by travolta. Yeah. Have you seen him? He's gone bald now. Have you seen him? Good for him, man. Has he? Yeah, he finally just ripped off the old rug, said, this is me, and he's got a great bean. He looks fantastic. Oh, I'm sure. I'm happy for him. That's good, because he's been hiding that for decades. So we should talk about a few other points of terminology that might pop up. There's something called a pinnacle level incident, and that basically means that any kind of incident where it's so big that it really goes up all the way up the military chain to the very top yeah. It's a big deal. In other words, it's a big deal, as Travolta would say. And there's a few more incident codes that I think are pretty interesting. There's one called a nuke flash, and that means an accident or incident that could be the precursor to the trigger of nuclear war. That's a big one. Yeah, that's the one where there's, like, somebody accidentally sets off an intercontinental ballistic missile toward Russia. That is, like, one that can lead to nuclear war. And did you read that as nuke flash? I read it as nuck flush. That's funny. Thanks. What about front burner? Yeah, front burner is triggered by any hostile it is Pinnacle level, and it's triggered by any hostile attack against US. Forces. And it's not necessarily a nuclear incident. No. But it can lead to a nuclear war. So it's kind of considered part of that whole family of nuclear jargon. Yeah, and I also don't think I said it's a hostile attack by someone that we're not already at war with. That is a big caveat because I guess if you're already at war, front burners everywhere. Front burner. There's another front burner. Yes. That's a good point to make, dude. There's also empty Quiver, which that's the name that should have been given to the Travolta Plater movie. Correct. That's where the nuclear weapon is stolen. And I got to say, I don't know what's scarier that a nuclear weapon can be stolen or that it happens often enough that there's a name for it. Do we go over bent spear yet? No. Not to be confused with burning spear. No, a bent spear is an incident nuclear incident. That's a big deal, but it's not Pinnacle level. And this is like if someone violated a regulation or a procedure or something when you're storing or transporting a nuclear weapon. Like, it's like a Three Stooges level type of nuclear accident. Okay. Nothing really bad results from it. It's just somebody screwed up. And Ed gave this example. I had not heard of this one, but apparently in 2007, there was a burning spear. I'm sorry. That was genuine. There was a bent spear incident where six armed nuclear warheads were loaded on a B 52 and they walked away, slapping the dust off of their hands and turned in for a good night's rest and did not leave a guard. These six armed nuclear warheads were left aboard a B 52 that was unguarded overnight, and the next morning they flew them across the country as scheduled. Okay, so nothing happened. No. It's like one of those ones where you find that you've bitten down to your cuticles because you're just so mortified at the idea of how bad things could have gone, but we just narrowly averted crisis. All right. Are there any of these other terms that matter to you? No. Okay. Not at all. All right, well, we'll talk about we'll go over some broken arrows later and some actual incidences, but we should talk a little bit just about nuclear weapons. They are very much classified as to where they are. And the upper brass basically has an exception to that where if there's an incident and it presents a hazard to the public. Like. Boy. We need to get people out of there. And we actually need to cop to this thing. Then that is an exception where you can reveal that they're like. Surprise you're living near some nuclear warheads. He didn't realize it, but over there in that silo, it is not wheat. Yes, I get the impression also where 750 soldiers suddenly converge on a farm field where a plane went down. It's usually kind of already old news to the locals that there's a nuclear bomb somewhere in play, especially if this happens to take place during the 50s or the 60s, which were the worst decades in American history for near miss nuclear accidents. Yeah. And it's interesting, I kind of just thought, like, oh, it's because technology and that's sort of true in that in the if you wanted to drop a nuclear bomb, that's why they say drop a nuclear bomb, because you are literally doing that. It was not attached to some missile on some base. It was in the belly of a plane, and you flew over a site and opened doors and dropped a bomb. Yeah, right. That's how you delivered a nuclear bomb. And so because planes were so intimately connected with delivering a nuclear bomb, early on in the Cold War, there was a guy who took over Strategic Air Command, and I think and he was an old bomber pilot, and he said, look, man, here's our new strategy. We're going to keep bombers loaded with nuclear bombs in the air at all times. There will always be multiple B 52s flying around with loaded nuclear weapons all the time, ready within striking distance of Russia. And so this thing was called Operation Chrome Dome, where pairs of B 52s would take off for 24 hours missions. They would refuel in the air. There would be multiple pilots aboard so that they could trade off shifts because they would stay off for 24 hours. And then before they came back to base to land at the end of 24 hours, another pair would have taken off. And from what I saw, at the minimum of Operation Chrome Dome, there were always at least four B 50, twos in the air flying these routes, like near Russia, usually there was twelve in the air. And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the height of Operation Chrome Dome, there were 75 B 52s in the air with nuclear weapons ready to strike at any given time. And because there were so many planes taking off and landing constantly with nuclear bombs, the chances of an accident with one of these nuclear bombs escalated tremendously. And that was the decades that Operation Chrome Dome lasted, when these nuclear weapon problems, what we call broken arrows, really kind of stepped up. Yeah. And I mean, if you've seen Doctor Strangelove, there's kind of three parts to the story, and one part is up in the air in one of these bomber planes. And that's what Slimpickens and James Earl Jones are doing up there. They are just manning a flight that is flying close to the Soviet border and hoping that they just land and take off again the next day and fly, and it's boring, and they land again. And like I said, the idea is you do this over and over and over, and nothing ever happens. But of course, in strange lot, things go wrong. But yeah, that's what they were doing up there. Yeah. So that's Operation Chrome Domen. Eventually we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, the ones that you talked about, like, in the ground in a base, they're capable of striking Moscow from Kansas. When we developed those in the 60s, we said, okay, we don't need this Chrome Dome strategy any longer. But also because there were so many accidents, and because the accidents were so colossally bad and yet still just near misses from a nuclear explosion, the idea of this chrome dumb strategy is like, we can't do this anymore. This is just too risky, basically. Should we take a break? I believe so, Charles. All right. We're going to take a break, and we'll talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how a nuclear bomb works right after this. All right, Chuck, I think we should do a nuclear bomb episode someday. Yeah. Where do we go over this? Was it during the meltdowns episode? Yeah. It must have been on, like, a fission reaction. Yeah. Because it does seem pretty familiar, doesn't it? Yeah. Because what a nuclear bomb is detonating and instigating or causing it's always starting stuff. A fission reaction. Well, that was the early ones. Right? Yeah. So how this works is a nuclear reaction is plutonium and uranium being compressed and smashing into other plutonium and uranium to get a nuclear fission reaction going. Right. And the early, I guess, H bombs is what they call them initially. Right. Hydrogen bombs. Well, atomic bombs, I think, initially, yeah. Atomic bombs. So we're very rudimentary. Wow. Yeah. Not sure. I tried to dress them up by adding an extra syllable, but they were still rudimentary. They were rudimentary. And in fact, the very first bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima actually fired a gun type mechanism to set off this reaction. Right. It was like yeah. They would shoot uranium at uranium, and that would set off the fission reaction, and you can produce a pretty substantial explosion, like they did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right. But compared to the other way that they later quickly figured out, I believe in the 50s, they moved over. I think those were the hydrogen bombs. Thermonuclear bombs where they used fusion, where it was an implosion that pressed the material, the plutonium or the uranium together to create this nuclear reaction. That's when you got something in the yield of megatons, millions and millions of tons worth of TNT explosive power, where the one in Hiroshima was like, 15 kilotons. Like 15000 tons of TNT. Yes. And thank God they hadn't figured that out at that point. Yeah. Because those earliest Broken Arrow ones were like, dude, if this had been like a fusion bomb, who knows what would have happened? Although I can't tell if one was safer than the other. And Ed rightly points out the reason all these were near misses was because along the way scientists thought we need to include some failsafes here so that if something does go wrong. A cascading string of multiple failures have to happen in a certain order for this thing to actually go off or you have to make it so it purposefully happens in this order for it to actually go off. And that if one thing doesn't happen in this cascade then the thing won't actually have a nuclear detonation. And the fact that the scientists worked in these safety mechanisms, that's what kept like South Carolina and North Carolina from having entire towns level the nuclear explosions accidentally. That's right. Because what happens now with this implosion, this nuclear material is packed and surrounded by high explosives, just regular conventional explosives and these things go off and they create a big boom in and of themselves that is very dangerous. But like you said, there are so many safety features built in and unless you have that exact implosion pattern that you need, it might be scary. But these high explosives going off don't necessarily mean that there will be that fusion reaction. And if it gets shot, like let's say somebody bombs your bomb, that doesn't necessarily mean it probably means it won't happen. It will again be a big boom, but it will break apart that nuclear material and just scatter it around. It's not going to compress it in the way you need to create that fission reaction. No. And that's what a dirty bomb is. It's where you're not creating a nuclear explosion, but your explosion is spreading radioactive material that contaminates an area. Which is bad enough, but it's not nearly as bad as an actual sustained nuclear explosion. And because the nuclear bombs were made in such a way, like you said, that explosive pattern has to happen. Exactly. Just so you're probably not going to get that same pattern. If those explosives go off from hitting the ground after being dropped 15,000ft or burning in a jet fuel fire from a crashed jet, they'll still explode, like you were saying, but it's not going to create that nuclear explosion. It still will make you bite your fingernails cuticle though. Yeah, it'll go up that Pinnacle chain. Right. I'm also not sure about how bombs are now, but I know that for a while and maybe that's still the case, they're just physically distance. Like those explosives are not right next to the nuclear capsule and that distance can actually help prevent those nuclear explosions. Yeah, or there's like an electronic circuit that has to be completed for the detonator to go off. And so even if it's exposed to flames or impact, it's still not going to go off because it's detonated electronically. There's like more safety systems that they worked in but initially one of the earliest ones they had with those imploding Hbombs was that they just simply wouldn't put the core of the nuclear material that was to be imploded in the bomb. It would really just be like a 5000 or, you know, 20,000 ton bomb of high yield explosives. Of high explosives. But the nuclear core wasn't plugged into the center. So it might be on the same plane, but it wasn't plugged in. At least some cases. In other cases, the military use that the core wasn't inserted into the bomb at the time, excuse very frequently to basically say there was really no chance of this becoming a nuclear explosion. But there's a lot of debate about just how true that is in some of these instances where some of these were fully armed nuclear bombs. That just so happened, we lucked out that the pattern of explosion with the high explosives didn't follow the right pattern to set off that nuclear reaction. Yeah. And again, these protocols came about in the which is why almost all these Broken Arrow incidences were in the in the 1990s, there was a technical report on the safety of our arsenal conducted independently by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And this is great for the general Republican dumb dumbs like us. They just gave it like a school rating, like A through F, basically, on all the weapons that we've used from 1950 to 76 or no, I guess up until the 90s. But every weapon from 50 to 76 received a D except for one. And that one was the Minute Man, too. And it got a C plus. C plus, which is pretty nice, especially among DS. But everything else has a D for 26 years. Right. It just goes to show you just how poorly these things were. Safety mechanized, I guess. But even still even despite they still went to some extent to make them safer, but they just hadn't gone far enough. And yet, despite that, we still didn't manage to accidentally blow ourselves up with the nuclear bomb, despite all the broken arrows that we have gone through, which will now go through. Should we take a break and then go through some of these, or sure, do something. Take a break. That little word play in. No, we'll take a break. All right. Take a break. Right? Yeah. We'll be right back with broken arrows. Okay, Chuck. As far as we know, the military will cop to 32 broken arrows in the history of the atomic age. As far as the United States goes, other countries have their own, and apparently the Soviet Union had at least as many, if not more than we did. They copped you if you've seen Chernobyl, they were probably like hundreds more. Yeah, and possibly the same for us. It makes a really good point that once the intercontinental ballistic missiles came along and we didn't need Operation Chrome Dome anymore, broken Arrows all but vanished. But it's also possible that the military just decided, like, we're just not going to publicly announce these things any longer. Yeah. Which is entirely possible. Who knows? But as far as it goes, officially there have been 32 Broken Arrow pinnacle incidents that have happened in the nation's history and some of them are just absolute doozy. Yeah. So we'll go over some of these. I guess we can start with the first one just for nostalgia's sake. This is February 13, 1950. A B 36 B peacemaker bomber set flight from Alaska. And this is just a training mission where they want to simulate a nuclear strike against Russia. Right. But they did have a big bomb on board. It was a 5000 pound bomb with just conventional explosives or at least the Department of Defense in the Air Force say. And we're going to be caveatting all these because we can only say what they told us. But they said that there was no plutonium core on the plane. But this is one of the planes that took off, had engine trouble, the crew bailed out and set off the bomb in the air and then bailed out of the plane. And the bomb luckily went off over the ocean. Right. And this kind of strikes at the core of a lot of these accidents or whenever you think about why haven't we been obliterated by a meteor or something? It seems like the world is just full of people but there's way more empty land and water still than there are massive amounts of people. So the fact that we haven't been hit by the big asteroid or that a lot of these bombs go off in places where there are no people, it is lucky. But the stats are also in our favor. Yeah, it's either that or we're living in a computer simulation. One of the 20. Exactly. We're in the matrix. So that was the first one. That was in 1950. And the fact that the government says there was only like what did you call it? What was the kind of flight it was on? Just like a training mission. Training, yes. So there's a training plug inside of the thing. It's made of lead rather than plutonium. Right. And that actually probably holds up to scrutiny because in the early 50s that's the kind that they were using. They were small enough that you could send one of the pilots or one of the copilots or somebody to the back to actually arm the nuclear weapon with the plug. And if they were on a training mission there really wouldn't be much use for that. Right. So that probably was a non nuclear bomb that went off. But by the late fifty s the government had moved on to much bigger bombs. And because they decided that they needed to be hair trigger ready, they were armed. Despite what the government says. These type of bombs that they moved to are called sealed pit weapons where that core was inserted. And then the bomb was sealed and then it was loaded onto the plane. So the plane was flying around with a fully active, ready to go nuclear bomb. So anything starting in the late 50s onward is suspicious if the government is saying that it wasn't an active nuclear bomb. That's right. Very true. Here's another one. We're just kind of picking through these. I think it gave us like 17 or 18 to choose from. Well, I thought, like, all 32 were on here. No, it just seemed that way. This one in March, and this represents sort of one that happened a few times, which is where a plane and the bomb in the plane will just vanish, never to be heard from again. And that happened on March 10, 1956, with a B 47 Strato jet. It was supposed to refuel in mid air over the Mediterranean Sea, but the plane never showed up for that dinner date, and they never found the plane. And it had two nuclear capsules, and they were never found either. That was, I think, 1956, you said. Yeah. If you fast forward a little bit to 1958, that was a really bad year for Broken Arrow incidents. Yeah. I mean, if you're a fan of Broken Arrow incidents, it's a great year. But for the rest of us, it was a bad year. From January 31 to March 11, there were three so in less than six weeks, there were three Broken Arrow incidents, two of which were among the most famous broken Arrow incidents ever to take place. The first one produced what's known as the Tiby bomb. You've heard of the Tabee bomb? Oh, yeah. Okay. So there was a B 47 that was on a training flight, and since this is 1958, it's entirely possible that it was a fully active nuclear weapon that it was flying around with. Government says no. Other people say it absolutely was. But on the training mission, the B 47 came in contact with a fighter jet that was also training and pretending to attack it, and they accidentally knocked itself out and knocked the B 47 out. The B 47 crew ejected. They jettisoned the bomb, and for weeks afterward, they looked around Taiby Island to find this bomb. And they still to this day haven't found it. Yeah. Taiby island, which is off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. And you said that the F 86 was pretending to attack. It was just like a training thing. Yeah. And it got too close, and I think it took its own wing off and crippled the B 47. Do you think that's because the pilot was going pew, pew, pew the whole time? Yeah, basically, it was a Mark 36 bomb, too. This is really important. It was a four ton hydrogen bomb that may have been fully active, and it's just somewhere, like, right off of the coast of Taibi Island somewhere. If you've ever been to Taiby Island, this explains quite a bit about Taiby Island, that there's a four ton hydrogen bomb just sitting right off the coast. Now. What does that mean? Are you knocking Tiby? No, I think Jerry vacations there. What? It is? Yeah. Jerry loves tibby. It's a great place. It's its own place, and I love it for that, but also super duper weird. Well, what I can't figure out is why they can't find this thing. It just seems impossible to me that you can't find this, given that Tiby is not the huge displays. No, I agree. I think it's just one of those needle in the haystack things. By now it's probably been covered with so much, like, silt and sediment, they may never find it. But I read this really interesting article, and there's been a lot of articles written about this search. There's a guy who I think is a former air force commander. I can't remember what he did in the air force or the military. He got interested in the idea of chasing down these lost, broken arrows, and he searched for the tidy bomb. And he claimed to have found it at one point, but I'm not sure what happened with that. But this article called the saga of the Tiby bomb it was by Roger pinkney in gardening gun magazine. I read that. Oh, he really played up the southern thing in his writing. Oh, my god. But it was good. It was a good article. But he interviewed a shrimp boat captain or no, he interviewed the nephew of a friend of a shrimp boat captain who on his deathbed, says that he found the bomb and said exactly where he trawled it to and then cut it loose when he realized it was a bomb and never told anybody. Or he did try to tell somebody and they ignored him, but he kind of left this legacy of potentially where the bomb is. And he said it was right off of the dock of the coast guard post on taipei island. Well, maybe they never found it because it was after his long list of shrimp recipes. It's possible. Fried shrimp. Shrimp newberg. Shrimp newburg. That was a great movie. Was it? Was it not? I don't think so. I don't think forrest gump has aged well. Oh, really? I'll have to go see it. Then again. Yeah. That was a sweet movie. Yeah. All right. Okay. We'll take that up later. All right, well, let's go with another one in another very famous one. On march 11, when the United States air force b 47 going to britain and it had an issue with the locking pin on the bombay doors, there's a story supposedly that one of the copilots went to fix it movie style by hitting the fault light with the butt of his gun. It's like right out of a movie. The planes captain just like and this may have been a big inspiration for doctor strangelove, because if you remember in that movie slim pickens, there's an issue with the bombay doors and he. Basically rides the bomb very famously at the ending, wearing his cowboy hat right out of the Bombay door. But the planes captain climbed into that Bombay to go check things out and accidentally pull the emergency release lever or push the button that he shouldn't have pushed, depending on who you're asking. The bomb dropped. These doors were closed, remember? But this is a four ton bomb. So it just smashed right through those doors, fell 15,000ft, and blew up a farm in South Carolina. Yeah, like they bombed South Carolina with a nuclear bomb. And just by the grace of the nature goddess, there was no nuclear explosion. That's right. But a big boom. Yes, a huge boom. And it actually ruined the farm of the Greg family, the Walter Greg family. And he lived bitterly the rest of his life because he finally sued and got like 36 grand or something like that, which even at the time wasn't enough for him to rebuild his house and his farm. And no one died. It was just miraculous. But several members of his family were injured and had to go to the hospital. But it was a big deal. It left a crater that's still there. It's in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, which is not too far from Florence, but it was something like 5 miles from Florence, something like that. And had this thing gone off, it would have wiped Florence right off of the map. Wow. Yeah. It would have been a really big deal. And this was just a nuclear accident where somebody accidentally dropped a bomb on a farm in South Carolina. This other one in 1958. And you are right, there are a lot in 1958, but this one in November was pretty bad. It was a B 47 crashed. It just seems like there were nuclear planes crashing all over the place because there were so many nuclear flights taking off and landing every single day. I guess so, yeah. And they were moving the bombs, like, from one place to another constantly, too. Well, this one crashed in Texas, and it was carrying a nuclear weapon. And the Air Force kept this one classified for a long time, but it had enriched uranium, so they figured it was a sealed pit weapon that was armed, and the high explosive did detonate. But there was no nuclear explosion. Again, hopefully because of these fail safes. But the kicker here is there was an environmental cleanup. This was in 1958. And the Air Force said, you know what? We should go in there and clean this stuff up because it's 2011. Right. That's how long they waited to clean the site up. Yeah. And apparently they grew grain and fed cattle that grain on this land. That was a nuclear disaster site because, again, the nuclear bomb might not actually go off, but those high explosives are blowing the nuclear material all over the place and just totally contaminating the area. And they didn't do anything about it for, what, 53 years, while they were feeding cattle grown on the land there. That's crazy. What else you got? So there were two incidents that kind of brought the Operation Chrome Dome era to an end. Okay. Remember we said the intercontinental ballistic missile development really put an end to it, but also the idea like, this is just too risky. And they knew it going into it. They were like, we're going to be flying around with armed nuclear weapons. It's far riskier, but it's a great strategy in case the USSR strikes us, we'll be able to strike back, so it's worth the trade off. They knew going into it, but after all of these accidents, they finally were like, okay, it's not worth the trade off anymore. And the last two that really did it in were in January of 1968, I believe. And the last two that really did Chrome Dome in both happened in January, but two years apart, january 66 and January 68. And I think one of the reasons it really hastened the end of Chrome Dome is because they happened on foreign soil, where we had Air Force bases. But we're guests of the country and the country that this happened and the countries that happened, and we're not very happy with us for allowing these nuclear accidents to take place. Yeah, there was one in January. It was another mid air collision during refueling, which, if you've ever seen those midair refueling, it's a tricky thing. So you can see how that would happen. And that's, of course, how Strange Love opens over the opening credits very famously with the refueling scene shot in a very sexual nature, on purpose, of course, because it was Stanley Kubrick, but this one was near Palomatos, Spain. Nice. Is that right? Yes, I think that's good enough. All right. And like I said, the two planes crashed into each other and four bombs were on board. Four? One fell into the ocean, one fell on land, and the other two fell on land and detonated the high explosives. One went to market. You're going to say that one went off? I think it blew up. You said out of the four, that's actually pretty lucky. No, one of the three that fell on land, two actually detonated the high explosives. Okay, got you. And then the one that went in the ocean, they looked for that for weeks, and they finally managed to find it, which, based on these Broken Arrow reports, is really rare to actually find the bomb. But they found this one in Spain, and then they actually cleaned up the site because this was in Spain, it wasn't just in Texas. Right. So they went to the trouble of cleaning up the site, and they removed 1400 tons of contaminated soil from the crash site where this radioactive material had been scattered by the explosion. Amazing. So that was two years before Chrome Dome and the last one, the one that really brought about the end of Chrome Dome was in Greenland. The incident at Tuli Air Force Base in Greenland in January of 1968. This one happened in literally, from what I read, the next day, operation Chrome Dome was ended. Oh, really? So this was a B 52 crash, crashed onto sea ice, and apparently they had to get rid of 237,000 snow, ice, water, and plain junk. Yeah, they removed it to the United States because it was contaminated with radioactivity. So the fact that it happened in Greenland was bad enough, but Greenland was a territory of Denmark at the time, and Denmark had a no nuke policy, so they were really unhappy with this. But what's cool is Denmark forced the US. To conduct an environmental estimate and study this stuff to make sure that there were no prolonged effects. And they found that there weren't what the study turned up. But yeah, but this is back in the they're doing this kind of thing. So where do you go? Denmark. I think we should talk about the one over North Carolina, too. Even though it jumps back in time, is that all right? Yeah, I'm fine with jumping back in time. January 24, a B 52 got a fuel leak, starts getting out of control, and it's trying to get back to its base. The crew ejects, the plane, breaks apart and crashes near Goldsboro, North Carolina. And there were two nuclear bombs on board here that separated from the plane and fell to the ground. One of them was fully armed. Hydrogen bomb had nuclear material. Everything was there for a three eight megaton explosion, and it crashed to the ground at high speed and disintegrated without either the high explosive or the nuclear explosion going off into sort of a swamp. And what happened to the other one? It actually fell gently to earth. Its parachute deployed, and it just went and got stuck in a tree, and they got it out. A hydrogen bomb stuck in a tree with tons of high explosives attached to it just hanging out. But they managed to get that one back. It's amazing. When you read through some of these, it looks like and I know it's not the case, of course, our military does a great job, but it looks at times like it's a three stooges episode. Like there was one plane that was pushed off an aircraft carrier that had a nuclear bomb just sort of pushed off the side of the carrier off the coast of Japan. And it's still down there, from what we understand here's, something horrific. Chuck, the pilot was in the plane at the time. Oh, really? They've never recovered the plane, the pilot or the bomb. It's just down there in, like, 12,000ft of water, I believe. Yes. I imagine you sink pretty fast. Oh, God. Man, that's just terrible. There was one where this was missile stored ready and armed at an Air Force base in New Jersey when a helium tank burst. I guess they were blown up. Birthday party balloons. All right. And this did not have a high explosive detonation, but the missiles fuel tank ruptured, and there was a big fire, a bunch of these. There were fires, like big fires where they thought, is it going to happen or is it not? And luckily, it did not now, and I'm sure that was a consideration every single time. Is this thing going to blow up into a nuclear explosion? I mean, some of these would have been massive. The one in Goldsboro, North Carolina, we were talking about, have they gone off? It would have been 253 times larger than the Hiroshima blast. Wow. Yeah, it would have been enormous. I mean, look what that 115 kiloton bomb did to Hiroshima. Imagine 253 times worse over North Carolina. I'm sure that would have been Georgia. It would have been South Carolina. As far as fallout goes, it would have been massive and enormous. And the fact that we didn't ever for every single one of these, not once did a nuclear explosion go off. It's really a testament to the scientists who designed this thing to be as safe as humanly possible. Yeah, for sure. You got the other one. Yeah. I mean, there's some others, like the USS Scorpion nuclear sub went down. It had a nuclear reactor board and a couple of nuclear torpedoes. If you go through this list, there's a substantial number of nuclear bombs, like out there in the Sea of the Philippines, off the Azores, off of Taibi Island, just hanging out, waiting around, hopefully indefinitely or forever and never going off. But I remember that was, like one of the big concerns among the people living on Tiby is like this high explosives are aging. What's going to happen when they reach a certain age? Are they just going to blow up? And if somebody's both going to be over the area at the time, what are we doing here? And the official thing is it's gone, and it's safer to just leave it wherever it is and try to move it at this point. Yeah. The other, I think, funny thing Ed included here towards the end was he says there are hundreds of other incidences that would be classified as bent spears. Like dropping fully armed nukes onto the concrete. He said so many times, I lost count. Or just like dropping off the wing of an aircraft onto the ground when they were doing something. Wasn't that in a movie? I don't know. That happened in the movie. And it's like, oh, it's just so cringy. It's like a top secret or something. Hot shots maybe can only help. The Zucker brothers. I went and watched a loaded weapon. Was that good? It's good for what it is, for sure. Yes. Now, was that the Zucker? Yes, I believe it was one of the zuckers, if not both of them, but Amelia west of us. He's great. You're a big fan of him. I love it. He's a good actor. Don't you always champion the sanitation worker movie? Minute Work. Yeah, minute Work. It's such a good movie. I still haven't seen that one. You got to see that one. It's got a real plot to it and everything. Oh, yeah. And I mean it's. Amelia Westfield and Charlie Sheen. When else are you going to see those two together? Agreed. Thanksgiving, maybe. Yeah, that's right. Christmas time. Maybe Easter, depending. Maybe they're brothers. I know they are. That's why you'd see them together. That's right. Are you telling me that or telling the listeners that? I don't know. I'm just talking to the ether. Okay, good. Well, since we started talking about Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, I think it's time for a listener. And Charles yes. This episode comes out. It so happens on the 31st, I believe. That's new Year's Eve. That's right. I was trying to get you to say it, and you did. So a couple of things. We want to wish everyone a happy new year first, of course. And also I want to wish a happy birthday to my dear, sweet wife. Yummy. Happy birthday, Yoons. Thanks, man. So happy New Year, everybody. We hope that it is a spectacular 2020 for you. It's the future now. That's right. So let's all kind of shape up and act right for it. Let's do. Okay. So happy New Year, everyone. And now it's time for listener me. Yeah. We're going to share a dream here. We don't usually do this because let's face it, listening to someone's dreams is the worst. But this was kind of funny. It's from Cassie. She wrote it at 05:30 a.m. Right off the bat after having this dream. She said the dream was I won some random drawing and the prize was to sit down on a recording of a podcast while you were in my area. So you guys come to my cabin, which I don't have in real life. You explained that you want to record the podcast in bed. So there we are, all three in bed together, wearing button up jammies that no one really wears in real life. You have your microphones and everything and you're doing your stuff. You should know things. And I'm just sitting there watching and laughing and learning when you decide that you're done and it's time to go to sleep. So we go to sleep in the same bed that you recorded from. Josh is in the middle and Chuck and I are on opposite ends. I was extremely self aware that I roll around in my sleep and there's no way you guys are going to be able to sleep. And sure enough, after a while, Josh gets up and says, I'm going to go watch TV. I can't sleep. So I was mortified that I kept them up and then Chuck rolls over and wraps his arm around me and spoons me. And I said, what the heck are you doing? And Chuck says, oh, no, this isn't a sexual thing. I'm happily married, as you know, but Emily knows that I have to hold on to someone in order to fall asleep, so it's okay. And he says, normally it's Josh when we do these overnighters, but, you know, so I usually spoon you, apparently. Well, sure, everybody knows that. So now there's no way I'm falling asleep. I told Chuck I was going to go watch TV with Josh, and Chuck says, I can't sleep either, and ask for Pepto Bismall and winks at me like it's code for something. So Chuck starts laughing and says, no, don't worry about the Pepto Bismal. So then there we are, all three watching TV on the couch, and you guys are asking for snacks. I open my fridge and I have tons of expired snacks, and I'm embarrassed and realized that the snacks are expired and they never even fed you dinner. That is pretty embarrassing. You guys awkwardly pretend to be okay not eating while we're sitting on the couch and your stomachs are literally rumbling extremely loud. And finally we all fall asleep on the couch. The next day you were doing a live show, and apparently you're great friends with my pharmacist and my pharmacist posted selfies with Josh lifting weights at the gym before you guys went to do your live show. Isn't it crazy where these dreams go? They go all over the place, man. All over the place. I don't know how they knew that your pre show routine was lifting weights. Right. You like to buff up before the show? Sure. Anyway, I'm still laughing now, and I'm definitely going to have a great day because of this dream. Thank you. I'm sorry and you're welcome. That is from Cassie. Thanks a lot, Cassie. Much. I appreciate it. Yeah, we'll just move on from that one. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us like Cassie did, you can go on to Stuffyoufnow.com. You can check out our social links there and you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradiocom. Stuff you should know is the production of iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erker 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." | |
96dccbb8-440c-11e8-82c5-1b5ff2005e20 | A List Of Games You Would Surely Lose to a Computer | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/a-list-of-games-you-would-surely-lose-to-a-compute | We live in a time where computers can beat the best humans in the world at chess, checkers, poker and video games. But these games are really just demonstrations of how intelligent our machines are growing. They’re growing more intelligent by the hour. | We live in a time where computers can beat the best humans in the world at chess, checkers, poker and video games. But these games are really just demonstrations of how intelligent our machines are growing. They’re growing more intelligent by the hour. | Tue, 22 May 2018 16:47:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=16, tm_min=47, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=142, tm_isdst=0) | 53779747 | 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. There's Jerry over there. I'm just going to come out and talk, tell everybody making fun of me for some weird reason, vaguely weird ways, but I'm all right. So check out a story for you. Okay, I'm going to take us back to the 1770s and the swinging town of Vienna. Not Virginia, not Viola, Georgia, which, you know, that's how they pronounce it. Right? Vienna. Vienna sausages. Right? Vienna, Austria. Have you ever been there? Vienna, Austria? No. Been to Brussels. That was pretty close. Vienna is lovely, I'm sure. I think it's a lot like Brussels. Very clean. Lovely town. I just remembered it being very clean. Yeah, very clean. Gorgeous architecture. Weird little angled side streets. They're very narrow. Very pretty town. So we're in Vienna, and there is a dude skulking about going to the Royal Palace in Vienna. His name is Wolfgang von Kempelen, and he's an inventor. He's an engineer. He's a pretty sharp dude, and he's got with him what would come to be known as the Turk, but he called it the Mechanical Turk, or the automaton chess player. And that's what it was. It was a wooden figure that moved mechanically, seated at a cabinet, and on top of the cabinet was a chessboard. And when he brought it out to show to the royal court, it was cool, kind of, but nothing they hadn't seen before, because automata was kind of a hip thing by then. Yeah. People loved building these engineering, these automata machines to do various things, and people are just knocked out by the fact that you hide these gears and levers behind wood or a cloth, and it looks as though there's a real well, not real, but you know what I mean? That is like a real machine. Yeah, but they weren't fooled into thinking, like, is that a real man for their time? It was so advanced looking that it's like us seeing ex machina in the movie theater. Sure. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it does make sense, but imagine seeing, like, ex machinan being like, I've seen this before. This isn't anything special. Okay. Yeah. And this thing, to be clear, look like, is it Zoltar or Zoltan from big Zoltar? I don't know. It's one of those two things. One of those two. Like, this guy is wearing a turban, and it's in a glass case, like a bust, like, you know, like a chest up thing. Yeah, he seated at this cabinet, so there's no need for legs or anything like that. But the thing this is what was amazing about the Turks, he could play chess, and he could play chess really well. So yeah, he was like an automaton, and he moved all her jerky or whatever, but he could play you in chess, which was a huge advance at the time. This is something that wouldn't come up again until the 1990s, more than 200 years later, this thing, this automaton, could play a human being in chess and beat them. Well, yeah. And it looked like when the game started, it would look down at the chess board and caucus head, like, what should my first move be? Right. And if people I love this part. If people tried to cheat apparently Napoleon tried to cheat this thing because this guy, he debuted at the Vienna court, but then it went on a world tour. Yeah. And it was taken over by a successor to the guy who toured with it even further. People went nuts for the stuff they did. They loved it because they were like, this is crazy. I can't believe what I'm seeing. Most people, though, were not taken in by it. They're like, there's some trick here. Sure. But von Kempelin and the guy who came after him I don't remember his name they would demonstrate. You could open this cabinet, and you could see all the workings of the mechanical turk inside. Right. So what I'm saying is, if this thing, since a cheater like Napoleon supposedly did, napoleon would move a piece out of turn or illegally or something. This dude, the Turk turk 182, would pick up the chest piece, move it back, as if to say, like, no, no, Napoleon, that's what you're doing. And then if the person attempted to move it again, I don't know how many times, maybe two or three times, eventually it would just go and wipe his hand across the board and knock off all the pieces. Game over. Right. Which is pretty great. Yeah. It's a nice little feature. Yeah. But it even showed even more that this thing was thinking for itself. That's the key here. Right, sure. Chess had been, for a very long time viewed as only something that a human would be capable of because it took a human intellect. And there was actually a guy, an English engineer. I think he was a mechanical engineer. His name was Robert Willis. He said that chess was in, quote, the province of intellect alone. So the idea that there was this automaton playing chess blew people away. But again, people figured out, like, okay, there's something going on here. We think that von Kempelin is controlling this thing remotely, somehow, maybe using magnets or whatever. Other people hit upon the idea that there was a small person inside the cabinet who would hide. When the workings were shown in, the cabinet was open to show the workings. And then when the cabinet was closed again and the mechanical turks started playing, the person had crawled back out and was actually controlling it. This seems to be the case that there was a person controlling it. But the idea that it was a machine that could think and beat humans in chess had, like, kind of unsettling implications. Yeah. This author, Philip Thickness, great name british author. Sure. Phillip Thickness, he said. And people like you said, all those more complicated explanations in this article you sent, astutely points out that he followed Accomplish razor and basically said he's got a little kid in there. He's got a little Bobby Fisher in there that's really good at chess, and that's what's going on. And other people speculated that other little people might be in there, just adults who would fit in there. But then there's the explanation that he would open it up and shine a candle around and say, Nothing to see here. Right, everyone? So should we reveal the real deal? Sure. I think I did already. Well, I don't think you spelled it out well. Spell it out. There was a little person in there. Yeah, not just one little person, but they would travel around and recruit people. I guess people would get tired of being in there, or they'd forget about them and they'd starve and have to replace them. But it really was a trick. There was a little person in there. They did the same thing as, like, the magic axe. When they saw a person in half, the lady just gets into a tiny little ball in one section of that box. But my thing is, this is not a satisfying explanation to me. Chuck, I think it's great. How did the person keep up with the board above? Well, I mean, I don't know if they ever proved exactly how it was going. That's what I'm saying. Okay. Whether or not I think the Turk was just hollowed out and you would just put your arms through the armhole. So you would crawl up into the church. Yeah. You would become the church. You and the church would fuse. That's what some people thought. I think that's what Edgar Allen Poe thought, too. He loved kidney. Right. Other people thought that the little person was underneath in the cabinet operating the trick with levers and stuff like that. Well, there could have been a mirror or something, I guess. Like a little telescopic mirror. That's what's getting me. How would they keep up with the game? Right? You could keep track of the game, but how could you see where the other person moved? You would know where you moved, but you wouldn't be able to see where the other person moved. That's what I don't get. Just mirrors. Smoking mirrors. Maybe so, but the point is, it was a fake. It was a fraud. But it raised some really big questions about the idea of a machine beating a person at something like chess. Yeah. And it really peaked the mind of one Charles Babbage. He was a kid, or young, at least at the time, when he saw the Turk in person. And a few years afterward, he began work on something called the Difference Engine, which was a machine that he designed to calculate mathematics automatically. So some point to this is kind of maybe the beginnings of humans trying to create AI. Well, yeah. With Babbage's. Differential machine or difference machine. Yeah. Different engine. But at the very least, what this is is the first that I know of. Example of man versus machine. Even though it was really man versus man because there was a man in the machine. Right. It was a fraud. Yeah. But it sparked that idea. It definitely did. And that's something that chess in particular has always been like this idea of, like, if you can teach a machine to play chess, you've really achieved a milestone. Sure. And there's been plenty of programs, most notably Deep Blue, which we'll talk about. But there's been this idea that part of AI is chess teaching you to play chess. But the people who develop AI never set out to make a chess playing AI just to make a machine that can play chess. Right. That's not the point. Chess has always been this way to demonstrate the progress of artificial intelligence. Yeah. Because it's a complex game that you can't just program it like it almost has to learn. Well, it depends on how you come at it at first. Right. So initially, they did try to program it. Okay. 1950 to 2010, 60 years. Right. That is how they approached AI. And chess is you figured out how to break chess down and explain it to a computer. If you could, ideally, you would have this computer or this AI, this artificial intelligence, be able to think about the outcome of every possible outcome of a move before making it. Right. That's just not possible. Still, today, we don't have computers that can do that. Right. So what you have to do is figure out how to create shortcuts for the machine, give it best practices, that kind of thing. Yeah. And that was actually laid out in 1950 by a guy named Claude Shannon, who's the father of information theory, and he wrote a paper with a pretty on the nose title called programming a Computer for Playing Chess. And you have to say it like that when you say the name. Yeah. It's got a question mark at the end. Right. But he laid out two big things. One is creating a function of the different moves, and then another one is called a minimax. And if those were the two things that Shannon laid out, and they established about 50 or 60 years of development in teaching an AI to play chess. Yeah. So this evaluation function is just sort of the very basis of it all, kind of where it starts, which is you create a numerical evaluation based on the state of the board at that moment right. And assign a real number evaluation to it. So the highest number that you would shoot for is obviously getting checkmate. Getting a king in checkmate. Right. So what you've just done now is, by assigning a number to a state, like the pieces on a board, what you've done is to say, shoot for this number. Right. The higher the number, you're going to give the CI the rule. Now, the higher the number, the more desirable that this move that could lead to that higher number function. Evaluation function is what you want to do. Right. Like capture the night or capture the queen. Capture the queen would have a higher evaluation number. Right? Exactly. So that's the function. And there's another one called the minimax. Yeah. This is pretty great, where you want to minimize the maximum and this is another shortcut that they taught computers. Maximum loss. That is, right? Yeah. So what they taught computers do is no computer can look through an entire game, every possible outcome, but there are computers that can look pretty far down the line at every possible outcome. And what you can say is, okay, you want to find the evaluation function that is the worst case scenario, the maximum loss, and then find the move that will minimize the possibility for that outcome. Yeah. And this is you're only limited by your programming power, but by looking not only at the state of the board right now, but if I make this move and I move the pond to this spot, what are the next three moves? Possibly that could happen as a result of this move. Right. And you're only limited, like I said, by programming power. So obviously, the more juice you have, the more moves ahead that you can look. Exactly. And then they just shy away from ones with a higher function number. Exactly. Or lower function number, depending on how you've programmed it. But they're making these decisions based on these rules. And then there's other things you can do, like little shortcuts to say if a decision tree leads to the other players king being in checkmate. Don't even think about that move any further. Don't evaluate any longer. Just abandon it, because we would never want to make that move. Right. So there's all these shortcuts you can do. And that's what they did to teach computers. That's what Deep Blue did when it beat Gary Kasparov in 1997. It was this huge, massive computer that knew a lot about chess. It had a lot of rules, a lot of incredibly intricate programming that was extremely sharp, and it actually won. It became the first computer to beat an actual human chess grandmaster in regulation match play. Yeah. I don't think Casparov gets enough credit for being willing to do this because it was a big deal for him to lose. It was in this community and the AI community. It sent shockwaves. And everyone that was alive remembers, even if you didn't know anything about either one, remembers Deep Blue being all over the news. It was a really big deal. And Casparov put his name on the line and lost. Yes. And I was wondering, Chuck, how you would get somebody to do that, I'm sure. A mountain of catch. I guess that would probably be part of it. But I don't know. I bet that's out there. I just didn't look it up, so that's possible. It's also possible that they said, look, man, like, this is chess we're talking about or whatever. But really what you're doing is helping advance artificial intelligence, right? Because we're not really trying ultimately to win chess games. We're trying to cure cancer. Yeah, we're going to take your title because we're going to beat you, or our machine is going to beat you, but even still, you're going to be helping with cancer. Think of the cancer, Casperov. That's probably what they said. Should we take a break? Yeah. Well, should we tease our special guests first? Okay. I can smell them. I don't think we even said we're going to have a special guest later in the episode. Mr. Jonathan Strickland of tech stuff. Nice. It's been a long time since, like years since we had strick on. The last time we had stricken was like, 2009 with the necronomicon episode. Where has he been besides sitting in between us every day? It's been a strickland drought, is what it says. Yes, the strickland's coming later, but we're going to come back after this and talk a little bit more about man versus machine. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career Prep is helping change that. 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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. OK, dude. So what we just described was how AI was taught to play things like chess or to think. Like, you take something, you figure out how to break it down into little rules and things that a computer can think of. Right. And then follow these kind of rules to make the best decision. That's how it used to be. The way that it's done now, that everybody's doing now, is where you are creating a machine that teaches itself. Yeah, that's the jam. That was the breakthrough you may have noticed back in about 20 13, 20 14. All of a sudden, things like Siri and Alexa got way better at what they are doing. They got way less confused. Oh, really? Your navigation app got a lot better. The reason why is because this new type of AI, this new type of machine learning that can teach itself and learn on its own, just hit the scene and they just started exploding. And one of the things that they were first trained on was game. Yeah. And it makes sense. And if you thought chess was complicated and difficult when it comes to these new AIS that they're teaching to teach themselves game strategy, they said, we might as well dive into the Chinese strategic game Go, because it has been called the most complex game ever devised by humans. Yes. And actually, that was actually a quote from Demi Hasabi, a neuroscientist and the founder of DeepMind, which was DeepMind. They were purchased by Google, or were they always part of Google? I don't know if they were a spun off branch or they were purchased, but it's one of Google's AI outfits. Well, they're one of the teams that are designing these new programs. And to give you an idea of how complex Go is, it deals with a board with different stones, and there are ten how do you even say that? Ten to 170th power. So that means 170 zeros. And take that number, and that's the number of possible configurations of a Go board. Right. So, like you say, chess is very complex and complicated and it's very difficult to master Go. And I've never played go of you. No. So it's supposedly it's easy to learn. Right. But very complicated and it's simplicity. Right? Exactly. It's extremely difficult to master. And there was a guy in the late ninety s, and I'm guessing that he was saying this after Deep Blue beat Casperov. It was an astrophysicist from Princeton. He said that it would probably be 100 years before a computer beats a human at Go. To give you an idea of just how complex go is that deeply would just be casparov. And this guy saying it will still be 100 years before anyone gets beat. It go by a computer. And he was someone who knew about this stuff, who's an astrophysicist. He wasn't just some schmo at home. And drunken is reclining asinine predictions. And again, we've said this before, but I want to reiterate the people that I think AlphaGo is the name of this program. The people that created this at DeepMind, they wanted to stress that this is a problem solving program. We're just teaching at this game at first to make it learn and to see if it can get good at what it does. But they said it is built with the idea that any task that has a lot of data that is unstructured and you want to find patterns in the data and then decide what to do. Right. And that's kind of like what we're talking about. It crunches down all these possible options, aka data, to decide what move should I make? Right. And you could apply that. Ideally they're going to apply this to Alzheimer's and cancer and all sorts of things, right. That's general purpose thinking. Right? Yeah, and thinking on the fly too, when faced with novel stuff. So one of the reasons why it's good to use games like chess or Go or whatever those are called, perfect information games where both players or anybody watching has all the information that's available on it. There are definite rules. There's structure, it's a good proving ground, but as we'll see, AI makers are getting further and further away from the structure gains as their AI becomes more and more sophisticated because the structure and the limitations aren't necessarily needed anymore because these things are starting to be able to think on their own in a very generalized and even creative way. Yeah, it's really interesting the way that they're like you said earlier, before the break, that we don't have computers that can run all the possibilities. So what they teach in the case of AlphaGo, this program teaches itself by playing itself in these games and Go specifically. And the more it plays itself, the more it learns and the more ability it has during a game to choose a move by narrowing down possibilities. So instead of like, well, there are 20 million different variations here, by playing itself, it's able to say, well, in this scenario there are really only 50 different moves that I could or should make. Right. That's kind of a simplified way to say it right now, but it's true. But that's exactly right. And what they're doing is basically the same thing that a human does. It's going back to its memory banks. Yeah, exactly. It's experience and saying, well, I've been faced with something like this before and this is what I used and it was successful 40 out of 50 times I'll do this one. This is a pretty reasonable move. Yeah. That is what humans do. Yes. Not only we screwed up the chess episode, but I get the idea that when you're a chess master, you don't just think, what are the numbers say? And what does the book say? But, man, I did this move that one time and it didn't go as the book said. Right. So that's now factored into my thinking. Right. Except imagine being able to learn from scratch and get to that point in eight days or 8 hours. Yeah. So that Go team. The AlphaGo, the first iteration of AlphaGo, I think they started working on it in 2014 and in 2016, at the end of 2016, they unleashed it secretly onto an AlphaGo website and it started just wiping the floor with everybody. Yeah, everybody's like, this thing's pretty good. Oh, it's AlphaGo. What year is this? That was the end of 2016. Okay. So chess had already come and gone by this point. You can download a program that's like Deep Blue. Right, that's a great point. Yeah. Today, the stuff you play chess with on your laptop is even more advanced than Deep Blue was in the it's just on your laptop. Yeah. So this is the end of 2016. The end of 2017, AlphaGo was replaced with AlphaGo zero. It learned what AlphaGo had taken two years or three years to learn in 40 days by teaching itself. And it beat the master. Yeah. And finally, in May of 2017, AlphaGo took on Key G, the highest ranked Go player in the world. Don't know if he or she still is. No. Lisa Doll is the current or was until AlphaGo beat him. Oh, man. Yeah. Do they get knocked off and AlphaGo is the champion? That's not fair. If it's match play and the human player has accepted a challenge from the computer, I don't see why it wouldn't be the world champion. Or do they just now say on websites like human champion? Maybe in italics with, like, a sneer? Right? Maybe, yeah. Interesting. What do they call that? Wetware, like your brain, your neurons and all that. What, instead of hardware, it's wetware. Oh, I don't know about that. I think that's the term for it. What does that mean, though? It means that you have a substrate, right. Your intelligence, your intellect is based on your neurons, and they're firing all that stuff and it's wet and squishy and meat. Then there's hardware that you can do the same thing on, you can build intelligence on. But it's hardware, it's not wetware. Oh, interesting. So that's probably it. It's the wetware champion versus the hardware champion, but wetware's italicized with the sneer. So where things really got interesting, because you were talking earlier about with the chess and Go, what are they called? What kind of games? Perfect information games. Right. My first thought when you said that was, well, yeah. There's games like poker, like Texas Hold Them, where there are a set of rules. But poker is not about the set of rules. It is about sitting down in front of, whatever, five or six people and lying and getting away with it. And you're self like, there's so many human emotions and contextual clues and micro expressions and all these things. Like, surely you could never, ever teach a machine to win at Texas holes in poker. Yeah. It'll be 100 years at least before that happens, I predict. No, they did it. And more than one team has done it. Yeah, I read there was one from Carnegie Mellon called Libratus AI. Gomelonheads. Yeah. The Thornton Melon. Yeah. University of Alberta has one called Deep Stack. That was the one I read about. Okay. And actually, here's the thing. If you read the release on it, you're like, you don't know how this thing works, do you? Oh, really? Yeah, and I'm pretty sure they don't fully get it because it's one of the problems. Actually, talk about this in the Existential Risks series that is to be released. Right. That there is a type of machine learning where the machine teaches itself, but we don't really understand how it's teaching. That's probably the scariest one, right, or what it's learning, but that's the most prevalent one. That's what a lot of this is. Like, these machines is here's chess, go figure it out. And they go, okay, got it. How did you do that? Wouldn't you like to know? So that's the scariest presentation you will see on AI is when someone says, well, how does all this work? And they go, but we just know it can beat a human at poker. But the thing about Deep Stack at the University of Alberta is that it learned somehow, some sort of intuition, because that's what's required. It's not just the perfect information where you have all the information on the board. With poker, you don't know what the other person's cards are and you don't know if they're lying or bluffing or what they're doing. So that's an imperfect information game. So that would require intuition. And apparently not one, but two different research groups taught AI to intuit. Yeah, Carnegie Mellon came out in January of 2017 with its Liberatus AI, and they said they spent 20 days playing 120,000 hands of Texas Hold them with four professional poker players and one and smoked and basically got up to they weren't playing with real money, obviously, but that would have been great. They're playing with schedules like me as a kid funded their next project. Liberatus was up by one. 7,000,001 of the quotes from one of the poker players that he made to Wired magazine said, I felt like I was playing against someone who was cheating. Like it could see my cards. I'm not accusing it of cheating. It was just that good. Right. So that's the really interesting thing, man, that they could teach a program or a program could teach itself. Intuition, right? It's creepy. I thought this part was interesting. The Atari stuff. This gets pretty fun. Google DeepMind let its AI wreak havoc on Atari 49 different Atari 2600 games, see if they could figure out how to win. And apparently the most difficult one was Miss Pacman, which is a tough game still. Man, Ms. Pacman. They nailed it. It's still one of the great games. But their game, or their Deep Q network algorithm beat it. I think it got the highest score, 999,900 points. And no human or machine has ever achieved that high score, from what I understand. Amazing in the way this one does it. The hybrid reward architecture that it uses is really interesting. It says here it generates a top agent that's like a senior manager, and then all these other 150 individual agents. So it's almost like they've devised this artificial structural hierarchy of these little worker agents that go out and collect, I guess, data, and then move it up the chain to this top agents. Right? And then this thing says, okay, I think that you're probably right. What these agents are probably doing, and I don't know this is exactly true, but there are models out there like this where the agent says, you have a 90% chance of success at getting this pellet if we take this action. Somebody else says, you got an 82% chance of evading this ghost if we go this way. And then the top agent, the senior manager, can put all this stuff together and say, well, if I listen to this guy and this guy, not only will I evade this ghost, I'll go get this pellet. And it's based on what confidence level that the lower agents have in success in recommending these moves. And then the top agent weighs these things. Wow. They should give them a little cap, but all this is happening like that. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying? This isn't like, hold on, everybody. What is? Harvey, what do you have to say? Well, let's get some Chinese in here and hash it out. And everybody sits there and order some Chinese food. And then you wait for it to come, and then you pick up the meeting from that point on. And then finally, Harvey gives his idea, but he forgot what he was talking about. So he just sits down and eats his a girl. Well, here's a pretty frightening survey. There was a survey of more than 350 AI researchers, and they had the following things to say. And these are the pros that are doing this for a living. They predicted that within ten years, AI will drive better than we do. By 2049, they will be able to write a best selling novel. AI will generate this, and by 2053, be better at performing surgery than humans are. Again, one of the things about the field of artificial intelligence, which I know a lot about. Now, famous, famous for making huge predictions that did not pan out. Sure, but you've also seen it's also famous for beating predictions that have been levied against it. But there is something in there, Chuck, that stands out to me, and that's the idea of an AI writing a novel. Like for a very long time I thought, well, yeah, okay, you can teach a robot arm to put a car part or something somewhere if you wanted to just follow these mechanical things. Or it can use logic and reason, but to create that's different right? That was like the new frontier. It used to be chess and then it was go, the next frontier is creativity. And they're starting to bang on that door big time. There's a game designing AI called Angelina out of the University of Falmouth, which I always want to say foulmouth, but we'll just call it foulmouth like it's supposed to. And Angelina actually comes up with ideas for new games, not a different level or something. You should put a purple loincloth on that player that'll look kind of cool, like new games, but whacked out games that humans would never think of. One example I saw is in a dungeon battle royale game, a player controls like ten players at once, and some you have to sacrifice to be killed to save the others. Like the stuff that human wouldn't necessarily think of. This AI is coming up with well, I mean, when you think of creatively, especially something like writing a novel or a film, if there are only seven stories in that sort of thinking that basically every dramatic story is a variation of one of seven things. Yeah. So, I mean, you can look at like, AI is scary and in some ways it very much is and can be. But there's also definitely a level of excitement of the whole thing. And the idea that there are artificial minds that are coming online or that have come online now that are out there, that they'll just naturally, by definition, see things differently than we do. And the idea that they can come up with stuff that we've never even thought of, that is just going to knock our socks off, hopefully in good ways. That's a really cool thing. And so maybe there's just seven, as far as humans know, but there's an unlimited amount if you put computer minds to thinking about these kinds of things. That's the premise of it. Right? So the robot would be like, you never thought of boy meets girl meets well, trilobite. But see, even that's a variation of right, just imagine something that we've never even thought of. Well, Gina, how they should do this if they do do that, is not is just release a book and not tell anyone that it was written by an AI program. Because if they do that, then it's going to be so under scrutiny, they should secretly release this book and then after it's a New York Times bestseller. Say, meet the whopper the author of this, right? His interests are roller skating, playing TicTacToe, and global thermal nuclear war. All right, so we take a break and get Strickland in here. Yeah, we're going to end the strickland drought because it is about to rain strickland in this piece, 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 Twelvecom podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? Then you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, we're back. And get this. The scent of strict has permeated our place. It's a beautiful scent. It smells like a soldering gun and a circuit board and a feel of lavender and a protein bar. That's fair. I was going to say Draco Noir, but that would have been a lie. Is that how you say it? I always call it Dracar a Dracar. That's fair. Dracar. I always pronounced it Benatan colors. That was what I wore. Oh, is that what you wore? Yeah, during what I call the Year of cologne. I had a couple of seven. This is Scintillating. Why am I here? So we know that you already know, because we talked via email. About this. So we'll tell everybody else. We have brought you in here because you are the master of tech and we are talking tech today, which we've talked about without you before. But frankly, Chuck and I and Jerry huddled and we said this is not quite as good without strict, so let's try something different. Got you. And we're talking about games and machine versus man and that whole evolution and how that's gone super crazy over the last few years. Games without frontiers, like Peter Gabriel would say, or without fear. And we've talked a lot about the evolution of machine learning and how now it's starting to take off like a rocket because they can teach themselves. Right. But one thing we haven't really talked about are solved games. I mean, we talked about chess. Yeah. We talked about go. Right. Would those constitute solve games? Not really. So a solved game is the concept where if you were to assume perfect play on either sides of the game, you would always know how it was going to end, which we always assume perfect play. Right. Yeah. That's kind of our bag. So perfect play just mean that no one ever makes a mistake. So very much the way I do my work stuff, you should know. Exactly. So if you were to take a game like Tic TAC Toe and you assume perfect play on both sides, it is always going to end in a draw. Which is what's, in War games? Yes. The only way to win is not to play, right? Yes. So a game, a game like Connect Four, whoever goes first is always going to win assuming perfect play. Really? Yes. I don't think I've played Connect Four. That's where you drop in a long time. That's when you drop the little tokens. Yeah. Kind of like checkers. We did an interstitial with playing Connect Four, remember? I was faking it, though, and you had perfect place, so I knew it was useless. No, I was going to say that I'm so humiliated by all the Connect Four games that I've lost, starting even. Yeah, but I mean, perfect play, that's something that obviously only the best players typically achieve with significantly complex games. Obviously, the simpler the game, the easier it is to play perfectly. Right. TicTacToe, once you've mastered the basics of Tic TAC Toe and the other person has, you're never really going to win unless someone has just made a silly mistake because they weren't paying attention. Like they put a star instead of an exploit. Right. Which doesn't count. Automatically disqualified you. One thing I found that's very enjoyable is playing with little kids who haven't figured out that TicTacToe is very easy to smash their face on the board and rub it in. The same reason why I like to join in on Little League games, because I can really whale that ball out of the park. Yes. I really miss you. Feel like a man, that's the most tech stuffy thing you've ever said. You really whale that ball out of the park. Well, to be fair, I did just do a tech stuff episode about the technology behind baseball bats. On to listen to that one, actually. It's a lot of fun. So there have been a lot of games that have been solved. Checkers was one that was recently solved back in recently by the early 90s when it was played against a computer called Chinook and chinook? Yeah, like the helicopter or the winds that blow through Alberta. Exactly. And so there are certain games that are more easily solved than others. You do it through an algorithm. But other games, like chess, are more complicated because in chess, you have multiple moves that you can do where you can move a piece back the way you went. Right. You're not committed to going a specific direction with certain people. I never thought about that. Like with a night, you could go right back to where you started on the next move if you wanted to, and that creates more complexity. Right. So the more complex the game, the more difficult it is to solve. And some games are not solvable simply because you'll never know what the full state of the game is from any given moment. Did you have a chance to talk about the difference between perfect knowledge and imperfect knowledge in a game? Yeah, we talked about that some. Yeah. So computers, obviously they do really well if they understand the exact state of the game all the way through. If they have perfect knowledge, all of the information is there on the board. Right, right. And all players can see all information at all times. But games like poker, which you guys talked about, obviously you have imperfect information. You only know part of the state of the game. That's why those games have been more difficult, more challenging for computers to get better than humans until relatively recently. And there have been two major ways of doing that. You either throw more processing power at it, like you get a supercomputer, or you create neural networks, artificial neural networks, and you start teaching computers to, quote, unquote, learn the way people do. So we talked about that, and one of the things that we talked about was how there's this idea that the programmers, especially say the people who are making programs that are playing poker and are getting good at poker aren't exactly sure how the machines are learning to play poker or what they're learning. They're just getting better at poker. Do they know how they're learning poker, or they just know that they're learning poker and that they're good at it. Now, where's the intuition? How is that being learned? An excellent question. The way it typically is learned, especially with artificial neural networks, is that you set up the computer to play millions of hands of poker that are randomly assigned so it's truly as random as computers can get. That's a whole philosophical discussion that I don't think we're ready to go into right now. But you have games come up where the computer is playing itself millions upon millions of times and learning every single time how the statistics play out, how different betting strategies play out. It's sort of partitioning its own mind to play against itself. And through that process, it's as if you as a human player were playing thousands of games with your friends and you start to figure out, oh, when I have these particular cards and they're in my hand, and let's say we're playing Texas hold them and the community cards are these, then I know that generally speaking, maybe three times out of ten I end up winning. Maybe I shouldn't bet. Right. Well, the computer is doing that, but on a scale that far dwarfs what any human can do and in a fraction of the amount of time. Right. It's intuition in the sense of it's just done it so much. Right. But does that mean it's completely ignoring micro expressions and facial cues, so that doesn't even come into play? Yeah, I should say Strickland just nodded yet. Yeah. I was waiting for John. How many years have you been doing? I still nod when I do a solo show and I do a lot of expressive dance. What do you think, Jonathan? I don't know. Jonathan. It gets lonely in here, guys. But yes, what you're saying, all the tells, right? The tells that you would use as a human player, the computer does not pick up typically check data. Yes. Typically what it would do is it would study the outcomes of the games from a purely statistical expression, so that makes more sense. Most of these poker games tend to be computer based poker games. So it's not that it's playing. It's not like there's a computer that says, push ten more chips into the table. It's exactly a little winky face, a motocon. Like, I don't have good cards. No, it's all usually over. Sort of like internet poker, which a lot of the people who play professional poker cut their teeth on, especially in the more recent generations of professional poker players. Kids today. Yeah. They don't know what it's like being a smoky saloon. Like moneymaker. When Money Maker rose to the top a few years ago, like a decade ago now, he had come from the world of internet poker and so he was using those same sort of skills in a real world setting. But obviously there are subtle things that we humans do in our expressions that computers do not pick up on. And in fact, that leads us sort of into the realm of games where computers don't do as well as humans. Yeah. Is that list you sent a joke or is it real? No, that's real. It does seem like it's weird. Like one of the games on. There is pictionary, for example, tag or tag. Yeah, some of these sounds silly, but when you start to think about them in terms of computation and robotics, you start to realize how incredibly complex it is from a technical perspective, but incredibly easy it is for your average human being. Okay, so with humans, a game of tag. Once you know the basics, it's all instinct. You know what to do. You run after the person, you try to catch up with them and you tag them, but you also know, push them in the back as hard as you can. Well, if you're Josh, you push them as hard as you can. But most of us, we tag and we're not trying to cause harm. Robots, however, robots not so good on the second stuff stuffiest thing you said. I'm just saying, Issac, Asimov's rules of robotics aside, robots are not very good at judging how hard they have to hit something in order to make contact. Right? Yeah. They're not as good at even your bipedal robots that walk around like people, even the ones that can run and do flips and stuff. Have you seen that one the other day? That the footage of that thing running and jumping. It's really impressive and super creepy. Yeah, but even so, that's a clip of the best of if you ever see the clips where they show all the times the robots falling over or pouring hot coffee in someone's head. Yes, but they always play those clip shows to Yankee Stack. Yes, this is true. So DARPA had its big robotics challenge a few years ago where they had bipedal robots try to go through a scenario that was simulating the fukushima nuclear disaster. So the interesting thing was the robot had to complete a series of tasks that would have been mundane to humans. Things like open up a door and walk through it and pick up a power tool and use it against a wall. And you can watch the footage of some of these robots doing things like being unable to open the door because they can't tell if they need to pull or push, or they open the door, but then immediately fall over the threshold of the door. Right. And when you see that, you realize as advanced as robotics is, as advanced as machine learning has become, and as incredible as our technology has progressed, there are still things that are fundamentally simple to your average human that are incredibly complicated from a technical standpoint. Like a six year old can play jinga better than a robot. Right, okay. But the thing is, we're talking robots here, and as we go more and more and more online and our world becomes more and more web based rather than reality based, doesn't the fact that a robot can't walk through a door matter less and less? And the idea that machines are learning intellect and the roboticity you just blew my mind that that's becoming more and more vital and important and something we should be paying attention it absolutely is something we should pay attention to. I mean, we have robotic stock traders. They're trading thousands of trades per second. Right. So fast that we have had stock market booms and crashes that last less than a second long due to that. So the robot army that will ultimately defeat us is not something from the Terminator. It's invisible. Right. It's online. It will be online. It's what's determining our retirement. Right. Yeah. The global economy or our municipal water supply or whatever. Yeah. The fascinating thing to me about this is not just that we're training machine intelligence to learn and to perform at a level better than humans, but that we're putting a lot of trust in those devices and things that have really incredible impact on our lives. Significant enough impact where if things were to go south, it would be really bad for us and not in that Terminator respect. Terminator is a terrifying, dystopian science fiction story. But then when you realize what could really happen behind the scenes, you think the robots don't have to do any physical harm to us to really mess things up. Right. So there are certainly some cases for us to be very vigilant in the way we deploy artificial intelligence right from the outset. Exactly. But is it too late? Depends. No, not necessarily. I don't think it's too late, but I think it's getting to that point of no return very quickly. By December of this year. Yeah. Well, if you're someone like Elon Musk, you'd say, if we don't do something now, we're totally going to plummet off the edge of the cliff. But now is a window that is rapidly closing. Yes. Now is a time where we've got a deadline. We don't know exactly when that deadline is going to be up, but we know that it's not getting further out. We're just getting closer to that deadline. And a lot of this is covered in deep conversations and the artificial intelligence and machine learning fields that has been going on for ages, to the point where you even have bodies like the European Union that have debated on concepts like granting personhood to artificial intelligence. This is a really fascinating and deep subject. And the games thing is a great entry point into having that conversation. I'm lucky if I can win a game of chess against another human being. Oh, yeah, right. So I can't even describe chess. My big thing is I do that night thing. I call it the Night Shuffle. I just move them back and forth. Right. I just cast. If I can castle, then I'm so happy. And that's the third tech stuffiest thing to come in three S. Well, Strict, thank you for stopping by. I think you should stick around for listener mail. I think you should, too. I'd love to throw out any funny comments that you have. I'll throw out comments, and then Jerry can decide which ones are funny. Okay. All right, fair enough. All right, so if you want to know more about AI, go listen to Tech Stuff. Strict does this every week. What days? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Wow. That's amazing, buddy. And wherever you find your podcast. Yes. Okay. And you've been doing it for years, so if you love this, there's a whole big backlog 900 plus episode. You're celebrating your ten year as well, right? Yes, I sure am. We'll be turning ten and tech stuff on June 11. Congratulations. Thanks. Well, since I said Happy anniversary, it means it's time for listing or mail. Guys. I'm going to call this Matt graining and cultural relativism. Hey, guys. Love your podcast so much. The massive archive makes for endless learning and entertainment. My favorite part is you are such rad guys, including Strickland, and I could totally imagine how do they know? I can totally imagine myself getting a beer with you, too, but without Strickland. Your Simpsons episodes were absolutely perfect. I used to live in Portland and drove on Flanders and love Joy Streets a lot. Wait. Is this Matt Greening? No. Okay. Matt Greening. Drew Bart in the sidewalk cement behind Lincoln High School in downtown Portland. You can Google that. I would like to offer one interesting observation, though. I've noticed that on several episodes, you guys have said that you are cultural relativist. Is that pronounced right? Yeah. But then in nearly every episode, I hear you pass moral judgments on all the messed up stuff that people do, whether it's racism, preach shows, or crematoriums bearing bodies on the fly. You guys are never shy to condemn something that deserves to be condemned. Reminds me of something I read from Yale sociologist Philip Gorski, who points out that our own relativism is rarely as radical as our theory requires. We can't be complete relativists in our daily lives. He then gives the example of how academic, social scientists, or die hard relativists get furious and moralistic at the data fudging of other researchers. Anyway, love the show, guys. Love tech Stuff especially, and will forever be indebted to you for your hilarity and knowledgeability. Cheers. Jesse Lusko. PS. Go. Tech Stuff. That's sweet. How about that? Yeah, thanks a lot, Jesse. There was an actual episode, and I don't remember which one it was, where we abandon our cultural relativism. Do you remember? Because we used to just be like, no judgment. No judgment. We just can't judge. And then finally we're like, you know what? Don't. That's not true. We changed our philosophy to include the idea that there are moral absolutes that are universal, although sometimes we are just judgy. Even beyond that, look at us. Yeah. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark and Johnstricland is at Johnstricland. That's correct. On Twitter. Chucks atmospherecrush. And you have a text of HSW Twitter, right? That's right. And then we also have SYSK podcast. We're on Facebook. Comstuffyshehnov techstuffycresh. Do you have a movie crush page for Facebook? Yeah, that's actually where I spend most of my time. Oh, I didn't know that time. And then there's also a Slashstepyteknow Facebook page. You guys have a lot of Facebook to do it too. So many social media flying around. You can send us an email to Stuffpodcast@housesteporks.com. You can send John an email to Techstuff@housetopworks.com. Nice. And then hang out with us at our home on the Web stuffyshow.com and just go to Tech stuff. Just search it in Google. I come up all the time. Fair enough. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
What's a brownfield remediation project? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-a-brownfield-remediation-project | The EPA defines a brownfield as land that is abandoned because redevelopment is complicated by possible environmental contamination. Tune in as Chuck and Josh examine the process of redeveloping a brownfield in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | The EPA defines a brownfield as land that is abandoned because redevelopment is complicated by possible environmental contamination. Tune in as Chuck and Josh examine the process of redeveloping a brownfield in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:11:48 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=16, tm_min=11, tm_sec=48, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=153, tm_isdst=0) | 17592069 | 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. I'm Josh Clark. Guess who who's with me. And I'm Chuck Bryant. That's right. And weird this stuff you should know, team. That's right. The fat, lumpy fingernails. Hairy Teepee stuff you should know. Team. We're a teratoma. I know you hate that, don't you? I'm saying it for one listener for Racking Up right now. Right. That's who that's for. Who is you when you listen to your own podcast next week? No, you. You. Yes. Okay, can we get on with it? Let's do this. Chuck. Hey, Josh. What's a brownfield? That's so funny you should ask, Chuck. I know what a brownfield is, and it's even the name of this podcast. So I will tell you as follows. Yes. Basically, a brownfield is any abandoned industrial site, old dry cleaners, an old gas station. Sure. Any place where there's a potential for a local environmental contamination. Right. But not necessarily proven to have contamination. Right. It can just be something that looks like it or someone might suspect if there was a bunch of chemicals there at one point in time or over the years, consistently, somebody could reasonably say, I'll bet that place is contaminated. Right. Which is not to be confused with the Super Fund. Really? You bust the super fund out this early? Let me redact that statement. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, Super Fun absolutely. Is contaminated. It is. With serious hazardous waste. Right. And actually, I was looking around on the EPA's website, because it's what I do. Sure. And there's several super fund sites slated for clean up in Georgia, but I came across one that I knew you'd be particularly interested in. Hit me. Your house. I'm kidding. There's robins Air Force Base in Houston County. I think it's a little north of here. Yeah. Is Houston County north of here? I don't know. Okay. Well, anyway, Robins Air Force Base is up there, and they have an old sledge pond. Okay. And in the they said, you know what? We've got these old cans of paint. Throw them in the sludge pond. We have all this trash. Throw it in the sludge pond. So they kept throwing stuff in the sludge old tires, refrigerator. And then finally, once the 70s rolled around, and there was such thing as the EPA and Earth Day and all that, the airport and covered it up with 5ft of loam. What's that? It's like sandy silt. Okay. Like real thick sand. So they made a beach, they just covered it over. Right. Which actually, again yeah, that was a stupid thing to do. Right. And now it's a super fun site. Now you clean up all the loan in addition to everything else. Here's where it gets interesting. Why I think you'd be interested in it. Okay. In just a little sense, it's kind of crammed in there. They were like yeah, there's like, old chemical waste. There's old material waste. And also there's unexploded ordinance and Agent Orange. Really? There's Agent Orange and a sludge pond on Robins Air Force Base. So this stuff was leftover from Vietnam and they just dumped it there? Probably, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So super fun side is a place where there's Agent Orange under 5ft of loan. Right. And it's seeping into the groundwater and all that. Yeah, but like you said, these have been clearly identified. The government knows about them. They're doing their best to clean it up. Actually, I don't know if that last part is true. But they know about them. Right. And at the very least, they've gone into the trouble of identifying them. Right, sure. But a brown field is different. Like you said, it's potentially contaminated. It could be contaminated. It's still a brown field, but it's not so contaminated. Or the materials that have contaminated that are so dangerous that you can't use the site again. Well, no, in fact, quite the opposite. They're trying to encourage the use of these sites. Right. And actually, Chuck, what makes brownfield so interesting to me is they're not just like an environmental hazard, they're an economic hazard as well. Right. Because usually, let's say we've talked about urban exploration before, right? Sure. There's all these old abandoned industrial sites or something like that, and they're just sitting there. They're being left to rot. They're derelict because no one wants to do anything with them. And the reason why is because there's so much potential liability. Like, let's say you or I got a wild hair and we wanted to invest in a new mixed use development. Sounds good. So we buy some old industrial site kind of on the edge of town. Heck, in the middle of town, right. Atlantic Steel here in Atlanta. Yeah. Atlantic Station was a brownfield redevelopment remediation site. Absolutely. So we buy this thing, everything's hunky dory, and we're starting to get some business. We've got some tenants in our buildings. There's people walking their dogs. I see some guy flying a kite. There's a cute little girl with bows in her hair. She looks like she's going to the Gap for the first time ever, and pretty excited about it. I wouldn't be. Right? And then, bam, out of nowhere, somebody finds out that the groundwater under our site is contaminated. Right. Old petroleum investors pull out. Buddy, you better hope we have investors sued away at this point. Yeah, sure. Yeah. If it's all our money sunk into it, not only are we getting sued, we're going to lose all of our tenants. We're in big trouble. Right, which is why people stay away from brownfield sites. But if we remediate brownfield sites, and we'll get into remediation in a second, if we remediate brownfield sites, not only do these old hulking, rotting, derelict places get rebuilt, which is bad for urban explorers, but good for everybody else. It actually saves virgin tracts of land, woodland, other areas. It keeps green space out there. We don't have to develop green space exactly, because we're reusing land rather than just abandoning. Right. And that's one of the great things about brownfield areas, is that it's not, like you said, completely untouched. So what you've got probably in place is some infrastructure. You have water lines, you have gas lines and stuff like that. Any kind of line? Yeah, any kind of line. So that's awesome. It's not as expensive. No, it's not. In theory. You don't have to lay down that new infrastructure. You don't have to lay the pipe, so to speak. That's exactly right, Chuck. The infrastructure is already their pipes and all. You know how many brownfields are in the United States estimated I want to hear it, baby. $450,000. That's a lot of brownfield sites. It is, yeah. That's a lot of real estate. It is. And what you were saying before, the fact that there's infrastructure there, there are buildings there. This makes brownfield sites real property. Right? Right. Well, that means you get whatever is on the property. The buildings are yours, the mineral rights are yours. It's all there for the taking. Okay, but if there's so much liability attached right. How do you overcome this kind of thing? Well, what do you mean? Like, how do you clean it up? Well, no, I mean, how do you attract people to brownfield sites rather than have them go cut down a bunch of trees and just build on land that they don't have to worry about is contaminated? Well, one way is with incentives, government incentives. There's a ton of them, aren't there? Tons, dude. Yeah, it's happening all over the place. Let's hear about them. Well, I went to the news section of Google to find out, like, the latest breaking news, and there were literally a dozen stories on brownfield remediation. Like, this week, it's definitely picking up all over the place. And this is, I should say, brownfield remediation has been, like, a viable alternative, or at least a government backed alternative since, I think, the early to mid 90s. Right. That's the impression I have. You? Yes. Okay. Texas is getting $2.2 million worth of funds nice. To remediate some of these brown feds. From the feds. From the feds. Baltimore has potentially more than $1,000 contaminated properties. I can believe that. I went to Baltimore recently, and hey, Baltimore shouts out, but I can believe it. Okay, we love you, but, boy, it's just like one big brown field. And actually, they have this place remember Bucket, 1997? Sorry, I wasn't a big bucket guy, but yeah, they have a place there that is Buckhead 1997. It's like a time machine. It's called power station live. And it looks like a remediated brownfield site. And it's crazy. It's like everybody just finished watching the most recent episode of France. It's a Thursday night, and now they're going out. Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So getting back to the different projects, maine is getting about $6.1 million. I don't know much about Maine Springfield situation. Well, it's probably nicer looking, I would guess. Sure. But 6.1 million, that's a lot of money, considering Baltimore is only getting about $400,000. That's the problem with the bailout. One and a half trillion dollars. $6 million. Seems like peanuts these days. It does. Yeah. So Georgia actually is happening right here, too. Governor Purdue has signed a bill which is going to help clean up 600 polluted sites here in our own state. That's awesome. Yeah. I got a friend that works in hazardous waste cleanup. Oh, really? Yeah, he worked at Atlantic Station, and when there's, like, a train derailment and spill hazardous chemicals, he manages the site. A train derails in my neighborhood once when I was younger, but it just spelled grain. Well, he typed it. Well, I don't know. They usually kind of clean up any kind of derailment. Okay. Yeah. Cool stuff, though. Yeah, that is very cool. So, yeah, like you were saying, there's a bunch of incentive programs. Yeah, you're just talking about the Feds doling out money, big time. States do out money, too. And one of the ways that they do it that's almost specifically for remediation projects and reuse projects is a tax increment financing. Have you heard about this? Yeah. Go ahead, though. Okay. So basically what the government does is, let's say it's a local or state government, they say, you know what? If you remediate the site and you turn it into a big mixed use development, all the area around it, if it's successful, is going to start attracting businesses. The real estate values around this area are going to go up. If the real estate values go up and all these businesses and condos and all that stuff goes up, too, we're going to start as a government. We're going to start making more money off of it. It's going to increase our tax base. So we're going to help fund your brownfield, remediation and reuse project by giving you money based on what we think we can make in the future because you're raising the tax value of the real estate in the area. What a cool idea. It's a very cool idea. Well, and also, they also give tax breaks to people that are doing this, right? Sure. For the cost of the cleanup. Yeah. I think we should look into getting a brownfield together. Seriously? We can build that gap. We can? Sure. If we need some dough. So not a bad idea. So, Chuck, how do you remediate a brownfield? Well, first thing you got to do, my friend, is go out to the site, conduct an assessment, some soil samples, look at what you're get those tested, see what you're looking at, seeing just how contaminated it is, and confirm what's there and what's not there. And the EPA says that nearly one third of these sites are 100% contamination free. So that's awesome. If you get lucky and pick the right site, your gold. Right. And there is a huge process involved, and there's actually a huge, I guess, sub construction industry, probably related very closely to the demolition industry that is engaged in remediating sites. And it is huge, massive work depending on if the area is contaminated and what the pollutant is. Right. Because you remember when we did our webcast and I think it was last week or whatever we were talking about this week. Wow. Everything is blending together these days. We were talking about the lost nuclear bombs. Yes. Missing H bombs. And we're saying in Florence, South Carolina there's a sizable chunk of Florence, South Carolina that's now in Savannah. Right. What they did was remediate that site. Right. Because the bomb exploded, the TNT exploded, not the actual nuclear part of it, thank goodness. Sure. But it was still spewed contaminated metal and stuff all over the place. Yeah. So they scooped it up and shipped it to Savannah. That's exactly right. So removing soil, contaminated soil is actually physically getting it out of there and storing it in a safe place that's remediation. A lot of times the water is tainted, so you have to remediate that. And actually there's some pretty cool bacteria out there that actually eat petroleum right. And convert it into, like, harmless compounds. That's awesome. Yeah. So there's all sorts of water treatment equipment that you run it through, and this bacteria just eats the stuff and spits and water out the other end. You can plant vegetation. Certain vegetation will suck out the chemicals from the ground, especially. A lot of invasive species of trees planted in a brownfield area will just suck it up and then you just remove the trees. Right. And they did say they mentioned that covering it up can work, too, which was what you're talking about the loan. But clearly not if you can't cover up everything. Right. It depends on what it is. And also the EPA is starting to really kind of encourage green brownfield remediation. Greenfield remediation. Yeah, that's totally different. A green brownfield remediation is basically remediation practices that we're already using, but say throwing some windmills on the site to power the equipment you're using, like the equipment that remediates the water or decontaminates the water, use up a lot of energy. Why not power it with windmill or solar or something like that, trying to use alternative fuels on the heavy machinery that you're removing the top soil with, stuff like that. So there's a lot going on. And I got to tell you, we're at 6 billion people. Agriculture has a carrying capacity of 10 billion people. Right. We're coming up on that. I think some predictions are 2050. Land is important. It's very important. We need to start reusing it rather than just such a wasteful, consumer disposable society species, even yes. Like, oh, that's an old gas station. Let's build a new one across the street. Just let that one sit there. Yeah. And actually, I used to work in a town in a county down south of here, and the mayor's brother owned a gas station and he sold it to the city. Well, it turned out that the city found out that there was an underground storage tank for the gas that had leaked and the soil was contaminated. That was that. Nothing ever came of it. Yeah, there's quite a few. I've seen some abandoned gas stations around Decatur. They've been there for years. Like Kudzu Swamp. Yeah, because nobody can do anything with it. Well, hopefully this is changing. Or I shouldn't say no one can do anything with it. It kind of contradicts our entire podcast, let me say. People are afraid that they're not going to be able to do anything with it. Right. But there's a lot of incentives, a lot of tax breaks, and a lot of money being sold out. So if you're a developer, man, I say get on it. Yeah, I think we should get on it, too. Right after Chuck, since we have nothing to plug, listen, or mail. Right. Are we there? Is that your set up? That was it. Beautiful listener mail time. Josh Today. I'm just going to call this scary dreams of an impressionable 15 year old girl. Awesome. Fan mail. So Shelby, who says she's an impressionable 15 year old girl, wrote us. She says, Guys, you have scared me out of my mind. I had an extremely vivid nightmare last night, and I had way too much in common with your podcast. I was a victim of a second Holocaust in her dream. Just her. I think you have to have more than one person for a Holocaust. Well, give her a break. She's 15. Okay. The Disney corporation was behind it. Awesome. But I don't know what their goal was in killing millions of people. Anyway, they started mass producing propaganda films, and we're aiming to rule the world and establish Disneyism as a mandatory global religion. Some might say that's happening for real. Wow. I was in a very large movie theater with one such film being played, and at the end, a Disney rep announced that the entire audience was going to die. The rest of my dream consisted of me dodging bullets, being fired at me by various mascots inside of, and doing forced labor, making parts for the Disneyland trains, which brought new prisoners from the parking lot and working on the Disneyland railroad savage beatings abounded. Awesome. It's so cool. All prisoners had to be stamped on the forehead with one of those reentry stamps that smell like lemons. Like amusement park. Yeah. My number was D 31749. I can't believe she remembers all this. The gates of the entrance of the park redwork makes you the happiest person on earth. And the statue of Walt disney standing next to Mickey Mouse was replaced with one of Mickey Mouse and Hitler. Can't believe this girl's. Sistine. Poor thing. At the end, the park camp was liberated, but I don't know by who or whom. But that's not the point. The point is that I spontaneously had this nightmare with all of these details similar to your podcast before I even knew the title of it. That really creeps me out. I'll keep listening. Anyway, what was her name again? Shelby. Shelby. You have one of the more fertile imaginations I've ever encountered. Beautiful. I'm sorry you were terrified, but you're going to go places. Yeah. Right now at the Disney Corporation here, they're thinking, we need to find the shelves. It's like Italy here. It is? Yeah. So if you want to reveal your innermost thoughts and fears or you want to tell us what you think about the Disney Company or just say hi, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blogs on the Houseofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Urban 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." | ||
Hula-Hoops: The Toy That's A Shape | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/hula-hoops-the-toy-thats-a-shape | We've covered our fair share of pop-culture icons and here is another - Hula-Hoops. They've been around since ancient time in some form or another, but made their name in during the Hoop Boom of the 1950s. Learn all about this popular fad and more. | We've covered our fair share of pop-culture icons and here is another - Hula-Hoops. They've been around since ancient time in some form or another, but made their name in during the Hoop Boom of the 1950s. Learn all about this popular fad and more. | Thu, 13 Aug 2015 14:07:25 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=14, tm_min=7, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=225, tm_isdst=0) | 37862590 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. How's it going? It's fine. Great. How's it going with you? Good. Jerry is distracting me a little bit because all I see in my peripheral vision is her practicing her new Hula Fire dance routine. It's pretty dangerous. It's dangerous. But it's it's interesting to see out of the corner of one's eye. It really is. Yes. Performance art. Performance hula art. Can you hula hoop? I cannot, sir. I'm too self conscious, too to even try it. Yeah. It's a grown man, 44 year old man hula hooping. Plus, when I do it, like, as I rotate my hips, it makes the sound gyrate. Rotate my hips? Yeah, it makes the sound of, like, almost congealed jello just slapping around in the bowl. You know what I mean? I don't want to make that sound. Yeah. But I did see at the East Atlanta Strut festivals. One of Atlanta's many great neighborhood festivals, I believe. The Strut, to me is known for having the better music of most of the festivals. Okay. And our buddy Craig Johnson's band played spaceknife. Not space. Knife. I can't remember the name of this band, but that band is no longer. Now he's got a new band. Even that guy is always coming up with new stuff. You would never pan him down too good. You should check out Space Knife, though. People on the web, you can find it. It's good. It was in our TV show, too. Yeah, that's his alter ego. But anyway, Craig's band was playing, and I was pretty hula naive. Hoop naive. Okay. At this point and a few years ago, and there was this lady doing a hula routine to his band playing, and I videoed it. It was so awesome. So she was hoop dancing. Hoop dancing? Yeah, like the neck, the arms, the legs, moving around with it. Like supremely talented hoop. Yeah. If you go onto the web and type in hoop dancing, it's going to bring up some pretty impressive videos. Yeah. And it's quite a workout. I could tell. We'll get to that. But just watching her, I got tired, and so I drank another beer and just listen to music. Yeah. And pretended you were hula hooping in your head. Yeah. You're like, I'm so good at this in my head. But I was like, man, that's a thing again. I had no idea. But it's a big thing. Yeah, hula hooping. But it's been around for a while. Yes, it has. For example, Chuck, did you know, as Robert points out, robert Lam wrote this article from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and he says that the hula hoop has been around in some form or fashion since before most of the world's religions. Wow, that's really saying something. That is saying something. So let's get in the wayback machine. Oh, we're going way back, aren't we? Yeah. Let's go back to 1000 BC. My friend. We're in Egypt, and there are little children, Egyptian children, with dried up grapevines they've made into hoops, playing with them. And there's some Egyptian who's like, get off of my patch of sand, kids. Yeah. Instead of a lawn. Sure, I get it. Sounds good. That was all right. So they no doubt used them in similar ways that we did today. But one thing they did, which was a big sporting thing to do for a long time, which I don't get personally, the fun value that is, is using a stick to push a Hula Hoop down the road. I think the fun in it is that the hula hoop, as it's traveling down the road, which does seem to be the oldest use of the hoop as playtime activity. Right, yeah. It wants to fall it wants to fall over. Sure. Right. So if you can keep it going, then there's probably a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction that you can carry all the way to bedtime with and maybe have good dreams because of yeah. I don't even see if you had a plastic polyethylene hula hoop, the modern hoop. I don't see how a stick like, how you would even push it. You would want a stick with maybe like a fork. No, probably something like a stick with a big wad of chewed bubblegum on it to just have some sort of point of contact. Because as we'll see when we talk about Hula Hoop physics, friction plays a big part in making Hula hoops. Hula hoop, yes. Around the waist, that is. Well, in this case, as well as the stick makes contact with the hoop, you're using friction to push it along. Yeah, good point. So I see your point. Like, if you're going to use a stick on a plastic, it's going to slide off. It's going to want to maybe it scares me. That's why I think it's dumb. Maybe I would be made a fool of by the hoop. Intimidated. Maybe at first. But Chuck, you would have to hang in there and stick with it, and pretty soon you'd be rolling hoops. Like an Egyptian kid. Yeah, like an ancient Egyptian child. Yeah. Hoop rolling was a big deal throughout ancient Greece as well. In Rome, they decorated them with bells and things and toys. Fifth century BC. There. You ever heard of Ganymed? Of course, ganymede, he was a handsome hero. Oh, he was handsome. Supposedly there's an old fifth century BC earn of him where he's holding a rooster that was apparently a gift from Zeus. Yeah. And a Hula Hoop. Clearly a Hula hoop. And apparently this discovery, I'm not sure why it's called the Berlin painter earn, but it is again, no idea. But apparently they said, well, I wonder if hoops played a role in the earliest olympics. And I guess they discredited that idea now, but for a while, because of this, earn this picture of Ganymede with a hoop. They wondered, was it a sport? Yeah, an Olympic sport. But the Greeks supposedly did use hoops for physical fitness as, like, a physical activity, in very much the same way it's become popular today. I would imagine an Olympic hula hooper would be sort of like, what's the sport? The curler of today, kind of like in ancient Greece, like, hey, what do you throw the hammer? What do you do? Although I would guess it would probably be more akin to the hula hoopers of today. Yeah. The hoop roller is what the sport would have been. That'd be more like curling, right? Hula hooping. That's tough, man. It is tough. What else? The ancient Britons, they had a game called the battle game called kill the hoop. Yeah, I like this one. When they would roll the hoop and try to throw a spear through it. Pretty neat and dangerous. And apparently they also used it in the hula method. And people get injured. Yeah. There was a 14th or 15th century, 14th century hula hoop craze in Britain. Isn't that bizarre? That is weird. And yeah, people are getting injured. There was a proclamation by the early physicians. They would pull up their crows mask, their plague mask just long enough to be like, stay away from hula hoops. Steer clear of those things. Yeah. The warning was hoops kill was, I guess, what was posted on the church door. And this is like in addition to being in the way of a spear that was being thrown at a rolling hoop, this is just from hula hooping. I would stay away from the hoops altogether if I was an ancient Brittan. Yeah, because really, if you're like an ancient Britton, you're going from zero to 60 as far as physical fitness goes once you're hula hooping. Oh, yeah. You know, just because you're not just sitting around eating, like, lambs brains. Right, yeah. Drinking meat. What else? The Native Americans have a long culture of using the hoop. In New Mexico, the Tow Pueblo people, they use them in ritual dances, private healing ceremonies. And did you look up this chunky thing? No. Did you find the chunky reference? I did. The Kahokian native Americans. That was an unusual way to pronounce that. How would you say it? Cahokian. I'm thinking Native American would be hookey in. Okay, that's fine. Near St. Louis, apparently, is where they played this game Chunky, which I just had to look it up because the game called chunky with an EY. And from what I saw, it was more of a small stone disc than, like, a hula hoop okay looking thing. And it was like kill the hoop, though in Britain, right? Yeah. They would throw a stick. Apparently it looked like a combination of botchie and kill the hoop. Weird, because I think they would try and throw the spear where the disk would eventually land and the closest to the disc one. So they're predicting where the hoop would fall. I guess this makes sense. Although that's not really like, Botchy at all. There's a proximity element that's Botchy s. Yeah. Well put. But I don't know. I don't know. Once I saw that and saw pictures, I was like, I don't even know if they should be in this article because it's like a small donut. It's a hoop of sorts, I guess. So it's a stretch, if you ask me. But it was a big spectator sport. Like, 50 acres. Stadiums of people would watch this. Wow. Would go to the chunky games. Chunky matches. So there was chunky matches in Kahukia? Yeah. And the pueblo, I think, as you said, they used hoops. And they weren't the only ones. There were other tribes from all over North America, and mesoamerica, I believe, that used hoops for dancing. And apparently it was in 1930. A guy named Tony White Cloud, who was a Yamaz pueblo down in New Mexico, did, like, a hoop dance in public and basically brought it back. It had been virtually lost to the ages, at least as far as the average American was concerned. Most people didn't know this was the thing. Luckily, Tony White was like, check this out. Did an awesome hoop dance. And then by 1991, there were national hoop dancing competitions in New Mexico. And they're a big deal still to the state. Yeah, of course. I think did he kick off the American craze? Yes. No, he didn't. He was strictly Native American. Hoop dancing. Got you. Not hula hooping. Okay, well, let's take a break, actually, because this is the big revelation here. That's right. All right, Josh. We're at that point where mainstream America goes hoop crazy, but to get to that point, we actually have to go backwards again in time for a second back in the way back machine. So let's get it running. Let's go to, I don't know, Fiji or Tahiti or Polynesia. And it's the 18th century. Yeah. See all these British sailors? Can we drink some rum? Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. In addition to the rum we've already drank today. All right, good. So the British sailors that you see here are noticing a holiday dance, right. And they're filing it away in their mental catalog. And now when they reach Britton again yeah. Why have we been saying it like that? I don't know. They notice that it bears a striking resemblance to what people do with the hula hoop. You gyrate every time you say that, by the way. Can't not do it. Okay. So the term hula became applied to the hoop, especially when you used your hips to gyrate to rotate them. When you rotate your hips with a hoop, these British sailors ended up applying the word hula to it, and it stuck. That's where it came from was polynesia. Right? Even though there was no hoop involved in polynesia. Correct. Yes. They just kind of ganked that word for their own purposes is 1997 all over again. That was a big 90s term, wasn't it? Yeah. Let's go watch some X Files. Let's. Actually yes. The movie is coming out soon, right? Yeah. They're doing another one, aren't they? Yeah. That thing will never die. I don't think it should. No, keep doing movies. That's what I say. So we mentioned that the Greeks, I believe, used it for physical fitness, right? I don't think we said that. I think I said it. Okay. The Swiss actually came to adopt it for the same reasons, too, in the 19th century and early 20th century. Yeah. Someone named Emil jacques Del Crossey. That was great. That's tough. I had a program called your Rhythmics. Of course. I started seeing Sweet Dreams this morning, of course, because of that. And I've been seeing it all day as a result. So that was a special training program and it was apparently a big deal. It was a big deal. So your Rhythmics used hoops for, basically, physical fitness, but also interpretive dance, that kind of stuff. It was a combination of it was like dance training is what I can gather. And it used hoops. The reason that we're mentioning this when we're talking about the American craze is that it directly led to the American craze, potentially because your rhythmic spread from Switzerland to Great Britain and it was brought in as part of a PE class in Australia. And it was in Australia that the founders of WAMO were inspired to create the modern hula hoop that we think of today. Boom. So it's possible they watched a rhythmics class or heard about with Australian kids and then said, well, this is clearly something of Australian design and let's bring it to the US. And start a craze. They said Sweet Dreams were made of these. Yeah. This was Richard Ner and Arthur Spud. Melon. Melon. Sounds like M-L-O-N. Like Thornton Melon. Don't tease me with that movie. The great Back to School, I saw a bit of that recently and the only thought through my head was like, man, why couldn't I have caught this from the beginning? Because I wanted to see it all, man. His son is pasty. Oh, yeah. I thought you were saying that was a line for the movie. It should have been, yes. His son, Keith Gordon, who became a great movie director. Really? Yeah. The guy from Christine and back to school. Yeah. He gave up acting and started directing movies and directed a bunch of good movies. One called waking the dead. You should see I thought Keith Gordon costarred and they live. I don't know. Maybe. I'll have to check that. So where were we? Oh, yes, the two founders of Whammo. They said. You know what? Let's take these wooden hoops. Let's make them out of polyethylene. Let's make them 40 inches, and let's charge 198 for them and make them all kinds of fun colors. Yeah. And boom. The hula hoop craze in 1958 was born. It was the definition of a flash in the pan craze. Yeah. A lot of money in a very short span of time, like a summer, basically. Pretty much. In 1958, WAMO released it, and by the end of 1958, these things were rotting in the warehouse. But in the meantime, they sold globally from the summer to the end of 1958. 100 million hulu. Yes. More than that, I think. Bam. My brain. Yeah. You forgot what we were talking about. I almost said frisbee. Did we do one on the frisbee? No. I thought we had, but we haven't, have we? No, we do one on the boomerang. Oh, right. It's just like a frisbee, but not like a dangerous frisbee. So, they sell all these hula hoops. They make a ton of money, like, over $50 million in a short span of time, which I'm sure they weren't happy with, that it didn't last. But they're also probably, like an injection of cash. Like, that is great for any business. Yeah. Then they moved on to the frisbee and made even more money. Yeah. And they did not secure a patent for it. I guess it didn't matter in the long run. Well, they couldn't because it was so demonstrably an ancient invention that nobody could patent it. Nope. But they trademarked it. They did. They trademarked the name hula hoop in the United States, which is why we still call it hula hoop today, I guess. Yeah. We should probably put the title with r in a circle for this. Oh, yeah, we should do that. Like barbie. It was named the number 35 toy of all time by time magazine. And they know toys. They know their toys. And then from 1968 to 1981, there were national hula hoop contests held, and I guess in the early 80s, people were finished with it. There were also, like, a tremendous amount of musical singles released called the hulu hoop song. Oh, really? Different people recorded different songs about hula hooping? Doesn't surprise me. Yeah. It was a craze. Big time. Yes. And you say that they were done with it by the 80s. Not true. The national competition. So if you look at hula hooping records, the most recent hula hoop records from 2009 wow. But was that part of a national competition? Probably. A guy named aaron hibbs. He just hula hooped for 74 hours and 54 minutes. Wow. He broke the record of I couldn't even stand up for that long. He broke the record of a girl named kim koberley. She held the record twice in 1978 for 54 hours and in 1984 for 72 hours. Wow. It's pretty impressive. Like, hundreds of them at once. Yeah. There's a guy named Paul dizzyhips Blair who set the record in 2009 with 132 hoops at the same time. Wow, that's impressive. He's basically probably just like the Michelin Man made of hula hoops. Yeah. That would tell you about the surface area. Man costume in Athens. No, I was out on Halloween in Athens in college, and dude, I know the guy's name is Blake. You may have seen him. He had big red dreadlocks. Kind of a short guy. Just a ubiquitous athens, dude. No, he looks kind of in my neighborhood now. I still see him every once in a while. We call him Sideshow Blake because of Sideshow Bob. Sure. And he came in the bar, in the Georgia bar, and he had these foam disks around his arms, around his legs, around his waist and neck that were huge, like probably 4ft across. And he was surface area man. That was his costume. Because when he moved around, he took up, like, probably 75 space, and he would just move through the bar and say, I'm Surface Area Man. And I'll always remember every time I see Blake I saw him at the grocery store the other day. Was he dressed like that? No, he wouldn't fit down the grocery aisle. Does he have dreads still? Yeah. Does he really? Still rocking the red dreads? He's dedicated. He looks exactly the same, actually. But we weren't friends, actually. I'm going to just walk by him and go, surface Area Man. You should. I'm going to do it. All right, let's talk about the Hudsocker Proxy for a quick moment and then we'll take another break. Okay. Did you ever see that one? I don't think I made it through that one. The Coen brothers? Yeah. Not all of their movies are great. I disagree. I love The Coen Brothers, but some of their movies think, oh, boy, they're part of my 100% Club, where every movie they've made has been great. That is wrong. Which other ones don't you like? The man who wasn't there. Loved it. Bob Robertson. They didn't. That wasn't theirs. Well, it was terrible. Okay. The Hudsucker Proxy, too. I liked it. I would put it at Lester Cohen's for sure. You'd have to. But I enjoyed it quite a bit. Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Lee and Paul Newman in a fictitious tale of the invention of the hula hoop. It is not the true biopic of the invention of the Hula hoop, but they coopted it for one of their movies, and it was nothing. Pretty great. Okay. But that's just me. Okay. All right, so go ahead. Oh, no, that was it. I just wanted to shout it out. Fine. Well, then let's take a break because we're about to get into physics. Yeah. And hoop games after this. No country for old men. Terrible. I'm kidding. Oh, you like that one? I love that one. That's maybe the best. Raising Arizona is probably the best. It'd be tough for me to pick on any given day, but Fargo is the one I can watch over and over and over. Yeah, I would say those three or five first. Do we just come back from the break, just going right back into the car? I don't know. All right, let's do it. We'll see how Jerry edits this. It wouldn't be a stuff You Should Know podcast if we didn't talk about the science behind something seemingly unscientific. Hula hoops are super complex as far as physics goes, you know? Super complex. Super complex. There's just a few things. We are not in agreement on stuff today, are we? I don't know what's going on. So let's say you have a hula hoop, right? And it's around your waist, and you take it and you throw it. You have it up against maybe one hip making contact with your body. You're starting in the traditional way, then sure. And you whip it around to one side, and as you do, you start rotating your hips. You're gyrating right? I'm rotating my hips choice. And as you do that, when you rotate your hips, what you're doing is first of all, you're conserving the angular momentum you gave the hula hoop. When you pushed it in a certain direction, you twisted it around yourself, right? That's right. You are the axis. Yes. You are the axis. Yeah. And when you move your hips around, when you rotate your hips, you're applying what's called torque. Yeah. Because all this hoop wants to do is fall down around on the ground and make you look foolish. It wants to stop? Well, no, it doesn't want to stop because of inertia. It wants to keep going, but it can't because of friction. But it wants to fall down to the ground, like you said, and make you look foolish. But ironically, that same friction is keeping it from doing that. Who is the fool now? Hoop. The hula hoop. Yeah, fool. All right. Did you talk about the torque? I did talk about torque. And torque is a twisting force where you're twisting your hips, you're thrusting the hula hoop around in the circle, and what you're doing there is contributing to the centripetal force. That's right. Centrifugal. No, centripetal two different things is a force that moves at a right angle to the motion of your body. So it keeps that thing, whatever it is, say, hula hoop or tractor tire, which, by the way, someone set a record hula hooping with a tractor tire. Shut up. Really? Yeah, for like, 70 seconds. A 54 pound tire. How big was a person? I'm sure he's ginormous. All right. I think he was from, like, Baylors or something. Yeah, they do that on a daily basis. So with the centripetal forces going at a right angle to the direction that you're thrusting your hips, it's constantly going to move around a circle on the axis. That is centripetal force. Boom. Centripetal motion, I should say. Yes. And when the soup wants to fall of course, we're talking about gravity. Gravity wants to win that fight. But if you keep that pulsing gyration going, then you're going to keep that hoop that's just a little ahead of the curve. Yeah. That's apparently the key, and Robert puts us in here is kind of like a throwaway thing that's the key of hula hooping is you want your hip to move just before that, I guess, wave that comes in contact with your body again, comes in contact with catch and release in a way. Okay. Yeah. Catching it on your hip and slinging it back around. I'm gyrating. Yeah, you are. Wow. There's a lot of gyrating going on in this room right now. There is. It's crazy. So there's a few different parts of the body at work. I don't know why, in 2004, they needed a 15 page study in the journal of biological cybernetics to figure this out. Because if you just look at somebody, you can tell that the hips, knees, and ankles are really what's at play, keeping that thing going. And that's if you're just doing the hip hoola hoop, not neck and legs and all that, of course, just the standard hooping. Right? Yeah. And so another study, I think, four years later in the journal of human movement science. I don't know why they needed that one, either. They built upon this 2004 study and said, okay, you use your hips, knees, and ankles. Everybody uses it. But depending on the individual, there'll be different contributions from the hip's, knees, or ankle. It depends on the motion of your ocean. Exactly. So it's like the individual everybody uses the same parts, but they use them in different percentages to come up with the hula hooping motion. Yeah. I bet certain body types are better at this than others, too. Yeah. Slim. Yeah, probably so. I met the one in front of Craig's band. She was pretty slim, I guess. Sure. She's working that thing, man. It was like it was pretty amazing. Who. The hoop. So that's hoop dancing when we'll finish up here with some other games well, we didn't talk about hoop dancing. We were just talking about hula hooping. No, we talked about hoop dancing at the beginning with that lady. Oh, yeah. Okay. So that's hoop dancing. Okay. That's when it's around the neck, and then you work it down around your hips and then up one arm and then up the other arm. Right. It's pretty impressive, your standard hula hooping, of course, which we've covered speed, endurance, depends on what you're after. Sure. Like, I want to do this for 20 minutes, or I want to do it 74 hours really fast for five minutes. Okay. Hoop rolling. This is one of my favorite hoop trendling. Like you're a little ancient Egyptian kid. Yeah. I'd like to see you do that hoop rolling. Sure. Let's do it. Let's do a video for that. Okay. We could do a periscope of it. Oh, yeah, let's do that. Are we going to start doing that? We could do at least one of me hoop rolling. I think people are going to get emails. Yeah, they'll turn out in droves to see that. Sure. Hundreds of people will show up for that. There's one not on this list that I want to give a shout out to. All right. It was invented, apparently, in Belgium. They call it Belgium skipping, called ankle skipping. It's where you put the hula hoop on 1ft around one ankle and you use it to hula hoop. You make the hula hoop motion with that one, and as it comes around, you jump through the hoop with the other one. Yeah. I can't believe it wasn't on this list. Yeah, that's a solid hoop endeavor, but apparently it's a pretty recent invention from the really? All right, that makes sense. That's sort of like hoop jumping, but not quite. No, hoop jumping is more like jump roping with a hula hoop. Yes, but that kind of reminds me of that, too. Okay. Hoop jumping is when you hold the hula hoop the top of it, and then you swing it around your body and jump up and down. Okay. Like you have nothing better to do in life. Right. Like you can't find a jump rope. You ever heard of those before? Return the hoop. This is the only one I was ever good at. That's when you hold it vertically and you fling it out as hard as you can backwards, and it sort of spins in place and comes back to you. Right. And if you're not expecting it, you're going to turn and run because it is startling. We already talked about kill the hoop. We don't recommend you use spears to do that or just make sure nobody's in the vicinity of where the hoop is. Yeah, you don't want to combine hoop chundling and kill the hoop because you'll kill the hoop trendler. No. And I'm not even covered this last one. I dare you to, though. I like this one. Hoop your environment. Yeah, go ahead. So it's like you put hula hoops around and you jump from them like they're islands and there's lava in between. Okay. What's wrong with that? I don't know. Too childish? No, I'm very childish, but I don't know, I just didn't you're childlike, not childish. Oh, got you. Big difference, man. Well, we talked about exercise. It is legitimate exercise. Our hula hoops class is now apparently, Marissa Tome, the actor, took hoop fitness classes to lose weight to get in shape for her movie The Wrestler in 2008. 1st lady Michelle Obama. Very famously, hoop worked out. Yeah. Hooped the lawn of the white House to say, hey, kids, get active. And at the US. Open. Yeah. You can still have fun by doing this. And they even did another study to see what kind of calories you could burn. Lots of hoop studies. Too many. They took women between 16 and 59 and said, Go crazy and hoop. And they added for half an hour. Yeah. And they were weighted hoops, too, by the way, which is not to say they were super heavy. They're generally still pretty lightweight. Yeah. But strangely, a weighted hoop is easier to keep going. Yes. Which makes sense, I think. And they average 151 beats per minute. Yeah. Heartbeats. Oh, they're heart. Yeah. Yeah. Tribeca Quest would be proud. Right. And that is burning seven calories a minute, or 210 calories during a half hour of hooping. So that's good exercise. People that's like weightlifting type calorie burn. Yeah. Plus, also, if you just break it down to calorie first of all, Chuck, I want to do an episode, and I'm not quite sure how to frame it yet. It doesn't have a thesis. But there are so many medical myths out there that are just taken as fact. Sure. Even by the medical establishment. Even though if you ask a doctor, Is this fact, they would be like, no, actually, it's not. Like drinking eight glasses of water a day. Totally made up. I know you're going to say that one. I think we should do one on medical myths sometime. What do you think we should have? We not no part of me wants to say we have, but I think things have just come up, like, here or there over the years. Anyway, even if you take the calories out of the equation, just hula hooping, the standard hip gyration hula hoop will really work out your core. You need a hula hoop. No, you can just sit in your chair and do what I'm doing now. Yeah. I'm sweating right now. You totally are. My lip, my upper lip is broken out in perspiration. Modern hooping burlesque uses hoops. If you go to any music festival these days, you're going to see the ladies like I was talking about, or they might have them decked out with LEDs. Are you in fire? Well, what's neat is hula hoops in particular are really displaying, like, the physics of hula hoops. Pretty neat through, like what's that type of photography? LSD no, what's that photography? Where you just keep the shutter open. So, like high exposure or long exposure? Yeah, you just said it keeping the shutter open. It's like when you see the pictures of the cars on the freeway and it's like a long trail of headlights. Yeah. But there are photos out there of Led hulu hoops there. It's just like you can see they don't just keep a flat path, they go all over the place in some way. It's really neat. It's pretty cool. What about this lady, the Israeli sculptor? Did you watch that? I saw a couple of pictures of it, yes. Her name is Sigilet Landau, and in 2003, she did a performance artpoliticalstatement piece where she did barbed hula. She was naked and hula hoops with a barbed wire Hula Hoop that just tore her abdomen up. Yeah, it's really rough. Yeah, it was pretty disturbing. But she said she was on the Israeli beach that she defined as the only calm and natural border Israel has. She was making a statement, my friend. Well, she's an artist. That's what they do. I got a couple of last things. Sure. In the Hula Hoop craze of the 50th yes. Not the 14th century Brittany one. Okay. In Japan. It was banned. The Hula Hoop was banned because they were worried it was going to lead to actual stuff, things happening, gyrating hips. Yeah. And apparently the Soviets said that it was evidence of the emptiness of American culture. Hula Hoop, Craig. Really? Yeah. Leave to the Soviets to be like, Americans. They hated America. Do you remember when the Iron Curtain fell and you were like, oh, wait a minute. Like everything we were taught about the Soviet Union was basically made up. Yeah. And they were like, the average Russian was a good person. Yeah. And the average Russian was a lot like the average American. Yeah. Drunk on vodka. All right, that's it. If you want to know more about Hula Hoops, you can type that word into the search bar athoustoforce.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener main. I'm going to call this anorexia. Did you read this one? No, I missed that one. Hey, guys, I'm a huge fan. I want to let you know how stuff You Should know. It helped me over the years. I began listening I love these. Began listening at the age of twelve, and I'm now turning 18. It's pretty cool. August 9. Stephanie Chanel has played a part in the young adult I've become. At twelve, I was diagnosed with restrictive anorexia, was hospitalized for about a month, and did day treatment for almost a year. After leaving treatment for the day, I'd religiously put on my headphones and turn on stuff you should know. The podcast was really helpful on bad days, especially if I had just had an argument with my parents or a difficult meal. Your humor was especially helpful. I remember laughing out loud many times in the car, which was quite a rare occurrence. I'm pretty solid in recovery now. But your podcast also helped me gain a better relationship with my sibling. My eating disorder caused a lot of tension between my sibling and I for quite a few years. But one day I invited her to listen to your podcast. So if you quickly became a part of her commute to university class, we occasionally would discuss the podcast topics. Nice. We now have a tradition and I love this part, too. We now have a tradition of listening to the Christmas extravaganza together while on winter break, which is what we want people to do. Yeah, man. To gather the family and make this a thing. Decent plump pudding. No. I don't know what? We're going to get pretty slim on Christmas. I've got at least one great topic already. Yeah, we need to start looking now, though. You're right. Yeah. We've even gifted each other matching stuff. You should Know shirts on here. More recently, I received a very urgent text letting me know in all caps that you guys were coming to Minneapolis this fall. And another text to let me know that Chuck's daughter Ruby shares the same birthday as her father. And I want to point out again, and Josh the Triumphant. That's right. Your podcast gives us endless topics and inside jokes, and I can't thank you enough for bringing us closer together. Thanks again for being such a big part of my formative years. My sister and I can't wait to see you guys in Minneapolis this fall. That is from Emily, and she said, please shout out your sister, Megan. Awesome. Emily. Thank you for telling us all that. That really means the world to us. Yes. And best of luck in your continued recovery. That is tough stuff. Yes. Congratulations, too. Yeah, we should do an eating disorder podcast at some point. That one's been hanging out there. Yeah, because there's, like, this new idea that almost everybody has an eating disorder in America these days of some kind. Yeah, like, typically binge eating is, like, a huge thing. Sure. Yeah, we should definitely do that. Thank you very much, Emily, and hello, sister Megan. I appreciate you guys listening, and hopefully we'll see you guys in Minneapolis when we come in October. Yes. And you know what? Actually, write me back. We'll put you on the guest list. Oh, man. How about that? So nice. Free tickets for you, too. Wow, that is something. Just for you, too. No guests, right? Just kidding. Well, you need to lay it down. We should probably have a legal disclaimer added after this, too. Yeah, we might hear from a lot of Emily and Megan. Minnesota. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuff you should know. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com. And as always, trying to set our home on the web. Stephenshealth.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ashken, 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/2017-11-03-mc-sysk-janet-varney.mp3 | Movie Crush: Janet Varney on Tron | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/movie-crush-janet-varney-on-tron | This week Movie Crush launches with two great episodes. Up first, actress Janet Varney talks with Chuck about the movie Tron and how much it means to her. | This week Movie Crush launches with two great episodes. Up first, actress Janet Varney talks with Chuck about the movie Tron and how much it means to her. | Fri, 03 Nov 2017 19:27:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=19, tm_min=27, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=307, tm_isdst=0) | 51737218 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, and welcome to Movie Crush. This is Chuck Bryant and this is episode one. Very excited to welcome everyone. If you're coming over from Stuff you should know, then thanks for your support. If you are just a movie fan in general and happened upon this, then welcome as well into our studio here at Pot City Market in Atlanta, Georgia. So guys, I am so excited about this show. I'm so excited about episode one because Janet Varney, I got to say, is probably the best episode one guest in all of podcast history. She's a pal of mine. I met Janet a few years ago at her comedy festival that she co created many years ago, sketch Fest in San Francisco every January. And for my money, it's the best comedy festival in the land. And she's been kind enough to ask Josh and I to perform there for the past few years. And it's become a little tradition for us. Janet is just awesome. She is a very talented actress. She's a gifted, improv comedian. And she's smart and funny and just as kind of a soul as you would ever hope to meet. So she was here shooting in Atlanta. So I had her in the studio, which is great. She was shooting season two of her awesome show on IFC Stand Against Evil, which actually just premiered yesterday on IFC. Season two just premiered. So check that out. It's a really great show. It's Dana Gould's comic take on the Zombie Show, which if you haven't seen it, binge season one. And then check out season two on IFC right now. So anyway, Janet was here shooting that. And the last thing that people want to do when they're shooting a TV show in the hot, hot summer of Atlanta, working a lot of nights, is to come in and record a silly old podcast. But Janet is a pal and very loyal person and friend. And so she was great. She came in here, we killed it. We talked about the movie Tron, the original, obviously, from The Disney Picture with Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxlightner, cindy Morgan, David Warner, written and directed by Stephen Lisperger, way ahead of its time, we both agreed. And this is episode one. And you'll notice here, this was such an early episode that as we get started here in our conversation, I didn't even have a title for Movie Crush yet. But since then, I did get a title from my good, good friend in real life, Scott Ipalito. Scott's one of my best friends, and I threw it out to him and said, hey, what should I call this thing? And I gave him the idea and he went, how about Movie Crush? And it was just that simple. So we talked a little bit about that at first, which was kind of fun. So here we go with Janet, Varney and Tron. This show is so new, I don't have a title for it. This is very exciting. So we just spend the whole time trying to figure out what the title is. Well, it's funny. I was going to call it like something Dumb and on the nose. Like my favorite movie. But then I was like, I don't want people to think it's my favorite movie. What's your favorite movie? Notable Person. And that's a bad title. But all those variations of all those things were taken. And that's the thing about podcasting, is someone can do a show for a month eight years ago, and it's sort of taken. Like, if you go to start something up, they could always say, hey, I had that first when I started my podcast, which is now and has always been the JV Club to the public, which is one of the greatest names ever, by the way. That worked out for me. Yes. I'm glad about that. But I was originally and maybe that's for the best, because this other I was going to call I Was a Teenage Podcast with this sort of, like 60s era monster movie kind of theme to it. But someone had had a podcast where they did a handful of episodes a couple of years back. I was a teenage podcast, so I had to throw that away. Those people, the worst, the ones that start something and don't succeed, and then they're like, give me $500 and you can have it. Like all of us at one point. All right, listen, here's some. I do improv. I surely can come up with some. My first instinct was to suggest Chuck's flicks instead of chicks. Flicks like Chickflix. And then I thought it could be called Chuck Flux. They won't know what it is. Chuck's Flux sings, my friend I did ask my friend who's great at titling things, and he said, what about the confession stand? Oh, instead of the confession stand? Yeah. But then that sounds like you really are getting into it. Well, but it also sounds like it would be just about guilty pleasures. Exactly. Yeah. You have to confess that. And no one would confess, like, oh, God. To say, like, The Godfather is my favorite. Don't tell anyone. Yeah, that's something to say with pride. I'm kind of ground I'm coming at zero right now. I have no idea. Okay. And then I thought about something like Psycho's Godfathers and Streetcar Named Desire. Like something big and grand. Right. That just sounds like the title of a book that then has a colon after it. Well, no, there was that book about movies called that's where I Stole it. There was a book about 70 filmmaking called Easy Writers and Raging Bulls, which I was like, I can just rip that off. Yeah, but I guess I can't because that's the person. You don't even know the book. It's a coffee table book without me knowing it's a coffee table book. We'll title it later. Okay, we're bringing that up because now that's just going to eat away at everything. I would have said only be thinking about, but now you just text me for sure, I'll come up with it. And then I'll put it on a T shirt for you like you did with Ben Acker and his dream joke, which we can't spoil. Did you go to movies a lot when you were a kid? Because I know a little bit about your life because of your own show in Arizona. Yeah, movies are very I guess I can finally put new. But did you go to the movies a ton? I did. That's definitely one of the things that you can do in a smallish city in Arizona when the summer is just brutal and there's nothing to be done outside. Really? Like literally thing melt in Arizona. Yes, exactly. I have so many memories of just the fold out car. Like no one uses those anymore. I guess because windows are better. Or maybe they still do in Arizona. Maybe you still have the sun shades that sort of open. But we just had those folding we just had folding cardboards, some of them before fancy and made the card look like they were in sunglasses. Sure. But that was vitally important as was trying to find any place in the shade because so many times I would get seatbelt burns. Well, you guys would have your seat belt burns. You know, I lived in Yuma for a year. That's one of the highest places on the planet. Carpeted dashboards. Yeah, because of that. Yes. Those are the moments where you really do think, you really think. I can barely survive here. And we have all the technology and the idea that the only reason we're here is because people have been dealing with this heat for a couple of years. Why did anyone settle here? They're even survivable beyond pre having car shades. I imagine every time I drove to La through that desert and then I would eventually get crossover into the La basin and that cool breeze hit. I used to think about like the settlers, what they must have thought, those who pressed on. Yeah. Like, well, this is clearly where I'm going to live. God, if you stop in Yuma and go, I think this is the best we're going to get, guys, we're not going any further. Wet. We keep being told just a few more miles. Not us. Right here. Yeah. So the movie theater obviously is a respite. Yeah, very much so. You would go see whatever I feel like I would. Like we dropped off by the parents, that kind of deal. Yeah, we get dropped off by my parents, for sure. Then I would take the bus. I saw a lot of movies by myself. Oh, for sure. The public bus. Yes, you bet. My dad's house is right in between two malls that have movie theaters. So there's a really easy couple of straight line go tos on the bus to see movies. I do have very specific memories of seeing certain movies, and I can sort of put them in context. And then there are other movies that I couldn't tell you. Bus movies. Not bus. Well, no, I don't think that. Like, for example, when I did craig Kakowski has a podcast where it is just us talking about his movie. He likes to talk about his old list of his favorite movies and his wife Carla's on it. And because they go on order, I happened to get Dead Poet Society, and that was a movie that I could remember. I could remember everything about, like, going into Elcon Mall and seeing it and then feeling like my life had changed. And I cried so hard that I had to wait until they kicked me out as they were sweeping their popcorn up. That was a heavy movie for people that like, you're a few years younger than me, but quite a few, actually. But just to be a teen, or a young teen and seeing that movie, that's, like, heavy stuff to process. Absolutely. Yeah. Although yes, 100%. And then I feel like shortly after that, I got into even darker stuff because you have to go through that phase in high school where you sort of love a coffee orange. Yeah. And, like, Eraserhead and all that kind of stuff. And I'm having a lot of flashbacks to that era because of Twin Peaks coming back. Have you been watching that? I have. What do you think? I'm struggling with some of it. I'm struggling deeply with some of it. Our producer, Noel, is very into it. You're into it. The hook, line and sinker, including this last episode. Yeah. Well, I've been watching and my whole deal is the Twin Peaksy stuff. I love 5% of it. And the other stuff is Total Lynch, which is great and weird and awesome, but I kind of wanted Twin Peaks. Yeah. Listen, I'll take Dougie all day long. I don't ever want Kama Clockline to be anyone but Dougie. I love him so much. Do road movies. Yeah. I will watch the seven minute take of him eating potato chips. Yeah. But I don't know if I can watch the seven minute take of XYZ. All of these other things that he's throwing in that are just they're so long. I just love it so much, though, and I just want him to be doing this stuff even if it doesn't resonate fully with me. Just keep doing it. I agree. Sometimes I feel like he's pranking us a little bit. Sometimes I feel like he's like, yeah, they gave me final cuts. I'm just going to do this. I'm just going to show this for five minutes. Because I can. Yeah. Because I don't think it fully makes sense in his head in a narrative way. No. There are things that don't advance the story in any way shape or form that I can lynch. And the dude is like, how old is he? And he's still that weird. Yeah. I interviewed him for Wired magazine and oh, really? I sat down with him and they got on really well because Brandon asked really interesting questions instead of, like, the questions that he was supposed to ask, probably. Right. So he got all this fun backstory about David Lynch and the bird that lived on his roof and all this kind of this and that. The kind of stuff that you want to hear that you want to go, oh, God, of course. That's how his brain works. But yeah. So lots of going to the movies when I was younger. My dad is a huge movie fan, and he introduced me to a lot of movies that I certainly wouldn't have seen as young as I was had he not been like, I think you're ready for this, you know? What was your first R rated movie? Do you remember that? I'm not sure what it was, but I know that my mom took me to see RoboCop. Is that our yeah, that was probably ours. Got to be our. There's no way that's not hard, R. There's some crazy violent stuff that happened. I guess I forget how violent the movies were back then. Yeah. So I don't know. And then she took me to diehard. Also, my Mormon mom, who did not have television at home for some reason, wanted to take me to both of those movies. Great. Yeah. So those were probably I mean, those have got to be the first art movies that I went to. I don't know if I had seen something at home before then, but definitely those. Mine was my dad took me to a war movie, the Big Red one, which is good and fine. Good World War II movie. And then the first one I ever saw, I think, at all, was Escape from New York. Oh, sure. And I was over at some friend's house after church and they were putting it on and I called my mom to ask if it was okay. Adorable. What did she say? Yeah, she said because I had called, if she had said no, you think you would have been like, I gotta go. Now, that's a good question. Here at the confession. And was an M rule follower. So I don't know what I would have done. I like to not walk through those stores. I saw the movie. She said yes. That's all that matter. She knew she had a good kid. What a relief. But my dad this is kind of really I can't believe I'm going to say this to people out loud. My dad took my sister to see Body Heat in the theater. Wow. Which I don't know, I can't imagine. My dad did not go to movies ever. So I've got to think that he had no idea what he was going to say it's called Body Heat. It's not like The Postman Always Rings Twice where you're like, oh, that could be anything. It's probably about mail. It's about the US mail system. Exactly. Body Heat. Yeah. What do you think? Like thermal tracking soldiers tracking that Predator guy? Yeah. Well, I would say I was asking about that one day, but I'm never going to ask him that. Maybe I'll ask my sister. I'll ask him. Do you want me to ask him? Yeah. Why didn't he get up and leave the movie? Yeah, I actually got up and left her in Greece, too, during the scene where the girls were having to sleep over in their underwear, my mom took me to see Greece and I was so embarrassed. I said, mom, can we leave? I can't even remember their underwear. I feel it wasn't just pajamas. I was Southern Baptist. I saw ankle. Ankle. There was a lot of refreshing going on. I didn't know what was going on. My dad let me watch Animal House, and I was like, Boobs. Oh, wow, boobs. So your dad was cool. Yeah. Well, that's what's weird is he really didn't want me to see violent stuff because he knew how sensitive I was. But he was like, sex is fine. It's silly. Comedy is fine. And then my mom, who, again, Mormon, didn't have a television, somehow wanted to take me to see those two movies. I just don't to this day. I don't understand. You got the violence from your mom? I guess so. From your dad? Yeah. It's great. As it should be. Yeah, the American way. Everything was covered. So do you remember we're talking about Tron specifically as your pick for all time favorite movie? Listen, first of all, I'm really bad at ranking anything like, that's the whole point of the show. But some people really, like kind of going like I mean, again, using Craig's example, he loves that he has this order that shifts and he plays with it and he kind of knows at any given time. But it shifts, though. Yeah, that's true. Anyone's all time favorite movie on any given day is probably going to be different. Yes, I guess so. But I do feel like there are people who take pride and kind of like it helps define me. This is my all time favorite movie, and for many people, it is a Godfather. I wonder how many times you're going to have to talk about The Godfather and are you going to tell people if that's your favorite movie of all time? We've talked about it three times already. Can you pick a different one? Yeah, I'm not going to repeat movies, I don't think, unless there could be something like a fresh take. Right. But it's funny that everyone I've asked so far has immediately been stressed out about the notion of picking one and then going public with that because I think everyone does think it says something about them. Yeah. Well. I think could I if I really sat down and tried to pick something someone asked me. I think actually when I did a brief interview at the La podcast Festival. Where we are pointing to you because we saw each other there and you did my podcast. I think I blurted out Herald and Maud because for a long time that would have been the situation from my teens into my early twenty s. I was proud to say that was my favorite movie. That's cool. And I still love it a lot. And I said that when I was interviewed. Then I was like, okay, I'll put Harold at the top of the list, I guess, but Tron, screw it. Yeah. I'm going to go with Tron because it's been important to me far longer. Yeah. And I love it. Well, there are a bunch of nerd dudes all over the world listening that are super excited that that's your favorite movie. Well, you're probably also safe in that. I don't think anyone else will. It's not going to be like, oh, dran again. All right, why is it everybody's number one, higher. Glass loves Tron. Yes. I have a confession to make about Tron. Have you ever seen it? I've seen Tron. I hate it. I saw it this afternoon. Really? It was the first time you've ever seen it? I don't know how I didn't see Tron. I never saw Tron. This is what a great first episode. I know. I loved the arcade game and played it obsessively and I never saw the movie. Oh my God, this is great. And I don't know why I was trying to figure it out today. I was like, I've seen Tron. Right? Yeah. The movie with the light cycles. Right. Then it started to dawn on me. I never, ever saw Tron. Oh my God. So I watched it today in full and we should talk about it. Okay. What was your first Tron experience? Do you remember seeing it in the theater? I don't remember my first time seeing it. I really don't. I couldn't tell you if I saw it. Theater probably VHS. Well, I could have seen it in the theater. It's a Disney movie, number one. Pretty young, though. Yeah, but I was, what, 619? 82? Yes. I think I probably saw in the theater. And the reason is that it rocked my world. And so I can't imagine that I would have seen it on VHS for the first time. Okay. I maintain to this day that it was so far ahead of its time. Oh, yeah. So far ahead of time. And it is pretty peculiar and amazing that it's a Disney movie. I think it's worth, like it's of note for that reason, in and of itself, I don't play video games. I'm not of games. I was going to ask you that. So it has nothing to do for me with like I never played. You didn't go to Arcade journey? No. Wow. I mean, I would play like handheld pacman games at my friend's houses and I played whatever, like PC learning games. My dad got me. I don't even think I had an Oregon trail back that was more advanced. Arizona trail didn't even have Arizona trail track. I'm talking about the only thing I can think of right now was a game called spell it. That was a spelling game that involved a frog whose little tongue would come out and like, it would lick and absorb the letters after you spelled something correctly. That was like your price. How old were you? This isn't like 15 years old, but it sounds like something that two year old would play. A two year old. This was when it was still, like it was shocking that there was any kind of a game to be played. So probably around six years old or something. Yeah. And listen, some of the words would get pretty tricky. I don't want you to think that it was like two silver words. The hunk frogs are hungry. They need long words. Arcade games that got you in there? Not at all. No. I just loved the world of it. I would have dreams about it. I still sometimes have dreams about it. Really? Yeah, that I'm inside the game grid. Yeah. And I think part of the reason that I didn't play the arcade games is that because I saw the movie first, the arcade games were just flat two dimensional things and the whole point was like, but no, don't you understand? These games exist for regular people to play. I'm a user, but I should be inside the game. That's the only way I want to experience it, is like viscerally with my cute uniform on. And I love the music. The music, again, totally out of its time and crazy and weird and great. Now we'll get into the kind of the sentimentality of it, which was that my dad also loved it. Okay. And we would play this game at night, like, here we go. Yeah, when I was this is why you love trying to walk out and just close the door behind me. We had an alarm system in the house where you have a motion detector and the little red light blinks when there's motion. And then we also had everything digital, so like, our microwave was digital, all our VCRs, clocks, all that kind of stuff was digital. Yeah. So that's all green. And our house was this little tiny three bedroom house, but you could go in a complete circle around it, right? So you could come in the front door, you could go through the living room, turn left, go down the hallway where all the bedrooms were, go back into the back room, and then that reconnected with the kitchen. That reconnected with the front room. So you can go in a full circle and there's a koi pond in the center. There was zero atria Nor koi pond. Okay. And so my dad would play this game where we were inside the game grid. We would turn off all the lights in the house. And when I was little, like, I guess six or whatever, because that's as little as I would have been able to be, he would kind of hold me Superman style and we would, like, scoot around the house and we would be trying to avoid Sark and all the bad guys. And so if we were trying to creep past the motion detectors listen, it was a great training for me. If I become an expert at Burglar, we would kind of get as far as we could before we see a light, and then we would see the red light. We'd be like, they see us, the recognizers. And then we'd, like, run into the next room. To this day, I'm not afraid of I've never been afraid of the dark because I only equate the total darkness with plaintron. Right. Which is good. Yeah. And it was this super great, cool game that my dad made up that was legitimately kind of scary and exciting, and it made me feel like I was inside that game grid. That's adorable. And then at Disneyland, we would go to Disneyland every summer. My dad would we had friends who lived in Lacaniata, which is kind of like Pasadena area. And because of the Arizona summers, he would wake me up. He would take a nap. Like. He would sort of sleep for a couple of hours and then he would get up in the middle of the night and wake me up and put me in a sleeping bag in the covered tab of our dots and truck. Which was carpeted. And he would wake me up at two or three in the morning and say. Miss Jay. Are you ready to go to Disneyland? Wow. And I was like, yeah. And so then I would get into the car and fall asleep, and then I would wake up and we would be almost there. And then I would kind of clamber through the little window and then come sit with my dad, and then we would get there. And then at Disneyland, they had the people mover. Which one little tiny sliver of the people mover was that you would go inside this kind of room that they had just put Trond out. Yeah. No way. All it was was movie screens. Yeah, but you would be on the people mover and then suddenly you would be on the game grid and they recognize we're coming. Almost squash you. And then you would go inside the lifecycle maze. Right? I did. I was like, I just want to live here full time. So those are all, like, very deep embedded childhood memories for me. But there's nothing about the movie now. When I watch it, it means every bit as much to me. There are plenty of movies that I loved that I can sort of go, does it hold up? I'm not able to see if it doesn't hold up. Like, you just watched it for the first time. So your experience was your experience, and I totally respect that, right? But I've brainwashed myself. I still watch it and think, god, this is ahead of its time. God, this is good. It's so good. Well, it was ahead of its time because of research today. It was one of the very first movies to use computer animation at all. Yeah. And this guy blown. Who's the director? The director is I heard you earlier. Stephen Lizberger. Oh, you nailed it earlier. Peter Lindberg I think you're just going to be funny. John Flansberg from they Might Be Giant. Steven Lisberger and it was kind of not kind of. It was a passion project for him. Like he thought of this world and was ahead of his time and couldn't get anyone to make it and sunk his own money into test shots. And we took it around to the studios and was like, look at what I have. Look at this amazing thing. I was like, I don't know about that. And finally, Disney took a flyer and said, all right, we'll give you, like $10 million, or whatever. Which was huge because he wasn't in the Disney plan. Right. He was an outsider. And he said he always felt that way, too, which is kind of sad. But it was way ahead of its time and no one knew what they were seeing. Now, for someone like me to watch it, who's never seen it before, sure, it might look dated, but it also looks modern in a weird way. Yes. Especially the stuff with the and I didn't know, but they really shot in black and white, the characters, and did this rotoscoping process. And that because of how they had to do it. That ends up looking kind of cool now. Yeah, it looks fantastic. Yeah, it's weird. And all the way the city lights up, I mean, it's all so wonderful. Also, collect these at some of the kind of, like, hipster Japanese toy shops. They exist in San Francisco and Los Angeles and some of the kind of certainly on the Western Coast cities. There was a place in San Francisco that sold. They're called Kubrick. Of course, I'm saying that because, of course, it's named after something also equally like niche and hip, where they would do these limited edition lines of toys from beloved movies like that. And so I have these really cool they almost look like mobile. Is it the little people? Oh, yeah. It's just a little kind of like Lego people. They sort of do look like Lego people, but they're in their little uniforms. But the design is so great. And there's this great I wish if we were in La. I could. Have brought it with me. But there's a recognizer that you can pop the legs off and then turn the legs inward in the center so you can make it into, like, the car. Yeah, the tank. That's really beautiful. But they're just so well done and well made. Do you own a lot of these? I have the whole set of the Kubrick stuff, and then I have, like, a scattering of the original toys that look more like Star Wars figures or whatever. Wow. Yeah. That's a good go to gift for someone. Well, my wheels are already turning out that's I think I know your birthday is. And they did this really cool they showed it at the Arrow in Santa Monica years ago in Los Angeles. And Steven, their director, was there. And then one of the producers and I think Bruce Bosslightner was there. And for sure, what's her name? The woman was there. Cindy Morgan was there. And so they all kind of talked and traded stories and talked about it. So cool. And they had a couple of costumes from there. Wow. And I hate Tron Legacy. Like, nothing that came after Tron. Do I have any respect for whatsoever? Well, I didn't see Tron legacy, and I think there was even a TV show. I'm not sure. Yeah, there was something in between the two main big Tron movies. But see, now that I've seen Tron at all, the idea I know what the idea of Tron legacy was. It seems like a great idea that this Jeffrey's Son has now come back. No. That's so boring. Yeah. It didn't capture the spirit of the original at all. Not to me. To me, it's just this sort of empty soulless. Wow. It just doesn't feel like it doesn't do anything for me at all. I see why they did it, though. Tron was so ahead of its time, and now they have the technology and to make a new and I like Garrett Hedland, but I don't know. I mean, I never saw it because I didn't see the original, and I saw it only once. I saw it. El Capitan. I mean, I went I went hoping it would be great. El Capitan, you don't know, is on Hall Boulevard, and it's Disney's big theater, and they have sometimes live entertainment forehand. It's a beautiful place. And that was the right thing to do, to see it there. I can barely remember what it was about. Did they have a light cycle up front? I wish. I bet. No. They might have had some costumes from that, but then, who cares? Because it's from the new stuff. It's so weird that I love that. Wise ass enough, right? Jeff Bridges character returns in different variations of himself. Well, they made him creepy on stuff. Yeah. And he's humorless, from what I can remember. Olivia Wild, she's lovely, but, like, everybody was just humorless. Right. I mean, the whole point so much of tron is Jeff Bridges being a complete why that? He's a total smart infuriating Sark, which, I mean, obviously, that's played by don't tell me. David. Yes. I always forget his name, even though I love him and he's one of the great bad guys. Yeah. A man with Two Brains is very close to the top of my favorite movie, but if you have a podcast, Sam Levine, that is his favorite. So I really struck that from the list because I knew Sam would want to talk about Matt's Two Brains. I could talk about that all day long. It came out the same year, you know. Yeah. David no, it did not. Deadman. Don't worry. I came out that year. Sorry. Oh, yeah. I can't remember his last name. David Warner. David Warner. Of course. And you know what's so freaky is I don't know if you do this, but you go back and watch some of your favorite movies, and then you think, wow, I'm older than them when they made it. Yeah, for sure. So Bridges and Box Lightning were both around 31 ish when they made it. David Warner. Young punks. It was five years younger than me. He was 41 years old. Yeah, of course he did. In our brain, because we were kids. Right. And I even watched it today. I was like, look at that old creepy guy. Yeah, he's five years younger than me. Oh, my God. Well, he also has one of those faces where you're like, oh, you're 60, 20 year old, and he wasn't you'll get there cargo shorts in a 41. Yeah. Absolutely not. And then the guy who plays Ram, and then when Ram dies yeah. It just still makes me cry. Yeah. And there's the whole idea of technology and the gods and that sort of playing with that kind of like theology, the idea that there would be information living inside a computer that would be intelligent enough to question where it came from, and putting all this faith in the people who created it. And I mean, it's just fascinating. Well, that was sort of the great fear, I think, at first, when computers became a thing. But now it's sort of a legitimate fear of robots becoming sentient. Master Control Program, man. Yeah, that's kind of a thing. Now, it was ahead of its time. But what kind of struck me, a couple of funny things on that note, when who is the main? Is it Sark? Sark, yeah. Was talking to the David Warner character and kind of explaining how MCP, that Master Control Program is the main, and then Sark is like his lackey kind of david Warner. Yeah. MCP. So MCP is just a little confusing because I played MCP. You hear that deep, scary voice, but then you see it like a computer grid face in the end. Oh, I also have the toy of that. It's so cool. But a couple of funny things. One is he said that he was getting involved with the Kremlin and who else? The Kremlin and the Pentagon. Because he said that he could design things 900 to 1200 times better than any human. Yeah. I just love that number range between 901, 200 times better. Yeah. And the other thing was, the beginning and the end of the movie is so weird and abrupt how the movie starts. It says Flynn's Arcade, which is in Culver City, by the way. I don't know if you've ever been by that building. The whole building. I haven't. That's where they shot the exterior. And it starts with just a dude playing the Tron game. And then it goes in on the Tron game. And then you're in the Tron game, and then it just starts. Yeah. And then it literally says, like, meanwhile in the real world. And then this. Jeff Bridges. And you're like, who is this guy? And then when the movie just ends, like they're in the computer world. They have the big climax fight. And then he gets out of a helicopter at the end and joins Box and Cindy Morgan. They hug. And that's the end of the movie. Listen, first of all, I'm not picking it apart. The big climax is definitely inside the game. Sure. And that's what the movie was about. He can come back out. And then when he comes back out, we see that he successfully got all the information that's printing out very slowly on the loud printer, the dot matrix. And that's all we need. And then David Warner sees that no, it didn't. Then it's like he's toast. And then it's like, hey, the boss is coming. And you're right. It's Jeff Bridges in the house. It didn't strike me as bad filmmaking. It struck me as such a thing of its time period to where movies would end with just everyone, like high fiving. And that's it. Now we've been tainted in the other direction by too many false endings. Oh, my gosh. Where you're like, Wait a minute. This movie, every scene now for the last 20 minutes has felt like the last scene. Tarantino, let's keep it clean. Let's get in, get out. Yeah. And then as the lights go down in the city, not to quote a Journey song, then how much it looks like the camgrid. What else? The whole building. David Warner. Jeff Bridges. Bruce Wayne. Throwing in. Well, Cindy Morgan. I know her from Caddyshack. She's a fox. It's a real fox. That's Lacy underhaul. Wow. Couldn't get away with that today. Oh, and then the other thing I thought was neat was income as the name of the company is, like, kind of one of the great evil villain companies of all time, I think. Yeah, it sounds like it could be anything. And that's what's so great and terrifying about it. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the key. And just all the stuff they're working on, the whole idea that you could use lasers to break down the atom to the point where you could achieve it through space. I mean, that's a little bit wonka vision, too. That's another movie. I could have probably said everything goes back to being a young person. I'm so connected to that unbridled passion that feels kind of unmatchable. Yeah, I think those are all the movies that I really go back to, because when I think about movies, after I saw it in Bruges, I was like, this is my favorite movie. And then I saw another movie that I felt was my favorite movie. A year later, I was like, no, this is my favorite movie. But in Bruges is in there. The Ice Storm, I still think is like one of my best movies ever made. One of my favorite movies. There's artistically intact and brilliant movies that would also be kind of in my list. But I like to say it's like, I have 25 top five movies. Yes, you get 25, but they're all part of your top five. But I did think of a segment today that I'm going to do for everyone, which is oh, you asked me to remember some think about maybe something more like guilty pleasures. We'll do that later. Okay. And by later, I mean in five. Okay. This is a segment. Maybe we'll get an old to do some cool music for this called What Ebert Said. This movie is a complete disappointment. Okay. All right. There are plenty of legendary film critics, but he's always been my favorite. Absolutely. Well, what do you think? First of all, do you have any idea? Listen, I want to believe that he was on board and that he understood how special and important it was and that he thought to himself, janet Barney will one day game this is a favorite movie. But I don't feel like it got particularly good reviews, and I don't think it did particularly well. And he was pretty influential at the time, so I'm prepared for him to have given it a thumbs down. Eber. Loved it. Okay. He gave it four stars and a thumbs up. And he says it was a technological sound and light show that is sensational and brainy stylish and fun. Oh, good. And then he went on to rave about the special effects. He said that the holy imaginary worlds of Tron are so cleverly composed that I never, ever got the sensation that I was watching some actor stand in front of or in the middle of special effects. Never. And I think you see that so much more today. Oh, yeah. You can really feel the sort of flatness. You can do anything. It's hard to actually it's really hard. Again, I feel like they were all there. They were all there living in that world. They're starting to get it right, though. Like, did you see The Jungle Book? Yes. That was good. It's been amazing. It really was. But for a while there, people kind of went nuts. Well, even still, even with, like, Fantastic Beasts, for example, I feel so strongly that I can see Eddie Redmayne sort of looking at his finger where something is supposed to be, and I just am so aware it's not there. I'm so painfully aware it's not there. I don't know about that finger scene, but well, I know what you're talking about. Like when there's a lot of mystical, fun toy things around. Well, the eye lines never quite match up. Even with all the technology. They're all just enough to where it looks like the Three Company episode where Jack's twin visits, which I don't think it ever happened. All those things. And the last thing here is I looked up the movies of 1982, mainly because I was like, why didn't I see this? What was I going to see? Oh, so I can know now what else was 1982? Well, yeah, is it powerhouse and stuff? Well, movies back then were amazing. Yeah. And this is just like when you look at the list of movies that are out in 2017 and then this list, it makes you want to cry. Yeah. Blade Runner. Shit, yeah. Et the Thing. Oh, man. Fast time to reach my High poltergeist. Rats of Con. Tutsi 48, hands down. Probably Bleed Runner. Too. Tootsie was just a March release in 1982. It wasn't like Oscar season coming up. That's where it would be slotted today. Movies. Chuck is blowing my mind. Did I say fast Times? I reach my high 48 hours. Officer and a Gentleman. Future Annie. Oh, my God. First Blood. Very big for me. Got it. The Dark Crystal. Gandhi. Rocky Three. Never saw Gandhi. Rocky II was very big for me. But I did see Rocky Three. That's where my priorities lie. I mean, there are a couple of movies that I wouldn't say like, oh, my God, this is so great. But they were big for me. Like beastmaster was never seen. Beast Master. It was great. But then Sophie's Choice world according to Garp. My favorite year. The secret of NIM diner. This is just a smattering. This isn't all the movies an average year in Hollywood in the early eighty s. I mean, I could comfortably pick some of my all time favorite movies just out of that. You could stop Blade Runner et the thing and poltergeist. And you could say no other movies were made that year. And it would be like one of the great years. The Thing I just saw on the big screen at the arc light and it beyond holds up. Yeah, that's great. Amazing and super gruesome. Really gross. John Carpenter, the man. Well, still does all his own music. It's great. Yeah, great. Any finishing thoughts on Tron? I love it. Thumbs up. Tron, I love you. Tron, I know that you're a movie, even though you were also a character in the movie named Tron. For the longest time, I was like, if I have kids, I'm naming my kid Flynn, no matter whether it's a boy or I thought you're going to say Tron? No, I wouldn't name that. No. The one I really love was the MCP. MCP. Yes. That'd be a funny name. Michael Chadwick Peterson. Just so I could call him MCP. That would be a pretty slick move. But Tron was a character, but also the name of the security system. That's right. That box lightner was my Tron program. Yeah, exactly. Knows. Just got up and I walked in. I walked and all he's done, that's what was confusing to me a little bit about the movie. So all the different characters playing. But that's what it's about. Dumbass bruce invented the program, Tron. So that's what Tron looked like. Tron looked like his user. And then Flynn designed a ton of stuff. Yes. So that's why when you go inside the beginning of the movie in the tank, that's Flynn, too, because he designed that program in the tank. What about the scene with Cindy Morgan and when Lacey underwalls and Bruce and the scarecrow? He was the scarecrow, right? Sure he was. He certainly wasn't Mrs. King. I never saw that show. But I just did the math real quick. The first time they go to see Jeff Bridges or Flynn. Excuse me. And he's so overly sweaty from playing the video game that at first I was like, is he really that sweaty? Because the armpit sweats out to his chest. Then his chest was sweaty through the shirt. It's like, why are they doing that? And he goes up and takes off his shirt. And I was like, I think that's exactly why they did it. Yes. He takes off one shirt and puts on a different shirt. And they're both Flynn's video game. But he takes it off in front of her because they used to date. And then he had that sly line about leaving the house messy or whatever. And then she practically shoves Bruce boxlight on the couch because of the quip about her leaving her house messy. Relationships, am I right? Is a go to to understand relationships between the two people who care about each other? No, probably not. But maybe between man and computer. Between man and computer. Between a bit and a program for that little bit. No. Janet, Barney, thanks for coming in today Pleasures. Oh, yeah, you're right. You've been doing this podcast for 1 hour in life and you don't remember the Bold? I have clothes with guilty pleasure. All right. What's your guilty pleasure pilot program? Well, I did think about it because I didn't want it to be a dream. Listen, first of all, how dare you? And I said that in our text, too. I said, don't you even pretend like my favorite movie can also be a guilty pleasure. I will never call it guilty pleasure. But I was trying to think because I thought, oh, I don't want to have some pretentious slot like you said, where someone's like my guilty pleasure is The Godfather. But it's kind of hard because I don't have a lot of the, like, oh, I know this. Same with reality television and stuff like that. I don't find that I have a lot of, like, this is delicious, and I know I shouldn't, but here I watch. I feel I get really impatient with stuff that isn't good. So I was trying to think of things that I would watch anyway, and I think I actually wrote a couple of them down. I know for sure that recently on planes, I can't stop watching movies about horses, which was never something I cared about. But all of a sudden, Sea Biscuit seems like the best movie I've ever seen. I watched Secretariat. Secretariat? They didn't have well, this is Delta, and they have some old movies that you can watch. Right? I hadn't gotten to the Horse Whisperer, which I've never seen. I probably won't watch Warhorse, but I see that suddenly I need, like, feel good horse movies when I'm on a plane because I'm too tired to enjoy anything else. So feel good horse movies, apparently that's a new thing. And then I also admitted to Black Beauty. Did you see that when you were a kid? No, the Black Stallion. I didn't give a crap about horse movies. I did see the Black Stallion. I barely remember it. Last Unicorn. That was a tough one. But I did, especially because I know you like Jaws so much. I feel the same way about Jaws, and I will see that's a guilty pleasure. No, but a shark movie? Not sharknado not like intentionally campy shark movies, but I will give almost any shark based movie a chance. And I love the movie Deep Lucy. I love it. I love it. I've seen it so many times. If it's on, I will watch it till the end. I love it. I liked how unabashedly schlocky it was. Yeah, it knew what it was, and so it camped out in a good way. But it was genuinely still very scary to me. Even though the sharks got smarter because they were injecting them with some sort of growth hormones that they could cure Alzheimer's. That's a side effect. The shots got small tests, the sharks got smarter. Chuck, that was the big pull line from the trailer. I remember that. And I was so starstruck when my friend Oscar, we were going to dinner with Oscar and Ursula, who are dear friends of ours, and he said, I hope you don't mind, our friends are going to be joining us. Is it the shark? It was the shark. Oh, my God. It was the shark. No, it was Saffron Boroughs. And I said, in a million years, I never thought I would meet Saffron Boroughs. Not a person that I think I travel the same circles with. I was very excited that I got to meet Saffron Burrows for that reason. Lucy, was it everything you thought? She's wonderful. Yeah, she's just great. That was her line, wasn't it? The shark, Scott Smasher. Yeah. She made those sharks smarter. She put us all at risk. She got Sam Jackson munched. That's a great moment. That was a great moment. Snatches them. I feel that that moment. I can't think of having seen that anywhere before, that movie. And I feel like I've seen it a million times since. Yeah. And like snakes on a plane, was a direct descendant of deep blue Sea. Yeah, because I think Deep Blue Sea I don't think they were. Was that Renny Harlin? What was it? Gosh, I don't know if it was. It might be. I might be making that up. It was not Steven Lisberger, because he didn't direct anything else. Yeah, he was like a Silicon Valley nerd who just went right back to do it. He did a couple of things. His claim to fame was animaniacs before. That's how he got a little juice in the industry. Sure. Oh, yeah. So, anyway, those are a couple of my guilty pleasures. And this is probably too far on the side. This popped in my mind. It was the first thing that popped in my mind. And that doesn't mean that it's accurate. But for some reason, the first thing I thought of was Intolerable Cruelty with Love. That movie with Catherine Zeta Jones and George Clooney. And I think the reason I classify it as a guilty pleasure is because I somehow know I'm supposed to not like it because it's not full of Cohen brothers. And so I've been told it's terrible. Do you know what I mean? Society has told me it's terrible. Unlike our brother, we're out there or whatever. So that was the first thing that popped my mind. I love that movie. Yeah. I don't like when people I think there's two coen brothers, Tiers and I love that second tier when they're clearly just having a good time making a comedy. I love those movies. Like intolerable cruelty. And the one I really love is man with Brad Pitt and Clooney. Oh, burn. After reading. After reading Love That Man. I think I hated that when I saw it, and now I like it. And I didn't love hail Caesar. And I'm wondering if in a couple of years maybe I'll love that too. I like Tail scene. I was fine with it. Yeah, that simple is like, make me laugh so hard. I love so good. But Born Finger is another one where I'm like, is that one of the all time greatest movies? Probably has one of the all time greatest endings of any movie. Talk about an ending. Yeah, I saw that. That's kind of one of my friends and mine's from college. Favorite movie. So we watched it saw in the theater. Then watch it obsessively in college. Very special. And he went on to be friends with Tony Shaluub, who like in real life, IRL. And he was so good in that. Yeah, so good. Yeah, in that little part and everything. How do you feel if you feel this went well, I think let's have a post mortem on camera. It went great. I might do a little solo post mortem. Not tonight because I have to go to bed. Fair. Because it's like 730. No, I think it was great. The pilot of A jammed in like eight of my other favorite movies in I think that's kind of whoever takes them, I still was the first one to say, yeah, that's kind of the point, though. Screw you, Sam Levine. That's right. Sam mammoth brains is really great. I could quote the hell out of that movie. I'm a real dork. What, for that movie? Yeah, just all my favorite movies. Everything I'm naming is just so dorky. But well, you went after Tron hard and now that I know the whole story behind it, it's a real thing. Yeah, I get it. You weren't seeking nerd cred or anything like that. No, hold on. Let me ask you to back off that for a second. Untrue. No, this is great. All right, well, thanks for coming in, janet Barney for show number one. Thanks, Chuck. Here I go. I guess I ran away only after the door was closed. Man, I'm just so excited about the show. That could not have gone any better. I knew Janet was a great choice as guest number one. Well, she's a professional podcaster herself and does interviews herself, so she knows how to keep the conversation going like a real pro. So that was just a lot of fun. Janet her feelings on Tron. I was kind of wondering what to expect on why that was her favorite pick. And it was very heartwarming to know to me that that was a movie that she and her dad bonded over and it was a very special film from her childhood because of the cute little Tron game that she used to play with her dad. So as we go on with Movie Crush, I think it'll be super interesting to see sort of the why behind why people pick these favorite movies. And I suspect that moving forward, we're going to get quite a few that have a lot of sentimental value. And that is certainly the case with Janet here in Tron and Stan against Evil. Guys, I am so excited. I love season one. Janet is so funny and everyone's just great. And season two actually premiered yesterday in real time. So November 1 premiered on ISC. Check it out, stand against Evil season two. It's wonderful. And check out JV Club, the JV Club podcast where Janet interviews people about their embarrassing high school years. It's a really good show. So thanks to janet for her time and until next week. Would it kill you to spare a little popcorn? Maybe. Movie Crush is produced, edited, engineered and scored by Noel Brown from our podcast studio at Pond City Market, Atlanta, Georgia." | |
454d0264-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-87388e8254d5 | Short Stuff: Thread Count | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-thread-count | Is thread count all it's cracked up to be? Listen in and find out in today's edition of Short Stuff! | Is thread count all it's cracked up to be? Listen in and find out in today's edition of Short Stuff! | Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=23, tm_isdst=0) | 12220400 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum Select Card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage miles. Actually, you earned Advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more at Citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Hi. Welcome to the Short Stuff podcast. I'm Josh. There's Charles. There's Jerome. And this is, again, the Short Stuff podcast. This one in particular is the Short Stuff podcast, where we discuss thread counts in bedding. Let's begin. Yeah. And this one reeks of typical stuff you should know, and that occasionally we will bust a myth or two and bust a move that probably might disappoint some folks, like Dr. Seuss lovers. Yeah. When we pooped all over his early career. But now we're going to poop on thread count, because thread count has become one of these things starting in like the early 2000s when you would literally see thread counts of 1000. It became one of those numbers. And they pointed out in this house stuff works articles like IQ or gas Mileage or something, where no one thought about anything but that number. It was like, oh, well, it's 1000. It's got to be better than the 800, which is better than the 600, which is better than the 300. Do you know where that came from, the whole thread count thing? It's not like thread count hadn't been a factor before, but it was like an industry thing and somehow it got brought out to the consumer, I'm guessing by some yuppie scum who boasted about their thread count somewhere, maybe in a movie or on a TV show, and then it just kind of took off from there. Yeah. Here's the disappointing revelation, everyone. What I read, it's not in this article, but I read in a different one that anything over 400 well, first of all, thread count is the number of horizontal and vertical threads per square inch. Yes. So if you cut a square inch out of your sheet, get a microscope and count every single one of the threads, not where they cross or anything like that, but just the individual threads. That's your thread count. And it just added. There's no weird formula horizontal plus vertical. Well, you also do the square root of pi right in the middle of it. Right. Just for fun. Yeah. Here's the dirty secret, though. Apparently anything over 400 is just bogus because a square inch is a square inch. There's only so much thread you can fit in it. And what I read was that 400 is that number without getting manipulative. Okay. All right, so what I read is that you can exceed that number without getting manipulative, but to exceed that number, you have to use smaller, thinner, and thinner fibers. But that's Manipulative. I guess it's manipulative. Yes, it is, but there's also outright manipulation where there's just not that many fibers in there. Oh, okay. All right. But if you use thinner and thinner fibers to fit more and more threads into that square inch, you're giving the thread count that you're saying, but it's not necessarily going to be a better sheet. It might feel pretty nice, because what you're doing is creating, like, one really solid piece of material, but because the thread you're using is so thin, it might not be quite as durable. Those threads might break more easily, leading to fraying pilling. Pilling is the worst. It might just catch fire spontaneously. It might suck the life out of you while you're sleeping. There's a lot of things that can go wrong if the threads of your sheets snap in the middle of the night. Yeah. So there's a woman named Lexi Sachs who works at the Good Housekeeping Institute, and she says in this article, the sweet spot is between 305 hundred or anywhere from 300 to 500, because if it goes higher than that, then the cotton becomes thin, because like you said, that probably means they're using thinner thread just to get that number up. Right. But what you're looking for is it depends on who you are. But if you want a soft and durable sheet, then you want it to be in that 400 range. Right? Which is great. They don't even mention thread counts much anymore, do they? I haven't bought sheets in a while, but I bet it's still a thing. Okay, but I think one of the reasons it used to be, like, whether you were in the market for sheets or not, you were bombarded with thread count on TV, radio, people in their car. Yeah. And it definitely has subsided. And one of the reasons it subsided is because we'll be right back after this message. 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Based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, Chuck. One of the reasons it subsided is because, again, some people were just straight up perpetrating. Outright fraud. perpend fraud. Yeah. Yeah, it is weird. I don't hear as much about it anymore, like you're talking about, and maybe this fraud being exposed has something to do with that. I think it definitely is. So, like, for a period of time in the United States, at least, we were duped into it. Like, I remember thinking, like, oh, my God, I don't know what my thread count is. I need to find it. That became the pickup line it replaced. What's your sign? Hey, I've got 800 thread counts. She's going to blow your mind. So we were all duped for a while, but it really kind of depends if you're shopping on what you're after in a sheet. Like some people. Like those flannel sheets. I think I had flannel for a little while in college. It's too hot for me, for sure. Sometimes people cotton to those all cotton. They call them Jersey or Tshirt sheets. This is weird. I went down that road for a little while. Well, you tried them all, haven't you? Yeah, I've never gone silk or satin. Yeah. No. What about satine? No. What is satin? I believe. Right. Is this a synthetic satin? Yeah, I think it's even, like, more satiny than satin. Okay, well, supposedly a sateen weave will float the yarn over a few rows at a time, which makes it smoother, apparently. So what about percale? I don't even know what that is. So percale is kind of like a crisp, sturdy cotton weave. Okay. It's kind of like a basket weave. But it's funny how if you use certain types of fibers and certain types of weaves, you're going to get totally different feels. And it is it's totally personal preference. I'm sure when I said Jersey just feels weird, someone out there is like, you're nuts, Clark. I love Jersey. Who doesn't want to sleep on a t shirt? It's all just personal preference. And luckily, the textile industry has heard this, that there are many different preferences, and they're giving us many different things to work with here. Yeah, and some of those, like, jersey sheets and the cotton sheets like that. Well, then this is something I've just learned by having a young daughter. It will tangle your hair a lot if you have long, straight hair. Or curly hair, God forbid, because that cotton, when you move around, it just grabs hold. So what they recommend is like a satin pillowcase for kids, for toddlers, and it just makes sense. Your hair will slip around on that and not get as tangly. So it's in the mail, it's coming. I'll report back on success rates. But that is supposedly a big anti tangler as a satin sheet. Yeah, Yummy has gotten us silk. Just pillowcases. Not the sheets, just the pillowcases. Yeah. You like it? Yes, it's great. I had no idea why. Now I understand why. I just thought she was showing off or something of France. Right. We got silk pillowcases now. But I mean, they are very nice to sleep on, I have to admit. Yes, it's a small indulgence. I like it. Right. It's just a fraction of an indulgence. You get the whole sheet set or whatever, then you are showing off. I don't think I would like it. I just like it's fine for a pillowcase. I'd be afraid I'd slip off the bed or something. Exactly. Because I wear my silk pajamas, silk on silk. You know what that means? Well, yeah, you're toast. You're just going to keep sliding indefinitely until a car, like, stops you. So everyone's getting duped. It's in the 2000s, they start coming out with these crazy numbers, like I said, up to 1000. And they were able to do this because there is no FTC mandate on how to determine thread count. So you can kind of just say whatever you want and you can't be tagged for false advertising. Well, what they were doing also was they were saying, oh, we're using two ply cotton threads, which are two thin strands of cotton wound together to make a thicker strand of cotton. So we have 300 of those in a square inch, but they're too ply, so we're going to call these 600 thread count. Some people, apparently India, Pakistan and China were putting out a substantial amount of sheets that just it didn't matter what you did. You weren't going to come up with the thread counts that they were being advertised at. The International Trade Commission, heard some complaints and they actually authorized customs agents around the world to see sheet shipments. Say that again? To see sheet shipments. Bam. That's a tough one. Yeah. And test them. I don't know if they tested them on the spot or what, but I'm sure there are some nervous boat captains, like, standing there like, what they're going to come back with, man? And they found, like, a lot of sheets that were coming out again, india, Pakistan, and China that weren't up to the thread counts. And I think that was kind of like the crest of that wave. And the fact that the International Trade Commission actually took action on it, it just kind of beat back that little subset of fraud. And so that's where thread counts went. And apparently one of the other things that was fraudulent was Egyptian cotton. Yeah, egyptian cotton is a real thing. And it is great because it's a longer fiber, longer staple is what they call it. Yeah. Which means it's softer for sure and more durable. So it's not like if you see Egyptian cotton, it's not some big scam unless it's not Egyptian cotton. And again, all kinds of brands are advertising Egyptian cotton that were not Egyptian cotton. So if you go into a store today and you see 1000 thread count Egyptian cotton sheet, be very wary, I would say, run away screaming. Well, unless it costs you a pretty penny and it's from a brand that you know and trust. Well, I don't know. I think the rules well, it's true. Yeah, it's true in this day and age. But at a time, I think if you bought sheets from a very trustworthy brand and they were expensive sheets, you would think you're probably getting what you're paying for. This article from households, workers says if you see Egyptian cotton and it's inexpensive, you're probably not getting Egyptian cotton. I'm surprised there's not an app delivery service called Shitty. Oh, I'll bet there's going to be in about two weeks now. All right, just give us a small cut. That's all I ask. Do they ever, though, Chuck, whenever you come up with these ideas, did Sharknado ever give you any? I got no sharknado money. You got no sugar from Sharknado? No. Did you seize the sheets from Sharknado sugar? I don't even know what that means. It doesn't mean anything. I got nothing else. I haven't had anything else for about 30 seconds. Let's end this. Okay? Okay. If you want to know more about this, go to houseofworks.com and check out this article. And also send us an email to stuff podcast@howtofworks.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-06-10-sysk-maps.mp3 | SYSK Selects: How Maps Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-maps-work | In this week's SYSK Select episode, yes, your brain may have just flash-dried from boredom at the thought of learning about maps, but it turns out they are a lot more than just tools for navigation. Maps are two-dimensional representations of how we imagi | In this week's SYSK Select episode, yes, your brain may have just flash-dried from boredom at the thought of learning about maps, but it turns out they are a lot more than just tools for navigation. Maps are two-dimensional representations of how we imagi | Sat, 10 Jun 2017 16:32:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=16, tm_min=32, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=161, tm_isdst=0) | 37759765 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everybody. This is Chuck again with another edition of Stuff You should know selects our Saturday classic edition episodes. And as you know, we're curating these one at a time and this week I got to pick and I picked how maps work and I picked this one because everyone knows I love maps and so I thought it was a good one to rerun. Plus, we get to talk a little bit about my old high school best friend Rad, who is a cartographer, and I'm always happy to get the word out about his work. So listen and enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, chuck Bryant. And I just had a bunch of peanuts, so it's stuffy. Snow time. Circus edition. Yes. I wonder if we could get REM's, Maps and Legends to play just subtly behind this entire podcast in the loop. I can answer that for you. No. Okay. What album is that from? Or is that an album? Boy, that was the early one, I think. I don't know, maybe like reckoning even again, people are home screaming at me because I can't call that to mind. Was that their first one? Reckoning, let's just move on. I'm ready to get anything wrong. Yeah, it's cool. People who are in REM are really in Remaps and Legends. Good song. Chuck? Yeah. Have you ever used a map? I have. I am notoriously terrible with my sense of direction. Literally almost all the time. If I say it's left, isn't it? They say no, it's right. We just talked about this. Because if I try to trick myself and go, I think it's less so I'm going to say right, then it's left. It's terrible. I've talked about it before. It's really yeah, we did recently. I can't place why or where. It's just my brain, man. It doesn't work that way. I use maps and I'm one of those people that has to turn the map in the direction I'm facing and it's tough for me. So when you were using a map, you could have also said or that you're terrible at using maps. You can say, I'm terrible at using two dimensional, contorted, grossly, misrepresentative images that supposedly stand for different data points of the Earth. That's right. That's another way you could put because it turns out that they're actually not so great. Even though they are extraordinarily useful, they're portable. Now that you can get them online, they're more portable than ever and we would be pretty much nowhere without them as far as the imperial colonization of the world went. Yeah. But we still have not licked some very fundamental, basic problems with maps. Maps and Legends is on Fables, by the way. You didn't even hear what I just said. I heard it all and I agree 100%. Okay. The problem is, dude, is the Earth is not a flat piece of paper or computer screen. No, the Earth is sort of shaped like a pumpkin. Yeah. I didn't realize that. I didn't either. Apparently the middle is getting bigger, too. You know what I just realized? What Tracy, who wrote this meant by pumpkin. Like she didn't mean the tall pumpkin. Well, yeah, pumpkin is coming all shapes. Right. So which pumpkin was she referring to? I think like the shorter rounder. The round pumpkin? Yeah. But apparently I think the Earth is supposedly getting bigger, expanding at its center. Not in the center, but it's getting more pumpkiny, I think. More pumpkin like okay, so maps are getting less and less accurate then? Maybe. Because here's the problem. Map, like we said, it's a two dimensional representation of something that's three dimensional. Yeah. It's hard to do. A map is flat and it's representing something that's round, spherical. And if you take a pumpkin, go to your pantry right now and get one of the pumpkins that you have there and take a piece of paper off of a roll, say a newsprint, and tear enough off to go all the way around the pumpkin. And you will see that if you take a pumpkin and mash the paper around it so that the pumpkin is completely covered, you're going to have something that's just grossly distorted. That's a map. It's a gross distortion of what's real. So much so that if you see a map that accurately represents what the continents look like and how close they are and the amount of size they each have, you'd probably be pretty startled because it doesn't look like what we're used to. Which is called the mercator projection. Yeah. And it's funny, when I was reading this, I remember thinking to myself, like, if you're going to make cheats, like make them in the ocean. And I think that's a lot of times what they do. Yeah. No one would notice the good Homologous, somebody's last name with an E. It basically distorts or chops up the world in the oceans. So it's real good for land mass. It'd be terrible if you're driving like an oil tanker across the sea. Yeah. You don't want to navigate by these things. No. And so since there's different ways to distort a map, there's different uses for different types of maps or distortions, which we call projections. Right. We'll get into that a little more later on. Let's talk about the basics of all maps. Right. A map is essentially a representation of, like we said, data points on Earth. Yeah. It can represent whatever. There's different attributes. If you wanted to show a map of distribution of golden retriever ownership, you could do that on a map. You totally could. Or the GDP of different countries or land use. It's basically an easy way, it's an easy language to show someone in picture form various attributes. Right. And maps are created by people called cartographers, which is great. And like we said, there's some basic commonalities to all maps, right? Yeah. I kind of collect maps, by the way. I know you told me. Not like a bunch, but I've got, like, six or eight maps. Any pirate maps? No pirate maps, but my entire desk, I made my desk, and I've got a map of the world on it that's like 4ft by 3ft. That's neat. And then I shall act over that. And that's, like, the base of my desk. Yeah. It's really cool because I reference it a lot, actually. Yeah. I could stand to do that a lot more. Yeah. New England. No idea. Well, it's like looking up a word in the dictionary when you don't know it referring to an atlas. Hey, where is Kuala Lumpur? But I don't have a map. And suddenly oh, my God. Miss Teen South Carolina's answer has come to pass. Like, I don't have a map, and I'm not bad with maps, and I think if you gave me a little time, I would be able to find anything. Sure. But because I don't have a map for easy reference, like, I use online maps now, but if I had one for easy reference, I think I would be a lot better at geography, I think. Everybody forget your computer. This is very handy, but I think everyone should own a globe and or a map of the world. Yeah. Just to have it. It's nice to have frame it, put it on your wall. They're very attractive. It's art. Right. All right. I like the maps. Like the kind you'd find at school. Yeah. From that era. I just like the design of them to look. Yeah. Kevin can, one of the comedians of Salt, Max Fund, was talking about his pillows and how you unsheathed his pillow, how nasty it is, and it looks like an ancient map of the world. It's like, brown with those lines. Yeah. What is that stuff? He basically is like this stuff is like, leaks from your head while you sleep. It's funny. It's a funny bit. Okay. So the basic commonalities of maps are, number one, usually land masses or bodies of water. So you're going to have an outline of what you're talking about or what you're trying to show. Yeah. Are you talking about, like, a physical map? Yeah. Well, I mean, any map is going to have that, but yes, physical maps are more like the terrain of an area. Right. That's what a physical map is concerned with. Yeah. And they use something called hip, symmetric tents, variations of color, to obviously, your water is blue, and then the land can be green to brown or white if it's like the Swiss Alps. Yeah. Have you ever seen a map where the water isn't blue? The one on my desk is. It's tan. What? Yeah, the whole thing is are you reading it backwards? No, there's no blue. It's all tan. Yeah, it's tan. I've never seen that, you know, like the tan globe. No, you've seen like, the tan globe where the globe isn't, like, blue and green. That's basically what this is. I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around it. Yeah, next time you're in my home office, I'll show it to you. Okay. You can have political maps that display, like, different cultural information about countries. Thematic maps, obviously, you have a theme like climate or GDP, like I said. Or you can get really specialized, like, hey, where's the internet available in the world? Let's draw a map instead of listing a bunch of countries. Got you. Yeah. And thematic maps, these are probably the ones you see the most, aside from using a map for street directions. Yeah. Thematic maps are the ones you run across. Like, it'll be all sorts of things, like you just mentioned, population density, oil exports, all that. Yeah. All right, Josh, let's talk about what they call cartography conventions. And this is not when a bunch of cartographers get together at the downtown Hilton in Atlanta and talk about maps, although I'm sure they do that. I'm sure there are real cartography conventions. We're talking about conventions in the sense of often used techniques. Right. One of them, which I have already broken with my map, is that, like we said, water is blue. That's so weird. I don't understand. Land is green vegetation screen or brown or tan land masses. Yes. That's just one of the common conventions. What color is the landmass then? If the water on your map is tan, they're also tan and green and brown. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. It's really not that big of a deal. I'll go look it up. I will post a photo of my map okay. Online, on Facebook when we do this. And everyone will go, oh, that doesn't look so weird. Okay, all right. I feel like a jerk now because my water is not blue. No, it's fine. Okay. I'm just having trouble understanding, that's all. Yeah. All maps depict their subject matter from above. That's something that you just don't even really think of. It's such a common convention. Sure. North is usually at the top. Yes. Generally. Or if it's not for some reason, they'll point you in the right direction, say this is north, this is south, east and west. Yeah. They have legends a lot of times. Yeah. Maps and legends like we talked about with RM. And scale is usually indicated, so it'll be like one inch equals 100 miles. Or there's like one there's a ratio or something like that. Yeah. And this is all the govtok. You find on the outskirts of the map. There's usually lots of stuff written down that you may not look at. That's where you'll find this information. And they should include in the legend that, like, Hawaii and Alaska are not actually right next to one another in the south Pacific ocean, as it seems that's true. That's just odd. Well, like we said, it's tough when you get around or pumpkin like world. Right. Coordinate system. A lot of times or not a lot of times, every time you'll see a map, there's going to be some kind of a coordinate system. Before the advent of online smartphone maps, when I lived in La. The thomas guide was your best friend. Yeah. And that's just a simple grid system. Like, you look up, hey, I want to go to Topanga Canyon. Go to page 400 and look up F six. Right. And then you'll just map your way from there. Yeah. The alphabets across the top. The numbers run down the side, and you find F six and sync someone's battleship. If it's like a map of the world, they're probably going to show you longitude and latitude. Right. But not necessarily something you can navigate with. No, but it should it should be accurate as the point. Well, accurate, but not like you don't want to take a map of the world into the woods. If you're orienteering, you want a topographical map. Right. Which is tricky to read, by the way. Have you ever looked at a topo map, like, been camping and stuff? Because you were talking about hip, symmetric tents to indicate different changes in altitude. Right. Or elevation. Topographical maps use contour lines, and yeah, you better know what you're doing, because it's not necessarily intuitive. It's not intuitive at all. You just have to learn it, and then once you learn it, you can wrap your head around it. Usually the closer the lines are every time the closer the lines are together, the more steep the change in elevation is. Right. And lines that are kind of spread out indicate, like, a very slow yes, I think that's the slope. It's been a while since I've taken basic orienteering. Is that a word? Orienteering? Yeah. I've not heard it. Really? Yeah. Are you messing with me on this episode? Orienteering is when they give you a map and a compass and send you out in the woods. Yeah. I thought that was called trailblazing. You're also trailblazing. Okay, well, hold on. Before we go any further, it's time for a message break. Okay, so we're back, and we're talking about map drawing conventions, believe it or not. And here's a cool experiment you can do. If you want to know how difficult it is to draw a map and have it look accurate, get a balloon, blow it up, draw whatever you want, but draw the United States and Mexico and South America and Canada. Put Canada in there and then deflate that balloon and see what it looks like. And that will give you a little bit of insight into how tough it is to be a cartographer. Right. I mean, you mentioned lines of longitude and latitude, right? Yes. Those are coordinates on any map, and since they're coordinates on a map, people use them to navigate by. Right. Yeah. But since we're going from a sphere to a flat plane, you have to figure out how to adjust for that. And you're basically making a decision. You're going to say, okay, am I going to make it so that the angles, if somebody draws a straight line, the angles are all going to be the same along that line. Meaning you can follow that line on a compass in the real world and get there. It's called a rum line. Or are the lines of latitude, which are called parallels yeah. And lines of longitude and meridians, they're going to be equidistant accurately. Correct. Like, that's the conundrum. That's the big conundrum with maps, typically, yeah. Like, where do you want your inaccuracy to be? Right. Which is pretty weird. I never really thought about it, though, like that. It's an interesting job, and that you have to know that you cannot draw a perfect map on a piece of paper. Right. So where am I going to fudge, essentially? And you do this you figure this out with what they call map projections, and that is basically the method that you choose to project that severe onto a flat surface. Right. So, Josh, you've cracked the code. I have not. It's tough to think of because we're talking about now how distortions occur. Yeah. There's different ways to manipulate how something is distorted. First of all, let's say you are making a new projection, okay? Right. That's a different manipulation of distortion as a projection, and you're making a brand new one. One of the tools you can use is called tissues indicatrix. T-I-S-S-O-T apostrophe. Siso. Those are the circles. Yes. And what you do is you just overlay the Equidistant, exactly the same, aka identical circles. It's like a grid of circles right over a globe. And then when you make your projection, the circles will distort, and you will be able to see where your distortions are on different areas, how they distort, what direction they're going to distort, and get an idea of how your projection is distorted. Right. And the reason that maps distorted again is because you're taking a three dimensional spherical representation and putting it on a two dimensional flat surface. Right. And the projection that we are all very familiar with, the one that we use almost across the board, is the Mercator projection. And there was a guy named Gerardis Becca, who in 1569 created a map of the world, and Mercator decided that I'm going to make my maps for sailors. He made a very important decision. He made it so that rum lines, where you measure between two points on this map, and you can follow that angle with your compass in real life, and you will get there. Right. He made it so that those were precise, but he gave up lines of longitude and latitude being precise, and he figured out how to represent this very cleverly. Where on lines of I'm sorry, not lines of longitude and latitude, just latitude. Since the Earth gets narrower at the top because it's a ball and it's widest at the middle. Anything above or below the equator, as you get further away, the lines between the Latitudinal lines get bigger and bigger, the spaces between them. Right. So, like you would see on a globe, maybe. Yeah. It's a really clever representation of what happens when you take a piece of paper and put it around a globe. A ball. Yeah. That's the Mercator projection. Okay. And the way to figure out how he did this or to imagine how he did it, is to take a cylinder like a piece of paper and roll it up into the shape of a cylinder. This is a magic piece of paper cylinder. Okay. And you have a balloon, and it's a magic balloon. Is this the same balloon we've drawn our world on? It can be, but it's a magic version of it. Okay. Because we needed to have our world on it drawn on it perfectly. Okay. And you blow up this balloon until it hits an edge of the cylinder. So it's just touching the inside of the cylinder on two points, one on either side. What? That balloon has just become a tangent to the cylinder. The secon is where the cylinder would intersect the balloon, but right now it's just touching. And you take a Mercator projection and you've got a perfectly blown up balloon inside a cylinder. That's what you imagine as the projection. You have to take it a little further. You blow up the balloon until it completely fills up the cylinder. Right. So now all of the information on this balloon is pressed up against the inside of the cylinder. The place where it was tangent, where it touched naturally when the balloon was just filled up and it was just a sphere that's going to be undistorted. Okay, that makes sense. The stuff that you're blowing up until the balloon is no longer as fear, but is filling up the cylinder, that stuff becomes distorted. And the further toward the edges you go, the more distorted it is. Now we can pop our magic balloon because all that information has been transferred on the inside of the cylindrical paper. And you unroll it and there's your Mercator projection. Wow. Pretty good. Yeah. I think I get it. Do you really? I got it more than I did then when I read this, like, eight times. Uncle Josh coming through for me. But in the center of a Mercator projection, the distortions are going to be the least because it's tangent to the cylinder. That's where it's just naturally touching the edges. It's not distorted. It's not being forced into the cylindrical shape. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. We should call this one what? Maps. The sun part too. Yeah. Right. It is really hard to wrap your head around it. Is, especially when you're like me and you're bad with maps to begin with. Yeah. So we talked about projections, depending on what you want to do. Different projections have their good points and their bad points. If you want to have an equal area map, you would make an equal area map. That means you preserve the correct area and it's going to distort the shape of your landmasses. It might look weird if you're looking at the entire world, but it's area wise, it's going to be accurate. Right. If you have the Pseudoconical Robinson projection, that's the map that you're probably most used to seeing that actually looks quote unquote correct. But their distances and directions aren't accurate in that case. Right. So it's not good for navigating. It's good for being like, oh, so this is how the continents are situated. That's where Russia is. Is it Asia or is it Europe? Yeah. But depending on where you begin, the cartographer has a lot of leeway into deciding, like, what is going to be the center of the world in this map. So Russia may not actually be over there. Depending on the map, it can be up into the left a little more in reality. Right. And it may be a little smaller. It just depends on you remember where the balloon touched the inside of the cylinder and that was the tangent. Wherever you position the cylinder around the world, where it's going to touch, that's your line of least distortion. And that can be the center of your whole map, but it doesn't necessarily mean that in reality, it's the center of the world. Yeah. Very good. So it's up to the cartographer what choices they're going to make to make what the center, what's where? And then again, what they're going to distort. Right. If you want to be accurate with your distances, you're going to create an equidistant map projection. And if you want your directions, if you want, like, a navigational map, you can actually use that's when you're going to have to use those rum lines. So your compass bearings will actually use this map to get around. Right. You can make a straight line on the map and follow the same straight line, because if your rum lines aren't straight, they're going to be curved. But if your rum lines are straight, then your latitude and longitude are curved. Yeah. So you're sacrificing one for the other. But another thing you can do to get around this distortion is to just tear out pieces of your math. Yeah. There's something called Gores that they use this to make globes. Right. Because the globe can start out as like, a flat piece of paper, but then they cut out angles so that when you fold it, it doesn't crumple, it just kind of lays in perfectly. Yeah. Right. Gorge usually go on lines of longitude. That's where they separate and it's just kind of random. So like a part of a landmass will be completely separated by this. Another region that doesn't really exist except in two dimensions. Right, right. That good. Projection one of my favorites. And it's also the logo for the UN cuts out these things called tears, not gore's. Oh, is that the very famous yeah, I know which one you're talking about. Yes. And they just cut through the ocean because it looks like a bunch of footballs. Yes. Connected the Arctic. Yeah. Which itself is a little bit cut up, but yeah, that's the same one. That's my favorite. I like it. It's very land centric. Yeah. I like Land centric. Me with my tan oceans. So, like we said, maps are visual expressions of measurements. So if you go to make a map, what you're probably going to be working on is all the maps that have come before. It's definitely like an aggregate thing. And you can make your brand new map, of course, but over in antiquity and history, maps were made by going out and measuring things and writing that stuff down. And eventually, the more we discovered, the more accurate the maps were. And it was a big group effort, basically, to land on what eventually was an accurate map. Took a long time. It did take a long time. The oldest maps date back to, I think, 3500 BC. The Babylonians were making maps. Right. And their anthropologists and archeologists disagree. But there may be even earlier maps. But among the drawings yeah, but the anthropologists are like, is it a painting of an area or is it a map? Yeah. You can't really say what the intention of I call it a map was. It might just be here's, tuktuk's Fortress. And here is where the fire is and here's where the dinosaurs are. Yes. But that's still a very crude map to me, so vote for map. Okay. Surveyors are going to come in handy, obviously, to take these precise measurements of both land and water these days. They have GPS is going to make things a lot easier and more accurate. They have something called remote sensing or aerial and satellite photography. They use that a lot now. And that actually was used back in the 18 hundreds. 1858. Yeah. That was when they first use aerial photography. But it really came into its own in World War II when we had all these reconnaissance photos to use that sort of to map out your data. Yeah. Cartographers were like, can we have those when you're done? Yeah, exactly. And map making kind of exploded after that. So, Chuck, we talked about thematic maps, right? Yeah. Like, where are all the trout in the United States? So it's basically like the basis is a physical map. You got mountains, rivers, all that stuff. You can overlay political maps if you start to carve that terrain up by national or state or county or city borders yeah. And then on top of that, you can lay a thematic map, right, like a census or whatever. And that's when the cartographer becomes researcher, basically, and uses a lot of the same methods that a writer would. They need accurate information. They need it as up to date as possible. Most maps like that will actually have citations, just like a research paper might like, hey, we got in touch with the World Bank for this map, or the World Health Organization who are sitting for these numbers. Right? I mean, if you're doing something like smallpox outbreaks from 1872 to 1915, then you could cite World Health Organization statistics and show that on a map just by using some colors. Yeah, that's bam. That's a thematic map right there. Yeah. And in 1852, Francis Guthrie, he was in England, and he said, you know what? I have this theorem that all you need is four colors. And everyone said, Shut up. And he said no. Really? They said, Shut up. He said, you need your blue. Well, I actually don't know the four colors. I guess it'd be blue, brown, green, and apparently tan. Apparently you just need tan. I guess so. But that became known as the four Color Theorem, and he proposed that you could map out all the counties of England just with those four colors. Why make it more complicated than that? And people said, okay, maybe you're right. And he was, you need skill as an artist, obviously, if you want to be a cartographer with computers these days, geographic Information Systems, GIS, they have automated a lot of these tasks. But as Tracy points out, the best map still comes from skilled artists. Yeah. And map making is I get the impression that, like, it really blew up after World War II thanks to aerial photography, and we had some really great maps that were created as a result. But I feel like the Internet has really ushered in a new era for maps that has not been seen since, like, the age of exploration, where it's like people are making maps for everything. They're a lot easier to make, although they still require a great deal of skill. I think what I mean is the tools are there to make a map easier to make. They're more accurate. They're more up to date. The time between starting and releasing a map or publishing a map is a lot shorter, and people just, I think, tend to use them a lot more, and they're having a lot more impact thanks to things like Google Maps. Sure. People are discovering entire lost cities thanks to Google Maps. Like Google Earth. Yeah. There was a war that broke out over Google Maps, I believe, between Nicaragua and Costa Rica may be. Really? Yeah. In 20 08 20 09, there was a skirmish, and I believe it was Nicaragua and Costa Rica. There was a little disputed bit of land, and some rogue lieutenant said, you know what? I found a Google map. That sites. This is ours, and I'm going to go colonize it. And it started an international incident between the two countries. Holy cow. Yeah. So, I mean, they still have, like very maps have a huge impact on world and culture, and I think also a lot of people assert that they have an impact on the way people think of a nation or continent or a group of the people who inhabit that area. Something that's big and in the center of a map. Right. That must be an important place. Sure. Something that's small and off to the side is marginal, and I think that has an impact on the psychology behind maps. And I think probably a good cartographer takes that into consideration. Yeah, for sure. Well, something else that you have to consider is what is your purpose of the map period, like, what information you're trying to get across, because that will determine what kind of data they're into and then what's the audience just like, if you were writing a story or a paper, you want to cater your map to who's going to be using it. Right. Is this for a children's website or is it for getting around the big city? Right. But also, are you asserting the domination of Europe over the rest of the world and your artist mercator, and it's the 16th century, so you put Europe in the center of your world and make it way bigger than South America, which is actually twice its size. Yeah. I think these days cartographers fall into their different niches. Like, you might be into political maps, and so that's what you do. Or actually, we can just get to this now. One of my best friends, one of my oldest friends is an illustrator and cartographer, and he does well here, let me show you what he's done. He does everything from ski maps to ski slopes. Oh, that's a nice map, isn't it? It is. To like, the rivers of Utah or the rivers of this certain part of Africa. It's like really cool maps. Like, that pretty. Yeah, it's very pretty. His name is Rad Smith, and we're looking at yeah, Raddington. Radkey. I can't bradford. Yeah, I've told you I mentioned him before. So I sent Rad a few questions, actually, just to spice this thing up, because when you have a cartographer at your back and call, you might as well use them. Right. Ben Franklin, I think, said that. I think. So I just threw a few quick questions at him earlier in the day, and he was kind enough to respond. And you can see Radswork, by the way@radsmithillustrations.com, if you're so inclined, or illustration. No s. So I asked him what kind of personality traits, what kind of person becomes a cartographer? And he said, patience is obviously a big thing because you can't just, like, whittle off a map in a few minutes or a few days, he says, especially in relation to having the ability to source and seek out existing data, because every county, state, university, federal agency, etc. Has their own data clearing house and GIS library, so finding the right data for your needs can really be a challenge. It also has become a crowd sourced resource as data libraries are growing every day. I think having a strong mathematical background and understanding of scale and perspective is important, too. And enjoying looking at the world from a map perspective is a plus. He said he never gets tired of looking at maps old and new. Yeah. And this was a dude that we used to sit around and watch the Weather Channel together in high school just for fun. It really panned out for him. Yes. And he would be doodling and I would be, like, writing stories and look at us now. That's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. He uses the GIS systems and GPS because I asked him how much is actually field work, and I think generally he works in conjunction with people out in the field and then asked him how he got started. And he said he always loved maps. He started painting watercolor maps for a magazine. He would paint background textures to suggest terrain, water, and other geographic features. I bet he didn't paint it brown. No, I bet rat. He's all about the blue water. He's a surfer. That may have been when we talked about it. Yeah. Oh, and finally I asked him, like, how long? And that's the worst question ever. Like, hey, how long does it take to do a map? But that Moonlight Basin ski map I did, he said took 170 hours wow. To create it looks like it. Yeah. He said he worked from dozens of aerial photos, topographic maps, satellite images, building plans to piece it all together. So it's very cool. It's like, kind of figuring out a puzzle. I think that's neat. And then relaying it in a way that is both accurate and interesting to the user. Yeah. And I like looking at maps, too. There's a bunch of cool ones all over the Internet. I think if you just search, like, strange maps yeah. It'll bring up some pretty cool sites. Yeah. And it's fun to look at the old I'm into what people used to think the world looked like and the land masses were shaped like. Oh, yeah. Well, if you look at certain projections now that are supposedly very accurate, it looks really weird and nothing like what we think of as well, maps is done. Do you got any more? I got nothing else. Way to add the cartographer at the end. That's nice. Yeah. Thanks, Ryan, buddy. Thanks a lot. Rad. He's pretty excited about this, I think. Oh, yeah. Well, sure. Cool. Anytime someone's highlighting your field, he does other illustrations, too. He's not just a cartographer. Oh, yeah, exactly. That's just what he does on the side. Right. If you want to know more about maps and cartography. You can type maps into the search bar@housetoforce.com, which means since I said search bar, it's time for listener message break. And how about some listener mail? All right, I'm going to call this fraternity in drag. Okay. All right, this is from Cameron. Hey, guys, and Jerry. First off, I'm a big fan of the show. Recently listened to the episode on Drag Queens. I thought I'd share a little bit about my organization. I'm the president of the Zi chapter Xi I think that's right. I think it is. Of Delta Lambda Phi international social fraternity at UC Davis in California, where a special interest fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men. For the past almost 25 years, we put on Northern California's largest drag show called Davis Burning. The name inspired obviously by the documentary Paris's Burning, which you guys mentioned. The show is a night of gender bending fun as many of our brothers dress up and perform and drag for an audience of almost 1000 students, staff and community members. So that's awesome. Like everyone's getting involved in this, right? Additionally, we have local celebrity drag performers from Sacramento. Are there Sacramento celebrities in San Francisco? Okay, there you go. The audience gets involved too in our famous Drag King and Queen competitions. While the show serves mainly as a fundraiser for the chapter, we donate a large amount of money from the show to the Trevor Project, an anti suicide hotline for at risk LGBT youth. I think it's great and that you guys featured this piece on the show about drag queens and had some fun with the lingo, did a great job. Feel free to check out our website for the show@davisburning.com. That is from Cameron. Thanks, Cameron. We got some good replies. Did you see the guy who he and his partner met? One of the veterans of the Stonewall, right? Yeah. Down in Puerto Rico. Yeah. Selling drag and just like living history right there. Very cool. Very cool. So thanks to them. Although I'm sure she would not like you to refer to her as living history. Hopefully she doesn't listen to this. Why living history? What's wrong with that? It just makes us not old. Well, she is old, but she's part of history and she's alive. Anyway, I hope she's not listening. He also hit him at the end of the email. Oh, yeah. What do you say? He's like, hey, Chuck, if you ever decide to swing over our way, give me a call. He's like, Josh is too skinny for me, but that's hilarious. Yes. I guess he's into the bears, the Chevy bearded ones. Yeah. I didn't even notice that. Scroll down further in my emails. From now on, you should. The PS is always riveting. If you got a PS that you want us to hear, you can tweet to us here at Syscape podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, you can join us at our podcast, I'm on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit httws.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-05-02-sysk-poetry-final.mp3 | How Poetry Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-poetry-works | Poetry is a broad and expansive art form. From dramatic verse to haiku, rhyming poetry and spoken word, there are many hats a poet can wear. Join Josh and Chuck today as they break down the history of poetry, a dive into what's so great about it. | Poetry is a broad and expansive art form. From dramatic verse to haiku, rhyming poetry and spoken word, there are many hats a poet can wear. Join Josh and Chuck today as they break down the history of poetry, a dive into what's so great about it. | Tue, 02 May 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=122, tm_isdst=0) | 62146418 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Emily Dickinson, Bryant and Jerry Longer fellow role in me. Like I said, I'm just Josh Clark. I'm not a poet. And if I am, I don't know it. Won't you come over and help me straighten out my longfellow? Oh, yeah. The great Ronnie Dangerfield, was it? And Back to School. Yes, but I think we should start off by saying that Jerry likes to deliver confidence builders. Right before we hit record. Yeah, she said. Hey, something I've noticed when you guys record, too. If there's one that you think stinks, record that one first. Yeah, this one recording first. I like this one, though. I do, too. Jerry, apparently is not down with poetry, though. Jeez. She's like it's stupid. She's bass. I hate poetry. I like regular sentences. She's a fan of prose. Yes. What this episode did for me was reminded me that I like poetry. Yes, I remember now as an English major. Really getting into it for a little while. I bet you had to read a lot of poetry for that. I did, and some of it I didn't like it all, but a lot of it I really liked. And I just realized I don't read a lot of poetry anymore, and I really kind of dug it. There's plenty of good poetry out there, for sure. I've never been wanting to be like, oh, I'm going to sit here and read poetry all day. Well, it does carry a certain, like, thing. Although I have smoked pipe before. Some of my long sleeve shirts have suede patches on the elbows. But I guess I'm just a pozer because I don't sit around reading poetry. But I do appreciate a good poem. Well, I think that's my deal is, like, a really good poem. Just impresses me to no end. Sure, yeah. Obama, try writing a poem yourself. I did once. How did it go? I post college, wrote a poem that I liked so much, I sent it to The New Yorker. Oh, you liked it that much? Yeah, I liked it enough to realize rejection. Did it turn out that Ziggy had already done the same poem? No. You know the reference? No. There's a seinfeld where Elaine sent in a comic to The New Yorker, but it turns out she had ripped off a Ziggy. I don't remember that. It's a good one. Anyway, I have a copy of this somewhere, a hard copy only, I think, in some box. You didn't bring it today? Well, no, I mean, it's got to be in my attic, but I need to get it because I remember thinking, like, it's pretty good. Well, yes, if you send it to The New Yorker, I would guess you thought very highly of it. But I was also 23, and I wrote my first poem. I'm going to send it to The New yorker. Yeah. So it was your first and only first. You're like going to the New Yorker first shot. Yeah. That's funny. That's, like, akin to, like, just writing your first script and being like, I should get this in Scorsese hands. I might as well prepare my Oscar speech. Anyway, I did get a rejection letter, but it was nice to get that even. Yes, you should have it framed next to your poem. Yeah, I'd like to see this poem or hear it. It was sort of longish, and it was about a kid jumping in a pile of leaves in the fall. That's nice. But as we will see, it had symbolism and metaphor. I never said leaves or pile of leaves or anything like that. It was all, like, very, I thought, skillfully. Sort of crafted. Yeah, you just put me on my head. Like, I thought that the poem was about jumping into leaves, and the leaves are a metaphor for something else, but it's about doing something else. That's a metaphor for jumping in a pile of leaves? No, it was about the kid jumping in a pile of leaves. I just never explicitly said that. I see. He became a locomotive. Like a steam train. Sort of fancy, oh, I got you, that kind of thing. But that was good. Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. I think everyone wants to hear this poll now. You're going to have to post it. Well, if I dig it up, I will definitely read it in a very special stuff you should know. Okay. It's a deal called how to get our listeners to jump into a ravine. So one of the things, Chuck, when I was researching this, I looked all over for learning to appreciate poetry or what it takes just for some advice. Because it's always been a tough nut to crack for me, which I think makes me like just about everybody. And I came across this essay on poets.org, and it's called how to Read a Poem. And that's exactly what it's about. It's written in prose form, thankfully, so you can understand it, like, right off the bat. And the author made this point. He said that readers make three false assumptions when addressing an unfamiliar poem. Right. The first is that they assume they should understand the poem right out of the gate first time they read it, and that if they don't, there's something wrong with them. Or probably less frequently, there's something wrong with the poem. Right. The poem doesn't work. The second is that there is. In any given poem, there's a code. And if you can crack the code, you get the whole poem. Poem is only about one certain thing, and it's all encoded in one way. And that's that like, you just crack it, bam, you're done. Poems been read. Right. And then the third one is assuming that the poem can mean anything the reader wanted to mean. That's not true. The poem means what the author intended it to mean. Well, yeah, it's open to interpretation, certainly, but the poem still, from what I'm gathering here, there's no poet. Whoever wrote something, it was like, I have no idea what that means. Yeah, but I have heard poets and songwriters say, like, I meant it to be this way, but it's whatever you take it. Sure. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of meaning imbued in not just poetry, but any kind of writing, any kind of art by the viewer, by the listener, by whoever. Right. But the point is, a poem is so meticulously crafted that you can bet every word, literally every syllable in every single line was hand picked and almost sculpted. And it all comes together to point out that the best way to approach poetry is as a typewritten object of art. Yes. And that once you come at it like that and that it's going to be hard, it's going to give you trouble. But the more trouble it gives you, the more rewarding it's going to be when you understand it. If you come at a poem like that and you're not going to get it the first time out that you're supposed to spend some time and effort on it, you can start to appreciate poems. Yeah. That's what I got from this in prose. I wonder if one of your issues with poetry has something to do with how concise poetry is. And you as a writer, like, why you haven't written a 2000 page novel is surprising to me still. Yeah. You know, infinite Jest the Sequel. Like, I always imagine your book would be, like in Wonderboys, that scene where he goes down and he types out, like, I can't remember the first three digits, but you think, oh, it's 300 words. And then he types like a four at the end, like 3000 pages long. Right. Yeah. And Katie Holmes is like, yeah. Once you started getting into the different lineages of the horses that were, you stopped making choices. Such a good movie. It is. Yeah. What do you think? Do you think that's accurate? Like, why you might oh, that it's too concise? No, I can appreciate things that are different. I think for me, I ran into the same thing that the author of how to Read a Poem kind of called out, which is you expect to get it the first time, and if you don't, you just get kind of frustrated and you give up. Right. I'm a quitter. I'm a quitter reader. That's not true. I take it back then. Should we talk about history? Yeah. Well, one thing I thought was kind of really neat is that poetry predates literacy by hundreds of years, if not thousands. Yeah, true. I think kind of every site that I looked at talking about the history of poetry all pointed to Epic of Gilgamesh. Such a good story and just the kind of the earliest poetry period were these epic poems. And a lot of people think that one reason they turned to poetry was so they could memorize stories. Right. Yeah. Because if you're a storyteller in your group, you were in a story, and that was your role. Yeah. And you needed to remember actual, like, facts, events, that kind of thing. So it's a way to help record and memorize history in a way. Right. Which is kind of a revealing thing about poetry, because a lot of people think of poetry as written or typed, when really poetry is actually usually intended to be read aloud. And once you start reading poems aloud, then I think you'll be like, oh, I see. I hate my voice. I don't go to poetry readings. But there is a dude. In fact, I'm going to read one of his poems later. There's a modern poet named Derek Brown. You know Derek? No, I thought you might have met him somehow. He's a touring poet cool. And opens up a lot of times for music bands and, like, comedians. He opened for Eugene Merman. Okay. That's how I met him once and got to know him a little bit, and he's just great. That's pretty cool. Like, his poems are awesome. Well, yeah, I'm sure if you're a touring poet yes. You're not going to suck. But he's trying to sort of and there are all kinds it's not like he's the only person out there writing poetry. But you see articles about poetry being dead every now and then, and it's just not the case. Yeah. The article either says poetry is dead or poetry is alive and well, but everybody calls it rap and then somebody else writes another. Yeah. And there's this huge ongoing debate over whether rap qualifies as poetry. And it's just all written by middle aged white men. Pretty much, yeah. Oh, goodness. So speaking of epics, the Greeks and the Romans, historically, between, what, 1200 BC and Ad 455 was when they were really cranking stuff out. And everyone always points to the two biggie's homer wrote the not The Iliad and Odyssey. He didn't write the Iliad. I don't think the official title is The Iliad iliad and Odyssey. I was surprised that he said was called out instead of, like, Virgil. I would have guessed Virgil would have been name checked sooner than he seed right. As number two behind Homer. Yeah. Homer is number one, for sure. Yeah. Ancient Greek epic poets. Yeah, I think so. But he see it. Come on. No works and days. Not bad. Yeah. As far as epic poems go. Sure. Which I'm not into. I struggled with both Eliot and Odyssey. Oh, you read them both? Yeah. In English class. Yeah. I mean, I can't absolutely look back and say I read them both all the way through for class. I might have been a little lazy about it, but we study them in great detail. Yeah, I read enough of, I guess, The Odyssey that I started to confuse it with odyssey? Harry hamlin or La law. They just kind of run together. He started to confuse it with Making Love, his 80s movie. I never saw that one. Yeah, it was a movie about, like, a gay man that was married and had a secret affair. Harry Hamlin was him? Well, no. I think the husband was Michael Aunt Keen. Remember that guy? No. And I think he had the affair with Harry Hamlin because who wouldn't? Well, yeah, I mean, that guy speaking of I want to say something, and it has nothing to do with anything. He just reminded me with Ads movie, I've been watching a lot of Rift tracks lately, and they kill it. I want to specifically recommend and if you have an Amazon Prime membership, it's streaming on prime. A lot of rift tracks. Nightmare at Noon, I think, is what it's called. So had you not watched a lot of Rift tracks? I'd seen a few, but I just kind of caught the bug and I've been crying, laughing at some parts, or like I'm just wiping my eyes. Listen to me, man. I don't laugh like that. And it's making me laugh like that. Yes. Kevin and John listened to stuff you should know. Supposedly. Yeah, I've heard that. At least they were nice enough to say that to my faith. I don't know. Either that or they're just super nice guys who didn't want to make me feel bad. I could kind of see that they're like, yeah, listen to stuff that knows. So, moving on to medieval times, things started to get a little more well, not creative, but they started to expand the poetic horizons a bit with the language they use and the subject matter they wrote about. Chaucer in particularly started doing something really unusual is writing in the common everyday language. Which kind of didn't happen a lot before him. No. Been Latin up till then. Yeah. And he's, like, talking about common people in the common language. Yeah. Well, common for them, but Chaucer is tough. Oh, man. Impenetrable. Yeah. For me, it's like, what's this guy talking about? Yes. You need a good teacher for that stuff. Like a really good English teacher that can walk you through that stuff. Yeah. Supposedly, Canterbury Tales are really interesting and there's a lot of wit and humor to them, but yeah. It's just really difficult language. Yeah. I had to be somebody who knows it. I had a good teacher in college, and I had an idea to make Canterbury Tales into a modern movie, but on a Greyhound butts. And I thought that was great. I thought all my ideas were good when I was, like, 21. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. It's all right. It's no sharknado. You need loyalties for that one. So, moving on to the Renaissance period, things got even more creative and this is when we saw new forms of meter. Young man named William Shakespeare, Thomas Marlowe, they started the verse drama movement. Right. And so initially you've got poetry. It's just oral history, basically. And then the Greeks come along and then the Romans and codify it and make formal structures out of it. And then everybody starts to undo those. And it's getting further and further away from the Greeks and the Romans until we hit the Enlightenment period from about the mid 17th century till almost the 18th century. Almost the 19th century, I should say. And they went back and basically venerated the Greek and Roman traditions, which seems weird to me. Somebody was struck and said these guys knew what they were doing. Yes. I'm kind of surprised, too. I would have thought the Enlightenment would have taken things in an even further yeah, like away from that. But I guess not. I guess not. I think the Romantics did, though. 1790 till about 1830. That's when they kind of poopooed in poopoo. But they strayed a bit from what the Enlightenment was doing. Well, rebelled, for sure. Yeah. It seems like there were periods of strict structure and then rebellion away from that over the decades and centuries in the history of poetry, which is literally what we're talking about right now. And probably a cultural movement as well. I'm sure it was kind of all tied together, right, sure. Certainly with the transcendentalist movement in the United States. And I used to be all about those cats. Yeah. Love them. And then I started really learning about thorough and I was kind of like, he's a bit of a weirdo, like, in real life, odd dude, and not like, in all great ways. You know, I could just go off and, like, poop in the corner at a party. You just go off and live deliberately like a weirdo poop in the corner party. All right. But the transcendentalness and the Romantics did focus a lot on create nature and stuff like that. But certainly through the road, for sure. It was all about it. I'm just saying I liked Emerson more than Thoreau as I got older. Okay. I used to think Thoreau was great. Sure. And then I came to like Emerson more. Well, thorough, that's a young man's game. Sure. Wondering how many people are just like, what are these guys talking about? Welcome to our new subscribers. Victorian period, 1832 to one. And this is further breaking away from the establishment. And this is when you get, like, the great granddaddy of them all, Mr. Whitman. Yeah, he's like, structure, meter, rhythm. You can take it and shove it. I say nuts to that and things kind of like that was it from then on. Like, you had your traditionalist still, and even today you still do. But that's when basically all the rules were out the window and you could do whatever you wanted. Yeah. And call it poetry. Thanks to Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, baby. I think that was the original title. Yeah, baby. A couple of y's on the end. Should we move into the 20th century, too? Well, you kind of have to, because it's not like poetry just ended with Whitman. No, the 20th century definitely saw its share of movements. Apparently, in the very early 20th century, there was a modernist movement that sought to go even further away from the norms. And they even rebelled against poor Walt Whitman, who may or may not have still been alive to see this. But they said, you know what? We're sick of your flowery language and your fancy calligraphy and all that. We are going to make short, concise, interesting poems. And that was the modernist movement. This is where it really started to get interesting for me. The modernist. Yeah. I was way into EE. Cummings and Yates and Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Plath. What about Robert Frost? Yeah, he was good. Sure. I mean, listen to me. He was good. He was all right. No, he was amazing. He was WH. Alden. Which one was the one who made pizza rhyming short rhymes? This is so sad. I got my poetry from King of the Hill. But there was this one, King of the Hill, where Peggy Hill is reciting a poem. She said, the cow is of the bovine ilk. One end gives moo the other milk. Who was that? It wasn't Ezra Pound, was it? Ezra Pound wouldn't have written something like that. It sounds like something like Oscar Wild would have done. No, it was a Texan, I believe, because they were observing the guy's house. Okay. No idea. Definitely it was not for a while, then. Anyway, that's when I really got into poetry. It was way more accessible to me and I could read EE. Cummings and sort of get it. I think part of it also, though, Chuck, is your experience was a lot closer in resemblance to the experience of people in the early 20th century than it was to a Puritan writing in New England like the 17th century about how much I love God and my neighbors. Like, your experience is different, so of course you can identify with it. So of course the poetry that's created from that experience is going to speak to you or at least be more accessible to you. I think that's why a lot of people get turned off from poetry, too. Here's another reason. It's because you're indoctrinated into this history of poetry, and it should go backwards. It should go counter chronologically. Like, you should be inculcated in poetry roughly in at least the same century, within the last 50 years, actually. And then once you start to get that, you can take on older and older stuff. But it's like, not only do you have to get the poem, you have to get the poem and also understand, like, a completely different social outlook from somebody who lived a couple of hundred years ago. Yeah. What are they even talking about? Well, I was about to give advice to English teachers, but then I realized we just did the same thing. It's like if you start your class with, all right, let's talk about the epic of Gilgamesh. That's how you can lose a student. But we just did the same thing. Jerry, can you just reverse publish this thing backwards? Surely there's a way. Well, I have to admit to my Deadpote society had pretty big impact on me, too. Never saw it. Shut up. Never saw it. You're kidding. I've never seen it. Just so I could save this moment. Have you really? Yeah. I've never seen it. We should start a movie podcast where we each just are like, no called you've never seen that? I was inculcated into the work of Robin Williams in the wrong way. And much that Morgan mindy. No. Patch Adams. Once I saw Patch Adams, I was like, I can't see any more Robin Williams movies. You should see dead boats. I'm sure I should. It's really good. I think I've got another 1015 years of Patch Adams to wear off first. Is that the only Robin Williams movie you've ever seen? No, that's the last one I saw. That okay. Really? No, that's not true. Father of the Year, I saw. Have you seen it? You're picking the wrong movies. Have you seen it? No. It's good. In a weird indie way. It's a weird little movie. He did good. I think that might be his last one. I think I'm thinking of something else. Yeah, this is a little weird ending movie. Yeah, I'm thinking of something different. I think Bob Gold Tweet directed it. Oh, well, then it's good. And then we move on. We're getting in. No, we're getting into the mid forty s. And I got into this stuff, too. The Beat Poets. I think every college student probably went through a little phase sure. Where they listen and listen to Ginsburg. But Red, Ginsburg and Carwack, that generation definitely sort of embraced to do what you want with the style bongos. Yeah, I liked it. I thought it was cool. Oh, the Beats were awesome, man. Yeah. Carwick in particular. I never got into any of the other guys, but I like him a lot. Everyone should read Howell by Ginsburg. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's his most famous poem. And I'm sure big Ginsburg fans will say, of course you can recommend Howell. Yeah. Troy, you should. Howell. Sure. And we should take a break. Yes. So, Chuck, we are back, and we are done talking about the history of poetry. Let's talk about poetry itself. Okay. So a poem has four lines. They all rhyme. Yes, they all rhyme. A, a. They're all in iambic pentameter, which we'll describe later. And they're each made up of four stanzas. That's a poem. Anything else is just commi propaganda. Right? Yeah. Boy, we're silly today. I guess we should talk about the genres. And this is one of those topics where we're going to do 50 minutes on poetry when there are we could do 15 podcasts about poetry. So forgive the overviewness of this. That's what we do. Sure. You have narrative poetry, which is poem that tells the story. Yeah. Which doesn't have to be an epic poem. It doesn't have to be book links. It can be a very short poem that tells the story. But it's got, like, basically a plot in action and characters. Yeah. Star chase. Right. At least one. But epic poetry does fall under that banner, though. Right. You have dramatic poetry, which we talked about with Shakespeare. A lot of people maybe don't even realize that Shakespeare was writing poetry for the stage. Yeah, I guess. Or maybe they don't think about it that way. I thought everybody thought that's what it was. It was poetry. Talk about dense and impenetrable, too. Yeah. It's tough. Can be again. Need a good teacher. Good teacher, sure. I wish I could remember my teacher's names, to shout them out. My college teachers were so great at that. But I think I've talked about him before I had a great Shakespeare teacher. We just read it out loud in class and he would say, well, this is what's going on after each, like come on. Stanzas. Yeah. It's like an live, annotated version of Shakespeare. And his theory was, this is what you got to do to make these kids get it. But once they get it, they realize that these are modern stories. Right. Just told in a way that no one can understand. Right. Timeless stories. Yes, exactly. Lyric poetry is probably what a lot of people think of as a poem. Right. It might rhyme doesn't have to tell a story. It doesn't have to have a plot. It's like rhyme and rhythm, and it creates just like this. It's for effect of a feeling, maybe. It uses a lot of imagery, usually of different types, to get you to visualize something or hear something or imagine what the poet's trying to get across. There's lots of different meanings. Yeah. It's like what people think of when they think of poems. Yeah. Lyric poetry. Remember that one. And there are many other kinds and genres, but I think those are kind of the main ones that a lot of people consider. The three main genres? Yeah. Is that fair? I think so. We already kind of said it. When you're reading poetry, most of the time you're reading it silently to yourself, and that is not what you're supposed to do. Most poems are written to be read out loud, even if just to yourself. Yeah. And apparently the first time from this how to Read a Poem essay, the first time you go to read a poem, just read it out loud, and the author points out that you will notice a lot of stuff about the poem, and you don't have to get the meaning right away, but you want to just basically read it out loud at least once. And that alone is going to raise a lot of different flags and markers about the poem to you, because when you read it out loud, the sounds that the words make start to really come out, and that's really what starts to differentiate poetry from prose. The fact that basically sound effects are used in this written art. Yeah. Like a laser. Pew pew. That's how you read a poem. Rhyme, obviously, is the most common or maybe at least most recognizable sound effect. That might be alliteration. Yeah. In fact, I think it is. No, that's onomatopia. Onomatopia, right. And snap, crackle, pop, English major. We all know what rhymes are, so we're not going to insult you with the definition. But there are also things like near rhymes yeah. Or slant rhymes, which are when well, kind of when you can't think of a word that really rhymes, but you can get one that's close. So Emily Dickinson apparently was a master of the slant rhymes. Oh, yeah. How about bare and far? Yes. I mean, it's close. You're not going to be like stupid and swap the book off of your desk. It's not like bear and orange. Well, nothing rhymes with orange. Right. That's why I said it supposedly. Right. I've never heard anything that rhymes with orange. I'm sure there are some emails coming on that one. Orange. Right. There are a couple of other things we can talk about, like alliteration and consonants with nance and consonants is a good example. Mommy's. Mommy was no common dummy. Yeah, you got that sound. Yeah. But it's not necessarily at the beginning of the word, right. At the beginning of a bunch of different words close together. That would be alliteration right. But they are specifically continents. Alliteration you're right. That is the big brown bear bit. Benny's butt. Poor Benny. Yeah. What about accidents? That's one of my favorites. That one is tough. It can be tough to pick up on that's where a vowel is repeated or a vowel sound is repeated in a number of words close together somewhere in the word. Right. Like the rain in Spain falls gently on the plane. I think mainly on the plane. Whatever. Or I like the example. He's in here. I might like to fight nine pirates at a time. Yeah, that's a good one. I don't know. All the stuff I love, like, this is poetry's kind of playful quality to me. Right. Or when a poet sits down and you can put a lot of thought into if you're trying to pull off something like that, you know? Yeah. As you're trying to also tell a story. Oh, yeah. No, like, to be a genuine poet is to be probably one of the most creative and technically proficient artists around. Agreed. It's got to be one of the most difficult things to do. Well, I think agreed. Think about it. You're a great director. Well, you've got a camera to assist you and really get your vision across. You've got this technology. You're an author of pros. Well, how many pages did it take you to get your point across? Right. You are a musician. That's great. You've got a violin. Bravo. A poet. You got a quill, an inkwell, some paper. You better get it right. It's tough. You're wearing your breeches. Yeah, exactly. Well, what I said earlier litteration. But you said it was on a monopie. Yeah, that's the one where the word sounds like the word it describes. Right? Like bang, beep, snap, crackle, pop, buzz, snap. Yeah, and crackle. Crackle. Don't forget purr and pop, clash. I like those words. I would love to see this episode animated. Do you remember the dude who used to animate? Yeah, they were great. Oh, man. They were better than the actual episodes. Right. And this one, I think, would be virtually impossible to animate. I think you're right. And these, of course, are just sort of some of the most common sound effects or many tools that a poet can pull out of the old toolbox and use at their disposal. So sometimes I found that when you are forced to work within a structure, a very highly structured environment, you're able to be more creative than you might be if it's just like here, go crazy. No rules. Yeah. Because then you have to just thinking about the edges, the boundaries, and then you have to think about how to get creative. People need structure. So if the structure is given to you, it's easy sometimes to kind of play within that structure and to really let your wing spread, which I think is one reason why poems have certain structures, even though, really, it's a free for all. You can basically do whatever you want and call it a poem. But there are plenty of structures, and there are certain parts of a poem structure that you can find in almost any poem. Well, yeah. And these structures are just things that were repeated enough by enough people because someone did it first and someone else thought, hey, that's pretty clever. Yeah, I like that. And enough people did it to where it became canon. Cannon. Sure. All right. Canon structure. Yeah. Like, for instance, I said stanzas and prose. You have paragraphs and poems. You have stanzas. It's like a poems paragraph. Yeah. How you actually type that on the page is very much thought out, as in where you take the line breaks to the next line and where you might put that period if you break a sentence up. Or you can have one sentence that's super long on one line and then three words of a sentence on another line, and then one word. One word, one word on each line. Everybody's going to hate your poem. But no, not necessarily. You could do that. Or if you choose to break a sentence in the middle of a line that actually has a name, that's called engamant, and it's all part of this wacky, crazy, poetic structure world. But that's the thing. And there actually is a type of poetry called concrete poetry where the shape that the poem takes on the page is meant to visualize something or to be a depiction of, like, a picture, basically. Yeah. I'm not into that. I'm not either. I think most poets aren't. Oh, really? Yeah. I think the ones that do it's like so, like, a poem of a windy river is, like, typed in such a way that if you blow your eyes, it looks like a windy river. Sure. Right. That's called a concrete poem, I believe. I think on the nose is another word for it. Right, yeah. So most poets aren't breaking lines. They're not doing engagement to make a picture. It's meant to have to either point out a word to play with a series of words or just to create a rhythm that otherwise they wouldn't be able to if they just did sentence by sentence on a line. Yeah. And even when I wrote as a novice that poem that I submitted, I found myself doing that just instinctively after studying poetry and stuff like, oh, this word, I'm going to capitalize it and it's going to go on the line by itself. Right, exactly. Oh, they'll love this. New Yorker is going to go crazy. That's what I thought. So I ran across a guy named Robert Cree, who is apparently very well known for his engagement. Seriously? So here's a poem from the language. You're part of some lines from his poem. The language locate I love you somewhere in teeth and eyes bite it. So if you just read it like that, it's whatever, it's a poem. But this is how he has the line breaks. And apparently he's well known for reading his poems out loud and like leaving a beat after just about every line. Locate eye love you some wear in teeth and eyes bite it. But right now, can't you just see everybody in a cafe going like this, snapping after that? But this guy is like a master of jamming, because if you take it and you look at it, especially when you look at it, it just really changes the meaning of the words. Yeah. I think master of Him jamming should be your rap name, for sure. Oh, apparently you take your oh, is there a thing? Yeah, you take the last meal you ate and put lil in front of it. I'm Lil Ramen. Yeah, I'm lil fried chicken and collards. Really? That's what you had? Yeah. Where'd you get it? Hopstoon? Oh, downstairs. Good. Yeah, I've had the chicken. I haven't had the greens. They're great. I'll try that. Perfect. They're like not mushy. They're not undercooked. They're great. I had the ramen from downstairs. Yeah, that's good. My most common meal here lil ramen. Or I had the dondon. Maybe lil dondon would be better. Or lil don ramen. Little don is good. I was little nachos for a little while and I ate something. Yet another meal. I was little nachos for about 8 hours. All right, so there's something else called the caesura. C-A-E-S-U-R-A. Yeah. And that's a pause in the middle of a line. And again, these are all just that's usually where there's a period in the middle of a line. Well, that's an engagement. No, an engagement is like a break. Oh, a break in a sentence. Yeah. The Cicera is where there's punctuation typically a period in the middle of a line. Yeah, I had those backwards. And these are all just ways to play with the structural effect of your poem, basically. Exactly. Rhyme scheme is if you've taken any kind of English class, you definitely would hammer home the rhyme scheme of it's a test question. Like what is the rhyme scheme of this poem? Right. And that's the pattern and the rhyming pattern in the lines, basically. And it's aba or ABB, depending on what rhymes with what. Right. And the rhyme scheme is always described by like that. So depending on how many lines let's say you have four lines. You've got A-B-C and D. Well, the lines that rhyme say your first and third and second and fourth rhyme, they're going to share the same letter. Right. So ABAB is how your rhyme scheme would be written out and anybody who knows poetry would be able to look at that and understand what lines of the poem rhyme. It's pretty simple. Yeah, I think I just made it way harder than it actually is. No, I don't think so. Meter. You've probably heard your teacher talk about meter, too. And that's the actual rhythmic structure. And there you're mainly talking about the stresses on the syllables. Right. And this to me is one of the really neat things about poetry is the sort of and the sentence they use in here is actually a good one. He'd like to have some pumpkin pie. The way that's stressed is just very singsongy and sort of playful. It's almost like a dance in your mouth. I always dance around when I'm asking for pumpkin pie. I'd like to have some pumpkin pie. Yeah, and that's how you just did jazz hands. And again, that's just how you're stressing the words and how you're playing with the words. And that's the meter. It creates that rhythm. Right. So in a meter, the basic unit of a meter is a foot. And it can be any number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Usually it's up to four. Right. And there's different names for different types of feet. So everyone's heard of iambic pentameter. Yeah. Up until yesterday, I had no idea what iamber pentamiter really was. This new Shakespeare rodent in a lot. Right. Well, an im is actually a foot. It's a type of stressed and unstressed syllable pairing that is used to create the meter of a poem. So an I am is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Right. The example this article gives is the word partake. Yeah. Right. So par is unstressed. Take has a little more of a stress to it. Right. And if you put five IMS together so partake, partake, partake, partake, partake. Very creative. Oh, right. One line of a poem. What you have there is iambic pentameter, penta meaning five, and five IMS on a line, making up the meter. Iambic pentameter. There's plenty of different kinds of meters that a poem can have based on the type of stressed and unstressed syllable pairing and then the number of times that type of pairing appears on a given line. Yeah. So if you had four IMS, it would be tetrameter and so on and so on. There's another one like the word banjo is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. That's a Troke. Yeah. And you could have a trochaic pentameter and that's five trokies in line. Yeah. Which sounds I mean, all this sounds very dense, but it's actually pretty straightforward. Yeah. Once you kind of know what the words mean behind it. Right. What else is there? There's a dactyl, which is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Like capital. Yeah. Not a fan of those. Now, what about the ana pest? Not bad. That's too unstressed. Followed by a stressed the example they give us, 17 kip winger was a big fan of the Annapest. An amphibroch is an unstressed syllable followed by a stress syllable and then another unstressed syllable. Like archaic. Yeah. And then lastly, there's the cretic. That's my favorite. So it's stressed unstressed stress, like trampoline yes, or trampoline no. I'm a big fan of the critic. Are you? Critic for life. But think about this, though, again. Now we're starting to kind of like, pull back the curtain. And this is what poets are dealing with. This kind of stuff describes a line. A line will have different types of these types of meters, these different feet that make up these different types of meters. Well, yeah. And my hope with this episode is that if you slept through this in English class, you might listen now and say, oh, hey, that's actually kind of neat when you think about it in those terms. Yeah. At the very least, I hope you realize how hard poets are working. Sure. To go unappreciated by most people. Yeah. They're earning the lack of money that they don't make. Right. All right, well, let's take another break. Pour one out for the poets. We'll be right back. You should know so Chuck, there's, it's different types of poetry, too, based on yeah. You take all these structure or these different effects and you'll have different types of poems and put them together. Right. So a sonnet has a specific rhyme scheme. It's got to be 14 lines long, or else you can just take your poem and go home because it's not us on it. Yeah. A valid is one that's written in stanzas of four lines. Each has a specific meter of iambic tetrameter, which is four IMS per line. And then it alternates with iambic trimeter. Three IAMs per line. Yes. And that one I've always heard also is supposed to basically it's supposed to be a narrative. Right. Aren't ballads, at least as far as music goes, a narrative song? Yeah, but I'm not sure. It's probably the same thing in poetry, right? I would think so. I mean, definitely. No, it isn't a song. And like a murder ballad specifically, which is in fact, I think I wanted to put that down as one of our ideas to do an entire show on murder ballots? Yeah. Or narco ballots. Cool, rich tradition. Is there such thing? Oh, yeah. It's like huge in Mexico, like singing, basically ballads about these outlaws. There's a heisenberg got his own I'm Breaking Bad. Really? It's called Bad Ombre. I can't remember what it was called. Haiku. Boy, oh, boy. In the early days of stuff you should know, we put out a call for haiku or haiku. Haiku. And traditionally, haiku is three lines long, five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, and five in the third. And all these years later, occasionally we will still get the random haiku from a listener. But we got them a lot for a while until we said, Stop. Remember that guy who got us by sending in a haiku? And it was a well known T shirt? Oh, yeah. We read it on the air. I think that's when we said stop. Yeah, I remember that. Cystina. S-E-S-T-I-N-A. This one's a little different. Instead of a rhyme scheme, it repeats words. So it's broken into stanzas, each with six lines and the six words, the end each line. I'm sorry. Yeah. End each line. And the first stanza are then repeated as in words in every other stanza. Right. And I think you have an example here. The John Ashbury poem farm implements in Rude Vegas and a landscape. Yeah. Everybody go look up that poem and read it out loud to yourself. It's actually really kind of difficult the way it's laid out. You should read the first couple of stanzas, maybe. Okay. Are you ready? Yeah. It is a little long. The first of the undecoded messages read, popeye sits in thunder unthought of from that shoe box of an apartment from livid curtains hue a tangram emerges a country. Meanwhile, the sea hag was relaxing on a green couch. How pleasant. See, if you start reading it like William Shatner, she really comes out to spend one vacation on la casa de Papai. She scratched her cleft chin, solitary hair. She remembered Spinach. And so throughout this poem, spinach, thunder, apartment, and well, apparently three other words come through and are reused throughout the whole poem. And it gets really dense. And then all of a sudden it just zooms out onto Popeye who finally makes an appearance at the end and it just becomes kind of AGIG. It's a neat poem, actually. It's called what's it called again? Farm Implements and Rude. Bay is in a landscape by John Ashbury. Check it out. Yeah. And again, to me, this is like the fun of poetry. It's almost like a challenge to a writer to say, like, all right, try to write a sustaina, like, this weird structure. And not only do you have to meet the needs of that structure, but it has to be good and creative and interesting. Right. Just really neat to me. I love the kind of wordplay I might start writing poetry. I think you should. A Villanelle, one of the most famous poems of all time. Dylan Thomas. Do not go gentle into that good night is a villanelle and it's a 19 line poem. It's made up of only two end rhyme sounds that are repeated throughout the poem, which is tough on its own. But then to make things even worse or not worse, but more trickier tricky for the writer worse, the first and third lines are repeated in a specific pattern all through the poem. And I guess I'll read the first couple of bits from this one. I won't read the whole thing, though. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The wise men at their end. No dark is right because their words had forked. No lightning. They do not go gentle into that good night, good men. The last wave by crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. So that's probably the most famous example of all time of The Villanelle, don't you think? Oh, yeah, for sure. I think one of the reasons why that poem is so famous and universally loved is because you understand what it means. Yeah, it's pretty superficial, really, as far as poems go. I'm sure there's way more stuff going on right beneath the surface. Sure. But you can also appreciate it on its face as well. Yeah, it's about a dying father or something, right? Sure. But it's also basically called arms to go live. Don't ever just give in to death in your impending mortality. Live so much that you rage against the idea of dying. Eventually you need to go home and watch deadpoet society. You're basically just described the plot. Oh, really? Yeah. An ode celebrates well, it's an ode celebrates a person, or not even a person. It can just celebrate anything. But it's an ode to them. Yeah, it is. It's to say hey, you did a great job. Here's a poem for you, which is sort of like an elegy, but an allergy is about someone who died. Yeah. Did you read An LG for Five Old Ladies by Thomas James Merton that this article called out? Yeah. It's unusual in that it's about an actual real life event where apparently at an assisted living home, maybe in the think five older women were in a car waiting for the driver. No. And I think the transmission came out of park and it rolled into a lake and they all drowned. And Merton, I guess, read about it in The New York Times and was moved to write a poem about it. Wow. It's a bizarre poem all around, especially the fact that it was based on a true story. I have to check that out. Yeah, there are epigrams. That one's good. Did you read that one? Yeah, go ahead. So epigram is a poem that's, like, satirical or funny. Yeah. I don't know if this one's funny, but it's maybe satirical. It's existentially. Satirical. All right. A man said to the universe, sir, I exist. However, replied the universe, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation. You got to read it a few times. It gets better. Then you have a really niche type of poem. Obeyed A-U-B-A-D-E-I believe, is how it's pronounced. And it's about the arrival of morning. If it's not about the arrival of morning, it's not an obeyed. If it is, it's an obeyed. Yeah. And a lot of times, arrival of morning means, hey, I just made some sweet love, and I'm really bummed that the sun's coming up, because last night was a gas. Right. I think you just wrote and obeyed off the top of your head. I think so. And then an epistle is a poem, usually, that's addressed to someone very close to the poet. And there's some overlap with these, for sure. Yeah. Like an epistle can also be well, it could be an epigram, I guess. Sure. This epistle that this article this article on how stuff works did a really good job. I suspect it was written by an English professor. Oh, yeah. A poetry expert clearly wrote this. This is not just from research. Right. So the author calls out a poem called Dear Mr. Finley as an example of an epistle, and I went and read it, and this is really interesting. It's about this guy who notices. So it's basically like an open letter to Mr. Finelli, but Mr. Finley invited correspondence because he's like, the manager of a subway station, the 79th street subway station. And there's a sign that says, notice any need of improvements or anything wrong, get in touch with me, the manager, and Mr. Finley of the 79th street subway station. And so the author's writing to him with suggestions, and it starts to just kind of devolve into, like, this existential crisis that the guy is going through and he reveals that he hasn't been sleeping very well because he's really worried about the world and it just really goes off the rails. It's a pretty neat poem. Dear Mr. Finelli by Charles Bernstein. I'll have to check that out. And we've talked unspecifically about what a lot of these poems are using literary effects and anything that you use in your pros symbolism and metaphor and simile, you also can use and in fact oftentimes do use in poems. Similarly, obviously, is something where you have to use like or as that hillside. That hillside is like a beer belly. There you go. I like that. Yeah. Whereas a metaphor is saying something is something else. That hillside is a beer belly. Right. And the example they used is the wonderful poem The Road Not Taken. When you're talking metaphor, it's maybe more about your life choices than the actual road that's written about. Right. But they point out that frost in The Road Not Taken doesn't even say, and by the way, these roads are really a metaphor for your life choices. It's just left to the reader to make that guess, an assumption, which makes it a far better poem. And at the end he's like, and these are really your life choices I was talking about this whole time. Yeah. I think if I remember my poem correctly, it wasn't about the pile of leaves, even, that I didn't reference. It might have been about the boys, the childlike qualities that ultimately fade away with age, which I was writing on that when I was 22 years old. That's great. You got to find that poem. Yeah. It's probably not as good as I remember. You got a poem to read? Yeah, I got two. Okay. And I may have one. I was talking about newer poets and I mentioned Derek Brown, who is a good dude. And you should go see Derek if you have a chance. It's always a fun time because some of his poems are very funny. Some of them are just beautiful love poems that you see the ladies in the audience kind of squirming in their seat a little bit like swooning. Yeah, they swoon. Yeah, he does a good job with that. But this one's called Ringlets and he has quite a few books out. I think one's coming out soon. Here we go. Young prom ladies and loud dresses and ringlets mingle outside the restaurant and oversized men suit jackets their dates smile smoking, shivering, pretending not to shiver. The thing you said was dead is not dead. No virgin deserves a cigarette. We should head to the emergency room and just pop our heads in and say hello. Tell them we are all right so they don't think we only visit when things are bad. We are breathing without tubes today they don't make pills yet for this feeling it's like finding fruit in the snow I want to call down Cocktails and Black Tire Jacks from the Heavens. I want to break into something that kind of good. Your eyes are the kind we have all been waiting for when I hear a single note sustained in a room with bad lighting, I think of us both of our bodies shivering. Nice. Good stuff. Yeah. And that's what it says. I mean, sort of playful, but some of them are really funny. Like, he's kind of part comedian up there sometimes. Nice. Yes. Derek Brown. Derek Brown. Good stuff. We didn't even talk about poetry slams. Do we need to? Yeah. Well, it's kind of like a championship. Nodding yes. Talk about poetry slam. Like a tournament. Yeah. Where you got your poetry and you move on. And I'm assuming I've never seen one, but I don't think you take the same poem from Round around. Hopefully you have different poems so people don't have to hear the same one, like, four or five times. Yeah. And I think at the end, if you end up tied, you like Russell. Sure. As is the tradition. Right. You got one. I do. I'm going to say F, but that's not what Philip Larkin writes. Okay. Philip Larkin. He's British. I think he's writing in the Maybe, I think. And he is. Good. You may introduce me to him. This one's called this be the Verse. They f you up. Your mum and dad they may not mean to. But they do they fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you but they were effed up in their turn by fools and old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another's throats man hands on misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself wow. I love that guy. I love that poem. This be the verse, and I'm going to finish with probably my favorite new poet, New Meaning. Just around now is David Berman of the band Silver Jews, who I got into them because he did it. Now he's buddies with Steve Malcomus and Bob Nastanovich from Pavement. Well, wasn't Malcolmus in Silver Jews? He was for a couple of albums, and so was Nistanovich. Berman was the songwriter I Got You, and it was kind of Mountain Side Project and shoutout to the stand of that, too. I kind of know now. Wow. Because of this podcast, I'm getting to meet my heroes. Anyway, Berman, he's putting out many books of poetry. One of them is called Actual Air, which on the cover features the King and Queen building over in Dunwoody, which is kind of funny. Anyway. It's called Imagining Defeat by David Berman. She woke me up at dawn her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels I sat up and looked out the window at the snow falling in the stand of blackjacked trees, a bus ticket in her hand. Then she brought something black up to her mouth. A plum, I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler. I love that line. I reached under the bed for my menthols, and she asked if I ever thought of cancer. Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead in the distance, where it doesn't matter. And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree so far behind his wagon, where it also doesn't matter, except as a memory of rest or water. Though to believe any of that, I thought, you have to accept the premise that she woke me up at all. Dave Burman. Wow. That was good. Good one. That's why I want to go back and read again. You can do that here. Okay. Man we did poetry. Man yeah. We didn't mention illustrations. You can have illustrations with your poetry. It's not like the great Shell Silverstein article points out. It was very famous for using great illustrations to enrich the poetry. Yeah. And sometimes you wouldn't really get the poem without the illustration, like something's missing. It's about a man who's sitting there like, I dressed myself, and he lists off all the stuff that he put on, but he still feels like something's missing. And then in the illustrations, I'm wearing pants, so you wouldn't quite get it. Or my poem. I might have an image of a kid crashing in a pile of leaves. Right. But you would never say that that's what he was doing. It would just end and then have an arrow pointing to the picture, and underneath the arrow would say, get it? If you want to know more about poetry, there are a lot of places that you could start. Like, go to the Poetry Foundation, for example. That would be a great resource for you to just find some poems to start reading out loud to yourself in your bedroom at night alone. You were starting to sound like Steve Brooke. Go to the stupid library. Put that in your milk. Since I said, put that in your milk, it's time for listener mail. This is about band names. Hey, guys, been listening for a while now. I'm loving it. Also, really enjoy all of Josh's Simpsons references, since I know hey, Matt, by the way, we met Matt Graining once in person, and he was very kind to us, and we said that we had a podcast where we mentioned the Simpsons quite a bit, and he actually asked for the name and wrote it down. And then he looked at us in the eye, crumpled the paper and threw it away. Right. He was very nice. So I wonder if he listened. Yeah, we have signed scripts. Awesome. Yeah, that was bucket list stuff. And big thanks to Jesse for the millionth time for that experience. Anyway, here we go. Since I know you two can appreciate solid band names, I want to tell you this story. The other day, my wife was trying to tell me about a time she went to see a band. She said, I can't remember their name. And like a genius bolt of lightning, out of nowhere, I just blurted out pig Chesterton and the Knuckle Ducks. It was if my brain and the universe were one solid band name creating machine. Wow. I was super impressed with the odd combo of words my brain created in that split second of time. Also, to further the laughs and validity of this is a band name, my wife actually said, I don't know who they are. Still makes me laugh. Anyway, thanks guys, for such a fascinating, informative and funny show. That is Matt Burns from Gilroy, California. Nice. Thanks a lot, Matt. That's a pretty good email. Yeah, just to channel that band name. Not bad. He's a band name generator. Agreed. Oh, I've got one for you. The Benedict Cumberbatch. Name generator. It just comes up with all sorts of random stuff. My favorite. Is that's a website? Yeah, bend and Snap comer button. What is it? Just rearrange? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's good stuff. Man, I love the internet. If you want to get in touch with us like Matt did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark and S-Y-S-K podcast. Charles is at Charleswchuckbryant on Facebook and at facebook. Comstevychnow. You can send us an email to stuff podcastworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
f6fc45bc-83a7-11ec-9d7d-7ff6ed562122 | Short Stuff: Firewalking | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-firewalking | It’s pretty amazing to see a human walk over a bed of hot coals – until you learn the physics beneath it. Then it’s just fairly impressive. | It’s pretty amazing to see a human walk over a bed of hot coals – until you learn the physics beneath it. Then it’s just fairly impressive. | Wed, 02 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=33, tm_isdst=0) | 12379154 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. And we're talking about fire walking, which is interesting because you can explain how it works. And I love those. I was convinced we had done this, but we have not. No, we haven't. I just felt I don't know, I thought it fell into our circus arts. It doesn't seem like a 2010 2011 circus Stuff you should know episode, like a full episode, doesn't it? Yes. But it's not a circus arts thing at all. No. Maybe like a Jim Rose Circus might do something like this. But it is generally sort of a religious thing in most cultures, right? Yeah. And they think that it dates back at least 3200 years. The first mention of it is in ancient Indian text from around that time. And either it spread out of there I've seen some theories that it actually predated that it was one of the things that the Mesopotamians and neo Babylonians did, and then it just kind of spread from there, or people invented it independently because it has spread all over the world over the last couple of thousand years. Yes. These days. India, Greece, China, Spain, Japan, Bulgaria, Thailand, Tibet, Fiji. It's all over the place. And it's almost always a religious thing, like you're paying tribute to somebody who has passed or you are commemorating what you see as a miracle in your area, some sort of celebration or parade. There might be a firewalker, but it's usually got some sort of religious, spiritual connotation. A firewalker in a parade would be hilarious because that poor guy would just have to keep running to the back of the float and walking over it again and then running back. That would be a long parade for that guy. Oh, I was thinking more along the lines of the entire parade has to walk. There's one portion that's on fire. Yeah. All the spectators have to go down this way. Come over here. And we said on fire, spoiler alert. There's never flames. It's coals. Right. And we can thank our friends at the University of London Council for Psychical Research back in the 1930s for figuring that out. And they did that, Chuck, by conducting two different experiments on firewalking in which they also participated. Too. Yeah. These are not mean, but what they did was in both of these experiments, in 35 and 37, they got a couple of British scientists and then someone from a native culture, like in India or someplace. And basically the whole point of the study was, like, see, white British man did it. Too. It's not religious or special. Right. But they were skeptical societies, I think, is what they were doing. Yeah. And I'm sure they didn't rub it in like that. But you do 800 degree fire pit, and then those two separate years, basically, I think they use oak. And the whole point of it was to kind of just debunk like you have to be I don't know about possessed, maybe that's too strong of a word, but guided by a spirit to do so. Guided by voices. That's right. At the very least in the west, those two studies put that to rest permanently. And they did it so thoroughly, Chuck, that for about, I don't know, 40, 50 years, people in the West, I should say in the United States and Great Britain, didn't think much about this whole thing. They just were like, firewalking has been explained, whatever. And then as our friends in the New Age community kind of came along in the they adopted firewalking and apparently had never read the two studies by the University of London Council for Psychical Research because they started attributing it to a more metaphysical explanation, and that's when interested in debunking, it kind of came around again. That's right. And I think this is a good time for a cliffhanger, because we have danced around the fire and not revealed the secret to why. It has nothing to do with religion or spirituality. It's pure physics, and we'll explain it right after this. Welcome back to pure physics. Yes, since we're talking about pure physics, I want to give a shout out to Professor David Willey, who's a physics professor. I believe it's Willie. It could be Wiley. W-I-L-L-E-Y. Yeah, I think it's Wiley. Oh, I'm thinking of Willie Ames from Charles in Charge. All right. But Professor Wiley is a physics of firewalking guy. He has dedicated a certain portion of his career to explaining how it works and doing fire walking himself. So thanks a lot to Dr. Willy, because basically everything we're talking about is based on his research. Dr. Wiley yes. Right. So let's explain how this works. There are quite a few components that go into a successful firewalk, which is to say one where you don't end up with burns on your feet. The first thing that you got to start with is charcoal that is lit well before you walk over it. I sort of spoiled it earlier when I said there are no flames. But when you see a firewalker, they're walking over hot coals, not a real flaming fire. And these are embers that they're walking over. So right out of the gate, you've got a bit of an advantage and that there's not direct contact with the flame. Well, a huge advantage, too, but also the embers themselves. So you've got no flame. It's a big one. Just put that in your hat. Here's the second one for your hat. Those embers themselves are actually really good insulators, the type of wood that's typically used for firewalking. And you want to use specific kinds of wood. They glow really bright, but they actually don't conduct heat very well. Right. And I think the top two woods are cherry or maple for good looking coals that will get the crowd whipped up into a frenzy. You're right. Exactly. But not super hot. No, because there's also a layer of ash that coats them. Here's the third part for your hat. Right. I think the investigator would say you notice they don't do this during the day because you'd see that ash all over the place, but at night, that ash sort of goes away to the eyeball and it makes for a better show. But that ash is going to also provide a buffer and cut down on that heat transfer. Yeah, exactly. And then the last one and this one's pretty important, too. There's actually a really limited amount of time that your feet is making contact with the hot embers, because they are hot, like these fires that you're walking over. If you hold the thermometer, it's going to register something like 900 to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, 482 to 538 degrees Celsius. So it is hot. But again, it's not conducting that heat very well to your feet, and then your feet aren't touching them very long to begin with. Yeah. There's a reason it's not called fire sitting. Yeah. Fire standing around. There may be a thing. Who knows? Watch someone write in and say, oh, no, bro, fire sitting is totally a thing. I work for the gym, rose Sideshow, and I do fire sitting. It's firewalking. You want to walk across it at a brisk pace. They do say don't run. And by the way, let's just go ahead and PSA here or COA and say, please don't try this. Thank you for doing that, kids. Don't try and firewall. Just don't do it. But if you are a firewalker or you see someone doing it, they are walking at a brisk pace, but you don't want to run because they make the good point that you could actually dig in when you're running more than if you're just sort of hot footing. It's where the word comes from. Yeah, exactly. And you can end up with coals on top of your foot or just digging down too deep. So they say you walk less than a half a second of contact on like, a ten to 15 foot firewalk. Yeah. So it's only a few seconds. Yeah. So those four things together are basically the physics of firewalking. But even if you're not well versed in the physics of firewalking and you hold a firewalking event, it can go wrong. And that actually has happened from time to time. Most recently, from what I can tell, was in 2012, where 21 people were treated for burns at a Tony Robbins event. Right. He's doing this at least in 2012. Are you surprised by that? Have you seen shallow hal? Well, I haven't seen shallow hal. You're not missing much, but I don't know. I knew he was a motivational speaker. I did not know he did stuff like this. Yes, dude, yes. I didn't know his whole jam is stuff. I thought he's got on the stage and just made people feel good. Random stuff like this? No, he's very hands on. Okay. He had a TV show once that we had to cover for some reason back in the day. Do you remember that? It came in my mind today, and all I could think of was, what did we do with Tony Robbins? Did we interview him? We interviewed him. I think you did. I don't think I did. Yeah, but I don't remember what ever happened with the interview. But in the TV show, in the first episode, the pilot of this, there was a man who became paralyzed when he jumped into his pool after his wedding ceremony. He was so excited, he jumped into the pool and landed headfirst and became paralyzed. Tony Robbins talks this guy into Skydiving, and if I remember correctly, essentially, like, pushed him out of the plane. That's right. Tony Robbins, very hands on, motivational guy. So anyway, in 2012, 21 of the people at a Singh walked on fire, I guess had to get treated for burns. This made me want to try it, and why I won't why is because it's the bottom of my feet. Like, if something did go wrong, then I'm not walking for a little while or I'm walking in a lot of pain. Right? It's not like a pain on my forearm or something. Is it actually worth it? No. That's why I said, I'm not going to do this because I'm going camping tonight. And I was like, no, dude, should I pull out all the stops? Do you understand the physics of firewalking? Who are you trying to impress at this point? Emily? No, she won't be there. All my dumb friends from 25 years ago. Oh, well, then, yes, you should definitely fire away. No, I'm never going to do it. I'm so impressed. Did you have to stop? Just remember to use some cherry or what was the other one? Maple. I think you got maple up there. No, just a bunch of hardwoods. Yeah, you don't want those. They'll burn off too quick or else too hot. You want to use cherry or maple, like you said. And if you don't have it, don't fire walk. My old friend Jason Jenkins jumped through the fire one time in a drunken fit late night on a camping trip. Did he melt like snegorchka? No, he was fine. He jumped right through it. But I remember thinking, like, dude, if you would have tripped and landed in that fire, all of a sudden this trip is ruined. Which is another problem with firewalking. If you do trip, you're in trouble. Yeah. So don't fire walk. I was really just joking when I was encouraging you to. No, I know. Okay, well, I think that's it for short stuff, don't you? It sounds like it's out to me. It 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." | |
86dab792-3b0e-11eb-9699-8b9ffa2e4a69 | What's the deal with crash testing? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-crash-testing | Crash testing has been around since the 1930s, but only got serious in the 1970s. Today we dive in and learn all about why companies and the U.S. government purposefully wreck cars. | Crash testing has been around since the 1930s, but only got serious in the 1970s. Today we dive in and learn all about why companies and the U.S. government purposefully wreck cars. | Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:55:57 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=14, tm_min=55, tm_sec=57, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=259, tm_isdst=0) | 45051907 | 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 there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. All right. We've done one on airbags, right? Which one did we do that was all about the crumple zones and all that stuff? That's a great question, Chuck. I've been really trying to figure that out. I think it must have been Pintos. Was it? I know that we talked a lot about car safety and engineering and how I don't know, man. I don't know. Now it suddenly creeped out. Are you confident we have not done this one? I would put my confidence at I searched so far and wide 80%. All right. Which is we've agreed that is well above the 50% threshold that we required to possibly rerecord. None of this seemed particularly familiar. We've definitely talked about something like crumple zones, that kind of thing, because we talked about how cars like, I used to think they were pieces of junk now, but they're actually designed to come apart like that because in doing so, they protect the people inside. Yeah, we've definitely talked about that, and that really applies to what we're about to talk about. But the actual details of what we're about to talk about, I don't recognize them as familiar. All right, forward we go. So cars have become exponentially safer than they used to be. First of all, hats off to not only the House of Works article we're working from, but also a Consumer Reports article on crash testing that was really great. And then one from Jalopnik that was a really great one about crash testing your car. And on that Jalapnic article that's a great website. It is. It's wonderful. On that Jalopnik article, they posted a YouTube video that made the rounds, like, a few years back. And it's a 2009 Malibu versus a 1959 Bel Air. Oh, yeah. And they go head on, and the dummy in the Malibu is like, what? I didn't even notice anything. And the person in the Bell Air just disintegrates. Basically, they crashed the dummy in the Bell Air just disintegrates. Because cars used to be made to be sturdy, but that's really bad for you in the car. Nowadays, they're made to not be sturdy, and that moves the force and the energy of the impact around the car and not into you. And the reason why cars are so much better these days now is because we started crash testing them. And the people who test them, who crash test them started telling the public, hey, this car doesn't do very well in a crash test. This car does really great in a crash test. And people started to kind of sit up and listen and go, oh, wait, we can survive a crash now if we buy a certain car. Right? Go buy that car. And then automakers started to try to keep up and catch up. And safety became an important thing. And again, it was almost exclusively thanks to crash testing. Yeah, car makers said, I guess we all got to start making things here we go again. Go to save their lives. Nanny state. All right, so let's go back a little bit. We'll talk very briefly about the history of crash testing, because like you said, in the early days, it was basically if a car perform well out there on the road, then great, we care about driving the car, not crashing the car. Why would anyone care about that, right? And then in 1934, General Motors said, you know what? Maybe we should crash a car, because it turns out that you can die when you crash these things. Who knew? Maybe we should look into this. So GM held the very first barrier test at Milford Proving Ground in Michigan in 1934 with an unoccupied vehicle. And they would do this in different ways. Sometimes they would cartoon style, actually, in both cases, cartoon style, just like, release the emergency brake and give it a push down the hill. Or they would say, hey, driver, get in there, and as you approach that brick wall, jump out. And they said, okay, I guess that's fine. How much are you going to pay me for that? Don't worry about that. Don't. You a prisoner from a chain gang. Nothing, right? So these early tests, again, they weren't to protect people. They were just to try and make sure the car could hold up a little better. And so other car companies, as they started building cars, started doing this. They didn't have proving grounds necessarily, so sometimes they would even do this on public roads, which was nuts. And then in 1952, a man named Sam Alderson really changed the game when he founded Alderson Research Laboratories, which would later on become something you may have heard of, called Humantics. They were doing they won the very first contract to create anthropomorphic dummies for testing airplanes and spacecraft, like ejection seats, that kind of thing. And then eventually they said they were using, like, sandbags and stuff like that. And eventually they said, hey, wait a minute. You could do this in cars, too. So he got together with the Sierra Engineering Company and created the very first crash test dummy. Sierra Sam. That's right. We talked about Sierra Sam in the Murphy's Law episode. Okay. With John fault. Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff cobbled together. It makes me think we did this one possible. But Sierra Sam came along. They applied all these concepts to automotive testing, and Sam Alderson is sort of a legend now. He died at the age of 90 in 2005 and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013, rightfully with a lot of inventions, but largely this crash test on me, patented 1981 was the big one. Yeah. So was that the one that was called the hybrid three. The hybrid three. And this is still humantix, by the way, that makes these yeah, they're like, as good as it gets with crash test dummy design and creation. Yes. 1988 was when the hybrid three was first developed, and then I think they upgraded it in 91 to take seatbelts into consideration, and then in 97 to take airbags into consideration. And now the standard and we'll get to why they did this is the H 35 F, meaning fifth female. So the fifth percentile size wise female is the standard dummy that's used. Now, that's great. And that's a huge progression because for decades and decades, they used what was known as the 50th percentile male dummy. Right? Yeah. 5ft, ten inches, \u00a3170. And he was introduced, from what I saw in 1976, at a time when the average male in the United States was 510 \u00a370. Well, the average male in the United States has not been 510 \u00a3170 for a really long time. What is it now? Do you know? The average male's gained about \u00a325 and shrunk an inch since then. That tracks. That's the average male in the United States now. But the problem is these crash testers were still using that 50th percentile male dummy, even though it didn't apply. And that's not to say anything about child Dummies, female Dummies. It was basically like, you know how when they test a new drug, they tested on the healthiest, least vulnerable population and say, it works? That's exactly what the history of crash testing has done. But only in the last, I don't know, probably ten years or so. Have they really been like, no, we really need to expand the types of Dummies that we're using. So they're coming up with they're using female Dummies more frequently, child Dummies, more frequently obese Dummies, because apparently an obese person is about 70% likelier to die in a car accident than a non obese person. So they're now creating obese Dummies to get a better idea of just how safe these actually are in as close to a real world application as possible. Yeah, the way I read this is at some point they said, well, we need to make these safe for all drivers. So what's the most vulnerable driver, probably? And they all said, Well, I guess a 16 year old girl is statistically most likely to be probably the smallest version of these Dummies. So that's what they went with. They went with the fifth percentile female hybrid three. And I guess the reckoning is if it can be safe for them, then it can be safe for that dumb average male. It's pretty great. Yeah. But it's still not required. There's actually a representative, a congresswoman from DC named Eleanor Homes Norton, who just this past June introduced a bill that would require crash testers to also use female Dummies, too. So right now they should use a range. Yeah, of course. They should use range. It's just sensible. And so the people who do crash testing are aware of this, and they're starting to. But Chuck, there's one other thing I saw about crash test dummies. One of the things they can't replicate is tissue damage, or even real damage. Like when you do crash tests, we'll talk about a little more detail in a second. But when you use a dummy for that kind of thing, they're outfitted with loads of different kinds of sensors, hundreds of sensors recording all this amazing data, and then they take that data and they basically turn it into a statistical likelihood that that amount of force, that amount of acceleration, that amount of g's suddenly pressing on your chest would cause an injury or not. That's what crash test dummies do for us. But they don't actually replicate, like, tissue damage or your leg falling off or anything like that, because they're made to be used over and over again so that they could be subjected to the kinds of stuff that would just destroy the human body. So some crash testing chuck. Chuck. Some crash testing uses post mortem human subjects. I wondered if that's where this is going. A lot of post mortem human subjects, some of them Embalmed, which we failed to mention in our bombing episode, some fresh. They call them fresh because an Embalmed one is just not going to replicate the kind of yuck that a fresh one will. And so that's a huge part of crash testing, from what I can tell, is using post mortem human subjects as well. Wow, that's amazing. And we should also point out maybe we'll take a break, but before we take one, we should point out that car companies do all kinds of internal crash testing before they get to the regulatory crash testing, because you don't want to fail those. So they'll crash 80 to 100 new vehicles in a line before they even get to the regulatory bodies to do their official crashes. Right? And what we're mainly talking about is those official crashes, but I imagine they're all pretty similar. No, we should also say those official crashes, they're not even necessarily official. Basically. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a bunch of guidelines. Some of them involve in crashes, and then they basically say, these are the guidelines. Your car makers better meet them. But they don't go and actually test the cars for that. The crashing that they're doing is beyond the minimum the law requires. So nobody's actually testing the automakers cars to see that they meet the minimum requirements. It's just the threat of basically being sued into oblivion for not meeting those minimum standards is what keeps the car makers honest. And then that and then one other thing I saw from that Gel Optic article is the minimum legal standards that a car can be put out on an American road are so low that they so vastly under meat under satisfy yes, thank you, Charles. They so vastly under satisfy what the average American would be willing to get in and drive what Americans want to drive. As far as safety is concerned, that's what car makers are meeting, not just the minimum legal requirements. Very interesting. Your car is probably going to exceed those minimum legal requirements. You don't really have to worry about that in the United States. Right. And then we'll talk about this at the end. There are tests completely separate, done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that are even more different and more robust. Great set up, my friend Chuck. Great set up to you, my friend. Can we just stop now, or do we have to come back? We probably already did this episode anyway, so we can just stop. All right, we'll be back right after this anyway. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. All right. So we've laid the groundwork here. We know they're crashing some cars a lot on the name of making things safe for us, but we know that they're not saying it's not like GM says, all right, here's the car. Go tell us if it's okay. Right. It's a voluntary thing. Sort of like, good luck selling cars if you don't. But sure, it's voluntary. And they are loaded with sensors, like you said. They're accelerometers. And accelerometers are going to measure acceleration in a particular direction. They use this, obviously, to determine if you might get injured. Acceleration is the rate at which speed changes. So if you're driving a car and say there were no airbags back in the day and no seatbelts, and your head hits that windshield, the acceleration from your head flying forward to hitting not zero because it's going to go through the windshield, but it's going to decrease really fast. And that rate of acceleration change is the danger. And making cars safe is all about softening that and lessening that kinetic energy of your body and that car's energy going from whatever speed it's going to zero. Yeah. Because you and the car are both traveling the same speed, and you both have to stop pretty quickly. You want to cut down on the car transferring its kinetic energy to you, and then you want to cut down on your kinetic energy. If you're going to have to transfer your kinetic energy to something, let it be like an airbag or something like that, rather than the dashboard. Right. So that's why they have these accelerometers all over the place. They're in your head, they're in the chest, they're in the pelvis, they're in kind of every body part you can think of. Their accelerometers. And it's neat. Like I was saying, like the crush test dummies, the anthropomorphic test devices is what they're called in the industry. They are getting more and more biofidelic. Like they're faithful to biology is basically what that word means. And so you're finding crest of dummies. They're starting to have, like, simulated internal organs and all that stuff. Because I can guess if you're in the industry, you probably don't really want to deal with post mortem human subjects. You would much rather have crushed us. Dummies that basically replicate the same things, but we're still a long way off from that. It's just on the horizon. They're starting to work on it now. But one other thing I saw. Chuck. Is that they may not ever become widely used because 3D modeling is so rapidly advancing that all of this will probably in the next 15 years. They will do crash test still. But it will be once. And it'll be after running tons of computer simulations. And then they will just do it once in the real world to make sure that the computer is right. But it'll probably all become virtual pretty soon because we're making sense. We're getting really good at modeling humans, getting good at modeling traffic accidents. So you put them together and you can kind of test cars based on the parameters that you just feed and you just make measurements on the cars and feed it into the computer and press Enter and sit back and, you know, maybe have a Clark Bar. I was just in Northern California and San Francisco and wine country, and just in San Francisco for the night. But in that one evening, walking around, I saw probably four different I can't remember what it's called, but the Google self driving car concepts, the death car driving around town. The Diablo. Yeah, what's it called? I can't remember, but I just saw this car with like a big thing on the roof with a spinner in it. And at first I thought it was like maybe Google Earth or something or Street View, and I looked up what it was, and it is a self driving concept car. And they had people in them driving, obviously at this stage, right? I was like, wait a minute, no one's in that car. But it was definitely when you walk around San Francisco that's the testing ground for all that kind of stuff. Sure, it's very interesting. All right, so you got those accelerometers. You have load sensors. They're going to measure the amount of force during a crash. You have movement sensors that they're going to sense the movement of the body and everything it's doing. And the really important thing within all this, and I think we talked about this in one of the other episodes, is these dummies are painted up and they're painted, and the different body parts are painted with different colors. And it's pretty ingenious, actually. Something an idea as simple as that can tell you so much because when they go to look in that car afterward and they see there's red paint here and there's blue paint there, they're going to be like, well, how did that knee hit that part of the car? Because that's the only place where there's blue paint is on the knee cap. I guess we got to figure this out. And so they look at the scuff marks and they can tell exactly what body part hit, exactly what car part. I love that, too, that we're just getting so much more advanced, but good old fashioned, like, you know, putting pain or chalk on the face to see what it hits is still just as useful as ever. Right. So how do these crashes go? Well, there's a few things that you got to do first when they're carrying out these crashes. The IIHS, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States. Those are the two groups that carry out the most crash testing. And they're both independent, and they go buy their own cars, and they just test them, and then they tell everybody what the results are, and they have their own rating systems, and we'll talk about all that in a minute. But the IHS one of the first things they do is they basically got the car, all the vital fluids out, I should say. They take out the antifreeze, they take out the oil, they take out the fuel, and then they replace it with, like, mineral spirits so that it still has the same weight and everything. Sure. Because it can be a pretty big mess when you're carrying out one of these tests. And there's no reason to get any freeze all over the place. You can go look and make a pretty good estimation of what it would have looked like just because the hose was ripped off. You don't need to see the antifreeze all over the floor. Right. So they'll actually prep the car to get it ready. They measure it, they weigh it, and they want it to be as close to a real life situation as possible. So they'll put different dummies in the car. Sometimes they fill it out with adult male, 50th percentile male, fifth percentile female in the passenger, another fifth percent female in the back, and then the car is ready to go. They put all sorts of cameras all over the car, as well as sensors, too. And they have all sorts of high speed cameras filming the whole thing as well, because just like painting the face of the crash test dummy is really important. Using your eyes, like visually inspecting what happens. You as a human engineer, seeing this with your own eyes, there's stuff that you're going to see that just wouldn't be translated from the data that the sensors are picking up on the dummies. Yeah. And if you're at home or driving your car right now and you're thinking, well, wait a minute, guys. If they're taking all the gasoline and oil out of the car, how does it go forward when they drop the cinder block on the accelerator and shut the door really fast? Great question. And jump out of the way. They're not doing that. The car doesn't have to be started, it doesn't have to be running because the car is on a track and it is being pulled down a runway. And that all makes complete sense that this is operated by police and not by an actual car being started and driven. All they need to know is that this thing is going to go 35 miles an hour into that wall. Or I guess in the case of the insurance group, they go 40, right? Yeah. So they go a little bit faster and they do different kinds of impacts. I think for many, many years, the gold standard was the head on collision. And so they have built cars over the years to withstand, as best as possible, that head on collision with another car or hitting that brick wall straight on. Like, we've all seen the videos and you think, yeah, that's the worst of the worst. Of course, that's what you should prepare for, but it's pretty cool. What's the name of the insurance group again? The IIHS. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Yes. They started saying and a lot of stuff was overhauled in 2010. They started saying things like, well, maybe the worst crash is when two people are trying to turn through an intersection or your left headlight meets up with their left headlight and there's like, just a bit of overlap. And it's not a head on collision. Like, we're building these for head on collisions. And what if there are weak points at these corners? And they're right, that is a real danger. So they have found out through these crash tests of these partial not layovers what do they call them? Overlaps. Yeah. Instead of a full head on collision, they're learning that some of those crashes can be worse. Right. And so we need to start testing that stuff. And maybe it's not a straight T bone into the side of the car. You think of that as the worst thing, but what if it's forward a little bit or backward a little bit from that point? Yeah. Or, you know, if you're doing a head on collision, it's so rare that two cars run me perfectly. Yeah. Like hood ornament to hood ornament. This is not how it happens. It's usually like the front bumper of one car into the other. And the auto industry, car makers have been creating these crumple zones in the front that were relying on that full front impact that the crash testers were testing for so that they could meet those standards, but they really weren't designing for the other real world stuff. And so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the IHS started making their tests a little differently. And all of a sudden, the automakers started not getting the marks that they were before. And so they kind of were forced to scramble to keep up, as we'll see, which is pretty great because it really shows that the people who run these crash tests and who actually do this work care about you and your family. When you're driving around in a car, they're not sitting on their laurels or they are, but then they eventually stop sitting on their laurels and re challenge everybody again. Yeah, I think they found that a lot of those sort of diagonal hits were causing a lot of pretty catastrophic leg injuries, right? Yeah. And so they had to kind of reconfigure things inside the car. And modern cars are so I think I bought my first new car of my life a few years ago when I bought my Volvo. And Volvo are known for their safety anyway, these things, they have all sort of most modern cars on the market now have these where they're breaking automatically for you and they're helping you stay in your lane and all that stuff. But if you do a certain move in this car, your seatbelt is called pretension. They have pretensioners in the seat belt that will tighten down on you right before an impact. And I've had that thing tightened down on me before, man. And it's a little disconcerting, like, you know, it's for your safety, but when you're not expecting it and you don't get into a crash and all of a sudden you're like and your seat belt cranks down on you. They also have something called a force limiter that is going to work in hand in hand with that pretensioner to make sure that it doesn't just pretension through your chest into the back seat. And so that all happens just before the airbag. It's all timed out, like by the millisecond to tighten down that seat belt to try and keep you from going forward at all. And then the airbag comes out. So when you do go forward even and you can listen to the airbags episode for all the detail there, but they work hand in hand to make sure that you're slowing that kinetic energy down as slowly and evenly as you can. They work hand and degloved hand, hand and yeah, you like seatbelts that do things like that. You like airbags. Thank crash testers who basically created who demonstrated the need for that and automakers responded because people who buy cars like you and me said, oh, yeah, I'd like to live. Yeah, I think my car even has a built in booster seat in the middle for my daughter, which she's finally old enough to ride in. And when that seat is unhooked and engaged, you just kind of pop a little lever and push it into place, the side curtain airbags raise because they know that the airbag will hit the child in a safer way, basically because the kid is in there. It's amazing, like, how far safety has come. Well, inside impact airbags. There was another development that came out of crash testing, too, was not just the existence of side impact airbags, but once those were created, they came about because of the crash testers suddenly doing, like, T bone testing, like side impact tests. But now they've also realized that if you hit, like, the front corner of your car, like, say, on a telephone pole, it's going to spin you around. You're going to start rotating around the telephone pole, and you might slide off of that front airbag coming out of your steering wheel. And they saw that on crash tests without a side impact. Right. So that they realized they went to the automakers and said, hey, you should probably have these side impact curtains come down when there's this front bumper impact, too, like on a telephone pole, because people are going to slide off and you want the side impact airbag to be there as well. Yeah. And then the stressed out engineer says, well, maybe the whole car should just be one giant airbag. Would that make you happy? Get out of here. That was a great stressed out engineering person. And then the people say, yeah, actually, that's not a bad idea. Put them everywhere. Yes. Who was that? Was that Dennis Leary? What? That was a stand up comedian who's, like, they should all just be oh, really? I think so. That just shows how easy it can be to steal a bit. Yeah. Accidentally, right? Yeah. You owe densely $5. All right. I'll pay them right after this ad break. Okay. Well, now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? You should. Okay. So we never really said what happens in the crash test. There's a few different ones that are carried out depending on whether you're hanging around the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash testing site or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash test site, but they're very similar. A lot of people look to the IIHS as maybe being the gold standard and the Safety Administration is being more government bureaucracy, but they're both doing pretty good work if you both of them really rely on the front crash, because those happen a lot. And when they do happen, they can have pretty serious consequences for the passengers of the car. So the Traffic Safety Administration, they do one, and there's this a full impact where they drag the car at 35 miles an hour into a concrete barrier and the whole hood, the whole front bumper is involved in the impact. Yeah, IHS and this is one reason why they're kind of looked at as maybe being a little better. They do parts where the front bumper only a percentage is used, and they do two different crash tests. They do one where 25% of the front bumper so it'd be like left headlight to left headlight. Kind of crash head on collision, and then they do another one that's 40% that involves more of the bumper. They also do those poll tests. Well, yeah. And I think the Traffic Safety Administration does that as well. Now. Right, okay. So they got on board. Yeah. Finally, they said, okay, we really need to kind of consider this, because people do run into a telephone pole once in a while, and these groups are trying to recreate real world scenarios as much as possible to see how cars hold up. Yeah. And again, to reiterate, the IIHS does an extra 5 as opposed to 35. There is an injury classification system that's used from one to six, one being minor cuts and bruises all the way up to fatal. And that is not the star rating. That's just totally dealing with the kind of injuries that somebody may like. The likelihood of what kind of injuries is what they're trying to measure, at least. Yeah. There was a group called the American the association for Advancement of Automotive Medicine that came up with that scale, the abbreviated Injury Scale. And there is a lot that goes into it. And they were kind enough to basically create a handbook that they shared with these car testers and car makers so that they could take this data and translate it into injuries. So they could say. Like. Oh. Well. The crash test dummy had a load of 5 million Newton's on what would be the Femur. And so the Femur would have just snapped in eight pieces. So that would be this number. And so that abbreviated injury report is taken into account and translated further into the rating systems because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration basically looks at how the car holds up and producing injuries, and then the IIHS looks at how the car holds up in crashes as far as injuries go. And then also the other occupant safety stuff too, like the seat belts, the airbags, all of that stuff. Right. And you mentioned in 2010 is when things and it's kind of horrifying to think of they were doing good work up until 2010. It's not like it was Willynilly or anything, but when you look at all the changes they've made since 2010, you're kind of like, man, it took that long to start considering some of this stuff, because it still seems a little behind the curve, even with the updates. Yeah. As far as body types and all that stuff, for sure. So they changed things in 2010. The new star ratings came out in 2011, and cars that were previously getting four and five star ratings in every category in 2010, all of a sudden, we're getting like three stars maybe, or maybe even two stars under the new system. And that's because they have these new injury parameters. They're adding these different tests now. They're using the different sized dummies. They're now using that again, that small adult female instead of the 510, 170 male. If I ever weigh literally 100, because I'm about 510, if I ever weigh 170 on the nose, I don't know, I'm either going to try and gain five or lose five. I don't want to be 170 on the nose. Okay, you don't want to be median. I get that. Hey, I'm doing a great job so far. Nowhere close to it, right? You're just playing it safe. Yes, but if I go on some massive weight loss campaign, I'm going to stop at 180 and be like a little chunk around the middle. That's what I'm going for, is 180 as well, maybe. Yeah, that's a good way. But you're like 6ft though, right? I am. Five foot eleven and a half. It just irks me to no end and getting smaller. Yeah. Just like the average male. Yes. You'll be 510 one day, my friend. You think so? No, probably not that short. Okay. But I used to be a solid 510 and now I'm like five nine and a half. What happens? You're just getting compressed, I think that's a good I mean, you shrink as you get older. That's a good shorty, I think. Okay, why do you shrink? I don't know. We'll have to find out and tell everybody. Some of the other key parts of the post 2010 is the NHTSA started assigning a single overall safety score from front side and rollover, with front having the heaviest weight of that overall score. They started putting in these additional measures for neck extension, chest deflection and femur. And I think they didn't have that before, which is kind of horrifying. Right. What else? I think they added the poll test. Yeah. Running into polls. It's a big one, too. One of the things that they did that really changed things is that rather than just getting an absolute score based on their criteria, they started pitting cars against one another too. Oh, yeah, that's a huge one. That was an enormous change because now they're like, okay, you want to be the best? Well, you've got to be the best in the industry. You can't just be like, yes, we're all going to meet this. And that was one reason why those 2010 changes were made and one reason why the IHS keeps changing its tests. Anytime they create a new test or they create a new standard, all of the automakers rush to meet that, and some of them may already need it or come close. They won't have to do too much to meet those higher standards because they're already over designing beyond what were the requirements before. But the rest of the industry, if you don't know by now, just from our Pinto episode alone, the auto industry is really lazy sometimes when it comes to over designing. They will sometimes meet minimum requirements even when they're exceeding minimum requirements. And this is a good example of that because with the NHTSA, when they're doing crash tests. They're basically just doing it for fun. This is again, this is not law. Like, you can get a one star rating from the NHTSA and you're fine. It just looks bad to your consumer. But the fact that it looks bad to your consumer means that the automaker will scramble to try to get that five star rating. But then they'll hack it. They'll figure it out. All we have to do is focus on the whole front crumple zone. We don't have to worry about the driver's side or the passenger side of the bumper. We just have to worry about the whole front, because that's what the NHTSA does when they're doing tests. And if we can meet that standard, we'll get that five stars. Well, when the NHTSA and the IIHS change their standards, all of a sudden the industry has to scramble to catch up to become like that gold standard. And they do it again and again and again to keep safety getting better and better and better, and then also finding new things that had been overlooked before to make those parts of cars safer as well, which is pretty cool. Again, this is superfluous. None of this is mandated. It's not mandatory. No car maker has to submit to us. They actually don't even have a choice because these agencies are going and buying their own cars and crashing them, and there's nothing illegal about that. But just the fact that somebody is out there doing this, I think, is just such a great it's just a great example of people caring about other people. Yeah, and it's gotten to the point where if you have a newer car with the airbags and such and safety standards and you wear your seatbelt, there are outliers, of course, with just these horrific car wrecks that do happen. But if you're just talking about a standard, even bad car crash, you are going to fare pretty well these days, thanks to the work that all these people have done over the years. Again, there are outliers, but they have made cars really, really incredibly safe to get into what I would just describe as sort of a normal car wreck and not a fender bender, like a car wreck that even might look pretty gnarly. And you see them on the road. You see two cars. You're like. Oh, my gosh. And you see people standing outside, like, giving the officer the account of what happened, and you just like, man, there it is right there. Those people are standing there talking to somebody. Whereas two decades ago, they were probably maybe not even alive, which is just a testament to all the work they've done. One way, they really need to ramp it up. And I couldn't tell if they were actually even doing this testing yet, but some of that stuff you sent pointed out says that they're still sort of crashing similar cars into one another. Oh, yeah, that's a big one. And that's a big deal these days when you've got these, you know what happens when a suburban crashes into a Honda Civic, right? These are two very much mismatched cars, not just in overall size, but bumper height is a big deal. And these bumpers are made to hit one another and then operate accordingly from there. If a bumper is going over the other bumper, which often happens in these cases of a big SUV or a big truck compared to a smaller car, this is where you're going to see a lot of bad injuries happening. And I don't know if they're actually testing for that, if they're just talking about like, hey, what do we need to do to test this stuff? Right? Exactly. I don't know if they are yet either, but they seem to be on the precipice. If not, another criticism I've seen of both groups is that they're testing these at 35 miles an hour. 40 miles an hour. Everybody's like, well, I drive a heck of a lot faster than 40 miles an hour. What am I going to do at 60 or 70 or 80, something like that? And that is a big criticism. Both agencies push back and say this is where most of the accidents happen. I'm sure they're basing that on statistics, and I would probably tend to say, okay, yes, but what about maybe that's 51%? But what about the 49% that is much faster than that? And I think if they did start crash testing at higher speeds, cars would be shown to be kind of pitiful in handling that and maybe automakers would start to scramble to catch up to that, too. Well, yeah, because they're kind of working on the assumption, which may be correct, that most of these wrecks are happening in neighborhoods and not necessarily on the expressway. But what about the guy who's driving 60 through the neighborhood, right? They're saying, like, this is assuming people are driving the speed limit, which is not the case. And I have a street very near my house that is not a highway, but people drive like it's a highway because it's really long and straight and sort of runs between all these residential neighborhood streets and people go 60, 70 miles an hour. It's just ridiculous. I know, dude. I've gotten to this point where I've turned into an old middle aged man where I scream too fast in your neighborhood, low down. I do, too. Somebody driving too fast. I can't help it. I can't not do it. Yeah. And I live near an intersection, and there's a curve in my street before the intersection. So people will come around the curve and if they see the light as green, they will just hammer it to try and make that light. And all of a sudden they're going literally like 50 miles an hour in front of my house. And I just, oh, man, it makes me so mad. Yeah, I'm with you. Get so angry about that stuff. Just no point. Well, it's because you know the deal. Sure. People driving that fast to save what ends up being 30 seconds at a stoplight. It's just when you outweigh risks and what you're gaining, like, even if you think you're in a hurry, you're really not, in the end, getting there that much quicker. Like a minute or two isn't that big of a difference. And it's unnerving that people take that kind of risk just to make a light. Nice. Don't do it, people. That's my soapbox moment. Yeah, I think you just stay up there on that soapbox, buddy. That is a big one. Can I come down to pee? No. You've made your bed, now you have to stand in it. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. One of the reasons why I also love the IHS is the highest possible rating you could get from them is just good, poor, marginal acceptable, and then good. How do we do? Good. Nothing better. No exclamation points, no confetti, no good. Well, since Chuck and I both said good, that means, of course, everybody's, time for listener mail. This is from our Trepidation At episode, which just dropped today in real time. Oh, no. Hey, guys. I was listening to the episode on tree panning, and I feel like I am such an adult. I literally had never thought of craniotomies as the modern version of tree painting. Trepanning, what did we end up with? Tree painting? I don't know. Tree painting. Doesn't sound familiar. Tree painting. Even though I knew about the ancient practice. This is really funny because I had a Craniotomy. Wow. I have a Chiari Malformation Syndrome. I have Chiari. I think it's Chiari. And I bet you it's not chiari. You got to say it like an Italian person. Chiari Malformation syndrome. And part of decompression surgery was a craniotomy. Wow. This totally computes with the idea of ancient people using trapanning to relieve chronic headaches, since one of Ciara's main symptoms is terrible, terrible, constant headaches. Oh, man. Something else he said in the episode helped me make sense of something my neurosurgeon said, too. When discussing the diagnosis and what the decompression surgery would achieve, he briefly said that some people think the surgery actually can help cure depression, even though there's no evidence. I had never heard of that and certainly wasn't looking for that case myself. Just wanted to stop falling over. But you mentioned in the episode that there were a lot of Internet rumors that trapanning can help with depression. So now I know why he said that. Anyway, this is a fun I've said to listen to and kind of see myself in. So thanks for that. Keep up the good stuff. That is from Amanda. Awesome. Amanda, I'm really glad we could kind of connect the pieces for you. Yeah. And I hope you're doing well. Yeah, me too. I hope you're not falling over any longer and you don't have headaches. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us, like Amanda did, then you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-05-sysk-tamam-shud-final.mp3 | The Baffling Case of the Body On Somerton Beach | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-baffling-case-of-the-body-on-somerton-beach | Since his corpse was found in 1948, wearing a nice suit in summer on an Australian beach, an unidentified man has refused to fade into obscurity, gripping the imagination of sleuths around the world. | Since his corpse was found in 1948, wearing a nice suit in summer on an Australian beach, an unidentified man has refused to fade into obscurity, gripping the imagination of sleuths around the world. | Tue, 05 Sep 2017 14:53:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=14, tm_min=53, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=248, tm_isdst=0) | 61935380 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke with Charles W chuck Bryant, and today is a very special day. We have a special guest producer. Been a while. It has been a while, man. It's been since, like, 2014 or something. Yeah. And Matt is one half of stuff they don't want you to know. One third. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And we are sort of awkwardly recording two of the same shows they've done. Yeah. So Matt's just sitting there with his arms crossed, shaking his head back and forth, so we're trying not to look at them. How are you doing? I'm good, except for Matt looking at us like that. What did you do for the eclipse? I looked at the eclipse unwisely. From where? From my house. I didn't see a full schmo. I figured you guys would be exactly the type to drive 2 hours to see it. No, you did, though, huh? Yeah. How was it? Well, I don't want to be one of those dudes, but the difference between 99% and full eclipse is all the difference in the world. I thought. I can't remember who put it, but they said that the difference between seeing a partial eclipse and a full eclipse is the difference between kissing a person and marrying a person. Oh, well, that's from the legendary eclipse article from the Atlantic from okay, who wrote it? Oh, man. I even sent myself the link to read it today, and I haven't read it. It's probably Tina Turner. That was at the height of her career. It was written by Annie Dillard. Okay. It's called Total Eclipse, and I haven't read it yet, but it's supposed to be just remarkable. And that's exactly how she put it. And it was. I think so. So that would have been a year before Bonnie Tyler came out with totally clips of the heart. Yes, it was. I cried, and, like, five other people with this cried. That's cool. Like, spontaneously, tears were coming out of my face. I was like, really? What is happening to my body? Yeah. I mean, what have you concluded? I don't know, man. It was just overwhelming. That's neat. To stare at the corona. And we're going to probably Texas for the next one. I'm going to every path of totality that I can get to between now and the time that I die. You're in a clip side. Now I'm a Totalitar. Got you. Totalitis. Totalist. Yeah. And we almost didn't go, like, literally that morning we were debating, and I was like, it's 2 hours away. Let's just get in the car and go. That's very cool. And my daughter saw it. Yes. Which was weird for her. Like, she knew something was up even at two years old. Yes. The sun's gone black. Yeah. And stars came out and crickets chirped, and it was just really strange. Yeah. That's neat. Yeah, it was a very quick two minutes, but I think the one in 2007 is going to have a four and a half minute totality. When is it? 2000? What? Seven years from now? What is it? 2024? Yeah. Okay, that great. Maybe we'll drive to Texas. We'll drive together. Well, if you want to drive 2 hours, why are you going to go to Texas? Well, hey, if I ever have a good reason to go to Texas, I'll take it. Well, it's Texas and then, I mean, we may go to Akron because that's where Emily's from. It goes through Akron. Oh, really? Then kind of over to Maine. I see. So on that you guys should just follow it in your van. Well, I wondered how fast of course you can't do this, but how fast would you have to travel the speed of the moon, stay in the path of totality. The speed of the moon, which is what, like 100 million mile an hour or something like that? I don't know. Listen to our moon episode. It's my new drug totality. That's neat, man. Yeah, I'm glad that happened to you. Happened on me. Got all over me. OK, you want to talk about this? The eclipse? No. You know what's funny is that we didn't do any podcasts on eclipses. No, I thought about that. We never have. I know. And it's just like us. Moon goes in front of sun, moon goes away from sun, it goes up, it goes down. Yeah, that's just figures. I'm sure we'll end up talking about like we'll do an episode on the effective and eclipse on plants first and then some other tangentially related episode and then maybe after that we'll do how eclipse work. Maybe if we're still around in seven years. There you go. How about that? Good idea. And I've jinxed just before by saying we won't be around, which is an opposite jinx, I was going to say. Is that a jinx? Yeah, that's to ensure that we will be around. Got you. So we're talking today, Chuck, about a pretty unusual mystery. Are you familiar with this one before? Yeah, I think we covered this in an internet roundup or something. Oh, yeah, yeah, we definitely talked about it. But I scoured our archives and couldn't find an official show. I wonder where it came up because we talked about it for sure. And then a lot of times you would do one of your best things you've read this week. We would then do an internet roundup piece on that. Okay, that's probably where it came up then. Because you're like, this is so good, it should be seen by dozens of people. Exactly. I want to share it with the 20. Yeah, I probably guess the article that I did, the best stuff we've read this week on would have been the Body on Sommerton Beach, I think is what it's called. The Smithsonian article from years and years. It was so, yeah, there have been plenty of good articles about it. That one is a good one. There's one from California sunday magazine called the Lost Man. Just some good stuff out there. If this floats your boat. It does. But let us set the theme for you, okay. Because this story takes place in Adelaide, in South Australia, which is not just a place, it's a state as well. Did you know that? Yes. I wonder what they call how they pronounce Adelaide there probably not like I just said it, but in Adelaide, South Australia. Adelaide is the capital, from what I understand. We haven't been there yet, but we probably will, maybe next year. I'm not going to Adelaide, though. I don't know. It sounds kind of neat and creepy. A little weird. Right. But weird in some weird ways. So Adelaide is this place that's kind of known as the murder capital of Australia, but it doesn't have necessarily, like, the highest homicide rate in Australia. It just has a history of kind of weird gruesome grizzly murders. Yeah. I think if you've had more than two or three dismemberment type murders, that you're on the map. Sure. And they definitely have. Yeah. There was a very famous case in the Beaumont children who went missing off of a beach called Glenale Beach, I think that's probably how you say it, which is near Adelaide, and we're never heard from again. No trace of them was ever found. We should do an episode on that one, too. There was the Family. Yes. So dubbed by the cops in the seventies and eighties. This one's really freaky. These were supposedly just like regular professional men, presumed men who had a sort of cabal of torture and murder of young boys, basically like season one of True Detective, but in real life in Australia. Yeah. Well, with an equally weird ending. Right. Yes. The sky just opens up. It's a total eclipse. And that one again, unsolved. Right. I think one person was convicted, but the people that he implicated were never charged or convicted. What about the Bodies in the Barrel thing? That's all you need to say? Okay. There's a string of murders called the Bodies in the Barrels Murders. Right. It's a lot of pluralization. It is. So the idea that the one we're talking about, which is the death of just one man, a nonviolent death, possibly, who was found on a beach almost 70 years ago. For that to still have Australia and the world in its grips today, it must be a pretty interesting case. Agreed. And it is. Yeah. So I guess we should go back in time, getting the old way back machine, and travel south to Adelaide. Post war Adelaide. Look how beautiful it is here. It's hot. I smell shrimp cooking on the barbie. Yeah. Drinking Fosters. Yeah. It's like a 55 gallon drum of Foster. And lots of other Australian tropes are happening all around me. Yes. There's a Crocodile Dundees over there. When we tour there, they're going to really get sick of us by capture the first show. They can run us out of town. Okay, fine. New Zealand wants us. Yeah. And New Zealand. Yeah. Come on over here. So Adelaide is well, it's an interesting place, post war, apparently. It was kind of a place where you could go to sort of if you want to disappear and rewrite your life, that wasn't a bad place to do it. Right. There was a lot of black marketeering going on, apparently. It was really hard to get your hands on a car. So there's like a big black market for cars of all stolenness, all levels of stolen, right? Yeah. There's just a certain amount of post war scarcity that was still going on. And there's a lot of espionage going on, too. So the Cold War had just started and Australia was in this weird position where there were a lot of Soviet spies running around. There were a lot of Brits and American spies running around, and the British themselves were conducting secret rocket tests in the country. So there was a lot of espionage, a lot of black marketing, and a lot of people who were not who they claimed to be floating around this country. Running around and floating. All right, so that brings us to a very important date for this story. Tuesday, November 30, 1948, about seven in the evening, there was a jeweler named John Lyons and his wife. They were taking a little stroll there on Summerton Beach, which I'm sure is lovely, and they saw something weird. They were walking toward Glen ALG, so I guess they're connected beaches. And they saw something interesting on the sea wall there. They saw a man lying in the sand, but very well dressed in a suit, kind of propped up on the sea wall there, as if you were sort of sitting up about 60ft away. In America, that's 20 yards. In Australia, it has a certain amount of meters. About 20 meters. Okay. Really? Is that what works? It's pretty close to the yard and the meter are very similar. And he was doing something interesting, so they say he extended his right arm upward, then just let it fall back down to the ground. And they thought, that looks like a passed out drunk guy, or maybe a barely awake drunk guy maybe trying to have a cigarette or something. Right. It was remarkable and that they made a mental note of it, but they just kept walking and whatever. Sure. I think his suit being on the beach was probably one of the big deals. Yeah, he was very sharply dressed, not just wearing a suit on the beach. Like the suit he was wearing was pretty nice. Pretty nice, right. And about a half hour later, another couple walked past and this time the guy wasn't moving at all. And apparently he had a whole swarm of mosquitoes around his face. And the boyfriend says to the girlfriend, that guy must be dead to the world if he's not noticing those mosquitoes. He must just be absolutely wasted. So they were clearly closer. I guess. So if they could see mosquitoes on his face. Yeah, for sure. Because from 20 yards, it's a tough thing to see. I don't know for the strain. Mosquitoes are large. Right. So the next morning became pretty clear what was going on here. This was a dead man. The same jeweler. John Lyons. He went for a little morning swim, as you were to do in Australia in the mornings when you hung over and he saw a bunch of people crowded around where the guy was, and it was on. This is a dead dude. Yeah. The dude was in basically the same position you'd seen him in the night before. That crowd was like, he's dead. Croaky. Yeah. So Lions is like, wow, that was pretty surprising. That's the end of John lions. Yeah. But very important here. And that they are the only people who supposedly saw this body move. Right. Super important. Yeah. So within about a few hours, the body is in the morgue at the hospital and is being examined. And just from the initial examination, there was a lot of just weirdness that immediately came out. Yeah. Right. So, remember, the guy is like, sitting up against the sea wall. His legs are extended out, his feet are crossed. There is a cigarette, depending on who you ask, either a half burned cigarette, either dangling from his mouth or on the collar of his shirt, as if it fallen from his mouth. Yeah. And when he was taken into the morgue, the doctor said that he was probably dead by 02:00. A.m. Yes. And most likely when they did the full autopsy, a man named John Dwyer said he was probably poisoned initially, even though there were no traces of poison, which is a little odd. Right. But the reason he said that is because when they crack the guy open, this John Doe, who's widely become known as the Summerton Man, his organs were all kinds of messed up. He had blood in his stomach along with his final meal, which was a pasty. Yeah. It's like a Hot Pocket. Yeah. A delicious Hot Pocket. Or a hand pie. Yeah, that sounds dirty. Handpie. Yes. His spleen was enlarged and engorged with blood. Yeah, that's not a good sign. And firm. His liver was giant and bloody. Not unusual for Australian. Yeah, that 55 gallon drum of fossils. His pupils were smaller than normal and just quote, unusual. Whatever that means. Right. And then they said that he had a little spittle on the side of his mouth. I thought that was a pretty tacky thing to note. Yeah, just leave the guy alone. He's dead. Like sleepy drool is what I thought. If I'm so pretty that I just have a little bit of spittle coming down my mouth when I'm dead, I'll be more than happy. Oh, you mean that's the only thing? Yeah. Agreed. I mean, come on, give the guy a break. Well, they were doing forensics, right? Had to note everything. Yes, indeed they did. And they kept saying, like, this got to be poisoning. Like, his organs are all kinds of messed up, but there was no trace of poisoning. And they brought in this guy named Cedric Stanton Hicks. Yeah. They ate the pastry, the ham pie. Yes. Nothing is wrong. Right. They gave it to Eugene and he was still standing afterwards. Yeah. So it's all good. So Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks comes in and says, well, let me see this. And he concluded that it was probably one of two poisons that would have done this kind of damage, resulted in heart failure. We didn't say that. So they concluded he probably died from his heart failure, ultimately, but that wouldn't have left a trace. And he did not feel like it was a responsible move on his part to say these things out loud on the record during the coroner's inquest. Cedric so we wrote them down, and the coroner's like, okay, all right, and picked him up and read what he read was digitalis and struffantin. And sir, Cedric said he said it. I didn't. Right. He goes, oh, gosh, did I throw it out loud? That sounds like something that you'd see in a movie. It just added for the drama. But apparently it really happened. Right. So he read those names. Well, I don't know if you read those names, but at least those names were recorded onto the record. Right. Sir Cedric Stanton Hick suspected the Stro phanthan, although later investigators feel sure it was probably the digitalis. Right. It sounds like it doesn't matter which one it was because they were both kind of used and I think maybe still used to treat heart disease. Is that true? Yeah. And then you can get them with a prescription from a pharmacy. I don't know if they're still used. Maybe they are, but they definitely were common at the time or obtainable in just about every major city. So they have an idea of maybe what poison it was. But again, it bears pointing out again and again that no one has ever found any direct evidence that the man was poisoned. Right. And to this day, 2017 and beyond, if you're listening to this years from now yeah. They still don't know how he died. Yeah. And they may still be looking because this is one of those, like the DB. Cooper when we did one of those cases where amateur sluice on the Internet are still trying to figure stuff like this out. And unless we come up with some really amazing technologies in the next 1020 years or something like that, the time is passing quite quickly on this case. And DB cooper as well, where we may never know. It may remain a mystery forever. Unless we invent time travel. Then somebody will go back and figure those out. So the dude who looks a little bit like Harvey Kitell yes, he does. Didn't you think so? I mean, look up a picture of this guy. If you're not in your car, you can look them up. They're two very famous photos, I guess, from the autopsy scene. Just straight onto his face and then sort of from the side with his eyes open. Yeah. He looks like Harvey. Caitel he does. It looks like a wasted Harvey Caitlin, which is to say he looks like a Harvey Caitlin. So he's in about his mid forty s. Yeah, I guess a younger Harvey Caitlin. Yeah. He's wearing this double breasted suit. I saw that. He's wearing a knit pullover with a necktie. And this sounds like we're being too specific by saying the stripe slanted from left to right, but we're not. We're not. That will come into play. It will. Just hang on to that. Yeah, put that one in your pipe for later. He had no hat, which was weird for that time. I hadn't ran across that, but yeah, I've never seen that. There was a hat. Yeah, and they never found a hat. But it would be unusual for a man in the late forty s to not have a hat. Yeah, I guess so. Fedoras were huge. I'll bet Panama hats were huge down in Adelaide at the time. Fedoras in Australia were literally huge. Like sombreros. Made of tortillas with melted cheese in the middle. Oh, man. Is that a thing? It was on the Simpsons. Okay. Nacho hat. What else? He had weird feet. Yeah, wedge shaped feet, they said. And his shoes seemed to be molded almost to his feet. The real weird giveaway was his calves. His calves were remarkable. They were bulbous, just below the knee. And the guy who performed the autopsy, I think it was Dwyer, said, this is like, what, dancers or people who wear high heels? It's the kind of calves that they have. He said, look at that. He looks like Leana Horn. Oh, my gosh. It is Lena Horn. Yeah. So that's definitely notable. The other thing they found out, too, was a couple of physical traits that he had, which will come into play later on. His ear is simba, which is the upper hollow portion of the ear. Not hollow, but caved in. Caved in? Yeah. The rolled over part up here. No, like just the upper hole than the lower part. Oh, got you. Yeah. We've already done showing ears. Have we? No, we should. The simba is larger than the Cavem, which is a fairly rare thing. So I would guess the Cavem is where your eardrum leads to your eardrum. Yeah, that's where you put your finger when you want to. Right. But if you put your finger up over that ridge. That's the simba. Yeah. So yeah, that would be weird if this one was bigger than that one. Yeah, it's a pretty rare genetic trait. As were his strange teeth. Yes. He had something called hypodentia, which is he was missing his lateral incisers, which are the teeth that most people have between their front teeth and their canines. His lateral incisors never develop. So his canines were adjacent to his front teeth. Yeah. And it's what did you say? Hypodonsia? That can be as common as, like you'd never get your wisdom teeth, but in this case, those particular teeth, it was pretty rare. I saw hypodencies. So that would include not getting wisdom teeth, huh? Well, in any teeth not developing as hypoanka, I got you. Well, I don't know if hypodancia in general or just this type of hypodontia. Is that 2% of the population? Yes, it's specifically for those teeth. Was pretty rare. Got you. Yeah, 2%. Pretty rare. Everyone's got those teeth. And people at home were like, why are you saying all this weird stuff? Who cares? Just settle down. Everybody settle down, because it's all going to come into play. We haven't said anything that will not come back into play. All right, should we take a break? I think we should. Everybody's getting all riled up. Let's take a break. And then we're going to detail for about 15 minutes what was in his pockets. Yeah. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Okay, Chuck, so we went over the body. Now it's time to go through his personal effects. Yes. Which were kind of weird in and of themselves. Right about the details. When you're talking about murders and disappearances and things sure. Unsolved. After 70 years. Yes. You need to pay attention to the detail. What kind of podcast cops would we be if we were just like, yeah, he sort of looked like Harvey Caitlin and he's in a suit. No good. That sounded like Harvey Caital. Yeah, it did, didn't it? Not bad. That was my Harvey. Caitlin and the piano. Oh, man, what a movie. All right, so in his pockets he had a pack of Juicy Fruit. Juicy Fruit? Yeah. Oh, nice. Chewing gum. Good stuff. He had some matches. Bryant and May matches. Well, he had a lot of tickets in his pocket. He had an unused train ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach. He had a bus ticket from Adelaide to Glen ALG, and then he had a used ticket that said he had come arrived there by bus from the railway station there. Yeah. From the Adelaide Railway. Correct. Yeah. He also had a pack of cigarettes. That was weird. Army Club. The pack of cigarettes was an Army Club pack, but inside was something called Concedus, which was a much more expensive brand. That makes no sense. That's the opposite of the only thing that could make sense, which is he just kept the expensive pack and would put cheap cigarettes in it to look fancy. Right. Unless he didn't want people bumming the expensive ones off of them. So he kept the cheap packer would have that. Right. The, likelier, story is that he bumped a bunch of cigarettes off of somebody and put them in his own pack. All right? Like, hey, man, you got to smoke or seven. Or seven, yeah. Interesting. Or perhaps they were poisoned and put in that pack. That's another possible explanation, too. Right. So that was, like, the extent of his personal effects, aside from his clothing. Right. There was no ID. He had a couple of combs. Okay. Hair combs. More to the point, there was no ID. No ID, no wallet, no cash. Kind of odd, for sure. And his clothes were odd in and of themselves. Right. So, again, he was wearing a very nice suit, but the maker's labels of all of his clothes had been, from what I understand, carefully, snipped away. Yeah. I saw one explanation for this that made it seem a little less odd, which was, back then, apparently, people oftentimes, because there were nice clothes, were not scarce, but you wanted to keep them for yourself. So you would write your name a lot of times on your suit jackets and things. Sure. And then if you ever went to sell them secondhand, you would flip out those labels. I see. So that's one explanation. It's not bad. I don't know if that's a reach or not, but at least something could make sense out of that. Yes, but the other thing could mean that this person was being dumped and no one wanted them to know who they were. It's a possibility, too. Or that he didn't want anyone to know who he was. That's another possibility as well. Yeah, that's what a lot of people think, that he was trying to cover up his own identity as well. Yeah. His trousers, I think, had a little repair done with orange thread. Bear with us. And then that was about it. They took fingerprints of the guy and spread it around, to no avail. Spread the fingerprints around, right. They figured out after a little while, I'm not sure when, but this would have been so December 1 is when he was found. This is like July to us in the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of July. Oh, jeez. So it's starting to get hot down there. Right. You can only keep a body for so long in the 1940s in summer in Adelaide, it's already a hot place to begin with. And the authorities were like, we can't keep this guy above ground any longer. So somebody had the bright idea of making a plaster bust of him and they did, and they kept it at the Morgan and they buried him in a pretty smart way, if you ask me. Yeah. They buried him with this marker. Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton beach, 1st December 1948, and he was buried just in really dry ground. So if they ever needed to get in there, they could. And they encased them in concrete as well, to really, like, keep them preserved as much as possible if you ever need to be exhumed. Right, correct. So, like I said, they took the set of fingerprints and they're still looking for this guy. They buried them finally, but they're like, this is driving us insane. Who was this man? What happened to him? So they spread the fingerprints all over Australia. They started to send them around to America, the UK. It's just English speaking countries. Yeah. They also, like, kind of before they got rid of the real body, they brought people in, locals, to see if anyone could identify them. I think afterward they probably showed quite a few people the bus and they were just trying to do anything and nobody could recognize who this person was? No. I mean, some people saw, like, pictures of the bust or the death pictures that are famous now in the newspaper, and we're like, oh, it kind of looks like Uncle Ted, and then they go in and see him and be like, It's not Uncle Ted. Right. And so the fact that this is becoming a weird, unsolved mystery already, like, just quickly after the case started to capture the nation's attention a little bit, and the police, the South Australia State Police, were not shy about publicizing stuff as needed, right. Like, as they developed breaks in the case, they would tell the newspapers about it and the newspapers would tell the rest of the country. So it became a pretty big sensation in Australia, so much so that a lot. Of people are just basically taking for granted that the man was not Australian, that were he Australian, several people would have come forward because the case had that much exposure nationally. Yeah. And I'm just guessing here, but I imagine 1948, this part of Australia probably wasn't, like millions of people living there. I don't know how small of a town it was, but I don't think it was, like some huge city, was it? Well, yeah, italy is the capital of South Australia. Yeah, but is that how big was that? 1948? You think there was, like, at least 500 people there. I'm going to say the minimum. Someone's going to write in and tell us, all right. And they're going to be mad that we didn't know. No. Australians are nice about things, usually. Yeah, they aren't. They are. They're the Canadians of the south. So they decide, the cops decide. Very smartly. You know what? We're going to widen this investigation. We're going to see if anywhere in town someone has found something, there are any possessions that this guy might have left behind since he was just found with what was in his pockets. Surely there's something and in fact, there was. They discovered that there was a suitcase, brown suitcase and a cloak room that was left there on November 30, which was the night before the morning that he was found. Yeah. The first time he was seen on the beach was November 30. Big lead. It was. And because he had that ticket that showed he had taken a bus from the Adelaide rail station, that was one of the first places detectives went. Yes. And they found this suitcase that had been left there, like you said, on November 30. And inside there was some stuff that linked it to the guy. Yeah. I mean, it was full of stuff. It was clearly someone who was traveling a lot. There were lots of clothes. Shirts and scarves and underwear and pajamas and handkerchiefs. There were two pairs of scissors, one broken pair, one in a sheath, like a shave kit, screwdriver, lots of just normal travel things. Razor. Razor strap. All the junk. You would expect multiple pairs of scissors. It's a little weird thread, but the thread was the big one. Orange thread. Yeah. Barber, not Australian brand barber thread. Yeah. Which perfectly matched where his trousers were stitched. So it's got to be him. Right. That's the thing that really links him with the suitcase. There was also some stencils for stenciling cargo. Yeah. That's a little weird. Very weird. And there was a suit jacket that had what's called a feather stitch. Well, stitching it's the lightest stitch. Right. And they're like, we don't do this in Australia. We don't even have the sewing machine that can do this in Australia. Yet. A Taylor said this is an American coat. Yes. With their feathers. Right. We need a hammer stitch. And then inside some of these clothes was the name Keen, because I told you people wrote on their clothes a lot. Said T. Keane. K-E-A-N-E-R-K-E-A-N. Right. And the best cops could figure is someone did that to sniff everyone off the case. Right. Because they looked around and there was no T. Ke Keen or any Keen that they couldn't put their fingers on who is missing. Correct. And the tie, years later, the cops at the time didn't know this. I wonder if they noticed that it was slanting one way or another. I know, but they probably just knew it looked weird for some reason they couldn't put their finger on. Yeah, but at the time in Australia, the ties slanted left to right, and this guy's tie slanted right to left. And that was the style in America. It's like everything is the opposite. Isn't it so weird? Yeah. Summers, winter, winter, summer, flush the toilet goes in a different direction. I think that's an urban legend. No, I think that's true. Right? No, I did something on it. Really? Yes. I think it's an urban legend. It has to do with the shape of the drain. What? I was so looking forward to pooping in Australia. You can still do it. Well, you probably should, actually, while we're there. I'm going to. But the joy is dead. Just don't watch it flush. Yeah, but you might be better off, actually, in this way. I've just been used to my poop turning into such a direction my whole life. I was really ready for something new. All right, I'm sorry. So the tie is opposite. They said, this is an American tie, like you said. Yes. And then they brought in and actually, we should say those were Internet sleuths within the last 1015 years. You figured that one out. All right, well, good for you, Internet. Finally, in April 1949, police brought in a dude, expert pathologist named John Cleland. And this was a big deal. Apparently, the cops in South Australia were not as thorough as you would think because they didn't even check his little pocket watch. Pocket? The little pocket inside your pocket. Because there was a really key piece of evidence rolled up in there. Yeah, this one broke the case wide open. It seemed like it would. There was a little scrap of paper rolled up very tightly in this pocket, and written on it, in some pretty fancy type setting were the words tamod. Tamamshud. And the cop said, what is this? First orange thread. Not some weirdo words rolled up in the sky's pocket. What is this? And John Cleveland said you dope. It's called a lead. He didn't check his pocket in his pocket. Right. I said no. So they would figure out in a little while, by a stroke of luck, it seems that tamum shud means it is finished or it is done. Or in this case, the end. In Persian. Correct. Sounds very random and out of left field. Anybody would know this, but a reporter working the police beat there said, named Frank Kennedy, said, no, I know what that's from. That's from a 12th century book of Persian poetry, solid Rubayat of Omar Kayam. And that just sounds so out of left field. But in fact, that book had been translated by an English poet named Edward Fitzgerald, and it was kind of a big deal once it was translated into English. Right. So it wasn't like what I'm looking for obscure that nobody would know what it was. No, it was extremely popular in the west after that. I think even in America, there's a Peanuts comic strip that makes reference to it even. Well, it was one of those things where people might not know about it, but there are plenty of people out there who did. And one of the reporters recognized it. Right. Yeah. So they realized then that they needed to find the copy of the Rubyte that this came from, and they started looking and looking and looking, and they couldn't find it. So the state police did what they had been doing all along. They went to the newspapers and they said, hey, we found this weird scrap of paper. It says Tamil Schude. We're told that it comes from the Rubyte. Yeah. And specifically, it's the last words of the RubyAt. Right. The last words of the last poem. Right. And go to it. And the media went wild and let everybody know. And it turns out so this is April when they found the scrap of paper. And in July, they got another break based on finding that scrap. A guy came forward and said, you know what? I found this copy of the Ruby in the back seat of my car, which had been parked by somerton beach around the time the man who was found on Summerton Beach was found. And I have no idea whose it is. I put it in my glove compartment. It's been sitting there until I read this article in the newspaper. Yeah. Presumably his windows rolled down or his car was unlocked. And whoever ripped this thing out, because they did find out that part was ripped out from his book, just tossed it in the backseat of this guy's car. Right. Not very smart if you're trying to cover your tracks. No, but maybe you're not trying to cover your tracks. Exactly. Right. So they now have the copy of the RubyTHE that the scrap of paper that was found in the Summer to man's trousers came from. Yeah. Which, by all accounts, is a oneofa kind printing. Right. Yeah. Like a oneoff. Yes. And not an addition of hundreds. Like a single printing of this one book. Right. But supposedly it's part of an addition. I can't remember which edition it was by the printer. But for years, people have been trying to track down a copy from that edition, and they couldn't find it. Well, somebody finally found one. They're like, this is not the exact same book that the cops found with the associated with somerton man. Which is a very odd thing. Totally. So in this book, they get another huge break. This breaks the case open even further. Right. They're like, Surely we're going to figure it out now. Yeah, this is huge. They found two local phone numbers. One was a bank phone number, which didn't lead to much of anything. And another one. X 3239. Well, they found a couple of things. They found this number that belonged to a woman, a nurse named Jessica Thompson, who we'll talk about in a minute. And then they also found we did our episode on Spies, and one of the things sometimes spies would do would have these throwaway pads that they would literally write things on and you could make an impression such that it's like the kids trick where you rip that page off and you have what looks like a blank page. Let's see the impression of what was written above it. And in this little kids will use a pencil to see what it says. But in this case, they used a UV light to see what by all accounts is a five line code. Right. And the code's pretty odd. Yeah. I mean, I think what you should read it, it'll sound like gibberish. But if you're into code breaking, you probably already know about this one. Sure. But if not, here we go. All capital letters. Line one is Wrgoababd. Second line Mliaoi. That was scratched out. Interestingly. Third line WTBIMPANETP. Four line M-L-I-A Again, that's repeated Boaiaqc. And finally I-T-T-M-T-S-A Go break it. Right. The eagle has landed at midnight. Which they basically said that, go break it. And no one could. No one has. Yes, a lot of amateur cobrakers. Because again, they went to the media, like you're saying, go break it. And a lot of cobrakers tried and failed. And then they contacted the Australian Naval Intelligence Service and they tried and failed. And either the Naval Intelligence Service or later Sleuths concluded that there was too little information to ever break it, that you didn't have a key that you needed to have. And then it may have been as simple as the first letter of a list that he was trying to remember. Right? Yeah. Because apparently they bear resemblance, frequency wise, of the first letters of common words in the English language. So it's possible that it's a to do list that the guy was just trying to remember. Buy these groceries, go see this person at this time. That kind of thing. A lot of letters. It is a lot of letters. And a lot of people say, no, this is obviously a spy co book. Don't be naive. So the cops there's the code breaking thing that they're doing and then simultaneously they're like, well, maybe we should call this local phone number. And they did. And on the other end, a woman picked up, and it turned out, like you said, to be Jessica Thompson. Do you want to take another break? I think it's a great place. We're going to take a break, and we'll get to Jessica Thompson right after this. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get 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 avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation, we should say. Coming back from break, we just got compliments from Matt. This is like praise from Caesar on something like this. What happened to Caesar, though. Yes. On your birthday, Matt said, you guys are really doing a great job. And Josh said, tell us that. Go back to sleep. All right, so we promised talk of Jessica Thompson. This is a really good lead. They called her up. She answered the phone. It's a good first step in my movie Virgin. At least she answered the phone and went, well, she was a nurse. She was married. She had a kid named Robin Thompson. Robin a boy, though, right? Yes. And her maiden name was Harkness. And this was kept private for a lot of years. Her name was she asked him to keep it a secret. And I read a bunch of accounts, most of which said that she may have had a few boyfriends here and there. Affairs. The paternity of Robin Thompson was called into question more than once. So I think that the general idea was that she was probably just trying to keep this quiet in the 1940s, wouldn't be outed as a troll up. Right? And the cops said, sure, no problem. And actually, to this day, the state police have never publicly identified Jessica Thompson as the mystery woman whose phone number was written in the Summertime Man's copy of the Rubiot. But in 2013, her family came forward and publicly identified her. And even though the police haven't confirmed it, it's been known for so many years that that was probably who it was. That again, it's basically taken for granted as a fact of the case that she is that woman. Yeah. Her nickname was Jestyn. J-E-S-T-Y-N. That's how she inscribed copies of this rubyte. Well, and I guess that sort of gives away what happens next. Yeah. The cops are like, OK, we've gone through a lot to get to you, lady. Have you given a copy of this 12th century book of Persian poetry called The Ruby Yacht to anybody? And she goes, yes, I have. And the cops are like, yes, we're about to figure it out. Yeah. And they said, who have you given it to? And she said a bloke named Alfred Boxall. They said, okay, we'll call you back. They hung up and ran around looking for Alfred Boxall. Well, yeah, they probably figured that's Harvey kitel. Sure. And they were unfairly. Alfred Boxall disappointed when they found he was alive and well in New South Wales. And he said, yeah, I got the book right here. She gave them to all her lovers. There was speculation that perhaps she gave it to him over drinks one night, that he perhaps had been one of her lovers. Yeah. And I think that's probably absolutely correct. Yeah. Because she had inscribed it, like I said, with Justin, and that's how the cops refer to her on their case files. Right. So they went, oh, you're alive. Great. And he said, yeah, but I've got the book. Not all is lost. And it was intact. That's correct. So they said, You've got to be kidding me. The lead of all leads. I was going to break this case wide open. It's a dead end. Are you kidding me? And one of the officers developed a permanent scar from banging his head slowly against the wall. That's right. He couldn't be stopped, couldn't be consoled. And so they said, okay, lady, your phone number was in this thing, so we want you to come down to the Morgan, just take a look at this bus we made as a dead guy. And they said, Also, is there anything else, anything weird happened to you in the last year or so? And she said, well, the only thing I can think of is that my neighbors said to me once when I came home one day that some man they didn't know had called on my house and that was it. That's literally the weirdest thing that's happened to me in the last few months. Knocked on her door that she didn't know. Her neighbors didn't know. It happened to me, like, three times a week. Right. So they bring her in to look at this bus. Detective Sergeant lionelane, and he was one of the two leads that was not an Australian accent. No. Okay. And I don't know what kind of accident it was. It was mid Atlantic, but I was not trying to do Australian. And he said that she was completely taken aback to the point of giving the appearance. She was about to faint, end quote. She knows who this dude is. She's a nurse. First of all, she wasn't even looking at a body, but she is a nurse, so she wouldn't be freaked out by any of this. No. And again, it wasn't even a body. It was a plaster bus. Yeah, right. But she was like and they go, did you know him? And she goes, no, I didn't. Just got some heartburn, and I have nothing more to say about this, so don't ever ask me. And she clammed up. Not weird at all. No, not at all. So immediately, the cops are like, you know way more than you're letting on. But apparently they didn't beat up people that they had in custody to get information out of them. So they let her go and just said, oh, well, I guess we'll never know the answer to this mystery. Yeah. There's a retired detective named Gary Feltis. Is it Gary? I thought Gerry. G-E-R-R-Y. Probably Jerry. You've convinced me. That's funny. We just crossed over to one another side again. So he took up this case later in life, and he actually interviewed her in 2007. He said she was evasive under questioning, and like, this lady knew something. Yeah. And again, this guy was a hobbyist amateur sleuth on this case, both those guys. But he had 40 years experience as a detective in Adelaide, so he knows questioning people. Have you seen the Netflix documentary series The Keepers? No, I haven't even heard of it. It is about a cold case murder of a nun in the Think. And there are these amateur detectives that have been working on this all these years, these two women in particular that were students of this and on at school that are just amazing and really get an appreciation for these people who become obsessed with solving these cases that aren't even like family members or anything. Is it like JAMA or documentary chidpart documentary series. Oh, wow. I got to see that. Oh, dude, it's one of the most upsetting things I've ever had to sit through, and that's all I'm going to say. Okay. I've been waiting for this since I finished making of a Murderer. Yeah, it's better. I think I like the murder. What? Very disturbing stuff. Wow. I got to go. You got to leave it. So hats off to you amateur sleuths out there, for sure. For getting in the way of real police. No, for doing work that real police. These are cold cases that they're hard pressed to get information anymore in most cases. No, it's true. I was just kidding, sniffing people off the case after the cops say, yeah, right. And I was kind of mad not to get too derailed by this, that these cold cases just sort of stay cold. Yeah. But then you think you can't just concentrate on a 40 year old murder case, and there's so many current things you got to be looking into. Plus, it's hard. It really is. All right, so back to Thompson, evasive under questioning later on. Her son Robin, as we said earlier, he started looking into it, got really interested in trying to figure this thing out. Oh, he did? He did. I didn't know that. And he turned out to be a professional dancer. Yes. With the calves of Lena Horne and the Australian Ballet. Right. And hypodencia in exactly the same way that the Summerton Man had. And he had the same ears. Yeah. So a lot of people again, there's something that hasn't been proven, but most people take his conclusive fact that Robin Thompson, son of Jessica Thompson, who didn't know the Simmerton man was the son of the Sommerton man. Yeah. What I saw was between the ear and the teeth, they put odds for both of those things at about quite a range, between one and 10,000,001 and 20 million. Okay. But let's just say it's one in 10 million. That's still pretty say it's one in a trillion. At that point, it's the same thing, basically. So eventually another is it the same amateur sleuth. Not Jerry. Derek Abbott is a different sleuth. Their arch rivals. It's hilarious. They hate each other. He got involved and said, you know what? I'm going to get Robin in here for a DNA test. Robin's Aim. But it says here her is a him, right? No, Robin's daughter was the one who took the DNA test. Robin is long dead. Got you. Yeah. Okay. No, I think I had it backwards, and I don't think he got involved in trying to figure it out because he's dead. Oh, okay. That's why I was kind of surprised. Got you. So he got her daughter to take a DNA test and then trace back the paternal lineage, which would have been possibly the Summerton Man, who, by all accounts, seemed like he was American. Yeah. Which would have explained the tie, perhaps the thread. And what else? The fact that no one in Australia could identify them or was willing to identify them. The only thing left then after that is, okay, well, somebody just dig up the Sommerton man, like he buried him in such a way so we could do this. Right. Well, it turns out in Australia, from what I saw, there are two reasons that a judge will let you exhume a body. One is to contest a will there's no will or state, really, in question here. And then the other one is to identify a lost soldier, a soldier lost at war. Other than that, it's an uphill battle getting a body exhumed. And two different times, derek Abbott, who actually, as an aside, married Robin Thompson's daughter who took the DNA test on his behalf. He petitioned twice to have somerton man exumed and twice he was turned down because obsessive curiosity was not a good enough reason to dig up a body. So he swabbed the inside of her cheek and that was true love. Exactly. I got to get in there over candlelight. All right. He gave her a hand pie. So here are the theories. Well, I'm going to go ahead and start with my favorite theory, which sort of is in here but not really suicide. I think that perhaps and I didn't invent this, but the theories I've read I like this one. I think that he was an American man who had an affair with Jenny Nurse Thompson justin and went there, traveled there, found out she was pregnant and was rejected and went down and killed himself by poison and was prepared to do so. Okay. And the other things I've read said that he could you know, the things that don't add up was like the body was found with no vomit, which a lot of times happen if you are poisoned. Sure. Even if you're not, one of the last things you do as your life is ending is throw up, usually. Oh, really? Yeah, it's pretty common. No one ever tells you that it's a dinner party. You've never been told that. No one ever tells you two things in life that you poop when you have a baby and you poop and you throw up before you die. And you poop when you die too. You poop when you die? I think so. I guess that's why Elvis died on the toilet. Yeah. Very efficient. He wanted to go out with some dignity. Right. Oh, man. So where was that? The thing I read said that perhaps he went down to the shoreline, drank the poison into the water and maybe like vomited and wretched there and then kind of went back up to beach and lay there to die and maybe had one last cigarette. Tried to very possible that's one theory. Another theory is that he died by poison, but that it was murder. Sure. As this case is becoming more and more publicized, the public came to widely believe that he was a spy and that as more details of the case spread out more and more over the decades, this vision of aspiring emerged. Makes sense. Jessica Thompson as this communist spy master who was posing as a housewife and somerton man was a spy who worked for her or a rival spy. And Alfred Boxall was a spy who worked for her, which would explain why she gave both of them copies of the rubyte. And that actually the copies of the rubyt were one time pads themselves, which were actually the keys to crack the code. Unfortunately, the cops in Adelaide through the Rubiot. That was the summer to mans away in the they got rid of the suitcase in the 80s. Maybe it was both. Maybe he was the spy who loved her. Could have been. But the murder theory is that Alfred Boxhall murdered the man or she had him murder him and then they took his body to the seaside. Alfred Boxhall was actually confronted with that in the TV. And he's like, that's pretty ridiculous. Everybody some people are like, we know you were in intelligence in World War II. It turns out he was like an army engineer or something like that. He wasn't an intelligence. And everyone said, that's just what a murderer would say. Right? That's ridiculous on TV. Right. So the idea that the Sommerton Man's copy of the Ruby app was basically a one of a kind, it seems, definitely lends credence to the idea that it's possible he was a spy. Yeah, and that code for sure. So that's another big, strong possibility. Here's the thing I saw, too. In 1959, the third witness came forward, the shared, never before revealed story that he was on the beach in the wee hours of the morning and saw a man carrying an unconscious man over shoulder toward that spot, but was dark, could not identify anything, and nothing ever came of that. Stuff like that. Give me my money for the movie. Right? Stuff like that. I think it could be either it wasn't him or just I don't know how people are. They just make something up to get on the news. And then I thought the same thing with the hand raising up. Maybe that didn't even happen. Well, yeah, that's another thing. What I realized from researching this, Chuck, was that this case has been so muddied with conjecture and false truths that have just spread across the Internet, that did the lions ever recant their version of seeing him move? If so, then maybe he was dead when he was taken out to the beach. Who knows? You really have to dive in. But if you want to dive in, this mystery, maybe even more than any others, is just an enormously deep rabbit hole to get sucked into. Because even if they dug up over to man and found conclusively that he was Robin Thompson's father, that still doesn't say who he actually was or how he died. And it's just like how this mystery unfolded as the police were investigating it. You can crack the case in one major way and it'll probably lead to a dead end. There's still always this tantalizing mystery that we may never know. Somerton man tamum. Shoot. Okay, I just said something in person. If you want to know more about Silverton Man, you should go listen to the Stuff they Don't Want You to Know episode on it for sure or watch it. I'm not sure if it's video or audio. Maybe both. And you can. Also check out the lost man on California Sunday magazine and The Body on Somerton beach on Smithsonian, among many other great articles. And since I said many, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this on accents. And I got to say we got more email on stuttering and accents that I've seen in a long, long time. For real. I don't know. I think a new accent would be big. Stuttering really hit home with a lot of people, I think. And there's a stuttering email, too. It's either going to be on the next one or the one that was just released. Okay. You may have heard it's upcoming. Hey, guys, listen to accents. And I wanted to hopefully set up set the record straight with Chuck's help. My name is Chris and I'm from New Jersey, and I've heard Chuck mentioned a few times that he lived in New Jersey for a bit. First off, where did you live? What brought you here and why did you leave? I lived in Bernardsville next to Basking Ridge, sort of near Morrist town is the biggest town that you might have heard of and not far from bedminster golf club of Donald Trump. Wow. Awesome. What brought me there? I lived there after college because it was a free place to live because of a roommate's, parents who were out of the country in Australia. Actually, it's all coming together. They didn't want to sell their house, so they said, you guys are done with college. You want to live here for free, hang out in New York? We said, sure. And why did I leave? I left because they came back. That'd be weird if I was still living there. Anyway, he might be able to confirm my suspicions. People from New Jersey don't have an accent, but if they do, it's slight New York accent, if any. No, you definitely have accent. You're insane. In my opinion, many older adults have moved from New York to New Jersey for the suburbs. Seen many older people meet and talk about the street they grew up on Brooklyn or like to make clear that no one from New Jersey says New Jersey. That's true. If anything, that is in New York accent. Chuck, can you confirm? I can confirm I never heard anyone say New Jersey, but I cannot confirm that there's no accident because definitely have an accident in New Jersey. Yeah. In fact, one of the things that I noticed is not so much an accent, but people in New Jersey would say button instead of button or like words that are split in half like that. Right. They would stop, like a hard stop button. You know what I'm talking about? Sure. Very new Jersey. And they call everyone kid. Yeah, I knew that. You ever heard that? Sure. Hey, kid, even if they're older than you. Anyway, I hope Chuck agrees. Also, I hope he's a fan of pork roll and not taylor Ham. I'm a fan of Taylor pork roll. I don't know if that counts. I thought that was the only pork roll. Thanks for the endless amounts of entertainment. He's seeing you guys in Brooklyn on the upcoming tour. So chris Ortado from Highland Park, New Jersey. Nice. I can't wait to see at the Bellhouse. Thanks, Chris. If you want to get in touch with, like Chris did, you can hang out with me on Twitter at Joshua Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant? You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at how stefanworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyoushineo.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 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 Would Happen If the World Stopped Spinning? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-would-happen-if-the-world-stopped-spinning | Over the last 400 million years, the day has grown longer by two full hours thanks to a slowing of the rotation of the Earth on its axis. While it will be a very long time before it stops spinning altogether, it never hurts to plan. Listen to Chuck and Jo | Over the last 400 million years, the day has grown longer by two full hours thanks to a slowing of the rotation of the Earth on its axis. While it will be a very long time before it stops spinning altogether, it never hurts to plan. Listen to Chuck and Jo | Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:11:57 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=18, tm_min=11, tm_sec=57, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=52, tm_isdst=0) | 19573964 | audio/mpeg | "This July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, 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. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chipper and cheery Chucker Bryant right across from me. How are you doing? I'm good, man. I'm about to go get that jar of moonshine for my cubicle and we've never done a show where we just drank moonshine the whole time. No, I think we should. What better day? I don't think he's at my desk. Oh, really? Yeah. Do you have beers still? There may be some over there. I don't know. What about beer? Well, there's a case of beer that some other dude sent me. It wasn't show related, but it's been sitting there for like a year. What shinerbock? Oh, I got some, too. And then there's a couple of beers from, like, England and then there may be some moonshine. Yeah. So let's just get drunk. Okay. So you're feeling good? Yeah. I'm just kidding, folks. We're not going to do that, is what you're saying. What's your intro? Well, my intro is you've already poop pooed. Yeah, I feel kind of bad about that. I don't feel bad. It's pretty much par for the course, buddy. All right. Are you ready? Yes. Chuck. Josh. Many years ago, roughly around 4.8 billion years ago yeah. The Earth really started to form together from a bunch of dust and rocks and other dust. So it says you right, because the universe was spinning and all these particles were spinning, and as they came together, form an accretion from an accretion disk, they form the Earth and all the other planets, obviously. Right. And all that spin, thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, one of them continued to spin and actually accumulated. And so the Earth just is spinning. That's why it's spinning, because it's always been spinning and all of its particles that make it up have been spinning. So it's spinning because of the conservation of angular momentum. Right. Yeah. In Newton's first law of motion, of course, that's what it was, not thermodynamics oh, is that what you're saying? It was the law of motion, which is what if an object in motion will remain in that state of motion unless basically someone comes along and puts the brakes on it. Right. Unless something acts upon it. Exactly. And in the vacuum of space, there's nothing to act upon. It to slow the Earth down. So it's just going to keep going. And actually, the Earth has slowed in its older age, 400 million years ago, a day lasted 22 hours. Yeah. It's been slowing consistently over time, right? Yeah. But it's going to take a while to stop. I think in 400 million years in the future, they think that the day will be 26 hours. So two years slowing by two or 2 hours a day over 400 million years. It's not quick. Well, in 400 million years right. Is there going to be any Earth? I don't know. That's such a good question. What will we look like? I don't think that's the image in 400 million years. That's my guess. Okay, so the Earth is slowing. We understand why it's spinning. We understand that it is slowing down. But what happens if somebody just comes along and just stops? It automatically? Just stopped. Stop. Well, and by the way, Jerry, that wasn't an edit. Yeah, that's our signal when we beep. Yeah, that is a call out to Jerry. So we're moving very fast, like faster than the speed of sound, even though it didn't feel like it. Right. So if someone stopped it, those same things that would happen if you just stopped your car all of a sudden or a train stopped all of a sudden would happen here on Earth. Except it would be much more drastic because we're spinning much faster. We're spinning in an easterly direction at about 1000 miles an hour along the equator. Yeah. So, yeah, if all of a sudden you stop the Earth, everything that's not attached to the Earth would keep going eastward about 1000 miles an hour, instantly dead, massive flooding, you name it. The wind, shock waves, buildings, everything, just go. And you said something that I find kind of interesting when I started to research, like, the Earth's rotation. It's one of those things where I just assume I know what I'm talking about. And then the more I looked into it, I was like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of little stuff here, like questions like, why don't we feel the fact that we're moving through space at about 1000 miles an hour? And well, I found the answer. Because the Earth moves at a constant speed, constant rate of rotation. There's no acceleration or deceleration, which we would feel if that happened. Yeah, right. Why don't we spin off the Earth? Do you know why? I do. Okay, let's hear. Because of gravity and the gravitational pull. Like, we want to spin off the Earth that's in there, but the force of gravity, or the force that wants to spin us off the Earth is zero 3% the force of gravity. Right. Centrifugal force. Way much more gravity going on. Then there is the other. And I found that if the Earth rotated at a rate of 80 minutes right. It's spun around on its axis one full time. So one day was 80 minutes long. That would be fast enough to overcome the force of gravity, would be thrown off into space. Well, but we're not going anywhere because the Earth is never going to start speeding up like that. That's just crazy talk. No, and it's not going to stop spinning either anytime soon. Yeah, but we can still have fun with this topic. So say that we were existing right now as the Earth was really starting to slow down. It's making its last turn. Yeah. So it did it gradually, like Superman style. Right. And then the ecosystems were intact. Everything was generally intact the moment the Earth stopped spinning. The Day the Earth Stood Still. Exactly. Yeah. There would be some really interesting things that happen. Like a lot of the geography of this planet I took for granted until I read this article, which really opened my eyes. So what are some of the things that would happen if they just stopped spinning? Well, seismologists think that it would set off a massive chain of super earthquakes because they suspect that the rotation of the Earth plays a big role in the movement of the tectonic plates. So seismologists think that we would all be dead because of massive, massive earthquakes. Okay. We'd probably be dead for a lot more reasons, which we can explore. But yes. Earlier, how would you diverse? Basically yeah, because think about it. That spinning Earth, the centrifugal force of the Earth, is so strong that it basically keeps the oceans in place. It creates a bulge around the equator. Like, the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It's bulge at the middle, and that's because of its spin. And that bulge actually brings the world's oceans toward the equator. In the southern hemisphere, they move north. In the Northern hemisphere, they move south. But it's being pulled toward the middle of the Earth, the Earth's spare tire. So if it stopped spinning, all of a sudden, the world's oceans would go toward the poles. Yeah, like, quickly. It would be pretty cool to see, I guess not if you're at the poles. Did you see a map of what it would look like? Yeah, like basically a supercontinent in the center on both sides of the equator. Yeah, like all the way around the globe. And two big oceans, one on top and one on the bottom. Yeah. And the one on the top of the Arctic would actually be about 1000 meters deeper. Not because there'd be more water there, but because the Antarctic basin is bigger, deeper. That makes sense. So the water would be shallower by comparison. Yeah. More displacement. But yeah, I was looking so, like, Chicago would be just underneath the north shore of the Northern Hemisphere's ocean. Wow. And from that point down, the United States would be largely intact all the way into the Caribbean south. It'd just be land. It's pretty neat. There's a little map. I love freaky weird maps. Yeah, like the early maps. Those were a little weird. There's a blog called Unusual Maps, I think. Odd Maps. I can't remember what it's called, but it's just like this blog about strange maps. Oh, cool. It's pretty neat. I used to collect maps. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I mean, I didn't have a ton. I had like 15 or 16 cool map posters. I still have a few of them, but I think they went the way of the dodo in my house. Were they like scholastic fold outs? No, some were like Civil War map or the Earth at this point map, or just various? None of them were just straight up. And I had one straight up map. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com hey, 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, what else would happen? One thing that would happen is and Robert Lam wrote this, didn't he? No, I got his name. Jonathan Atteberry. That's right. Atteberry. Atteberry. Good job. He says that it will take a whole year to pull off what the Earth does in a day makes sense. So one part of the world would be a blazing, scorching desert, and then one part of the Earth would be a barren, frozen wasteland half a year. And that's because since the Earth rotates on its axis in about 24 hours a little under, I think. Yeah. If it stopped doing that, it would still move around the sun. It just wouldn't spin on its axis. So I figured this out. If you're having trouble visualizing it like I did, put your thumb in front of your face out a little bit so that your thumbnail is facing you. And then pretend that the sun is in between you and your thumb. Yeah. And your thumb is the Earth. Okay. And you just rotate it around so that your thumbnail is facing you all the time. But it's going around the sun, and you'll see that at any given point. Right. This part of the Earth is facing a different part of the sun, the thumbnail. So there would be seasons, but there'd be four seasons, and they be very different. The line demarcating them would be really different. And when you went from winter to summer, eventually you would have nothing but sunlight and then nothing but dark, depending on the temperature. Swing would be huge. Right. So what that means is we probably have a really difficult time propagating with husbandry in general. And you don't mean sex. You're talking with plants and animals. I'm not sure what you mean there. Propagating with husbandry sounded like a euphemism. Yeah. No, just farming and animals. All that would be more difficult, if not impossible, to grow crops. Or maybe you grow them during the sunny parts of the year. You can grow and then store. But we'd be in bad shape. I think we'd be in very bad shape as far as that goes. But botanically speaking, we are pretty quick witted species, so we could possibly overcome it technologically, maybe. I'll bet we'd have a really good song and glasses. Yeah, that's true. And coats. What else would happen? Anything? Well, the magnetic field, while gravity I got something on gravity here. Gravity would be changed, which is not in the article, but it would change significantly if it stopped spinning because centrifugal force, of course, which you're talking about, contributes to that gravitational field, and it wouldn't exist any longer. So the gravitational field would be strongest at the poles instead of at the equator. And who knows what that would do? You'd just be a lot heavier at the poles. Right. You think? Maybe. Okay. We'd also lose a very interesting thing called the Coriolis effect. Yeah. My favorite, which, you know, supposedly with the Coriolis effect, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, if you flush the toilet, the water goes down the drain clockwise. And in the Northern hemisphere counterclockwise. It's not true. It's all plumbing. It's all the design of the drain. The Coriolis effect has nothing to do with what part of the Earth you're in? No, it has nothing to do with the drain. Supposedly, the Coriolis effect, the fact that the Earth is spinning faster at the equator than it is at the poles yeah. Has long been tapped as a reason for whirlpools. Right. They're saying no. This is probably if you're talking about a drain, it's the angle of the drain. It's the design of the drain. It's the water rushing in when you flush the toilet. It has nothing. That's an old wives tale. But there's a coriolis effect. It's just not quite as interesting. Basically, it says that if you leave the North Pole and fly toward the equator, toward a certain mark of the equator, if you go in a straight line, you're going to miss your mark because the Earth is spinning, and it's spinning faster at the equator than it is at the pole. It's a curve. It would look like a curve, right? Yeah. You have to basically correct longitudinally okay. To hit your target. Like, you just can't find a straight line from the North Pole to the equator if you're trying to get to a certain spot. Yeah, that's the Corios effect. Nice. I guess. Unless I'm missing something. That seems kind of basic. Yeah, it's kind of basic once you wrap your head around it. There are some things that are slowing the Earth down. Like you said, the days are longer now than they used to be. Yes, they used to be, what, 22 hours, you said 400 million years ago. Yeah. Okay, so we are slowing down. There is tidal friction, and the tide drags 2.3 milliseconds on each century, every 100 years. So that's pretty slow. Right. But it adds up over time, surely. Of course it does. Weather can affect it, too. Winds can actually slow it down. Earthquakes can redistribute the mass and actually speed up. Didn't it speed up the earthquake in Japan? Yeah, I think by 1.8 microseconds. The Earth's day, its solar day, was accelerated because that earthquake was so massive. Nothing we could notice. No. What about magnetic field, though? That's what I don't fully get. So with the magnetic field, we're not quite sure why Earth or how Earth has a magnetic field, but the prevailing theory is that because of this Coriolis effect, in the center of the Earth, whirlpools are created of molten iron. And as this molten iron kind of moves around and forms these whirlpools, that actually generates an electrical field, an electrical current, which in turn generates a magnetic field. Yeah. So we have this magnetic field. We think that's how we have it. But we also have long suspected that the magnetic field protects the Earth from solar winds, which are positively charged ions from the sun that travel about a million miles an hour off of the sun toward us. And they are about a million degrees Celsius. And we long thought that it protected our atmosphere from being stripped of the ions that we need. Then we started looking at other planets, and they don't have any magnetic field because I think it's just the Earth and the sun and our solar system are the only ones with magnetic fields. Right. And we found that they lose ions at about the same rate that our atmosphere loses ions. So we don't know what the magnetic field is doing. But I did come across this one interesting fact. We lose about a ton of atmosphere a day. Really? Yeah. And mostly in the form of water vapor. So the Earth is drying out very slowly. Wow. Yeah. Boy. So we're slowing down, we're drying out, and in 400 million years, we'll all be toast. Yeah. That's pretty much the long and short of this. And what we did a podcast on what would the Earth look like in different intervals in the future. Yeah. And I think we eventually landed on ultimately destruction, if we're even here any longer. Yeah, exactly. We'll use the Earth up. It's probably where we landed. Yeah, I think you're right. 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. Fleece 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 Erkart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Well, good going, Chuck. Let's hear for Chuck, everybody. Do you have anything else? I do not sure. If you want to learn more about the Earthstanding still, go to houseoffworks.com and type in Earth and it will bring up some pretty cool articles and probably an entire channel. Earth science just fascinates me. Yeah, me too. I said search bar somewhere in there, which means it's time for listener mail. You called out for how we helped you in your life email. We got one from Rachel in Portland. What's? Here Portland. You guys have helped me through some of the toughest times in my life. I shortened the video. Okay. In August, I moved from a small town in Mississippi to attend the University of Portland in Oregon. Transition was rough. Needless to say, I did not handle it well. I started smoking again. I had trouble focusing on and attending classes, and I could tell that I wasn't settling well or making friends. On top of all that, my three year relationship with my high school sweetheart fell apart because of the distance and the stress of us both beginning university, I began to relapse into depression, something I've struggled with off and on for five years. Man. I found myself unable to listen to music, even because every song I heard made me so sad. Awful. Yes. One of those heartbreak days when you just sit around and listen to the radio and cry. I downloaded your podcast to listen to as I walked to and from classes and while I did homework, did notice at first, but every time your podcast was on, it made me laugh. I'd feel a little bit better. About halfway through the semester, I found the courage to seek help and visit the campus health center for therapy and antidepressants. I am now in my second semester of college with a 3.94 GPA. Wow. I have a few great friends and I'm even dating someone new. Nice. I love my school and I love the city of Portland. I feel as if your podcast serving integral part of helping me make the transition from home to here. Learned and laughed with you all, and now and then a Southern draw will sneak into one of your voices and make me nostalgic with the south. This may sound silly, but I feel I've come to know you guys really want to thank you for helping me through such a hard time. Rachel 18 in Portland. Thanks, Rachel. It's awesome. I'm glad to hear you're doing better. Yeah, I had a rough first few weeks of college. I think a lot of people do. And I think my advice is to just stick it out and before you know it, you're going to be loving it. Yeah. I remember my parents telling me that when I went off the camp. Oh, yeah, you didn't like camp. I did not like camp, though. Did you like going off to college? Yeah, it's fine. You're probably ready for that. Yes. I freaked out because at the last minute I tried to change to go to Georgia Tech because my brother was there. I was basically scared. I was like, I just want to go to school with my brother. And it was too late to get the application in. So it's like, all right, I guess I'm going to Georgia by myself. And it ended up being the greatest thing ever. I'm glad you stuck it out. You know the rest of the story yeah, it is true. I mean, like, just hanging in there and being brave, even when it feels like that's the worst thing to do often. It's often the best thing to do. And six years later, I had a college diploma and a lot of friends for life, correct? Yeah. That's good. Chucker, let's see if you have a great story about solar wind or how we've helped you or college or whatever. We want to hear about it. You can find us on Twitter, right? S YSK podcast. I feel like a lot of you aren't getting that S YSK podcast. It's a great Twitter feed. Yes. Josh is the Twitter master. We have a great Facebook page that Chuckhelms facebook. Comstuffyshonow. People love that. You can send us an email, which is fine. That's stuffpoadcasted discovery.com. And everybody, seriously, stop what you're doing right now. Go to the home of Josh and Chuck on the web. It's our very own website. It's fun. It's called Stuffyshaneau.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today, you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo, elevate as, Pepco Pep supplied plus and select neighborhood Pet stores." | ||
02dd8f64-3b0e-11eb-947e-8f1b31fd70c6 | How Venus Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-venus-works | Venus is so hot lead would melt on the planet’s surface. It spins backwards. Its year is shorter than its day. Venus is amazingly awesome. | Venus is so hot lead would melt on the planet’s surface. It spins backwards. Its year is shorter than its day. Venus is amazingly awesome. | Thu, 17 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=168, tm_isdst=0) | 39768465 | 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. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands? Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus, and select neighborhood pet stores. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And Jerry is lurking in the background like a total creep, which is super appropriate for Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. Have you been singing the song all day, Venus as a Boy? How can you not sing that song? I don't know. I mean, I guess you could be singing that shocking blue song, Venus, that banana Rama covered. Oh, no, that's the one that I was talking about. Oh, I was talking about the Bjork song. Venus as a Boy. Oh, no, sorry. I was thinking of Yo Venus, actually, funny enough, honestly, that had not popped into my head, and now I won't be able to get it out, so thanks a lot. I thought of you yesterday. I don't even know who it was. It was just one of those dumb Facebook posts that comes into your feed, said all it said was, now the final countdown by Europe is in your head. It's like? Is that Josh? Well, that's amazing. That's the catchiest song of all time. That's pretty funny. That's great. So, Chuck, we're doing Venus, and I was, like, skimming the House of Work site looking for articles, and I started to see I saw this one article about how Venus is starting to get some love again from the space agencies and how little we actually know about it. We've never done one on Venus. We don't usually do planets yet. Maybe we should eventually do all the planets over time, but this is a pretty good place to start because the more I dug into Venus, the more I was like, this is one of the most interesting planets of all time, actually. Yeah, it's described in this article that you put together as a hellscape, and when you start reading into it, it's like, wow. You will melt and boil if you get near it, or you won't even get near it because the sulfuric acid in the clouds will destroy you. Yeah. And your teeth. Yeah. So it's like not a hospitable place, but possibly once was. Yeah. Which makes the whole thing even more compelling. It wasn't always like this. It's like the mom, what's eating Gilbert Grape when she sees is it Juliette Lewis and says, I wasn't always like this. And Juliette, lewis says, I wasn't always like this. It's just like that. It is, basically, except on a planetary scale. Yeah. And I think the cool thing about Venus, too, which we can put a pin in this, but we're starting to gain more interest in Venus now because it could offer a peek into our own bleak future as a planet. Yes. Just like you said. Put a pin in that and smoke it in your hat. Right. So it's weird that Venus is this hellscape now that we understand it, because it's a very ancient planet as far as human consciousness of it goes, because it is so bright. It's actually the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and the Moon. Then comes Venus. So, like, humans have been able to see it long before we had anything like telescopes or anything like that. And in fact, as far back as, I think, 1660 BCE or the 1600 BCE, the Babylonians were tracking it, and they call the Ishtar, after the goddess of love and war, after the movie. And then they would say, it ishtar black. And then someone would go, hey, it's not as bad as everyone says. That's right. And then that person would get shouted down, and then the whole cycle would start over again. Yeah. It went by quite a few different names. It was ishtar before the Hellenistic Greeks came along. They thought it was actually two different stars. So it was known as both Vesper, the evening star, and Lucifer or Phosphorus, the morning star. That's right. And then eventually Pythagoras said, it's just one star, everyone, and can we settle on a name? And the Helen stick. Greek said. How about aphrodite? And then, of course, the Romans came along, said, no, we call it Venus. That's right. And that's where we've settled, because the Western world is modeled on the Roman world, I guess. But Venus, the idea that it is this feminine planet that it has to do with love and beauty, it really is in stark contrast to how we understand it today, since we did start really exploring it in the. But even still, if you look at some of the details of Venus that have been named by people, apparently almost all of the features on Venus are named after women. Like, there's a crater named after Sakagaway, there's a canyon named after Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. So it's all about feminine beauty, but it's also like this crazy hellscape that will make your teeth fall out and burn you alive. So it's a real paradox in terms, you know, what I mean, totally. It is the second planet from the sun, which makes Venus our little neighbor. And which also means that if Venus is getting sunlight, it's getting that light a couple of minutes before we do. I love that. It is terrestrial, so it's made of rocks and solid things as opposed to being like a gas planet like Jupiter and Saturn. And there's also a boundary between the surface of the planet and the atmosphere. So it is like Earth in some ways, but also not like Earth in a whole lot of ways. Well, it is often called Earth's twin, and then sometimes Earth's toxic twin. I think that's an aerosmith reference. Right. But because it is closer to the sun than we are, it's one planet in its orbit, actually, is between us and the sun. It falls within our orbit around the sun, which means that to us here on Earth, venus seems to have phases like the Moon does, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I think Galileo figured that out in 1610. Galileo? Yeah. Oh, you on a first name basis? Yeah, I go way back. I bailed him out of jail. One. You just call him Galley. Yeah. The gal or GG? So, yeah, when Venus is on the opposite side of the sun, it's in full phase. And then it looks like it's in the new phase when it's between the Earth and the sun. Yeah. And every once in a while, our alignment with Venus and the sun is like a perfect line. And it just happened in 2012. And I don't think I bothered to look because I don't remember looking. But the next time it's going to happen is 20 117. And unless aging researchers really have some sort of breakthrough, I'm not going to be around to see that. You didn't look. And you call yourself a friend of Galley of GG? Yes, I know. You'd be so disappointed. He'd be so disappointed to me. Come on, Josh. Just to look into the sky. Venus. They call it the Earth twin for the similarities and not the differences, obviously. Even though, like you said, it's an evil twin. It's about the same size. It has about 80% of our mass, but is almost a perfect sphere because it is a slow roller. The Earth spins, obviously, everyone knows, very quickly, revolving once every day, every almost every 24 hours, exactly 23 hours and 56 minutes. Which means, of course, that centrifugal motion is going to bulge the equator. So we're technically an ellipsoid in shape. But Venus spins very, very slowly, once every 243 days, earth days, that is. It spins on its axis. It's the slowest spinner in our solar system and a really kind of perfect little sphere because of that. Yeah. It doesn't produce that bulge because it's so slow, the unsightly bulge. And also because of that same slow spin, it has an iron core and molten mantle a lot like Earth does. And through that rocky core, that metallic core, earth's magnetic field is produced. But it's also produced because it spins so fast. Well, even though it has the same kind of core and mantle that the Earth does, venus spins so slowly it can't produce a magnetic field, at least one that's not very strong. I think Venus's magnetic field is 15 10,000 of a percent the strength of Earth's magnetic field. They have nothing. Nothing. Like, you try to use a magnet up there, it's going to melt in your hand, you dummy. Don't even try it and you're dead anyway. Yeah, exactly. There are some pretty cool theories about some interesting aspects of Venus. One is, and this isn't a theory, it is a fact venus has no moon. But one of the theories is that Earth's moon used to orbit Venus, but our gravity was so strong, we just came in and said, that's ours now. We'll be taking that moon. I know. Imagine seeing that moon approach out of nowhere, too. It'd be like Melancholia. Oh, my God. That movie. I love that movie. Did you see it recently? Not too recently. I loved it, too. I'm glad you didn't say I enjoyed it because that's the movie that you enjoyed, right? Exactly. I read this article once. I think it was titled, like, Lars von Trier is Campy. And they were basically like, everybody's taking large bond tree incorrectly. Like, this is all he's like a huge jokester. Like, this is all in jest. And once I read that, I was like I really started to appreciate his stuff a lot differently. Yeah, I mean, those are a lot of his films are tough to get through. Yeah. Ted dancing. What a party that is. Once you realize that it's like a joke, or at least as far as Lars von Trier is concerned, it's a joke. It's just easier to take and watch. And it's actually kind of funny. But is that true or were they just sort of I don't know that they had him quoted as saying, like, yeah, you got me. But they made such a strong case that it's tough to not see it that way. I'll see if I can dig it up and send it to you. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Okay. All right, so no moon. Earth perhaps took the moon. Another really interesting thing that has sprung a few different theories is that the backward spin of Venus relative to Earth, and this is interesting in that some scientists say, yeah, it's backwards because it used to spin relative to us the same. Then it slowed down and stopped and started spinning the other way. And we can tell this because it's slowing down again. They measured at 16 years apart and at the end of that run, it spun 6.5 minutes slower, which is a lot considering the Earth's rotation slows only by about 1.8 milliseconds every 100 years. Yeah, so that's the one theory. Others said, and never did, quote unquote, spin backwards. It just got knocked 180 degrees on its axis. So it looks backwards. Yeah, like the planet got flipped upside down somehow. And so to us, it looks like it's spinning backwards, but it's spinning the same way it always has. They're like, well, how would the planet get knocked upside down? The obvious idea is a planetoid remediate something like that, striking it in just the right spot with just the right force, that it flipped the planet upside down. Another one is that Venus's atmosphere is so thick. How thick is it? It's so thick. You took my line. It's possible the sun can create gravitational tides like tides in this atmosphere, and that these tides started sloshing back and forth at some point and got so forceful and strong that they eventually flipped the planet over. I think this is a really good start. How do you feel? I think it's pretty great, actually. And I have one more fact I want to give out, Chuck, about the day relative to the year. Okay. So you know how the day of Venus is 243 Earth days? Yeah. This one's a little bit of a head twister. Well. It turns out that Venus orbits the sun in 225 Earth days. Which means that the Venusian day is longer than the Venusian year. Which is a pretty amazing fact in and of itself. Pretty wacky. Because Venus spins backward relative to the direction it orbits the sunrise. Like a day night cycle from sunrise to sunrise is actually only 117 Earth days. Because the sun kind of catches up with Venus in its spin. So it's not a 243 day stretch between sunrise. It's actually 117. So there's three big numbers you need to remember. For Venus day night cycles, 117 days. The year is 225 days, but the day is 243 days. All relative to us, of course. Well, yeah. I mean, what else counts? Nothing. So, a minute ago, and I said, I think we're off to a good start, I was kind of lying. Something felt missing. But now we're really off to a good start. I think so, too. So we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the surface of this weird hellscape right after this. 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 5G. Now, 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 download of apps required. Five G may not be available in your area. For coverage details, see att.com fiveg for you, visit www.att.com. CallProtect for details. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all picks of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. All right. Surface of Venus. A lot of clues because we're still trying to figure out Venus. And like you said, it's getting more interesting to us more recently, which is kind of cool, but there are clues kind of everywhere. The surface of Venus is one clue that maybe something pretty big did happen. And it's sort of recent past. Because Venus is about the same age as Earth. Is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.8 billion years old. And they look at impact craters to sort of gauge how old a planet might be. Like. How many things have hit it over time. Because they know about how often that might happen. And these are good, rough estimates, but when you look at Venus, the crust of Venus basically looks like it's only a few hundred million years old. So, like, maybe up to 800 million, maybe as little as 180,000,000 years old. So that is a big clue that, like, yeah, something happened to kind of remake the surface of Venus at some point, which is really interesting. Yeah. I mean, Earth's crust is much younger than the planet itself, but Earth has plate tectonics, which basically is crust recycling. Venus doesn't have that. So it is significant that the crust is that much younger than the rest of the planet. And it's also made up mostly of bizarre, which I think in the history of stuff, you should know the 13 year history. It's the first time I said it correctly, right off the bat, instead of what what did we used to say? Basalt or basil? Basalt. Basalt. I love a little sprinkle of basalt. Chocolate ice cream. Yes. It's old bay mixes salt. Oh, man. Which is volcanic rock, which makes sense because Venus has the most volcanoes of any planet in the solar system. Something like 1600, I think. Some of them. They might even still be active right now. But it's weird that the crust would be that old because it's like, why would all the volcanoes been erupting at around the same time in such measure that it would have remade the entire crust of the planet? It's a head scratcher, as you say it is. The surface of Venus has some huge mountain ranges, some as high as Everest. They have a couple of gigantic highlands the size of Australia and South America. You mention all those volcanoes, which is just remarkable. Like the most volcanic planet in our solar system, for sure. Right? Yeah. By far. I think Earth only has like 1597. They have about the same gravity as we do here on Earth, so you'd feel about the same weight. But there's a little caveat there because of their dense atmosphere, which we're going to talk about a little bit more in a minute here. There's tons of surface pressure, so there's no way you would be alive on Venus. But if you happen to be, let's just say it's about 90 times the pressure that we have here on Earth. So it would be like you're about a full kilometer down underwater into the ocean. Yes. Which is kind of crushing. I was like, oh, you'd be crushed like a tin can. Actually, that's not entirely true. I think the diving record is a little deeper than 1 km. Right. So a human can withstand it, but it's not the kind of thing you want to do. And when you combine it with all the other issues that you've got going on now that you're standing on Venus, somehow that pressure would probably actually be the least of your worries. My biggest worry would be the heat. You would have a lot of trouble with the heat because here's another fun fact for you. Mercury is the planet that's closest to the sun. It's 23 million mile closer to the sun than Venus is. But Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system. Queue on that for a second. Yeah. And that'll all be clear here in a second. We're kind of dancing around it, but it's going to be fun. So just wait. But in the 1960s, and we'll also talk about the various sort of spacecraft that the USSR and NASA has kind of set up to explore. But the Mariner Two recorded did a little flyby and recorded surface temperatures between 304 hundred degrees. And it turns out that maybe about half. I think recently they calculated it's probably more like 880 deg, which basically will melt almost anything. Well, definitely aluminum, zinc and lead, for sure. Yeah. So it's super hot and there's a tremendous amount of pressure at surface level. And I read this article from I think it might have been space.com or NASA, I'm not sure where, UC Boulder astronomer, planetary scientist named Kevin Mcdirk said you can feel what it's like on Venus here on Earth. Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface, and then run over that hand with the truck. I didn't get that quote. He was saying it's very hot and there's a tremendous amount of pressure. That hot plate is at 880 deg. Is it? No, but really, I think once you reach a certain temperature and you're placing your hand off sure. I think red hot is that line where it's like after that, it doesn't really I got you. He's trying to appeal to the common person, I think. So they take an extra class or two now in Planetary science normies. All right. So I guess we've been dancing around like, why is it so hot? If it's not as close to the sun as Mercury, how can it be that much hotter than Mercury? And it is because Venus is an environmental nightmare, basically, which is one reason why we're a little more interested now because it gives us a peek, like I said, to what could happen to us in a very long time. But it is a CO2 nightmare on Venus. Yes. So Venus is locked into what's called a runaway greenhouse effect. And I actually talked about it in The End of the World with Josh Clark in the Natural Existential Risks episode. But the kind of the broad strokes of it is that the greenhouse effect, you want to have some degree of the greenhouse effect where you have visible light coming in from the sun, warming the planet, and then the planet rereleases some of that heat back through the atmosphere as infrared heat. Right. And not all of it gets reemitted. Some of it is captured by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And this is actually, like I was saying, you want to have this. This is a beneficial thing because it prevents wild temperature swings between day and night. There's, like a nice average temperature that you're going to keep throughout the day and throughout the night because that atmosphere is acting like a blanket, preventing all of the heat from reescaping. So you do want some greenhouse gas. But what Venus is teaching us is that there's a point where you can reach this point of no return, where your greenhouse effect just goes haywire and gets locked into a positive feedback loop that is positive only in the most academic sense of that term. In no way is it a good thing, at least as far as life or habitability goes. Yeah. And Venus hit this tipping point a few hundred million years ago. The atmosphere got really hot. They basically think the oceans literally boiled off because there used to be oceans and rivers and it used to be a lot more Earth like. But these oceans boiled off. It turned the atmosphere into water vapor, which just made the problem a lot worse because that's another greenhouse gas and it just sort of accelerated this thing. And then eventually that water vapor was broken apart by radiation from the sun, by this ultraviolet radiation, and all this hydrogen escaped into space, left behind oxygen combining with that carbon. And what you've got is 96% carbon dioxide and no water vapor in the atmosphere. No Earth has, I think, zero 4% carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. And we still are able to maintain, like, a healthy greenhouse gas effect. So the fact that it's a runaway greenhouse effect that seems to have made Venus into this hellscape that it is that's what kind of makes it a cautionary tale or at least something that's worth investigating much more deeply to find out? Like, how did it reach this point? Where was that tipping point? Because here on Earth, we're contributing atmospheric CO2 more and more frequently thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. So it's like, okay, did it hit that point when it reached, like, an atmosphere of 80% carbon dioxide or zero, 8%? What's the difference? And it really matters to us here on Earth, because at some point, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 or other greenhouse gases becomes enough that visible light can come in infrared, heat won't go back out, and you've got that runaway effect that just locks it in, and you're in big trouble. So we need to find that out. And it's a good thing that people are starting to talk about exploring Venus now, again, for the first time in a while. Let me ask you a question. The End of the World with Josh Clark, is that available on Apple podcast or wherever you find your podcast? You know, Chuck, as far as I know, wherever you find podcasts, you can find The End of the World with Josh Clark. A ten part series. They don't pull it like Netflix after they're done with you. I don't think so. I haven't checked out in a little while. I'd be very dismayed. No, it's an excellent series. And if this kind of thing turns you on, then you can listen to that and then quite a few other ways that we might all become extinct. Or if me just speaking for 45 minutes in a monotone turns you on and you're going to like it. That's right. So that's why it's hot on Venus. That's why you would just melt if you managed to reach the surface of Venus. But you wouldn't even manage to reach the surface of Venus because of that atmosphere that we're talking about. You talked about our teeth. Along with nitrogen, the biggest component of the atmosphere of Venus is sulfuric acid, which we call battery acid. And, yeah, your teeth would be the least of your problems because your skin would burn, your lungs would explode. And just these massive clouds blanket Venus, full of these lightning storms and sulfuric acid. And it's literally like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Right? And if up to this point, you're like, prepare for this. The Venus member spins on its axis once every 243 days. It's a Venusian day. But the upper atmosphere is so volatile yes. That the clouds that make up the upper atmosphere spin around the planet once every four days. They're moving that fast, faster than any tornado here on Earth I saw. But then down below, toward the surface, the winds are just like a few miles an hour. So that difference in wind speed creates huge vortices. Apparently, there's a vortex that has not fallen apart that stayed raging for a very long time now at the South Pole of Venus, and they don't foresee any time when it's going to stop. So there's huge lightning storms, clouds of sulfuric acid that form Vortices in this atmosphere that at surface level is the same surface pressure or the same pressure that you would find 1 km down in Earth's oceans. Yeah. And then consider that for several billion years, venus was a lot like us. Like I said, it was habitable. It was fairly temperate, had oceans and rivers and streams and was kind of balmy. And it was this greenhouse, runaway greenhouse gas effect that kind of made it into this hellscape. And like I said, it's a big reason we're going. Maybe we should look into Mars, but also look into Venus. Yeah. So I didn't know this, but there was another space.com article that did a good job of kind of chronicling some of the history of exploring Venus growing up as a Cold War school kid. They didn't tell us, like, oh, by the way, the Soviets just had a great breakthrough on Venus the other day. Let us tell you all about it. I don't remember hearing any of this stuff, do you? No, but I think that's a great little dramatic teaser. Okay, so let's take a little message break, and we'll tell you what the Rooskis were doing in the 1960s right after this. 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 and T. It's pretty easy not to play favorites. And that's just what at and T does best. They give you their best deal. Doesn't matter if you're a new customer or if you signed up when a flip phone was still the future. Who doesn't want a deal? At and T won't make you feel like a middle child. They love all their customers the same. Join at and T for their best deals on every smartphone and the choice of plans. And after you're signed up, give your mother a call. She misses you. Eligible plan required. Offers vary by device. Restrictions may apply. See at and t. Comdealsforditals 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. Okay, Chuck, I can't take it any longer. My teeth are falling out from the suspense. Is that Bob newhart thing again? Yeah. So I didn't learn about this in school. Either. But in the 19s from the USSR, they were into Venus. They were checking it out with pretty decent regularity through their Venera and Vega programs. And some of these milestones that they hit are some of the first milestones in just space exploration period. Not only for Venus. In October 67, Vana Four was the first probe to ever beam data back from another planet from the atmosphere of another planet. And that's when they said super hot, very thick Russian. Was that good? No, yeah, it was okay. I think the Venera Ford technically did make a hard landing. The parachutes, of course, melted and this thing actually transmitted data for about 20 minutes with photographs before it melted into nothing. And then I think a few years after that, vana Seven had the first soft landing on any planet other than Earth. Another first in visiting our solar system. Like before we did stuff like that. Yeah. I did not realize it, but apparently Venus is the first planet humanity has ever visited, which is pretty cool. I mean, not personally, but we sent some machines up there as our emissaries right in venera 13 recorded the first ever audio on the surface of another planet, which is pretty cool. Vega One and two missions in the mid 80s deployed balloons into the atmosphere to make measurements. So a lot of what we know about Venus came from these early Soviet explorations. But it's not like the United States has completely ignored Venus. We did have some interest in and I think we had the first ever flyby of Venus with our Mariner Two probe back in 1962, I believe. Yeah, that was the one I mentioned earlier that recorded what seems like half accurate temperature of Venus. But there was also the Mariner Five and the Mariner Ten and 67 and 74. And then we started to get a little more intense with it. In 78, we launched an orbiter and a multi probe, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the PV Multiprobe. And I think the multi probe sent four different things, four entry craft into the atmosphere in December and then the orbiter did its thing. It orbited kind of studied things from a safer distance until 1992. Yeah, so we're getting some stuff on Venus, but then it just kind of went away. We've stopped researching it actually after Magellan. Which was launched in 1989 from the space shuttle. Which. By the way. I was reading the official accident report on the Columbia crash and it is just jarring. But it's amazing what this scientific explanation of it really dry technical stuff still can really jog your imagination and kind of put you in the catastrophe even though they don't seem to be trying to. It just for some reason it really kind of gets you in the right way. Is all that stuff just online? Yeah, it's like just 400 page document about what exactly went wrong, exactly when down to I think maybe the dec, if not the millisecond. Yeah, they really dug into it. I still never saw that documentary. It's still out there. It's stirring. It's going to just knock you on your butt. Have you seen Twelve Years A Slave yet? No. I know you're going to ask me that like once a year. You have homework this weekend. Oh, I know. But anyway, as I was saying, magellan was launched from the space shuttle in 1989, and it was kind of hanging out monitoring Venus until 94, and then after that, and even kind of a little bit before that, just the focus on Venus kind of started to die in no small part because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Right. Yeah. They were way more into it than we were. And then it collapsed. And so a lot of that stuff stopped. NASA said, you know what, you get a lot more out of your exploration dollar by going to Mars because it's way more hospitable than Venus is. And so we can use these robots and now with Mars landers and it's just amazing. Like the stuff that we're bringing back from Mars. Yes. But as a result, Venus was sort of like cast aside because it's tough. I think that Veneera 13 and 82 has the record for the longest manmade object ever on Venus. And that was 2 hours before it melted. Yeah, that's it. And that's a lot of dough to sink into something that, you know, like and that was when 82. I'm sure we could get something up there for more hours than that now, but I'm not sure how much longer. No, but we need to figure it out. And the only way to figure it out is to start going back there. Right. So we are, I think, this month, June 2021, NASA said, hey, everybody, get this. We've got two visits planned, two missions planned for Venus by 2030. There's the Veritas mission, which has a bunch of different scientific instruments named in its name. It's a big acronym. There's also DaVinci Plus, which sounds like a new streaming service for maybe PBS. And they're both going to be going by 2030. But it's not just the United States who has its eyes trained on our sites, trained on Venus. Europe, the ESA has a Venus program in the works. India does as well. Russia does as well. And there's a private company called Rocket Lab that's going to be sending something up there by 2023. Actually, Venus is literally hot right now. It is. I have seen in the news, and I think did you mention the old Houseworks website that we worked for had a really recent article on this, right? Like why we were poking around. That's what initially caught my attention about okay. Did you see the thing, though, also, there was a big todo, I think in June of 2020, or at least sometime in 2020, there was a bunch of press on Venus because some British researchers said, hey, we were examining the Venusian atmosphere with radio telescope and we found a biosignature phosphine. And everybody said, what are you talking about? And they said, no, really, check it out. So they wrote this paper and it does make kind of sense to an extent that you might find life at some point in the Venetian atmosphere because parts of it are the same temperature and air pressure as you'd find on Earth, but it also just makes zero sense because it's just so inhospitable too. Yeah, I mean, it would have to have really evolved to be able to survive. And again, maybe possible, but then some other scientists came along because they smelled something rotten and they said, let me see those papers. And they looked them over and they said, you know what, we're not going to falsify this and say this is definitely wrong, but maybe you might have gotten this confused with sulfur dioxide instead of phosphine because these chemicals both absorb radio waves at a similar frequency. And everyone sort of has made this mistake at some point. Guys, rookie mistake. He shouldn't feel too bad, but it's probably sulfur dioxide. It makes a lot more sense. But like I said, they didn't definitely shoot it down. And I think it just sort of piqued everyone's interest to kind of get going again. And with these radio telescopes, we can finally I think for a long time we couldn't even see anything at all because of the telescopes that we had. Right? Yeah. It's just blanketed by the super thick atmosphere that light can't even penetrate any longer. Now that we have radio telescopes, we can see a lot more clearly into it. But yeah, we're just on the very beginning cusp of starting to study it. And it is possible that there was a bio signature and the Brits didn't get it wrong because it would have to be a low oxygen, like, anaerobic type of life. And that's exactly the kind of organism that produces phosphine. So it's not like it's been settled like you were saying, but it's just tantalizing. In addition to learning more about Venus and maybe the lessons that can teach us about what we need to do or not do here on Earth, the idea that maybe there's some weird random life swirling around at hundreds of miles an hour in the Venetian atmosphere, it's like, yeah, let's go check Venus out now. Yeah. I feel like I never hear about space programs from many other countries except for China, the US and the old Soviet Union. Yeah, I never hear about the Brits exploring space. Well, they're with the ESA, I believe. So they just all got together? I think so. And then, yeah, India has its own program now, too. That's pretty ambitious as well. What about Japan? Do they have a space program? Yeah, they have a space program. I don't remember what it's called, but they definitely do. But there's a lot more collaboration than there used to be during the Cold War, from what I understand. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Because we're trying to solve global problems here, and Venus might hold the key to some of those. Yeah, it's our fire. What's our desire. That's right. You got to go listen to Venus as a boy, too. You're going to love it. There's also Venus infer Velvet Underground and then Venus. I can't come up with a good job. We'll just forget about it. They really beat it out, Bob Newhart's style. Yeah, Bob Newhart would have finished the joke. That's why I'll never fill his shoes. Right. If you want to know more about Venus, well, then just look skyward and see what you think. And maybe do a little research, too, while you're at it. And since I said look skyward, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this PAGs military follow up because we heard from quite a few military members already and it was in our real time. It was just released earlier today from service people who were quite fond of the little POG currency that they had over there. Longtime listener guys loved the show, just listened to the episode and thought I'd write in. I was in the Air Force for just shy of a decade when you mentioned the army and Air Force exchange services pogs and it brought me back. Instead of using coins, they would give you these pods has changed. So if you bought something for ninety five cents, the cashier would give you a five cent POG. Subsequently, if you bought something for $0.93, they would still give you a five cent POG because there were no $0.01 pogs. That's hilarious. So they rounded down. I guess it's going to be cheap. So you would frequently lose money on those transactions. I remember being frustrated when I first experienced this. If I remember correctly, there being only 510 and 25 cent pods. That's all I saw. Yeah, five, ten s and twenty s. I remember having stacks and stacks of these pods while overseas and I rendered them completely worthless. Looking back, I'm sure I could have bought a dollar worth of Pogs and exchange them for real US currency, but the thought never crossed my mind. I think they owe me some money. I wish I would have remembered my POG days. I was also way into Pogs in the 90s because that would have been a good way to pass the time while over there. Thanks for always being there on my hour commute to work. I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays every week. PS. My family was moving recently and I was going through an old box of my things and found a lone POG with Maggie Simpson on it. Nice. Not sure why I decided to keep that one after all these years, but I did, and that is from Jeff. That's an awesome email, Jeff. Thanks a lot for that one. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us like Jeff did and tell us about the POG you found or what your tour of duty was like or anything like that, you can get in touch with us via email at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus, and select neighborhood pet stores. Hey, it's Delilah, we can all use a hug now and again. I wish I could deliver them all in person, but since that's not possible, my daily podcast, hey, it's Delilah is the next best thing. It will wrap you in ten to 15 minutes of happy, heartwarming, hopeful radio content every Monday through Friday at whatever time of day you need it the most. Find hey, it's Delilah, and get your radio hug." | |
b8a1070c-3620-11ea-938d-2f5fb634cc5e | Short Stuff: Lying in State | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-lying-in-state | After RBG passed away she had the honor of lying in state. Who decides this? Listen and you'll know. | After RBG passed away she had the honor of lying in state. Who decides this? Listen and you'll know. | Wed, 07 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=281, tm_isdst=0) | 11260281 | audio/mpeg | "Hello. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and this is Short Stuff, and it's a very solemn addition of Short Stuff. In fact, that's right. Recently in real time, in my recently in podcast time, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on September 18. I think she deserves a full show on her, which we'll get around to sooner than hopefully, but she died at 87 from complications from pancreatic cancer, and after serving for 27 more than 27 years on the Supreme Court, she became the first woman in American history to lie in state. In the US. Capitol Building. Yeah. On Friday, September 25. Like you said, our time is a little off, but as we're recording now, that's tomorrow, she will be the first woman to ever lie in state, and people will be able to visit, and they will hold a whole ceremony that we'll talk about. And ceremony is the right word because this is a it's meant to be a very solemn. Very ceremonial occasion where the nation is basically called to more. And a very important person who gave to the country with all of her might. With all of her will. With all of her strength. Somebody like that is important enough to say. Hey. As a country. No matter how divided we are. We're going to more in this person. And that is the entire point of lying in state. That's right. And now I'm confused whether we should talk in past tense or future tense. We'll just flip flop back and forth. It'll be like that movie Looper. But she also will lie in repose at the Supreme Court, which is a different thing. But lying in state at the capital is quite an honor. The last time it happened was Representative John Lewis right here from George's fifth district. Before that, it was Representative Elijah Cummings. Right. I believe John McCain was only the 13th senator to ever lie in state, and he was the last person from Congress to lion State before Cummings and Lewis, I believe. Yeah. And the point here is it's not like any politician that served the country is worthy of this honor, considering McCain was only the 13th senator. Yeah. I think only a handful of private citizens, including Rosa Parks, have ever been honored as such, and that was in 2005. Yeah. And being a private citizen, rosa Parks lied in honor, which is different, as we'll see. But lying in state is a very distinct honor, and it's actually I don't want to say fairly new. The first time it was done in the United States, in the capital, was July 1, 1852, with Henry Clay, who was a congressman from Kentucky and known as the Great Compromiser. And he was honored because he had worked basically his entire political life to stave off Civil War. He failed posthumously, but during his lifetime, he managed to keep it from happening. And so he was the first person to lie in state in the United States capital, right. So maybe we should take a break, a little cliffhanger and tell everyone who actually makes the decision on when this happens, right after this. Alright? So drum roll please. It's Congress. Nice. I hope there was a high hat too when you said Congress. I can't do a high hat. Although ironically, I do have a drum set behind me in my face. Turn around, Chuck. This is a whole other dimension we're just banking to incorporate here. So Congress has to propose this and approve of this. It could come by resolution. Usually you don't have to have a resolution. Usually they can just say, come on, can we just agree on this one thing and not have to have an official vote on this? Right. Congressional leadership just goes, hey, this is what we're going to do and nobody objects. Man, there's so many political jokes and just avoiding right now. But yes, that's exactly what happens, for sure. But you said something before that not everybody gets this honor lying in state and lying and honor are basically the same thing. It just depends on whether you're an elected official and whether you're a private citizen. It's much rare for a private citizen to get it. But the only people who automatically are offered the opportunity to have their remains lie in state at the US capital are presidents and ex presidents. Isn't that right? Is that true? Yeah. So Congress can decide, hey, you're significant enough to lie in state but it's not automatic, right? Unless you're a president. Right. So like you said, Congress has to propose it and when they do, they alert this agency called the Architect of the Capital which I had not heard of before until researching beside you. Well, it's a different AOC, that's for sure. Right? Yeah, that's what they're known as, AOC, which I'm sure can be confusing, especially when AOC eventually dies in office 50 years from now and is lying in state. When the AOC takes care of AOC's state funeral. That's right. The Architect of the Capital in this case is notified. And basically it's sort of just like any event that you're going to plan, a lot of cleaning has to happen. They like power wash the front of the building, they wax and buff the floors. They want everything to look top notch. They fabricate a wooden stand to hold the casket and polish everything up and they just you got to get all the cobwebs out of there for something like this. That's right. You know, you've arrived when they're power washing the capital for your funeral, your viewing. Yeah. And I also wonder what that government contract looks like. Right. So the stand that they put your coffin on, sometimes they construct them for sure, but they also have one. Those things are called cattlefolks and a cattlefalk is just that. It's a decorative ornamental stand that a coffin is resting on. And so when you see images of somebody lying in state, look at what their coffins on. And if they're a president, there's a really good chance that that's a pine cattlefolk that was first built to hold Lincoln's remains in 1865, which, my goodness, I can't imagine too many higher honors than being placed having your coffin placed on the cattle folk that was originally constructed for Abraham Lincoln. Yeah. What I'm curious about is if the wishes of the person or the president is to be cremated post hate what they do. I don't know. I would guess that they would probably revise build a different catalog or whatever. I would hope that they would acknowledge that the dying persons who is lying in state final wish, no matter what it is. But I think you have to you would think so, but I would guess that they would do that for sure. They would just adjust their mo, basically. But the thing is, you can also say, I don't want to lie in state in any form, whether cremated or anything like that, or your family can say that. And in fact, Truman's family and Nixon's family both declined the honor of having the remains of those former presidents lying in state in the Capitol. And instead, I know Nixon for sure was just lying in repose in his library in your Belinda. And the only difference between lying and reposing lying in state is whether you're basically on public display as part of a state funeral or not. If it's part of a state funeral, you're lying in state. If it's not, you're lying in repose. And so Justice Rehnquist family also declined the offer, and instead he lay in repose in the Supreme Court building. That's right. And I don't think we mentioned this all takes place at the Rotunda. That's the floor. They're buffing and shining up. There's obviously got to be a spot for media. They set up these risers because there's an actual ceremony hosted by congressional leadership. And you've got to have all the just the nuts and bolts in place, the lighting and the microphones. And like I said, it's like any other event. They just want it to go down very smoothly and very respectfully and by all accounts, very cleanly. Yeah. Power washed and everything. Right. So there was this anthropologist that this House of Works article interviewed, and her name is Shannon Lee Doughty, and she is an anthropologist at University of Chicago, and she pisses really beautifully. She said that ceremonies like lying in state are meant to embalm an idea that basically this person. Especially upon their death. Becomes like this electrified. Concentrated reminder of national spirit of America itself. Of all of the things that are good about America. Like their work in life and everything they did. Especially in death. When people forget about everything else and really focus on the good things that the person did. That those good things are really about pushing the country forward or keeping the country in a good state. And that that's one of the reasons. The main reason for lying in state is to really just kind of say, hey, everybody, just let's remember all this. Let's focus on that. To embalm an idea. I thought that was a really good way to put it. Yeah, to unite the country for four to 12 hours, tops. Tops. I know that's a cynical view, but that's kind of the truth. Yes. Cynicism and rationalism are basically interchangeable these days. It feels like that's a good quote, too. Thanks, Chuck. I appreciate that. You got anything else about lying in state? I got nothing else. I look forward to doing so myself. Yeah, me too. I'll be sitting there weeping over your casket wailing for days on end. Chuck. I appreciate that. Well, that's it for us. That's it for lying in state. That's it for short stuff. Short stuff is out. The stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
What's the deal with Bond, James Bond? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-bond-james-bond | James Bond, the most infamous secret agent ever to grace the silver screen, originated in the pages of British author Ian Fleming's novels. Amateur agents Josh and Chuck uncover all sorts of Bond trivia in this action-packed episode. | James Bond, the most infamous secret agent ever to grace the silver screen, originated in the pages of British author Ian Fleming's novels. Amateur agents Josh and Chuck uncover all sorts of Bond trivia in this action-packed episode. | Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:05:39 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=17, tm_min=5, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=196, tm_isdst=0) | 38027270 | 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. Hi. With me is Charles W, chuck Bryant. Bryant. Charles Bryant. How is it going, Chuck? It's an odd way to introduce yourself, don't you think? Not if you're a super spy. Are you a super spy? Actually, I wouldn't say James Bond is even a spy. Secret Service. Is that a spy? Really? No, he was an assassin and yeah, just general plot disruptor. I would say he was a blunt instrument of the crown. Yeah. If you wanted the job done and if you didn't have time to worry about the politics or diplomacy, that kind of thing. You sent James Bond? Yeah. Get JB on the phone. Yeah. He'll take care of business. Like Elvis. You could call him on his car phone long before any car had a phone. Yeah. All right. He was always predating technology. Yes. As a matter of fact, there's a James Bond theory of entrepreneurial innovation. I believe that from Russia with love. I can't remember who he talked to, but he was in his car using the phone that was in his car, and audiences went nuts for it. Oh, yeah. They were like, oh, my God, he's on the telephone. Right. In a car. But that's what they sounded like in England, though. Oh, yeah, sure. Actually, Ghana. Right. So, Josh, where do we start here? We can't not start with Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming. So we got to start. Let's do it. Now. There was a colon after that, as everyone knows, and if you didn't, you need to get out from under your rock that you reside in right now. The creator of James Bond in novel form, he was also originally a journalist and a stockbroker, and World War II starts to come around, and he joins the Naval Volunteer. Royal Navy. Royal Navy. And he was actually chuck, did you know, assigned as a spy himself in Washington, DC. Yeah, sort of a spy, you could call it. He was in intelligence, and he would occasionally he was an administrative guy, but sometimes they would send him out to do fieldwork where he would take secret pictures of documents, just like in the movie. Do you know who was assigned to his spy unit? James Bond. Yeah. No. The guy who is the inspiration for James Bond name was William Stevenson, aka. Intrepid. Right. Yeah. One of many inspirations. Right. But in an interview in the Times in 62, fleming said, james Bond is this romanticized version of a spy. Bill Stevenson is the real thing. Right. Version of himself. To an extent. Sure. Another member of that spy ring was a guy named Raul Dahl, who wrote James and Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Yeah. And a bunch of body books. Right. He also had the non children's books that were a little racier. Yes. Not many people know that. So, Chuck, let's talk a little bit more about Ian Fleming. Give it to us, buddy. Yeah, I mean, like I said, he was sort of base James Bond on kind of, I think, who he wanted to be. He was a playboy. He was an island hopper, an adventurer, a skier. He dove with Jacques Cousteau and snow ski from the tops of mountains in Switzerland, and had a place in Jamaica where he actually wrote all these books. Right. He named the place GoldenEye. And every year he would go to Jamaica and write a book. And I just want to dig them up and throttle them for that, because, I mean, what a life. It's time for me to go to my estate in Jamaica and write a book that's going to just make me millions more. Yeah. Which he did. And he reportedly picked the name James Bond because he wanted the most boring name he could find for his super secret agent. I think he didn't want the name to compete with the actual character. Why bother giving him some fancy name? Just name him James Bond and have him kick butt. Right. You know what the opposite of that is? Hexagon Jim Duggan. Yeah, you should have named him that. Yeah. Well, then it would have competed with the character. Duggan hacksaw. Jim Duggan. I could hear that. So, yeah, he wrote the article says 13 novels. Well, he wrote 13 books. I got 14. What's the 14th? Well, I've got twelve novels, plus two short story collections. For your Eyes only. And Octopus In the Living Daylights was another collection. So it seems like it'd be easier to find this out, but I literally saw two different sets of information. So are we going to go with 14? Because you are quite the sniffer. Let's go with 14 total. Okay. Twelve novels. All right. But I think he wrote the novels first, maybe. Or did he write the short story books like In Between? Yes, they were in between. They were toward the end. Okay. But he was getting fat and lazy in Jamaica. Yeah. Interestingly, though. Or maybe it's not that interesting. They made the movies way out of order. Yeah, they did. Dr. No was the first film, but that was the 6th novel. Right, but did you know that originally, the people who made the official Bond movies originally wanted to make Thunderball? Thunderball was a story that Ian Fleming came up with, with another guy who wanted the rights to make a movie out of it. Oh, really? That fell through. But Ian Fleming went ahead and wrote the story anyway that they come up with as Thunderball. The guy sued his pants off and actually gained custody, gained the rights to the book Thunderball, which tied it up and made them opt for Dr. No to go first. And there was a lot of litigation over the years in the bond franchise. Yes, there was. I guess when you have a franchise that long and that vast, there's going to be people suing people or something. Well, plus, it's legendary. He's a legendary character, and he's made a lot of money for a lot of people. Absolutely. The other interesting thing I thought just before we move on, was that Moonraker was written in that was the third novel. That is insightful. And of course, there wasn't a space shuttle. They changed the setting and all that stuff, but it did involve, like, a nuclear weapon. So kind of odd. And The Man of the Golden Gun, which was the Roger Moore's second film, was the final novel, and it was released after his death. So it was way out of order. And in that one, he predicted Harvey Viche, which nobody saw come in except the inflammy. It's weird. Let's talk about James Bond a little bit. The character James Bond. So it turns out James Bond had a Scottish father, which he didn't originally. Now, that came about because of Sean Connery. Yeah. Ian Fleming was not a big fan of Sean Connery at first, and then Sean Connery is like, check this out. And he made one pet go up while the other went down a bunch of times, and Ian Fleming just like, clapped and squealed, and that was that. Right, right. He was a big fan. And he said, you know what? You are James Bond. And he actually went back and changed James Bond's history to kind of match Sean Connery a little bit because he came to see, like, this guy is Bond. Right? Yeah. So he gave James Bond to Scottish father Andrew and his Swiss mother, Monique del Croix. Nice. And they both died mountain climbing. Right? Yes. When little James was eleven years old. And he went to the orphanage. And he went to an orphanage. He was supposedly born on November 11, 1920, but there are different accounts of his birthday and when he was born. And clearly when you have a franchise with Daniel Craig playing him in 2008, he can't be born in 1920. Yeah. Because Bobby By, the exhibition wasn't showing in Miami in anything. So yeah, there's a sliding scale there, obviously, to make it viable. But James, much like his author namesake, Ian Fleming not namesake, you can change one. Much like the author Ian Fleming went to the Royal Navy in World War II, rose to the rank of commander. Yeah. After the war. That's when he entered the SIS known as Mi Six, which is the 6th branch of the Military Intelligence Directorate. You got that, buddy? Right. And his first two assignments, Chuck? Yeah. We're two taps, aren't they? Assassinations right off the bat. So apparently you have to kill two people to get AAA status, which is the license to kill. And he got them, like you say, right off the bat. Yeah. And he was the 7th dude to get them. So that's where double seven comes from, right? The 7th agent. It shouldn't say dude because were there female agents? Yeah, there were female agents, I'm pretty sure. And we should probably take the time here to explain. I like James Bond. I know that you like James Bond movies, too. Is this the disclaimer? We're going to get killed here. We are not members of James Bond fandom, I would say, right? I mean, I've seen all the movies, but no, I haven't studied the books. I've never read any of the books. I don't think I've seen all the movies. But I do like them in a very recreational manner. So that being said, we are not going to get every single thing right here if we are going to walk right past information that we just don't know exists. So in a very friendly manner, if there is anything that you have to say that can round this podcast out even further, the more we love knowing new things. So please let us know, I guess, is what we're saying, right? Oh, they'll let us know. They will. Except for this, like, three dudes that just turned it off and went, well, they have no business even attempting this thing, right? And then they go, give us a one star rating on itunes. So back to Bond. He, as we all know, is a sharp dresser and he loves fast cars. He loves his martini shaken, nut, stirred. He loves women. Yeah. And do you know, if you shake a martini instead of stirring it, you pretty much ruin it? I disagree. I shake all my martinis. Dude, how does it ruin it? It feathers it, I think. What does that mean? It means it's screwed up. What does that mean? I like a good dirty martini myself. Oh, you like them dirty? Oh, yeah. Gross. I like my martinis so light. It's basically just a vodka rock. So you just like the vermouth bottle, just wave near the glass? Pretty much. I like just a little vermouth, little olive juice, but no olives. No olive juice. I'll put three olives in usually. Really? All right. But then I eat them so fast that they have no time to taint the martini. Well, that's why you're not a super spy. So, Josh, James Bond, a couple of the other traits we should just mention. He is a martial artist. He's a gifted man with his fist and feet. Or if you're Roger Moore, a karate chop. Yeah, he loves the karate chop. Oh, yeah, that was a big deal in the he famously carried a Walter PPK handgun, 32 caliber. Yeah. And that's a little guy. Have you ever seen them? Oh, yeah, they're small. And I've played Gold Nine. Gold Nye. It is a great game. Yes. And you know, they're bringing that back for we I've heard Matt Frederick of Coolest Stuff on the Planet told us that they are bringing that back because it's still sort of the standard for first person shooters. Like 15 years on, it's still a great game. So they're bringing it back as is, like, completely as it was, but with better graphics. That's going to be fantastic for the we. Yeah, pretty exciting. Back to the real life yes. Of the Fake Life of James Bond. That's what we should have titled this podcast, the Real Life of the Fake Life. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the enemies. Dr. No, he was the first one to appear in the films. Dr. Julius now, right. He's an atomic scientist. Yeah, he was clearly joseph Wiseman played him, and he was a great villain. Goldfinger. You can't talk about Bond without talking about Goldfinger. You don't like him? No, not really. I was a big goldfinger guy. Were you? He tried to laser the crotch of James Bond. Oh, yeah, that's right. Pretty hardcore. Yeah, it's like Max Scorpio. Yeah. In that Simpsons where somewhere ends up going to work for the supervillain. Right? Yeah. He's like, no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die a very cheap funeral. Odd Job was one of my favorite, and he was one of Goldman's henchmen. I loved him, too. Asian guy with a bowler hat. He could cut like the head of a statue. Yeah. Very big dude. Jaws. We grew up with Roger Moore. He's can't not talk about Jaws. No, he was great, too. He was in two of them. Right. He was in Moonraker and the Spy Who Loved Me. I thought he might have been more than that, but he definitely I looked it up. He was only in two. Really? God made quite an impression. Yeah, he did. He found the girlfriend in Moonraker, I think. Right. He falls in love or something. Yeah. The little, like, nerdy girl. And then he pops up again in Happy Gilmore. Was he in that? Yeah. I didn't see that. Yes, he was Happy Gilmore's boss, like, on the construction site, and he ends up becoming a fan. Did he have the teeth? No, he didn't have teeth for the movie. But he was a big guy. Yes. Lately, we've had more recent villains that I don't think the new villains compare, personally. They kind of come and go, like in Casino Royale. Yes. They're okay. But they're all who the villain was. Yeah, they're all decent, but they're not, like, iconic characters like they used to be. Right. Like Blowfeld. Yeah. Well, Blowfield was the sort of legendary I don't know how many movies he was in, but he was played by, like, tele savallis donald Pleasants. Yeah. Donald Pleasantz was my favorite version. He's good. And Max Van. Sidow played him, I think. Never say never again. Maybe. Nice. Max Van Cedar. He's a class act. Yeah. What did I watch the other day? Oh, Shutter Island. He's in that. And I leaned over to him and I was like, you know, I want to see, max Vancito will play like a kindly grandfather in a movie. I don't think you can pull it up. Anytime that dude pops up in the movie, you're like, oh, well, he's the evildoer. Right. He's the villain. So you think, until Shutter Island falls apart at the end, don't ruin it. Yeah, that was Blowfield. He was the bald guy. And he was the head of Specter, which was the special executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. Right. Great villainous title there. That's not only like, a great name, it's your mission statement. Yeah. All wrapped up in the one. One of my favorites, max Zorin, played by the great Christopher Walken. He was dude, I know you love that movie. One of the best Bond movies ever. But that had the worst Bond woman ever. Grace Jones. No. Tanya Roberts. I don't remember her. She was the Bond girl. I don't remember. She was the lady from the 70s Show. That was like one of the late Charlie's Angels replacements. Tanya Roberts. Yeah. Who cares? It was the 80s. Nobody was paying that much attention. But it was a good song. It was. And Christopher Walken was in it. Grace Jones was in it. She was pretty scary in that. Yes, she was. Excellent talk about a martial artist. But McDon, did you know he was the product of genetic experiments by Nazis? Walking was well, not walking. Yeah, I don't remember that. Yeah. And one of the unintended side effects was it was a complete psychopath. I thought you were going to say one of the side effects was his use of punctuation. You are good, man. Everybody does walking. I can't do a walk in. Let's hear it. It's really just an altered John Travolta. Why are you so weird, dude? That's great. Thanks. Of course, Chuck. There's six Alec Treville. Yeah. What was he in? That was one of the Pierce Bros in one, wouldn't it? Yeah, I think. Yeah. Which I don't remember those. I love Pierce Brosden. He was good back that he wasn't James Bond earlier. He's like, oh, yeah, you're going to cast Timothy Dalton, are you? Well, I'll go beat Remington Steel jerks. Yeah. And they tried to get him again, right? I think so. And he was committed to Remington Steel. It was sort of like James Bond for TV. So did he do? Remington steel first. Yeah, he did. Remington Steel. Well, it goes back and forth. Like Timothy Dalton was offered the role before Roger Moore. Did you know that? No, I didn't. When he was 21 years old. Really? He was going to replace Sean Connery. And Dalton said, I'm too young to play James Bond. And then he comes around years later, just like Brassen did. Okay. But I am glad that Pierce brosnan went in. I just happen to think that his period of movies were unfortunate. They were pretty good. I didn't like them. Now I'm really happy with Daniel Craig stuff so far. Well, my statement on that is that was the only direction they could take that franchise after the Jason Bourne movies. You couldn't have a guy like, winking at the camera like Roger Moore and slapstick sounds and sound effects. You had to take him in a real bad direction. Yes. You mean like See Mohaya bad? Yeah. So, double six Alex Travolan. I think he informs the character. Alex Cric from X Files. You think so? Very nice. Josh all right, so those are some of the villains. Clearly not all, but we should also talk about some of the people that James Bond had working on his side at Mi Six. Right. Which we will call from here on out is approved. Flu with characters? No, dude, they're great. MQM was the head of Mi Six, and there were several Ms. Ms just a title. And was the one that's always frustrated with Bond. Yet he knows that he's the blunt instrument of choice pretty much in every movie. Right. You should say he or she for M. True. Dame. Judy Dench took over. Yeah, man, she's doing a great job, too. Q is the head of the Q branch. Judy Dench. Did you hear that? Chuck just said you were doing a great job, so keep it up. Keep it up. Dane judy Dench. Dame. Dame, dame, dame. Yeah, she's a dame. Q is the head of the Q branch. Mi Six is Research and Development Branch. And Q, as you might know, is the guy who, in all the films, gives James his gadgets. There's always that great scene where James goes into the laboratory and starts messing around with the gadgets and exasperates Q because he's burning something or he's firing a missile inside. And he shouldn't be that's Q. Right. And he's now been replaced by his former assistant, R. Right now is R John Cleese. Yeah, he's doing a good job, but he's the new Q. He just used to be R because Q died. Right. Lou Ellen yes. Chuck that was the actor that played the original Q. Is that right? Or the Roger Moore Q that I loved. Right. Who else? We got Felix Leder, who I like. Jack Lord, Jeffrey Wright. Both played him. CIA agent. And there's another guy named Hayward. Wade Was he CIA? Yeah. I thought they said they didn't know if he was DEA or CIA. He was around before the DEA was. Was he? Yeah. And then you've got, I think Jack Wade is his name. And he was actually played by a couple of people, including Jodon Baker, pierce Brosnan ones. Yeah. He had a couple of American counterparts. That's a good point. And little known fact, jodan Baker was in I can't remember the name of the movie, but it was one of the greatest mystery Science Theater 3000s. Really? Yeah. Bad movie. And then, of course, we have to mention Money Penny. He was Em's personal assistant, and Moneypenny you always knew Money Penny, because James would come in and flirt very much with her. And I always got the sense that if James were to ever settle down with anyone, which he clearly won't, it would have been Money Penny. Sure. At least he made her think that. Right. Every day was Secretary's Day. When James Bond was around, he was always just so nice to her in bringing her things from his travels. Shot glasses and stuff. Right. Spoons. She had an extensive spoon collection. Refrigerator magnets. Chuck, Josh, let's talk about the movie, shall we? Yeah, sure. Let's talk about James Bond on screen because it wasn't necessarily just relegated to the movies. Yeah, good point. So James Bond first appears on screen, on a small screen, on a CBS TV series called Climax with an Exclamation Point. Really? Yeah. Wow. And he was first played by a guy named Barry Nelson. Barry Nelson you may recognize as Mr. Olman, the manager of the Overlook in Kubrick's The Shining, who tells Jack Torn to ropes that's the first guy to ever play James Bond. Wow. Was he English? No. American? Yes. CBS TV series. So he's had a Scotsman, quite a few Englishmen, an American and an Australian and what. What do you mean, Australian? I mean someone from Australia. That was George Lazeme who was Australian. Was it? You know what happened to him? Well, he was much of an actor. Well, it wasn't just that. After the success of his Bond movie, I mean, he played James Bond and it was filmed and produced and released on Her Majesty's Secret Service. Right. He was like, Holy cow, James Bond, and I'm going to buy a boat and sail around the world for a while. And he came back and his star had already faded because he did one thing, and that was it. Oh, really? Yeah. He kind of blew it. He wasn't much of an actor, either. But it wasn't just that. It was a combination of those two things. He was a bad dude, though. He got the role, apparently, because he impressed Ian Fleming because he had a faux fight scene with a wrestler for his audition, and he actually punched the guy, like, got mad and punched him. And Fleming is like, this is our dude. Wow. Yeah, because Fleming wrote the Bond character is much darker. Yeah. The novel character, for sure, like Roger Moore took it in a very awful direction. Specific direction that was not the least bit like how Ian Fleming had written them. You're the ultimate roger morphologist. I love Roger more. He's good in The Saint, and that's why I got the role, I think. Okay. The TV show The Saint. Sure. All right, so, Chuck, let's get back to the beginning again. So we talked about Barry Nelson, and on the big screen, the first Bond ever was Sean Connery, right? Yeah. Well, they did a pilot, though, on TV as well. That's the Barry Nelson one. Oh, it was called Casino Royale, though, now. Right. It was based on Casino Royale. Got you. Okay. You know how they used to do, like, they would have the name of the series, but then there'd be different wonderful World of Disney. Yeah. It was like the name of the series, but then there were different documentaries or cartoons or whatever. Okay. I think it was like that. And that flopped. And it got to know what they were doing with TV back. They had no idea. Yeah, you're right. Doctor Know was the first film in 1962. And there's been 22 in total now. Yes. And we're waiting. And that's official Bond films because they parodied him and other things. Woody Allen played him, for heaven's sake. Yeah. In the parody he did of Casino Royale. Yeah. There's also an unofficial Bond film with an official Bond. Right. Let's hear it. Never Say Never Again. Yeah, that was Connery's that was also fraught with lawsuits. That was based on the Thunderball lawsuit. Yeah, they remade Thunderball. Right. And they named it Never Say Never Again because Connery had said after 1971 that he'd never play Bond again because he played Bond. But for the first, like, six movies, something like that, 12345. And then George Lazenbye. Then he came back and did diamonds are forever. And then after that came Roger Moore. Yes. And then Roger Moore had a pretty good run. Sean Connery stops playing bond. George Layzenby comes along, doesn't want leaves. Sean Connery has to come back another time. After Sean Connery, they get Roger Moore. In the midst of Roger Moore's run, sean Connery makes another Bond film. That's when the kids too. Twelve years after the last one he made. Right. Kim Basinger was the Bond chicken, that one. Yes, she was. And they called it Never Say Never Again because he'd said that he would never play Bond again. Never. Trebek that's what he said. Right. Timothy Dalton. I guess we might as well venture into his years. Yeah, I saw those when they first came out, like, in the theaters, and I didn't think anything of them. I don't know if they were over my head or whatever, but I didn't like them. They were pretty good. Living daylights and license to kill. They were both are. They good. Really? Yeah. It was definitely a more novelistic Bond. Like, he was darker and a little more bad dude. It might have had something to do with it coming off the heels of Roger Moore in his vaudeville act that he brought to Bond. And Dalton had a two picture run and then was replaced by who everyone thought should have been Bond before Dalton. Pierce Brosnan for 1234 films. And then they went the inevitable direction with a blonde Bond with Daniel Craig. Is that inevitable, you think? Well, I meant the inevitable way of making him a tough dude, but, yeah, his blindness was not inevitable. You make fun of Roger Moore, but he had a seven picture stint as James Bond. Yeah, and that was our childhood. Trust me, dude. At the time, I loved it. But then when I got older, I revisited all of the Sean Conneries, and then I saw the butt kicking us of Timothy Dalton and now Daniel Craig, and now I'm. Kind of like a joke to me. No, you still stand by it. All right. I like Roger Mourn. Sam Neil was considered at one point. I could see him as James Bond. He would have been bad. He was great. And dead calm. Yeah, that was a good movie. You know, I don't know that this even qualifies as a podcast. He's going to be like, you guys are just kind of chitchatting. Chuck there's also theories, tons of them. Best one, actually, the only one I could find, really, is the code name Theory. Have you heard this? I have not. Cracked got a lot of publicity for it. It's a fan theory that basically says team Spawn is a name that goes along with seven, and each actor was playing an actual different person who had assumed this undercover name James Bond. Really? Which explains the changes in personality. Yes. It explains why Sean Connery was so suave and Roger Moore was so goofy. Sure. It explains why Daniel Craig and Timothy Dalton are so violent. Right. It explains a lot of stuff, actually. It explains George Lazenby's departure because his wife, the only time James Bond has ever been married, died. And that's on Her Majesty's Secret Service. Yeah. He had a wife most people don't know, and she was killed by Blowfeld. Right. So he leaves after that. That explains that, right? Absolutely. There's actually holes in that theory. Do you know them? I know a couple. Like, for example, George Lazenby recognized gadgets that were debuted during Sean Connery's tenure. He was a new person. It would be new to him. He'd be like, what's his start gun? Right, exactly. Right. And I think The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore, is recognized from his college days at Cambridge as James Bond, which would mean that he was using the name before then. But it's still a pretty cool theory. If you want any cool theory shot down, I recommend you go to Commander Bond.net, mi Six, dot Co dot UK or James Bondwicky.com. Those are some good sites. I'm going to retract my Roger Moore bashing a little bit. Okay. I actually liked, like, four out of seven of his films. Okay, see, so you're right. Sometimes I forget about the awesomeness of Live And Let Die and Man With the Golden Gun. For your Eyes Only. Those are all pretty good. It was like octopusy. Moonraker was really silly. Does not age well at all. And you do a kill. I just can't get behind you. A kill is awesome. What about the spy who loved me? That's the one. With the underwater lotus. Yeah. Great movie. And I have one last fact. Are you ready? The legendary Bond producer coproducer Albert Cubby Broccoli. His family invented broccoli. They crossed cauliflower with Rabbit and invented broccoli. And he actually left the family farm to go to Hollywood to pursue his fortune when he was like 18. Are you making this up? I am not. He invented broccoli. His family did it's, like parents, grandparents. That's a pretty good fact. Broccoli very cool. Good for him. They're in trouble now, though, because MGM is in trouble. Yeah, but they're saying, like, it's just a blip on the radar. If you listen to anybody who's attached to the Bond 23. Oh, it'll happen at some point, but it's fine. Yes. It's being delayed big time, though, because in GM over their heads financially. If you know anything about MGM, if you're an insider, MGM, we want to hear from you. Let us know what's going on with Bond. That's funny. We got to talk about Bond girls. That's one of the hallmarks of Bond films. And usually there are two Bond girls. At least there's like a hot villain and an aide that helps them out in some way. Sometimes she turns out to be a villain, but there's usually two Bond girls, and he's equally attracted to both. Like Grace Jones. Yeah, he's attracted to her for some reason. They are fem fetals. Like I said, Bond cannot help but fall for them, even though it might mean he has to eventually kill them after he makes sweet love to them. Right. And I'm going to go ahead and ask you what your favorite Bond girl is. I just recently realized that Carrie Lowell was a Bond girl, and I used to have the biggest crush on her when I would watch Wild Orchid. No law and order reruns on Anne. Yeah, they used to show Law and Order for eight hour blocks on an E. And I'd be like, I'm not going to class today. I'm just going to watch Law and Order. And she was on a lot of them. She would be my favorite Bond girl. I'm going with Ursula. Andress. Yeah, she was hot, dude back in the day. She played Honey Rider. And that's another hallmark of the Bond women as they usually had really awful names that hinted at sexual innuendo. Yeah, plenty of tool. Honey Rider. Pussy Galore, actually. Solitaire Jane Seymour. She was pretty good in living. Let die like that. She was actually a really good actor. Okay. Moonraker, of course, had Holly Goodhead and a view to a kill had Tanya Roberts as Stacey Sutton. They didn't even give her a cool name. So, Chuck, what's the best Bond theme song? Well, let me take a wild guess. I'm going to say Live and Let Die is probably my favorite. I would have put $1,000 on that or what's her name? Carly Simon. Spy Who Loved Me. Nobody does it better love that song, dude. Best Bond theme song, if it's not okay, if it's not that, it is. Nancy Sinatra Singing you Only Live Twice yeah, that was awesome. Yes, it was. Shirley Bassey, just another little factoid. She did two. Now, she did more than that. She did Goldfinger. She did. Diamonds are forever. She did two. Moonraker, Moonraker. That's three total. I was also a big fan of Sheena Easton for your eyes only. Yeah, she did. And Rita coolidge all time high for Moctupussie. Didn't Tom Jones do thunderball or something? He did. Yeah, he did Thunderball. And since we're talking about the songs that have really gotten lame in recent years, like the Chris Cornellan and Garbage, you probably didn't even remember they did songs. Garbage did the one for world is not enough. Okay. Pierce brosden and Cheryl Crowe did one. Did she really? Yeah. Well, it is lame. And Madonna did one. And now it's gotten to the point where they're just like the last one, they put Jack White with Alicia Keys. Up next is Miley Cyrus. Oh, God. Saying Bond 23. What else do we have here? This is the podcast that won't die. No, I do have, like, James Bond just goes on. I do have a couple of more facts. Okay, well, first of all, before you move on, if we're going to talk about the songs, we need to talk about the opening sequences. The title sequences. When you're a young Baptist boy and there are naked silhouetted women jumping on trampolines yeah. It's very titillating and arousing and arousing. For a young boy named Chuck, I'm titillated and aroused. And then the opening sequence of the films typically is some awesome action scene, and then the title sequence comes up. There'll be like a seven minute action scene. Right. They call it a cold opening, buddy. A cold opening, yes. It's very nice. And just got a couple of more facts for you, Josh, and then I'll let you put this to bed. All right? What would you say is the highest grossing Bond film of all time? Adjusted gross. Adjusted gross. I would say Casino Royale. No, top two all time, thunderball and Goldfinger. You're a liar. Adjusted gross. You know, Casino Royale worldwide netted like, almost $600 million so far. A bunch of money. Thunderball and golfinger did more. Did they really? Yeah, thunderball and 1965, dude grossed $141,000,000. What, is that worldwide or US? That's worldwide. Okay. And that is close to what, license to Kill gross in 1989. That gross, like, 150 something, and Thunderball, 30 years more, grossed 141,000,000. Right. But what I'm saying is casino Royale grossed 600 million. Well, I mean, yeah, that's not an adjusted gross, though. You can't complain. I see you're figuring inflation in. Yeah, that's why it's called an adjusted gross. And that's about it. We could say the cars he used really quickly. The Aston Martin, obviously. My favorite is the lotus. The Lotus, the Alfredeo and then the new Audi. That's pretty cool. Do you like the Audi? Yeah, it looks awesome. Okay. But I do miss the lotus and the fact that it could also be a submarine. Right. And lastly, Chuck, I would like to say to all the kids of our generation, if you ever noticed the similarity between Inspector Gadget and James Bond, you were dead on. Yeah. You think so? Yeah. All right, so that's about it. If you want to know more about James Bond, like I said, there are at least three really good websites for all things Bond fandom. You can check out our website by typing. James Bond brings up a bunch of stuff in the handy search bar. And now, if you can believe it, it is time for listener mail. Yes, Josh? I'm going to call this Samurai stuff from Thomas. Guys, I'm a total samurai geek. I practice Japanese sword based martial arts, kindo and Ayaido. I've read all this material about samurai, and your podcast was a very good introduction and I thank you for it. However, I'm kind of surprised you did not mention the greatest samurai of all time, meomoto Massage. This guy was the epitome of everything samurai. We're supposed to be a dedicated soybean, a poet, a painter, a calligrapher philosopher, a general, and an all round but kicking killer. Not only did he write The Book of Five Rings, he also killed 60 men in single combat before age 40. Not to mention all the guys he killed in warfare. At one point in your podcast, you talked about the wooden katana called bokung in Japanese. Yes, it was a practice sword, Josh, but it was also a weapon in its own right. Because Japan is such a wet climate, swords were sometimes destroyed by rust, bokan were cheap and easy to replace, and Musashi was famous for winning some of his greatest battles with the wooden sword. Ow. I know. Can you imagine, dude? Ow. Things smacked to death. Well, he says instead of cutting someone's heads off, he would brain them, which I guess seems like you crack the skull. Yeah, until their brains come out. Also, he was a big fan of using two swords at one time. Sometimes two katana, sometimes the short and the long. Whatever it took to do the job. You guys rock. I love your show. I'm grateful for the samurai show from Thomas. Well, thank you, Thomas, for the extra information. As I said, we are always interested in knowing everything we possibly can about a subject. So if you have anything to tell us about James Bond that we missed, that we got wrong, that we need to know, we want to hear it. Wrap it up and send it in an email. Don't forget to spank it on the bottom and maybe serve it a dry martini, shaken, not stirred. Address it to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housetofworks. Check out our blogs on the houseofworks.com. Homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?" | ||
How Bullfighting Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-bullfighting-works | When the Visigoths ruled Spain, they introduced the idea of battling bulls at festivals. Today matadors get paid $100,000 and perform in front of 50,000 fans. But is bullfighting an antiquated, abusive relic or a cultural tradition above reproach? | When the Visigoths ruled Spain, they introduced the idea of battling bulls at festivals. Today matadors get paid $100,000 and perform in front of 50,000 fans. But is bullfighting an antiquated, abusive relic or a cultural tradition above reproach? | Thu, 03 May 2012 15:15:10 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=15, tm_min=15, tm_sec=10, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=124, tm_isdst=0) | 42783211 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporics.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Olay. Chuck olay. Olay. Right back at you. How are you doing? I'm great. How are you? I'm doing pretty good. Yeah. I've been learning a lot about bull fighting lately. I don't know if you mean bull killing. Bull fighting is what it's called today. It's not what I call it. Or you could also call it a corridor. Boy, here we go. Corridor. You ever been to Spain? No, have you? Yeah. Where? I've been to Barcelona and then tosa de Mar, which is a little coastal town near Barcelona there in the coast of Brava. Very nice. Have you been to and that's it. Okay. Yeah. Have you seen a bullfight? No, I would not do that, sir. I have seen a bull fight. Oh, yeah. And to offend you even further, not only was it a bull fight, it started off with a cock fight. It was in cancun. I saw it with my sister and my dad. Wow. And it was crazy because we were there, and it was a bullfight. It wasn't like you could have accidentally walked into this thing like it was a bullfight. Sure. And I would say 80% of the people there were white, probably American tourists of course they were. Who booed and yelled and shouted things the whole time. And I remember thinking of that one, Simpsons, where Lisa was having a nightmare about being second chairs for saxophone and school band. And at the concert, everybody was booing. And she wakes up and thinks, like, why would everybody come just to boo? It was exactly like that. People came just to boo the bull fight. Well, that is one people who say bull fighting is not good, of which I'm one of them say that's one of the only reasons bullfights are still even going on is because of tourists. Oh, got you. They're the ones buying the tickets. And many times those tourists get there, and they're horrified, and they leave early and think, wow, no refunds. May not exactly. You just funded bullfighting. Yeah, exactly. Sucker. Couple of quick stats. Oh, yeah. Roughly between 200 and 250,000 bulls are killed each year. From bull fights. From bull fights. That's a lot. And I'm not sure if this is accurate, but the number I got was that 52 matadors have been killed since 1700. I'm surprised it's that few. Have you heard of Julio Apariccio? No. If you have a very strong constitution, uncle Josh warned you against this one. This guy through the face. Yeah, I saw it. Holy cow. It was almost like, how is it not photoshopped? It was perfect. So Julio Aparicio, he fell down, and bull got the best of him. Gordon with its horns. With his horns. A boy. Sure. And what a boy, huh? Yeah. And Gordon under his chin, through his neck, and then the horn came out of his mouth perfectly, and a guy from getting him just got a close up of it, like, 50 of them. Just videos of it. It's amazing. I haven't seen the video. It's on the YouTube, and it's one of those that's so awful that you have to sign in and verify your age before you watch it. Got you. And I would do not advise people to watch this. I don't even advise you to look at the Daily Mail article that has it, but it's pretty crazy. But, yes, it happens. And I'm surprised that only how many? 57. The stat I got was 52 in the last 300 plus years, so there's not much of a fight going on. And matador is actually Spanish for killer. Is it really? Yeah. Yes, they're killer bulls for sure. It's the whole point. There's really no gray area here. Like bullfighting is the purpose of it is to kill the bull under certain conditions or within a certain framework. But that's the point of bull fighting. It's not anything but that. And if the matador fails to kill the bull, that's on him, and it is a huge disgrace. That's a loss, and it's not very good. Right, but I'm starting to suspect that you are opposed to bullfighting. Yes, there are a lot of people, and apparently Spain. In Spain, it's like a natural cultural thing. It's been around for a while, and even people who feel the same way you do still say, I still don't think it should be illegal. It's just too much a part of our tradition. Not everyone feels that way, though. No, definitely not. They did a Gallup poll in 2010, and 70% of Spaniard said that they were ready to do away with it. Oh, really? Yeah, it's a lot of Spaniards, and that's up from 31%, like, 15 years earlier. In this modern day, people are starting to think twice about it. Well, let's talk about this, Chuck. Let's talk about how long people have been fighting bulls on the Iberian Peninsula. We don't know for sure, but there is evidence of bull rituals dating back all the way to 1500 BC. Yeah, the Mycelians apparently used to leap over bulls that were charging. It was, like, a thing. And they're always revered as, like, these godlike creatures, which is why, I guess, they want to kill them. What's the taurus one? Taurus. Is that an astrological sign? Yeah. Okay. Of course. Pretty ancient. The article points out that the visigoth rule of Iberian Peninsula from 1415 to 711 no, 415. What did I say? 1415? Yeah. 415 to 711 had men on horseback fighting bulls, which evolved into mounted bull fighting, which rijono which still exists in Portugal. Yes. Horseback bull fighting, where they kill the bull outside the ring later on. Right. They weaken it to a certain point, which is the equivalent of killing the bull. I guess there's some point of no return that the Portuguese understand, and they're like, okay, well, we're done. Come outside, and then that's that. But as anyone who's opposed to bullfighting will tell you, that's not any more humane. Of course not. It's just out of sight of the spectators. Right. So what is it? Rejuneo. Rejone. And then bullfighting itself, as we understand it today, was firmly established in Spain by the 11th century. And it came about during festivals, specifically one festival called the Fiesta de San Fermented. And anybody who's been to Pompeona will recognize that because that's where the running of the bulls takes place in July. Now. Oh, is it July 7 to 14th? When did it used to be? September. Okay. And then in the 16th century, they moved it to July. And ever since then, the running of the bulls has been held, but it's been going on since long before that. And it actually started with a bunch of ranchers and their kids moving the bowls from their pens to about a half a mile to the arena. Right. And then people started running alongside them and evolved into the running of the bulls. Now, interesting, el CID, the Spanish military leader, mid 11th century, he was one of the first to actually bring it into the arena and make it the sanctioned corita, which was government sanctioned, is today, at least if it was back then, financially supported by governments, too. 15th century, it was a big part of the aristocracy until Queen Isabella came along and said, this is not cool. I don't know why she was against it. Probably because she was an animal lover. I would say that's probably a good idea. And Pope Pius Five. Almost a V. He banned it. But that didn't last very long, only about eight years, because people were into it pretty big time. Right. And then I guess in the 1600s is when that whole divergence between horseback and football fighting took place. And it remained the support of the aristocracy until Philip came along and he said, you know what? This is barbaric. You would have to be a low class barbarian to engage in bullfighting. So if you're a member of my court and you get caught doing this, I'll shoot you in the knee. And the aristocracy said, well, we want our knees intact, so we're going to stop doing this. And at this point, bull fighting transferred from a kind of highfalutin Snooty pastime to the pastime of the people, the national sport of the Spanish people. That's true. And from that point on, it stayed that way. Yeah. But the author does point out that there are arenas in Spain that still have the royal boxes for the royal family to attend these things. Yeah. So it hasn't gone away completely as far as that goes. So Spain is the heart and life center of bullfighting, but there's other places that it's held, obviously. I saw one in Cancun. Sure. And if you're a bullfighter, you can follow the season pretty much year round and get work if you're good. They have it in France. Did you know that? I didn't, but I saw that it was banned in the UK. Had no idea anybody was fighting bulls going on in Germany. It was going on all over the place. It's crazy. But that doesn't make sense that it would happen in Germany if the Visigoths are the ones who introduced it to the Iberian Peninsula because they were Germanic people from south of the Norway. We'll call you Southway. Look at you. The goths. So we'll walk you through what happens in a Korida in this whitewashed article version, but before this ever happens, we'll walk you through the couple of days before the bull even gets to the ring. This is a special treat for me. It is. The bull is not an aggressive animal at all. Bull likes to hang around and chew grass and smell flowers. That sounds like Ferdinand bull fighting propaganda to me. No, Ferdinand the bull is like a sweet creature, but they actually are not aggressive. They're only going to charge somebody if they're threatened and angry, which is what bull fighting is all about. Sure. So in the two days prior to the bull showing up at the arena, they are abused. They are basically mentally destroyed versions of what a bull should be like. You're there, you're fat bull. Well, they do fatten them up to make them slow. Well, that's a big problem, and you can call somebody out for that. They have wet newspapers stuffed in their ears so they can't hear anything. They have Vaseline rubbed on their eyes so their vision is blurred. They have their eyes taped open so they can't sleep. They stuff cotton up their nostrils so they can't breathe very well, and they stick a needle through their genitals that'll take anybody off. They rub this caustic solution on their legs, which makes the bull not be able to balance and keeps the ball from lying down, ever. They strap their horns to the ceiling of their transport truck to take them on their long, hot journey to wherever they're going. And for the two days before, they keep them in a box. Wait, I'm sorry, that's not all. They give them drugs to either pep them up or slow them down, just to keep them in whatever state they want them in and give them laxatives to just obviously make things even more uncomfortable. Got you. Then they put the ball in this dark box for two days to disorient the bull. Finally, when they open the box, there's a light at the end of the tunnel that the bull thinks, My God, I'm finally getting out of here. Runs to the light and all of a sudden they're in a bowl ring, right? And there's trumpets and fanfare and people cheering, and the bulls like, oh, cool. Hey, how are you all doing? Yeah, I've been through some rough times lately, some of that stuff. I think if you were found out, you would be disqualified immediately, especially doing stuff that slowed the ball down or made it less dangerous. Yes. The ring is a ring for a reason. Bulls would want to go try and hide in a corner, but the circular ring will confuse in a bowl to where it can't hide anywhere. Have you ever seen that footage of that bull that makes it up into the stands, like, jumps up and is in the stands, like, on top of people? It's crazy. Was that bull run our test? No. Did you get that joke? Yeah. Okay, so the different acts, I believe, are called tercios? Yes, I believe so. And there's three of them, right? Yes, there are three of them. And that's three acts in a fight. In a carrito. Yes, in a bull fight, yeah. And there's no suspense going on either, by the way. They all go down the same way. I'll bet it's suspenseful for the bull. So the bull comes out the first act, or what? Yeah, act One. Okay. In act one, there are guys called Picadors, and they're mounted on horseback, and they are basically, I guess, low level Torreros, or bullfighters. Yes. Because matador is not the only kind of bullfighter. He is the cream of the crop pinnacle of bullfighters, the well paid rock star. Yes. But he works with a crew of Picadors who show up in the first act and Bandalos, who show up in the second act. But the pecadors, what they do is they lance the bowl between his shoulder blades around his neck muscles. And the whole point of this, Chuck you'll love this one. Is to weaken the neck muscles so that the bull's head hangs so that the matador can get to its heart more easily. Yeah. It also hits a gland in the neck that releases adrenaline, apparently. Crazy. So they lance the bull three times and twist the blade around to ensure maximum blood loss. Three matadors will now come in. They will fight individually later on, but they all come in at first in the first act with their capes for the bull fight. It's an afternoon of them. There's six bowls and three matadors. And each matador fights two bowls, and each bullfight takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Yes. Roughly. So they come in with their little capes and do their little maneuvers to draw attention away from the peak of doors. And the peak of doors go and hide behind their little walls. They have these interior walls that they can hide behind whenever the bull starts to get too dangerous. They run and hide behind these walls. Yes. Or if this is America, the peak doors would be dressed as clowns and would hide in barrels, like at rodeo. Yeah. They will do a rodeo podcast at some point. Do we have to? Sure. Okay. I don't think they kill the cows and rodeos. No. Okay. So the picadors leave the ring, the matadors leave the ring. Act two begins in the Van der Guerros. I know that's a tough one. Yeah. They come in, they're basically bullfighters. Assistant bullfighters. But they're on foot. Yes. And if you've ever seen a bullfighter or a picture of a bullfight, bulls seem to have some crepe barb sticking out of them. That's the bandeliaros work. Yes. And that is called a bandarias, and it's a barbed dart that's adorned colorfully bulls aren't the only things dying in this episode. So is the Spanish language, because we are butchering it. I'm trying this, of course, further weakens the bull. So the mighty matador doesn't have much work to do, so the bull is still dangerous. Are they running in circles at this point, too, to get it nice and dizzy and confused? Right. The mandatory comes out for the final act, and he has ten official minutes to kill the bowl. Well, to do a little showing off first and then kill the bull. After the ten minutes, he gets in a visa, which is a first warning. After three minutes, he gets another one, and then he gets a third one. So he has a total of, in actuality, 15 minutes to kill the bull, or else the bull is let out alive and the matador is disgraced. Okay. But for the most part, the matador is going to dispatch the bowl, and he does it. He first starts using the cape. And the cape is always held in the left hand. Is it? I saw right handed dudes. I did not. I was looking, and I could even tell that the cape was kind of clumsy. Held in the left hand. They were still holding it in the left hand. Well, the guys I saw were practicing, so maybe I don't know. But I don't see why they would practice with the right hand. Yes, I don't either. Okay, but you have a cape in one hand, you have a sword in the other. Yes. Then the point of the cape by the way, we should probably get to this now. Sure. Cape is always red because red angers bulls. Right? Not true. No. Bulls are color blind, so they're not angered by red or any other color. What does get them going is the movement of the cape and sticking swords in their neck. That's another thing that keeps them going. Yeah. And actually, that's not necessarily true. By the time the matador comes out, sometimes the bull is really tired from blood loss and being tortured for a couple of days, apparently. Yeah, of course. And so the metadora really kind of has to work to get it riled up again, even though the bulls just like, just kill me. Metadata is like, not yet. We have a crowd to please. First, so the metadore eventually, after the cape work is done oh, the cape is read, by the way, the high blood stains. Yeah. Once the cape work is done, the matador will, as the bull runs past him, will plunge the sword in between the shoulder blades and what's called an estacata, which is the death blow. And if properly delivered, estacada will sever the Bullsey order and that will be that almost immediately for the bowl? Yes. If it's not done correctly, then the bowl can be in even more tremendous pain as it bleeds out. But to protect against this, a bandeliaro will come out and immediately deliver another thrust of a blade to make sure the bowl is dead with a Pontia, with smaller knife. Ideally, they killed him with one blow. That rarely happens because apparently matadors aren't so great at doing that anymore. I don't know if they ever were. And a lot of times the bull lives even through the smaller knife plunge and is still alive when the ears and tail or hoof are cut off and presented to the matador. Usually there's another fail safe where they just bring out a tractor and run the bull over a bunch of times to make sure. That's so nice. If that doesn't work, then the people come down from the stands and just start shooting it. That's not true. And it's not funny. It's not funny because it's not true. And they oftentimes do survive hanging on by a thread. Their lungs are punctured, so they're drowning in their own blood and vomiting up blood through their nose and mouth like a whale dying and flurry. And sometimes they will take it outside and skin it while it's even still alive. Yeah, that's a kind of a tradition. I saw the bowl after the bull fight. It was pretty sad. They take the bowl right outside and they'll dress it and then sell the meat at the stadium, which is customary and very strange. But that's one of the aspects of bullfighting. If you've ever wanted a bull burger and you wanted to eat it right after you saw it die, go to a bull fight in Spain. They will drag the bull out with some mules attached to chains. And I don't know if the booing you heard because apparently the people will boo and throw beer cans at the bowl at the end. I don't know if that's what you heard. It depends. So it depends. No, they were booing the matador, the band or the arrows, the doors, everybody. They were booing the whole country of Mexico for this. They're booing everybody. Now it depends on the bull. If the bull was a wuss, then I could see the fans throwing beer cans at it. There's also an aspect of this that cannot be deny that a bull that shows great bravery, anger, spirit, spunk, really tries to kill the matador or the band of the arrows will be very much revered by the people in the stands and gruesomely. They'll bring it out for a victory lap, being dragged by the mules in a circle around the arena. After it's dead, or apparently while it's still dying, people will cheer it. There are roses for it. And there's a rule where the crowd or the matador can ask for an indulito, which is a reprieve for a particularly courageous bull. And the president of the bull fight, the referee can say, yes, I give this bull or a prieve because it's such an awesome bull, we're going to let it live. And the matador proceeds to, with an empty hand, simulate the death blow thing. I could have killed the bull, but I like the bull so much, I lobbied to get it released. What a guy. That bull is taken away and put out the stud for the rest of its life. And there was one it's very rare to get an indolito. And there was one bull called Manzanito in 1887. He got an indolito because he gored all three matadors in the plaza that day. Wow. That will get you off right there. You get to go stud for the rest of your life, Mr. Bull. Horses are also abused. The ones that participate, their ears are stuffed with newspaper, wet newspaper. They're blindfolded, and they sever their vocal cords so they can't scream out in pain, because people don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear screaming. Yeah, people don't like that. So they sever the vocal cords so the horses that are trembling in fear inside this ring at this bowl, don't bark out and let people know that. And if the horses are hurt, they take them out of the ring and patch them up and send them right back in there. Where are you getting this activist info? All over the place. Yeah, okay. I mean, it's not activists info. It's how it goes down. Now. It all just kind of has a certain ring to it. I'm not disputing it. I'm just saying, like yeah, well, I mean, coming out of my mouth, it probably sounds activist because I think it's an awful thing to do something like this. Got you. But these are the facts. Okay, well, in Chuck, you will love the next part where we talk about famous matador. Yeah. Feel free. So people have been doing this since we said, like, the 11th century, right? El CID was supposedly the first guy to fight a ball in an arena, and since then, it's just become huge, big business. But the first real and probably only real golden age, if you call it that. Bull fighting happened from 1914 to 1920, and there were two matadors, juan Belmont E. Garcia and Jose Gomez, who fought bulls under the name Jose Alito had a rivalry, and Belmont E. Garcia was actually the first guy, apparently, to stand still or stand his ground when he was doing Cape work with a bowl rather than try to run away from the bull using fancy footwork. That erect style. Right? Yeah. Joselito was his rival and the rivalry was really going swimmingly, I guess, for everybody but the bulls until Joselito was fatally gored at a match that both of them were at garcia and Joselito were fighting at in 1920 and that end of the golden age of bullfighting, you'll be happy to hear. He must have been small. Jose? Yes. His name is Jose. And I think if you're Jose and they call you Jose Lito, that means you're small. Like add that ito to anything. Or lito or young, because he started very young. Yeah, maybe that's true. He started at age 13 and he was only, I think, 2025. He was 25 when he died, when he was gord. So another guy who is Gordon? His name manuel Rodriguez. E Sanchez. Do you think that's like the mother's and the father's names when it's two last names and there's an E and and in the middle? I don't know. I would think so. Manuel Rodriguez and Sanchez. You put the Rodriguez together and the Sanchez is together and you get Manuel, also known as Menalete. Maybe so. And he was gorge in 1947. He was the top mandor from 1940 to 1947. And I think his going and the end of his being the top matador was not coincidental. You're probably right. Should we talk about the bulls? Because it's very specific what kind of bulls are fighting? Yeah, they're all four years old, which I didn't know. I didn't either. And they are specifically bred to bull fight and they weigh about 1001, 3000 hundred pounds. You want to translate that into kilos for our friends? It's 590 kg. That's right. And they are bred and ranches in this article says that they are tested for bravery and ferocity and that if you pass that test, you become a fighting bull. And that may be true sometimes, but matadors like to make their money and they don't want to be gored. So the highfalutin matadors will request very placid docile bowls just to keep the show going. Is that true? Well, that's what I read. Okay. They just want to put on the show. They don't want to die. Well, I'm sure they don't want to die. They want to make a few million bucks a year doing it easy too, because they get paid about 100 grand a bullfight and they can do maybe 30 to 40 or more. Yeah, I know the guy, Belmonte, he had a record 109 bull fights in 1919. It's a lot. It's like in Rocky Three when he was fighting all the chumps just for a payday. He didn't want any real challenge. But ultimately he did want a real challenge because he fought draco. Well, he fought club or lang three. It was the Russian. Oh, no. Three was Clover Lang. No. Yeah. The first two were apollo. The third was Clover Lang. The fourth was the Russian. I thought that was the third, Tommy Morrison. And then the 6th was when he came back as a trainer, and the 7th was him enjoying a nice sandwich for 2 hours. No, rocky three is definitely clever, Lane, because that was my favorite one. Okay. Until I got older and I realized that the first one was actually the better one. You know, I thought that I would think that, too. And then I went back and watched it as an adult, and I'm like, I mean, it's pretty good, but I loved it. There was just too much character development for a Rocky movie, if you ask me. Well, it's a love story. It wasn't even a boxing movie. I'm with you. I understand. But it was a love story. Starring and written and directed by Sylvester Stallone. That's right. All right, back to the bulls. Bulls are never exposed to more than one fight. Yeah. So apparently they have very good memories. Sure. So they'd learn how to out duel the matador in their cape. Yeah. So that's why they don't fight them twice. And the guys who test their ferocity for, I guess the ones that are tested, those are done on horseback. So the bull is not like, oh, I remember those capes. I'm going to get you. I associate you with laxatives. Well, even this article says that they alter balls to make them easier to fight. But this is what I'm saying. It's a very participatory sport for spectators. So you can ask for an indolito. You can also challenge or charge somebody with fighting an altered bolt, one that's overfed and too fat and slow. One of these horns have been altered because apparently the tips of the horns of a bull are very much like a cat's whiskers. And if you remove that, the bull is not going to have a very good sense of kinetics and whatever hit the matador. So if the crowd thinks that your career is, like, over pal, that's why I don't think it's quite as widespread, either that or else bull fighting crowds have become complacent. Well, I think that's definitely true. Yeah. Well, because it's 80% tourists, they don't know how to spot a fat bull. Well, then that very well may be the case. And they also apparently, the way they stabbed them and where they stabbed them, they do so in order to make sure they charge straight, instead of like, I've got a bad left leg, all of a sudden I'm going to be going left all day or right all day. Yeah. So, Chuck, we mentioned that you can make a pretty decent living doing bull fights, but you also mentioned that there may be the death of bullfighting, as it were. Do you think that's really true? I mean, seriously, people have been doing this since the fourth century, and now all of a sudden, just because of. A bad economy and animal activism. Bullfighting is going down. It's starting to where's the evidence? Well, the polls that the popular sentiment is changing in Spain over the past 15 years is one. Catalonia is the first region in mainland Spain to actually ban it. In Barcelona is in Catalonia. Yes. Which is big because Barcelona had not one, not two, but three bull fighting arenas. That's right. And that took effect four Plaza del Toro. That took effect actually just this year. On January 1, they said, like, let's finish out the 2011 season and then we'll ban it. Starting from that point. They had the last one in September, I think September 28, 2011 was the last one ever. Was it? But that's a huge deal. Yeah, but even in Spain, they're kind of like the Snooty Catalans. They don't enjoy bullfighting. I think that's made some quarters of Spain even more fiercely proud of it. Yeah, probably so. Like, Madrid apparently is still very proud of their bull fighting. Right. In 2010, one of the state television station said, we are going to ban coverage, live coverage of it, because kids can watch this on TV. They happen in the hours, afternoon hours and early evening. So they won't broadcast until after 10:00 P.m. Now. Right. Well, there's a law that says you can't show animal cruelty on Spanish television until after 10:00 P.m. Because of children. And so that's effectively banned showing bullfighting in Spain, which is a huge blow to it, I guess, economically or financially. Because think about how much money comes from television deals and sponsorships if you can get rid of it on TV. That's that. Yeah, that's true. And then they've shown that there's evidence that the federal government in Spain is pretty much what's propping up bullfighting these days, because it went from 1000 bull fights in 2008 to 800 in 2010 in Spain. And that 200 was almost exclusively the result of cuts and government subsidies to small towns that can't afford to put on a bullfight. Right. And so that means that the government's holding the whole thing up. Yeah. I read a couple of interesting articles today. One of them was from a veterinarian, and they have vets at the bullfight on staff, I guess. And this vet went on record as saying they did all this testing of, like, adrenaline and noradrenaline and all these different chemicals in the body on these bulls that had just survived, ones that were dead ones before they went in. And basically to prove that the bull suffers a great deal because there's this misguided notion that the bull doesn't suffer because they're this magical creature. I saw this one interview with a bandol and he said that a veterinarian. And this is translated, obviously, but he said, a veterinarian told me that the bulls have a special cell in their body that prevents it from suffering and feeling pain. It's not true. Are you sure? Yeah. There's no special cell that keeps them from feeling pain? Well, that's a larger debate, too. I believe both can suffer. But if you've read David Foster Wallace, is considered the lobster. Can a lobster suffer? Is no section. Is the perception of physical feeling of pain. Right. Is that the same thing as suffering? No, we've shown it's not. Remember in our Happiness audio book, we talked about the difference between experiencing physical pain and experiencing suffering, and they actually utilize different parts of the brain. Right. So if there's no suffering, is inflicting pain on something, eg. Cooking it, is that cruel? Yeah, that's a good point. It is. But I think bulls experience suffering, especially if they go through what you describe. Yeah. And if you're against bullfighting and you want to do something, you can email or mail the embassies of these countries that still participate and tell them that, hey, I'm not going to visit your country, I'm not going to spend my money there. If you're still going to endorse this, it's a small thing you can do. Can you mail me some wine? Because I can't make it over. There some temper INEO. And I'm going to go on record as saying this whole thing that it's part of the culture is just crap. Well, the Spanish federal government would disagree with you because in 2010, and what a lot of people see as a response to the Catalonia ban, the Spanish government transferred jurisdiction over bull fighting from the interior ministry to the cultural ministry as an attempt to keep it from being banned. It will be a tough fault one, but yeah, apparently even Mexico now is entertaining the idea of banning it. You know, some other things that were defended as culture genital mutilation on females, witch burning bear baiting. You ever heard of that? No. Bear baiting was popular in England up until the 18th century. That is, when you take a bear like a grizzly bear, brown bear, it up like a clown. Well, not far off. You put it in a pit and chain it to a stake and release dogs on it. And the dogs kill the bear, or the bear kills some of the dogs. So they release more dogs and people sit around and gamble on is the bear going to get eaten first or the dog's going to get killed first. And it's blood sport. And I think this is the same thing. That's where bulldogs came from and that's where they got their name from. It's called bull baiting. Oh, really? And bulldogs used to not even come close to resembling what they do now. They were actually bred to be less vicious by making them slower and dumber and more cuddly. Or dumber but more cuddly. And that's how we have the modern bulldogs now. But they evolved from basically in the 19th century, bulldogs were where Pipple breed is now, where there are a lot of people being like, we just need to wipe this breed off the face of the planet. It's gone out of control. They're crazy. Everybody's scared of them. They're killing people. And then they managed to breed the meanness out of them. But bull baiting, too. Bull baiting bullets have been taking it all over the place. Well, and bear baiting actually still happens in Pakistan, and it's horrific. So for me, to you people of Spain, Mexico, France, ritualized killing of animals for people to pay for and watch is a little outdated and just silly and cruel, and I say, please stop. From chuck to you. From me to you. And one more thing. The whole notion of culture, isn't that supposedly to advance your civilization? And isn't that supposed to mean, like, positive things like culture? I mean, what brings people together more than the rituals? Campaign getting bullfight. All right, I'm done. Also, fox, how do you feel about bullfighting? Personally, I think it's great. If you want to learn more about bullfighting or chuck's views on it, you can type in chuck or bullfighting in the search bar@houseoffworks.com. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Very riled up. Listener mail. That's right. Now, this is calm. I'm going to call this illustrator wrote us about the comics episode. Guys. I'm currently an illustrator. Does he not have much hope for his future in that field? No, I think he does okay. I felt because he does like digital illustration here. I guess I found your podcast when I was hip deep in art school at the art institute of Boston, but there are only so many times I could listen to the same old hour lady peace songs on repeat. Remember that group? No. Had, like, one song. Okay. Which song was I can't remember. I dug at the song. Actually. I got the CD because of that song. Man, I used to fall for that when I was, like, 1214. You just be like, that's the only good song on the whole CD before the casingle. Yeah. I'm now a professional illustrator, but I also teach art at AIB. And I was able to live a mini dream when my higher ups approached me about teaching a comic book class. So he's pretty stoked about this. And this is just some things he pointed out on the comics code of authority you guys talked about. World war II was long over, and the new round of superheroes spiderman fantastic four had yet to emerge from the minds of lee, Kirby and ditko. As a result, comics were merely treading water and chasing from fad to fad, westerns to romance to eventually, horror. Horror comics are what really started to worry everyone, so they began to put pressure on companies like EC, who had made their names and over the top horror. In turn, EC basically jettisoned its stake in horror comics and latched onto a little humor comic mad, which we talked about. It was like stories guaranteed to drive you mad. Exactly. But to this point, Mad was published basically as a comic book. In essence, EC was looking to hedge its bets, so it relaunched Mad as a magazine, which is a very different distinction because all of a sudden wasn't under the code of authority. In 1955, we were blessed with the very first Mad magazine. A very calculated move since they were not heavily scrutinized by comics, and they didn't have to worry about the comics code. That is very smart. It is. I hope to make it big as a comics illustrator and children's book illustrator. Who says I can't do both? I also thought you might like to know that you're keeping me company during these long hours chasing the dream. And this dude's stuff is awesome. And if you want to hire Greg Marathon, you can get in touch with him at the Gregmarathoustudio, which is Gregmarathas.com, or read his blog, Gregmarathas Blogspot.com. Nice. This stuff is very cool. I told them I'd keep them in mind. If we ever needed drawings, we could use some drawings. We need some Facebook timeline drawings. Yeah. If he's willing to work for free. Yeah. Get to it. Remember, we got chastised by a graphic designer for holding that T shirt contest? Yeah, I emailed him back, actually. Did you call him down? Yeah. I was like most of these were amateur designers. There were some pros in there, but there was a pro to mine. It's not like we forced anybody to do it, but there's a whole movement from designers about design contests being awful. Like, what other industry basically asks for free work as a contest? Quote, unquote? There's, like, fiction contest. Yeah. There's all kinds of Fox derbys. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that people do for free as part of a contest. Bake offs or bakes off. I'm sorry. And I saw some designers that say, I don't agree with that contest. Make me better. And if you don't, architecture. That's a ridiculous idea. Architecture as a field has been in contest mode for a century or more. There's a lot of work put into it. There's a lot of work put into graphic design. Contests are everywhere. I think that's a ridiculous stance. Well, his point was because he emailed me back, and he was like, well, fine. The contest is fine, but you should give them a cut of the T shirt sales. I don't disagree with that. I know, but we had no choice. Well, no, we're in no position whatsoever to share. I told them, Dude, if it was up to me, they would get 100% of the T shirt sales. I don't know about that, but we don't get any. Well, I know, but still, we could if we could negotiate on their behalf, we would work a little bit in for us, too. What a volatile episode. Right to the end. Yeah. So I guess if you want to express your volatility toward us. That's cool. We can handle it. We've been taking it for years. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can send us stuff on Facebook, including Facebook art for the timeline at facebook. Comstuffyshenell. You can also email us at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House of Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools 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 can get listen to new episodes of My Favorite Murder one week early on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
Why is the U.S. so dependent on cars? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-is-the-u-s-so-dependent-on-cars | Today, automobiles are undoubtedly the dominant form of transportation in the United States, but that wasn't always the case. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the history of public transportation and automobiles in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Today, automobiles are undoubtedly the dominant form of transportation in the United States, but that wasn't always the case. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the history of public transportation and automobiles in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:42:43 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=15, tm_min=42, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=244, tm_isdst=0) | 29553982 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful from the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is the lovely and effervescent Charles W. Bryant. I'm vessel. I'm not effervescent. You're effervescent, whether you like it or not. Now, how are you doing? Great, sir. Do you seem like you were in the best mood today. It's Monday morning. Yeah, compared to Friday afternoons when we usually record, there's a slight change. Sure. But, hey, I'm fired up. You sound like it's the first week of the rest of our lives. Yes, sadly enough. Chuck, how did you get to work this morning? I drove to the subway then took the subway to work. You took the subway? Sure. Terrible. I drove to work. So let's go with me. Good for you. I'm like the vast majority of Atlantis driving. Driving to work. Yeah. I remember there was this huge this is ultra local, but I'm sure it happens all over the United States. There is this proposed rail line from Lovejoy way down south in the southern suburbs of Atlanta that was going to come up to Atlanta proper, really city. And the people who came out against this came out against it like it was a proposal to murder one of everybody's kids. Is that 500 people who live in Love Joy? No. It wasn't just love, Joy. People in every county that this rail line was going to go through, I mean there are elected representatives that were coming out against it. Everybody was arguing against this public transportation and simultaneously they were throwing their support between because there's horrible congestion below the city. It's probably the worst they fought the Marta going too far north too. I know. By the way, everyone marta is our public rail system. Our sad public rail system in that land is one of the major cities in the country. We have a cross, we have a plus sign for a transit system. Yeah, there's a couple of little lines that spur off of it now, but not much. I've never seen them. Northeast and then straight north. And I should say, in my defense, I could drive, I guess, to Art Center stop or something like that, and then hit the rail next time. Worthless. Right? Exactly. It's great for me, though. It is. Chuck, you are well served by our transit system. But yeah, generally the argument against transit is that the poor will use it to go no, they'll use it to go rob houses in the suburbs. Oh, I thought they thought they'd start living along the line. No, the argument I've always heard is that it will increase crime. So can't you just see people laden with flat screen TVs and all sorts of other they have the burglar mask on. Right. And that money sack with the dollar sign on it. They just came from some wealthy suburbanites house and now they're using public transit to make their getaway. Right. Yeah, I could see it. So, yeah, that's one reason that it's stalled. But as I was saying, to solve this congestion problem down south, the proposal is to make 75 by 75, I think from five lanes to eleven lanes in each direction. I wish I had a stats to back this up, but I've always heard that making roads wider does not do much to east congestion. No, I've heard that as well. And cars will fill it. Yeah, it's kind of like if you build it, they will come. Right. It's like giving condoms to teenagers. They wouldn't have sex if you didn't give them condoms. But once you do, they're just like rabbits, you know? Ridiculous. So, Chuck, the debate continues, and I'm actually surprised after reading this article we're about to talk about, written by our esteemed colleague John Fuller of stuff from the B side. Yeah. Very hip, young, soft spoken. Man, that rail is even alive these days. Yes. Have you ever taken a train ride, like an Amtrak trip? I have. Yeah. It's awesome. I don't remember where I went. I was kind of young, but it was pretty cool. Yeah, it's really cool. I wish it were a little more comprehensive and cheaper. It's quite expensive. It is. And you also realize it's federally subsidized. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Amtrak is subsidized by federal money. So you pay for Amtrak pal? Yes. I should take it. Do I get free tickets or anything? Can I catch in on that? No, you can't, but let's talk about it. Man. If you look around, we take for granted just how much we rely on the car. Like Fuller points out in this article, the very designs of our cities, of our shopping malls and everything is made with the car in mind. It's hard to imagine life without parking lots. And what if everything were street cars and subways and trains and things? I can't even conceive. What if parking lots were green space? Like, you still had your shopping mall, right, but it was just surrounded by, like, a park. Yeah, that'd be awesome. It would be awesome. But it's too late. Not necessarily. There's a movement for mixed use development in walkable cities. Atlanta. We have our own thing going. Yeah. The belt line proposal. Yes. Which I got really excited about when I first started hearing it, and then I read the finer points. It is great, but it's going to be finished when I'm, like, 70. Yeah. So it's like, cool. Maybe I can have kids and Grandkids will enjoy it. Hopefully, it'll be wheelchair accessible for you. Yes. Let's give a little background, right? Okay, let's do it. We're in New York. All right. There's newsies everywhere. Yeah. There's the Irish are fighting one another. Right? It's crazy. So let's not spend too much time here. It's 1832, and New York has just installed the first street rail line. And it's horse drawn, right? So it's a little horsey right there. Can you hear it? Yeah. All right, let's get out of here, Chuck. Yeah. I see Daniel Baylos is coming after with a meat cleaver. Okay. So now, my friend, we're in New Orleans, right? Only slightly less dangerous. I'm slightly drunk. What do you mean, slightly? Sure. And New Orleans has just opened its first street rail line. And, Chuck, if you want to go ahead and flash forward with me to 2009, take my hand. Okay. All right, here we are. Wow. The same rail line is still in use in New Orleans, and it's just as dangerous here. Wow. Let's go back to the studio. Okay, so rail lines have been around a little while. Yeah, a long while, actually. And longer than the car, apparently. There was a what is it called? Zeitgeist when a bunch of people come up with the same idea at the same time. That happened with the automobile. Germans, mainly. Yeah. And a guy named Gottlieb Dimeler. He is widely viewed as the first to come up with the real functioning automobile. Right. That could get you from point A to point B. And he named the car after his daughter named Mercedes. Yes. Even if they sound familiar. He hooked up with a guy named Carl Benz. Hold on. I've got to say, Chuck, hats off to you for your extra dedication to throwing that little German X on there. What was it? Bavarian. Yes. I thought it was interesting to think if it would end up being called the Dimer bins instead of the Mercedes Benz. Good name. Yeah. But certainly not now. It's the iconic Mercedes Benz. Yeah. So they were the first ones, like you said, to come up with a working car in 1884. Right. And years later, they looked to America because we kind of perfected that scene and started building highways. So they looked at us and they had to build an auto bond super highway. Yeah. And there was a guy who, again, by historians, is widely considered the man who did perfect that scene, as you put it. Yes, sir. Guy named Henry Ford. Industrialist. Fascist. Eugenicist. Well, the very least supporter of eugenics. Dentist. Why not? Probably in his spare time. He was something of a Renaissance man. Right. And the reason he's credited is perfecting the automobiles because he applied the principle of the assembly line. Right. A lot of people created that term. Actually, he did. He didn't come up with the assembly line itself. He did coin the term, but he applied that to car manufacturing. And all of a sudden, you know, making one car by hand by one person, which took forever, they just popped it on a line and each person had their own job. And he cranked out, I think, 14 million cars. Yeah. Between 1913 and 1927, they built 14 million model TS. Yeah. Which is a huge jump because just in 1915, there were only 2 million cars. Right. And that was when there were about 100 million people in the United States. Yeah. That's a lot of cars. Yeah. Especially for it having been considered kind of like a plaything of the rich. Yeah. It was almost like a toy. It's like a personal submarine is today. Sure. Maybe so. And they weren't even that well liked at first because they were clunky and they smell bad. I know. John said that one of the early names nicknames for a car was a stink Chariot, which I thought was pretty funny. Couldn't stink worse than horse manure. Or could it? It could, I guess. It's a different kind of stink. I kind of like the smell of horse manure. Yeah. But what if it was coming out like that was the emissions of the time? I'd be in heaven. Really? Sure. How do you control those emissions, I wonder? With the corks. Right? Yeah. Or don't do like Kramer did in Seinfeld when he fed the horse Robbie Hole beeferrone. Yeah. That was a tangent. 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 at IBM. Comconsulting. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything. To sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on squarespace. Yeah. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s y SK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. Chuck let's talk about rail lines. Yes, we can't forget about rail lines. They actually opened up the country. You know, back before then, John Candy was in a covered wagon, and that's how you really got around. You ended up devolving into cannibalism. It was nothing but hardship. There were no roads, really. Basically, you had to have a murder app on you back east to take a covered wagon out west. Right. Well, there were no interstates and freeways. There were no local roads. You were literally a trailblazer, which is why Portland has that name, trailblazer. Interesting. Yeah. Well, that's an assumption of mine. You're full of facts. So the railways open this up, and actually, they're wildly successful. They actually are considered to have created the modern industrial state of the United States that we view it totally right. They opened up the continent, and I think 1.2 billion people were using rail lines every year by 1020, and that was at its peak. Peaked in 1020. Yeah. And that's about 106,000,000 people living in the United States then carrying 1.2 billion. So it's pretty clear that every American was probably traveling by rail several times a year, or maybe several times a week per day, who knows? And it also opened up the rest of the country to ordinary, everyday people. Before, it was pretty much horse drawn carriage. Yeah, maybe a Model T. But with the absence of roads in between towns, not very comfortable. No. And they were bumpy. People just kind of stuck around their town. Yeah. The rail line you could go didn't even leave. That where they were born their entire life. There are people who do that still today, which is just weird. Yeah. I remember when I took my grandmother, who lived to be 101 and passed away a couple of years ago when we took her to the ocean for the first time. Dude, she was like, in her 70s. Yeah. What did you think of it? She walked out and forget. I was like, twelve. She walked out to the ocean and stood there and went, well, it's big. Swear to God. That's all she said. Granny Bryant's famous quote, and we actually called her Granny Brian. That's funny. Did you? And she pretty much turned around and was like, all right, let's go home. That was it. Go back to Tennessee. Okay. Yeah. And once you've seen one ocean, you've seen them all. Pretty much. So rail lines are really making a huge impact, but they kind of fell to the wayside even though cities like New York and Boston started offering commuter stops. Right. But it was still a train. It wasn't all that convenient. It was really good for long distances. Sure. But with some refinement of the automobile and some huge marketing campaigns and lobbying and some unholy alliances yeah, we'll get into that. The automobile started to take on more, play more and more and more of a role. Yeah. Streamline into the manufacturing. Of course, like any manufacturing process got a little cheaper, too. That's for the consumer. Once prices start to come out, ultimately, no matter how played upon your brain is by PR firms, no matter how little of a choice you're given by huge monopolies right. Ultimately it comes down to the consumers choice. It's something that's really easily forgotten. Yeah. We talked about that in our econ audiobook. Yeah, definitely. And when consumers are given a choice, they almost invariably choose the cheaper option. Yes. So when cars started to become competitive price wise, with maybe a rail service, that kind of thing, people started buying more and more cars. Right. And you didn't have to depend on the rail service's schedule. Of course. All of a sudden you are in control of when you went somewhere and how far you traveled, and you didn't have to worry about what the rail line said about it. Yeah. Which is still a criticism today of public transit. Right. Cars offer freedom. It's as simple as that. They also offer more privacy, too, which I think a lot of people value. Right. And an ability to engage in road rage, a national pastime here in the United States, which is a little more removed than subway rage, if you remember. What was that girl's name? Soldier girl. Yeah. Who went off again on Marta. Her beloved Marta. Yeah. You can find that on YouTube still, I'm sure. Would they type in Chuck Solja? Girl, I think S-O-U-L-J-A if you want to watch a nice subway rant yeah. Nothing like road rage, though. No. So rail lines is kind of fading into the background as far as public transportation goes and taking on more and more of a role as good transportation, commodities transportation. Right, right. But there's also those street rail lines that we were talking about. Actually, most cities, whether huge or not, had public transportation in the form of trolley. Yeah. La Dude was one of the big. They had one of the biggest trolley and streetcar lines, the red cars and the yellow cars is what they're called. And, man, they connected and this is way back then, they connected, like, five counties. Wow. And it was really vast. And they were pretty much squashed. That's what we're getting to now. This is arguably the death blow of public transportation. National City Lines. National City Lines. This is where I think it really comes down to. Let's go ahead and say that we found in our research two views of this. I read an article by a guy who says that the scandal is a myth. Right. So not everybody is on board that this actually happened the way that it said. But we do have some facts. Let's do it, Chuck. National City Lines. Yes. National City Lines was a group that formed made up of, I think it was about eight companies, but that included General Motors, Firestone, standard Oil of California, phillips Petroleum. So clearly the big hitters in what would be the burgeoning auto business. Yeah. And basically what they wanted to do was buy up the streetcar systems and replace them with buses. They did. And they did it quietly. What they did was it wasn't just buses, but all the tires on these buses were Firestone. Sure. All of the gas put into these buses was Standard Oil. And all the buses were manufactured by GM. Yes. So basically, all of a sudden, auto mobiles, whether it was a bus or Model T's, that was the way to get around. Yeah. The Charlie line was dead. And it's called it's referred to as the great American streetcar scandal. Right. And also, if that sounds vaguely familiar, you may have seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I was going to mention that that informed one of the subplots. Loosely masked, but definitely based on that whole scene. So back in 1947, there was a guy who was actually a trolley enthusiast. I guess he was from a wealthy family. His name was E J Quinby. He was a naval officer. He sounds wealthy. He was. But he bucked the family trend of just being wealthy and took a job managing trolley lines in New Jersey. Cool. As his first job after college. Right. Nice. I guess. Then he went into the Navy after the war or during the war, and he noticed what National City Lines was doing because he was right there. He'd been there while they were buying up all these trolley services. So he figured out what was going on, and he wrote this letter with all this detailed evidence to every person he could think of really had anything to do with federal, state, municipal, elected officials, and transportation. Anybody who had any kind of saying it got a letter from this guy across the country. So he started this whole thing for people to start paying attention to this. Yeah. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. A lot of people say that he would have it may not have ever been noticed that he not brought it to everyone's attention. And he did literally. No, he wasn't. I remember he was from a wealthy family, but he did such a thorough job that National City Lines was indicted by the federal government or the Justice Department for breaking antitrust laws. Yeah. The Sherman Antitrust Act. Right. Okay. Now, in 1947, we've got them by the short and curly. Right. Obviously National City Lines is going to go under. These people are going to all be taken out behind the woodshed and shot in the back of the head for trying to one of the charges was monopolized ground transportation in the United States. Which is pretty huge. Oh, yeah, very huge. They were actually acquitted of that charge. Yes, they were. And they were found guilty of a lesser charge. Guilty of monopolizing the sale of buses, which come on. Yeah, they were found guilty. And what happened, Chuck? They were fined $5,000, the whole thing. National City Lines, which is owned by GM, all the Firestone and Standard Oil was fine $5,000, which in 1047 even, wasn't that much for a corporation. No, not for all these corporations. The executive surely had to pay. Right, Chuck? They did, dude. How much? One dollars. A symbolic fine of one dollars. And from an outsider looking in, you would see this lesser charge, quote, unquote. It's pretty much the charge, and I don't know how they got around it. I don't know if there was some nefarious bribes or anything like that. I know that some conspiracy folks think so, but it still hasn't been found out. Really? So the fact that that case was tried and convicted in 1947, still, it didn't catch the public eye all that much. It was actually a district attorney or federal attorney, I think, named Bradford Snell, who in 1974 testified before the Senate and really drummed up public eye about this occurrence that had happened a couple of decades before. Right. So it wasn't really considered a scandal or a huge nefarious plot until Bradford Snow came about. Right. And again, still, not everybody is on the same page about whether this was a nefarious plot. No one actually disputes that GM and National City Lines were trying to sell buses across the country. Right. But they're saying monopolize ground transportation prove it. Right. You can't really prove motivation like that. Or clearly the federal prosecutors couldn't. Right. But as one guy pointed out in a Mountain Express, which is a paper out of Asheville, I read a cool article in there about this the result was still the same. The death of the trolley car. Absolutely. So whether that was the intent or not, that was still the result. Yeah, that was the intent. And I think one of the reasons why this became such a point of source of irritation among the public when Snow came out was that it was which was kind of right in the middle of the energy crisis, wasn't it? Well, that was part of it, but also it was around the birth of the environmental protection movement, right? Sure. We have, like, the Nascent, EPA, and people are starting to think about paying attention, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I think also faith in corporations had been lost time and time again. People were kind of getting fed up with it. Right? Yeah, it's a good point. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no muss, no fuss, then there's nowhere else to look. In Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code S YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace. Comssk. Squarespace. So, Chuck, we were talking about public transportation and cars being in a horse race to see who was going to serve or which was going to serve the United States. Right. There's also another sub race going on between what exactly would fuel those cars? Yeah. Oil or gasoline or ethanol. Right. Henry Ford designed the Model T to run on either one. I know. Which is pretty interesting to think back. This country could have gone in a whole different direction, man. It totally could have. Ford was actually a huge proponent of ethanol. He called it the fuel of the future, which is kind of weird because it had been around for several decades already. It used to power all sorts of equipment. Right. I think Ford also said that one year's yield of an acre of potatoes can be used to fuel the machinery to cultivate that acre for the next century. But we went with gas. We did go with gas. And do you know why? I'm not sure. I know that gas was just kind of a dirty byproduct at the time of oil crude oil production. Yes. They were looking for kerosene. They wanted kerosene to light things. And no one really had any use for gas right at the time. But once some oil fields opened up you ever heard of a little movie called There Will Be Blood? Yes. Once some oil fields opened up in Texas around that time, oil suddenly became cheaper, gas became cheaper, advances in the refining process became cheaper, and ethanol was more expensive. It was as simple as that. And Daniel Day Lewis once again drinks our milkshake. Yes. Which we've mentioned before, I will eat your life a long time ago. Yeah. It was so Chuck, I guess with the national CityLine scandal going on, there was R1 last nail in the coffin. That came from a president, right? Yes. The cars were in full swing. People were digging it, and what we needed now was major interstate to connect everyone together. And in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower, he signed the Interstate Highway Act, which created about 42,000 miles of highway from coast to coast. Yes. And the rest is history, literally history. Also, that one act really changed the American economy a lot, too. Yeah. The way we spend our money. Not just that. I mean, think about fast food is one. Sure. Roadside attractions through food. Yes. Billboards. John was talking about billboards in the article, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah. I came across a study by these two guys named Shapiro and Hassett, and they reckon, I guess you could put it, that every year, cars in the highway system, just automobile use, generates $314.7 billion for businesses in the United States. That's direct. Like, you drive up to a McDonald's, okay. You drive to the mall. The fact that automobiles exist generates that. Right. You know what else happened to help this along? What they started? New zoning laws were created, and when businesses were built, and for the first time, parking spaces were required, and a certain amount of parking spaces per business, which still exists today. And what happened was some cities, like, abandoned sidewalks altogether at this point, and they pushed businesses back further from the road in favor of parking lots, obviously, and places that were pretty easily accessible by foot or by whatever, bicycle, all of a sudden, they were a little further away, and they weren't as accessible, and the only way you get there was by your car. Wow. So thanks a lot for that, too. Yeah. It looks like, I don't know, public transit. Does it have a choice? Chance? Well, it's making a comeback now, obviously, because gas prices are so high now, and the car production has reached, I think, a ten year low last year. John said. Dropped 18% last year. Yeah, but that was because gas was $5 a gallon, and everybody you remember, Marta ridership went up through the roof like double or tripled, and then gas goes back down. Everybody's. Like, what the heck? Marta yeah, but I think people are starting to realize a little more coupled with the environmental impact and public transport is coming back a little bit, but it'll never overtake all. Consider this, though. The Cash for Clunkers program, right? In and of itself, supports automobiles. The recently defunct yeah, as of today, I think, actually. Oh, it ended. Did they go through all $3 billion already? I don't know. It was hugely successful. I know they sold an estimated quarter of a million cars with just the first $1 billion. That's a lot of cars. It is. And you say 4 miles per gallon, I think, was the requisite. Was it? Yeah. Weird. So the American obsession with cars continues. And to answer this question, why are we so dependent on it? Has it become the dominant form of transportation because it was cheaper at the right time, and that's what consumers want. So if you want to know more about this, there's all sorts of cool links on the LMI page on this article. Type in automobile, dominant form of transportation, and the handy search bar, howstep works.com. And Chuck, let's plug real quick here. What do we plug in this time? Plug the blogs in the webcast. Josh and I have a shared blog called Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. You can access it on the right side of the home page on our website, and we write about interesting things and newsy items and people getting the little scrappy debates, do they? Yeah. Social media, my friend. Yeah. And the Friday blog recap is getting a lot of traffic. Now. We welcome you, if you want to say something about the show, to log on Fridays and tell us what you think. Yeah. And the webcast is live at 01:00 p.m.. Eastern time every Wednesday video. Yeah. You can find that on your blog post that day. It's also on you stream and Facebook. Right. So there's the plugin. Plugging is over, which means it's time for listener mail. Listener mail. Josh, I'm just going to call this. We shall use our powers for good. We have a regular kind of an email buddy, Christopher, that writes in a lot, and he's a really cool guy. And he wrote in and asked us to give a little shout out to blood platelet donation. He and his family have been donating platelets for years. And he says beginning at the end of August is a very critical time when blood and platelets are needed the most. And people know a lot about blood donations and how important that is. But few people know about platelet donation and other forms of donation that the Red Cross and State blood services take and what they're used for. Platelets, for example, are used for chemotherapy and leukemia patients. These treatments destroy platelets, which are essential for the clotting of blood, which is a very big deal. Sure. And patients frequently require platelet transfusions to allow their blood to clot if they get injured. Platelets are needed all the time, especially with the increase of cancer and leukemia cases in recent years. Blood Services also accepts red blood cells and plasma to help other patients and people in need. So his family has a freakishly high platelet count, and when they donate, one single donation goes to help three or four people in need. Pretty cool. Yeah. And most people single donation goes to help at least two patients. So he said it takes a little longer, about an hour and 45 minutes, which is one reason why they don't get as many donations. And that's just the process, though, and they really need it. So we just want to encourage folks. He actually wanted us to podcast about it, so maybe we'll do that one day. But go give blood platelets people. Did you know that my girlfriend's blood saves infants? Really? She lacks the type of herpes that most people get by age five. Really? But you're not supposed to get it before age five. Very few people are without this type of purpose. She's one of them. So her blood is used directly to save infants. How crazy is that? Did you know that a gaze from my wife saves a baby puppy from all over the world? So she looks upon them? That's very cool. She should exercise that to beat that yumi. Okay. Yeah. Yuumi. I want to see a yummy and Emily saved down. Right? Let's do that. All right, so donate blood, platelets and blood and plasma and puppy and Joshua and puppies and Joshua are going to go do that today. All right. If you have an email about what you can save, send it to Stuffpodcast at how. Steflix.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, 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 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. 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79882611-797c-442a-81cb-ae9b012ff9e4 | Cats: Invasive Species? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/cats-invasive-species | Josh and Chuck wade into dangerous waters with the debate over just how destructive cats are for local ecosystems (turns out it’s pretty bad) and some ideas on what to do about that (you may not want to know). Tune in and tense up!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Josh and Chuck wade into dangerous waters with the debate over just how destructive cats are for local ecosystems (turns out it’s pretty bad) and some ideas on what to do about that (you may not want to know). Tune in and tense up!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 24 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=144, tm_isdst=0) | 44576257 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey. And welcome to the hornets nest. I'm Josh there's Chuck. Jerry's here. And this is stuff you should know. Josh is his idea. Yeah. As I was researching this, I started sweating like cartoon bullets off of my forehead like I was Little Orphan Annie or something when she startled. Yeah, I get it. Nancy is a better one. Do you remember Nancy with sluggo? Yeah, I remember nancy and Sluggo. Yeah. So she is one of the great overlooked comic strips of all time. And she's still going on. She got a new breath of life in her. She's using computers and the Internet and everything. But same great almost kind of subversive humor and outlook that Nancy always had. Check it out. I haven't looked at the funny papers in a long time. Do they still have the old favorites? Yeah, but I don't think they call them funny papers anymore. Because they're not funny. They never work. No, because no one wants to point out that it's made of paper. The comics. Yeah. I used to love Beetle Bay, of course. Garfield in Bloom County. And when I got a little bit older, someone that got a little political. That was so good. Sally Forth. No, got political. Yeah, not Bloom County, but the other one that was Dunesberry. Yeah, Dunesbury. Oh, yeah. That one was always political. And then Beetle Bailey. I love Beetle Bailey. What about Hagar the horrible? He was fine. Family Circus. I liked it at the time, but looking back, it was the least funny comic in history. It was cute. Brenda Starr, Mark Trail. Mary Worth. Mark Trail. What was going on with that guy? It was just a nature propaganda disguised to say a comic strip really was, you know, nature propaganda. Save the Earth and all that. Big nature. So that's funny that you say that, because there's a group of people who are involved in today's topic that possibly refer to their opponents as big nature. Weirdly. Chuck. I don't think they do. But the same sense and sensibility is still there. Jane Austin reference, second one in two podcasts. That's right. So, yeah. Can we just caveat this episode? You said it was a hornet's nest. This is about cats, domestic cats being an invasive species. I'm sorry, but they are. I love cats. I've got two cats. I've always had cats. Always love cats. I will always have cats. So this is nothing to do with being anti or pro cat. It is just dissecting sort of the scientific problem of cats in the same way that cats dissect birds and small mammals for sports. Right. Which we talked about a lot, but we'll talk about it a lot more. Yeah. So I'm with you, Chuck. It is an issue and it's a problem. And one of the things that's contributing to making it a problem is that the two sides are so diametrically opposed and so over one another that there's just no conversation going on. And then the general public like you and me are just kind of blissfully unaware of this and then just get goose every once in a while when the media kind of picks up this issue or runs a headline or an article about it. And the idea is, like you said, that it's pretty much widely held among wildlife and conservation biologists that cats house cats, and specifically feral cats are an invasive species around the world and they wreak enormous havoc, including species extinction in the habitats in our backyards and the habitats that they inhabit. But before we really kind of get into that and lay out the case one way or another, we should probably talk about the cat and where the cat came from and why they hang out in our backyards to begin with. That's right, we should. They came, we think, from the mid east. With not mid east as in Virginia. That's not the mid east. The Middle East. That's the Mid Atlantic. Yeah. The Middle East of Planet Earth. Okay, got you. Which was these wild cats from the forest called Felix Sylvesteris, which is interesting. I never thought about Sylvester the cat taking it or Felix the cat. Yeah, or Felix taking their names from the original cats. But that is the thought is that they came from there were most likely domesticated about 12,000 years ago, and we don't know for sure, but the general thought is once we started becoming an agriculturally based society and we had grain and seed to store, then the mice and the rats started coming around and the wildcats started coming around to take care of that problem. And humans were like, hey, this is fine with us. And then over time, some of those cats got a little friendlier than others. And the people were like, oh, you like a little scratch under the neck, huh? Well, you want to come inside and have some milk? Shouldn't give cats milk, but they didn't know that at the time. And that's the best idea we have going of how cats initially became domesticated. Yeah, and there's evidence of cats being domesticated that come from Cyprus, where there are no native cats. So cat bones and cat fossils are ostensibly domesticated because they would have had to have been taken there by humans by ship. It's possible the cat stowed away, but it's also just as possible that 8000 years ago, when this cat bone on Cyprus is from the cat was domesticated enough to ride along aboard a ship with sailors. And then there's another cat fossil from about 1500 years earlier than that. So just under 10,000 years ago, where the cat was deliberately buried with the human, which strongly also suggests domestication. So it's not a really big stretch. That by about 120 years ago and we started storing surplus grain. That's about the time when cats and humans really started to kind of coincide. Yeah. And I think you would probably best describe this as a mutualistic relationship at this point, because both species are benefiting. We have talked in the past about commensalism, and maybe that's how one might have described it, which is like, cats are eating the mice. Humans were like, Fine, big whoop, we don't really care. But I would say it's probably more mutualistic, don't you think? Yes, absolutely. Again, I posit that there's no such thing as commensalism. I think both parties somehow, some way, always are either benefited or harmed by the situation. And this is a great example of that, because if we're growing surplus or if we're growing grain, we have surplus to feed more and more people. And the last is through the winter. Whatever. We have these grain stores. If mice and rats come along and eat our grain, that's a problem for us. And if the cats come along and eat the mice or the rats, that solves our problem. So the cat is getting to eat all of this food that's showing up at these green stores where otherwise they would have to go and hunt all over the place. The cats benefiting. We're benefiting mutualism. That's right. I agree. Okay. You don't have to talk me into it, buddy. Okay. I'll lay off, then. I'll lay off. We need T shirts, man. Do we still have T shirts? I don't know neither. I haven't seen them in a while. We've never done a good job at promoting that stuff. No, that's all right. So here's the deal with cats as an invasive species, though, is they are very hardy as a species. They survive even though they don't have a real natural range. They can live in many, many different environments successfully. And there are obviously your pet cats, which I don't think we said. What was the name of the domesticated cat finally? Felix Cattus, which sounds like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, like when Road Runner would they freeze frame? Yes, it's basically what they would write, but that's it. Yeah, totally unimaginative as it gets. So you've got your feral cats and you've got your cats that live inside houses but also freely roam outside. I have a pet cat, but it never comes inside because I don't like changing litter boxes. So we have outdoor cats, and then there's the feral cat, and those are the two cats that are causing problems. And they are very much different. This is from The Grabster, he points out. They're very different than other, quote unquote, domestic, invasive species that you might have as a pet, because we talked about the Burmese python problem in Florida. Those aren't truly domesticated. And then there are feral dog populations in the world, and they do cause problems, but not like cats do. No, definitely not. So apparently there's also, like, a really good case that's made that cats aren't truly domesticated either, which rings a bell to me from our animal domestication episode. Yeah, I think I remember that. I think they're considered semi domestic, actually. It's all intents and purpose, basically. Oh, no, they just come and go as they please. They hang around us as much as they want to. All right, well, speaking of hanging out, let's take a little break and we'll get to the grizzly details of what these cats do, because even though we've said it before, you might not have heard that episode. You might think, what would my sweet little cat do if let outside besides just creep around? We'll tell you what they'll do right after this. All right, Chuck. So I think anybody who owns a cat that's not 100% indoor cat has had some experience or other where their cat has shown up on their doorstep with a present of a bird mouse, a small rodent, baby squirrel, a baby seal, depending on where you are, but some little animal where the cat is saying either, hey, I want you to have this. I really appreciate all of the fancy feasts, or they theorize that possibly the cat is keeping a toy that it was playing with earlier, it's brought home to hang on to, or it's following in its kind of evolutionary impulse to teach other cats how to hunt. It's teaching you how to hunt, right. That's what it's bringing. Those are the big main theories that I saw. Yeah. Like, see how it's done, buddy? Yeah. You see this bird? Can you do that? And you may be horrified when the cat does that. You may also be like, you know, Felix, come on, you can't do that. Where's this bird's head anyway? And then just kind of forget about it, put it out of your mind. Maybe you go to the trouble of burying the bird, which is nice if you do that, but you just move along with your day. Your cat might do that a few times a year. And if you multiply that by the number of cats who are roaming around and you multiply that by the number of feral cats, you suddenly get into really big numbers. And the idea of just how destructive invasive cats are really kind of comes into focus. Yeah. So here are numbers from about nine years ago in 2013. And this is kind of hard to track, but they do the best job that they can with these numbers. Domestic cats. These are to say, pet cats and feral cats. And we should say that feral cats kill about three times as more animals and birds as domestic cats, but between 1.4 and 3.7 billion with a b, birds and 6.9. And this is a big range to 20.7 billion mammals a year. This is every single year. And you found some more stats that really kind of put a cherry on top here. Rodents are linked to the extinction of 75 different species. Cats are linked to the extinction of 63 different species where they have completely been extinct. 40 bird species, 21 mammal species, and two reptile species. Right. So we should say that the species extinction, that's global. They think those numbers that you said, between up to around 4 billion birds and as many as 20 plus billion mammals every year, chuck, that's in the United States alone, and not only in the United States alone. That's just in the contiguous 48 states alone every year. That's what this 2013 study between Smithsonian Institute and the US. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded Right? So there are people, and we'll get to some of the possible solutions later on. But if you talk to the head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and named Pete Mara, he will say very clearly that there should be a zero tolerance for free ranging cats. They should be trapped. They should be removed and not returned, and then goes on to say more things that are a little more grizzly should be done if you have no other choices, which is euthanasia, professional hunters, poisons, stuff like that. Right. And it is super harsh. And if you're a cat person, you're just, like, horrified right now. But what about the bird people? Right? So that's why there's the opposition on one side, or wildlife biologists and conservationists, and on the other side, cat advocates and activists, and they're butting heads over this. And it's like a really big it's a huge issue one way or another. And one side is saying, just leave them alone. The other side is like, no, we can't leave them alone, or else they're going to continue to create species extinctions and kill billions and billions of birds and small mammals every year. And there's a lot of ways that they might do this. There's a story of a cat named Tibbles. Oh, man, this is crazy. It was a single female cat who arrived on a little island off of New Zealand called Stevens Island in the 1890s. There were no cats there. In fact, there were no predatory mammals. So much so that the little Stevens Island rent lost its ability to fly. It had no reason to fly. It had all the food it needed on the island. It didn't need to escape predation. So they lost their ability to fly and became one of just three flightless songbirds in the world. And now we have two species of flightless songbirds in the world, thanks to Tibbles and the litter that she had. That's right. Tibbles arrived pregnant. And, I mean, this is a very clear cut case of one pregnant cat showed up and literally, Tibbles in the offspring, made the Stevens Island rent no more. It is completely extinct. Yeah. And so that's one single instance where they can say, this cat did this, and I've even seen it, like said in places like the legend goes or the story goes, or something like that. So I'm not 100% certain on exactly how well documented it is. And more to the point, even if that is 100% accurate, it's really difficult to extrapolate that onto the rest of the world, onto wildlife in general. There are a lot of factors and a lot of pressures that go into a species going extinct. But from what I'm seeing, the conservation biologists and wildlife biologists who are doing meta analysis of smaller studies and kind of putting the numbers together, they typically tend to make suppositions on the lower end. Right. So these numbers may actually be under reported. They may be much higher than what we think. But the upshot of it is that there seems to be a cats seem to be, if not directly or solely responsible in some cases. They are largely responsible for some species extinction. That's right. Cats also spread disease. If you look at rabies in 2014, it's not that long ago, cats accounted for 61% of all rabid domestic animals in the United States. I don't know, people talk about, like, possums and raccoons and rats, and they're just like, oh, God, they're rabid animals. Yet they will feed a stray feral cat, which is something that even animal people say you shouldn't do, because that just means they will reproduce and there will be more feral cats. And feral cats don't do so well. They struggle to live, and they get hurt and they get hit by cars, and they get run over. And I think a large percentage of the litter doesn't even make it past six months. So if you love cats, you shouldn't be feeding feral cats. Yeah, it's hard to wrap your head around it, but if you want a healthy population of cats, you shouldn't feed feral cats. Right. It does seem very paradoxical and even mean, but we'll get into a little more why. But one of the things you said about affects cats can have on the ecosystem, especially feral cats, is that they in particular spread toxoplasma Gandhi, which we had an entire episode on years and years and years ago. But it's a type of parasite that can create neurological symptoms in humans. It's pretty rare that it actually does that, but it can cause birth defects in children, in fetuses, which is why you're pregnant. You're advised to stay away from litter boxes or handling cat feces in general, which is just good advice, generally, because of toxoplasma. And it actually can kill other animals, too, right? Oh, sure. And it spreads through the feces. So any warm blooded we can get infected. Humans can and do get toxic. I'm sure I have toxoplasmosis by this point. Any warm blooded animal can get it, and yeah, it can kill animals as large as a seal. Yes. And the reason why cats are so important into this chain is the tea. Gandhi eggs can only reproduce or the parasite can only reproduce in the gut of the cat. If you take cats out of the equation. If you take cats that are roaming around the landscape, pooping everywhere, you take toxoplasmosis out of the equation largely, too. And then lastly, Chuck, one of the other things, in addition to actually wreaking havoc on bird and small mammal and also vertebrate reptile and amphibian populations, too, by directly eating them or killing them for sport, they're having an indirect effect on some other native populations of, like, hawks, owls, larger mammals that eat these things for food. Like, this is their food that the cats are killing and eating in some cases, or sometimes just killing. That's right. And we've talked a lot about the trickle down effect of removing anything from an ecosystem. And certainly birds are a vital part of any ecosystem, how they spread the seed and pollination. Like, everything ends up being affected when you start extincting. Sure. extincting birds. Sure. And so I know it sounds very much like we're teeing off on cats. We're not. That's not the point. The point is to kind of get across that what you think of as like a lovable, cuddle bug of an animal actually does have negative impacts on the ecosystem. In particular, the ones that are feral, the ones that are unearned, the ones that don't have a home to go to, the ones that it turns out we have zero idea of exactly how many there are. The ferocat pop populations. That's right. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, we'll take our second break here, and we'll talk a little bit more about the problem and some solutions right after this. So there are about 86 million pet cats in the United States, and I know I've talked about this before about 25% to 30% of those cats are either full time outdoor cats as your pets, or do you let your cat outside for large parts of the day, or whatever? Indoor outdoor cats? It's a problem. I don't think people should let their cats outside. I think if you have a pet cat, it should be an indoor only cat because of the lizards and the birds and the mammals that they kill, because of the disease that they can spread. I've always been an indoor cat person since I've been an adult. I grew up having outdoor cats, and there was a constant flood of dead animals on our front porch all the time. And it was pretty horrifying as a kid to grow up with that kind of thing. But this is one of those situations where we don't like to get on our high horse very often, but you should keep your cats inside. And if not wanting to deal with the litter box is your issue, then you might want to rethink why you have cats. Martha Stewart hawks one where they send you a new fresh litter box every however long, and then you just pack up the old one, throw it away. Yeah. I mean, it stinks. I hate cleaning up the litter box more than anything, but I love birds and chipmunks more than I hate cleaning up the litter box. That's a really good way to put it, Chuck. Yeah. So that's just free roaming cats is what they're called, what you described. They have a house to go to, they have people that feed them at that house. They're considered a pet, but they're allowed to run around the neighborhood as much as they like. So if we have about 86 million cats that are pets and 25% to 30% of them are roaming outdoors, that's a significant number. But from the sentences, the studies that have been conducted over decades, the feral cat population vastly seems to outnumber the free roaming cat population. Some studies say it's about the same, maybe are probably a little more feral cats. Maybe 30 million. That is the lowest I've been able to come up with is 30 million. That's the lowest estimate I've seen across the entire internet, everywhere on the Internet. And the lowest I saw was 30 million. Yeah. Some sources put it more in line with about the total number of pet cats, that there's about 80 million feral cats running around again, the United States alone, just the US. And that if that is the case, then you really do start to get into some really big numbers really fast about how much of an effect that 80 million feral cats could have on local bird and small mammal populations. Yeah, and if a feral cat makes it to adulthood, which, like I said, pretty high percentage, died before six months of age, but if they do make it to adulthood, they are very efficient killers, and there are no natural predators for cats. And you might think, oh, no, there's plenty of things that can kill a cat. Sure there are. But their populations, like a cougar or something, there aren't many of those left anymore. Those populations have been decimated because of all the reasons that that might happen. And what you end up with is a lot of feral cats with nothing hunting them, but they're hunting everything else. Well, I found a 2013 Ohio state study, and they found that urban coyotes, we did another episode on coyotes, remember? Well, as their numbers are growing and growing, they're actually keeping feral cat populations in check. Interesting. And as a result, some bird species, small mammal species, their numbers are rebounding because urban coyotes tend to keep feral cats at bay, like feral cats avoid them like the plague. The thing is, coyotes tend to avoid humans. So the feral cats have just been hanging around buildings, offices, businesses, like human built areas in avoiding kind of more natural urban areas like woods and parks and tree, forested areas, that kind of thing, where the coyotes hang out. So the wildlife is protected in the forested, woody areas of a city, but they're prey, like, around human habitation, like buildings and offices and stuff, right. Which makes sense. So we've outlined the problem. It is really sad because I love cats and I don't like the idea of cats being a problem, but they are. So what are the solutions? What are the solutions? You're leaving that to me. Yes, we'll both talk about it, but I'm ticking you up. So one of the solutions that and this is if you're a cat advocate and activist, you are probably very much in favor of a type of approach called Trap Neuter Release TNR programs, right? These were developed the earliest I saw is in the late 90s. If you were animal control, like for a county or city or something like that, if you have a Trap New to release program, if you find a cat, you capture it, you take it to the shelter, spas or neuters the cat, they clip the tip of the cat's ear off and then you release it back into the wild feral cat. As they're doing this, the point of trap neuter release is that the cat is not euthanized. So it's an end to euthanasia as far as animal shelters like before. Trap New to Release, if a cat got picked up by animal control and made it to the animal shelter, that was it for the cat. This is a chance to give cats the opportunity to live their life out, but you've taken away their ability to reproduce. So you're now managing the reproduction rate of a feral cat colony. And if you get your hands on enough of these feral cats, and you spay and neuter enough of them, and you keep up with it fast enough, studies have shown that you have a really good chance of stabilizing and then eventually diminishing the feral cats in your area. Yeah, and there have been a lot of studies on this. It was one in 2019 that found over a decade. It's called high intensity TNR, was very successful at reducing feral cat populations. There's high density and low density TNR. And the idea it seems to shake out is that unless you are doing high density, unless you're getting to like 75% of the population, then they say you might as well not even be doing it right. So high intensity TNR really works. And then in this one study, it had a couple of other interesting parts to it, is they weren't just measuring how many feral cats are out there, but they're trying to do studies that like, say, hey, we want healthy cat population, so let's look at harm reduction for feral cats. So if you have overpopulation and too many feral cats, then Ed points out there's a lot of misery going around. They struggle to find food more, they spread disease more, they are constantly pregnant. Cats reproduce like bunnies do. They can have up to three litters a year and up to twelve to 15 cats per litter. And these cats walking around constantly pregnant, constantly giving birth to kittens that don't live more than six months, constantly looking for food because they're overstressed. If you're a cat lover again, that's not what you want. And so they tried to measure the harm reduction and they found that high intensity TNR reduced preventable cat deaths by 30 times. Yes, 30 times. Not 30%, 30 times fewer preventable cat deaths. And they define preventable cat deaths by cats that were picked up and euthanized at a shelter or cats that died before reaching adulthood. And cats have a really high mortality rate for young cats. I saw a study from 2003 or four that found a mortality rate of about 48% within three months of birth and 75% within six months of birth. You want to talk about harm reduction? The most common cause of death was trauma. So they're getting mauled by dogs or eagles or owls. Hit by cars. Yes, getting hit by cars. So it is a really harsh, unhappy life for feral cats. And the premise of TNR is, okay, we can actually lead to a reduction in these kittens that are being born in these horrible conditions. Living three months and then getting malled by a neighborhood owl or something like that. That's a bonus. That's a plus. But you hit on something that's really important, Chuck, that there is a pretty decent amount of research on actually, that's not true. There's not that much research on the effectiveness of trap nude release, but the studies that have been done on them that are high quality studies do emphasize that. No, there's definitely a threshold to where you're just completely wasting time and energy. And even worse than that, if you're not hitting, I think, what do you say about the 75% threshold of Spain and neutering feral cats in a given colony? Yeah, if you're not hitting that 75% mark, you're doing worse than nothing. Because the people who are aware of TNR, the TNR program in your city and county, think you're doing something right. It's worse than doing nothing. Because if everyone knows you're not doing anything, then people might say, we got to do something. But if they think you're doing something, but you're not actually really doing anything, that's harmful. And that's ultimately harmful, not just to these kittens that are being born like that, but also to the birds and small mammals that those kittens are eating within their three to six months on Earth. That's right. TNR is expensive. It takes a lot of time. Trapping any animal is hard. Like one of our dogs, Charlie, we trapped. It was a feral dog in the woods and it took five days to trap these dogs. It's a commitment to trap an animal. Wait a minute, wait a minute. You have a dog that you trapped that was feral? Yeah. Charlie. I didn't know that. Yeah, Charlie, we found in the woods with four other dogs, and just these dogs would not come near. Anybody when they were puppies. And we spent with our friends, Adair and Elliot spent, I think, like, five days trying to trap these dogs. And Charlie was the last one that was holding out that we could not get in a Burger King cheeseburger is what finally did it. They'll do it every time. And Charlie, as a result, spent the first six years of her life very afraid of people and would just be rounders through our house when people would come over and not come near anybody. But since my daughter came along, more people at the house, and just over time, she's just the sweetest girl. Now. It goes up to everybody after 20 seconds, and it used to take days or weeks. Oh, that's cool. It's a great success story there. But long story short, I have to say, Chuck, while you were describing tracking Charlie and her pals, I just imagined that music in that scene from Planet of the Apes where they're rounding up the humans with nets, right? Is that basically what was going on? No, we had a big cage trap. Oh, got you. No nets on horseback. No. Like, dog goes in to get food and then the door swing shut. But Charlie was very smart and Charlie just turned 13. Oh, happy birthday, Charlie. Great. But a long way of saying that trapping an animal takes a lot of time. And cats are super smart and it's time consuming, it's expensive, and TNR, it's hard to get a lot of people rallying around it and funding it, especially if you're expecting the county to fund it. Most of that stuff is going to come from donations. Plus, also, if you're a wildlife a conservation biologist, you might say, no, I don't want to do TNR at all. Like these cats, let's say you pick one up at six months and you neuter it and release it into a feral colony. Most of those feral colonies are managed by the city or the county, meaning that they're fed, right? Which ends up attracting more abandoned cats that haven't been neutered or spayed yet. And then worse than that, let's say these cats live an extra four or five years. How many animals do they kill? Yeah, they're not reproducing, but you're releasing them back out to kill these birds and mammals. And those biologists say, this is too big of a problem to take up TNR programs. We need to do something else, right? And everybody says, okay, well, what else? What can we do? And the biologists clear their throats and kind of like, put their hands in their pockets and look at one another and say, who wants to say it? And the one who's on his phone not paying attention suddenly realizes everyone else is taking a step back. And he's up. Oh, boy. Oh, and that's me. Yeah, it's a terrible thing. But the other solution is that, you know, I don't even want to say it, but it's killing cats. Australia does this pretty effectively. In 2016, they began using a poison. Here's the deal. His cats probably won't eat poison, so they have these traps where a cat will go in and it will spray their fur with poison. The cats groom themselves by licking their fur. They ingest the poison and they die, ed points out. He's like, listen, no one cries for the dead rats and the dead mice, but dead cats? You're going to get some public outrage. Yes, for sure. There's a lot that's mixed up with that one. We've chosen cats. There's, like, only just a small handful of animals on the planet. Out of all the animals on the planet, there's such a select group that we've said, come live in our human world or human culture. And cats are one of the top ones. Cats are pets. Come into our house, right? Yeah. Have my milk. And again, the cat's like, please, this is really bad for me. I can't turn it away. Please stop tempting me. But that's a huge part of it. So even knowing that cats are out there having this huge effect on birds and mammals, like possibly creating species extinction, that doesn't just trigger something in us humans, like, oh, well, then we got to get rid of cats. Right? That's just not how it works. But that's what a lot of biologists suggest we do, and not get rid of all cats, but get rid of feral cats, like get rid of do away with TNR programs and instead go back to if you pick a cat up, you take it in and euthanize it, and that's that. Because not only is it not reproducing any longer, it's also not killing small animals in the time between where it's picked up and spayed and neutered and then released back into the wild, and then the time that it dies of whatever cause. But again, how are you ever going to get anybody behind something like that? Do we even want to get behind something like that? And is that a thing that humans would want to take on? Like, okay, we've got this big problem. We need to handle it. If we handle it this way, we can probably handle it basically once and for all. But is that something we want to do? Is that okay to do? Yeah, I mean, these are the big questions. I hope you're not looking to me for an answer. No, unfortunately, it's definitely rhetorical right now. Some people would answer, obviously, one way or another. But I think there's a lot of people who are like, man, I really do care about birds, and I really do care about chipmunks and biodiversity, and I really don't like invasive species. Like, what am I to do? Yeah, well, at the very least, if you have outdoor cats, bring them inside. Yeah. And that's another thing, too, is one of the things that you would have to do part and parcel with this is in most cities and counties, you have to get a license to have a dog. You don't necessarily have to do that for a cat. You could start creating laws like that, create leash laws for cats. Like, really step it up and say, we love cats. You can have a cat, but you have to keep your cat in the house. If your cat's out of the house, you have to keep your cat on a leash. If a cat's feral, it's going to get picked up. So there's stuff you can do. It's just a question of will, is what it is. Yeah, when I said that before, I got met with emails. But my cat loves being outside. All they do is want to be outside it's because they want to go kill things. Yeah, almost exclusively. Like, cats love to lay in the sunshine, but that's why you'll find them on sunny spots inside your house. And those sunny spots are just fine. The cats want to go out and kill things. That's why they scratch at the door if you let them out once. And I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here, but I love cats, and I hate the idea of running over a cat in my car. That's very traumatizing for an individual and a family and the cat. Well, sure. So that's where I stand. Go ahead and email me if you're mad at me. So there's a group of vocal critics and opponents to the very people who produce these studies starting in 2013. And basically anybody who criticizes TNR programs who say these studies that are getting all of this media exposure, they're based on bad science, their numbers are inflated. They're basically making all this stuff up. One of the arguments that they make is that cats tend to prey on old or weak members of, like, bird or small mammal species that probably wouldn't have made it to reproduction time anyway, so they're not actually having an effect on the population. And there's answers to all these, too, that they've had. There's a flame war going on between this group of wildlife biologists and a specific group of cat advocates, and they're like answering one another and calling one another out. But one of the answers to that is, well, okay, they're still animals that are suffering harm because cats are killing them. Even if they were going to die anyway, they're still being mauled by a cat. And then also, what data are you basing that on that cat there? You tend to kill infirm and weak members of status. Where did that come from? So each side, in classic 2020 fashion, is accusing the other of basically basing all their stuff on junk science, making things up, making kind of character attacks, being snying to one another. It's just a beautifully 2020s argument. So it's interesting to read about, but then you step back and you think this is really serious stuff. We need to do something. Everybody says we've got to do something. Either a good TNR program or something. We can't just keep going on like this. Yeah, because doing nothing creates again colonies of feral cats that are not living their best life. Right. You got anything else? No, not right now. Okay. Well, if you want to know more about cats as invasive species, and in particular trap neuter release programs, you can read all about that stuff all over the Internet. There's a ton of it out there. And since I said there's a ton of it out there, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Green briar bunker addendum. We heard from a few people that have been there, taken the tour and had other interesting things to say. And this is from Greg Soster in Columbus. Oh, hi. Let me see here. Let me skip the beginning. In 1995, my family returned to the Greenbrier. They had previously been there in 1991 for a Christmas stay. This time the bunker was known by the general public and we signed up for the guided tour. So I guess when they went, it was still not known as a thing. So it was kind of shrouded in mystery at that point. Here we go. Number one. The back entrance also has an enormous blast doors with a very long haul leading to the under the mountain. A truck has to be able to drive in the ear pressure when they close. It is amazing. Other interesting rooms included dentist office, surgical operating room, and a crematorium TV studio and a water purification plant. The answer, and we heard from quite a few people here, families do not go to the bunker. Each member of Congress has an assigned bunk, and each bunk has their prescription medicines fully stocked and spare prescription eyeglasses for everybody as well. That's such a great touch. Yeah. Otherwise you get all the Gloria Vanderbilt. Right. Congress arrives by plane. There's a giant airstrip about 10 miles away, and the army built a wide super highway from the airport straight to the bunker. Secret Service would run drills to get the president to the bunker in eleven minutes or less. And then finally, it is strange to drive there because it was windy and it was a two lane road. And then suddenly the last 10 miles, it's like a racetrack. I remember joking to my wife that the greenbrier had a heck of a driveway. So they're talking about the superhighway that leads right to it. Right. And just to finish out, greg says the entire hotel staff and many townspeople knew about the secret for decades. And they kept the secret out of a sense of duty and pride. They hated it when the secret was revealed by Mr. Ted Gupp because the traditional treasure was lost. That's pretty neat. So who is that from? That was from Greg in Columbus, Ohio. That's right. Thanks a lot, Greg. That was a good one. I appreciate that info. And if you want to be like Greg and send along some info to us, we'll try to sort through it from all the hate mail we're getting from cat lovers in the not too distant future. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-10-19-sysk-internships-final.mp3 | How Internships Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-internships-work | The term intern comes from the medical community, but virtually every industry now uses them. From real world training to coffee fetchers, interns can be used and misused in many different ways. Dive into the world of internships with us today. And for he | The term intern comes from the medical community, but virtually every industry now uses them. From real world training to coffee fetchers, interns can be used and misused in many different ways. Dive into the world of internships with us today. And for he | Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:11:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=15, tm_min=11, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=292, tm_isdst=0) | 37374818 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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 to paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass whilst yelling who's a. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned, mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. And I'm Josh Clark. And this is stuff you should know. The intern, his coffee is too hot. You're fired. Even though it'll pay you. Yeah, that's pretty much an average Monday for an intern. Can be man. When I was researching it, when I was reading this, I was like, oh, okay, this is interesting. I like all the movie references. It's great. But then when I did some external research too, I was like, whoa, this is, like, a real social issue that we're facing right now. It totally is. You know, it's like the dirty underbelly, for sure. And it sucks because it seems like there's a significant portion of millennials who are just strapped with this, who are saddled with this is just the way that the career paths have kind of gone. And from doing research, it's our fault. The Gen Xers are the first ones who caved on this, and it just paved the way for it to be the new normal. Did you ever do an internship? No. Me neither. And it wasn't like when I was in college 75 years ago, it wasn't that big of a thing. Like, of course I knew of internships, but nobody I knew did one. No, you were basically like a go getter who was just looking to pad your resume a little bit. Yeah, definitely extracurricular. Yeah. It was not super common, at least among the people I knew. And we were all just normal, average, smart college students. It wasn't like I hung out with the heads by the dumpster, so I didn't know about internships. Right. Well, that's why I didn't know about internships. Well, sure. I'm glad to know that I wasn't missing out. My mom made me steer clearer. Guys like you. I know. And now we work together. Our states are intertwined. That's right. Get this check. I saw this statistic between the 1980s and the mid two thousand s. The number or the percentage of college graduates who done an internship went from between when and when? 1980 and the mid 2000. Yeah, that's crazy. That underscores what we were just saying. Which is why I threw that out there. You have data to back it up? Yes. And data, by the way, is plural. Okay. I just want to make sure that it's set. If I stood up in front of my symposium and say, I have a lot of data for this, I might get laughed off stage. What symposium are you talking to? The data symposium. I want to be there. All right, I'll put you on the list. Okay. Bring some pretzels. So, this article is just so cute because it opens with an episode of Friends, which I don't even remember, and I've seen all those, but apparently Chandler got an internship and it led to Wacky Hijinks. Imagine that. Right? Which is also the plot of every other intern, movie or film ever. Yeah, there's one with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. Didn't see it. Me either. There's one with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn I saw just a little bit. Just enough of that to know I didn't want to see it. That was shot here in Atlanta, though. Okay, so you saw it being filmed and you're like, you and everybody on set heard you? Yeah, I think it was Google. Like real Google, not made up Google. I saw a guy the other day I meant to tell you this. In what city were we just in? Not Lawrence, Kansas, but Austin, Texas. By the way, thank you to those cities and all the others on this most recent tour, which are winding up here in New York and Atlanta soon. Right. But big shout outs to Lawrence, Kansas. Especially. Love that place. Right? But anyway, I was in Austin, and there was a group of tech dudes in Austin yes. At this restaurant that I was at having drinks. And one of them, the most obnoxious of the lot, had a Hooly shirt on. And Hooly is the fake Google type company from what's it called? Silicon Valley. The TV show. Oh, my. So he had a Hoolie shirt, and he was the one leading with all the bad jokes, and I wanted to punch him in the face. I'm betting he listens to the show, too. So you've really made your point here. Yeah. If you're in Austin and you have the Hoolie shirt, you, sir, have a punch coming. Yeah, that guy's listening. It's like, well, it's not me. My joke is rock. Yes. That couldn't be, bro. All right, so here's another step for you. The 2016 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the Nace, they said more than 72%. And this is where it gets a little like this is actually good information because the whole big question is our internships worth doing? And they found that more than 72% of paid internships did lead to job offers. So that's pretty good. That's a good number right there. I actually saw one from 2013 and it was at 63%. So there's an actual get better. Yeah, it is getting better. Which is pretty interesting because that means that it's becoming, I guess, a legitimate career path then, rather than just a fake career path. Right. But that is to point out very clearly paid internships. Paid unpaid internships, which we'll get to, which is basically, to me, very unethical, illegal thing to do. Illegal. Depending on how you're doing it, you can get away with it. But I think completely unethical. You should always pay people to work. Yes. Not exposure. Yeah, exactly. Fewer than 44% got job offers from unpaid internships. And that is not too far above the 36.5% of people who get a job offer with no internship at all. About 8% more 2013 saw that climb, too, because it was 37% got a job offer versus 35% who hadn't interned. So it does seem to be having an impact, at least between 2013 and 2016. It's been changing. Yes. And with unpaid internships in particular. I've seen that there is like a whole mentality among millennials entering the workforce who are saying. You know what. I would rather take an unpaid internship in the field that I want to get into in the hopes of getting a good job in that field. Then to start down a different path in another field that I'm not feeling so hot about and end up getting trapped in there. Yeah. And apparently they are so dedicated to this idea that people are starting to take like two, three, four unpaid internships in their fields in the hopes of making this work. Part of the problem is that means that you're feeding the gig economy because you're doing whatever side hustle you can, which, man, I hate that term so much. Side hustle. Yeah. To pay the bills. Because it just makes it so cool. It's like, no, you're being exploited. That's what it is. Not a side hustle. It's exploitation and you're messing up the economy. Okay. To a certain degree, you're having to carry out gigs to make ends meet or you have some other low paying job that is not so demanding that you can't also do your internship at the same time for parents who will just float you. Right. That's a big one, too. And so if this is the new career path where you work unpaid internships, 2340f them before you finally get a paying job in your chosen field, and it makes you rely on, say, your parents or whatever for people who can't rely on their parents. That means that path to a chosen career is closed to them. They have to just start working immediately. Yes. And that means that it's automatically unfair. So exploitation is leading to unfairness in even more sinister ways as well. Yeah, and that's something that, you know what, because of my privilege, I never thought about. But if you're out there saying, well, what's the big deal if I want to take an unpaid internship and my parents are going to float me to do that, and I get the experience and I get a job, like, who am I hurting? And you're screwing up the economy, and you're creating an unfair system for people that cannot afford to do so. You're part of the problem. And it's not just you millennials. Calm down, calm down. This has always been the case with internships, especially unpaid internships, but internships typically come from connections. Yeah, sure. So the more connected you are, or your parents are, meaning the wealthier they are, the higher chance you have of getting a plumb internship. And so advancing along the way, so much so that I was reading this really good article I would recommend to everybody. It's called the dream hoarders. How America's top 20% perpetuates inequality? And it was basically saying that any time you use your outside channel connections, outside of formal networks, your connections to get your kid or your nephew or whoever, an internship, you are gaming the system and making sure that inequality just perpetuates on and on and on. Yeah. Cronyism. Is that what it's called? Yeah, I guess so. And nepotism. Both sure, both theisms so let's look a little bit about the history of the intern. You need not look any further than the medical community as to where that comes from, that term at least. Because Postw one, there was a consensus that like, hey, you went to medical school, that was fine. You poked around some dead bodies, you may be cut a few open and that's great, you know a lot. But we don't fully feel great about just releasing you into the world as a doctor just yet. Maybe you should tag along and work as an apprentice of sorts, as a physician in training, in a hospital or a physician's office or whatever. You know, how you're going to do this, maybe you should do that. And we're going to call them interns. And that's an internship. They've been doing this for centuries and centuries. There have been apprentices where you would learn about a trade, and then later when politics came around, you could be an apprentice to a politician and learn about government jobs and such. But the word intern really comes from medicine, right? You could be a sorcerer as apprentice, too. That's right. Your parents would float you, right. Mickey Mouse's parents were loaded. At some point, though, some companies started to say, hey, I got a great idea. We can actually kind of formalize this informal thing of like, hey, can you get my cousin biff's kid on this summer as an intern at your company or at your law firm or whatever? We could formalize it by using our connections with other prestigious universities. So prestigious company meet, prestigious university, and we want some of your students to come work here for us for free. We just want to make sure that's clear. And in return, why don't you give them like college credit for it? How about that? And that's when the internship at the time it was called a coop, but that's when it really started to develop and spread and catch on. And I think the earliest one was something like at Northeastern University, which sounds made up from a Jeremy Piven movie or something like that. But it wasn't until the it really started to catch on. Yeah, it sort of started and then took a bit of a dive in the obviously eighty s and beyond from your stats. But again, as we said, even as we're saying it caught on, you are not in the norm if you got an internship in college, it was still unusual. Yeah, but between 70 and 83, the number of universities offering these co ops or internships went from 200 to 1000. So a big increase to be sure. For sure. And some people still say co op, although they're probably like in their 70s if they're saying that right, they're trying to sound hip. Well, and there is a bit of a difference, actually. Co ops, I think usually you would just stop going to school and take a full time job for a little bit, like up to a year. It's almost like a work abroad, but you don't leave. I guess you could leave, whereas internships usually, like you said, it's like a summer thing or I'm going to take a semester off and do this kind of deal. Right? Is that right? I believe so. Well, let's take a break. What man. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about whether or not internships are really necessary right after this. Hey. Summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon. Music that's so good. It's Criminal Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between. Hosts Selena Erkart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage Bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table, because there's so much world to see. And the cityadvantage Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. All right, so under the banner of this article, do we need Internships? They can be super useful. Here's my take on it. Okay. If you're going for a science based job in the Stem field, if you want to be a chemist or a biotechnologist or neuroscientist or something you want to work in AI data analysis, you might benefit from pretty well from doing an internship. Same goes with, like, psychology, political science, economics, a lot of those fields. It can be a good way to get your foot in the door and really learn as, like, a research intern or a laboratory intern. Yeah, because when you enter a profession, there's a lot of stuff that are really peculiar to that profession. It has certain jargon. People tend to work in certain types of groups. They use certain types of software, and you're making good connections. Right. They use certain types of equipment, that kind of stuff. And so through a formal internship, a real internship, you can learn quite a bit and a lot. So much so that even people who are generally against unpaid internships would say, if that's the type of internship you're talking about, then, yes, technically, an unpaid internship is acceptable because what you're getting is such Unrecreatable real world experience. Yeah. Like real job training, that's worth at least as much as you would be paid for doing whatever work they're having you do as well. Yes. And this is just me talking here, but my sense and my experience of talking to people and reading about this stuff is that internships with, like and this is not across the board, because we have had interns here not for stuff you should know, but here at how stuff works. And by all accounts, they obviously were paid and paid well. But I think in every case, really enjoyed their time and learned a lot. But generally, I think media and entertainment companies are where you are most likely to be exploited and abused and get less real world training out of your internship. Yeah, because it's broad statement, but generally true. They're the ones that are always getting sued by former interns. That's right. Which is true. We'll talk about it later. And I think one of the reasons why is because especially, like, the Stem professions or architecture is a really good example. It has such a long history of internships that there's, like, a formal process that has been established over the years. So it would be very obvious to any intern very quickly if they were being exploited instead of actually being trained in the field that they're looking to go into. Yeah. You're probably not going to go to a science laboratory and have them say, hey, I need you to take my personal laundry to the cleaners after work. Probably not. But you will probably get that from a producer, right? Exactly. Or go sit in Selena Gomez's front row seats at this concert because she's going to be a little late. Seriously? I read that article. That means I get to watch, like, the opening band pretty much. They're like, yes, that's how you want to look at it. Not like your attitude, where you're going? You're going to go places. That's funny. But yes. With media companies, they're kind of like, hey, we want that, too. So I think that they kind of picked up the slack and started twisting what was initially a good thing into something exploitive. Correct. Why is Selena Gomez? What's your name? Selena. You know, Selena Gomez, I take it she's someone famous. But why would she need someone to hold her seat, I wonder, that might be assigned seat in a ticket. You would think so, but let's say that there's some riff raff who are like, I'm going to sit wherever I want. Sure. Selena doesn't want to deal with that. Okay. She doesn't want to have to come up and be like, excuse me. Very nice. Excuse me. Got you. You're in my seat. So, intern, you just go sit there. Yeah, because she can walk up and be like, intern, you can go now. Yeah, you better not fart. I would fart all over that seat. She'd have the fartest seat in the joint. It has those cartoon green wisps of air coming off of it. All right, so all kidding aside, what you want to do when you get that internship, though, if you're looking like, some people are just looking for experience, some people are looking for a job at that company. Make yourself invaluable. That's true. With whatever, whether it's an internship or whether it's your job. Yeah, sure. Always make yourself invaluable. But what you want as an intern is for when you leave, for them to go, crap, sam's gone. Right. Where did sam. Go, we had Sam doing all this great stuff for us. Sam's the real intern. I know. I was reminding everybody else. I knew. You knew? Yeah. Well, I think people we might have said this on the air sam, who used to send us our podcast topic ideas that one summer summer of Sam and was the bat boy in one episode, the softball episode of our short lived TV show. Yeah. I ended up writing a letter of recommendation for Sam for college. He went there and ended up coming back and interning with how stuff works this year, and he was shoved by Mary, a house to work staff member. No, I think Sam had a good time. He had a great time. And I could see Sam coming to work here full time. Yes. I mean, that's not a job offer. Sam I'm not the decider, but it's one of those things, like when Sam or any of our interns, when they leave, you want people to say, well, what do we do now? Because that means that they have a good chance of coming back and working. Right. What does this have to do with Selena Gomez, though? I don't know, because she's probably never an intern. But you know who was an intern? Who? Bill Gates. Was he really? Where? I don't know. Oprah. Okay. You just got a list, huh? Tom hanks Brooks shield. Steven Spielberg tom Ford spike Lee. Tom Ford. Yeah. The fashion industry is, like, notorious for exploiting its intern. I could see that. So much. So there was a I can't remember the name of the organization, but it grew out of Occupy Wall Street, and they were handing out buttons at Fashion Week that was saying, like, pay your interns. Yeah. I don't think it went over all that well. I said Vinty. Right. I wonder how many times that's been screened. A lot in a fashion office. A lot, yeah, a fashion office. Fashion office. Cow farm. That's my understanding. All right, well, let's talk a little bit more about paid versus unpaid. Okay. And get real with some stats. So the Nace that I was telling you about earlier in 2016, they did an internship and co op survey report, and they said the hourly wage average for interns undergrad has been close to the same for about seven years at a pretty good $17.0.69 an hour. That's not bad for an average for a paid internship. I was surprised by that. I've never made that much an hour. I wonder what industry is driving that up. I don't know, because that seems high to me. Maybe us. Well, I mean, you weren't ever paid. That because the cost of living was, like, a third of what it is now. When you were an intern age. I think my first job, I was a busboy at JJ's Barbecue in Stone Mountain when I was 13. That's awesome. And I think it was, like, 335 or 375 an hour was the minimum wage. Isn't that crazy? That is so low. That's gross. I'm 13 and I live with my parents, and I can't even live on this. No, it's pretty great. Like, what 13 year old is making $60 a week? That's a lot for a 13 year old. Yeah. In 1983, he could have bought a car for $60 in yeah. At all the Van Halen albums I could buy. I'll bet you I was buying doubles just so I could play Frisbee with them. Nice. So that's paid internships. But as we have been saying, you can get away still with not paying internships. There is a six point bullet point list from the fair labor standards act for private sector for profit businesses. Yeah. Because we should point out that if you're an intern at a nonprofit yeah. They have no problems with this. Legally, you're just a volunteer. Right? Exactly. That's the distinction. Yeah. Good pointing that out. Thank you. But private sector for profit, you can technically not pay in or here are the qualifications to meet for unpaid internship. Number one is internship is similar to training that would be given in an educational environment. Boom. Right there. That's all you need right there. Yeah. That's the one that's not met, I think, most of the time. What's another one? Another one is that the experience has to be for the benefit of the Internet. That's a big one. Yes, that is a big one. These are all pretty big. Number three, the intern does not displace regular employees that is big. But works under close supervision of existing staff. Right. Not like, go make these knock off gucci wallets. Here's how you do it, and then we'll see you at the end of the summer. Make 500 of them. Yeah. You know how to run a sewing machine. Well, too bad, because you have to stitch this by hand. What's the number four, the employer that provides the training this is weird. Doesn't get any immediate advantage from the activities of the intern. And this is my favorite part, and on occasion, it's operations may actually be impeded. Yeah. This is the one that's probably never adhered to. That's the intern rule. Yeah. No immediate advantage. In other words, it 100% has to be about you giving of yourself to teach the intern. Right. And you're actually putting yourself out by having an intern. Apparently gomer pyle is your intern, or something like that. Because your operations are impeded. I don't even know if I fully agree with that one, to be honest. I love that one, though. Number five, the intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the end of the internship. Easy enough. And finally, the employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages. So it's just got to be clear. It's not like after two weeks, you're like, so where's my paycheck? Right? Like, oh, we didn't tell you and this is the way that things have been for years and years and years. But then there was something that happened in 2011 and it changed everything. And we're going to talk about that right after this message. Hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun is 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 Hardstark Banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great and it's a fun show and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you advantage miles and loyalty points and two times advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see and the Cityadvantage Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. All right, Chuck. So I was saying that in 2011, things changed a little bit cause for years and years, everybody's just like whatever. Everyone knows interns are exploited, free labor. Who cares if they want to do it, whatever. But then in 2011, two interns stood up and said no and end to this. Eric glott and Alex footman both worked for fox searchlight pictures, and I believe they both interned on the film black swan in particular in new York. And they said, you know what? This is total BS. Employees were being worked like employees. This is not an internship. We're going to sue Fox for back wages. And they did. They filed suit against them. And their whole case was based on the idea that everything. That they had gotten out of it was the same thing that any entry level employee would have gotten from it. Yes. There was no formal internship whatsoever. They weren't taught anything. There wasn't like any kind of vocational training, nothing like that. They were just basically exploited grunt work. Like I said, they sued Fox and they actually won. Yeah. I mean, I read an article called work is Work Free Internships are Immoral from The Atlantic, and the author said, basically this is a good quote, we accept that they are not salaried because they are temporary, because the work is done by students, and not insignificantly for the simple reason that we choose to call them internships, a position we've come to consider unpaid. Like, by all accounts, these dudes were Pas. Right, exactly. And they thought so, too. And a judge actually, in 2013 said, you know what? I agree with you. It was in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The judge said, yes, these guys are right. They were employees who exploited them. You need to pay them. And he actually came up with a different set of rules, his own test, which is basically like the exact same thing as the other test. Yeah, well, we'll redo it quickly just because it is a little different. The intern and the employee understand there's no expectation of compensation or job guarantee, provide similar training to the educational environment. This one's a little bit different. It's tied to the interns formal education program through integrated coursework or academic credit. Right. That is significant, too. It is aligned with the academic calendar. That's a little different. And the interns work compliments rather than displaced paid employees. Yeah, right. But he also took out something, which was that the employer does not benefit from the internship. Right. Which I guess, in some ways, at the very least, clarifies it or take out what the judge considered was an impossibility. Yeah. And made it harder for insurance to point to that and say, no, they clearly benefited from it, but they're going to anyway, I think was the judge's point. So ultimately, Fox settled in 2016 with these two guys, and they have been awarded 400 no, I'm sorry, one of them was awarded $7,500, and the other one was awarded $6,000 in back pay. And then I think 98 other interns from Fox Searchlight at the time who joined the class action are getting $495 in back pay each. Good for them. Yeah, it's the point. And they actually there were huge ripples that went through the industry, all industries that involve interns and just change things quite a bit. Well, I saw where one of them I don't know if it was this case, but one of them was appealing the decision. And I read that and I was just like, Are you serious? Yes. The fact that Fox went for five years arguing against this, they had to pay out 13. Five plus another I don't know, five grand, 50 grand for paying these kids to work and do a good job. Unbelievable. Yeah, it was a little unbelievable. But again, I think what they were fighting was, no, we really like having free interns. We don't want any of the rules to change. That's ultimately what I think they were fighting. And because of this lawsuit, the rules did change. Not with this test that the judge came up with. Most states still use the original one that we went over, but a lot of companies said their legal counsel said, hey, your legal exposure has changed now, so you need to reconsider your internship program. Yeah. And that was just one suit. There was one in 2014 against Kanda Nast where they paid $5.8 million to settle a class action suit. 7500 interns got together. And this is, like, in the fashion world, like you were saying, they work for Vogue and Vanity Fair and other magazines like that, and they refuse to pay them, like, at least minimum wage. What was the other one? Viacom? Yeah, Viacom, MTV, Bet, they agreed to pay about $7.2 million in 2013. MGM paid about $232,000 earlier this year. So, again, like I was saying, it's like media and entertainment companies are the ones that seem to take the most advantage. All of these lawsuits, there was a huge ripple. And a lot of places like Conde Nast said, we're not doing interns anymore. It's too much legal exposure. Places like some places, like, I think NBC News said, we're going to pay our interns now. And it's just like flipping a switch. You basically have to do one or another. There are actually three things that you could do. You could set up a formal internship program that works with universities. You can start paying your unpaid interns, or you can just stop your internship program. But the fact that these two interns just changed the entire intern economy with the initial lawsuit in 2011, it's surprising. Yes. If they do away with internships, they're just calling them entry level jobs. Yeah. And so I guess the difference is you can't do that as a student, probably, right? What do you mean? Well, do that entry level job, you would have to quit your college, probably, to do that in most cases. Yeah, I guess so. But again, there's another way to do it, which is to actually set up a formal internship program. Right. Which is, I think, what we have here, right? I would guess so. I actually don't know. I would guess just because we're one of the top hundred most ethical companies in the world. Yeah. Is that a real ranking? Yes. I can't remember where. I think I saw it on, like, the side of a Delta jet, maybe. Really? Yeah, I saw it somewhere. Nice. No, my coffee. I've seen it somewhere. It's definitely a real thing and how stuff works deserves, if you ask me. Yeah, for sure. So if you do want to take part in an internship because it can lead to jobs, we're not poo pooing internships. We're poopooing non paid ones. I'm poo pooing the nonideal internships where you are learning real stuff that is going to apply to your real career right. And that you got based on your merit rather than your parents connections. Yeah, that's what we're celebrating here. So one way to get these internships is to use your parents'connections. Well, it is true. The friends and family and networking, that's how you get jobs. It's just sort of the reality of life. Your university professor, Mike, can help out, contact the business themselves. I remember Sam sent an email to us and I said, great. And I sent Sam to Tamika here in the office who handles that stuff, and said, I recommend Sam. And he got this gig. So it was through a connection in a way. Right. But it was through a connection he made by being a go getter and emailing us. Sure. What else you can LinkedIn is a place you can look. There's something called insurance. That's a great website name. I don't think that's it. Internships.com here it is. That they call the eharmony of internships mediabistro. Do you ever look at Media Bistro for jobs? No, I never heard of that one. Oh, it's like all things like writing and movies and cool jobs. Yeah, but you can find lots of internships on there. And on our beloved ZipRecruiter Chuck, they post internship jobs, too. Yeah, that's true. Go out and get one. Get a good one. Get it in the right way. You can learn a lot. There's also, I also ran across some stuff. There's like a whole community of unpaid interns, the intern nation. And they've kind of come up with, like, blogs to just commiserate with one another. There's fashion Intern Problems is one of them. Anonymous? Production assistant blog and Intern anonymous. There are three good ones to start. I think the last two are mostly associated with production stuff out in Hollywood. Yes. But in all seriousness, if you're being exploited for real or taken advantage of for real, I know it's probably hard to speak up because you think like you're in there, you don't want to cause trouble, but be brave and blow that whistle. That's what I say. You just ruined, like five kids lives. What made them better? Yeah. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. This is a tough one. I know, right? Let's see. If you want to know more about internships, you can type that word into the search bar@housetopforce.com. And since I said that, it's time for listening to me. I'm going to call this Secret Service. This is a good one. Just listen to Secret Service guys wanting to fill you in on a missing piece. You're joking a little bit about why there weren't younger, more agile secret Service agents out there protecting the president. But there's a really important reason for that, that you would need to be older and more experienced. In a former job, I used to interact with the security team who had been the presidential protective detail in the White House. They were the most stoic and tight lipped people I've ever met. I can imagine, sure, but one of them did occasionally tell the story about a time where there was a credible threat when their team had to respond quickly. The upshot of the story was that in order to do their jobs, they had to take charge of the president, which meant getting him in a car, rerouting the motorcade against his will. It's basically like it doesn't matter what the President is saying, supersede that. The President was furious and tried to order him to change course, but it later came out that the threat had been real. The decisive action had probably saved the President's life. I don't know many 27 year olds who would have the cojones. This is what anonymous says. Did they use J? Yeah. Oh, good going, Anonymous. Instead of what? An H. Yeah. Spelled correctly, the cajone is to stand up to a direct order from a sitting president or who would have enough experience to be able to convince the leader of the free world to shut up and get in the car. Don't forget, the presidential protective detail is responsible to save the President's life, which sometimes means saving it from his or her own bad judgment or ignorance. Wow. Love to all, Anonymous. Way to go, Anonymous. And also where to go with that or her addition. Yeah, this person is right up our alley. If you want to get in touch with us, like Anonymous did, you can join us on Twitter at Sisk podcast. Or Joshua Clark, you can check her both on Facebook and@facebook.com stuff. You should know you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.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 Kilgara and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet foods that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopeet.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2019-03-13-sysk-walruses-final.mp3 | The Huggable, Lovable Walrus | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-huggable-lovable-walrus | When it comes to the animal kingdom, SYSK has covered a wide range. This week, the guys dive into the frigid waters of the Arctic to delight in everything that is the huggable, lovable walrus. From their tendency to sticking together in tough times, to th | When it comes to the animal kingdom, SYSK has covered a wide range. This week, the guys dive into the frigid waters of the Arctic to delight in everything that is the huggable, lovable walrus. From their tendency to sticking together in tough times, to th | Tue, 13 Mar 2018 13:26:49 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=13, tm_min=26, tm_sec=49, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=72, tm_isdst=0) | 48408112 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm MC. Josh Ja, josh Clark. There's. Chicha Cha, Chuck Bryant. Have a Jerry's DJ on the wheels of steel of stuff you should know. It's the podcast. And that has nothing to do with what we're talking about today. No, it doesn't. I couldn't even feign surprise. I know it has nothing to do with it. I was just being silly. I know you like it. I love it. Silly josh is one of my top five favorite. Joshua. Is it? So I guess you're feeling pretty good today, Jerry. You are too. Yes. She says. Yeah. Everybody, the reason we're feeling good is because there are fewer just simple pleasures in life than researching and talking about animals. Agreed. It's one of my favorite sys episode categories of animal ones. Yeah. I picked this one out and it sort of dawned on me it had been a minute. And sometimes these are some of our lighter lifts because we have some really great House of Work articles on animals and insects. So it doesn't require like another 20 hours of research on stuff. And we needed a lighter lift this week. And I was like, hey, it's been a while. I was perusing, I saw Walruses and they're so darn cute and lovable. I thought, all right, well, we got to get in there on this. Yeah. Plus is a Jennifer Horton joint. Remember she used to be like the in house animal writer. Oh, was it? Yeah. I remember Jennifer. Pretty good work. Yeah. Wonder what happened to her. I don't know, but she left behind a legacy that includes an article on Walruses. Yeah. And I will go ahead and say upfront, this is now in the running for me with a little competition between the octopus wow. And the jellyfish. Okay, well, then this is what we're going to do. You're going to go, that's all I can think of. Okay. When a fat comes up that you're like, this is one of the reasons why they're in competition. Okay. Okay. All right. Before we get started also before we get started sorry. I wanted to give a big shout out to our pals at the Daily Zeitgeist, one of our sister podcasts they had me on yesterday. I know I haven't listened to it yet. How was it? It was pretty great. They make it really easy on you. They're like, Here, read all these articles that we're potentially going to talk about and study them for 5 hours. It's just like, you do stuff you should know and then we're not going to talk about any of those. Not a single article that I researched. Oh, no. We talked about it, but I managed to keep up anyway. That's how easy those guys make it. So thank you to Jack and Miles and Anna for having me. And I guess when you're hearing this, by yesterday, I mean march 5. So go back and listen to the March 5 episode of Daily and then listen to all the episodes of Daily Zeitgeist. Yeah, I saw that they had a cut out cardboard cut out of you sitting in a chair, which was kind of funny. Yeah, it is funny. But then I'm like, what are you guys doing with a cardboard cut out of me? If I made it for this right? I guess, but they got a big budget then. We don't have a budget for cardboard cutouts. No, but I'm glad you gave me the inside skinny, because I'm going to be on at some point, and now I'm going to say, hey, don't do that crap you did with Josh. I'm not reading a bunch of stuff unless we're doing it. Yeah. No, just show up. Just show up relaxed and prepared to talk and you will be great. So the other thing I had to say, of the two things running in for my favorite animal okay. And another movie prediction from apparently I'm the great movie predictor or just life predictor. Sure, pixar, get on it. Because if you don't do a lovable story about a family of walruses at some point, then someone else is going to beat you to the punch. Maybe. Yes. And it's going to be great because there's nothing cuter. Just look up on your favorite image search, walrus calf and mother. Or just walrus, calf and get ready to be outcuted by most other animals. They're so cute. They can make you forget that you're watching them live in captivity. That's how cute those things are. Some of these are photographed in the wild. Yeah. The videos that I've seen of Cavs are mostly the one that was born at SeaWorld. It was like the first walrus born in captivity. I think, if I'm not mistaken, he is just as cute as the day is long, but not small. It's like our size. Yeah, they're not small. No. So, like, apparently here's a fact for you, but I'm going to give you the chance to do your heraldry, okay? I'm not going to make any sound. All right, cool. The walrus calf is born no less than \u00a399 and up to \u00a3165 born. How much? 99 to \u00a3165. And for our friends outside of the United States and Liberia, that's 45 to 75 kg born. Yes. So a mother, a cow, walrus cow. She's hoping for a 99 pounder. Right. For the ease of birth. Right. Because they only get up to, like, \u00a3100. So they're like, all calf and they're all water births, though. No, they're ice bursts. Are they? I was kind of curious about that. Yeah. All right, we're getting ahead of ourselves. I'm getting excited. All right, we should go back to the beginning. Who invented walruses? They were invented by the guy who invented sea monkeys, which just dropped today. Yeah, that was a good one. It was. All right, so should we go to by beginning we just mean we're going to talk about walrus. Well, how about this? We could talk about where they came from because walrus, they're very isolated. Sure. And as they exist today there's two species. I guess they're really subspecies but they can't mate and they're geographically isolated. So they're technically two different species. Can they not mate because they're not near each other or their parts don't fit? Jennifer Horton? I don't know. She just says that they're reproductively isolated which means they can't they can't talk and kiss. Exactly. I don't know if that means that yes, like their parts don't fit. But she says they're geographically isolated too. So why would you also say that? If they were one and the same? It's just insult to injury. I guess so. But there are two groups, subspecies or species of walrus, the Pacific walrus and the Atlantic walrus. Yes. And they're both related. I think they diverged as recently as like half a million years ago. It's like 5000 years ago. There used to be a lot of different walrus species. Now there's just the two. But at some point they all descended from the same ancestor of red pandas. So walruses are related to red pandas? Just a little back on the family tree. Well and they're even more related to red pandas than they would be to say like manatees which you'd be like well, manatees and walrus is the same thing. No, not even remotely related. I thought you're going to say Wilford Brimley. He's what? Or Frederick Nietzsche. Does he have the walrus mustache? Yeah. Are you somebody Sam? Yeah. And then there was the professional golfer Craig Stadler. I don't remember him. He's probably on the senior tour now. But his nickname was the Walrus. Well, he would need to look out for Jack Nicholas whose nickname was the Golden Bear. Yeah. They didn't get along really, did they not? No. That would be the Polar bear. Yeah, I guess so. Today, Chuck, there are walruses in the north of the Pacific and the north of the Atlantic around basically the Arctic. Yes. And there's the Pacific walruses and the Atlantic walruses. Yeah. The differentiation here, the males are generally bigger, between nine and 12ft and roughly \u00a31700 and about 4000 at the top, top end. Right. Females, the ladies are about seven and a half feet to 10ft, 400 to 1250 for the Pacific. The Atlantic males are a little smaller. They top out around the low end of the Pacific and about \u00a32000. And the ladies are shorter and a little heavier and about 8ft. So about the same length but a little heavier. Yeah. So they're big Majamas I mean 800 to 1700 kg for Pacific males. Those are big boys and they're all members of the order Pinopedia. So they're related to seals and sea lions and their Latin name, their scientific name is Otobenis Rosemarys which means are you ready for this? Yeah. Tooth walking seahorse. That's great. And the name walrus, too, by the way, is a Danish word. Yeah. And of that order, pinopedia. They're the second largest only to the elephant seal. And they're the only one that have those tusks, those hallmark tusks of the walrus on the male jutting down well, females have them, too, but on the male jutting down from that big Yosemite Sam mustache. Right. It's part of what makes them so cute. Yeah. So those tusks and I was looking up what the difference between a tusk and a tooth is. I think once it really kind of protrudes from the mouth, it becomes a tusk. But their tusks are just overgrown canines, canine teeth that grow up to, I think, about a meter or 3ft long. That's crazy. Long. It is. And they can do all sorts of stuff with that. Right. So because walruses are so isolated, they're so far north, so far away from most humans, they have been little studied scientifically. Although of the two groups, we know the most about the Pacific walrus. But the stuff we do know has been largely guesses. Only very recently did we figure out that they don't use their tusks to eat because they eat like seashells, like mollusks and clams and other bivalves. Right. And they used to think that the walrus either use their tusks to root out mollusks off of the sea floor or they use them to pry open shells. Well, both of those are wrong, it turns out. They don't use their tusks for much except to menace one another when they're trying to establish dominance. Yeah, that's one of the things they can do. But I think he's a good word there, menace. They don't try and kill one another with their tusks. No. They like to jab at one another and establish dominance as like, hey, I've got bigger tusks. I'm larger than you. But first of all, they're protected. They have this really thick skin around their neck and shoulders. So they're protected in a sense. And they're not looking to kill one another either. Right. But they do I mean, they do draw blood when they jab each other. So they have their little technique is they lean their heads back like so so that their tusks are parallel with the earth. And then they go ninja strike. Right. Yeah. And they'll draw a little blood and they'll even, like, leave scars. But like you said, their necks are so protective with blubber, it mainly is just to make a point. And the point typically is move, from what I can understand. Yes. They also will use their tusks sometimes to break through ice to breathe. And then this one cute, cute move. If they're swimming around, they're tired, they might stick their head through and hook their tusks onto the ice and just hang there for a bit. Yeah. Which is pretty great. Yeah. They have these sacks, farageal sacks that allow them to kind of buoy upright, keep their head upright above water. But I would guess that that gets tiring after a while and eventually just let the old teeth do it. Yeah. And like I said, the ladies have them, too. But the males are longer and stronger, a little bit straighter, and they can grow. I mean, a walrus can live up to 30 years and the tusks may grow for about half of that life. Yeah. I also saw 40 somewhere that they can live up to. 40. All right. That's one of the things I'm not going to make the noise, but anytime animals live a long time with one another, that kind of gets me. Yeah. And I found this very fascinating about walrus's man. They are very social creatures. Like, they hang out together, they swim around together. The boys rest together for months at a time, or weeks at a time, sometimes during certain times of the year. But they live apart from one another, males and females. They only come together to mate. And then they say, okay, this has been really great. I'll see you next year. Yes, I'll see you at camp next year. It's very interesting. As far as the rest of their body, they're mostly dark brown, although I don't want to give it away. But they can change color depending on what they're doing, which is kind of interesting. And this is one of the situations where it's kind of a big clunky creature on land, but once you get them in the water, then they're just so graceful, which is a really lovely thing to see. Yeah. And when they walk on land, so they turn their flippers out, the front flippers, they have two pair, right? So they turn the front flippers out to their side and just kind of use that for side to side stability. And they put their back flippers underneath their pelvis and they use that to kind of propel themselves forward. It's very cute. Yeah. And because they're on ice, their flippers have rough bottoms, like a shoe sole, almost. And then in the water, it's kind of a reverse boat thing. They don't steer from the rear. They use those front flippers for steering and obviously power themselves with those super strong alternating back flippers. It's like one of those ships that hides you, the Scowl. Oh, yeah. Remember? Yeah, that's right. So it's basically the walrus of the riverboats. Yeah. And these guys can swim. They say they average about four and a half miles an hour. I think that's just when they're kind of cruising. But they can swim as fast as 20 to 25 miles an hour. If I guess they're fleeing something. Even though they don't really have many predators. No, they don't. They basically have two, don't they? Well, including humans, they have three, don't they? Okay, what are they? Okay, well, if you want to talk predators, they have polar bears, as you said earlier. Oh, right, sure. Killer whales and then humans. Right. But that's one of the reasons why they've been so successful. And we'll talk about that, how successful and whether or not they're thriving or stable or whatever spoiler they are right after this. All right, Chuck, we're back. That's right. Did you notice any of the videos that the wall was up close, like, in their face? What do you mean? So their eyes in particular, they have, like, pug eyes. You know, pugs eyes look like they're about to pop at any minute. Yeah, they always look a little surprised. Yeah. I didn't know if it was because there was a camera on them all of a sudden. It could have been I was looking up walrus intelligence because there's a lot of videos about walrus where they're saying, like, whistle or speak or whatever. Because as we'll see, walruses can make a lot of cool noises and the walrus do the different things. So they're obviously trainable, which means that there's some level of intelligence. But I couldn't find anything about, like, oh, yeah, these guys are as intelligent as an octopus or a pig or something. Couldn't find anything like that. But they are trainable, as anyone who's seen the screen classic 51st dates can tell you. I don't think I saw that. That's a good one, actually. Yeah. Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Right. Where does the walrus fit in? He is like a marine biologist who specializes in, I think in walrus or something like that. No, because it's got penguin friends, too. But anyway, there's a trained walrus that factors into it. I have to check that out. It's actually a pretty cute movie. Hey, you got me at Adam, Sandler and Walrus. Okay, so these guys and ladies are, like you said, all over the Arctic. If we're talking Pacific, we're talking the Bering Sea, the Chukchi, which shout out to my friend Max Goldman. I just saw on Facebook this morning. He had a great picture of himself staring out at the icy Chuck Chi Sea. Well, my only Alaskan friend. That sounds really cool. Yeah, it was really gorgeous. And I said something about hey, I was just reading about this. And of course, he's on Alaska time, so he probably isn't woken up yet. He's like, I can see Russia from my house. He might. And then the laptop sea in the Pacific, and then along the coast of Canada on the Atlantic side in Greenland is where you're going to find the other guys. And we're talking 250 total walruses, about 200,000 of which are Pacific. Yeah, 250,000 total. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but again, we'll get to it later. But they're doing okay. Yeah, they really seem to be, don't they? Yeah. We don't want people to worry too much about the walrus. Back to the walrus's pug eyes, right? Yes. They kind of protrude, and you'd think, wow, that walrus can see all over the place. It's doing a 360 with its eye right now. Not necessarily. They're actually not the best at seeing, but they don't need to be because their other organs are more evolved to kind of make up for it. They hunt and can smell out predators. Using their nose, I think is probably their primary sense, from what I understand. Well, yeah, in their ears, they can hear. They have these two little kind of flap ears, basically openings with a little protective flap. And they can hear things like, perhaps pray up to a mile away. Yes, I was looking for that. Did you see that anywhere else? No, it was one of those ones that raised a red flag because I looked all over. It was like seeing just that. They can hear for up to mile away. The closest thing I saw that proved that was demonstrations by Arctic natives who would make, like, a walrus call and walrus like a mile away would respond to it. They said, hey, walrus. And the walrus looked around, said, you talking to me? Yes, sir. Is that how they talk? Yeah, like Southern gentlemen. They have that high cotton accent. I don't even know what that means. That's a Southern thing. Like? Well, there's a bar in Charleston called High Cotton. Think of Gotcha. So their noses, though, is where that's their money maker. It's very sensitive, like you said. They used to think that they use their tusks or I don't know if you said it, but they used to think they use their tusks to grind into the sea floor and dig things up. But that is not the case. They are blowing out of their nose to clear away stuff and stir up things to eat. And those whiskers, those what do you say, call those vibes vibrasay? Sure. 400 to 700 of those in 13 to 15 rows. Not only do they look cute and like a big walrus mustache, but they are super sensitive. Yeah. So that's like their tactile sense. Then these little whiskers, the sensitive whiskers, and they use those so they shoot water out of their nose into the bottom of the sea and it stirs up some stuff. The clams are like, stop, stop. And they start to float up. And the walrus sense the clams with their whiskers, their vibrate or whatever you call them. And then things get even weirder. Right. Because remember, they don't use their tusks to open the clams. They don't use their tusks to burrow. Their tusks actually appear to kind of get in the way, if anything. As far as feeding is concerned. What they do is they have a very high cavity in their mouth and they can pump their tongue back and forth like a piston. So they actually produce a form of suction so strong it sucks a clam right out of the shell. So cool. The clam, they can't say anything. Yeah, that poor clam. They're just hanging out down there. Before you know it, they get snotted on and sucked out. And a lot of them too. It's a very undignified ending for the clamp. Yeah. It says in here, and I didn't find backup for this, but I believe it is, that suction is so powerful they've been known to suck holes in plywood. Yeah, I saw that elsewhere too, that they've had, like, five pound plugs in some of their aquatic habitats. They've sucked out of the floor. That's crazy. Also known as the floor, the flower. Yeah. So they do have that was your high cotton exit right out of the floor. They do have some amazing suction going on. And they don't even chew. They have these amazing three foot teeth. They don't even chew with any of them. They just eat a clam hole. And I think did you say 3000 to 6000 of them in the city? No, I said a whole lot. That's a lot. Yeah. They said that they can eat between four and 6% of their body weight each day. So let's just say an average 3000 pound walrus eating about 5%. That's \u00a3150 a day of not just clams. They're not super picky anything down there. seaworms snails, crabs. They'll eat all that stuff. But I get the feeling that they really love those clams. Yeah, they like the claims the most. As they should. But think about that. If there's 250,000 walruses in the world all basically up in the Arctic and each one is eating something like 3000 to 6000 claims a day how have claims not taking over the world by now? Yeah, it's crazy. You know, the comedian Nate Bargati? Yes, I do. He had that funny joke about a million sharks a year killed. And he was just like, I didn't know there's ever been a million sharks in the history of the world. That just sounds like a lot of sharks. Yeah, except Nate does it great because his delivery is that of a professional comedian and that high cotton act and not me. Well, he is from Tennessee. There you go. So they're eating geez, I mean, I can't even do the math. 250,000 times 4000, that equals a ton. And we're still able to dip our Cristini and clam juice at an Italian dinner. Do you like clams? Sure. I'm more of an oyster guy. No. I like them both. I like to be turned on by my food, you know? Well, I mean, I definitely love oysters and we'll never not order them if it's at a place with a good chance of having good ones. Sure. But I'll dip into a clamshell. Well, you put clams in your Bloody Mary mix. Oh, yeah. Komato. Sure. That's clam juice. Yeah. Oh, man. I could kick it up a notch if I put a couple of clams in there. Yeah, not in the shell, but just like, pick the meat out. Well, yeah, live. Have them live in there for a little while. Get used to that vodka. They do live up by Russia. I bet there's been more than one beach bar called the Drunken Clam. There's got to be, and I think that's the bar on the Family Guy. Oh, is it? I'm pretty sure. Oh, we're going to find out if it's not. Yeah. I don't know, ma'am. I feel like we've gone a little off the rails. Do we take a break or can we pull it back without it? Well, quickly, let's talk about the third potential breed. Another subspecies that is not officially a subspecies that lives in the lap of the sea near Siberia called the Laptop walrus. And apparently their skull and body size is pretty similar to the Atlantic and the Pacific, and I'm not sure why it wants its own distinction, but they haven't been recognized as such protests. Yeah. I mean, they must be different enough in some way. Yeah, I saw some people see them as a different species. Other people just do not. I'm not sure what the deal is. Maybe they're isolated themselves. I don't know. I don't know, either. Now, you want to take a break? Yeah. Okay. All right. So one of the other things that I love insert whatever sound effect is in your head listener, is that they are very and this is the same deal with the elephant in any creature that's very sensitive and caring to one another, they will watch over their injured friends. If one of them dies, they will push them off the ice. If hunters are nearby so they can't get them, the ladies will this is so sad. But the ladies will carry their dead young away from hunters. Right. And if they sense that there are dudes nearby, these hunter men nearby, they can hack away at ice to break it away and free, like, a calf that might be stuck or something. Yeah, they could really take care of each other. It's been documented. Yeah, it's pretty cool. They're very sensitive creatures, it turns out. I don't think we could talk about walrus if we didn't talk about blubber. Right? Yes. So you said that it's pretty thick. I think that's an understatement, Chuck. The blubber layer on a walrus is something like about almost four inches, 10 CM thick. And during the winter, when they're at their blubberiest, it's about a third of their body weight. So they might have, like, \u00a31000 of fat in their body at any given point in time, which is pretty you got to tip your hat to that. Well, yeah, of course. This is an adaptation to deal with the temperatures where they live. It keeps them warm. Apparently, they lose heat 27 times faster in water, and they are in water. What is it, like, two thirds of their life or something like that? Yeah. So they have this remarkable blubber to keep that body temperature at about 98 deg 97.9 degrees pretty consistently. Right. So you were saying you were alluding earlier to how they can change color. Here's how. You ready? Yes. When they're in the water for a while, or when they're exposed to really cold temperatures, their body pumps blood away from their skin and sends it to their core to keep their internal organs warm. Because the skin doesn't need to be as warm as, say, the internal organs survival mechanism. Right. Yeah. And then once they start to warm up, when that happens, they turn kind of white, like a white worm kind of thing going on. Did you ever see that movie? The layer of the white worm? No, but that sounds familiar. It was an early Hugh Grant movie where there's this group in England that worship this white worm that comes out, like, every century or something like that. It's like a weird English horror movie that is also kind of funny in some ways. It's a good one. But anyway, that's what a walrus looks like when it's really cold. Like you Grant. Yeah. But white. Super white. He's about as white as it gets. These guys get even whiter because they're very cold. That's right. And then once they get back to where the sun is shining or maybe back on the ice where it's ironically slightly warmer, their color can come back. They're still brown, but they can get a little bit more of a pinky look to them. Yeah. With that blubber. They can handle water that's down to negative four degrees Fahrenheit to something like negative 20 Celsius. Like you said, they spend two thirds of their life and water this cold. They live in the Arctic, so they're pretty well suited for it. Well, negative four is the low end. They can go all the way down to negative 59. Wow. That's nutty. Wow. And they do have little hairs that they shed in the summer, but pretty much everyone is in agreement that it doesn't really do much to keep them warm. It's leftover from when they were bears. That's my theory. It probably is, yeah. So they have another cool adaptation. They can go a long time without oxygen. And this all has to do with how they circulate oxygen in their blood. So when they dive, they actually slow their heart rate down, and then that blood, again, goes to those organs because they need oxygen and warmth. And they also have a special protein in their blood called myoglobin that binds with the oxygen and then actually stores it in the muscles. Right. So they have plenty of oxygen whenever they're diving. How deep do they dive? I can't remember. It said that they feed, I think, from between like 30 something and 150 to 175ft. But they prefer it a little shallower because one of the worries with global warming is the sea ice is retreating and going away. Right. So they're having to go further and further north to get to the sea ice, which. Means that the waters are deeper, so they're having to learn how to dive deeper to feed. And this is one of the effects of global warming, is sometimes the moms will get separated from their calves because it's such a long journey and they don't know are they going to be able to adapt and learn to dive that deep to hunt for food, right? Yeah. It's not just where they hunt for food from. Like it's kind of like their little base, right? So when they're on ice or an ice flow, they'll die for food, they'll come back up, they'll rest. That's where they sleep, that's where moms and their calves rest. Sometimes they nurse there. It's where cows give birth to calves. Ice plays a very important role in the walrus life, so much so that in the Pacific, walrus, the females basically just follow the edge of the ice north in the summer and then come back down south in the winter as the ice kind of like, ebbs and flows right towards the North Pole. And as it doesn't retreat as far down, it's messing with the program a little bit, like you said, not just with food, but also with just typical regular behavior. Yeah, I bet in a lot of these cases, too, there's got to be just some confusion for however many millions of years you've been used to the same thing. And if all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, like, where are we going now? They're like, I'm just a walrus. Your world frightens and confuses me. What happened to the accent? Well, this is a different walrus, okay? This is Ted, the walrus. Also that far and gel muscle that you're talking about, which can puff up to kind of buoy them. They also will puff that up to close off water from entering their lungs when they dive. Right. Let's talk about those pharyngeal sacs, because they are pretty amazing. There's a lot of stuff they can do with those. First of all, walrus make some of the coolest sounds of any animal I've ever heard. There's a clip on YouTube, just type in walrus sound. And there's one that comes up, and it's just a static picture of a big old gigantic walrus. What do they call them? Are they called bowls? Well, they call them cows and calves, probably, but I didn't see bulls anywhere. A dude walrus. Right. Just a big boy. And it's about two and a half minutes of just the best walrus sounds. And it's actually, in a really weird way, kind of soothing. Like, you can have it on in the background. I noticed that I retained 12% more information while it was playing than I did when I wasn't listening to it. Right. I just made that statistic up, but you get the point. And can we play some of it? Yeah, can we do that? Sure we can. Jerry's nodding and she rolled her eyes. Well, here's, like, 20 seconds is some good walrus sounds. So 1020 seconds, who knows what it is? Well, we can only use ten because of rights issues. Okay. You don't want to get sued by the walrus association. Right. Exactly. I'm Ted Walrus, and I've had enough of this getting pushed around. So the way that the walrus are one of the ways the walrus makes so many different sounds is because of these pharyngeal sacks that they use to buoy themselves with. They use it also as an amplifier, and they make all these sounds when they're mating with women. That's right. So you remember how the females in the Pacific go north in the summer and then come back in the winter? On their way back, they meet up with the guys who generally stay south in the Bering sea the whole year, and that's just pacific. The Atlantic ones stay put year round, both males and females. But as the pacific females are coming back, mating season is timed perfectly with that. And they will sit in groups of about 20 or 23 on a big chunk of ice and say, dudes, let's see what you got. Yeah. And then the little Gilligan's island talent show starts, and they literally line up out there, give each other a little space. They fight for that prime spot. Yeah, they'll tusk. Yeah, that's when they get a little aggressive. And the poor always feel bad for the guys, like, in the back row or whatever. He's got to really ramp up his vocalization, I guess. And he's like, my tusk broke, but he's probably got a lady out there who likes that. I hope so. But they do they kind of perform for them. They do a little routine, and the ladies are like, you sexually mature, man. Who. I think the male reaches sexual maturity at about eight to ten, females five to six. But this is adorable. They still don't hug and kiss until a few years after. Right. Just because, I don't know, they want to do it the right way. I think that we don't have to take our clothes off song is one of the walrus favorite songs of all time. They're really big in the promise rings, but friendship bracelets first. Sure. So the female has a gestation period, about 15 months. So this is a big deal. They're pregnant for a long time, so they want to hook up with the right dude to get them pregnant. Depending on when it falls in the cycle, they may even sit that out. If they're pregnant, they may take a year off. Yeah. They're like, I'm good. I'm covered. But it's the thing. If a cow is pregnant come next mating season, like you said, she's going to kind of hang off to the side and wait for her friends to be done so they can keep going south. But that actually is going to have an impact on her calf because she's going to spend more time raising it and nursing it. Yeah. Which is really great. Like, if that happens and the timing works out, they can be with their young for up to a couple of years. Yeah. I think like a male calf. So remember, males and females, they separate. They only come together during mating season. And then if you're a male calf that's born, you're hanging out with your mom for a year or two years, depending on the timing of her pregnancy. And then you go off with the male herd and say, what up, boys? I'm here. It's party, and they should get to the back of the line. Yeah, I saw that. It just sounds so adorable that very young walrus calves boys will practice that tusking thing. Oh, really? Even before their tusks are grown out. So they mess around with each other like, I'm going to tusk you when my tests come in. Look, I'd love to see that. It's like little goats before they get their horns. Yeah, they can do the same thing when they just have those old nubs. They just walk around headaches all the time. I have goats that live across the street from me. I don't think I've told you that. Satanic goats or cute goats? No, cutest. Okay, good Christian goats. Yeah, yeah, they're great. I'm not sure what the pat, my neighbor across the street had like seven or eight of them last year. They went away for the winter and now she has a new batch. No, she's Jamaican. And I think what someone said in the neighborhood is that she keeps these goats around and then raises them and then has them shipped to Jamaica as like a charitable thing right. Where they're eating? I don't know what they're eating. I'm pretty sure. I'm not sure. But this is a new batch of goats. And of course my kid loves it. Yeah, I love goats, too. Little baby goats. Baby lambs. You and I watched this documentary called The Secret Life of Dogs. Have you seen it? No. It's from 2013. I think BBC originally made it. If you get a membership with Curiosity, a subscription on Curiosity on Amazon Prime. It's on there. That's the only place I found it, I think. Is it a subthing? I have to join because I'm already on the prime. Yes, it is. It's an extra subscription, but it's like a seven day trial or something like that. But you're really curious. You will pay for it, right? So they have the secret just check it out. Check. You're going to love it. It's just a really well made documentary, but in part of it, there's this herding dog, some sort of shepherd. That bottle feeds a baby lamb holding a bottle in her mouth. This little lamb is nursing off of the bottle. It's one of the most adorable things you'll ever see in your entire life. Well, I think we've agreed in the past that inter animal mingling and coupling and friendship is the best thing in the world. Maybe not coupling, but the rest of it. Well, yeah, I just mean in a friendly way. There's just one more thing about this. The woman who owns the dog, or who I should say is best friends with this dog, said, I didn't teach her this. She picked this up herself. Wow. Yeah. And I just dropped the mic, as you can see. I probably watched 25 minutes the other day of baby pigs playing with puppies. Oh, that's adorable. It's pretty great, man. Okay, so back to the walrus. Yes, back to reproduction. This is kind of really cool, actually. For the first up to five months of gestation, the eggs aren't even implanting yet. So they just float around in the uterus for up to five months, and then eventually we'll implant on the uterine wall. And they think this is all done on purpose so that the calf is born at the right time in the best environment possible. Yeah, I thought that was a weird adaptation. Like, why not just have a shorter gestation time? I guess they got to figure it out. I'm not going to cry. Yes. So again, it's 15 month gestation period, and the calves are born usually on ice, which, again, melting ice is a problem for them. And then they stick around for a year or two, go off to the male herd, and then you've got the males and the females, and the females migrate. In the Pacific, the males generally stay around the same area, which means that they move to land when the ice recedes. And there's actually this island in Alaska called Round Island. It's very famous for being a walrus summering area, where for a couple of weeks, I think, every summer, and for reasons no one knows, the Wallers males all just come to this one island and there will be, like, 12,000 of them just on top of one another, hanging out, just basically being social, having a boys week. That's great. And it's so dense with walrus. It's wall to wall risk. You can't see the sand or not the sand, but is there sand or is it just ice? It is sand. No, I'm sorry. I read that it's rocky. I haven't actually seen it myself. But you can't see anything beneath the walrus. It's just walrus flesh and blubber. Yes. There's this one. If you ever drive up the coast of California, I'm going to butcher this because I don't remember what the animal was. If it's a manatee, it's probably not a manatee. I think it's sea lions. If it's in California. Yeah, but there's something near the house, the Hearst castle. There's a beach that Emily and I drove by that was wall to wall. I guess it's sea lions when we went, I'm pretty sure. And it's got to be a certain time of year, maybe time of day. I have no idea, but we didn't even know. We just sort of lucked upon it and saw a bunch of cars pulled over with mouths agape and sure enough, the whole thing and the sound was amazing. It was just a bunch of imagine one thing going and then imagine 1000 things doing. That right. Like the sweathogs. Very nice on queue. Thank you. All right, Chuck. So we said there's basically three predators for the walrus, the polar bear, which by the way, I saw that a walrus can fend off a polar bear with its tusks one on one. Oh, yeah. The way that polar bears hunt walruses is they cause a stampede and walruses try to get away from the polar bear and they will trample a few unfortunate walruses and the polar bear comes up and says, hey, thanks for the free meal, man. That's how they hunt walruses. The same thing happens when humans get too close, say like in a low flying plane or just basically spook the walruses, but they are hunted, but very narrowly by a very small group of people in Upieck. And the Upik, natives of the Arctic area in the US. Canada and Russia are basically the only human beings allowed to hunt a walrus. And the reason why is because it's part of their cultural tradition to hunt walruses. And when they were forced to stop for about 30 years from the their culture really started to suffer a decline as a result. Yeah. And they are protected as such now, over the years. They've been hunting walruses, it says here, since the 9th century. These are oil, the ivory, of course, for art their skin. And for many years that they were being depleted because of the oil mainly that they would use for soap or lamps or it says here, even machine lubricant. Right. But we have gotten on board with protecting them along with, like you said, Canada and Russia and they're doing pretty good now. Yeah. Apparently the population is stable. They're listed as vulnerable. I didn't see why, because they are almost universally protected by Arctic nations. There's not a ton of poaching. A little bit, but it's not like poaching in Africa. Right. For their ivory, typically. Right, yeah. I think for the reason why it might be climate change then that would be the only thing I can see. Because they're pretty well protected reproductively. They're doing top notch and that's it. I wonder if when a polar bear is eating a walrus, if they get in there and they're like, hey Phil, he's got like 2000 clams in them too. This is bonus. I've read actually that their meat is hard, kind of tough, but it's also very lean and supposedly very tasty as well. Really? Yeah. And one of the things the UPC and the Upags are known for is using 100% of the walruses that they kill. Yeah. I think a lot of times, almost all the time with indigenous peoples, they understand the value of a creature and respect that animal. And part of that respect is I'm just going to take these tusks and kick it back in the water. It's using everything from the stomach for a drum to the skin to cover your boat. Right. Or raincoats, apparently. Yeah, they used to use their, what was it, the intestines for raincoats. It's pretty sharp. And apparently these villages, too, they were early environmentalists. They would set their own standards for hunting because they knew the value of making sure they thrived. Yeah, I've read this really interesting article, I think, on a site called like cultural Survival or something, and it detailed how I think the UPC and the US. Government in Alaska over like 30 years came to an agreement finally about hunting on Round Island. But it was pretty interesting. I was like, wow, the government really is taking this seriously. This protection, they just wouldn't give at all on any of it. And then finally the Epics were like, we have to do this culturally. This is not just us being yahoo's, doing this for fun. We have to do this. We are losing this cultural tradition. So they came to an understanding that apparently is doing quite well. Nice. Just like the Walruses. That's right. If you want to know more about Walruses, check out Walruses onhousepworks.com there's a good article on there. And since I said how stuff works, it's time for listening to mail. All right, I'm going to call this wonderful email from an eleven year old kid. We always love these. Hey, Josh and Chuck, I love listening to your podcast and it brings me great joy every day. I'm eleven years old and I think your podcast is awesome for all ages and is very informative. I'm learning so many new things, my mom is even surprised. I just wanted to let you guys know how happy you make me and how much fun I have listening to you, man, isn't that nice? I tell people all kinds of things they never know and they're like, wow, how did you know that? And I say, I listen to how stuff works. So thanks for your time and stay awesome. That is Lucas. Lucas, you stay awesome. You stay awesome and you start saying stuff you should know instead of how stuff works. Yeah, but that's okay. It's close. The people might eventually find it if he steers into how stuff works. That's right. We appreciate it, Lucas. And if you're listening to us at eleven, then you are on the right track, my friend. And stay cool because remember, we lose them around high school. Yeah, don't get lost around high school, Lucas, because we'll still be here making episodes. Where will you be? Yeah. And secret, we are cool. Yeah. No matter what your high school friends tell you. Correct. In the meantime, we're glad you're listening to us and we appreciate the listener mail. If you want to send us the listener mail we appreciate, we would love to hear it. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast or at Joshua Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook.com Stuffychenknowcharleswackbryt. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housedefirks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffycehoodnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen 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." | |
a6191332-5462-11e8-b449-df6bbde2e574 | Genghis Khan: Madman or Genius? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/genghis-khan-madman-or-genius | Depending on who you talk to, Genghis Khan was either a sadistic madman or one of the great leaders in world history. One thing is sure, he was one of the most advanced military minds of all time. | Depending on who you talk to, Genghis Khan was either a sadistic madman or one of the great leaders in world history. One thing is sure, he was one of the most advanced military minds of all time. | Thu, 21 Jun 2018 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=172, tm_isdst=0) | 48451165 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding Desert Mesa, we have some big news. You guys bought so many tickets, we have actually changed theaters to a bigger theater. Yeah. We moved from the Van Buren, which is very, very beautiful, right around the block to the amazing Orpheum Theater so that more of you Phoenix Sidians can show up and see us, because we want to see as many of you as possible. Yeah. Otherwise, everything is the same. So if you have tickets to that Van Buren show, then they count for the Or PM show, obviously. And now there are a whole lot more tickets for you desert dwellers. And I can't wait to see you all in your lovely tans and your scorpions and your tarantulas and your rattlesnakes. Yes. So we'll be there on Wednesday, October 24, at the Orpheum Theater. And if you haven't gotten tickets yet, you can get them by going to Sysklive.com, our clearinghouse for Stuff You Should Know live. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and sitting across from me, it's Charles W. Chuckas Chinkas Bryant. And sitting to your right is ghost producer Casper Nobody. It was Ramsay guest. Producer Ramsay. We've got, like, all these new guest producers coming on hot and heavy now. Jerry, she had to leave today, and I think everyone's busy. Someone came in. There's also a distinct lack of interest I picked up on. Boy, remember the days when people used to jump at a chance to sit in here? Oh, yeah. Now they're like, I've got to mail something. I know you used to be like, oh, my gosh, Jerry's gone. Let me do it. Let me do it. Then they grew up. Yeah. And then they grew up in now we have our little dunking bird to peck the key. The R record button. Yeah. Just going back and forth, thinking about where it's life went wrong. Just us chuck and a guy named Dingus Khan. Do you pronounce it dingus or Chinggus? Are you being serious? I know it's not Dingus, but I've also seen it spelled in a way that would suggest you Dingus. You pronounce it Chinggis. Oh, really? I think I have heard that, but we're going to go with the general genghis pronunciation. Okay. Right. Although what was his birth name? Timu Jin. Genghis Khan isn't even his real name, everybody so calm down. It's Temujin, man. Did you see that statue? I've seen it before, yes. It's enormous. Have you seen it in person? No, I've not yet been to Mongolia. That's something else, man. I will one day, though. Yes, I know. It's the world's biggest equestrian statue, and with good reason. It's, like, 40 meters or 130ft tall. Yeah, that's an enormous statue. It's pretty impressive. Whether you're on a horse or not. That's a big old statue, right? Sure. I almost didn't say old. And I think it's made of, like, 250 tons. Of stainless steel, which means it rinses clean really well, and it looks like I saw the wide shot. It doesn't look like one of those that's surrounded by Burger Kings. Oh, good. Looks like there's a lot of land around it. Well, Mongolia has a lot of land. A lot of undeveloped land, from what I understand. Yeah, this was an interesting one, because depending on what kind of historian you are, he is either a revered mastermind or scorned butcher. Butcher, yeah, I know. He's actually I think both. Well, of course he was both, but yeah, there are definite camps, for sure. A lot of people I've seen them called the Pro Genghis camp. The Prog, yes. They're all about all the cultural transmission that happened under his rule or all the new innovative laws or religious tolerance was another one. Yes. And yes, all that stuff happened. It's not in dispute. There are a lot of things that we'll talk about that were really positive. But he's also directly responsible for the deaths of about 35 million people. Yeah. The antigee, over a 25 year period. That's a ridiculous amount of death of people who, had Genghis Khan not been born and decided to lead a conquest, would probably otherwise not have died violently. That's a big mark in his favor or against him. My morality just switched off there for a second. So you got the Pro G, the Anti G, and the alligee that's the third camp, the Buoyakasha. Buoyakasha. I missed that. It's good stuff. It is. But they tried to bring it back, remember? And it was like, oh, really? Was there a part two, part 2.0? That's the problem. They didn't do new stuff. It was just him introducing old stuff. And it was like, we want more new stuff. We've all seen this. I don't remember, it was like, for a month on FX. But they shot new hosting segments. Yes. They were like 15 seconds long. So basically they said, hey, Sasha Barrick on how'd you like to make another X amount of dollars by showing up for a day? How would you like to do the Ollie G version of SYSK Select? All right, I'm not going to examine that one too closely. All right, so we're talking about OG, I mean, Genghis Khan, right? Yeah. And just some large statistics right off the bat as far as his influence. Well, not his influence, but his rule and sheer numbers. Yeah. This is the reason we're still talking about not just because he killed so many people. Yeah, agreed. By the time of course, everyone knows he was a great conqueror who just kept branching out further and further. And this is how far he reached. Eventually, in modern day terms, he would reach Austria. Austria. He banged on the door of Austria. His son did. Just get out of world map. And look at where Mongolia is. So, Austria, Finland, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Vietnam, Burma, Japan and Indonesia 12 million contiguous square miles, which is the size of Africa again. Amazing. Yeah. And then to put that in context, the great Roman Empire, that was about half the size of the United States. Yeah. The Roman Empire was half the size of the United States. Yeah. It took them 400 years to amass that. In 25 years, Genghis Khan had an empire the size of Africa. Yeah. And then at the time, the population of the world was about 7 billion people, and the Mongolian Empire was about 3 billion of that. So it's just astounding it is astounding and to put it in true cultural or true historic context at the time, in, say, like, the early, early 13th century, the Mongols were the Mongols a bunch of nomadic tribes on the steps of Mongolia. China was a well established and fairly advanced patchwork of dynasties. You had, like, Europe growing. They were in the Middle Ages, but they were like, the Renaissance is coming. Not too long. You had the Native Americans over in America doing their thing, africa doing their thing. So there's all these different things going on in the world, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this tiny little bunch of people who aren't even into agriculture take over Eurasia in 25 years out of nowhere and kill 35 million people out of nowhere. It'd be like if Polynesia suddenly rose up and took over the Americas in 25 years. They just assembled and said, we're taking over. And they were just so ferocious that America just didn't even know what to do and was overrun by them. Yeah. And their rule was not long lasting for a lot of the reasons that there's a lot of ironies, a lot of the reasons that they were able to spread so fast ended up being their undoing. But this is all just set up fodder. Yeah. We haven't even gotten into it yet, so let's do start. Okay, sure. Back in, people think the best guess is probably, I think, 1185. I saw there was a kid named Temujin 62. I'm sorry. And he was born in a place called well, along the Onan River near ULA Batar, which is a great name, but that's the capital of Mongolia. There's five as in that's a lot of a's and this kid, this Temujin, who would grow up to be Genghis Khan, was not Genghis Khan material from the outset. No. He was a middle brother, and apparently both younger and older brother outshone him. Yeah. He was very much the Jam Brady of his family. He was, because apparently little brother was a much better athlete and a better aero shooter, or I guess you would call them archers, kind of better at everything. And then his older brother picked on him. He was illiterate. He wasn't, like, formally schooled or super smart. Right. But, I mean, in his defense, neither were most of the people he knew or lived on the steps. Yeah. It's not like his two brothers got their doctorates. Their PhDs been kicking butt. Wow, that's true. I wish I knew more about this whole era because it sounds like it was just a crazy time, especially over there where people would be like, if I want something, I'm just going to go take it. Yeah. If I want that tribe going, I'm going to go kill them. If I want those ladies and their children, I'm going to kidnap them. And that was just sort of how the land was ruled. It was kind of not chaos, but just brute force. Lawless. Yeah, pretty lawless. You were loyal to your tribe or your clan, and your tribe or clan was nomadic, and you live by the horse and yeah. There was a lot of war between these tribes on the steps, and there are tiny wars. Like you said, kidnapping. Like, you would kidnap your wife. That's how you got your wife, was you go kidnapper from another tribe and be like, you're my wife now. That's how his mother came about, right? Yes, that's how he came about. His father's mother, technically, his father was the chief of his tribe. What's his father's name? Yasugi. Nice. And Yasuki kidnapped Hulu and, yeah, there's a lot of UML out in there. I don't know how the Oomlout represents Mongolian dialect, but we're going to do a German style. So her name is Hulu. Is that pretty German? Mertley crue. So she was kidnapped, and this is the thing I have no context to put this in if this is a common thing. Was she like, I'm being kidnapped? Okay, I guess I'm 18 now or something. This is just a normal course of events for so it didn't impact her? I don't know. Or is that just a ridiculous thing to even think? And like, yes, if you were kidnapped and taken from your tribe and made to be some dude's wife unwillingly, it doesn't matter where it happened or when it happened. It was a horrific experience. I think it was that and just sort of the way it was. Women had no recourse or say in anything at the time, so it's both. But I think I know what you're saying, though. Like, she had these children and they were a, quote, family, but what does that mean in that context? Yes. Is it a family if mom's looking for an escape route the whole life? Right. Either way, it was not like people recording one another back then. Right. So Yasugi, right? That's what we decided on. Yes. Yasugi was the chief, like I said, of the clan, of the tribe, a very powerful dude. And he was poisoned, actually. He died by poisoning when Temujin was nine. And that was bad news for Temujin, his mom and his two brothers. Yeah. They were just sort of kicked out of this new tribe, and I'm not sure why. I guess because he was the son of yeah. Okay. They didn't want anybody being like, oh, by the way, I'm the rightful heir, right. I should really be the chief of this tribe. I'm very surprised that they didn't just kill all of them. Yeah. Because that's kind of the way it usually went. Yeah. So, yeah, they were kicked out. She had a rough childhood. They had to scavenge for food. I reckon it toughen them up a little bit. But as our article points out, that he kind of gave him a will to and probably ticked him off. So he had anger and will, vengeance and vengeance all rolled up into one, which says a lot about the man that he would become, I think, for sure. So he and his family make it not all of his family. There's a story called The Secret History of the Mongols, and it was written in about 1240, so shortly after Genghis Khan's death. We don't know who the author was, but that's the primary source for most of the biography of Genghis Khan. They know a lot because somebody sat down and wrote this, and we'll see eventually why. But that's where we're getting all of this information, which is also why, if you listen to the history of Genghis Khan, a lot of it sounds like a string of fables and tails wrapped, for sure, but historians tend to think that there's some kernel of truth or just outright truth to most of it. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break, and we'll talk about what young Timidin was like. All right. So we said that he was a bit of a crybaby, got picked on, wasn't very athletic or strong, but he had charm, he had chutzpah, he had charisma and a little bit of moxie. Definitely, you got to throw in some moxie. And apparently he was able, through his charisma, to talk people into helping him out, and that became sort of a trait through his life. And they give a couple of examples. One time, he was going after a horse thief, and he just ran upon a stranger and kind of convinced the guy to not only give him a horse, but to help him out. Yeah. He really attracted people into his orbit, from what I understand. Yeah. He was like Gilbert Godfrey. It's funny, because I knew I was trying to think of someone legitimately, and I knew that you were headed down. Do you know the opposite of that? What else? There was another time that he had a bride to be, or maybe I think he was married. Yeah, I think that's good. And she was kidnapped because that's how it went. And so he went to the leader of another tribe and said, hey, take this sable skin. It was one of my wedding gifts. Oh, nice. Yeah, he was pretty impressed, apparently, because he helped him rescue the wife and then pledged his allegiance to him as an ally for life. Yes. He said, not only am I going to help you get your wife, you're going to go on to do great things and I want to be there with you. Love me. So there's just tons of stories like that, like early stories where he was held prisoner by he was kidnapped himself and escaped by beating the guy watching him with a wooden collar that he had passed around his neck. There's just tons of stories like that. If you put it together, you can kind of see this guy develop over time, right? Sure. But eventually he probably hit the weights eventually, right? Yeah. As he grows up and develops and more and more people kind of come into his orbit and want to help them out, he starts putting that charisma and that vengeance to, I guess, productive use. And he assembles like his own tribe and other tribes. He starts aligning with other tribes, and the tribes that don't go along with it, he slaughters. In war. He was known for having an eye for other talent, which would aid him tremendously throughout his years as a conqueror. But for example, if you were a good enemy soldier and he noted that in battle, there is a good chance that you are going to end up a field commander on his side after the battle was over and he beat your guys. And there's actually a story where his horse was shot out from under him. And after his group won the battle, the Mongols won the battle. He wanted to know who shot that arrow. And the guy on the other side stood up and said, it was me. And he said, your name is Jeba now, which means arrow, and you're going to become a field commander for me. And he went on to be one of the best he ever had. The guy was like, is he messing with me? Right. But that was pretty par for the course with him. And so through these actions, he started assembling like an army and became the leader of the steps. Yeah. And people like you said if they challenged him, they were squashed. He had a surrender or die policy, which apparently if you literally did not fight and you were just like, okay, we're all yours. Apparently he was okay to you. He wasn't known for torturing people. I don't want to say he was kind to them, but I think he kind of wanted his subjects to be happy and productive. Right. So if they didn't fight him, he was like, all right, you're part of the big extended con family. Come here, you. Thank you for your kingdom. Although he isn't con at this point still. No, that didn't take place until I believe twelve, six. Yeah. That's when the Mongol tribes all got together. They had a great assembly called Curali and they said, you know what? You're the man. You're genghis khan. Now, we are all on your team, because, quite frankly, we're scared of you. Right. We're scared. He was like, hey, that's fine. Yeah. So Genghis Khan. They think Khan means ruler. Indisputably Genghis. They're not 100% sure what they meant by it, because it can mean ocean or just so I think they were saying, like, supreme the leader all the way to the ocean. Sure. And then you run into Triton. You don't want to mess with him. Right. But up to Triton's area, this guy is the leader. So that's what they meant by ocean leader. He was an Aquaman. No. So they're unified now, and he said, I have to assemble a nation here. I've got all these tribes. I want a unified people. Yeah, that was a big move. It was. And it was a smart move. And all these old clans got together. People that were enemies joined forces. I don't know if they became best buds or anything. Well, one of the things they did is they renounced these old rivalries. They stopped worrying with each other, they stopped robbing one another, and they started identifying not as these individual clans, but as Mongols. Yeah. And, like, strengthen numbers. I think they realized this could benefit us all if we're one big, powerful group. Right. But numbers is relative, though, man. From what I saw, at its peak, the army of Genghis Khan had about 100,000 men. Yes. Which is peanuts. It is peanuts. So why were they should we get into why they were successful yet? Yeah. Okay. Why were they successful? Well, a few reasons. Probably one of the biggest is these dudes could ride horses and shoot arrows like nobody's business. Yeah. They had an incredible calvary. He was one of the first whoever wrote that article you sent that one historian. He was great. Yeah. So he pointed out that he realized that the cavalry didn't need to be followed by an infantry, which was a huge advantage, I guess, in battle, you need far fewer guys. Yeah. And just get everyone up on a horse. They were incredible archers. Their accuracy was unmatched. They could fire an arrow, apparently, like, over 300 yards accurately. These horses were awesome. They were grass fed. They could live off the land. They had this armor that was really lightweight and flexible. So at the time, they were fighting people in much heavily armored apparel so they could move around better on their horses. They were firing arrows, and they had these little short swords, and they had this thing called a hooked lance, and they're like, a lance is all right. It's cool, I guess, to poke someone off a horse. But what if you can poke them or grab them? So they added a hook to the land. It's a very simple feature, and it really changed things. It was like a modern evolution and weaponry. Right. So these are just a few of the reasons. One of the others is tactics and strategy. He would scout out before battles for weeks. Sometimes. He wouldn't just go as brutish as they were. They would spend a lot of time doing research and spying and really kind of figuring out a game plan. Like if they were going to sack a city, like they knew where the supply lines were, the gate routes, all that kind of stuff. All the stuff you need to know to sack a city. Yes. One of the other things, part one I saw, it called the quantum leap in military strategy and technology. Yeah. Okay. That was the first thing. The other thing is something you touched on earlier, their surrender or die policy. Yeah, right. So their military prowess combined with their tactics and their policy of if you don't just say yes, that's fine, we don't want to fight, we're going to kill everybody. Just about everybody. They were actually pretty smart about it, too. They'd find the skilled craftsmen in sharp cities. We're going to spare your life because you're now a Mongol. Yeah. You got to move to Mongolia, by the way, but they would just kill so many people that a lot of historians have tried to figure out why were they so ferocious. And there have actually been a number of theories that have been put up. One is apparently Genghis Khan. He was into shamanism. That was his religion. Yeah, but he was like fervently religious about shamanism. And there was like a great god of the sky who I think is analogous to Vishnu, maybe in Hinduism. And this god supposedly gave him a vision that he should become conquer of the world. And so some people said, well, if you oppose him, you're opposing his god. And so there was no room for that. And that's what made him so ferocious. Probably the best explanation, though, is that if one of their 100,000 horsemen died, that was a big deal, right? Yeah. So to save their numbers, they were better off not fighting. So by slaughtering an entire city, that word about that gets around the area. So when those guys show up to your city, there's a pretty good chance that if they say surrender or die, you're going to surrender. And so the Mongols didn't have to sacrifice a single person. Yes. And also get the idea we're going to talk about his major seizures. But he also had a lot of smaller skirmishes with just kind of regional tribes, I think. And I got the idea that he wouldn't send all his dudes in there. He would send in a small amount of people as possible. Right. Because they were so fierce and good at what they did. He didn't need to. And then that also reduced the chances of loss of life, I guess. And then, so the smallest units does that 100,000 man army boiled down to units as small as ten people. That was the individual unit was a ten person cavalry group and you could just say send five groups in or a thousand groups in or whatever. Yeah, there you go. As he went, he would pick up whatever weaponry and tactics that other armies used and use those. Because one thing that was pretty clear in reading this genghis Khan did not like walls in walled cities. I saw that too. It ticked him off, especially for some reason. Why would you do that? So he got catapults and things like that. And he would do some awful things like with ladders and catapults. He would fling diseased animals. I don't know. He wasn't the only one to do that. But some of the things like Lore, though, the thing with the cats and the birds. Yeah. He told one city that he'd spare them if they gave him 1000 cats and 10,000 birds. And they gathered up their 10,000 birds, which I guess they had in 1000 cats and gave them to him. And then he set the cats and the birds on fire and flung them over the walls to start fires in the city. Well, suppose we could have cotton to them and set them on fire. Well, that's much better. But I'm sure the fire spreads. It does seem apocryphal. Yeah, I don't know if I believe that apocryphal. By the way, I just learned in like the last year or so that word made up. You didn't know that? You never heard the word or? No, I've heard of plenty of times. I just didn't realize. I always assumed it meant like biblical and end of time. Oh, interesting. Because it's resemblance to apocalypse. I've got one more for you. What's that? I just this week learned what coup de gras actually means. I thought it meant like the cream of the crop. The ultimate it's the death blow. Like there's nothing after it. Not because it's the best. Right, because you just had your head cut off. Yes, the coup de gras. Yeah, the final blow. Just learn that this week. Yes, I think I knew that. You know what word I used to always get wrong was dubious. You're thinking about POC? I don't know. Yes. Can you score me some dubious? Did you ever listen to funk? Dubious. They were like this rap group from the 90s. Yeah, they were great. All they want to do is have fun in the midst of the whole gangster rap thing. Funk Dubious funky. I totally remember that. Boy, they just went away. I haven't heard that name. I think they had like one album and that was it. What was their big hit? I don't remember, but I'll bet it had to do with Pot. Probably so. All right, so he's got Mongolia pretty well taken care of. Wait, what did you think Dubious meant? I made a joke instead of letting your answer no. I don't remember what I thought it meant, but I think I just used to get it wrong, we'll go back to funk TV. So he's got Mongolia pretty well under control. And he is insatiable though, Genghis Khan. He starts looking around and he's like, China is big, you look pretty pretty. And I think even though they are wealthy and tough and have a lot of dudes to fight, I think I can take them because I'm Genghis Khan, which is a nut. So thing to say at that time. Sure. Especially depending on which of the dynasties in China you are talking about, because I think there are at least three major ones. Well, he's like all of them. Let's just go one at a time. Yeah, that's what he did. That's exactly what he did. He started with the I'm sorry, everybody, I'm having trouble keeping up with all of the names, but the Tangy. Yeah. The Kingdom of Jihad is how I would probably pronounce it. Not Dixie a Chang. No. Yeah. Zizia and the Tangates. And I think this was sort of a test, his biggest test militarily at the time. Yeah. He'd been fighting other tribes on the steps to consolidate them and killing off the resistors. They didn't have cities. The Tango were the first ones that he encountered that had like, cities with walls that were fortified that he needed to figure out how to lay siege to. Yeah. And he did. To the point where the king finally said, all right, you are my master, here are my troops. And here's the Princess Bride as well. Right. Because I've heard you get around. Yeah. And Genghis Khan said, as you wish. That's right. Is that what he said? I think so. Okay, so the next he said, alright, how about this other region, the Chin Kingdom? And he faced a 70,000 man army and it said virtually wiped it out in this article. So he's working his way up here now. Yeah. So he actually hit the Chin twice, from what I understand. And this House Works article says it happened in 2013. So I bet the Chins were quite surprised to see Genghis Khan show up five years ago. Yeah. I wonder why it says that he came back and got a bunch of silk and gold and got a bunch of engineers. I wonder if that was the purpose of that mission. Maybe it was like, hey, I don't think we properly rated them. Yeah. Because this was two years after the first one. I guess that's all it was. That he wanted some more silk and gold and again, appropriating weapons like crossbows, catapults, and because of China early versions of explosives. Right. And so he's using all this stuff. He's not married to just the hook pole and just the sabre. He'll try out anything he sees works. Right. Yeah. So he's knocked out the first two dynasties. He's brought them under his control. He now controls a significant portion of China, all of the steps around Mongolia, and he's got. His sights set on the biggest one of the three, the Jin Dynasty. Yes. And he actually got in contact with them, or else they got in contact with him first. But the Emperor of the Jin Dynasty, this is an advanced civilization at this point. Very wealthy. Maybe the most advanced and wealthy civilization on the planet at the time. Maybe Genghis Khan is a backwoods redneck horse rider who just happened to get lucky a couple of times, caught the other two dynasties slipping. Sure. That's what the emperor of the Jin Dynasty is thinking of. Yeah. He's thinking, you're going to be my slave. Yeah. He's like, You've done pretty good, kid. I'll tell you what, I'll let you look over my land in the south, you'll be my vassal. And here's the princess bride. I hear you like them. Yeah. But it did not work out that way. No, it didn't. He actually successfully defeated the most advanced, wealthiest society on the planet at the time. The gyms. Yeah. Slaughtered thousands and thousands of people. Well, that's how you do it, I guess. And these three campaigns, these are huge, enormous campaigns. China was extremely populous at the time, and the number of people who died most of the people who died under Genghis Khan's rule through war and conquest happened during these three China campaigns. Yeah. About 30 million people died. And this is over ten years, I think. Less than ten years? Yeah, I think so. It's nuts. Ma'am. Yeah. So he wanted to continue going, I guess, west 2019, he made his way through modern day Central Asia, like Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Iran. And the Shah Mohammed there said he killed an ambassador that they had sent forward from a trading caravan, and he had a big walled city, and he's like, I'm going to be fine, I'm not sweating this guy. Right. And he burned the city down. Genghis Khan did, and including 1000 of the soldiers who were in a mosque hiding out, killed about 100,000 people. But of course, like you said earlier, he spared the skilled craftsmen and workers. Right. And this is the quoras I can't even practice this one. The empire, which it's capital city that he sacked, is now in Uzbekistan. But I've seen it called mostly like Afghanistan, iran, for the most part. This is the area it covered. Iran is what I see. It mostly compared to these days. Yeah. And things are starting to get a little out of hand at this point, and it's basically sort of due to the fact that he went too far. There were too many people, too much land. When you control your I think the guy who wrote that article you sent said that they weren't producers of anything, the Mongols. Yeah. Right. Or tradesmen. They were conquers. That's it. Yes. And that's not like you got to diversify. From what I understand, they didn't have a written language, they didn't do anything. They just conquered people. And took over your land and then leached off of you. Yeah. Which is a good skill to get going, but if that's all you can do I think he likened it to a shark needing to feed. Right. Like, eventually you run out of lands to conquer, and then the interior, it's such a huge corporation at this point. It gets unwieldy. So Genghis Khan recognized this at some point. I saw that he had basically a change of heart about agriculture, about walled cities, about a sedentary lifestyle, and I think he mostly saw, like, oh, you can make way more wealth this way. So he turned from conquering as much toward figuring out how to administer this area that he conquered. Again, Eurasia is conquered. It's under this guy's never been united before and hasn't been united since. Even under Soviet rule. The Genghis Khan's empire was bigger than that. Right. And so he put it together, and he's like, what do I do now? And we'll talk about that after this message. How about that? Yes. Okay, Chuck. So Genghis Khan has conquered Eurasia and said, what now? Eurasia. What do you guys want to do now? I'm done with killing. Not really, though. Well, he died. Yeah, I guess that's right. Yeah. No one knows quite how he died. Still. Some people say he had a fall from a horse and was injured, eventually died. Other people said it might have been typhus. There are a few other theories floating around out there. Yeah. Like, shot in the knee with an arrow is my favorite. Yeah. Which, I guess, just infection. I would die from pain. Yeah. It's interesting, though, in August of 1227, when he was on his deathbed, one of the last things he did was say, remember the tangots? Go kill all of them. I think they were the first people he conquered. Right. They were the jija people. Okay. The first people in China. And when he went to go attack the Kwarazem Empire, he demanded that they send some troops as reinforcement, and they said, no. He defeated the Korzm and turned around and went right over to Jija and was like, you guys are your toast. You're in trouble. And that was his last act as a living person. Yeah. He was succeeded by one of his son, Ogidai, who took that stuff all the way to Europe. Oh, yeah. He had a bunch of sons, and I guess we might as well talk about his lineage. It's very famously, the Genghis Khan. I mean, what is it, like, one of every 200 men, something like .5% of the total global population is directly descended from him. That's amazing. It's amazing and gross. That's a lot of people. Yeah. He was about 65 ish when he died. And no one knows where he's buried? No, because they killed everyone on the way to the funeral. That's one. And then also, they rode over his grave with horses. I looked up. Do you ever go on Quora? Sure, every now and then. It's great, man. Yeah. You can usually tell who knows what they're talking about of the answers. Multiple. And frequently it's most of the people. It's a good place to get info that you should then go double check. Yeah, I agree. Though it's not like the old days of what was the terrible one years and years ago where you would ask a question. Yahoo questions. Yeah. Properly or Yahoo. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And there are a lot of platforms like this. This is a pretty good it's not corrupt yet. How about that? Yeah, I think Core is pretty good, actually. So I went on cora. This one you can't really look up. But this one guy, two people like, the question was, why was Genghis Khan buried in secret, I think. And two people said they didn't want his grave robbed. Makes sense. They wanted to make sure that the transfer of power to his son was complete, so they had to keep his death a secret. That makes sense. Yeah. This one guy said, don't be idiots. He was a little arrogant, but he said, don't be idiots. Genghis Khan was a shamanistic person, religiously fervent. He would have gone one of two ways. They would have cremated him and just spread his ashes, or they would have done a sky burial. Remember we talked about that before, where they just left him on the mountainside for the vultures to pick over. It wouldn't have buried him with grave goods. He would have been embarrassed with that. So he's the only person I saw say something like that. But it gave me pause. It made me wonder if the hidden grave is just more lore about Genghis Khan and off the mark. Interesting. Yeah. Well, his legacy looms large still, not only in his lineage, from his loins, his overactive loins, to leaching out goop, but depending on who you're talking to well, he definitely did some things. He opened up trade. Right. The west got things like noodles and tea and playing cards. He perhaps founded the very first version of what would later be a post office. What was it called? The Yam. Yeah, like a Pony Express. Yeah, different stations. The Pony Express. Yeah, like straight up, but like 600 years before the Pony Express. Yeah, exactly. But depending on who you're talking to, some people lay almost all of modern warfare at his feet. Which is sort of interesting because you can sort of draw a line back to his tactics that eventually would become the Crusades or the slaughtering of the Aztecs and the Incas. Yeah, like they would learn from him and then do that. Right, because it was more of that cultural conveyor belt. Right. So they say that he conquered the Kwarzam Empire, came in contact with Islam and taught them ferocity, which the Europeans learned during the Crusade. And they took that ferocity back to Europe and then eventually to the New World, which they used on the Native Americans they found there. And somebody said no. The Europeans were already well versed in ferocity and brutality and warfare. They need to learn it from Genghis Khan. That doesn't mean that's wrong. Right, but it's the suggestion that the Europeans were naive to brutality and warfare is incorrect. Well, it's complete BS. And the author of that article also makes a good point. And you can't look and judge him by today's lens. He wasn't any more brutal than anyone else back then. It was just the number. Yeah, he just did it better that to me, though. So I guess then maybe my problem is, like, celebrating people who've killed tons of people. That's what I have a problem at base. Sure. Because great man history, it bugs me. It bugs me, too. We didn't come across that way, did we? No, but just by carrying on the tradition of talking about this guy and you definitely keep his little flame burning. Well, there's 150 foot statue of him. Yeah. Like, he's still very much revered. Well, let's talk about that. If you were in Mongolia right now, you're probably pretty mad at me and Chuck. Apologies for that. It's the great man history thing we have a problem with. But in Mongolia, he is known as the founder of Mongolia. Yeah. Basically the greatest leader Mongolia has ever known, and possibly the world, if you're a Mongolian. And during the Soviet occupation of Mongolia, you were not allowed to talk about him. Yeah, they took him out of history books. Yes. Because they were trying to stamp out any kind of nationalism in Mongolia at the time. So the moment the Soviets left, the Soviet Union dissolved. They were like gingus come. They built the statue of them. They named him an airport after him. They put him on currency. So he's definitely revered over there. But I think that the author of the article, I think his name is Frank McLin. I'm almost positive. It's a really good article. Yeah, it's great. Frank McLinn. He wrote this wonderful article called The Brutal Brilliance of Genghis Khan. But he points out, like, whatever you think of the guy, even if he was the same as his contemporaries, and it still seems alien to you. Like, think about your own leaders. Your own leaders send people to die on the battlefield, too, and they're revered as well for causes that aren't not noble. Right. So the point is, I guess don't hate on Genghis Khan. Hate the game, not the player. Right? I guess so. Wow. Boy, this guy took a deep left turn, didn't it? Well, it is interesting. Yeah. We could talk about this dude forever. Yeah. He also makes the point, too, that the Mongols were what he called culturally unbalanced. So he's, like, at least the Europeans, while they were slaughtering and killing, were giving us the divine comedy and carmina barana and these great cathedrals and operas, whereas the Mongols were just barbarian raiders and butchers all slaughter, no substance. That's a Tshirt. Yeah. Very famously, too, in the movies, kingis Khan was played twice. Once by John Wayne, believe it or not, in The Conqueror and then Omar Sharif. Okay. Egyptian. Also not close to Mongolian. Right. I don't know if it's better or worse than John Wayne is probably the same. I think it's worse or no, better. Better. Well, now it'll be Hugh Jackman. Now. I think Hollywood's changed somewhat, but, like, five years ago, they would have been like, what about Jason Momoa or Matt Damon? Pool manchu mustaches on him. They just picked momoa because he looks tough. Who's he? And he looks sort of ethnic. He's the guy that plays Aquaman. I got you. And is on very versatile Game of Thrones, probably. And I even looked up Mongolian American actors to see if there was anyone out there who they could tap into, and I don't think there are a lot of them. Okay. Probably have to be some good unknown. So speaking of looking like a Mongolian okay, got one last thing. Are you done? I'm done. The Mongolians were really good at propaganda, and one of the ways that they showed this was in Iran, in modern day Iran, the Khwarism empire, when they subjugated it one of the things they did. We don't have an alphabet. We don't write things down, but you guys do, and we want to put that to good use. You have great artists. We want you to do a history of the Mongols. And the scribe said, sure, we'll do that. And we want you to do A History of the World. All the great leaders in the world, all the great civilizations in the world. We want you to do those. So they did. They built this they wrote this huge compendium, a Universal History of the World. But the Mongols had them illustrate, like, illuminate the text. And they had them whenever they drew a leader or a conqueror or an army, they drew them as Mongols. Interesting. So they insinuated themselves into history as basically the progenitors of all greatness and thus justified the subjugation of this area. And they did it through propaganda. They had all that copied, hand copied, and distributed as widely as they could. Wow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. There you go. That's it. All right. If you want to know more about Mongolia or Genghis Khan or any of that stuff, you can type those words into the search bar. How stuff works. Pick up a book, you dingus. Since Chuck said that, it's time for listener ma'am. Hey, guys. Recently listened to the show about bearing Ferrari. Another cool story about an almost buried car. 2013 brazilian billionaire Count Chinquinho Scarpa made headlines when he announced he wanted to bury his $500,000 Bentley like the pharaohs did with their precious possessions. So he could supposedly ride around the afterlife in style tracked tons of press and social media buzz, with many people outraged he would do something so selfish. On the day of the burial, tons of Brazilian press and media crews show up to his house to see him bury his Bentley. But moments before the car is lowered in the ground, the Count pulls a major plot twist and announces he won't be burying the car. And he reveals true intention to create awareness for organ donation. Wow. Because people are buried with something valuable their organs and it was all a stunt. And the use of social media and buzz marketing create awareness for organ donation. That is fantastic, man. What a cool guy. Really interesting. Anyway, guys, big fan of your show. Learned a lot from your stories over the years. I wanted to take this chance to share this cool story with you. And that is from Kate Miller, who is looking forward to more stories. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Kate. I definitely had not heard about that. That's a good one. If you want to let us know a cool story, we want to hear it. You can tweet to us. I'm at Joshmclark and S-Y-S Kpodcast Chucksonfacebookcom moviecrushandcharleswchuckbryantandstuffyshow. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com and as always, choice at our home on the web stuffychano.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housestepworks.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 favourite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
a8512164-9c4d-11ea-bc66-4f1271590e25 | Josh Clark's Speech from Commencement: Speeches for the Class of 2020 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/josh-clarks-speech-from-commencement-speeches-for | In this episode of Commencement: Speeches for the Class of 2020, Josh Clark, co-host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast, divulges secrets to graduates that their parents and teachers may have neglected to tell them. | In this episode of Commencement: Speeches for the Class of 2020, Josh Clark, co-host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast, divulges secrets to graduates that their parents and teachers may have neglected to tell them. | Fri, 22 May 2020 19:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=19, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=143, tm_isdst=0) | 10890087 | 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, the holidays are the most wonderful time of the year. But they can also be the most stressful. And with the threat of covid 19 still looming, emotions are high and can be overwhelming. Cal Hope can help with free emotional support for you and your loved ones this holiday season. Call 833-17-4673 or live chat@calhope.org today at Metro by T Mobile, we're giving you more with the big 5G upgrade. Now. Choose from the largest selection of free 5G phones and prepaid like the Samsung Galaxy 5G. Just switch and trade in your old device. Plus, enjoy 5G access on every planet at no extra cost. All powered by the TMobile 5G network only at Metro. Requires port in ID and eligible plan, plus tax. 5g coverage not available everywhere. Sees more for details. This episode is brought to you by DirecTV Stream. Introducing DirecTV Stream, the best of live TV and on demand. Which means you can watch your favorite sports, movies and shows all in one place. So whether you want to catch the game live or watch the latest blockbuster, they've got you covered and there's no annual contract. DirecTV Stream Get Your TV Together@directv.com requires high speed internet and compatible device content varies by package and location restriction supply commencement Speeches for the Class of 2020 is a production of iHeartRadio Class of 2020. Parents, faculty, rising graduates, welcome to commencement. You made it. This year is a little different, a difficult time to graduate because the traditional graduation day has been put on hold. So we are bringing it to you wherever you are, because this is still your day, your moment. And now, put your hands together. It's time to be inspired this year's commencement speaker, the one and only Josh Clark. Dear students, congratulations on reaching this point in your life. It's a big deal, and you should be proud of yourself. Now that you've gotten here, I've come to fill you in on a little secret you've been told for practically your whole life now. How special you are, how singularly important you are, how packed with uniqueness you are. And that is true. You are special and unique, and you are important. But your parents and teachers haven't been telling you the whole truth all of your life. They've only been showing you a part of the bigger picture. Surely you've noticed hints of this throughout the time that you were in school, like when you got older, and suddenly the stories in history class began to get a lot darker. They told you all the same stories when you were younger. They just arranged the picture without all of the pieces to keep you from truly understanding. And perhaps you resented it when you realized the whole truth had been kept from you. That's understandable. Most of us do feel that way. But don't waste your time stewing on this. Each generation does it to the next. They think it protects the young, when really it just keeps things as they are. The important thing here is to learn from that experience, because people are going to continue to do this to you your whole life. People will try to lay out the pieces of the truth that fit together to make the picture they want you to see. It's a way to get people to do what you want them to. And throughout your life, you will get this from all sorts of people. People you're friends with, people you love, people on television, people on the Internet, people running your government, people running other people's governments. Your actions and your thoughts are powerful and influential, and people want to sway them. This means that you will have to learn to think for yourself. Do your own research. Seek out people who are experts on the topic. Talk to other people. In this day and age, it's not enough to trust your eyes or your ears. You have to put in work to find the truth. Don't be lazy. Find the truth. It's not necessarily what's on the news. It's also not necessarily what's in some video that says the news is lying. Always remember this whatever someone is showing you, they're probably only showing you part of the picture. It's up to you to fill in the rest of the pieces that make up the whole truth, and maybe you'll never find it. That's okay. It would be exhausting to spend your life constantly searching for the truth, constantly paranoid that every person you speak to is manipulating you. Don't do that. That's not what life is about. And people aren't that mean at their core. Most people don't even realize they're showing you an incomplete picture. And usually they're not doing it for nefarious purposes when they do. Instead, the vast majority of people are just passing along an incomplete picture that someone else showed them. This happens a lot. It's a big problem. So to keep from dying of exhaustion by age 30, all haggard and paranoid and upset, do two things. One, decide if something is important enough to you or the world to search out the missing pieces to find the truth of the matter. Sometimes all it takes is an effective Google search and taking the time to read a couple of reliable articles. But remember that even if you do search high and low, you may never find the truth. About whatever it is you're trying to understand. So it better be important if you're going to go looking for the truth of a matter. And two, if it's not important, shrug it off. You will never know everything. You'll never know most things. Some things will be important enough for you to search for. Most will not be. But if you decide it's not that important, then this is really important. Don't pass along the incomplete picture to others. When you do that, you are shaping someone else's view of things. They trust you. They know you're a good person with the good of the world at heart. So why would you lie? Throughout your life, people will listen to what comes out of your mouth. So be careful that you believe in what you say. But back to what I was saying before about your parents and teachers giving you an incomplete picture. I hope you understand a little better now that they don't mean any harm by it. They might think they were protecting you all these years by keeping ugly truths from you. But those ugly truths, hard as they can be to take, are what allow us to grow as people. If you see a beautiful flower, you admire it and are glad that it's there. If you see a weed growing, though, you pull it. But if the people around you are telling you that the weed you're seeing is actually a flower, it's hard to know otherwise. And it's even harder to know that the weeds should be pulled. Remember that your parents and your teachers weren't lying to you because they wanted to deceive you. Their parents and their teachers showed them pictures of weeds that grow in our world and told them that they were flowers too. And their parents parents and their teachers teachers told them some weeds have been called flowers for so long that no matter what you say to some people, they will fight you tooth and nail that the weed is a flower. That's their truth. And people are deeply protective of what they hold to be true, even when it's not true at all. Part of the reason they'll fight and argue with you when you tell them a flower is actually a weed is just simple laziness. It takes a lot more effort to pull a weed than it does to pretend it's a flower. But the bigger reason they'll argue is because they don't want to believe they've been wrong all this time. The thing is, no matter how long everyone's called a weed a flower, there are some aspects to a weed that a flower doesn't have that will always give a weed away, like hurting people. If something that people you know say is a flower harms other people, it's really a weed. Weeds can hurt people in all kinds of ways. Maybe they give rights to some people, but not to others. Maybe they make it so some people have more wealth and power than they could ever possibly use. While other people have so little they can't barely scrape by. Other weeds make it so that when some people hurt other people or other life or the planet, they don't get in trouble for it. If you suspect a flower is really a weed and you look at it closely enough, you'll see that the people who say it's a flower are the ones who get all the benefits from it. And you'll also find there's a whole other group of people out there who've been calling it a weed all this time. It's just that nobody's listening to them. And sometimes it's even worse than that. Sometimes those people are told that their own flowers are weeds. So what does all of this have to do with you being special and unique? Excellent question. And actually, that's the whole point of everything. It's not a lie that you are special and unique. You are both of those things. But not simply because you're you as you've been led to believe all these years. That's an incomplete picture of the whole truth. You are special and unique because you were born a human being. All human beings are special and unique. Not just as individuals, but the whole human race. Every one of us is special. Every one of us is unique. And the same goes not just for human beings, but for all living things. Life is special. And in this way, every single person that you will ever meet in your entire life is as valuable and worthwhile as you are. Some of these other people you'll meet will disagree with you and some of them may harm you. Just because a person is unique and special doesn't mean that they're good. But as hard as it can be to remember sometimes, never forget that on the whole, human beings are generally good. They generally care about each other. They generally want what's best and most. Just don't forget that humanity is generally good. It's just that sometimes other people don't recognize a flower is really a weed. You can find a collection of incredible commencement addresses from all your favorite speakers as a commencement podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to podcasts." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1227034359883hsw-sysk-corporation-person_1.mp3 | How Corporate Personhood Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-corporate-personhood-works | Corporate personhood is an ancient legal custom tracing back to Roman law, whereby a corporation is legally considered a person. | Corporate personhood is an ancient legal custom tracing back to Roman law, whereby a corporation is legally considered a person. | Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=325, tm_isdst=0) | 15759384 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, everybody. Chuck, how are you doing? Good. That's Chuck, by the way. And I'm Josh. We're going to be your guide to the next 15 minutes of total mind expansion. Right. Tell you some stuff you should know. Yeah. And this one is actually pretty cool. The one we're doing today. I guess they're all pretty cool. We like to make them cool. But this one is something that probably a lot of your friends won't know about. So you can wow them at the next cocktail party, right? The next kid's birthday party, any kind of party. That's very succinct, Chuck. Chuck, let's talk about legal fiction. Okay? Okay. You want me to talk about it? Yeah. You're not talking about John Grisham. No, sorry. That was crichton that died. Right. I think John Grisham is alive and well. Yes. And he's an attorney and a novelist, right? Yeah. He's pretty good, too. But no, we're not talking about Grisham's work. We're talking about is actually a legal term that's used basically to describe anytime a court says something is true that's not true. Just for the sake of moving things along, keeping things tidy. It's kind of like if you and I were having a conversation, Chuck, and I said, my right job is a million times better than yours, and we were kind of debating that rather than stopping and saying, that's hyperbole. I don't agree with that. You're just going to kind of nod and we're going to stick to the meat of it. Right. Or we should punch each other and we could find out. That's one way to find out. Yeah. Although, as everyone knows, we're not big fighters. No. I would miss your face. That's how bad I am. It would be clumsy. Well, let me give you an example of legal fiction, specifically. There's this thing called a renunciation of a legacy. Have you heard of this? No. So basically, let's say I find out that I'm in your will, okay? And I'm just like that chuck he's far too generous. I can't accept this. Maybe if I take myself out of his will, he will go ahead and give that money to the poor or orphans or something like that. Okay? The thing is, you're sticking to your guns. I'm in your will. You love me. You want to leave me some money. There's something I can do? I can renounce that legacy. Okay. I go to the court, and the court says, okay, you're dead. Chuck has outlived you as far as this will is concerned, I've predeceasedd you, which means that any claim I could have is null and void since I'm no longer alive. Right. You see what I'm saying? I do. That's legal fiction, right? As far as that will concern, I'm dead. You're still alive. Interesting. Isn't that interesting? It is. There's another piece of legal fiction called corporate personhood that's right? Yes. This is the meat of what we're talking about. Indeed, corporate personhood is exactly what it sounds like. There is a legal custom, not just in the US. But it dates back to the Romans, I believe. The ancient Romans, not today's Romans, the original Romans, where a corporation, which is really just a pool of investors money that's taken together and used to conduct business right. Is considered an actual artificial person under the law. Yeah. This is kind of blew me away. Me too, to be honest. Yeah. There's this guy named Tom Hartman who I heard years ago on NPR talking about this, and he wrote this great book, and it's worth a read. I can't remember what it's called right now. I've got it written down on one of my notes that I can't find. But he turned me onto this. He has this radio show out west and he is very much against corporate personhood. A lot of people are here's. Why corporations if you treat them as a person? Well, our punitive legal system, Chuck, that keeps us from stabbing old ladies for their purses or just walking into grocery stores and opening up cash registers. Right. There's a little thing called prison. Sure. There's also a thing called the gas chamber, the electric chair, the hangman's gallows. There is punishment out there for our action. And this punishment is designed to keep us from crossing that line from upstanding citizen to anarchistic criminal. Right. And so we don't do things in large part because there's prison. There are consequences. Right. If not, I would be hitting old ladies over the head every day. Who wouldn't? Exactly. Prison keeps our society intact. Right. I'm just as clear as that. Right. So with a corporation, you have to kind of look at it. Since it's an artificial person, you have to look at it as a superhuman person, too. Right. It doesn't need food, doesn't need water. You can't put it in prison. It doesn't feel pain. Right. It has no lifespan, can't die. It's limitless. As long as those shares are out there and it's making a profit, a corporation can live indefinitely. Right. So this is why it's kind of a sticky discussion. This is why people like Tom Hartman are very much against corporate personhood. Right. And the whole thing actually, this has been going on for a while. Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, was very much an advocate of putting restrictions, lifespan limits, restrictions, including lifespan limits on corporations in the Constitution. And he failed. Yeah, he failed on each count. Yeah. So actually, we almost had a constitutional provision that said corporations can only last this long. And there's this limitation because Jefferson, in his usual capacity, saw far into the future and all the problems that this random aspect of American society or global society will have. He was a pretty insightful dude, and he was absolutely right. We've run into some serious problems with the concept of corporate personhood. Right. And I know the 14th amendment is kind of where it all comes together. Yeah. Actually, the irony of the whole thing is that rather than being restricted by the constitution, corporations were actually protected by the constitution right. As artificial people under the 14th amendment, which I know you pointed out the last word of the 14th amendment equal rights protection under the law to every person. Every person. That is a very significant word. Right. Because, of course, corporations are artificial persons. Right. So in very rapid succession, I was 1868 when that was ratified, the 14th amendment, very quickly, a court case came to the supreme court for a decision that had to do with applying that to corporations. Right. Santa Clara county, the southern pacific railroad. Yeah. And if you think about it, basically applying a constitutional amendment that protected freed slaves, newly freed slaves, and trying to get it to apply to corporations, isn't that the pinnacle of tastelessness? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Well, 19th century Robert barons weren't above anything. And one of the things they did was in that case, the union pacific case, they finally applied it. The supreme court, I can't remember who was at the head at the time, basically said, you know what? We realize what this case is saying. And ultimately what the case did was it upheld the long standing custom that it was up to a state to tax and to charter corporations. And that's still going on today, like as president elect Obama excruciatingly pointed out, and I think the second debate, delaware is a big haven for credit card companies, which is where the vice president elect hails from because of the tax benefits, correct? Yeah. It's set up in a certain way so that credit card companies benefit the most from that state, saying that Florida is a tax haven for, I think, real estate businesses or something like that. Right. I think Florida doesn't have an income tax. Is that right? No, they don't either. They don't have an income tax. Yeah. No, they just operate on borrowed time. Right. I'm moving to Florida. Yeah, same here, buddy. So in this case, Santa Clara versus southern pacific. Union pacific one of the two. Southern southern pacific thank you. That was established. But here's where everything just gets totally hinky. I know, and I couldn't believe this. Isn't this the court reporter for the supreme court wrote a little head note, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a note at the head of the brief of the ruling, and it said, court decides that under the 14th amendment, corporations are afforded equal protection under the law. And that was it. Right. But where it gets hanky, as you say, is that the chief justice did not say this. No. He actually wrote a personal note that was uncovered later on that said that the court specifically did not rule on that. I knew that that's what the case came down to it was just written down prepared to do that right. Just written down by the court by the court report who turned out to be I believe an ex president. Is that a step back to go? There's a long tradition of high finance of huge industry putting their own people into public government. Interesting as somebody said recently Paulson's from Goldman Sachs and Kashkari right. Somebody said recently there is a revolving door between private and public service. Right. Very linked. And apparently this is been going on for a very long time. Well it worked in this case. It did because since it was a head note it wasn't law but it did set precedent. Right. And I don't understand how that works to be honest. Well somebody can say look it's written right here and you can use it as part of your argument. And they did. I think two years later there was another case I think another railroad case or something they pointed to it and the Supreme Court finally ruled and said yes corporations have equal protection under the law artificial person. Because this schmuck wrote it down. Because he wrote it down at the head note of a ruling that had nothing to do with it. Yeah I had no idea that court reporter was such a position of power. Well apparently no one else did either. So that's how we've gotten to the point where corporations have the same protection as you Chuck. The cops can't just come into your house and start looking around in the hopes that they find something incriminating because you're a person and you're protected under I think the Fourth Amendment from unreasonable search or seizure. So to our corporations right? Yeah there was a case in the 70s where ocean inspectors they could just walk into a corporate headquarters business something like that right for an inspection and yeah looking for violations that kind of thing. Somebody sued that corporations enjoy the same protection under the law in the Fourth Amendment and one right. So now if you want to find violations you have to make an appointment with a manager the store one of the corporate officers right. And I don't think this applies for food restaurant inspections because I used to work in restaurants and I remember we were always caught very much off guard when the health inspector showed up. Yeah I don't know why that would be any different but yeah well maybe we'll take a restaurant to follow a suit for it to happen. Maybe so. Maybe so. There's also a really sterling example. Nike as we all know as his common knowledge now Nike was running some really abusive corporate practices overseas. And factories it's one word for them. Definitely in the 90s. This is not widely known right. I mean a certain subversive section of society understood this right. People that did their homework right. Most people didn't really walk around going oh Nike runs sweatshops over in, I think, Malaysia. One MIT student actually managed to break it into the public view. And I can't remember do you remember when this was? When Nike would allow you to have anything you want stitched on their shoes? Which campaign? I don't remember that. But it was in 2001. You could get something stitched a personal message or whatever your name, something. Yeah. And this guy from MIT wanted the word sweatshop embroidered on his Nike. Yeah. And they said no. They said no. So he forwarded the email around and in a very short order it got picked up by some of the major news services. And people started investigating Nike's practices more and more. Well, Nike started this huge PR blitz right. Where they said, no, that's absolutely not true. This is completely unfounded. We treat all of our employees very well. I mean, just lie after lie after lie. Finally somebody went to Malaysia, some of these countries, these developing countries where Nike was running these sweatshops and filmed the practices. Right. Somebody made a pretty decent documentary out of it. I can't remember what it was called. But apparently the living conditions were important. Factory workers were living in shanny towns next to the factory. And the roofs were made of discarded souls like the stuff they used for the souls of the Nike. It's just really bad business practices. So finally Nike is forced to say, okay, fine. Well, a man sued them. That's right. A lawsuit was brought by a man in California. And what was Nike's Defense? Nike's defense was, and this is just unbelievable was that because they are granted the same rights as people they are allowed to lie under the Fourth Amendment? Also advertising you can't be sued for it because you're allowed to lie because you're a corporation and an artificial person. Yeah. It didn't really hold water, though. It didn't. But no one ever ruled on it. Well, it's because they settled. Nike settled smartly. Yeah. And so they, I think, shelled out like 15 million or something like that. Actually just 1.5, unless your decimal point was off yet. It's terrible. Well, it did go to some sort of labor protection group. But 1.5 million? That's not a lot. It's not a lot of people. Although they will buy a couple of houses in Malaysia, I imagine. But the fact is that still the jury is still out on whether or not a corporation can lie. But that's how this whole thing has been established over time. It's been kind of whittled away and added to and taken from, I guess happy ending to this story is Nike was finally put in such a bad light that they wrote a lengthy report on the working conditions of their factories, all of them, and basically self reported that they were mistreating their workers overseas and clean up their acts. Yeah, I believe so. Yes. Freedom of speech goes both ways. And in our litigious society, it's good to have good lawyers. If corporations have the same rights as you. It's a shame it took that kind of action though for Nike to realize that the greed that was going on. Agreed. That's just my opinion. I agree with you. I don't know who wouldn't. Well thanks for listening. Go tell everybody that all corporations have the same constitutional protections as you. Just do it. Exactly. And if they don't now they soon will. Well you can read all about corporations having the same rights as you by just typing in a few magic keywords in our search bar housetofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics visit houseofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housestofworks.com." | |
Will the moon save humanity? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/will-the-moon-save-humanity | In this disaster-themed episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck ponder ways the world could end -- and how projects like the lunar Doomsday Ark propose to save humanity. | In this disaster-themed episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck ponder ways the world could end -- and how projects like the lunar Doomsday Ark propose to save humanity. | Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:10:57 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=17, tm_min=10, tm_sec=57, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=21, tm_isdst=0) | 21952702 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, who's making fun of the weight gain I've managed to accumulate over the holidays. I'm not. You seem like you're pointing that out, and so I guess you honestly don't look like you've gained any weight. Thanks. Sure. New to you. Well, I came to Christmas, but I've dropped a few cents. Yeah, I was looking at you. I'm like Chuck's Facebook's a lot. When was this? Like two days ago? Not really. God bless you, Chuck. Let's get started. Cho. Yes. What is your bet for how the world is going to end? 2012? The Large Hadron Collider. Maybe a third world war starting in the Middle East. I'm going to go with natural disasters setting off a chain reaction of events. What would those chain reaction of events be? Paranoia. Chaos. Dogs and cats living together. Man fighting man. Woman fighting man. Woman fighting woman. My favorite. Yeah. And yeah. Then everyone kills each other. That's what I'm going with. Okay. What do you think? I think it's going to be a single cataclysmic event. I think that humans are really good at adapting the stuff. Eg, climate change, that kind of thing. I don't think it has the gumption to wipe out humanity. A natural event or a human generated event? It could be either one. Like a major asteroid impact or a nuclear holocaust. I think it's going to be something like that, something big and sudden. I think Facebook and Twitter will play a part in my scenario. Well, no, that's the degradation of society. This is the destruction of humanity we're talking about. Well, no, I mean, once the chain reaction starts, I think things can get out of control with information being so easily doled out. This is why I love us, Chuck. We have not spoken about this at all. I sent you a link. Like, how about this for this stuff you should know. Okay. And we haven't spoken about it. Right, right. And one of the things that I came up with for the intro was that we're a very paranoid species. And you've just touched on that, too. Yeah. Thank you for being you, Chuck Bryant. I was talking to Emily about that the other day that no one really knows what social media is going to do. Right. And I could definitely see paranoia spreading, false truth spreading so fast that it gets out of control. And what's the deal with Twitter? Can you really say anything important? Twelve to 15 times a day and 160 characters or less. You're asking the wrong guy. I don't think so. You got a Twitter page. Yeah, but I don't ever use it. You don't? No. I did for a little while and just kind of like, a week. Yeah, it was a hell of a week. I've been saying hell a lot in podcasts lately, have you noticed? No. Yeah, listen to the sun one. Okay. Hell. Hell all over the place. Fire. Yeah, speaking of hell and fire. So we're talking about the world ending and we're talking about humanity being paranoid and one of those, I guess, beneficial byproducts of that paranoia is planning. Good, sensible planning. Agreed. Right. You ever heard of a little country called Norway? I have. Norwegians live there. You're going with the seed vault? Let's start with that. Sure. What's the official name of it? Do you know the vault in Norway? The seed vault, yeah. It's pretty cool. What they've done is they have taken pretty much every seed known to man. Like one and a half million species. Yeah. Along with equipment right. To help grow things. Sure. And they put it in a vault buried deep within the Earth. I think it's in a mountainside somewhere in the Arctic. Okay. Yeah, I don't know exactly. I think it is in a mountainside, actually. Now that you can research this. Well, no, well, this is totally supplemental right. And we're doing this off the top of our heads, but yeah, I remember hearing that the entrance is in the side of a mountain. I think so, yeah. So there's a bunch of seeds and the idea is to grow things again. Right. If we're wiped out. And then the British have an underground vault that is basically a DNA depository. Yeah, I didn't know about this one until today. Yeah. They have genetic samples from all manner of plant, animal right. Material people kind of things. Yeah. They said that you could potentially rebuild an ecosystem with this stuff. Yeah. Specifically which ecosystem? I'm not entirely certain. Is it a desert? Because who really wants to rebuild that? Nobody. Good point. Right. And then of course we have the point of this article. Right. There's a nice little moniker that gets tacked onto these things, like the Seed Vault in Norway, the DNA vault in Britain, doomsday Arts. Right. Is there more than one? Well, yeah, the Norwegian thing is doomsday arts. Oh, I thought you were going to talk about the specific one we're talking about, which is the Lunar Doomsday Arc. You can't just say doomsday ark because people say which one? The one in Britain, the one in Norway. So they all fall under that larger heading. Right. Did not realize that. It's true. Good info. Thanks man. So we're talking today about the lunar doomsday arc, right, Chuck? Yes. Which is a concept that was first proposed in 1099 book by a guy named Robert Shapiro. Not the lawyer. Right. Called Planetary Dreams, I believe. Right. And then again in six. Right. By some actual scientists. Yeah, he's actually a member of the alliance to Rescue Civilization, which sounds kooky, but Robert Shapiro and his colleagues that form the higher ups at the Arc are actually really well respected they're scientists, science writers, physicists, engineers, and they've come together to create this group that is trying to carry out this idea of creating a doomsday vault on the moon. Yes. And they're based at NYU, at New York University, and they officially, actually tossed us out in eight at a conference in France. Yeah. And it has received a little bit of chatting and a little bit of support as well. Yeah. And I think I was reading a blog post on it, and you get kind of the sentiment that a lot of people are like, you guys are idiots. This is never going to work. And here's why. It's super cool. One of the comments on a blog post I read about it was, what harm can it do? How much money have we funneled into NASA just to get to the Moon and be like, well, we're here. Okay, cool. Right. I mean, if this thing costs even billions of dollars, let's dissolve AIG and sell its holdings off and then put it into this. What can it hurt? Is the point. And what could it help, potentially, is all of humanity. Right. How? In the planet? Well, Josh, the idea, like most arcs and vaults, is to bury important things deep within, in this case, the Moon. So they're protected in case something really bad happens. Right. And what they want to start with the alliance to Rescue Civilization, which, by the way, was very much legitimized when the European Space Agency got on board with this plan. Absolutely. So what this joint venture aims to do is to put all of humanity's knowledge, not all of it, because they are aware that there's not an infinite amount of storage, but the selected most important stuff among humanity. So there won't be a drawer with our podcasts on a hard disk. Buddy, they won't even consider these. It will be all this American life. They want to put it all on hard disk. Right. And bury it on the Moon. Yes. And they're going to record all this in different languages. It's pretty cool. Arabic, English, Chinese, Russian, French and Spanish. So you got your bases covered. Pretty much. Right. But what the hell? See, I just did it again. What's the point of burying some hard disks with all of humanity's knowledge on the moon anyway? Well, what you got up there, dude, is DNA sequences, tech information, how to make metals, how to rebuild what are you talking about? This valuable info. It is valuable info. If and the whole point, remember, is to help rebuild humanity civilization if the people here on Earth can access it. Okay, I got you. Right? That's the most important part. Otherwise, it's just going to sit there. So let's say that there is a meteor. Let's go with mine. Yeah, yours makes more sense. A meteor hits Earth, kills off everybody except, like, 50 people across the planet. Okay, so it takes buddy, I know. And these 50 people start wandering around water, world style, the postman style, take whatever home you want. How about Bolderim style? That's probably the best style around. Okay. And they stumble upon one of 4000 Earth based repositories. Right. And what they're going to find in these things are computers that run on wind power, solar power, and some preserved food and medical supplies, that kind of thing. It would be like a bonanza for them, right? Yes. And when they hit the space bar on these computers to get the screen up, they're going to find that they are receiving transmissions from the Moon if they survive, which is we'll get to the downside of this, but that's assuming that these receivers would survive whatever cataclysmic event. Right, but let's say they did. Okay. So the point of having these hard disks buried on the Moon is that they're going to be hooked to radio transmitters that constantly transmit this information back to Earth. So in addition to debut C's la mer, which really has very little value when you're rebuilding civilization. Right. There's going to be things like how to grow wheat, how to grow corn, how to smell iron. Right. And how to rebuild civilization. Right. So they're going to do it in, like you said, I think, seven different languages, I guess, with an instruction manual that any postapocalyptic dummy can understand. Smelting for dummies. Right. You know what else they might have in there? What? Human and animal embryos. Yeah, how's that? They were saying that the suspended animation, the temperature needed for suspended animation right. That they're figuring. So far it's something like 70 Kelvin. Really? Which is really low temperature. You can't really do that here on Earth without sucking up all the energy on the planet. But you can in the shade of a lunar crater. Okay, so that's definite possibility. Well, you also have to create an environment that these things can survive in. Right. It's not like Earth. No. Should we talk about that? Yes. It's a three step process. Let's hear it, Chuck. Okay. First, what you have to do is build some machines that generate the proper gas mix that basically replicate our atmosphere, because you have to create a little mini Earth inside the Moon, which is kind of mind blowing, actually. And the plants can thrive inside this atmosphere, and then they eventually decompose and release what, CO2. Yes, they release carbon dioxide deadly to humans unless there's something present, like algae, perhaps. Sure. So they bring along Mr. Algae, and Mr. Algae absorbs the CO2, emits oxygen and basically establishes a cycle just like we have here on Earth. Yeah. And bang, boom, done. You know what you have right there? What? Atmospheric conditions that are suitable to sustain human life. Perfect. So all of a sudden now you have a place. This lunar ark now becomes a lunar colony. Potentially, yeah. Well, it'd be great if we had a colony up there first. Well, yeah. We need people to tend to the stuff. That's the ideal scenario. In the meantime, Arc is saying that we could do it through the use of robotics, right? Sure. For a while, make sure that all this stuff is functioning properly. But if you can make it so that this is sustainable for human habitation, then you have a lunar colony, right? Right. So let's say that meteor does hit, okay, and it wipes out all but 50 people, okay? And by spectacular coincidence, all 4000 sites, these repository sites, basically bomb shelters, are also wiped out. That's bad news. It is bad news for the 50 people on Earth. Luckily, we've got the people up on the Moon who can come back down here and say, hey, here's all the information you need to know. Let's just show you how to smell iron, buddy. So that's kind of one of the big points of the plan, is that if we can get humans up there, then we have taken a part of the human population out of the equation of a global disaster. They'll just be up on the Moon like, that stinks. Right? And then they'll have to wait like a little while. Sure. If all of humanity is wiped out, part of the contingency plan for this is that the people up there on the Moon will wait a century, maybe two, and then come back down to Earth and then the sexy business starts. Well, if they're waiting a century, two up there, then there's going to be sexy business on the Moon too. Sure, there will be sexy business on the moon, but then they're going to bring their sexy business back to Earth, which means the first people will be born on the Moon. Sure. They will not be earthlings. Technically, no. They'd be moonlings. Nice point. Cute little moon links with a little edible kneecaps. Yeah. So then once that happens and humanity repopulates the Earth through their sexy business, everything is saved. Basically, we went to the Moon, waited for the cataclysmic event to occur, waited for the dust to settle, went back and we're like, all right, let's do this again. Right. What is wrong with this plan? Well, there's a lot of problems potentially that I can see. One is, like I said earlier, you have to count on the fact that these receivers will not be wiped out as well. Their answer to that is, well, let's say they are wiped out, we'll still have the information for man to eventually rebuild them and make them work again. Right. And the Lunar Arc will be transmitting still that whole time. So when they do get these radio transmitters and receivers back up and operating, they'll be like, oh, here's all the information we need from the Moon. Sounds a little far fetched to me, doesn't it? Yeah, a bit. One of the other problems, Josh, is no one is going to know where these are hidden. Isn't that correct. Right. You're not exactly publishing that. No. If you do, then you've got somebody like the creepy blonde guy from the movie Contact trying to sabotage it. Right. Or Geocachers. Sure. The most nefarious group of all. Right. They take some take the radio transmitter and leave some Bhutanese money in its place. Or a fantasy. D right. And I say that because we got some boutanese money this way from a geocacher. From a geocacher who is just this convergence of our podcast, a walking convergence of stuff you should know. And really, also, I think one of the reasons that this is such a derided plan not by me. I want to say, like, I know it sounded like I'm chiding it here, there I'm really not. I think it's a good idea. I need to come up with the money, and it doesn't take food out of starving people's mouths. Let's do it. Right, I agree. But I think the whole thing hinges on a lunar colony. We could bury hard disks under the lunar surface, we could start broadcasting transmissions, but really, we have to have people on the Moon with an ability to get back and forth from Earth to the Moon for this to really work. Right? Yeah, that's the ideal. And we're nowhere near that. We're a long way off. They've poked around that scenario a bit, but it's not ramped up anytime soon. No. They do hope to have that stuff buried by 2020. Yeah. And then what was the other date? By 2035, they want to have living organisms right. In that three part atmospheric creator machine. Right. 2035 sounds like the serious future. But I said that about 2010, too, and I was not a little 7th grader. And now it's the future. It is. Yeah. We're living the future. And there was one other point that I thought was pretty interesting. I read about this, the whole sentiment of it. While it does underline our paranoia as a species, it also underlines our disposable mentality. We're like, okay, the Earth is screwed up. We'll just move on to the Moon. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Climate change was a big reason that this whole idea was proposed. Sure. So rather than do anything about it, let's just figure out a way to get out of here, see what other planet we can mess up. Yeah. Have you heard of Terraforming? No. They're talking about? Terraforming. Mars. I'm not exactly sure what they would shoot into the atmosphere around Mars, but they are shooting to orbit around Mars. But there are, I guess, elements that they can put into orbit around Mars that could spontaneously generate an atmosphere really? Which would habitable atmosphere. Right. Which would essentially turn Mars into the new Earth. Cool. Yeah. Get your ass to Mars. Thank you for that, Chuck. Name that movie. Total Recall. Amen. Very good job. All right, so, Chuck, I think that's about it for the doomsday arc, if you want to read about that. Or the Norwegian Seed Bank. I don't know if we have one on the we got one on the Norwegian Seat Bank then. Okay. You can type Doomsday Arc into the handysearchbar@howstephos.com. It will bring up all manner of interesting stuff. And of course, that leads us to listener mail. Yes, I did want to say an official thank you to Mark from Massachusetts for sending us Bhutanese money. Yeah, thanks, Mark. He leaves those as his little geocaching treats and as little found items. And I did look it up. $1 is equal to 45. However, you pronounce that goldrums. Bhutanese goldrums. Yeah. So it's not very much money. No, but it's pretty. It's a sentiment. Yeah, it's very pretty. Not like our ugly American money. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this funny email so you get on the air. This one. Kelly. Okay, josh and Chuck, I recently heard a podcast where a woman wrote in to say your podcast saved her life. I felt compelled to tell you that you also saved another nearly unfortunate soul, that of my coworker. Oh, yeah, you read this one? She's from Detroit. Yeah. You see, I work for a local magazine and a small office that consists of about 20 short cubicles. For the most part, the people I work with are great, but I always assume there is the exception of one. I liken her to the case of the Monday's Woman from Office Space. Great movie. She chooses and pops her gum incessantly. She repeatedly and loudly sighs Oyvae throughout the day. Someone taught her that word one day and she thought it was the greatest thing since she learned to blame everything on Murphy's Law. She wears ungodly amounts of perfume that smells of my grandmother's couch and lingers well after she has left the area. And possibly worst, but definitely not last. She Whistles Loudly christmas carols in midsummer. Do you know what's more irritating than a poison ivy rash in a spot you can't reach? Josh? What? Hearing Let It Snow whistled through the maw of an obnoxious coworker in July. But let me assure you, I grew up with three older brothers. I'm a poster child for tolerance. This woman would try the patience of a saint. One day when I was at my wits end, another co worker of mine came into the office looking a little under the weather. I asked him what was up and he said his brain had shrunk and went on to explain that he had one too many the night before and subsequently his body had stolen water from his brain. And basically this is how she learned of our podcast because this guy had a hangover. Now, whenever I want to hear the unmistakable first notes of O Holy Night, my favorite Christmas song, I plug in and let your sweet voices of salvation take me away. So on behalf of me and my co worker that I nearly went postal on. Thank you and keep up the good work, Kelly. Thanks, Kelly. Thank you for not murdering anybody. She almost killed her coworker. Yeah, I think I would, too. Yeah, she sounds kind of annoying. Nice to check. Before I give a call out for emails, I want to mention our Kiva team. It's been a little while. Good job, Josh. Dude. We have generated since the beginning of October, right? The stuff you should know. Listeners who have joined the Kiva team and donated have made over $60,000 in donations since the beginning of October. That's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. We are the 7th largest donation team. And here's what gets me, Josh. I know that a scant percentage of our total listenership has gotten involved here. Yeah, I think it's like 20 00, 10 00. Like 10 00 13 00 members? I think so. That's like one half of a half of a percent of our listenership. I think so. Yeah. Well, if you want to join our Kiva team, there's always room for one more or 100,000 more. Whatever you like. Yeah. Every once in a while, Chuck and I go on the team message board and say hi, and there's all manner of interesting people on there. All manner. Yes. You can check it out at www. Dot kiva. That's Kivaorg team singularstuffyouchenko, right? It will make you feel good, I promise. Yeah. And if you have an email that contains a descriptor of how your grandmother's couch smells, you can wrap it up and send it to stuffpodcast@howtuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com Homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this 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." | ||
41ea9a8a-53a3-11e8-bdec-f33d79ce5bc3 | Is photographic memory a real thing? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-photographic-memory-a-real-thing | Photographic memory is the stuff of movies and TV, but is it real? Sort of. But not really. But kind of. It's a little bit a matter of semantics. Listen in and this will all make sense.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Photographic memory is the stuff of movies and TV, but is it real? Sort of. But not really. But kind of. It's a little bit a matter of semantics. Listen in and this will all make sense.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:37:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=37, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=183, tm_isdst=0) | 43581945 | 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 with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is, like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One NA member FDIC attention, world. If you can make it to America, then come see us. We are going out on the road for SYSC Live again. And we are going to start the whole thing off in Chicago on July 24. That's right. And if you can't make it to America, maybe make it to Canada, because we're going to be in Toronto, and the next night, the Fourth Music Hall. Then in August, we're going to do a couple of dates at the Wilbur and Boston, october 29 in Portland, Maine. Lovely State Theater on August 30. Yes. And then we're going to be heading down to Florida. We're going to be at Plaza Live on October 9. And then the next night we're going to be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater. That's right. And then we're going to round it out in Brooklyn, October 20. 324 and 25 at the Bellhouse. Yes. So come see us. You can get tickets and info@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there. And the ghost of Jerry Rowland is next to us. Just frank the chair, I guess. Yeah. Hey, Frank. Yeah, Jerry? Everyone has a hurt shoulder from bowling. Has to go to the doctor and did that deal, which she's only done a couple of times, where she just hits record and leaves and it always feels like the teacher is gone. It feels really weird in here and that we should, like, do something disruptive and wrong. So we're practicing paper airplanes, basically. It's the worst thing we could come up with. Doing spit balls. Josh just threw a couple of pencils up and stuck them in the ceiling. I still got it. Remember that old move? Sure. Well, clearly. And what else? We started a fire in the metal waste basket. Chuck's trying out drugs. Sure. And we started listening to Motley crew. That's right. And we're going to talk about photographic memory, which, as it turns out, it's kind of not real. Yeah, it's a semantic thing. Photographic memory. It's funny that we're talking about being in elementary school because it's sort of one of those things that used to hear a lot on the playground about so and so has got a photographic memory. I know. They can read a book and recite every word from it or something. There's something so juvenile about claiming that you have it yourself as an adult. Yeah. The facts of that playground thing I haven't put my finger on, but that's exactly what it is. Yeah. And as it turns out, what you call photographic memory isn't really a thing. There are people with amazing memories and people with amazing techniques to develop better memories. Right. But this whole notion of a photographic memory, like you could walk, like you see on TV or something, isn't really a thing. No, it's a thing from TV, it's a thing from books. It's something that you attribute to, like, Sherlock Holmes or just some great genius. Sure. Or John Holmes. Sure. Obviously everybody knows he had a photographic memory, but the idea that you can just walk around and have an experience or flip through a phone book and a year later the site, that phone book, that just doesn't happen. There's maybe one person who's ever lived that came very close to that, who we talked about before, Kim Peak, the inspiration for Rain Man, but they're still not sure if Kim Peak would have really fully fit that bill, even. But for the most part, that idea is not it's not real. But again, it's also a question of semantics, because if someone has the abilities of a Kim Peak, it's like, well, isn't that photographic memory basically? Right? Yeah, I think maybe. Then let's say it like this anyone who says that they have a photographic memory is probably full of it. Yes. They probably have a better than average memory. That's what they're saying. But that doesn't mean that they have a perfect memory. Because here's the thing. Even people with outstanding amazing memory abilities, they still get stuff wrong. Sure. And that seems to be part and parcel with this idea of a photographic memory that not only is the recall amazing over long periods of time and in detail and clarity, but that it's flawless too. That they don't get stuff wrong. Yes. They don't insert stuff that wasn't there originally, they don't misremember things. That's part of the photographic memory and that doesn't exist for sure. That would be perfect recall, and the brain just isn't really capable of that. All right, well, we're going to start out this episode, though, talking about something else. That's a slight variation, which is called idtic memory eidetic. And that is something found exclusively in kids between the ages of six and twelve. Roughly about 2% to 10% of kids in that age group. Yeah. So here's what they do for these tests. You get a subject, you get a little six year old or seven year old. Right. Or an eight year old, a nine year old or a ten year old or eleven year old or twelve year old. Okay. But no more beyond that. No. And then you show them an image. Kid can look at it for whatever, 1520, 30 seconds. Then you take that image away, and then you say, what do you recall about that image? And if you have Identic memory for a very short term, you can recall with astonishing detail what was in that image. Yeah, maybe another 30 seconds, maybe up to a couple of minutes. And there's a lot going on here. All right? So it's not like, Here, look at this image. And then you take the image away, and the kid goes over and sits down and really thinks about what was in the picture. The kid holds the pose and their line of sight just like they were when the picture was in front of them, as if they are still looking at the picture. And here's the thing about Identic memory. The kid who's showing off there, and people who have identical memory are called Identicars. Okay? I know it's weird, but the Identicer isn't recalling what they saw. They never stopped seeing. They're holding it visually in their line of sight, even though the picture is no longer physically present. Yeah. And one of the ways they can tell is that they talk about it in the present tense still. They don't say, well, the picture had a red car with a weird looking dog driving it. Right. It's present tense. The picture has a red car with a weird looking dog driving it. Yeah. So it's a big one. Right. People think, well, that's photographic memory, but that's really the closest thing to photographic memory that science has really happened upon. Well, one of them will get into another one in a little while, but there's a lot of divergence from what you tend to think of as photographic memory. For one, again, it's a very short duration. Right. 30 seconds, a couple of minutes, and then five minutes later, they talk about the picture. And the kids like, what picture? What picture? Where am I? Why did you drag me and tie me up? Apparently even them speaking during this period, or even blinking can shut it off. Yeah. And especially not just speaking, but saying what the thing is saying out loud. Oh, red car will make the picture vanish from their trance, or something kind of really interesting. Yeah. They can make errors as well and put things in there that weren't there. So that obviously is not a photographic memory. Yes. The dog driving the car had a cat friend. That's believable. That's really stupid, kids. Yeah. By the way, everyone the cats and the dogs are getting along great, just to update that. Oh, good. Everyone's getting along fine. That's fantastic. But we have one of the kittens is a bed peer, and so we're trying to sort that out. Oh, boy. Which is not a fun problem. You know what the solution to that is? Kitty diapers. The cutest diapers. Yeah, we're getting through that. What do you do you just, like, clap loudly next to it, and if you catch them, you try and hustle them really quickly into the litter box. The whole idea is to get them associating litter with peeing. So it's just like your bed training a dog. Yeah, but usually cats are really intuitive. I've never had a cat that wasn't, like, immediately just litter trained. Yeah. So this is a little bit distressing. How long has it been going on? We had, like, three or four bed peas. Oh, that's not too bad. Yeah, they'll pick it up in no time. But anyway, I just wanted to update everyone. So is this true about the idtic memory studies being done by the Nazis? Is that correct? Yeah, the Nazis found out about this. I'm not quite sure how, but they are attributed to some of the earliest studies of idtic memory, and they, in Nazi fashion, gave it a really bad name because they were using it to promote how the Aryan race was obviously superior because our kids have identical memory. Right. And so since just about anything the Nazis studied, whether it was legitimate studies or not, it just had a taint to it afterward, a choad, if you will. Nazi stank, pretty much. Right. And so it was discontinued for many decades, and then I can't find out who picked it up. It's really weird. Like, when you look up photographic memory, almost everything that comes back for research says photographic memory is not real. And here's why. There is such thing as Idetic memory, but there's almost no information on, like, the actual study of it, who's conducting it. Usually they'll even cite one study. Everyone will. This doesn't even have that. It's real cryptic, almost, and weird and just I want to say fringe, but there's nobody who questions the science behind it. It's proven that this does exist. Right. We know kind of the mechanics of it, how it actually or what the process is, what's actually happening, or how kids display this stuff. We know how to test for it. So it is real. And there's that catchy name, idetars. Yeah, it's definitely a real thing. But how it's being studied and who's studying is just totally lost. I mean, I can't find it. Well, and we don't know why. It's only in children or really a whole lot of concrete conclusions about it other than the fact that it happens. Well, there's some interesting hypotheses about that. Let's hear it. Well, the fact that kids from six to twelve are developing it and it stops beyond that suggests that it has to do with language development. Okay. And the fact that if you verbalize what the thing is, you've labeled it in a certain way and shut your brain off, that suggests it has to do with labeled language development, too. They think that maybe the kids are not compartmentalizing what they saw in abstracts, like people do with normal memories. And so it's able to stay in their visual field even after they are no longer looking at it. Interesting. Yeah, but about 2% Identic memory. Well, it is interesting, though, because the word photographic memory, this sounds as close to that as it gets because it almost sounds like they are taking a sort of a brain snapshot because they're just sort of in a trance and gazing at what it once was. But again, they can't move, they can't speak, they can't blink. Right. And five minutes later, once they do blink or whatever and snap out of this trance, if you want to call it that, which you clearly do. So we will. We'll just call it trance. Once they snap out of the trance, they can't recall the picture. So it's not a very good example of photographic memory, but it's the closest thing science has shown aside from some other ones. What to talk about later. All right, should we take a break? I think we should. All right, let's do it. And we'll talk more about PM 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 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, Chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money, and it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah, for anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for Hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting, plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air cover for host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F with Air cover for host, it makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb Comaircoverforhosts. All right, so they have not found any. Like, again, science hasn't come forward and said, hey, there is photographic memory and this is it, and this is how it works. Right? All those people who are, like, promoting themselves with having a photographic memory, no one's gotten their hands on one of them and said, this guy is totally right. He has a photographic memory. Or she right. Or they that's right. But it's still something you hear on the playground. It's still something you hear people tout, and there's a few reasons why one is and this kind of has to do with the perfect pitch, I think humans just like to label and assign geniuses with these tags, like, Tesla had a photographic memory, and it's very easy just to write that down and it looks cool on a piece of paper. And that's kind of just as simple as that. He apparently was self proclaimed with a photographic memory. A lot of people say this about themselves. He doesn't seem like the type who would do that. He seems like the type that people would say about him without him claiming it. Yeah. But Mr. T is one who claims to have a photo. Really? So that I saw. Wow. So he could list all the fools he's pitied. Right. All of them. I'm wearing 18 chains right now. It doesn't even have to look down. Wow. Who else you got? Anyone else? Teddy Roosevelt. Okay. Truman Capote. Okay. Leonardo DA Vinci, sir. I'm not sure if he was self proclaimed or if people just again, kind of ascribed it to him because he's a genius. Right. He is a DA vinci but it is like that kind of thing, like mythologizing extraordinarily smart people. Well, we equate memory with intelligence. Kind of like Sherlock Holmes. Right. Of course he's going to have a photographic memory. He's a highly intelligent person. So anybody who seems extremely intelligent, genius level intelligence, especially someone in history, we would describe something like a photograph. Well, there was an author named Kavya Thiswanathan, who there was a case where this author was accused of plagiarism from another author, and Caviar was like, no, I just have a photographic memory, and I'm sure I read that book, but it was just so burned into my brain that I must have just repeated these things without even knowing about it. She said that? Yeah, in the New York Times. And so that gave occasion for a lot of journalists and scientists to come forward and be like, by the way, everybody, there's no such thing as photographic memory, but there is a thing as plagiarism. Yeah. I was looking I was like, what were some of the examples? That was pretty bad. Was it? In the original book, there was a line, in truly masochistic fashion, they chose to buy Diet Cokes at Cinnabon. Okay. That's the original. The plagiarized one is in truly masochistic gesture, they chose to buy Diet Coke at Mrs. Fields. Yeah. That's plagiarism. Yeah, it is. That's Plagiarism 101. Swap out one word for a likeword right. And then it's fine. Right. Isn't that crazy? She said this in the New York Times. I have a photographic memory. It's not my fault. Right. Another reason this is still sort of out there in the public sphere is the fact that there are people with amazing memories and there are memory competitions and memory exhibitions and things like that. Yes, I looked into that, Chuck. So I got sucked into memory. I was like, oh yeah, I forgot how cool memory stuff is. We did a few podcasts on it. We talked about it in Canada. Thinking cap. Make me a genius. We talked about in a podcast to Remember or Memory one. We talked about it extensively in the amnesia episode. Right. Just some good stuff. And there's more we could do. But one of them is this whole idea of mind sports, which includes memory, but it is organized competition to show off your memory skills. There's actually five mind sports memory mind mapping, which is a form of taking notes with icons and colors and stuff. It's really neat. If you ever really need to commit something to memory, look into mind mapping, speed reading, IQ, which is a little iffy to me. And then creative thinking. Like there's a mind sport competition for creative thinking. I was like, what is that? And you'll be given a question like a little passage that says the alphabet makes no sense. No one can make heads or tails of why it follows the order it does put the alphabet into a sensible order and explain how it makes sense. Wow. Stuff like that. So there are people who are answering these questions, coming up with a major you would just devise a creative system. That makes sense though, right? It's got to make sense or else you lose. You'd lose. You'd be run out of town on a rail. Wow. Yeah, it sounds really neat. But with memory in particular, there's the World Memory Championships, and they're being held in Wuhan, China this December 6 to 8th, 2019. Well, you think of a show like Jeopardy, and there are things that you can certainly figure out, question and answer wise on Jeopardy. But I would say most of that is recall. It is recall. And that's the same thing with mine sports, too. Like if you talk to a world memory champion, there's one in particular named Dominic O'Brien, who is what? I don't know. It's just funny to think of these like a picture walking in with his boxing robe. No, you'd find him with like a neat scotch and a cigarette going in like a dark bar somewhere. Okay. He distracts me, that super friendly, neat guy, and he's just like mumbling presidential returns over the past 15 years. No, he's like running numbers or something like that. Okay, that's my guess. Got you. He's like a bookie in a bar or something. That's what he strikes me as. All right, again, really nice guy. I don't know he's doing anything illegal, but a British man named Dominic just strikes me as like a bookie. Okay. Anyway, he's an eight time world memory champion. Wow. World memory champion. And he'll tell you like, it's all training. It's practice, it's mnemonic devices. And just about anybody who is involved in mind sports will say it's all practice it's using techniques to expand your memory, which is really amazing because what these guys are doing, one of them is card reading. Okay? They will give you a deck of cards, and you will go through, scan it in order, maybe be given a minute to scan it, maybe three minutes, something like that. You'll put it down, and then 20 minutes later, they'll ask you to recall the deck and the order of the 52 cards. And these guys get it flawlessly. Perfect. That's pretty amazing. It is amazing. But they are saying, like, I have learned to do this. I was not born like this. I don't have a photographic memory. I'm using things like paralymic devices that are techniques to help me remember stuff. Yeah. Have you ever heard of a memory palace? Yeah. Okay, so a memory palace, then it's just like building a castle or whatever. And different rooms are where you put different things. And specifically, you might have a drawer for a specific thing, and you remember where that specific thing is because you placed it in the drawer in that room in your palace that you've built in your mind. Yeah. It's a very helpful way to remember things, for sure. And also shout out to a friend of the show, nate Demeo, and his great the Memory Palace. The Memory Palace. Oh, my gosh. I never put two and two together. Yeah. Nate's still around. Still a great show. Well, sure. I don't think he died or anything, but I'm saying, like, I knew his show is named the Memory Palace. Yeah. You should make that connection. I never did. You should have put it in the Memory Palace. That is a great name, Nate. Yeah. Didn't it? That is a great I liked it even more before, but I was just taking it more like Tolkien cellar door. It was just pretty you know what I mean? Right. Wow. So there have been some connections that people have made with sinister and people with supposedly photographic memories. There's a writer named Solomon Chauchevsky who was a writer I think I already said that in the 20th century. In the early 20th century. And he had these really amazing powers of memory, and he used mnemonic techniques like we talked about. He did. But he was also a synastete. Right. So the point was made here was that he basically had been doing this his whole life involuntarily because of associations that synasetes make with color and sound and shape and things like that. Yes. That's how a memory becomes all the more solid, is associated with an emotion or a physical sensation. And he was a multiple sinisty. Right. So rather than say, like, a sound having a color, this guy, when he heard a bell ring, he saw a white, tasted saltwater and sent something small and round from the sound of a bell. He would not read the paper while he was eating because the tastes that the words on the page evoked would compete with the taste of the food he was eating. Oh, wow. Like, he had it just powerfully. Powerful anesthesia. That's pretty cool. So, yeah, he couldn't help but have an amazing memory. Pretty cool. The mnemonic devices, everyone uses those in school, or they tell you that's a good way to remember things. But then there's also and this is a graphic article where he just called Relentless Obsession. And if you want to go on Jeopardy, memorize the Constitution, memorize every state flag, every state bird. Right. Every state motto. It's like if you pour yourself into that kind of study and you're obsessed over memorizing a certain thing, then you could probably do it over time. Right. Yeah. Ed uses the example of the what are they called? The Shas pollock. Yes. Who were a sect of Polish Jews who memorized the Babylonian Talmud, which is, from what I gather, one of two versions of the Talmud. Yes. I think they're like eight or twelve books. It's a lot. Yeah, like 5000 pages. And these guys would remember the Talmud so precisely that a case study from 1917, based on eyewitness accounts, said that you could put a pin on a word on one page and push the pin through, say, 50 pages, and they could tell you the word that that pin came out on the 50 pages ahead. So that's geography, too. That's a really good example of a potential photographic memory. Right. But also an example of obsession. I did a little more reading on them, too. They were known as NEMA nists. Okay. For Mnemonic. Right. It's interesting that's just I don't know. I think that might have been an early Eastern European and Russian name for someone with amazing memory, because the sheriff chefsky, he was written about as a patient just by the pseudonym S by a very famous psychologist named Alexander Luria. And he titled his paper book The Mind of a Nimonist. Okay. So I wonder if that was like an old timey word for somebody with an amazing memory. Nimonist. That's probably word. What is it? Nimonas. Yours is right. I like yours more, though. Another thing is that a lot of times when someone you might think or they claim to have a photographic memory, it's on a very specific thing that they are obsessed with. Like, a chess player may be able to memorize, like, these incredibly complex sequences or games that they've played, but may not have a great memory otherwise. Of other things. I can't remember their anniversary as their wives. Yeah, for sure. Who's this other guy? John Van Newman. He was a mathematical genius. Oh, yeah. And he could recite chapters of books and pages of the phone book, but apparently that was sort of where it ended. He didn't have a memory outside of these very specific things. Right. He also never claimed to have a photographic memory, which is pretty cool, because if anybody could claim that he was definitely one of them, and he was a polymath, just straight up genius in general, it's a great varied thinker. I read somewhere that he used to tell jokes with his dad in Classical Greek at age six, which, I mean, if you're doing that at age six with your dad, it's a specific type of household you're being raised in. Yeah. That Steven Wiltshire guy is pretty interesting. I remember seeing something on him a while ago. I think we talked about him in the Thinking Cap episode, too. Yeah, that might have been it. He's from London and has autism, and he's the guy who takes a helicopter ride over Berlin lands and then draws it in astonishing detail. Yes. And it is astonishing. And people put him up as an example of photographic memory. There are flaws in the recollection, in the telling, these are renderings or not architecturally precise drawings. But still, I mean, better than it's astonishing. No, I think what's astonishing is the art. And I think people should just, like, lay off the photographic memory part of it and just say, steven Wilson is an amazing artist who can see a scene and encapsulate it on paper with ease or seeming ease. Yeah. And then you really can't start a conversation about memory of any kind without talking about Kim Peak, who we mentioned earlier, who is, again, the inspiration for Rain Man, but was much more friendly, much more outgoing, much happier than Rain Man was. Yeah, he was a real jerk. He wasn't a jerk, but he was much more introverted. Kim Peek was much more happy go lucky and very talkative and curious. And for a very long time, he was considered to have had autism, but now they think he had FG syndrome, which is a very specific genetic disorder that's characterized by people who are friendly inquisitive hyperactive and have a short attention span. And from what I understand, that describes Kim Peak to T. Yes, he had a great memory, but he had basically memorized the calendar. And when you say calendar, that means the calendar of the past. Big is Tuesday. Everybody knows that. Yeah. But what day was July 1? He can say, well, that was a Thursday, and on this day, these things happened. Right. That kind of memory. Yeah. Which is pretty astounding in and of itself. But he was also able to do things like read the phone book two pages at a time. Yeah. Now, that's just off the charts. He may be the only human being who was ever born capable of doing that. Yeah. His left eye was reading one page, and his right eye would read another page. Okay. Astounding that he could do that just visually, optically. Yes. He would retain this thing. There's two parts. And he could tell you the phone number of somebody's name. You went back and said, what is John Von Newman's phone number? And he'd say, the phone number would be like, really? I want to call him. I'm sorry about say, John von Jovi for a second. I'm not excited. I have a joke in Greek that is let's sort of that part out. Really? Yeah. Okay. Here's the thing with Peak, though, is we talked a lot about the corpus callosum in the what's it called? Restless hand syndrome. Alien hand syndrome, yeah, one of our early podcasts. That's right. I forgot that showed up in that. The corpus colossum we talked about. It a bunch of shows, but that's what connects the two hemispheres. Kimpi does not have a corpus colossum. Like, not severed, not cut apart, not partial. It did not grow in his brain. So he has two independent hemispheres of his brain. And so when his left eye is inputting all this stuff and his right eye is inputting all this stuff, his brain can recall it separately, but together, that's just astounding. Is he still with us? No, he died a few years ago. I don't remember of what and, like, he was in his sixty S, I believe. All right, well, rip Mr. Peak, and let's take a break now, and then we'll talk about a woman named Jill Price right after this. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes 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 It automation. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation. Or towards your retirement fund. Or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for Hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air Cover for Host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air Cover for Host, it makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb Comaircoverforhosts all right, as promised, we're going to talk about Jill Price, who I remember from the news in 2006 is when she kind of hit the big time with the news. And she was the one that she's called the Woman Who Cannot Forget. Yes, pretty accurately, because she has an audit. Well, they now call it a couple of things. Now I saw HSAM highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. Right. And then another condition called hyperthysmia. Thymesia. Hyperthymesia? Yeah. Hypothymicia with a Y in symphony. Oh, is this misspelled? Okay. To delete my correction? And hyper means excessive, obviously, and then thymesis is remembering, so it's excessive remembering. I like highly Superior autobiographical memory, though. Yeah. And I saw where they found they know of at least 60 other people that have HSAM, whereas this said only two other people have been diagnosed with hyperthymesia. Right. It's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. Okay, so are there 60 people or there are three? There's 61, from what I understand. Okay. Yeah. Well, she can't forget stuff. And these people, apparently, if you go back and say, what were you doing 14 years ago in two months and two days? Or give them a date date, usually, and then they will be able to say what they did, what they were wearing, who they were with, what was on TV. Yeah, but the thing is, so you say, okay, great, fine. We found these are the people with photographic memories. Not really. Right. Because it's highly Superior autobiographical memory. And that is a very specific kind of memory. It's a type of episodic memory. Episodic memories are personal memories, memories you generate, as opposed to semantic memory, which is memories that you make of things like a car has two axles or something stupid like that, like a fact that you recall rather than an autobiographical memory. So the semantic memory is normal in people with HSAM or hyperthymesia. It's the autobiographical stuff that is astoundingly photographic. Yeah. And people also tried, after she came out and made a kind of a big splash on the news programs, there were people trying to poke holes in her condition saying that, well, starting in her teenage years, she started keeping these obsessively detailed diaries every day as well. Right. Which, sure, that can help, but just because you write an obsessively detailed diary every day doesn't mean you're going to remember it 25 years later. Right, no, that's exactly the point. Right, yeah. Maybe she is even using Mnemonics to solidify it even further. But the fact that you can give her a date at random and she can remember it without consulting her journal, it's pretty impressive. It's definitely its own thing. And there's a pretty widespread consensus that this is a real condition. Right, but the fact that you said it, she keeps an obsessively organized journal, they believe it's possible that it's linked to obsessive compulsive disorder. Right. That the brains of people with hyperthymesia have the same traits, the same structures that people who have OCD have. And they'll very frequently have kind of this comorbid collection of stuff. They have traits that somebody with OCD might have. I also wonder if it has anything to do with Narcissism. Really? I don't know, man. It's autobiographical. Yes. Like, they remember everything about their life. Right. But they might not be able to tell you who the president is. Sure. Okay. If it is Narcissism, it's a massacre. No, it's a masochistic. Okay. That's the one where you're bad to yourself. Right. Mean to yourself. Why? Because this is sort of a curse. Yes. Right. So if you see interviews with Jill Price, she's not a happy person by any stretch of the imagination because part of this condition is not being able to forget emotions attached to things. Yeah. She, after a very long time, met a man and married him. And they were very close. Like, she said later that he just got her. He was the first person to ever just get her and accept her for who she was. Other family and friends would be like, can you not just let this go? Can you not get over something that happened 20 years ago? And she's like, no, I really can't. This guy just accepted her. And then, of course, he dies young from cancer or something like that. So rather than going through the morning period and grieving like a person normally would, time healing all wounds. That does not apply to somebody with hyperthymesia because when they think of that day again or something reminds them of that person and the memory of them is recalled, they experience that same pain like they experience the first time it happens. Wow. Forever. They cannot forget. It does not fade. Like a Sci-Fi movie, basically, but it's a real thing. What was the Tom Cruise thing? Lib die. Repeat. Rain man. Yeah, that's it. You know who else has hyperthymese? Your highly superior autobiographical memory? I think I know this. Who? Because you talked about her at length in the podcast. You remember what? Who? I'll give you one degree of separation and you'll figure it out. Okay. Okay. Don't say Kevin Bacon. Tony Danza. Mona. No. That's right. Yes. What's your name? Alyssa Milano. No, Mary Lou Henner. From Taxi. Right. Alyssa Milano. She just looked up from the gallery in the congressional hearing. Who, me? I forgot about Taxi. That's right. Mary Lou Hunter. You can say you'll give her a date or even, like, a Taxi episode. She'll start reciting lines, the other person's line. She'll talk about what she's wearing in the scene, stuff from the 70s. It's really impressive. She has the opposite experience, though. She loves the whole thing like it's a gift to her, whereas it's a curse to Jill Price. My memory is weird because I will, and I'm sure we talked about this in the other memory episodes, but I can have the worst memory on the planet or the best, and it all just depends on whatever detail it is. It's either in the no brainer. It's not like I can recall some very specific things that people are. Like, how in the world do you remember that? You know, the thing that bothers me about this is we have had so much information pass through our brains, and I retain so little of it, it's almost like I really wish I had more of it in there. Yeah. It's just not, though. I mean, I guess it is if you jog it, but I can't bring it to memory very easily. Yeah. I find that couples, though, whether that's you and I or us and our individual wives can complement each other with their memories and their abilities. For sure. I'm really good at remembering certain things, and Emily's really good at remembering other types of things, and together, it usually works out. It's a whole person. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. I know what you mean, for sure. But you do that, too. You remember stuff that I don't remember. Like Mary Lou Henner. Right. And the list goes on and on. You remember way more than I do, but I don't remember nearly as much as I should, I think, or that I wish I did. I don't deal in shoulds anymore, Chuck. Right. So should we talk about Charles Strowmeier. John Merritt and Elizabeth? Sure. So this was a little bit wrong, but the way I understood from what you sent me as a follow up is that Charles Strowmeier was the one who did this initial research at Harvard in the 19th 70s. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So this guy placed ads in newspapers. He was trying to do some studies on photographic memory, and all these ads were were images of random dots. And you could take a test yourself just by looking at these dots very briefly and then trying to reproduce them. And if you did a really good job, you would follow up by getting in touch with him, saying, hey, I nailed your test, dude. Right. You talk to me. I drew the turtle on the matchbook just right. Remember the turtle and the turtleneck? Yeah. And there was a pirate, too, right? Yeah. What was that all about? It was like an art correspondence course where you would learn to draw through the mail. Interesting. I think we talked about that on another episode, surely we have. I think so. Sorry for derailing you with the turtle saying, no. That's okay. But that was the long and short of what he was trying to do and how he was trying to recruit subjects. And I believe he got, what, like 30 people were successful, 15 of which he was impressed enough by to go to their house and follow up with. And one person he really followed up with, he did. He found out of the 15, none of them had photographic memory. True. But then later on, he came across a woman from a different study entirely named Elizabeth. And here's the thing. This is nuts, man. He figured out strowmeier figured out that took remember the 3D so in the colorblind episode yeah. The magic image or whatever, where you could see the sailboat and the big thing of dots. Right. So this thing didn't have to do with color. It had to do with overlaying the dots to create a 3D image. Right. So you need two sets of dots, and when you put them together, they'll create like a magic I poster kind of thing. Yeah. So what Strowmeyer figured out is you could take these two layers and separate them. Show one of the layers to somebody you're testing for photographic memory, say, really? Get a look at this. Yeah. Okay. Now I'm going to wait like a day, and then I'll show you the second layer. Bring to mind that first layer you saw and overlay it in your mind and see if you can tell me what the 3D image is. That's amazing. It is amazing. And Strowmeyer found one person who could do it, a woman named Elizabeth. And he married her and he married her. And the weird thing is, he wrote like this whole write up in the journal Nature. Then he married her. And no more testing after that. Yeah, he took her off the market. He did. So they're like, well, we can't say that this is definitely a case of photographic memory. If it were true, this would be the closest thing to photographic memory anyone's ever come up with. Yeah. Now, Kim Peacols is title, yet Elizabeth could be the key, right. Being studied. Probably not, though. I saw that in some follow up tests. This would explain why he took her off the market, that she couldn't do it. Really? Yeah. But then this guy, John Merritt, he came along later and used those studies for his own purposes. He did. He found that nobody could do this, that nobody is able to do that. Okay. But they did figure out that, hey, this makes a pretty good test to find identicals, because you don't show them one layer and then take away the other layer and ask them a day later, you show them one layer, ask them to hold it in their mind, and then put the other layer underneath it. And if you're in identical, you are typically able to see in three D. And you can go do this online, actually. Just don't blink. Don't blink and don't say what it is you're looking at. Like, Michael Caine always says, oh, I've never heard him say that. That was one of he did these kind of corny how to act videos series, I think, at one point. What? And Letterman used to play bits of them because they were really funny. One of them was the secret to great acting. Don't blink. Was he trying to be funny? No. The letterman would play for laughs. Don't blink. And you would show scenes, and he's like, look at me, I'm not blinking. And the letterman would say, don't blink, like, out of the blue, 50 times. The rest of the show, probably. I love that guy. Yeah. You got anything else? No, sir. I've got one more. Lex Luthor. What? He supposedly had photographic memory. He's not real photographic memory. All the more likely that he had photographic memory. Well, if you want to know more about photographic memory, go take that etiker test. You'll love it. The Mr. T thing is just back to the podcast. Maybe I pity the fool that tripped me on 57th street on July 20, 1982. Right. Well, Chuck made of Mr. T references means, then it's time for listening to mail. This is, I think, just some warm gratitudes. I like that. Hey, guys. I'm sure you get these emails all the time, but I'd be remiss if I didn't. Thank you for all your wonderful work, had a really tough time with mental illness, and there have been a lot of nights that your wonderful show is staved off panic attacks or worse. Thank you for keeping me calm and educated. Thank you for making me feel safe even in perilous circumstances. Thank you for giving me something to talk about when my depression has kept me in a fog. Without your massive backlog of seemingly endless supply of fresh, fascinating subjects that would surely be lost spent some time researching, I can truly appreciate just how much time and energy goes into becoming familiar enough with something to explain it as succinctly as you guys do. You are superheroes and rock stars. Nice. You have truly saved me. Kindest and warmest regards. Georgia. And here's the thing, everyone. I may have read this before, but let's leave it in there, okay? Because if I did read this before and forgot it, it would have been within the last six or seven weeks, and it will be a very funny ending to the memory of the story. Either way, the listener mail is so nice, you read it twice. Yeah, that's appropriate. Well, thanks a lot, Georgia. Two times over, maybe. Thank you, Chuck, for that great ending. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyhano.com, check out our social links, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, 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 Sea Monsters Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-sea-monsters-work | Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited with creating the universe. Even today when the sea washes something odd ashore we see monsters - we understand there's much more than appears above the surface. | Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited with creating the universe. Even today when the sea washes something odd ashore we see monsters - we understand there's much more than appears above the surface. | Tue, 30 Dec 2014 15:20:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=15, tm_min=20, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=364, tm_isdst=0) | 34960268 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles David. Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel. There's Nikola Tesla. It's Stephanie. We should know. There's Johnny and Scott. Are those your imaginary friends? No, that was Sigmund, the sea monster. Did you watch that show? No. Once again, the brief cultural divide that expands between us was that from the 70s or early eighties? Yes, it was one of the Sid and Marty Craft shows. Oh, HR. Puppy Stuff. Yeah. Sigmund, the Sea Monster. Johnny Scott worst buddies. Yeah, he was like he's a dude in a suit, I reckon. But he looked like a big blob of Kelp. I'm sure it was total nightmare fuel with eyes. That was cool. Sidmarty Croft, man, their sensibilities scare me. Yeah. I went to the place once in Atlanta they had down at the Omni, which is now Phillips Arena. They had Sidmarticroft World or whatever. And I went down there once, and looking back now, it was like a drug fueled indoor amusement park. You're like, Why are there so many 20 year olds here? Yeah, I never really put out kids. I'm sure I say this every single time that we talk about Sid, Martycroft, but you've seen the Mr. Show state of drug acusetts? Yeah, that's one of the best. I mean, it's hard to pick out for Mr. Show, but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's top five easy. Yeah. And that's sea monsters. Sea monsters. They're going to get you soon. Is that from a show? Okay, from this show. So, Chuck, are you familiar much with sea monsters? When you're researching this, were you like, everybody knows all this? Sort of half and half. Yeah, I felt similar. There were a lot of stuff a lot of things in here that I hadn't heard of. And the extra research we did to yielded some new insights. But one of the things that stuck out to me, and I guess it's probably the thesis of this whole thing is that we've been seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've been talking about sea monsters for millennia, and we still are. Like, have you heard of the Montauk Monster? Yes. Did you see pictures of that thing? Yeah, I remember when it came out. Okay. I just heard of it. Oh, really? Yesterday? Yeah. I feel bad for not sharing that with you. It's awesome. Yes. In 2008, what was the beach? It was around Montauk. Yeah. But there was a specific beach, ditch Plains Beach. This girl and her three friends found this washed up Montauk monster. And I think what's funny is there's a trend here in naming these things sensationally throughout history, and we still do it because they could have called it, like a decomposed raccoon. But they called it the Montauk Monster. Right. And the jury is not out. It is a decomposed raccoon. Yeah, they pretty much think so. But it's not like you can't prove that. They have, like, a line of biologists from Montauk to Manhattan saying, it's a raccoon. It's a raccoon without its fur, which makes it look awesome. I've heard some other paleo zoologist say, like, it may be a sheep, though I think it was too small or other animals got you. But it's definitely not a sea monster. No, but this is 2008 we're talking about, and some weird thing washes up on a beach, and around the world, people hear of the Montauk monster, except for me. Yeah. Did you see the East River monster? I heard that one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly a pig, but it's still kind of cool looking. But still. They named it the East River Monster and not a pig. That was I don't know how the pig got there. Right. The pig of East River or something like that. Yeah, it's probably, like, somewhere in Chinatown a pig was no good, and they cut out that thing in the river. That's what they do. Yeah. Also in 2006, there was one in Russia. I didn't see where, but on a beach, something washed up and they said, sea monster. Yeah. And it turned out to be a beluga whale carcass, greatly decomposed. But it looked weird. It didn't look anything like a beluga whale. But the point is still, in the 21st century, whenever the sea spits something up, we're like, this is a monster. Clearly. Obviously. This is a monster. And then biologists come along and say, it's not a monster, but it's this weird thing. Or sometimes they say, this is new. It's not a monster, but this is new. And this is the point, finally, that I'm trying to get to is that the oceans the seas cover 70% of Earth's surface. Yeah, right. That's a lot of hiding places. Sure. And I think humans have known and still know intuitively that there's a lot of stuff down there that we don't know about, we don't know what it is. But over time, science has replaced superstition enough so that while we still know there's stuff out there that we don't know, we don't think of them as monsters. So our mindset has changed somewhat. Yeah. But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown organisms that we're still learning about. Sure. What's? The 90, 95% of the deepest seas are still completely, like, unresearched and undiscovered. Well, James Cameron just took away a little percentage of that with his deep sea dive. He took away a bit of my soul with every movie he's made since Terminator Two. Oh, really? You like Terminator, too? I didn't see that one. Yeah, it was pretty good. Yeah, I think that was a good one. Have you not seen Titanic? Did you know that there was an alternate ending for it where they kept the diamond or no. Where something like the Titanic didn't sink. It worked out well in the end. No. Bill Paxton ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's what it was, I think. Speaking of recent sea monsters, though, which is not a sea monster, but did you see the footage of the angler fish recently? That's another great point. Yeah. Some of these deep sea creatures look like creepy monsters. Right? I mean, the anglerfish is one of the scariest looking things I've ever seen in my life. Creepy. And it's real, though. It's just science. It's not like, oh, what is this thing? They know what the angler fish is. Exactly. But they live so deep. I think until recently, it had never been filmed in its habitat until, like, this year, 2014. Until, like, three weeks ago. Yeah. Apparently it wasn't until 1975 that we ever photographed a whale underwater. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. 2006, I think in 1976, we discovered the megamouth shark. The sea just coughs up new life to us. Were we slightly more superstitious, we would have called monsters. So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But it goes back, like, really far, and looking at the different kind of monsters we came up with really kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it goes back. I mean, pretty much since people were writing stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster. Like, the ocean is always just enthralled, folks. I think the Mesopotamians had the goddess Tiamat. It was a sea monster. Yeah. And she was their creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back in Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from. That's where the universe came from, was Tiamat. Right? And then eventually, as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, she became what's known as the chaos monster, and she was slain by a male hero, and then the world was created from that. But originally, she was just a benevolent creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here, not all of the sea monsters. It depends on the culture and the religion. Some of them were benevolent. I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. The Old Testament had its leviathan even in the Bible. Right. And this is a question of mine, dude. Don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamat are one in the same? And in the Old Testament, it's the Hebrew god slaying the old Mesopotamian gods, saying, don't even bring that here. You created the world. I slay you. I am God. Well, I mean, there's a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament and other religions, and some people take great offense to that, others don't. What that? It's not no, this is the word of God. Oh, sure. Period. There is no crossover. That's just coincidence. Right? 20000 Leagues Under the Sea I think Jules Verne, this quote is pretty cool. In 1870. He wrote that great. Great book. And he said. Either we do know all the varieties of beings which people our planet. Or we do not. If we do not know them all. If nature has still secrets in the deeps. For us. Nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans and other kinds of even new species to which the character receiving that monologue said. Duh. Yes. But it just kind of plays to the point that if there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains or deep in the jungles or deep under the sea, because people would have seen them. So it makes it exotic and sort of grabbing as a means of religion or literature lore. Right. Plus, Jules Verne was writing in well, this is 1870, when he wrote 20,000 Leads under the Sea. So this is a time when a lot of the old myths and legends and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So, like, yeah, that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, but it's not actually a cracking, it's an Orphist. Yeah. Or it's a giant squid. And here's what it does and how it reproduces. And because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah, it's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're a fan of mythology, there are tons and tons of cool stories about sea creatures and sea monsters, all kinds of monsters, namely one Cetus, named by the Romans. King Cepheus had a wife named Cassiophia, and they ruled Ethiopia, apparently. And she said, you know what? My daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs. And of course, she's like, yeah, I said it. Yeah. And CDIs was like, all right, well, I've got a dog like head and I'm part fish. I'm going to come up and kill your daughter. Yeah. Beside me. Kill CTUs. Yeah. And Perseus, of course, is always saving the day. So he apparently was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he just chopped off, flying around and just happened to pass by. Is it Persephone who is about to be eaten? Andromeda andromeda and said, all right, I'll take care of Stevis on my way home. My sword is bloody already. Yeah. Harry Hamlin. Is that who it was? Yeah. I never saw the remake of that. Did you see that? No, I didn't either. I just remember release. The cracking was a buzzword. Yeah, that's right. Dean Neeson has a knack for buzzy movie lines of dialogue. Because that very particular set of skills was also a big thing for different movies. No, it was just in the one. Are you sure? Yeah, take him. Yeah. It was a pretty good movie, by the way. Sure did not see the sequel, though. Taken to Electric. Googler. Yeah. I thought it was weird when he started breaking. Yeah. He's doing the worm. Yeah. But not even very well. I would have thought they'd get, like, a body double who was, like, a professional dancer. Well, he did not have a particular set of skills when it came to being on the cardboard. Chuck, we'll talk a little more about mythology and what it reveals about humans and sea monsters right after that. So, Chucky, you were talking about perseus slaying. See this? Yeah. Homer's Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. Yeah. And there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah. These two point out an important and ongoing feature of some of these stories, which are that maybe they might symbolize something else real. Yes. Either a sea monster or in this case, maybe a dangerous reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common thing. Another Kraken. Also, the most dangerous part about the Kraken supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right. This is one thesis on why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory. Yeah. A tale told of warning. Right. So that quote or that description of Silla is described as having 12ft six heads atop long sinuous necks and mouths bristling with rows of sharklike teeth. That's probably a reef, right? Yeah, sure. And then Sharb just lay on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated the waters. There probably a whirlpool, right? Yeah. So maybe don't go there. Exactly. Did you read that thing on nuclear symbiotics? I did not. Dude, let me tell you about this for a second, okay? There is this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to express so, like, if you have nuclear waste and you need to put it away for 10,000 years, and to keep people away from it for 10,000 years, you have to figure out a way to warn people away from it. Sure. For 10,000 years? Well, how could you possibly do that? Put up a Godzilla sign. That's one idea. Sure. There's a lot of other ideas. And this whole thing is called nuclear semiotics. And one of the ways to probably the most agreed upon way is to create this thing called a nuclear priesthood, which is this group of learned people who know the secret of this nuclear waste site, but purposely come up with a folklore to warn people away. So to add some sort of, like, superstitious danger or something to the site that will get passed down and passed down. So eventually the people surrounding that area who live around it will know, like, you don't want to go there. You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear radiation anymore, but this folklore will get passed along and along, and they're saying, like, that may be the best way to pass along information. And that's exactly what the idea one interpretation of what sea monsters are is. Yeah. It's like a ghost story, too. You don't want your kids to go in that decrepit house with all the rusty nails. Right. Tell them a scary old lady lives in there. Or to play near the water. You don't want a carpee to take you away. It's really just manipulating your dumb kid, pretty much. It's not doing dangerous things, right? Exactly. Yeah. And it works. Over time, it's gotten passed down. So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like you said, the Kraken possibly being the giant squid, or I shouldn't even say possibly. It's probably a giant squid. Right? Yeah. There's always been stories of the Kraken terrorizing ships off of Iceland and Norway, and the Kraken is noted because it is huge, like, 1.5 a mile to a mile and a half wide. And the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid. If you're a sailor back then and you don't know about biology and things yet, and you see an eyeball pop out the size of a human head right. It might make you think that's a big crack in seamounts. Exactly. So then if that gets embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide with legs as large as the sailing mast, capable of pulling down a ship, well, I mean, it gets the point across the people back on land, like, wow, that was a really big monster that you guys saw. How big do these squids get? They get to, like, 40ft long. There's something even bigger called the Colossal Squid that's so much bigger. It's its own species, I believe, and it lives just in the Antarctic, so it's probably not the basis of the cracking. It's probably just a regular old giant squid. But you see giant squids. Look at those things. Right? Exactly. They're scary looking. They are very scary, and they're very big. Plus, also, the idea of the Cracking may have first come about before sightings of giant squid. Sure. They may have been taken from whalers who found, like, crazy scars on whales, who may have found, like, bits of tentacles, like, huge tentacles in the whale's stomach, things like that. And they've been like, Where did this come from? Yeah, the beak. Because they did find a giant squid once, but the sailors cut it up and used it for bait. But they preserved the beak, and that just fueled the legend even more and more. So that's another interpretation of sea monsters, is that they came from misunderstood or embellished sightings of actual sea organisms that we're familiar with now. Yeah. So it's the same thing. We just changed the name. Sure. Well, you're a sailor. You're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because you've been out at sea for too long. Looking toads, maybe. Looking toads. You may be physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Right. And you see a giant squid, you might write in your journal that, I've seen The Kraken. It makes perfect sense. Sure. And it spreads and takes shape over time. You got a little scurvy going on. The Kraken is not the only one that's probably based on something real like sea serpents. So the Leviathan was a sea serpent? Many headed sea serpent. It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said. No, I'm sorry. It was in the Old Testament. It may have been the Mesopotamian god. That's what I said. Yeah. But Leviathan always is sort of a catch all word now for any large, unknown, huge creature. Yeah. And apparently in Hebrew, it just means whale. Yeah. Which, again, is probably whale. Well, yeah. It could have also been a sea serpent. Sea serpents are their own things. The Norse had a legend of the Euroman Gondor, there's a lot in there and everything. And that was apparently one of Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah. That was the baby that was created when Loki, his brother, and a woman named Angel Boda, I guess, had the sex of the gods and created this creature, a sea serpent that wrapped around the globe, supposedly. Yeah. And that's just one example of a sea serpent, a huge seabound snake. And there's a lot of suggestions of what accounted for sightings of sea serpents. Huge things of floating kelp seen in the distance. Sure. Schools and porpoises. Yeah. All in line together. There's one thing, though, that could have accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the Orefish. Did you see this thing? Yeah, it is huge. And if an orifice was swimming in the water, it could be undulating up and down. And it looks like little spiny humps coming in and out of the water. Right. So that makes sense. Sure. They get up to, I think, 30 or 40ft. Yeah, they can. There's plenty of photos of ten dudes on a beach holding one up. Right. Because it takes ten dudes. Yeah. It's not like they all want their hands on the little fish. Right, exactly. Yeah. And these aren't photoshopped, either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures, too, but or fishes are huge and they look like big, slimy kind of serpentine fish. And then Chuck Merpeople were another kind of universal, I guess, sea monster myth. That's another thing that stuck out to me, is there are legends around the world from cultures that are separated by space and time that had similar stories without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that a lot of these people cited similar things sure. And came up with similar myths and legends to explain what they were seeing. Probably the mermaid is if you've seen Splash, you think, wow, what a neat thing to find a mermaid. But mermaids were not looked upon kindly, because they would, and this article points out they would. At their best, they would just forget that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die. And at the worst, they would do so on purpose. Right. And take the men down under the water and lights out for you, Tom Hanks. Yeah, sorry, Tom Hanks. Sorry. For the rest of your career, Darryl. Yeah. His career was pretty lousy after Splash, wasn't it? Well, yeah. What? No. Daryl Hannah, though, in the movie, she was not a bad mermaid because she kissed him and gave him breath. Right. Well, it's the Hollywoodification of the mermaid legend. Howard. Or like Ariel from Little Mermaid. Oh, sure. And that dirty, dirty DVD cover. Oh, yeah, I guess it was VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it went to DVD. Probably those Disney guys. Bored. Bored and yeah, sure. Yeah, I guess bored and blank. So the whole merck creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Oh, really? Yeah. Orkney I think and there's a whole part of Scotland that's underwater, now called dog land. That was around ten or 12,000 years ago that's like this really fertile Neolithic artifact area. It's pretty cool. Doggerland. That's what it is. Not dog land. So they had their own things called Carpies. Chuck and what's interesting about the carpee is that the kelpie the kelpie. I was thinking harpies or harpees. Exactly. This is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which are actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes change into humans. So they're kind of mer creatures. Sure. But every lake in Scotland has a kelpie. This supposedly associated with it, including Loch Ness. And it wasn't until the early 18th century that Nessie became like a sea creature that we think of her today, when some dinosaur bones, plesiosaur bones, were found around Loch Ness saying, well, this is what the Loch Ness monster is. Right before that, it was just a kelpie. We could probably do a full show on Nessie just for the fun of it. Totally. Should has been pretty much disproven, unequivocally, of course, sure. Because there is no, like, this monster. But I just think things like that are neat. I mean, we did one bigfoot it's more about just the legend and the war around it. I'd love to do unlock. Did you ever see the documentary that what's his name did? Verna Hudson? No, I didn't know he did one of those. I think he did a mockumentary, but not like a Christopher Guessumentary, just a Bow documentary. Waiting for Nessie. Yeah, Waiting for Nessie, where it just looked like he was I can't remember the name, when he was searching for the Loch Ness Monster and caught it on camera, but he made it seem real. I think it was Vernon Herdsigg. It was good, of course. Sounds a little dishonest for Vernon Herzog. Well, I don't think he was trying to pass it off. I think yeah, I'll look that up. It may not be him, but someone did that. And it was kind of cool because if you buy into it, then you're like, oh, my God, there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like, something on cable? Noel says it was her talking. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it probably played on cable at some point. Got you. Noel talks a lot more than Jerry does. So chuck that brings us to our third interpretation for where sea monster legends came from, people finding dinosaur bones. Yes. And we'll talk more about that right after this break. All right, Dino, Josh. Yeah. Let's hear it. Oh, well, I said that Nessie became this kind of sea monster around the time of Plesiosaur. I believe it's what it was. Skeleton was found around Loch Ness. They said. Well, this must be one of Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent. You mentioned the Chinese having a legend of some sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about 3ft long no, I'm sorry, about a foot long. The Guizu dragons. Yeah. They were basically marine reptiles called Kichosaurus Hui, but they were lucky. Like, if you found one of these skeletons, you kept it because it was a little sea monster skeleton that you got your hands on, and it would bring you good fortune. That's right. And I know earlier we were talking about just the early explorers, and you can't fault some of these dudes, because this one article, he said they were literally in uncharted waters, and it was before the rise of science, and all they had heard were stories in folklore. And anytime you saw if you ever see a map, oceanic map from the 1005 hundreds, it's going to have some sea monsters drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it was a time when, before observational data came along, we pretty much like the Internet today. You pretty much just rewrote earlier history books over and over right. Until they finally got a little smarter and say, you know what? Maybe we should really observe something and then write about it for real. This didn't really lead to anything more substantiated. Well, for a while, sure, but they called it a transitional era in this article, which kind of sums it up. Yeah. These were early scientists, early naturalists who were trying to get a handle on what the heck they were looking at. But they still perpetuated legends. Like they might have a real creature, like a whale. Right. And then it's similarly a natural biological illustration of a mythical creature. Right. Like a sea bishop. Yeah. So the sea bishop was this thing that was supposedly caught and taken to the king of Poland because it was this fish like creature that had, like, a meter and robes, like a bishop. And apparently it could also talk and refuse to eat, and it would make the sign of the cross and everything. And later on, somebody said probably didn't talk and make the sign of the cross. But if you look at a squid a certain way, sure, it's got the hat and some of his flappy skin, kind of like the robes. So maybe that's where the sea bishop came from. Yeah. Simultaneously to this, we're talking like the 16th century, there was pretty much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land had an analogy in the sea catfish, dogfish, sea horse, all that stuff. Yeah. And in some cases, they were right. There are catfish, there are dogfish, because we call them that. Sea monkeys. Right. The sea horse, too. Yeah. But all that kind of it was a rough time for science. It was still getting its footing. Oh, yeah. Because like you said, things were mistaken, like a whale and a walrus might be a monster when it's just a whale or a walrus. And there were all kinds of tales that when it's repeated over and over, you get the sense that it's just one of those, like, urban legends back then. Right. I guess it wasn't urban back then, though. What would it be? The Seafaring Legend. Yeah, exactly. Of whales being mistaken for islands, and, like, a ship will land on the whale and build and route down, basically get off the ship and build a fire. And then the whale, I guess, who's just chilling out at the surface, says, hey, there's a fire on my back, and I'm going to take your boat underwater and swallow you whole. Sorry, I'm away. Also, beware of whatever they call that whatever culture called that particular whale. Exactly. Now we just call it a whale, and again, probably land on their backs. It was an embellished story, but it was based on a sighting of a whale before they called it whales. And back when everybody lied about everything, they saw another culture that found dinosaur bones and created their own legends were the Lakota and Dakota Sue. Yeah, sure. They came up with something called right, sure. From dinosaur bones found around the Missouri River. Yeah. And that was a water creature. Well, they were very evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another. And so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with them. Thunder beams. Yeah, but I looked it up. It's basically thunderbirds. Okay, got you. Yeah. What they knew is that it was in a tetanka. That's a buffalo, right? Yeah. They were pretty sure. That's apparently where the legends of the Cyclops came from. From Native Americans? No, from finding old elephant bones, elephant skulls, the huge cavity in the middle. And you're like, well, clearly there was a race of giants that just had one eye. No, they were elephants. We often joke like they were dumb back then. Of course they weren't. They were just trying to figure it out. It's like to make stuff up. Sure. They didn't have TV or anything back then. And like we said, a lot of the stuff was legend. To keep boaters from going in may be a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or to keep the children away from the water. And like the ghost story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh, nuclear semiotics. Nuclear semiotics. Man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually, Roman Mars has a 99% invisible about that one. Oh, cool. Yeah. Nice. Nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat and effective. I imagine we'll find out in 10,000 years. I guess. So what else you got? Anything else? I don't have anything else on sea serpents. Just take a look at the angler fish video and tell me if you came upon that and see. We also didn't point out that this was before. Not even deep sea exploration like this is before underwater exploration. Right. People are just riding around on the top of the ocean, so we're fascinated with it, and we've gone to the depths that we can attain at this point, which is pretty deep. I wish I would look that up. I don't know how deep we can go. How deep James Cameron can go. Oh, he goes deep, buddy. But think about back then, man, when they couldn't, how scary that would be, right? When these strange creatures are like you see a giant squid. Yeah. And you're just partially seeing it. If you can't see it underwater, you have no idea. This is before the Diving Bell even. Or the butterfly. That's right. Yeah. You like that one? I finally saw that movie, by the way. Hardcore, man. That's good, though. Yeah, really good. If you want to know more about the Diving Bell and the Butterfly or about sea monsters, you can type those words into search barhouseofworks.com. And since I said search bar is time for listening or mail. I'm going to call this OPA. Just German for a grandpa. I thought it was Greek for, like, good times, maybe. I don't know. Really? Yes. OPA. Well, I'm sure those are just three letters together. It might be something in Greek, but, like, my brother in law Carsten is German and his grandfather was Oprah. I'm sorry, his grandfather was OPA, but his dad was native German, so my nieces called him OPA's. Ladies, I'm writing in specifically about your whaling podcast how appropriate. With a family story that Lucy relates. My great grandfather OPA left Germany when he was 14, pre war to work as a sailor, came to the US and was a member of the US coast Guard. One day, he was part of a team that was clearing a harbor of some old sunken ships. To do so, they used the sophisticated method of throwing dynamite into the water to blast the wood apart and then gathered the debris. His team rode out in a 14 foot row boat to gather up the wood shards and noticed a blast that killed the fish. They floated to the top, so the crew brought them in to the boat as well. Waste not, want not. Sure as they were going about their business, they came across a 16 foot hammerhead shark that had floated up. Clearly, it would be a great source of food. So despite their small boat, they pulled it aboard. I think you see where this is headed. No? I do. Well, as it turns out, the blast was strong enough to kill small fish, but only stun larger animals. The shark slowly started to regain consciousness in the row boat and being confused and out of water, was not pleased. It got to the point that it was thrashing about in the boat, threatened to destroy the boat and likely injure or kill the crew members. So in the midst of this chaos, they're able to flag down a sailor on a larger vessel, proceeded to shoot the thing to death while it was still in the boat. All the crew members were safe and they still got the feasted on hammerhead shark, but now had a much more exciting story. And you mentioned in the whaling podcast, old timey whaling crew members were deployed in small boats to get the whale and were often injured and killed. I thought you might find this interesting and I was hoping you could give a shout out to my sister Rachel, who turned me on to your podcast in 2009. She lives in France. We don't get to see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh and Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is Wendy Baer. She is a registered dietitian. And Wendy and Rachel, thanks for listening and for spreading the word and for being sisters. Way to go, being sisters. Yeah. Thanks for writing in, Wendy. Yeah. Thanks, Wendy. And Chuck. This is our last episode of 2014. Oh, man, the longest year. So we want to say happy New Year, everybody. Yes. And I want to say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife. Yumi. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the right free version. No, it's a Stevie Wonder version. Oh, it's a good one. So it's not rights free. Yeah. So happy birthday. Yummy. Happy New Year to all of you great people out there in podcast land. We'll see you next year. 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 Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. The app today." | ||
3fd40c86-5461-11e8-b6d0-77b4ec9362fa | Selects: How Mars Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-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, in this classic episode. | 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, in this classic episode. | Sat, 24 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=205, tm_isdst=0) | 49969185 | audio/mpeg | "You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo elevate at Petco Pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. What if you were 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 fleece. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Hello, friends. Have you ever been to Mars? I haven't. Do you know why? Because nothing ever happens on Mars. Did you catch that reference? If you did, then I'm glad, but I'm not going to spoon feed you and tell you what it was. This is how Mars works, and it was from April 22, 2014, and it is my pick for the Saturday Select. Please do enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. 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're on NPR. 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. Slap in the face. So I respond. 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. I was like, Man, I wish I was that clever. I said, I had no idea. It was 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 had this many Catholics. Good 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? Did you get 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 was from Mars. And one of the pieces of evidence of this possibility was that 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. And now they're 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 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. I 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 has 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. Shrouded in 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 parallel. 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 Sheparelli. It was good, that guy. Man have you been practicing at home? No, I just been eating a lot of pasta. That's good stuff. Man so Shepard, 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 believe that that was heaven? I don't know. I can't remember. Man I haven't heard that. 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, Xia Puerlli 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. Yeah. Get water to the martians. Yeah. And this established, like, what Earthlings thought of Mars for Earthlings. 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. Yeah. 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 it in this article. It did not cause the 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 rate oh, yeah. It scared everyone. Right. It caused a panic. People were wild in the streets, committing suicide, like, 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 in newspapers at the time. Have you done? Don't be dumb on that. No. Maybe I will. Can I plug that? Go ahead. Josh is 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 of 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 redee listed, he rooted it out and found out that it was overwriting credit. Is that why he was clapping weirdly? Yes, 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. Yeah, one of them. And 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. It'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, 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 the asteroid mission, that's not going to spur 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. Jim, do 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. That 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? Yeah. Or it doesn't come home, does it? No, it won't. But it's 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 down really already? I think it went up in late 2011. Oh, wow. So I think it's 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 in 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 they don't know how many, but at least a couple of periods of lots of volcanoes going on. Say it just like Earth lava flows. And then finally the planet cooled down and 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 this stuff and it would crash into the planet and get hot, basically, and just sort of meld together. Yeah. I was like, oh, Mars. And that was interesting. I looked at 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, there would be a corner that's not as close as other parts. That would be a creepy planet, like a cube. Yeah. But I wondered why doesn't 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 isotatic 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, and it'd be kind of cool. It's 2022 and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus infection or allergy. And that's why teledoc 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. Teedoc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoccom stuff for JD. Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower comAWARDS what if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. All right, so 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, you have a molten core, you have a softer mantle and then a crust that formed like Earth. Yes. And as that softer mantle and the molten core press up, you have volcanic activity, 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 a great writer for us. Yeah, PhD. That's right. He said Mars 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. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Two pints per cubic foot. Yeah, but that's a spoiler. Sorry. Actually, it can't be a spoiler. But it happened in the past, 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 as 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 that activity led to that atmosphere and 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 compliment? 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 mountain is something like I think it's 6 miles from the ocean floor. Yes. Nice, Chuck. And it's 140 miles wide at its base. 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, 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 no ocean. It looks like Earth, but with weird continents. Okay. And then it's 370 miles across Olympus. Monsieurs, that's large. It's big. And they have pictures. If you Google it, 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? It's a 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 surface turned into permafrost. And Mars became it 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? Maybe we'd be like, going there and back right now. Right? On vacation. Yeah, like Arnold. That was a good one. Or 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 disk. 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. Yes. 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 are extensive 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 lowlying regions that are 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 and thinner in the northern region. And the mantle just pushed up and formed, like, continentsized, plateaus that are called crustal upwarps. That's a great word. Yeah. I kept thinking I was reading it wrong. No. Crystal upwarps. And these crystal upwarps, 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 at least we should start a campaign to rename New Jersey Tarsis. And then 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 jumpsuit. So you've called out Olympus Mons as 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. 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 Valleys 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 Mariners is 370 miles wide. Yeah. That's nuts. Yeah. So it's a big old trench. Like 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. You think 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 ago. Yeah. What's the new plan? Just to be cremated and distributed with yumi. Okay. That's nice. Yeah. She's really calm. 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. It's not our polar ice cap. Right. And like Earth, depending on the season, the ice caps are going to change shape in the summer time. The CO2 from the northern caps melt away, and there's water ice below that. So not dry ice. 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. Amanda mission. Maybe. We'll definitely see a flyby. Yeah. A manned flyby. Yeah. Okay. You and Elon Musk. That's not even just me. It's me, Elon Musk. And the Senate. Okay. Yeah. They're all so excited. So, Chuckers, up next, we're going to talk about the interior of Mars. 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 teladoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and Telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Tele docs available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone. Has access to use teledoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teletoc. comStuff. To register or schedule a visit today. That's Teladoc.com stuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS what if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comitoimation. Okay, so we're back and we're talking about Mars interior. And to talk about Mars's 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 is 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 Earth core 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. I don't 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 crystal. 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. And that's why there's no active volcanoes right now, for one reason. Why 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. Yes. 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. A lot less nitrogen. 2.7% compared to Earth, 78%. Not much oxygen at all. Only .3%. That's a big factor. Toxic again. And about one 1000 as much water vapor is on Earth. Yes. 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. Yeah, this is all coming together. It's a long term plan. 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. They can't just exist as water these days. No, but like we said, possibly. Probably did at one point. Yes. So you've got a thin atmosphere, which means a lot of solar radiation is not blocked, is 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 fall, 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 its 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. No. 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. Well, of course, wear layers. It's the key to Mars, where layers peck. Big, wear 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, it basically is what causes those big dust storms we were 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, 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, their curiosity is one ton. And actually, what's strange is the dust storms it says are beneficial because it will blow any Martian dirt cake 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. 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 there 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 little green men. 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. And they're thinking 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. Pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Again, though, we have that periclorate 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. Yes, 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, trace amounts. But I think that has been debunked now with oh, 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, and NASA said, no, it would have been super exciting. But methane doesn't distribute and leave like that quickly. 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. Yeah. Wow. 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 us beat. 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 polar ice 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 would be alien. Like, it would still be in the rotation. But Outland 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 undermine 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, because Viking One in 1976 produced a photo that looked a whole lot like a feronic type face. Oh, yeah, 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 was 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're not in now. Yeah. 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 as 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 after that wasn't that 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. Yeah, 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 doesn't mention it, but Mars has two moons, phobos and Davos. Oh, yeah. They didn't get into that at all. No. And Mars popped up and pops up in pop culture a lot. There's the Mars Volta. The band. Yeah. David Bowie had a song called Life on Mars, one of the great songs. The Misfits had 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. Yes. 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. Yeah, 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. Yeah, like the two of them together make me. And there's got to be like that one, there's got to be a safe way to lose and regain weight. Yeah, but I'll bet there's not very many safe ways to gain weight. To make yourself look pudgy. No. 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 now, 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. 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. Alright, we'll look it up. It's 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. Howstepworks.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 postured 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. Fairly. Okay. I'll agree that about 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 country study, which is what caused the government to say fat will kill you, simply throughout 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 and has been fed terribly wrong information about health for a long time. Yeah, I've learned recently, like, 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. Jerry likes that word. And 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 om. I don't know if he's from Tharsa City or not, but he's from somewhere in Tharsis. 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 that 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 ones that should be long form because there's just so much great information in it. Eye opening. Yeah. 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.com stuffyhealth. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuffyheanow is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet foods that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopeet.com." | |
44395ccc-53a3-11e8-bdec-fffbbba0749b | Wind Tunnels: More Important Than You Realize | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/wind-tunnels-more-important-than-you-realize | Without wind tunnels we may not have airplanes right now. Early aviationists built them to puzzle out how to get and stay airborne. But wind tunnels are used for so much more than flight – from microchips to wind turbines. Enjoy this breezy episode.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Without wind tunnels we may not have airplanes right now. Early aviationists built them to puzzle out how to get and stay airborne. But wind tunnels are used for so much more than flight – from microchips to wind turbines. Enjoy this breezy episode.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:48:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=12, tm_min=48, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=287, tm_isdst=0) | 43095032 | audio/mpeg | "You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them Halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For digestive health, find us at Chewy, amazon and haloopets.com. Com. This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Bryant. There's Jerry Woosh. Roland over there. He's just getting worse and worse. This is stuff you should know. Wind tunnel a dish. Aren't you glad we're not in the same room so that you couldn't smell my breath when I went? Yeah, my daughter's got in a bad habit of doing that and she thinks it's funny. I'm like, it's really? Not. Of what? Of, like, breathing in someone's nose on purpose. Like, right in your face. And no one likes that. Yeah, she's just entered the age of, what, five to 55, where that's something people do. Yeah, not funny ever. I tell you what, these masks that we're all wearing, this is a real reckoning with your breath, though, isn't it? Oh, my God. It's funny. It's like an hour by hour slide into despair. You're like, I don't remember eating garlic. Yeah, it's like in the morning. It's like, oh, man, this is great. I love this mask. And later in the day, you need that toothbrush. Yes, it's true. They say you can't smell your own breath. And they are wrong. And I'm brushing my teeth now more than ever because I'm scared to go to the dentist. Yeah, same here. I'm also flossing like a mad person, too. You're flossing right now. I can hear it. Well, that was the most PC thing I've ever said, is what? I'm flossing like a mad person, not a mad man. And technically, I guess not. It would have been like a mentally ill health person. I think that's even bad. Who knows these days, right? That's right. Let's talk about wind tunnels. Okay, so we're talking wind tunnels, and I had no idea how interesting wind tunnels were. I had an inkling that there was, like, more to wind tunnels than people realize, which is absolutely true. But they're a deep cut. Yeah, there's way more to them. And you can do way more with them and learn way more from them than I thought. Because my experience with wind tunnels, like most people is seeing the cool TV commercial with the green smoke flying over the car to demonstrate how aerodynamic it is. And to be sure, that is a very big part of what they use wind tunnels for. Yeah. And, Chuck, you know, you and I were in a commercial in a wind tunnel. I thought you might bring this up. That was a wind tunnel. Technically, that indoor skydiving thing is a type of wind tunnel. It's a vertical wind tunnel. Yeah. If you guys haven't seen that, it's been a while since we promoted these things. We used to do these little shorts. No, this was different. Well, no, but these were based on those shorts. Sure. Yes. We did these little shorts that we called Interstitials. Did a lot of them. To me, it's like the best video work we've ever done as a team. I love don't be done. But that was just you. Oh, go on. Well, it was great. It was you in a room and it was this chair, and you sort of played a character. Yes. Go on. And some people had problems with the character because they thought you were making fun of a certain kind of person. Yes. Sure. That wasn't true. It was all very kind hearted and just funny. That's right. That was really great. Thank you. Sure. And that chair is still here in the office, right? Yes, it is. And I believe my outfit still is. I'm waiting for the Smithsonian to call. So, yeah, we did this TV commercial for Toyota that was very much in the vein of those Interstitials where we were in just all over Atlanta, in various parts of Atlanta, doing funny things. That was La. Remember? Well, no. Again, talking about the original Interstitial. Oh, God, I'm so confused. Then when we went to La. We did the same thing. We replicated that style in Los Angeles. And long the upshot of this all is we end up in an indoor skydiving facility having a conversation. Like a normal conversation, or trying to that was the gig. The gig? That was the gag. That was it, really? Yeah. And you get slung against the side of it at the end, which is kind of the funniest part. Yeah. Really? What? It was supposed to be an outtake, and they made it an intake. Those things were very difficult to if you've never done one before, it was fun and kind of cool. But it's not easy. You don't just go in there and be like, hey, I'm floating. No, it's really hard, actually. Yeah. Like you're working every muscle in your body. It's kind of like water skiing. Looks fun, too. Yes. You are good at it. I was not very good at it. It was okay, but it was tough. Yeah. So that was what would be technically called a vertical wind tunnel, right? Yeah. And they actually use those to research spin. Like when something goes in, like a helicopter goes in a tail spin. They would use a vertical wind tunnel to test for that kind of thing, right? But the wind tunnels we kind of more think of are the horizontal tubes where you see a car or something like that, having the cool smoke blown over it for a commercial. But they're very useful. And this is something I didn't really know. I kind of just thought they were all these big, giant things that you would put an actual car in. Most wind tunnels are these little desktop models that you use in a science lab that have a scale model that you're using instead of the actual thing. Right? Which means that you're using a smaller version, but that is precisely scaled down. It's roughly the right size. It looks the right size, doesn't it? I'm sure this plane will fly. This is close enough. But what's neat about that is that they can scale this thing down. They can subject it to the same conditions as they would a full sized model, but then they can correct for the data. Whatever the numbers they're getting the output, they can correct to scale it back upwards. Just using math. Because if there's one thing that goes hand in hand with wind tunnels, it is math, friends. Because the whole point of wind tunnels is to study aerodynamics, which is the flow of air or gases over an object. And in this case, it's a stationary object, and the wind is moving. But what they're really doing is simulating that object moving out there in the real world in the wind. And I mean, that's a wind tunnel. And when you put it like that, it sounds very simple. They are not simple at all. There's really nothing about wind tunnels. It's simple. From their construction to their cost to what they're used for, to all of the different variables and conditions that they can test for, they grew step in step, hand in hand with the aviation industry. We probably wouldn't have an aviation industry right now without wind tunnels. And that should kind of give you an idea of how complex the stuff that people are doing in wind tunnels is. The data they're extracting from these wind tunnels tests. It's not just like, look, that cool green smoke bending over the car. That's for yokels. Like, you and I watching ads while in between golf, right? Like, you're watching golf and the ad comes on, sure. My brain is the best part of golf. Bad. I've actually kind of gotten are you watching golf now? Yeah, kind of here or there. It's not something I seek out, and it's not for the golf. I could care less about the golf. It's the views, it's the shots. The golf courses are just they have the most amazing backdrops, and it's just so tranquil and calm. It's really something. Yes. I live right down the street from the legendary East Lake Country Club in atlanta and Bobby Jones course. And I've been to one day of that one tournament. That's the only time I've actually been to a professional golf tournament. And I stood there, 12ft from Tiger Woods, and the tee box is pretty neat. Wow. Just to see, because I played golf a lot growing up, and it's a hard sport. Yeah, it really is. And to see someone do it perfectly right in front of your face with that much power, it was really impressive. You know what would really help Tiger Woods swing? If they put him in a wind tunnel, put some green smoke in the wind and watch them swing. They could tell him how to do it better. You want smoke? I'll give him smoke. That's right. Shout out to our Detroit crew from back in the day. All right, so if you want to go back in time and talk about human flight, you're going to look at things like DaVinci's ornithopter in 1485 and kind of a lot of early stabs at flying, where humans looking at birds and thinking, well, if we're going to fly, we're going to have to learn how to flap wings really fast. Yeah. And it made sense, I guess, if you're looking at birds, they're the only thing flying around. It would make sense that that's where they would go. But they knew early on, regardless of the flapping, that they needed to understand wind and how wind worked with wings. And so they started going to these little hills and mountains, and they started going to caves. They were looking for some sort of predictable, constant wind so they could do some early testing. And they realize you just can't do it with Mother Nature. You can't get a consistent wind, not enough to get real data out of it and do that math that we need so drastically to make this possible. Right. Initially, we got that assist from birds and that we knew wings had to be involved. The whole flapping thing really kind of threw things off for a while. But because we knew that there had to be wings, we knew that there had to probably be some ideal or optimum shape of wings. And that's really where wind tunnels first got their start, was in testing different shapes of wings or airfoils. There was a guy back in 1746 named Benjamin Robbins who created a Whirly arm, which is basically like it was a centrifuge, basically, is what he created. Yeah. I had a hard time picturing this. And there's this one very rudimentary sketch that made it even more confusing. Okay, so just imagine you have, like, a pole coming out of the ground vertically, and you have an arm attached to that pole, and the pole can spin around in a circle like a centrifuge, like one of those G force testers that they have in astronaut training. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that thing. This is what that guy invented, but it was like, with wood in the dirt, and it didn't go that fast, but you could have fixed, like, a wing type that you were testing to see if it worked well to the end of it and push it through the air. And it didn't really help this guy figure out what wing style or size was the best. What it helped him figure out is that it doesn't have that much to do with anything with flapping. We don't need to be wasting our time inventing machines that flap their wings, because that's not it. It's all about this thing called lift and drag and the proportion between those two. And if you can figure out how to get more lift and decrease drag, then you can fly, basically. And this was the very first inklings of that that Benjamin Robbins came up with. Yes. And what I saw was that Robin's really kind of pinpointed drag. Like, the shape is super important. And then after him, Sir George Cayley had his own whirling arm, and he's the one that really figured out lift was a key after they realized the shape of the thing matters more than the shape. Like, the size of it matters. Size does matter, especially when you're flying. Especially when you're flying. And that if you could just get a quick enough takeoff, you don't need to flap at all. All you need is a lot of speed at first, which they could have also gotten, frankly. But if they would have kept looking at birds and realized they eventually stopped flapping, they might have realized, oh, you actually don't need to flap the whole time. You can glide if you've got enough speed. Right. Well, actually, a lot of the early flying machines were gliders. The Wright Brothers were not the first people to engage in human flight. There's a monk named Elmer of Malmsbury who has the first recorded human flight back in 1050 Ce, not BCE. That was almost a thousand years before the Wright Brothers. But the Wright Brothers are credited with an engine powered flight, human flight. Right. So they were dabbling in what, Kaylee and Robins well, Kaylee especially figured out that you need thrust, and there's just nothing around that's light enough to produce enough thrust. So Kaylee actually gave up and went and joined Parliament for a while before he finally created a flying machine 50 years before the Wright Brothers. What a loser. He made. His coach driver test piloted it, and the coach driver was so scared, even though the flight was successful, that when he landed, he was like, I quit. I quit. I don't work for you anymore. Wow. Yeah. But George Kayleigh is very much overlooked figure in the history of flight. He apparently figured out the general shape of a modern airliner back in 1799. Crazy. Yeah. All right, I say we take a break. We'll come back and talk about the first wind tunnel right after this. 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And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated USbased restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to Lifelock.com stuff. That's lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, so Kaylee has these whirling arms going, terrible name, but it worked out. Sure. Then enter a man named Frank H. Winham. He was another Englishman, and he was in the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, and he said, guys, we need gentlemen, we need a wind tunnel, and we need it bad. And so in 1871, he had the very first wind tunnel. It was 12ft long, about 18 inches square, with a 40 miles an hour wind, which is pretty good. It consisted of your daughter going, oh, God, stinky AST wind tunnel. Her breath isn't that stinky yet. Kids don't really start to stink until later, I think. Yeah, until later. But the winds were powered by a steam fan at the end of the tunnel, and it worked pretty well. He was able to get that leading edge of the airfoil and move it up and down and change his angle of attack and kind of see what shaped and what angles worked best to get the best lift. But it was still sort of choppy, and it was rough around the edges. And if you really want to make this, if you want to fly safely, you got to have a really consistent, very smooth wind to work with to get that data. And they still didn't have one at this point? No, they still didn't. But they were advancing by leaps and bounds here that people were building their own wind tunnels. Because up to that point, if you had a design for an air foil for, like, a wing size or shape. You had to build it and then go take it out into nature and test it and hope for the best. And it was really expensive, really time consuming. With your own wind tunnel, you could make a model of the shape and test it out yourself and then see, oh, this is actually worth pursuing, or, this is junk. And that's what our dear beloved heroes, the wright brothers did. In Ohio, outside of dayton, orville and Wilbur wright built their own wind tunnel. These guys were just like tinkerers. They owned a bike shop. But they were so fascinating, were following these developments in early flight, that they just kind of got into it themselves. And they built themselves a wind tunnel. They had, like two different or 200 different types of wings. I believe that they messed with selected the 30 best ones that they had developed in the wind tunnel of their own construction and design. And apparently I saw somewhere that by their wind tunnel test, the wright brothers, couple of bicycle repair men in dayton, had the world's most accurate data, scientific data on flying and wings in the world, and they come up with it entirely by themselves. Yeah, and here's the thing with these wind tunnels, especially early on and kind of still, it's not like they could use that wind tunnel and come out with a surefire product using math and testing different designs and shapes and tilts and angles. But it was such a time saver and broken bonesaver that you didn't just say, all right, well, I think this might work. Let's go and push our cousin off of a cliff or our coach driver or whatever, and see if it works. They still had their failures, all of them did. Oh, yeah. But it would have taken, I mean, god knows how many more years if they didn't, like, at least start from a point of likely success thanks to wind tunnels. Look at it. They went from they finished their wind tunnel tests in 19 one. They had their first powered flight in 19 three. Yeah, it's amazing. Two years. And it definitely did accelerate it, too. So you can see from the outset that aviation and wind tunnels just developed together, and wind tunnels developed aviation. But the first wind tunnels, like you said, they had a really big problem, and that was the air that they produced. The stream of wind was very choppy, very turbulent, and your data was not necessarily reliable. It wasn't too terribly much better than, say, going out into mother nature and subjecting the same model to those winds. And that's a big problem. So one of the first things that they figured out how to do was to make the wind smoother so that you could get a reliable, smooth, steady wind in your wind tunnel whenever you wanted to use it. Yeah, and that's where we come to the modern tunnel. Very smooth airflow and they have five basic sections. They're all different, but they have five basic sections in a modern tunnel. That's the settling chamber, the contraction cone, the test section, the diffuser and the drive section. So we start out with this swirling air and it's a big choppy mess and it enters the tunnel. And we'll talk about how in a second because it's kind of cool, a little counter intuitive, but it makes a lot of sense. It goes into the settling chamber, which does exactly what you think. It settles that air, straightens it out. They might have these little honeycomb holes or a screen or these panels and that's just sort of the initial thing to sort of get it nice and smooth and moving in the same uniform direction. Yeah. And then it goes down they step it down through that contraction cone and that just like anything else. If you make the tube smaller, it's going to increase that velocity of airflow and that's where it gets to the test section, which is whatever. And the test section depends on what you're testing. If it's a desktop thing, the test section might be twelve inches long and you might have a tiny little model of an airplane wing in there. Right. And that's where the actual thing you're testing is and where all the sensors are recording all the data because you've got your visual, you've got these windows so you can shoot TV commercials and you can look at the thing. But there's also all manner of sensors to pick up on all manner of data and observations. Yeah, I think that's really cool that when they operate wind tunnels, they still watch through the window because there is a lot to be gained visually from just human beings watching this stuff. You want to watch it, right? Yeah, for sure. Especially when they got the green smoke thing turned on. Oh, absolutely. So after it goes through the test section, it enters a diffuser which kind of slows things down and maybe just exits the whole thing. It's kind of the opposite of the contractor. It just opens back up. Right? Exactly. So as far as breaking, there's a lot of different kinds of wind tunnels, as we'll see. But there's really kind of two categories, two broad categories. You've got open and closed circuit. And an open circuit is where you have wind going in on one end, going through the diffuser and the honeycomb and the test section, and then coming out the other end, blowing into the room and another with the closed circuit, it's just basically an oval. And so when the wind is generated, it goes through the test section, out the back, but then bends around an oval track and then comes back around again and through the contraction cone and into the test section again and again and can just keep going rather than just blowing out the other side. Yeah. And here's the part that I said wasn't intuitive, but it's really kind of neat when you think about it. The drive section is where this fan is and this is what is just generating that airflow. And I always just thought a wind tunnel was a fan pointing at the thing. Right. They're actually behind the thing because you don't want to push air onto something. You want air being pulled over something. And it just makes total sense. But you never really thought about it. I always just pictured a big fan blowing at a car, right. But the fan would actually be behind the car, and it's probably looping around and smoothing out this entire way and then being gently pulled over the car exactly. In just the same way. That the fastest way to cool off, say, like a server room that you don't have good cooling on. You just throw a box fan the opposite way. So the box fan is blowing out into the regular room, but at the same time, it's sucking the air, the hot air out of the server room, and cool air is rushing in to replace that hot air. So you're creating like an airflow that's much less turbulent. When the fan sucks the air out, it's much smoother than when it blows it in, which creates a lot more turbulence. And that was the big problem that was facing, like, the Wright Brothers and some of those other early wind tunnel creators, is their fans were blowing on the front of their models rather than having the fan behind it sucking the air over the models. Right. So these little models they're kept in place, sometimes they're on wires, sometimes are on these metal poles. Sometimes I think the really super high tech ones use super strong magnets to actually hold them in place, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And then again, you've got all these sensors all over the place attached to the model measuring. I mean, we'll see it gets really deep, but just at the outset you can measure like, wind velocity and air pressure and temperature. If you're talking about airplanes, roll and y'all and drag and lift, you can kind of do anything you want in there. And if you're testing an airplane or a scale model of the airplane, you're going to build it's on something called the Sting, which is a pole, basically, that goes into the airplane's bottom, but then inside the airplane, the airplane is not attached to the pole. It's attached to something called a balance. And it's like all those sensors you just mentioned all in one instrument, like a cylinder or tube. And as the airplane moves and pitches and yaws and rolls and gallops and all that stuff not gallops. So I made that part up. It's acting on the sensors. And the motion, the mechanical motion on those sensors is translated into an electrical impulse and that travels down the Stinger into the computers, which are picking up all this data in real time and logging it and creating new versions of the model based on that stuff. It's pretty amazing. What's even more amazing that makes sense that that exists today that's existed since like the 40s or the 50s in much more primitive form, but essentially the same thing that we use today, the same kind of balance has been around for decades. Wasn't there Simpsons joke about all control? Yes. When they had one of those, like, backyard rockets, all right, now with y'all control and then like Buzz Aldrin or something, they're like, wow, look at that. Yaw control. Yeah, I think so. That was good stuff. It was good. Some other things that they measure, which you might not really think about existing, is viscosity and compressibility. This is huge. Or the tackiness or the bounciness of the air itself. So when you're thinking about air blowing over a car, driving down the road, you don't think that air is like, being sticky necessarily. But when that air is moving over the hood of that car and the top of that car or the plane or whatever it is, those little molecules are going to hit the surface. And just very briefly, they're going to cling to that surface. And even for that brief, brief amount of time, it's going to create a little boundary layer of air next to the thing that you're trying to measure airflow over. Yeah. Which is, like I said, a very big deal. An individual air molecule is going to stick for a nanosecond, just some ridiculously short amount of time. But there's so many air molecules that they essentially just replace each other as fast as they can move. And yes, they create this boundary layer. And as far as aerodynamics is concerned, say your car, like, driving through this wind that's sticking to it now has a different shape. That boundary layer creates a different shape or extends it outward beyond the actual physical shape of the car. Even a tiny amount matters. Yes, very much so. When you're trying to test, like, how fast the car is going to go, how many miles per gallon it's going to get, that kind of stuff. That boundary layer makes a tremendous amount of difference because it changes, physically changes the shape of this thing when it's out there traveling at high speeds. So one of the great benefits of an air tunnel is you can test, like, what boundary layer is produced by this particular shape of this car under this condition. If it's 90% humidity but 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and they're traveling at 80 miles an hour, what kind of boundary layers produced? Okay, well, what about 75 miles an hour at 60% humidity? You can just change all these variables, and the wind tunnel allows you to simulate it and basically get all this data in real time, just lickety split, basically. Although one other thing, I just want to say that we're making it sound. Like, this is fast. This is actually, and has been, especially until the age of computers, very arduous work. Because if you wanted to change one variable, if you said, well, this headlight is actually causing way too much drag you would have to switch the headlight out with your next model and run the same tests over and over and over again with the different conditions and log all that data. So it was really arduous before computers. And you kind of get the idea that aerodynamics as a field of study has really given over to computation. There has been a huge savior for that field and helped it along and saved a lot of people a lot of time. Yeah. And you mentioned things like humidity and temperature. They're all different kinds of wind tunnels and they can be very specific as to what they want to test or very broad. But they're all able to do things like that. You can dial in a temperature, you can dial in atmospheric pressure if you want to see what something is like on Mars, which they have to do if you want, like the Mars rover to be successful. Right. They can ice up a plane wing just by introducing refrigerated air and spraying a mist of water that freezes and lands on the wing. And you can simulate all these different things, humidity and temperature. And it's just amazing that they thought to introduce at first, they started out probably just looking at aerodynamics of flow over a thing. But as they got more and more specific with their needs, they just said, you know what? We can design these tunnels to kind of do anything we want to do. Recreate any environment you can think of, basically. Yeah, it's true. And, I mean, as we started to build planes that go faster and faster we started building tunnels that simulated that really high speed travel. And so we have hypersonic and supersonic wind tunnels that don't use fans at all but they use, like, bursts of compressed air that blow right onto the model. Yeah, those do blow at the thing instead of sucking behind it. Right, but it's a huge release of air that is traveling so fast it simulates, like, a jet flying through hundreds of millions of miles an hour, probably. Yeah. Or, hey, what's it like for a rocket human capsule to come back into Earth's atmosphere and not burn up? Like they can simulate those temperatures? Yeah. There's one in, I think, north Carolina. No, University of Texas at Arlington has something that can simulate that goes up to 8500 degrees. It's crazy, man. It is. It's a wind tunnel. For all intents and purposes, it's a wind tunnel. But they have built these things so that they can simulate basically any climate. And we talked about smoke and it's always fun in those TV commercials to see the smoke blowing over the thing. And it's a nice visual to sell cars that look super aerodynamic and are super aerodynamic. But that visible flow isn't just for the stoners and the lab department, like, late at night to play around with, although they probably do that. But flow visualization is a real technique. You might just have colored smoke. You might have liquid, like a mist of liquid. They use this colored oil sometimes that you can see, like the wind pushing the oil along the surface of whatever model you're using. And then they've got these high speed cameras capturing all of it. And again, it's another variable they can actually look at rather than just using numbers and data. Yeah, I saw one was taking photographs at like 200,000 frames per second. That's how high speed it was. But they were testing like a rocket or something or model of it. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll be right back. More on wind tunnels right after this. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. 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But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff. That's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look in Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything. To sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on squarespace. Yes. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comsosk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. So, Chuck, a lot of this really breaks my brain. It's one of those things where like, oh, yeah, I totally get this on the surface. Let me scratch a little deeper. I don't understand this at all. And the reason why is because aerodynamics requires a lot of math and formula and all sorts of calculations that I'm not that you're good at, that I'm not currently capable of doing that. But one of the things that I tried to shake down was when you do a scale model of something, do you have to scale down the conditions? Sure. It turns out I wasn't the first one to think about this. Other people have, including people who work in wind tunnels, and apparently they do not do that. They will say, subjected to the same wind speed as they would like the full size one. But then they go back and use math to adjust all the different variables. And again, we talked about pitch, yaw, roll, drag, lift, all sorts of stuff, I'm sure quite a few things and variables that you and I haven't even come up with or run across during our research. But in each one of these interacts with each other thing. Right. So it's like one of those things where you have eleven possible toppings for a pizza, and that creates 12 million potential combinations. It's a brain breaking amount of math involved. Exactly. That's what they're doing to scale it down and scale it up, they can say, oh, well, it produced this data. If we run it through these formula, we can show that actually it will have this effect. In the real world, they're using that level of math. Anybody who can do that with math, I admire them deeply. If you're listening out there and you can do stuff like that with math, my hat is off to you, because I will never be able to do that. And I admire you. Yeah. And you know what? We've taken some heat for kind of beating up on math a little bit is like, oh, boring, because we were English and journalism guys and history guys, but I've really come to appreciate math in doing this show. I'm no better at it and don't care to be, but I appreciate the math is the one thing that doesn't care about what you think about it. It doesn't care about opinions, and there's no interpretation or nuance. It's just math. To look at a math equation that would take a model of an airplane and a tiny little thing and a tiny wind tunnel. And then say, well, now we just scale it up to this. And this is how you do it, right? Just multiply by ten. It makes me so nervous. But a real mathematician would be like, this is the last thing you should ever be nervous about. Because it's just math. It's just right there. Well, the idea of doing public speaking would probably scare the bejesus out. And the thing is, exactly like different things attract different people. And that's great because that makes the world a lot more rich and complex that you have all these different people. If everyone was into math, it'd be a pretty boring place. Or if everybody hated math, it'd be a pretty boring place, too. You need all different kinds, different strokes for different folks. Makes the world go round, I think, is the rest of it. All right, let's talk about some of these wind tunnels in the world because they're amazing. NASA has one at Ames Research Center in San Jose, or near San Jose. Biggest in the world, biggest 180ft tall dude, 1400ft long. And the test section on this thing is 80ft tall and 120ft wide. So you can put a full size jet plane in that thing. Yeah, I saw that. I was like, well, what kind? And they said 737. That kind, buddy. Pretty good size. I don't know if they call it this, but I hear henceforth call it the Big Mamma Jam. Yeah. It uses six four story high fans, each of which is powered by 622 thousand 500 HP motors. Six fans, each as tall as a four story building. Man, that's amazing. 115 miles an hour winds is where it tops out. Yeah, which is pretty great. There's also a lot, apparently. I was reading some blog posts, I think, on a Formula One site, and they were talking about how every single company, every single racing team has in its facility of full size window. Like it can hold a full size Formula One car at the cost of like sixty dollars to one hundred million dollars or whatever. But they are like, cutting edge as far as aerodynamic study is concerned. And the reason why is because if you can shave a second off of somebody's time just by reconfiguring the engineers, reconfiguring the shape of a fin or a tail or something like that, it just paid for itself, basically, because it may have just won like the okay. Good job. There you go. Thank you. So there are NASCAR, obviously got a couple of these things in North Carolina, the home of NASCAR Arrow Den wind tunnel, that is in North Carolina, and it tests fullsize stock cars. There's another one called wind sheer there. This is a closed circuit tunnel that actually has a treadmill in it for cars. It's got a built in rolling road. Yeah, we saw that in a few places like BMW has one. Oh, I'm sure, with the rolling road. You know, what's interesting to me, too, is we saw that the aviation industry and wind tunnels kind of grew hand in hand. The auto industry didn't really look up wind tunnels until about the 50s is when they really started running their cars through those, and they went, boy, these cars are not aerodynamic. No. Look at that y'all control, though. Yeah, I love those old cars, though. My old Plymouth Valiant that I used to have this is obviously way before anyone ever thought of anything like anti lock brakes. And one of the most fun things I would do when I was driving with friends on an empty road late at night was get up to about 50 miles an hour and just slam on the brakes. It was so much fun, man. It was great. You would just go you would slide about 100ft before finally coming to arrest. That was a great impression of slamming on the brakes, too, by the way. It was good. And we called it the Sled because it was just this big, heavy hunk of metal. It's not like I was sliding all over the road. I was just sliding very straight in a line. What's the opposite of aerodynamic? That Plymouth Valiant. There you go. Yeah. Sluggish like a wet sponge. Yeah, that's about right. So, I think we should wrap this up on the future of wind tunnels, because people have been saying, like, well, wind tunnels are dead. Now we've got computational fluid dynamics, which is basically, computers can figure all this out. If you put a shape into AutoCAD and say, computer, figure out what you know will happen if I try to fly this under these conditions, it will tell you. And people have said, well, it takes a lot of work and a lot of money to run and build and use wind tunnels. So I think they're probably going away. People who work in wind tunnels say, no, do not do away with the wind tunnels. We need them still because, yes, computation helps a lot with the early work, but when you finally have something that you need to prove, you really kind of want to see it in real life. Make sure yeah, you want to see that smoke yourself. And computer simulations can't simulate green smoke very well. You got to see that in real life. So they're saying that this is complimentary technology and that we need to keep our wind tunnels around because we still need them. Yeah, and I think we'd also be remiss if we didn't say it's not just vehicles and seeing how, like, a space shuttle or a car or a plane or a dune buggy might run in the wind. If you want to see how airflow affects, like, a computer and components in a computer, you can oh, yeah. Good point. Like how they cool computer chips. If you want to figure out the very best design for a wind turbine or a wind farm, then you can use air tunnels. There are lots of other different uses that you don't think about just on kind of everyday products sometimes. Yeah. I have to say there's a Virginia Tech, there's an anechoic, I believe, wind tunnel where they test wind turbines to see what kind of noise they're going to make. So the walls are as far as the wind is concerned, it has four walls, but as far as sound is concerned, it has three, because one of the walls is made of kevlar, so wind won't go through it, but sound will go right through it like it's not even there. So they can take accurate measurements of what's going to happen when the wind hits this turbine, what kind of sound is it going to make? And they're making the country folk who live among wind turbines much happier. That's awesome. Yeah. So that's it for wind tunnels, everybody. There's probably more to it, but it's far beyond chucks of my grasp. So, again, hats off to all the aerodynamicists and all of their math. Agreed. If you want to know more about wind tunnels, go check stuff out on the Internet. I hear there's a man with the page boy haircut who does a pretty mean demonstration. No, that's just the printing press. Okay. I thought he was a factotum of he might be renaissance man. Well, since I said renaissance man, everybody, it's time for listening to me. I'm going to call this on Wetlands. And this is one from Brian from Queens. And this is very cool. I didn't realize this there was a music venue in New York when I used to live up in New Jersey called Wetlands that I would go to, and I never knew there was kind of a cool story behind it, and now I do. So this is from Brian, and he says, the New York City area is surrounded by salt marshes and there are tons of ordinances protecting New York City's natural flood and pollution guards, as you describe them, in the throughout the wetlands preserve. It was an activist nightclub named for the land that lower Manhattan was built on. The club was on Hudson in Tribeca, very much downtown Manhattan, which back in the early settlement by the Dutch was a subsequent takeover by the English, was all salt marshes. Wetlands preserve, colloquially referred to as the Wetlands, was open from 89 to 2001. Dual purpose was to create an earth conscious, intimate nightclub that would nurture live music integrated with a full time environmental and social justice activist center in the club's basement. Wait, what was the years that was open? 89 to 2001. There is a 100% chance that Jewel played there. He doesn't list Jule, but I bet she did. Okay, well, he list some people. He lists a few, but he also links too many more and she's probably in there. Okay, I think I saw wean there, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, cool. But he said downstairs, activist planned protests, made pamphlets, wrote letters to politicians and lobbies, generated boycotts and educated club patrons. While upstairs, they hosted some formative performances for legendary rock bands like pearl jam, Dave Matthews, maroon five, oasis, widespread, jewel, fish, rise against fishbone, bikini kill, blind melon and juul. Yes, the nightclub raise revenue for the activism center's efforts and the intern. The activism center staff and volunteers educated nightclub patrons on environmental, social, justice, and animal rights issues through posters, educational displays, literature, etc. E and film screenings. The New York based wetlands activism collective continues. The club is shut down, but they continue its environmental, social, and political activism to this day. And that is from Brian stolery. Nice, Brian. That's pretty great. Never knew that. I think it went to a couple of shows at wetlands. Oh, you did? And I never knew that there was something else going on there, and I kind of had forgotten about it. I wonder if when you show like the cops cop, that was Brian, you said yes, brian stolery. That's pretty cool. Thanks for filling in the blanks for us there, Brian. And if you want to be like Brian and fill in some blanks for us, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you played 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 Building Implosions Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-building-implosions-work | When you need to take down a 20-story building, a wrecking ball won't do. Instead, you'll need to turn to the handful of companies in the world that are capable of safely and successfully bringing down a building by blowing it up. | When you need to take down a 20-story building, a wrecking ball won't do. Instead, you'll need to turn to the handful of companies in the world that are capable of safely and successfully bringing down a building by blowing it up. | Tue, 16 Jul 2013 13:39:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=13, tm_min=39, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=197, tm_isdst=0) | 33666274 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chalk Brighton. That means that this is stuff you should know. And you know that's right. We are imploding the show today. I'm imploding. Josh is imploding today. This should be interesting. That's better than exploding, though. I've been doing a little bit of that, too. Yeah, that's no good, because that affects those around you. When you implode, at least you contain the turmoil within. Yeah. Don't be selfish. Don't explode, we should probably say, because I guarantee there's people out there who are like, buildings don't actually implode. Yeah, true. We should call this the how buildings detonating buildings so that they collapse in on themselves due to gravity. Right. Send an actual implosion where everything's sucked in toward the center. Right. Yeah. That's the scientific thing, that this is not happening when the building implodes you. But if you're not a jerk, then you just call them building implosions. Yeah, that's the nomenclature. That's what people say. I should say you're not a jerk if you are up in arms about that kind of thing. But I challenge you to email us and tell us what we should really call it, what words should stand in them for implosions. Yes. And we will read it out on a later episode. That's right. So considering that we're still around, then that's right, Chuck. Yes. Are you familiar with the city of Detroit? Yes. We love Detroit. We do love Detroit. Probably my favorite name of all time. Yad, Detroit. Yeah. Human being was named Jtroit. Yeah. I grew up in Toledo. Been to Detroit plenty of times. Loved the Tigers. Yes. Sparky Anderson was a great man. I'm a Matt Stafford place for the lions. Oh, yeah. That's another big Detroit link right there. Love the Red Wings when I was a kid. The Pistons. When you hear me talk smack about Detroit I'm joking. Lighten up. I find it extraordinarily satisfying when people write in, you need to lay off Detroit. And it's like, well, you need to listen to all the episodes of the podcast. I think it'd be funny. I always thought if we ever went to Detroit, which I think we should at some point for an event yeah. That 95% of people would be like, awesome, we know you guys love this. And then 5% when they would come and sit there with their arms crossed. Right. You got a lot of making up to do. Yeah. What's ironic is that if you switch those ratios, you'd have the number of people who live in houses with roofs in Detroit and the number of people who don't. Nice. So, also, one of my favorite things about Detroit is a website called Forgottendtroyt.com. Yeah, that's a good one. I've mentioned it a few times. It bears repeating. There is a website called Forgottendetroyt.com, and I get the impression that the guy was maybe german, Austrian or Dutch. And he obviously knows what he's talking about with architecture, because it comes through when he's documenting the building and talking about it. But he wandered around Detroit. Whoever made this website wandered around Detroit and did a lot of urban exploration of abandoned buildings, photo documented building after building after building, went back and found original schematics, wrote about the history and just made this exhaustive website called Forgotten Detroit.com. And the reason why it's so awesome, in addition to the fact that it's just abandoned building photos, which are like, the greatest thing on the planet, is that he documented buildings that are not there any longer. A lot of them have been torn down and some of them have been imploded, for lack of a better word. Oh, really? Yeah. Just to make room for something better and bigger. Yeah. To take care of the blight. Sure, yeah. Just like this has been here for too long. Exactly. With broken windows. Right. And no one's been in it, occupied it since 1980. Yeah. So let's get rid of this instead of a slow demolition over the course of 50 years by vandals, let's just take care of it now. Exactly. So that's how that site ties to this episode. Very nice. Okay, that's good. That's a good old fashioned intro. Thanks, man. So, like we said, gravity is really what's going on here. It's a pretty simple concept, what they're doing. When you implode a building. This is general demolition. Basically, upfront is they're removing the support structures at very specific points to cause them to fall down, one upon the other from the top down. And actually you start at the bottom, but it will still fall from the top down. Right. You know what I'm saying? Yes. And this is usually for specific height buildings. Like, if you got a five story building, you're probably going to bring in a wrecking ball, some excavators and a guy with a little black lunch pail. Exactly. Who's going to sit on an eye beam and eat it. Exactly. And anything over maybe eight, you're going to start to get into the concept of using demolition for is that the height generally? This article said 20. I don't know if there's a rule of thumb height. Yeah. I guess the key here is safety. You want to do it safely. So the key is the buildings. Where is it situated? Is it right in the middle of an apartment complex? Yes. Then you may want to implode because you don't want this thing falling left or right. If you got nothing around there but empty parking lot, you're right. Maybe a 20 storey building could be fine. Right. Because it's just going to fall in that abandoned parking lot with grass growing through it. Exactly. And who cares about that? Exactly. All right, so let's get into this. The first thing that you have to do is see if you can dig up the original blueprints for this thing, they may exist, in which case, you're all set. And if you know what you're looking at, you can see where the support structures are and where you need to kind of start your journey here to implode this thing. Even better, if you can find the architect, the principal architect on that job, he or she may remember some things about that job there, like, didn't show up in the blueprints or little foibles that the building has. Yeah, and be gentle with them. They may have a tear in their eye about this whole prospect. All right? Don't just bang on the door and say, hey, we're going to tear your building down, like where's it strong, you know, your counting achievement. Yeah, exactly. The only building you ever made. So that's just some personal advice. Be gentle with these people. They are going to drop their plan of attack based on experience. And we should point out there's not a lot of companies that do this. There's not 500 demolition companies that implode tall buildings. There's, like, 20 or so. No. And here's the reason why it's very difficult for a young up and comer to get into the demolition business with their own company. Because it's so dangerous. Yes, and risky. Not just to human life, but to other surrounding buildings. The areas like insurance companies are all nervous watching this. That you build a track record of carrying out building implosions and you're on easy street. That's what people hire you based on is your successful track record. Yeah, and trust me, we know. Josh and Chuck implosions LLC we didn't get any calls. It was a bad we wasted a lot of money with that Kickstarter campaign. Well, your mom called, but she was just trying to pump us up. Exactly. Honey, you're good enough. You can upload this thing. So they draw on their experience. Sometimes if they don't have the blueprints or if it's a little more complicated, they may even do 3D computer model and try it out ahead of time. Yeah, I would guess that that's pretty standard these days. Yeah, you think so? Yeah. I read this awesome article about people who I think it was maybe wired people who salvage huge ships that haven't sunk yet, but are about to. These people figure out how to keep them from syncing. All right? And even in that case, they'll have some guy fly with them and build a computer 3D model on the fly. I think everyone playing with 3D model. Right? Exactly. I'm sure if they're doing that to salvage tankers, they're doing it for, like, demolition, too. If for no other reason than as children, we all love to build and destroy models. I get to press Enter next watch. So, like we said, we'll cover implosions in a second. If you don't have to implode and you can just knock this thing over in an empty parking lot, you're going to do it kind of like you would a tree. If you want it to fall north, you're going to weaken it and blast it on the north side. And sometimes you might even have cables pulling it that way, just like you would that oak tree in your front yard. Right. Pretty basic stuff. If there is a bunch of junk around there that you have to protect and you need it to fall on its own footprint, then you're going to have to go the implosion route. Right. Which is kind of cool. I think everyone likes watching these videos. Oh, yeah. That's a really fun way to spend the day. Yeah. And there are enthusiasts, even as we learned in this article, that get a little too close sometimes to see these things in person. Right. Like building implosions are like the McRib of the demolition world. Like, it's got groupies and people go around the country. Doesn't happen that often. Right. You got to take it while it's there. Yeah. And it could kill you if you're imploding. They set these blasters and they look at the building basically as a series of towers instead of one building. And what I gather from this is that each tower, quote unquote, is like a support structure. Is that right? Yeah, like, if you're looking at just like a rectangular building, I would guess you probably break it up into four quadrants and then go after the support structures in each quadrant. Right. And then the aim is to bring them all down toward the center. Right. So like you said, if you wanted to bring a building down to the north, you'd put some blasts, some charges on the north side to weaken it. Well, if you had four quadrants that you're trying to bring down towards the center, you would weaken the side closest to the quadrant and then have them all fall in towards the center and then collapse the building downward. Right. Or another option is to actually weaken the center of the building and that would cause everything to fall inward as well. Yeah. But if you broke it into quadrants and then collapse everything towards the center, you would want to time it because you don't want everything just collapsing toward the middle and just holding one another up. True. That's the blaster's worst nightmare. Then you have the transamerica building oh, yeah, exactly. In that triangular yeah. In San Francisco, right? Yeah. So let's say, for example, you have a 20 storey building. You're not just going to set charges all on the first floor and hope that gravity does its work. You're going to set charges on that first floor and then maybe like, some on the 12th floor and then maybe some on the 15th or 16th floor. Yeah. And typically, like, couple or just blowing up the first and second floor and then adding just a little bit of gravity will demolish the whole building. But you're doing the 12th and say the 15th floor, too, to kind of break up the material that's coming down the rubble to make clean up a little easier. Right. Because you watch the video on YouTube and it takes 5 seconds and then you click on guy gets kicked in the groin or sports bloopers next. And then you don't think about the fact that, yeah, guys got to clean this stuff up. Right? Exactly. He wants small pieces, is my long way of saying that. Sure. But in the blaster it's like, hey, I put some charges on floors twelve and 15. You can thank me later in the cleanup gutsis. Thanks, tuna sandwich. I told you to thank me later. He says, I'll trade you an apple for that tuna sandwich. He's like you're kidding me? It's my wife's tuna. Give me the apple and the banana and the cookie. And then the other third one comes up and it's like, hey, you got the mocks. Remember those ads? No. You don't remember applesauce? Like the little single serve ones? There's a kid who looks like his name should be Spike or something and be like, hey, you got the mots. It was a really dumb ad campaign. Like a bully. Yeah, he looked like a bully, but I don't think he was actually supposed to be a bully. Weird casting decision. Yeah. Man, I didn't realize I was walking around with that one. I have had no idea. I thought you were about to say, and that kid grew up to be shy of a booth. Okay, where were we? Is that a Paul Harvey reference? No, I don't think so. They've got their plan in place. The detonators, the splashing company has a plan in place and now they have to actually prep the building. Yes. The first step in prep is they wash it. Well, they don't wash it. They surveyed the site. They walked through the building several times. Because you don't want to just make a cursory glance. You want to do your due diligence. You need to clean everything out of there. Right. Even before that, some crew has come through and gotten all the drywall and all that stuff out. Yeah. Like everything. You want it as empty as possible. Take out any non load bearing walls. You want to make it easier to tumble this thing. Sometimes I'll even cut into some of these support structures to give it a bit of a head start. I hit it with sledgehammers. Sure. Yeah. Release a little pin up frustration. Exactly. So then the blasting crew comes through and is making note of all this stuff. That's right, because they've already looked at the blueprints. But blueprints are those are just pictures for college boys. You want to get in there and really see what's going on first hand. Yes, exactly. Because the blueprint, I mean, there could be derivations. You never know. Sure. So then once you have everything cleaned out, maybe weakened some of the support columns with sledgehammers. It's not teetering, but mentally it's teetering. It's beginning to think about teetering. The building knows, like, oh, boy, time to come down. Yeah. My time is limited here. I was Accounting Achievement One. So then the blasters come in. They start loading these columns with explosives. Dynamite, if you're using concrete, is a good way to go. They drill these poles. They bore holes. It's really kind of rudimentary and stuff explosives into them. Yeah. And we should say also, it's not just a guessing game. In most demolitions, from what we understand, they will say, I picked the support column maybe probably up on, like, the 20th floor or something like that, rather than down low. And they will blast it. They'll attach some explosives to it and do, like, a test blast. Yeah. I don't think they're trying to blow it up. They're trying to do a small charge to see how much damage that small charge does. And then they can predict how much amount of a larger charge they will need to use to blow the columns up. Right. Or they might blow a column, but they'll wrap it in, like, chain link fence and a shield to kind of keep it in place and so it doesn't go everywhere and hurt people, obviously. Right. What they want to do is and this is comforting to know they want to use the minimum amount of explosives that it takes to bring this thing down. They don't just go in there, Willynilly, and just say, Load it up, boys. Right. Yeah. They want to use the smallest amount to still get the job done. Exactly. Because if they use too much and you got a bunch of chunks flying everywhere and there's damage to surrounding buildings and people get hit in the head. Sure. Bad news. Lawsuits use too little. You've got that building still kind of standing, and that's extremely dangerous as well because you have to bring in a crew to knock it down like you would a lower, smaller building. But it's a tall building that's just kind of half standing, and it's like a Jenga Tower now. Yeah. That's no good. No, that's very dangerous. So you want to use the minimum amount, but the right amount. Yeah. Well, that's one reason the World Trade Center was so dangerous afterward because obviously it wasn't some controlled implosion. Unless you're Charlie Sheen and, you know, get on the Internet and say that it's a government conspiracy. Well, he was an uncontrolled implosion himself, wasn't he? Exactly. But 911 is so dangerous to clean up because it wasn't done on purpose. So they didn't know what was weak and what wasn't. And it was pretty precarious getting in there and trying to clean everything out. Sure. Super dangerous work. So stating obvious. Well, we've got the test blast done. Yeah. Now they're going around and they're drilling boreholes. Let's say we're doing a concrete building. Yeah. So you got your dynamite. Yes. And what is dynamite? It's just basically like a kind of a paper material soaked in combustible, highly explosive liquid chemicals. Yeah. That it takes actually an explosion to explode dynamite. So you might have a fuse. I think if you're demolishing and building in two, you got a fuse going to the stick of dynamite. Yeah. But in between the fuse and the dynamite is a blasting cap. It's a small charge of explosive material that's lit by a fuse. That's right. It's a primer charge. And the point of using dynamite and why you want to use it in concrete structure column is that it expands, creates a bunch of hot gas all of a sudden, really quickly. And when it's doing that inside a concrete column, it explodes the concrete column into rubble. Yeah. Now that'll work for concrete, but you got yourself a steel structure. You're going to have to use something else called RDX. That's right. I'm going to say the long name. I'll try it. I want to try it. All right. You're ready? Yes. Cyclotrimethylene. Trinitromine. Damn, dude. I stumbled a little bit in the middle, but I still got it done. No, that was perfect. I mean, you look at it and it looks like the alphabet is such a long word. Yeah. But yeah, RDX. We'll call it RDX. And that's what you want to use if you have steel supports. And if dynamite explodes at a rate of about 600 tons per square inch, RDX explodes at about 27,000ft/second. That is like some serious stuff. Right. And you're not exploding steel because you can't explode steel. What they're actually doing there is they are cutting through the steel, splitting it in half, thereby weakening it. Yes. It's like using a club or a scalpel. Yeah, exactly. To use either one of these, as you said, you need a blasting cap that primer charge the fuse. And the fuse is just explosive junk inside of a cord. Like when you see the old timey fuses, like a sparkler, that's explosive material just packed inside like a tight cord. Right. And the whole point of a fuse is it delays the blast. So depending on how you want to sequence your blast, you're going to use varying lengths of fuses. Again, if it's that's right. And that fuse eventually will reach the point where it sets off the primary charge. And that's where the action happens. These days they use electrical detonators, mainly, probably exclusively, don't you think? I would think so. And that is sort of like a fuse, except it's just a lead line made of electrical wire, or it is electrical wire. You've got your detonator end where the wire surrounded by this explosive material, and then that's attached directly to the primer charge. And then the main explosives, and they have some sort of battery device, heats up the wire, and eventually it will get hot enough to set off that junk on the detonator end, sets off the primary charge, triggers the main show. Right. Like, you know the old plunger that they use in Bugs Bunny cartoons to blow up stuff? You mean when the mockingbird lands on it? Yeah, exactly. Behind Coyote's back and it slowly depresses. Yeah, sure. Apparently, that is an electrical detonator where you would have a charge going and then you press the plunger and it would release that charge. That's the same thing, except we don't use that old timey box and plunger any longer. But it's still the same. It's very gratifying, but yeah, I would imagine. I wonder if they have fake ones. Just sort of like a ribbon cutting, like that plastic phone you connect to your iPhone. Well, that actually works, though. Well, I'm sure this works, too. No, but if you just have a fake one, you're like the owner of the company is very old school. We have to set this up for him so he can push it down. Yeah, he loves giant scissors. But no, I mean, maybe there's like the little remote control is in the box and when you press the plunger down, it pokes a button. Yeah. And the owner of the company is like yeah, exactly. Do it again. Wow, that's funny. I guess we're both three year olds at heart. Okay. So they have to control this sequence sometimes. Like, maybe they don't want the first floor and the 12th floor going off at the same time. Maybe there's a delay. They can actually have a delay in the fuse areas where the fuse burn slower than others. Right. Or like I said, you use longer lengths of fuse. Sure. But yeah, you could charge a fuse and then add a little extra fuse between the original fuse that you just delivered the charge to and like a delay fuse and the blasting cap. You can time it and you want to time it again. You don't want everything falling down on top of itself and ending up supporting itself. Right. You want columns coming down and then columns coming out all on top of each other. And they're pushing one another down. Remember in the World Trade Center episode that we did? It's called Pancakes. Yeah. It's where the rubble on one floor hits the rubble on another floor with enough force that that floor comes down. It does it again and again and again. Yes. And it picks up speed as well. That's right. And once that happens, there's no going back. Yeah. And sadly, as we all saw on 911, and if you've ever watched the Internet videos, it only takes a few seconds and it's done. Yeah, it's a very quick process. Apparently, people are surprised by how fast it happens. Oh, really? Yeah, like two people who've never watched these videos. It says in the article the one thing they're surprised by most is how quickly a building collapses. Show me these people. I love it. I think when people write these articles like that, they just sort of say, I was surprised. So people are pulling journalism. All right, so let's say you're going to take down a building in a neighborhood. You might want to hire a consulting firm to come in. And the idea I get is that they sort of document the process, maybe work with the neighbors in a little PR, since to assure them that everything is going to be okay. Yeah. They're going to film it, of course, because you can learn a lot from watching it. Yeah. Not only put it on YouTube yeah, you can put it on YouTube. But also that's also one of the ways you're going to figure out how to take down the billing you're working on now, going back and looking at how you've taken down similar buildings. Right. So the owner would come in and say, hey, pull the bank in Houston from 88. Right. That one was perfect. It looks just like this one. So you've called in your consulting firm. They've done all their due diligence. They're working before things hit go time. You're going to, of course, do a really thorough check to make sure no one's in there. You don't want it in. Heather's. Remember that movie? Heathers? There's a Riveting magnum Pi. Episode where Magnum and Higgins are in not only in a building, it's about to be demolished, trapped in an elevator in a building. It was almost unwatchable. It was so tense. I don't remember that one. Yes. And Heather, I think the dad was an implosion expert and killed the mother that way. Right. I don't remember that. Yeah, because you said something about Christian Slater said, yeah, mom saw mom in the window or something. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think the mom kill herself was the implication by being in there. Yeah. I love my dead gay son. Yeah, that's a good movie. That's a great line. Classic. So they've calculated the perimeter, obviously, as well. Not only going to check inside the building, you're also going to make sure that you have a safety zone around the thing where no one's allowed. Implosion enthusiasts like to sneak a little closer. I know Crazy Chuck shaking his head in dismay right now. Why do you have a computer? Do you have access to the Internet? I guess there's nothing like seeing it in person, maybe. Sure. Oh, yeah. I can understand people who go around and check that out, but to get closer, to get within the blast zone, which has been carefully calculated by the blasting company, and then they have said, this is a dangerous area. Yeah, this is a safe area. You can see it from the safe area to just stay in the safe area. Right. So what you want is a very controlled situation. You don't want, like we said, over blasting. You don't want under blasting. You want to do it just right. The impression I get is 99 times out of 100, it goes according to Hoyle and it works out great. No one gets hurt. You might blast out a few windows of businesses around there. Apparently it's to be expected. Yeah, of course, with this kind of stuff, if you're close enough to it. So wait a minute now. There's been a ten minute siren. A five minute siren? Yes. The air is totally still. It's a crisp day, the sky is blue. Maybe a bird flies by. You hire Michael Buffer to do your countdown. Who's that? He's the let's get ready to roam. You know how much money he gets paid for doing that? I imagine a lot. So you get the 1 minute siren and then the countdown. That's right. If you're using an electrical detonator, your guy has his finger or her finger on the charge button. And it's very much like charging a camera. The camera flash. Yeah. You can't just pop one after the other. It's got to build up that chart. Right, exactly. Anybody who's seen Silence of the Lambs at the end when Jody Foster is being approached by Buffalo Bill, one of the greatest. Yeah, but remember that high pitched sound? That's the camera flash charging again. That's what you're doing with the electrical detonatory. It's got the finger on the charge and then they get to one and you press fire and the electrical charge is released and the billing goes kaboom. That's right. Have you ever played the camera flash game? No. I need to say this because it's really one of the more fun things you can do and I don't think it can hurt you. I'm going to look this up after. I think it's very safe if you have an old fashioned camera flash that you can charge and pop off like that. Get into a pitch black room with your buddy, find where your faces are so you're a couple of feet apart, like we are, and point the flash towards your own face, have them looking at you and you pop it off and immediately you get this perfect black and white image registers with your brain and you can see it. It's like right in front of you. And it's really cool and creepy. Nice. My brother and I used to do it all the time. It's a lot of fun. So you get a perfect image of the other person's face. Yes, I would point it at my face. You're looking at me, we're in the complete dark, and I pop the thing off and then you see this weird it's almost like a lithograph of my face. Nice. It's very cool. Did you know that if you mean fun, that ultimately damages your eyes permanently? I don't think so. If you take a flashlight and you look like you hold the flashlight up to your face with the beam pointing away from you, and you look right over the top of it, like. Right over your knuckles and just basically down the beam and just shine it around on the ground. You can see spider's eyes. I'm not sure what that means. You can see the eyes of little spiders that you could never see in the dark, but you can see their eyes reflecting back at you. It's really neat and unnerving, but you all of a sudden start to grasp just how many spiders there are around you at all times. So just like on your kitchen floor? Yeah. Or outside is better. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you just take a flashlight and hold it up to your face and just look down the barrel of the flashlight. What's the difference under the ground between that and just shining a flashlight? The angle of reflection, it doesn't work. You have to look right. And this isn't like an old snipe hunting or anything. I've done it myself. Like, you just look down the barrel of the flashlight and check out the little spider's eyes looking back. Is it terrifying? It is. It's surprising. It's not like that, but it goes from not seeing anything to all of a sudden you're like you realize, okay, there's a spider. Look, there's another spider. And I didn't even realize that I could do this. It's neat. I'm going to try that tonight. And they're green and tiny, too. All the ones I've ever seen were little green eyes. Totally trying that tonight. Okay. I'm telling you, if it doesn't work, don't be like, Josh got me. Like, just keep trying and adjust the angle or something. You'll see it. Okay. Boy, that was a long sorry about that. So we've detonated. You detonated. The building has imploded. It's going to send a huge dust cloud up, as you've seen on YouTube, as we said 2000 times. And it may be a bit of a pain for the neighbors, but the Blaster guys will argue that it beats like a month of slow demolition. Right? Yeah. Like this cloud will dissipate pretty soon and then it's gone forever. Yeah. Apparently if you have allergies in the area, they say just go away for the day and when you come back, it'll probably be fine. So, Josh, I want to be a blaster. Can I go to Blast University? Yes, Blasters. Right. It's an adjunct of Brown University. And you just go and roll there. They'll let anybody in. It's free, and you'll be a blaster the day you get out, after two weeks of training, bam. Not true. There is no such program at all. No organized school. The best way to get involved in this business is to get a job, probably sweeping up, I would imagine, at first for one of these companies and work your way to the top. And like we said, there's only about 20 well established ones in the world or in the United States, probably in the world. Yeah. And work your way up if you're into it. And maybe one day you can start josh and Chuck Demolition, LLC. Maybe. But, yeah, you probably do better to try and warm your way through the company. Plus, you'll also owe us royalties if you name your company Josh and Chuck Demolition, LLC. That's right. Okay, well, I guess it's impossible, right? I got nothing else. We nailed that one, didn't we? I think so. I hope you guys didn't skip this. Obviously you didn't if you're hearing me, say this right now. And if not, then they never knew. Yeah, but good for you for getting into it, because it's pretty neat stuff. I agree. If you want to learn more about billing implosions, you can type buildingmplosions in the search barhoustuffworks.com. That means, of course, it's time for Message break. Listener mail. Please listen. Or mail time. Okay, I'm going to call this leaching. Still happens, really, isn't it? Yeah. So this is from Annie. His husband Leeches. He works for the Mayo Clinic. So this is legit. What does he do for the mail? He sneaks leeches into people's beds. Hey, guys, just listen to the ECP podcast. At the end, you guess what would be the next archaic medical procedure to make a comeback. And you specifically mentioned Leaching. News for you, leeching is still totally happening. Don't call her comeback. My husband is in. Oh, boy. What is he in? Oterl. A what? Oto laryngst. Nice. Oto laryngelogist. Never heard of that. He does surgery on patients that need facial tumors removed. I would call myself a facial tumor remover LLC. Yeah, that's right. And they take tissue from other places on the body to repair the site. And if the flap doesn't have good circulation after the repair, they will stick leeches on it to get the blood flowing. All neat. And the medical grade leeches are huge and greenish, and they fall off when they're full, so the nurses have to keep an eye on them in the hospital. Isn't that crazy? I had no idea that that went on. Honestly. So that's still going on. And she ends by saying, so gross, leeches and more. Love, Annie. That was a great listener mail. Yeah. Short and sweet and who knew? Yeah. Good one, Annie. Way to go. If we have mentioned something that we thought was done, but it's still going on, we want to hear about that. We want to know what's going on, basically. So tweet to us at Syskpodcast or go on to Facebook.com stuff you should know and tell us what's going on. Or send us an email with the subject line what's going on? Now with the question mark, because they'd be asking us what's going on, and we want to know what's going on. Right? You would direct that email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, or you can find out what's going on@stuffyshthow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com hey. Netflix streams, TV shows and movies directly to your TV computer wireless device. Or game console. You can get a 30 day free trial membership. Go to www.netflix.com, slash stuff and sign up now." | ||
a77dc78d-e80b-4248-8738-aeb600e6c9f1 | What were the IRA hunger strikes? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-were-the-ira-hunger-strikes | In the early 1980s, imprisoned IRA members went on a prolonged hunger strike, leading to the death of ten men. This is their story.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | In the early 1980s, imprisoned IRA members went on a prolonged hunger strike, leading to the death of ten men. This is their story.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 16 Jun 2022 15:01:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=1, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=167, tm_isdst=0) | 48220035 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. And this is stuff you should know. Just the two of us doing it together. We're hanging out. We're going to get to the bottom of some stuff. That's right. And the grabster helped us out with this one a little while ago, and it almost feels now like I was purposefully sitting on it because of the turnout of the recent elections across the pond there. Okay. I'm not familiar with what happened. Well, the Shin Fein is now in place as the largest party wow. In 2022 in the Northern Ireland assembly elections. And this means that this is probably the best chance they've had in a long time for reuniting Ireland. Oh, wow. That'd be something. Wow. You really did save it for just the right moment, Chuck. Yeah. It was just a couple of weeks ago, and I read a bunch of articles on it on the likelihood, and it seems like a hard road still, but it's something they're interested in, I think, that party that is. And polls are very split. Yeah. I'm interested to see how it turns out. But that is pretty interesting that they're finally in a position to do that because that means they've come a very long way in the last 50 or so years. For those of you who aren't familiar, shin Fein is considered the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. And the reason we're talking about either one of those is because we're talking about hunger strikes. Specifically a set of hunger strikes that took place at the beginning of the 20th century and then toward the end of the 20th century. And they are very much associated with the IRA. In fact, if you ask most people who are familiar with hunger strike, they will probably bring up the IRA. It's like that closely associated with them. Yeah. And we should just say we're going to do our best to get this right, but this is one of those that is so fraught with emotion on both sides. So we just want to tell all of our friends in Northern Ireland and all of our friends in the Irish Republic that we're doing our best here with two Americans trying to understand a very deeply, long rooted, oftentimes hostile situation. Yeah. And for those of you like Morrissey with Irish blood but English heart, we will hopefully not tick you off either. We're doing our best here. Just a couple of Yankee American Joe's doing what we can. That's right. And we had a great time, by the way, in Dublin, and our only regret was not being able to go and do a live show in Northern Ireland. We couldn't squeeze it in, but we'd love to check it out one day. Agreed. So you said that this is a very emotionally fraught subject, and that is gross understatement, really, because what we're going to focus on is called The Troubles, which started at the end of the beginning of the 70s, but really it goes back even further than that. And you can kind of place the beginning of hostilities in 16 nine. When the Protestant English came into Catholic Ireland and said. Hey. We're going to take some of this land and we're going to take some of your land rights away from those of you with documented land rights. And we're going to set up some English enclaves and we're just going to basically show up and sit here for a while. And that didn't sit very well with the ethnic Irish or Gaelic people who lived in the area. So that was one part of it. And I also hit on another part too, Chuck, that we've got Protestant and Catholic basically versus each other now. Yeah, I think Ed makes a good point that it's not strictly about religion, but when you're over there and you're talking Catholic and Protestant, it's so intertwined in the fabric of kind of everything that goes on, including the politics, that there's no way you can separate it. But it wasn't necessarily an Irish Catholic, English, Scottish Protestant battle, but the seeds are there. So in particular in the north of Ireland, around Ulster, a bunch of Protestant, English and Scottish people kind of settled there over the years and formed what's basically what was known as the plantation of Ulster. And so, over time, you've got this largely Gaelic population inhabiting the central and south part of Ireland, and then a mixed Catholic Gaelic and English and Scottish Protestant kind of group coexisting for better, for worse in the northern part of the country. And it's remarkable that it lasted like this for several centuries before it finally came to a head at the beginning of the 20th century. Yes. And as far as how those people in Northern Ireland that were kind of mixed in together felt about things then and how they feel about things now, it makes some kind of sweeping statements that it's just kind of hard to do, especially when you look at modern day polls on reunification and stuff like that. Those seeds run deep and people are still kind of divided on it. So you can't necessarily just say that these days the people in Northern Ireland 100% favor Protestantism sure. And want to be a part of the UK. It's a mixed bag, right? Yeah. I would guess it'd be akin to people wanting their state to secede or the United States to break into five different countries or something like that. Although probably with much more emotional opinions about that. Yeah. And then throw religion in there. Exactly. Just that little light thing. So, like I said, this kind of precarious living situation, this living arrangement, came to a head all the way in 1912 when an Irish nationalist kind of movement began. I think they started before that. But in 1912, they started really pushing for Home Rule, which is Irish governing Ireland. It's pretty much as simple as that. And that created the home rule crisis. And it was a crisis as far as the British were concerned, because all of a sudden, they're Irish. People were saying, hey, we basically want you out and we want to rule Ireland. So let's just end this four centuries of occupation, shall we? The way you put it there just sounds very nice. Yes, I'm sure that's how they put it. This was sort of put off a bit by World War I. Obviously, that kind of disrupted a lot of things. But eventually, in 1916, the Nationalists did revolt and it was called the Easter Rising of 1016. And this was a bloody affair. I think there were more than a dozen leaders executed, many thousands of people imprisoned. It was a brutal conflict and that kind of kicked things off in 1916. It continued again in 1919 with what we know now is, I guess it was called this then, to the Anglo Irish War. And there were a lot of sort of governmental policies going on during this time. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920, officially, as far as they were concerned, created two Irelands, northern Ireland and what they called Southern Ireland, that were all still under the rule of the UK and Great Britain. But Southern Ireland was like, no. What is Southern Ireland? We're the Irish Republic don't even call us Southern Ireland. Yeah, so that actually kind of got translated into a treaty that ended the Anglo Irish War. It was a 1921 treaty that basically recognized Ireland as two separate nations. You got Ireland itself, which is, again, the central and southern part of the country, and then you have Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. It's a totally different country, at least geopolitically speaking, it's a totally different country. And again, there's a big distinction between Ireland and Northern Ireland and the population make up because those Protestant, Catholic and Scottish people that settled in the northern part of Ireland over the centuries had descendants. And those descendants stayed loyal to the Crown, they stayed Protestant, and at times they were more powerful than their Catholic neighbors. So in the late 60s, by the time the late 60s roll around and you've got two Irelands, you have a Protestant elite, small minority of Protestants ruling Northern Ireland, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Gaelic people who live there. And that kind of set the stage, I guess, for the troubles that followed. Yeah. And the Troubles, I know you said began in the late 60s. They carried through till about 98 more than I mean, the numbers kind of vary depending on what you're looking at. But at least 3500 people died, 50% of which were civilians. It was a mess. There were paramilitary groups on both sides. There were British military taking part. There were street battles, there were bombings. This is the kind of stuff that when you and I were growing up in the this was all over the news at the time, and I had no idea. I didn't understand it at all at the time. No, not me either. And it took me listening to a lot of you, too. Same here. And then trying to educate myself over what was going on over the years. But I don't think I fully really understood it until, like, the past few days when I really dug in. Absolutely. Same here. Ma'am. So one of the things that kicked off those Troubles you just described was the Gaelic Catholics protesting the unfair rule, as they saw, of the Protestant minority. And the problem is, these protests were kind of suppressed brutally by the Protestant government and with the aid of the British military, british police, I believe. And that turned quickly into rioting. And then eventually, like you said, the paramilitary groups assembling and basically guerrilla warfare breaking out in Northern Ireland. So imagine going to work one day and you're Catholic and your coworkers Protestant, and the next day you guys are fighting each other on the street for control of both of your country. Yeah. It's nuts to think about it as an American, because we can't fathom something like that. Two geniuses growing up in the Cold War Reagan era. Right. I mean, we're pretty far removed from the Civil War here in the United States. This is like civil war that took place in the early 70s or started in the early seventy s and continued for almost 30 years. Yeah. And previously we should back up a little bit, I guess, and talk about the origins of the IRA. This had to do with the Easter Rising that we talked about in 1916. It was initiated by what was called the Irish Volunteers in 1916. By the 20s, they were known as the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. And they fought a civil war in the early 1920s and 1923. There were a lot of different nationalist factions fighting one another. One of these was the IRA, and there was civil war going on back then as well. So there's just been decades and decades of unrest by the time the 1960s roll around. Yeah. And that 1920s civil war was in Ireland itself. So after it became a sovereign nation, all those groups that had fought the British started fighting each other to figure out who was going to run the show from then on. That's right. So the IRA that you and I think about, that we learned about from you two and the news and the all that they're the ones that you would call the Provisional IRA. And they formed out of the beginning of the Troubles, those protests and riots beginning in 1969. They were one of the paramilitary groups that developed, and they became pretty famous in no small part because of the hunger strikes that they ended up carrying out. Should we take a break? I think so. I think we've reached brightness. I know I was nervous during that setup. Where are you? You thought I was just going to keep going and going? No, not that. I was just like, man, this stuff is so there are fine lines and I just don't want to misspeak. I don't think we did, but now that I just said that, of course we did. All right, well, we'll gather ourselves and we'll be right back to talk about the history of hunger strikes a little bit right after this. Okay, Chuck. So why would anybody engage in a hunger strike? And why would they be the most closely related or thought of in relation to the IRA? Well, there is some evidence that they were rooted in Celtic tradition hundreds of years ago, there were stories of people undergoing hunger strikes, and it wasn't necessarily political at the time. So how it would go down is like, maybe somebody owed you money and wouldn't give it to you. So you would go very publicly to where they live, camp out on their doorstep and engage in a hunger strike. And it was sort of just a very public display of maybe you didn't have means to get it any other way. So it was a very public display and way of saying, this person is doing me wrong, and I am out here, like, starving myself. Pay attention. Right. It was so common. It was actually written into Gaelic law. It was called the troskad or troscad. I'm going with truscad. And the concept of hospitality in Ireland among the Gaelic people was so strong that it was just unthinkable to let somebody starve on your doorstep. So it was really kind of playing on two things. It was drawing attention to somebody, and then it was also showing what a terrible person they were for letting this person starve on their doorstep. The thing is, this is real. That really happened. Like, it comes up in some of the epics from the Gaelic culture, and it's documented that it was a real thing. But what's not documented is it's linked to the IRA hunger strikes of the beginning of the 20th century and then toward the end of the 20th century, because nobody involved in those ever said, I'm pulling a troscad. They didn't link it to it. But you could make a case that it was kind of like in the culture to think of doing something like that, because it had been around for hundreds of years. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. And it continued like in the early 1900s, there were how do we say it? Suffragettes? Suffragists. Suffragists? Yeah, like how you call a female or male a server or a female or male actor and actor. We don't do I thought the David Bowie song always confuses me, though. Well, it's a good song and it should remain, but they would undergo hunger strikes, but they would bring in sort of like religious iconography sometimes and sort of paint themselves as martyrs. They would invoke the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc and stuff like that. And again, this is not exactly the same thing, but this is just to say that in the early 19 hundreds, there were women in Ireland that were undergoing these hunger strikes. They also happened in Russia, and I think they called some of these, like the Russian method. They would do this force feeding, like reverse stomach pumping, to force feed some of these people. Sometimes that would kill them. So it was just a nasty way to draw attention. And the way that it was countered was also nasty. Yes. So the first IRA members to go on hunger strike were inspired by the suffragists who were sometimes in the same prison as them. The first IRA member to do it was James Connolly, who went on hunger strike in 1013 and was actually released from prison as a result. And then a few years later, the case of Thomas Ash drew national, I think maybe even international attention because he went on hunger strike and they accidentally killed him when they tried to force feed him. Yeah. They pumped milk and eggs into his lungs. Oh, my God. By accident, which is I mean, it's hard to think of what kind of an awful death after you're already starving yourself. Right. And we should also point out, too, that another similarity that they had with these original early 1900 suffragists with their hunger strikes is they were, and this is a very key thing for what ended up being the hunger strikes in the 1980s that we're going to talk about in a bit. But one of their main aims was to be looked at as political prisoners and not criminal prisoners. Yeah, that was a big ongoing thread throughout all of this, starting with the Suffragists and then all the way into the 80s with the modern Iran. Should we talk about that for a minute? Yeah, sure. Well, there's a huge difference in being viewed as a criminal and wearing prisoners clothing and having a prisoner's rights, which are to say, like criminal prisoners rights, which are to say, not very many, and what they were fighting for and what the IRA was later fighting for in the which was, we are political prisoners. We don't want to look like common criminals, we want to wear our own clothes, we want to be able to associate with each other and walk about outside of ourselves and congregate. And in 1976, they allowed this for a while, but 1976, the British government said, no, we're going to treat you like your terrorists and like your common criminals, and you've got to wear these. You can't congregate anymore, you've got to wear a prisoner's jumpsuit. And this was a big big deal. It really was for a number of reasons. One, the reason why the Brits said, we're not going to recognize you as political prisoners is because they had it at first and they decided that this was generating too much sympathy and legitimizing the IRA and its struggle for Irish independence way too much. And by casting them as criminals rather than political prisoners, they were saying like, hey, these people are dangerous, they are thugs, they're terrorists, and you should be on the side of us, the Brits and the Protestants, who are cleaning up the streets and getting these people off the streets and into jail. So it wasn't just the way your day to day life panned out in prison. It was also like the larger public perception, a battle for that that was going on, that both sides were really entrenched in their way of thinking with that. Well, yeah, and that's the reason a hunger strike in the case of the IRA could be at least very effective as a PR tool because a common criminal prisoner is it going to literally starve themselves to death for a cause. So on one hand you have the British government saying, we're not going to recognize you, you're just terrorists. On the other hand, you've got the IRA starving themselves to death, fighting for rights to wear their own clothing. I think this one thing you sent me said as far as them congregating is that in prison they just saw that as another IRA headquarters. Basically. Yeah. They did a lot of strategizing in the early seventy s and they were able to chuck because of something called Operation Demetrius. And that was something that the British army carried out in 1971 and it ended up backfiring because it generated a tremendous amount of public sympathy for the IRA and its movement. Because the British Army just started rounding up suspected members of the IRA and put them in what amounted to a prisoner of war camp. There was no due process. They didn't get to plead their case in front of a judge if they accidentally got scooped up and they really had nothing to do with the IRA. TS, there was no recourse for getting out of there. And they set up, the Brit set up a prisoner of war camp in Northern Ireland to hold, I think, hundreds and hundreds of prisoners starting in. And it really rubbed the public the wrong way because it's 1971. This isn't like the 17th century all over again. It's 1971 and they're rounding people up and holding them in prisoner of war camps against their will. That's crazy. Yeah. So hunger strike could be a pretty effective way to draw attention to this. Ed points out a few things about hunger strikes that could make it more effective, which is obviously to do it as a collective action is a much stronger message that you're sending than any individual. So if you have a group with a political cause, you're going to get more attention. It casts the prison officials in a light of which they're either allowing these people to starve to death, which is a monstrous thing to do, or they're forced feeding them, which sometimes kills them, which is a monstrous thing to do. And your body basically shuts down. I think we've talked about starvation and other episodes before, but your body uses up your fat stores, and once that's gone, it starts literally like eating at your muscle, eating at your internal organs, and between 40 and 70 something days, your body is going to finally succumb to organ failure and you're going to die. Yeah. Once your body starts eating its own organs, you're in trouble. And even if you manage to survive the hunger strike, you probably have done some serious permanent damage to yourself. Like we were saying after Operation Demetrius. Right. They rounded up a bunch of suspected IRA members, treated them as prisoners of war, but at the same time, they were also busting other IRA leaders with legitimate and legitimate criminal acts, like gun possession, things like that. So you had two groups of IRA prisoners being treated separately, the ones in the internment camp being treated like political prisoners or prisoners of war, and then the ones in the jail being treated like common criminals. So to kind of get the same treatment in the jail as the political prisoners in the POW camps were given, a guy named Billy McKee, who was an IRA leader, staged the first modern hunger strike in 1972. That's right. And it was an effective strategy for about four years. But this was right at that time, I think it was 1976, when they had that shift from recognizing them as political prisoners to just criminal prisoners. So this was pre that time and kind of led up to that shift. Yeah. And then so you've got the criminalization campaign being carried out by the Brits and the Protestants in Northern Ireland who are running the government. And remember, it has a twofold effect. Like, you can no longer congregate, you can no longer strategize, we're no longer going to recognize your hierarchy of ranks and just deal with your leaders like you're just a common criminal now. And it also turned the tables on the IRA prisoners who had formerly been treated with general respect by the guards. The guards were let loose on these people. And it led to a really horrible time to be an IRA prisoner because it's almost like there was pin up rage or something among the guards, and they just released it on the prisoners. They poured scalding water on them. They hosed them down with cold water hoses in wintertime. They beat them regularly and routinely, and again, they were treated as common criminals. From what I can tell, from about 1976 to 1981 was about as bad a time as you could be an IRA prisoner as there ever was. Yeah, we'll take a break in a SEC. But before we do, do I want to mention the movie that I watched today? Because I figured there was probably a movie about this. Steve McQueen, the director that did twelve Years of Slave and shame directed the movie. His first movie actually directed. Was it an infomaniac you watched? No, that wasn't him. Oh, wait, no, that large one, yes. But he did one where Fossfender is a sex addict. Right. That's Shame. Okay, shame. That's what I meant. Is that what you watched? No, that's not okay. You're like. When's the hunger strike going to start? It was his first movie from 2008, also with Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, who will get to after the break. But it was called Hunger and Boy oh, boy. I recommend it in one sense, and that it was a powerful film, but it was hard to watch, my friend. I can imagine it was brutal. The way he structures it is sort of a nontraditional narrative. It's not like a traditional biopic that you would expect. It's very quiet, not a lot of dialogue. It's only 96 minutes long, but it's a very slow pace film. But just a really I mean, I get the sense that it was a really realistic depiction of those years that you were talking about, between 76 and 81. And these guys were just brutalized, man. They would call in the riot squad and basically open the cells and throw their naked bodies into the hallway and beat them with batons and cut off their hair and their beards until they were bloody. And it was a very tough movie to watch. And The Hunger Strike part of it is only like the last 20 minutes or so of the film. The whole first part is just sort of the conditions in prison and what's going on. So I recommend it. On one hand, it is not for the faint of heart, but we'll kind of take a break now and we'll talk about what else is going on in the prisons in this. All right. So in the film and in real life, in fact, this is how the film starts out, is the first prisoner that comes in refuses his prison clothes. And that's what started the Blanket Protest when they were basically like, I'm not going to wear your common criminal outfit. And they basically said, okay, well, you're just going to be naked 24/7 for years and here's your blanket, and that's going to be your clothing. And that's what they did. It's called the Blanket Protest. That first prisoner under this new criminalization scheme said, fine, I'll just wear a blanket in very short order. I think 400 other IRA prisoners did the same thing. It's called the Blanket Protest. They were all just naked in the movie the whole time. Were they really? Yes. Have you seen the new kids in the hall? I haven't yet. I'm dying to, though. Are they naked the whole time? No, but in some places. And it's like, wow. It's pretty hilarious. Really? Yeah. And I have to say, I think they're better than they were in the first go round. Oh, wow. Which is very surprising. But I laughed out loud more than I did that I remember doing in the average Kids in the hall episode. Okay, well, I was a little actually worried to watch it. Don't be. For fear of like, they're not going to be as great anymore. And it would taint the original or something. No, definitely not. And I never understood that. How does something like a follow up taint an original? It doesn't taint the original. It taints the whole for me sometimes as a whole memory. I got you. Yeah. That makes more sense, for sure. Those originals aren't funny now. It's not like that. It's just like, I got you, boy. Then they went on to do something not good. So yeah, I wouldn't worry about that. And I don't want to talk it up too much. So you're expecting I don't want you to be let down, but I don't think you will be. Fantastic. Can't wait. Nakedness. Yeah. So this blanket protest, I'm not sure how long it went on, but it went on for quite a while. And it happened during that period that I guess hunger covers, which again, is about the worst time you could be an IRA prisoner, because they weren't doing this to common criminals that were in the same prison. They were doing it to the IRA members. So they went from treating them as political prisoners with a general amount of respect and all of the freedoms that came with to regularly beating them and hosing them down with cold water in the winter and taking their clothes. That was the shift, the change in treatment. And they were doing it to the IRA because they were trying to send a message to the British government, was like, this is what we think of you. This is how we're going to treat you. You should probably stop right now because this is what you can expect if we catch you from now on. That gentleman's agreement that we had before, that's gone. Yeah. So in 1978, and the film kind of portrays the blanket protest is concurrent with the dirty protest. Not sure if that's the case because the dirty protest came around in 78. This is when and this was really gross and hard to watch in the film. Oh, I'm sure Steve McQueen covered. Oh, boy. Very well. I know. And believe it or not, this makes me want to see Twelve Years of Slave more because I knew it was tough. But now that I've seen this, I know it's going to be hard to sit through again. And I'm still avoiding it. But I want to see it more because I know it's going to be like. Super realistic, I think. So hunger was your gateway drug to twelve years ago. I guess so. But the dirty protest is when the prisoner said. All right. Well. If we're going to be in here and you're not going to give us any rights. We are not going to bathe. We're going to smear our feces all over the wall and our food all over the wall. And we're going to take our urine and feces and dump it under the cell door out into the hallway so you have to deal with it. And it was a very it's a disgusting movie to watch, but this really happened. So one of the other things that happened, too, was that among those IRA prisoners who were treated like this, they formed a bond that has probably never been formed in the history of humanity, because no group was ever necessarily subjected to that exactly like that, in exactly the same way. So, I mean, I'm sure there are other similar bonds among enslaved and imprisoned populations, but because they were already fighting for a cause that they believed in and they were suffering for a cause that they believed in, this stepped up treatment just made that bond between them even stronger. So one of the things that came out of all this was what's called the Five Demands, and it was basically like you could summarize it as we want to be treated like political prisoners again. Yeah. And they're all reasonable demands. One was, again, to wear their own clothes. Number two was to not have to go on work detail. They said they wanted to be allowed a visit in a package and a letter, one, one and one per week. And in the film they did get visitors and they were smuggling and all kinds of things under the table, which is always a great part of any prison film. Sure. They wanted the freedom to associate again and organize and congregate, and then they wanted to revoke any of the punishments that happened because of these protests that were already in place. Yes, and like you said, they're reasonable. And they're so reasonable they almost seem small, like the IRA is going through this and that's all they want. But again, remember, being treated like a political prisoner has a lot to do with optics in the general public. Right, yeah. So that makes a little more sense that it was just that is all they were asking for. And they got a big assist by a woman named Bernadette McAliskey, who had been a Member of Parliament. Not the George Clinton version, but like the original. She played keyboards, so she was fairly well known, and she actually ran in the European Parliament on a Five Demands platform in 1979. And there was an assassination attempt on her life from the Ulster Defense Force, which was one of those paramilitary groups that began at the beginning of the Troubles, but they were a protestant paramilitary group. And she survived the assassination attempt and would show up to rallies and protests on crutches. But she did a really great job at focusing public support and attention on what was going on in the prisons and the protests that were being carried out and why they were being carried out. That's right. And following that, the early 1980s is when we saw sort of the two main modern hunger strikes. There was the one in the 70s, but the two in the 80s really, I think, got the most media attention. One began October 27, 1980, and this was, I believe, seven strikers quit eating again to try and get these five demands carried through. It lasted 53 days. And remember, that's right in the wheelhouse of where you could die. And one named Sean McKenna was very near death. And this whole time, Margaret Thatcher is she's known as the Iron Lady for a reason. And she was very much a hardliner I think it was a direct quote in the movie. She said basically, that these terrorists are resorting to a last resort, which is pity, that we should have pity on them, but basically that's not going to happen. But she was prepared to come to a settlement in this case, because of the optics. The strike did end because they didn't want Sean McKinnon to die, because that would be really bad optics. So that was the preceding the one in March of 81. Yeah. And the reason the March of 81 hunger strike started is because the Brits had agreed verbally to giving in on the five demands and treating the IRA prisoners as political prisoners again and then reneged on it. They just didn't follow through. They never got it in writing, basically, is what it amounted to. And so they staged an even bigger, even more public hunger strike starting March 1, 1981. And I think it involved at least 23 hunger strikers. But rather than all striking beginning at the same time, like they did in October, they staggered it five people a week so that the hunger strike would be drawn out even longer. Yeah, and that makes sense. I also was wondering, too, during the film or before the film, why can't they just squash this in the press and not let any of this out? Because hunger strike is only good if the public knows about it. But they were still getting visitors throughout this whole time. So Bobby Sans parents visited him in prison and saw his condition as he was slipping away. And we mentioned Sands because he was very much the sort of the main public face of this 81 strike. Bobby Sands actually was elected to the British House of Commons while he was wasting away in prison. He obviously wasn't allowed to campaign or anything like that and couldn't have because he was slowly dying of starvation. But this was a very big deal that he was actually elected to the House of Commons. Yeah, it was a big deal because it focused a tremendous amount of public attention. Like, every paper in the world was writing about how a guy in prison was elected to Parliament. And now that we're talking about him, why is he in prison? Oh, he's on a hunger strike. Why is he on a hunger strike? So it was a really big PR coup for the IRA, but then, also, politically speaking, it was a really big signal that the only way he could have been elected was if moderate Catholics who normally just didn't go to the polls because they didn't want to support the IRA, but they also weren't about to vote for a Protestant candidate. They came out and they voted for the IRA members. So it showed that the average person in Northern Ireland, the average Catholic, was really upset with how the British were treating the IRA and their treatment of the IRA was starting to backfire and that it was generating public sympathy and support that hadn't been there before. Yeah. And we should point out he was a young guy, he was 26 years old when he started this strike, and I think he turned 27 during the strike. So I think I had heard of Bobby Sands and I always just sort of pictured him as maybe some guy in his 40s for some reason. Me too. But he was a very young guy and he finally died of starvation on May 5. This was 66 days into the strike. Riots start erupting all over the place and protest all over the world, basically. It was a very public matter. I remember hearing about this when I was a kid, even though I didn't understand what was going on. I remember hearing about Bobby Sandstone. Oh, yeah. Wow. It was definitely not in my wheelhouse at the time. I think I was playing with a Tonka truck, maybe. No, I remember big news events like that, though. I remember John Lennon dying and I was like, he's the guy with the round glasses, that kind of thing. Right. So when Sands died, that was a really, really big deal. Thousands and thousands of people turned out for his funeral, including, very famously, IRA paramilitary members who were wearing, like, balaclavas, basically, at the funeral, along the streets, along the funeral procession, there were thousands more people who turned out. So it showed just how much people supported the IRA, or at the very least, sympathize with the IRA, that they were willing to die, to starve themselves to death for their cause. And Bobby Sans knew he was going to die. He said toward the beginning he fully expected to die. And he did. He did what I would say most of us would never do. He starved himself to death for the cause that he believed in, to help the cause that he believed in, to basically serve as an inspiration to show this cause means so much that me and some other people are willing to die, to starve ourselves to brutal death, to help further the cause, to help generate publicity for this call. By the way, Fast Bender dropped \u00a340 for this role, so he kind of pulled a Christian Bale. It was really tough to see that he's a pretty slight guy, even, like, under normal circumstances. You know, he weighed 170 and dropped down to 130. Wow. He apparently ate, like, nuts and berries and stuff every day, and that was about it. Wow. So Sands obviously was the main headline, but he was just one of ten men that died in prison during these hunger strikes. I think there were 23 total, 13 survived. And Ed is keen to point out that the reason that some of these have been survived is eventually you're going to lose consciousness and your family might step in and you're going to get your medical nutrition intravenously in that case. That wasn't the case, obviously, with the ten who did die in prison. But I think in a lot of the cases of the 13 that survived was because they weren't able to make their own choice and their family intervened. Right. So this strike get this this hunger strike, the second one went on from March 1, 1981, to October 3, 1981, and claimed the lives of ten men. Ten people died during that brief period of time from hunger, from starving themselves. And it finally ended, at least in part because one of the villains in this story, Humphrey Atkins, who was at the time the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and was very much aligned with the no pity viewpoint of Margaret Thatcher, he was replaced. He was replaced by somebody who wasn't quite as much a hardliner, a guy named James Pryor. And Pryor was like, I want to put an end to this, so let's start negotiating. And they ended the strike on October 3, 1981, again with ten people dead in that six month period from starvation. Yeah. And it kind of depends on which side you're on and whether or not you believe it was an effective thing, because they ended up sort of, in a roundabout way, getting a lot of the five demands met. But it was never like an official declaration that you are a political prisoner and we're going to meet your five demands. So if you look at it from the Thatcher side, they never gave in. If you look at it from the IRA side, they ended up, in a roundabout way, getting the same status. But I think there were probably a lot of IRA, too, that saw it as a defeat because they weren't officially recognized as such. Right. And we should say going on outside the prison gates in Northern Ireland throughout this time are car bombings, assassinations, protests, riots. There are a lot of riots around Northern Ireland when Bobby Sands died. And so it's not like this is the only thing the IRA was doing. We just focused on this. But one of the things that came out of these hunger strikes was this idea, especially among the Shin Feign leadership, that they were never going to liberate Northern Ireland just through the paramilitary, that it was going to require politics. This showed, especially the election of Bobby Sands to Parliament while he was in prison, that the IRA was viable, politically speaking. Yeah. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens moving forward. Yeah. That's where they can kind of source that where they are today is pretty much there from those hunger strikes in 1981. Yeah. And I would love to hear from our listeners in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic, like, what their thoughts are, because I trust stuff. You should know listeners generally as being alive in the world and having studied opinions, learned opinions. So I would love to hear from both sides to see what they think. I want to know what the tenor is over there. Yeah, same here. The word on the street. The word on the cobblestone street. You got anything else? No. This is a good one, Chuck. Good pick. I'm glad we did it. And since I said I'm glad we did it, it's time, of course, for listener now, by the way. I'm way late on this, but do you know Bono Son has a band? No, he has a band called Inhaler, and I just heard about it and listened to it. They put out an album last summer and it sounds exactly like you, too. Oh, boy. He sounds just like his dad. And it has the energy of the early you, too. It's really good. I like it. Yes. Okay, good. Yeah. I don't mean that in a negative, derivative way. Your voice sounds like somebody related to just by Genetics. Yeah, I want to sound like my dad. Sure. Yeah. I don't think he's using Auto Team like that. I'm just surprised he didn't go in, like, a totally different direction musically. Like maybe like folk rock or folk Prague or something. Yeah. I mean, I did see that. I read some reviews, too. Some people kind of knocked it for, like, going for that big stadium anthemic, YouTube thing right out of the gate, but stuff it is what I say. Where the sun don't shine. Let someone make the music they want to make, and good for them if they're getting huge. I love it. Yeah, for sure. All right, so this is just one of many squirrel emails we got. Who knew that was going to generate so much email? Momo did. Oh, man, it's crazy. Like, we got videos of people scratching on little squirrels that they've been feeding. Squirrels crawling up people's laps, and up there sitting on their shoulder like wild squirrels. It's pretty amazing. White albino squirrels or black squirrels. Where was it? That the ones with the big long ears? I don't know. No, I didn't see those. Are those Toronto or is it Utah? I'm guessing Utah. I can't remember. I feel bad now, but yeah, they have these little sort of wizard long ears that stick up. It's amazing. Wizard ears? Wizard ears. Health ears, not wizards. Okay, I got you. Healthy wizards, right? I don't think so. Not according to Gary Gayak. All right, so here we go. In the recent squirrel episode, Chuck said, show me kids that can get a squirrel and hit it with a stick. And here's my story. 2020. My wife and I were on a national park road trip in the western US. And while hiking in Zion, I heard a commotion on the trail behind me. I looked back. A couple was rushing over to decide the trail where there was a significant drop off because their son had gone over the edge. It's terrifying to witness, but thankfully the boy had gotten caught on a tree and was not noticeably injured. Here's how we got there. The boy spotted a squirrel on the trail and hit it with a stick. It came after and screeched at the boy, startling him and causing him to retreat straight over the ledge. Let this be a teaching moment. Don't go after squirrels with sticks or you may be in for a nasty spill. And that is from Reed Stiller in Dallas, Texas, who is a Texas A and M grad and came to Athens for the Aggies Bulldogs game a couple of years ago and had a great time in Athens and said to come out to College Station for a game and you will have a great time as well. Very nice. Thanks for the invite. We appreciate that. Who was that? That is Reed Stiller. Well, thanks a lot, Reed. We appreciate that big time. That is a really good story. Actually. My evil part says if you want to get in touch with us, like Reid did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite chose." | |
Josh and Chuck Make It Through Male Puberty | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/josh-and-chuck-make-it-through-male-puberty | Around ages 9 or 10 a boy will begin to undergo a magical, surprising, weird, amazing, totally bonkers transformation from childhood to adulthood. To separate fact from myth, Chuck and Josh take on the role of gym teachers and wade into male puberty. | Around ages 9 or 10 a boy will begin to undergo a magical, surprising, weird, amazing, totally bonkers transformation from childhood to adulthood. To separate fact from myth, Chuck and Josh take on the role of gym teachers and wade into male puberty. | Thu, 07 May 2015 16:29:22 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=16, tm_min=29, tm_sec=22, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=127, tm_isdst=0) | 47699268 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. Chuck here. Right now, there are millions of people around the world hosting on Airbnb. 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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there, which I don't know if Jerry should be in here for this one. Why not? We're talking male puberty. You and I, we're putting on our health class faces. Both of us got crew cuts for this one. You're wearing a whistle around your neck. I'm wearing knee socks and shorts. Yeah, because I was raised in a pretty conservative Southern Baptist home. I was taught this stuff by my preacher. No, they didn't talk about this stuff. That's my point. I was taught in health class yeah, by my PE. Teacher, this lady who seemed to struggle with teaching boys about puberty. I can't really blame her. She tried her best, but this is when the PE. Teachers had to teach health as well. And I don't think she got into that profession to teach health. No. She was like, I like coaching volleyball. Right. But I don't like teaching boys about puberty. She seemed very uncomfortable. Comes the job lady. TS. Well, if you are a gym coach and you're teaching a healthcare right now and you're using us to teach for you, you owe some money. Agreed. So we're doing a great job so far, if you ask me. I think so. And I think we have a responsibility because I was raised in that thing where my parents didn't teach me this stuff. So I think it's important that puberty is tough. It's important to normalize it, and the kids know that these changes are happening and what they mean and how they function. Oh, yeah. I think this is a bit of a service. It was, yes. I was talking like we'd already finished. Oh, you're hoping I've already finished. And this article, by the way, was written by the great Tom Shepherd. Did a wonderful job. Agreed. Chuck yes. Did you know that over the last 150 years of years, the average age of puberty in girls has dropped by, like, five or six years? What? Yeah. So in 1860, the average age of monarchy oh, yeah. 16.6 years old. Wow. That's pretty late. In 2010, it was 10.5 years old. Wow. Seems young, right? It does. And everybody's like, what's going on? It's probably the milk. Like, there's some horrible stuff going on. Or they're saying what's? Monarchy. Well, monarchy is the onset of menstruation for the first time in a girl. Exactly. I think that came up in our totem pole. It was a long time ago. Yeah. So this onsite of minority has decreased by a lot, and a lot of people are alarmed by it, but there are some evolutionary biologists out there who are saying, actually, settle down, we think that this is closer to the normal time when puberty should come on. Got you. And that, like, 16.6 is way delayed. And it was actually a relic, a remnant of changes that were brought about by a transition to agriculture. The result of higher infections and poorer nutrition led to a later onset of minority. Well, it's easy to say, well, the girls start puberty here and boys, it's not quite as defined, but they think that probably boys age of onset for puberty has gone back too, as well. Oh, really? Yeah. So we're going through puberty younger as young boys as well. Yeah. So even though it is very difficult to say this is when a boy starts puberty, that didn't stop some research, especially a guy named Richard Tanner, from trying. He came up with the Tanner scale, which is a scale of one to five in Roman numerals. And it's all based on the growth of your genitalia and pubic hair. Interesting. Yeah. And it's not completely subjective, but it's pretty subjective. Yeah. And you might have heard of the Tanner scale by seeing the posters in restaurants all around the country. Yes. Right next to the employees must wash hands before returning to work on. Exactly. All right. So we're talking about puberty, which is that transition that all kids go through. We're talking about male puberty, of course. In this case, just male puberty in this one. Yeah. Even though I already talked about female puberty. Well, we should probably tackle female puberty at some point. Sure. For little boys, they generally, like you said, the time has shifted. Perhaps. But right now, between the ages of nine and 18 is when it starts through completion. Generally. Typically. Typically, you can start earlier, it can go later, it can follow different courses. Sure. It moves at different speeds and different guys. Yes. And I'm going to say this a few times. If you are a boy out there and you were going through your changes in puberty at different rates than your friends that is okay. Yeah. You're not a weirdo. It stinks, but it is very normal. That's right. And you've heard of the term late bloomer. You may just be a late bloomer, and that's okay because you will bloom well. And you might not even be a late bloomer except for this month. Right. Next month. It's kind of like that horse race that you can do with the spraying the yeah. You squirt the water in the hole and the horses gallop. Right, exactly. And they kind of move back and forth. That's a lot like puberty. Yeah. Like once you've really got a bead on that water gun, that's when the horse really starts moving. But practice all you want, you can squirt water anywhere and it's not going to help accelerate your puberty. That's right. All right. So what happens the beginning of puberty, no matter when it starts, is going to get kicked off when a substance called gnatotropin is released. I'm sorry. Ganatotropin releasing hormone is released in the body. GN RH. That's the big that's the one that starts at all. That's right. And apparently you have that stuff in your hypothalamus. Yeah. You've got all these things, hormones in your body just waiting waiting to come and contact with one another. Like nitroglycerin coming together, basically. So you've got GnRH in your hypothalamus and apparently it has to move to the pituitary gland for things to get triggered. So puberty is like a Rube Goldberg esque process. Yeah. So it takes something called GPR 54, which is another hormone, to come in contact with ganatotropin releasing hormone. Right. And then all of a sudden things start up when that process happens. That's called ganadarchy. Oh, really? Yes. Interesting. I think the reason monarchy was such a funny word to me back when we recorded that, I figured it out all these years later. It sounds like malarkey. Yeah. Which is just a funny word to me. Right. Because no one says malarkey, but I think it's a great word. Right. So monarchy and malarkey is a little too close for my tastes to keep me from laughing. Sure. All right. So the stages of puberty, they're generally five and they overlap and it's one just big awkward mess. But you can kind of break it down into five stages. Right. The first one is going to begin, like we said, around nine or ten years old. Nine is a little early. Ten is what they would consider normal. I guess sometimes it might happen as late as twelve to get things going. Right. By which time you're like, Come on, start. I just remember being in school and some kids were like a foot taller than other ones. Yeah. My buddy Jim, he had a mustache when he was like 13. Yeah, I know. I had a friend like that in third grade. Yeah. It's crazy. So, again, different timetables for everybody and it's all okay. So when this GnRH is released in stage one, your testicles are going to start to mature and grow your body, your height. You're going to start growing at about two inches per year at this point, which is pretty significant. Yeah, for sure. Growing two inches in a year. When's the last time you did that? I guess probably when I was like twelve. Probably. Although I never hit one of those growth spurts like a lot of really? Did you? Yeah, here or there. Really? Yes. Just slow and steady wins the race. Yes. I don't remember any like, I remember some of my friends that had like their bones would hurt and they would actually have those growing pains. I never had that. Yeah. But I remember coming back from the summer and a kid would have grown like six inches, it seems like, in several months. And it just blew my mind. I was a late bloomer and drank wine from a deer skin. Now had a little mustache. Yeah. So your testicles are growing. And because your testicles are growing, that means their house, the scrotum, is also growing. And all this is because that gonadoshop and releasing hormones started up. That's right. There's no accident that it starts with gonad. Of course. It's all linked. Right. So your testicles are growing and maturing at this point, but you're not able to reproduce just yet. No way. No, that comes a little later. And I had a question like, why aren't we born capable of reproduction? And I thought I would find some stuff on it. All I could find was one single Yahoo answers question. And everybody was like, what kind of a stupid question is that? Basically, I guess it is kind of a stupid question. But the point is because you're not capable of taking care of yourself sure. Therefore you wouldn't be capable of taking care of a baby. You have to develop socially, psychologically and physically. Yeah. The female body probably couldn't handle childbirth either. Right. So it makes sense to not come out of the womb being capable of sexual reproduction. Yeah. It makes sense for that to have to develop at some point. Sure. Agreed. Also in stage one, you're going to start getting a little fine pubic hairs. That is called pubarky. Is it? Really? Not kidding. Just add Archie to anything. Pretty much. I got your hierarchy. There's all sorts of things that come about and you might start to get your first erections. At this point, you are not going to have any idea what's going on with your body. But it's going to happen. Right. Unless you take an advanced health class. Right. At like nine years old. Right. Or if you have parents who are comfortable with talking like this, or an older brother, how they should be. Yeah. But boy, sometimes you're getting bad information. Well, to combat that kind of stuff, there have always been educational films about this kind of stuff. I found one from the 50s called Everybody Changes or something like that. And it's basically like a track and field coach answering questions from his track and field team, like me, who all seem like plants, frankly, I guess, still. Yeah, but it's pretty good. It's on our podcast page. Yeah. Cool. For this episode. All right, so that's stage one. You enter stage two around twelve or 13. Your testicles are still growing. Yes. So that's the thing. And they grow faster and most prominently first. Right. That's like the sign that you're in puberty. Everything else might not be happening, but your testicles are probably growing pretty quick. Yeah. And that means, like, before your very eyes making a sound, if you're listening closely. I knew we would be just like two dumb little kids. The crew cuts didn't have any effect. And this means you're going to be producing testosterone as well, which is going to make you crazy as well. You're going to start to grow quicker and height two to three inches a year. One of the reasons why, Chuck, is because that testosterone is being produced. So, basically, the kineticropin releasing hormones sources chain reaction, and it leads down to your testicles and it basically says, start producing testosterone. And then that floods the body and has all sorts of crazy effects. But one of them is your bone cells have testosterone receptors, and they grow in the presence of testosterone. So all of a sudden, they're being flooded with testosterone, which is why you grow so quickly, why you undergrow growth spurts. It's because of the testosterone having that impact on your bones. Awesome. And muscles. And finally, in stage two, those fine pubic hairs are going to start, as my gym teacher said, to become coarse and curly and darker. You're going to get more erections more frequently, and your body is just going to start to become a little leaner. You're going to start to look a little more like an adult. Like a tiny adult. Yes. Which is funny. By the end of the fifth stage, they said, at this point, you look like a man. Your shoulders abroad, but you look back on your high school pictures and you're like, I look like a little baby. I didn't start looking like a man until I was in my 30s. Right, but compared to your six year old self exactly. You resemble the male physique more than before. Absolutely. Third stage of puberty for boys is going to be 13 or 14. Your pubic hair is going to get even darker and more full. Like about the pubic hair. Well, it's a big change. Well, it's part of the Tanner scale. That's why it's very recognizable. That's right. That's why it's on the poster. And Olive Garden. Your penis at this point is going to start to grow in length. And of course, all the while, your testicles are still growing, you're getting more and more erections, and your height is going to grow at about three inches per year at this point. Then your voice is going to start cracking, which is super interesting. I know you dug up exactly what's going on there with your voice cracking. Yeah, it's really interesting. So remember, testosterone makes stuff grow, basically. And one of the things that it makes grow is your vocal cords, right? Yes. Which are basically two cartilagenous bands that go over your trachea, your windpipe, so that when air passes through your lungs past your vocal cords, it makes them vibrate. And that vibration is what your voice is. It creates your voice. When you're a younger kid and your vocal cords are still small, they can vibrate a really fast frequency, like, say, 200 vibrations per second. Yeah, because they're smaller. Right. But as they grow in the presence of testosterone, they grow bigger and thicker. They can't vibrate quite as fast. So they might go down to like, 130 vibrations a second. Well, that's a lower frequency, which eventually leads to a deeper voice. Yeah, it's like a guitar string. The thicker guitar string is lower. Perfect analogy. That's exactly right. Another thing that happens, which creeps me out to no end, but it's part of it. It's your voice box that part of the top of your trachea that holds your vocal cords, grows in size and tilts forward. And my friend, you have an Adam's apple after that. Yeah, not always. Well, I mean, some are more prominent than others. Yeah, it depends on the shape and structure of your neck. Sure. But even if you can't see it, if you just kind of rub your finger up and down from your chin to your chest, it's in there. You're going to feel your Adam's apple. I'm in the online right now, buddy. Oh, it's so creepy. To me, it's kind of like it produces the same emotional state as thinking about peeling a fingernail back. Yeah, that's what Adam's apples do to make interesting. Like just the thought of my Adam's apple, I don't even like to touch it, but I can't stop. So odd. Wow, that is odd. Yeah. But anyway, that's your Adam's apple, and that's why your voice changes. It goes from growing from very small to growing large. And it deepens. One of the other things, too, Chuck. I thought this one was really cool. The testosterone in your skull. Yeah. The facial bones. Yeah. So testosterone causes your bones to grow. That includes your facial bones as well. And as they grow, your sinuses grow. So that means that there's more empty space for your voice to resonate in, which also makes it deeper. Yeah, and they don't know evolutionarily. Exactly why. But the theory, which makes perfect sense to me is that one to attract women or to intimidate other moon with that deep voice, right? Yeah. Or just a signal, I've arrived. Don't you hear my voice? Yeah, which sounds totally different than when you say, I've arrived. Don't you hear my voice. Yeah. You haven't arrived. Right. So that's in stage three. Stage four, around 14 or 15, you're going to start getting that armpit hair. You're going to start maybe getting a little facial hair. Although I didn't get facial hair until quite a bit later and I don't even remember when I got it, I think. I mean, I wasn't shaving in honey. Now I can't get rid of it. I know. Look at me. I look like Fidel Castro. Especially when you wear that hat. The Castro hat. Yeah. It's weird. Your pubic hair is going to get more coarse, your voice is going to drop even deeper, and you're going to start to get acne. Yeah. Which is really sad. Well, that's part of the result of sebum. Yeah. We did a great podcast on acne. I looked this up even September 2011, the comedo, which is Latin for worm. That's the stuff that you squeeze out of the center. Yeah. I mean, should we just cover what acne is real quick? It's that build up of sebum, that oil, which is necessary to waterproof your skin. Yeah. But you overproduce it during puberty. Yes. Plus you're also sloughing off skin cells at a crazy rate. Yeah. That's a recipe for disaster. All of those things are trying to exit through pores and hair follicles, and they can't always make it. So when it gets built up, it blocks it goes through the three Stooges syndrome, trying to get through the door at the same time. Right. And then certain types of acne bacteria come in and infect it and it swells. And then you have a pimple. That's right. That's all there is to it. It's fine. And Tom actually goes to the trouble of providing some advice on what to do with it. And it's great advice because you think you might want to scrub it to death and use every super drying product you can find. Yeah. With a scouring pad. That's the exact opposite of what you want to do. Yeah. Because that can make it worse. You want to gently wash your face or your shoulders or your back or whatever, or everything a couple of times a day. Keep it clean. Which is a problem because young boys aren't known for loving showers at this point. No, but if this is a thing to you and it's bothering you, then go to the trouble of doing something about it. Yeah. It's pretty simple and straightforward. Just wash your face gently with just lightly a couple of times a day, and that's it. And don't overdo it, because that just irritates it even more. It makes your face so mad. Yes. That showering thing is so funny to me. Our buddy Mark Farley from the TV show played Clinton kinken Beard King beard said that he had a Facebook post the other day about trying to get his son to take a shower was just like marching him to the firing squad or something. I remember that age where it's like, no, I don't want to take a shower, I don't want to do anything. But now shower is the best part of the day. Yeah, it's nice. I still hate taking showers. Really? The process of it, I'm like, I'd rather be doing anything else, but then afterwards I'm like, man, I love showers. Interesting. It's just like going to the trouble of taking it. It just bothersome to me. Well, sometimes I'll have that thing around, I just don't want to be wet. Yeah, that's another one too. Or in the wintertime, you know you're going to be cold afterwards and that stinks. Yes, good point. And at the end of stage four, your penis at this point will start to grow thicker and continue to grow longer. But again, guys, this isn't happening at the rate that you would like. Don't worry about it, just hang in there. Just hang in there, you'll be fine. I still have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. That's right. And finally, stage 514 to 18, you're going to grow most of your height at this point. Yes. Although you might grow in your twenty s a little bit, but probably not. This is where you're growing the fastest. You are growing several inches a year, basically. Whereas up to this point you're growing two, two to three. Now you're growing up to maybe five inches in a year. That's crazy. Yeah. That's quick growth. Yeah. And that's like when I see my nephew now, he's like six one. He is so tall. So weird. Yeah, he's not weird. Oh no. It's weird to see your nephew like taller than you right. All of a sudden. Just want to make sure we clarify that. Oh, he knows he's not weird. Okay, good. Your shoulders are going to be broader at this point. Your muscles are going to be more fully developed. You're going to have new muscle fibers. Everything is basically just getting thicker on your body. Yeah. They call it filling out. I think, again, it's because of testosterone and all of these other hormones that you are producing. You are producing them mainly at night while you slept before, which is significant that it's released from the hypothalamus because the hypothalamus also regulates sleep. Right. So while you're sleeping, the hypothalamus is like I guess I'll keep myself busy by having some of these new hormones produced exactly as you go further along. In the stages of puberty, you actually are producing them all the time and in vast quantities. So that would account for your muscles growing bigger and your skeleton growing faster than ever and all this hair coming out everywhere and growing coarse and everything. Well, since you mentioned it, I wasn't going to bring it up, but your pubic hair and stage five is going to start to creep all over your body. It's going to be in your inner thighs and creeping up your stomach, you might get chest hair, and you're just wondering, what in the world is happening in me? Yeah. So those are the stages. And right after this, we will come back with more on puberty. But not on pubic care. No, we've got more on pubic care. More on both. 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 Samps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. So, chuck, I've got a little more on pubic here. Okay. That's promise. So it's kind of an evolutionary mystery to why we have it, because if you think about it, it doesn't really do a whole lot for guys. It doesn't protect anything. It doesn't keep vital stuff warm. So it doesn't not really. Okay. I thought it would warm stuff up. No, it's like no, not really. Okay. Not enough to explain why it's concentrated, where it's concentrated mostly. You know what I mean? So they think probably what's going on is, number one, it's an outward overt signal that this person has gone through puberty and is capable of sexual reproduction, therefore he is a viable mate. Right. That's one thing that especially was a big signal when we weren't wearing clothes back in the day. Yeah. All right. And then secondly, they think also that it is a transmitter of pheromones. Yeah. Basically, that when you enter puberty and you start to grow armpit hair and pubic hair and just hair everywhere, you also start to open up a new type of sweat gland, apocrine sweat glands. Whereas before, you just smelled like a little angel because you didn't stink, because you weren't producing weird types of sweat. Once you go through going at Archie, all of a sudden you start to stink. Yeah. You start to get that little body odor here and there. Right. And even though you don't want to take a shower, everyone else wants you to take a shower. So just go take a shower. Yeah. Because you stink, stinky little teenager. Right? And one of the things that's making you stink is this new sweat with these new hormones that are coming out. But also supposedly you're producing pheromones as well. Although it's never been proven that humans are capable of sensing pheromones on other people, they think that there's a pretty high likelihood that we do. And they think that pubic hair and armpit hair serves just basically big neon signs for these odor molecules that we're not necessarily capable of sensing. Got you. So thank you for that, for giving us body odor. All right, so your body is growing like crazy, growing like a weed, as they say. You are probably going to start growing taller than girls in your class who were probably taller than you before. That because girls typically will grow height earlier than boys will. Right. I remember lots of girls that were taller than me through most of my elementary school. But don't worry, guys. You will catch up. And don't worry, girls. Yeah, because it's awkward for a girl sometimes to be taller than a boy because all weird societal norms. Societal norms that are not only weird, but wrong. Of course, when you're an adult, you realize it really doesn't matter when you are going through puberty. It is the exact opposite of realizing that it doesn't matter. Yeah, it seems like it matters a whole lot. Yeah. That is not the case in reality, however. Right. It's just what you're going through. That's right. Hang in there. You're also going to be gaining weight between 15 and \u00a365 through puberty. Your extremities are going to grow like crazy. That's why teenage boys have these big clunky feet and these unwieldy hands, and they don't know how to operate any of them. Right. That's why there's like this associated clumsiness with puberty. It's a real thing. Totally. It's not just this character sketch that people use for humor like pubescent. Boys and girls are clumsier than any other point in their life because their hands and feet are bigger than the rest of their body. And then also, if you ask a psychologist why they're clumsy, they will say that in addition to learning how to use these new, bigger hands and feet and deal with them, you're also acutely aware you're going through the most self conscious phase of your entire life. So you're suddenly having thoughts like, do I look weird walking? And when you stop and think about walking while you're walking, that makes walking really hard. So that contributes to the clumsiness as well. Yeah. Again, with my nephew, I remember before he was even super tall, I remember seeing these feet one time when I visited, and I was just like, what in the world is going on down there, buddy? What do you mean? Yeah, you just had these huge feet, and then the body catches up, and then you lose that clumsiness, and you're like, okay, everything's all. Proportioned now. Yeah. Your chin is going to get a little longer, your face is changing shape, your nose thickens up. And these are just like the physical changes. There's things going on inside your body as well. Yeah. Apparently your blood pressure increases. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Your metabolism decreases some, so you're going to start to put on a little more weight. We already talked about you're going to start getting a little more stinky, and this is all the normal course of things. If you start going through puberty too young, that can be a problem. If you're super young and going through puberty, you might want to see a doctor, because this could mean things, problems later in life. It's called precocious pubescence, Archie. No, but it can be caused by everything from a tumor to, well, a tumor. Yeah. It's not necessarily a medical problem, but it does suggest this article suggests that if you do and the Mayo Clinic did, too really? That if you have a really young kid that's starting to show signs of puberty, you might want to just point it out to a doctor and see what they say. Right. I wonder what ages. I guess if nine is early than anything before nine. Yeah. Okay. I would guess so. Another thing that's going to happen with your erections is you might have wet dreams. Nocturnal emissions. Nocturnal emissions, that's right. And wet dreams, apparently, is like a very common term. Sure. They used it in the 1950s educational film. Oh, yeah. I remember them saying that in my health class. It sounds like a sequel to Porkies or something, though, you know, Porkies. Two wet dreams. Yeah. Nocturnal emissions. It just makes sense. That's right. In class stuff right there. Yeah. That means you're asleep. You have a dream that's sexual in nature. And if it's a full wet dream, that means you ejaculate in your sleep. And the first time that happens and you're a little boy, you have no idea what's going on. You just wake up and you're like, what in the world just happened? But nothing to be ashamed of. Hopefully your parents are talking to you about this stuff. All very normal. Part of the process. Yeah. Just quietly take the sheets off your bed and tell your parents that you've decided to start doing your own laundry from now on. Exactly. Well, I was a late bedweather, though, so I didn't know what the heck was going on. Oh, yeah. I was just leaking fluids at night. I had no idea what to do. It's fantastic. And erections, you're going to get erections when the wind blows. You might get erections in the boys locker room. And they said that is not an indicator of sexual preference. Yes. It is also a very normal thing that happens. Yeah. Pretty much anything can do that to you, so, yeah, don't worry about that kind of thing. Again, you really should not base your worldview and your ideas about what life is going to be like on the period of puberty, because it is the weirdest time of your entire life. And not just yours either. Of all of your friends, of your teachers, your parents, eventually your little brothers, sisters, your parents, everybody. The weirdest time in their life is puberty. It's just a really odd experience. All right, you want to take another break? Why not, man? All right. We'll talk about these puberty hormones when we come back. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need, right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So, Chuck, we talked about that little time bomb of the hypothalamus holding the goinatot trophy releasing hormone, and it's just waiting for the GPR 54 to come along that's right. And trigger its release. And the GnRH gonadotropin releasing hormone makes its way to the pituitary gland, which is a little pee sized gland that I think it was descartes thought where the soul resided. Yeah, I think so. He turned out to be wrong. But that does actually trigger the production of two other important hormones. Right. Luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. And these two things, they're kind of like the chemical messengers that go down to the gonads the testicles and say, start growing, start producing testosterone and sperm. That's right. This is the process by which you become able to reproduce. This is the process by which you grow a mustache. That's right. FSH, when it reaches those testicles, and it's follicle stimulating hormone that is going to cause the growth of what are called seminopharis tubules. And those are the tubes, basically, where the sperm is produced. Right. And all the stuff is in your body again. It's just like it's waiting on the go sign. Exactly. It's like, this boy needs to become a man. Right. We're just waiting for the signal. And it's going to take six to eight years and then another 30 to 40 years after that. All right. So with the luteinizing hormone, that goes to the testes and it says, hey, there's these things called lady cells, and they produce androgens, which are hormones that basically help your development as well, including testosterone. And they say, start producing this. So these two things go down and you start producing sperm and testosterone as a result. And the sperm seeks its way out in any way, shape or form. It can, whether you like it or not. Right. And then the testosterone just spreads throughout the body. And again, it does everything from making the bones in your face grow, to making your voice crack like Peter Brady, to making you grow a foot in a couple of years. Yeah. To growing a mustache. That's right. Not ironically either, because when you did it when you were 13, you were super cool. You know who is like, the best example of a pubescent boy on television? I think. Do you ever watch King of the Hill? Oh, sure. Remember Joseph? I don't remember Joseph. See the neighbor Dale's son, but really it was John Redcorn's son. Yeah. My neighbor Bobby's friend Joseph. He was awesome. He started to go through puberty. He had, like, that little mustache. He'd get mad for reasons he couldn't explain. Just perfect. He was great. I was a big fan of Bobby, too, of course. Oh, yeah. Here's another cool thing. We talk a lot about the physiological things that happen. The body is actually physically growing, but there's also the mind and psychological changes that happen. And your brain is developing in such a way that it is really neat. You're going to start having interest in things that you never thought you had interest in before. Yeah. Not just like riding the bike down to the creek and teasing the girls. You start thinking about life and why some people are poor and other people are rich. Yeah. That's okay. All sorts of like kind of deep stuff all of a sudden now attracts your attention. Yeah. And you are going going to start kind of thinking about life beyond the 3ft in front of your face. Right. Or summer vacation. Yeah, exactly. Although summer vacation still rules for a while. We don't need to discount that. No, but you're going to start thinking about, like, maybe, what do I want to do with my life and what kind of career do I want? Where do I want to go to college? Like, these things naturally just start popping up in your head. And with that comes a lot of anxiety because I've never thought about what my place is in the world. Right. What if I don't end up being rich? What will become of me then? Yeah. So you're going to be confused. You're going to be anxious. You're also going to find that you're attracted to other people. Yeah. That's when those first seeds are planted, and that causes anxiety in and of itself, too. Yeah. Did they like me? Am I goodlooking? What is goodlooking? Do I look dumb walking right now? Right? What is walking? Is my stash coming in thick enough? What is a stash? Yeah, and you just but it's true. Like, when your brain is bathed in androgens for the first time, they find that not only does it restructure and reorganize the way you think, which is why all of a sudden you're starting to think about deeper stuff and into the future and everything, but also the way it worked already changes. So this reward pathway that used to get you to go eat more Blow Pops because they're so great all of a sudden is now concentrating on finding a date. Right. So what you place value on changes, and that's because your brain is literally saying, like, go do this, because this is going to feel great. Yeah. I definitely remember when self awareness sort of kicked in, when you didn't just walk by a mirror all of a sudden you looked at it and you're like, well, this is what I look like. Am I handsome? Do I look funny? Yeah, it's kind of short. Is that a bad thing? Yes, self awareness is the best way to describe it. And as a result of this, depression can set in. There is such thing as pubescent depression, which and it is in many ways, it's a very natural result of starting to question things and realizing you don't have all the answers. Sure. And just things getting more complex. Yeah. That's why it's very important for parents to try to have a good line of communication as possible. But it's going to be even more difficult because there may be a possibility that your puppets and Boyd's want anything to do with you at this point. Yeah, there may be a chance that that's the case. Well, not always, though. Or my nephew, again, I hate to keep picking on him, but he's super close to my brother and my sister in law and they have a great relationship. But I'm sure there's still some bit of that teenage stuff, and that's a good thing to have, too, for the most part. That when the boy strikes out on his own or doesn't want to have anything to do with you, or all of a sudden your car is stupid, so drop me off two blocks from school. That shows signs of them forming an independent spirit or whatever. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. You should encourage that and discourage them being a little jerks, though. You got to walk that fine line. Right. So as a parent of a pubescent boy, you have to give leeway, but you also have to curtail behavior. That's problematic. Yeah, absolutely. And we mentioned depression earlier, of course, keep an eye on that kind of stuff. And there's nothing wrong with having your young boy or girl go get talk to a counselor or something. There's something wrong with you. It just means you may need a little outside help. No shame. No. And Chuck, we should say, because somebody will write in to let us know if we don't what we've just described the social and psychological development of a person that's technically adolescence. And adolescence is this whole broad change from childhood to adulthood and actually includes puberty as a component. Right. So puberty is part of adolescence. We've been using them kind of interchangeably for the last little bit, but I think it works. Yeah, I agree. And it can be very trying to raise an adolescent. So hang in there, parents. You went through it, too, and before you know it, you'll all be buddies again. You have it coming to you, basically, for what you did to your parents. Yeah, pretty much. All right. I think we should finish with some pretty interesting male puberty rights from different cultures. Yeah. Here in America, when you enter puberty and your boy, your dad just gives you this kind of awkward punch on the arm and walks away and hopes you don't bring it up ever again. That's the rite of passage for puberty in America. Yeah, that's kind of what happened to me. If you're Islamic, your parents are going to teach their sons adulthood and basically say that from the time you have your first ejaculation is when you are responsible for your own actions. Yeah, I can see a little more leeway before that. Yeah. Makes sense. If you are Jewish, you might have a bar Mitzvah on your 13th birthday. Whether you like it or not. You officially are a bar Mitzvah. A son of the commandment. That's right. But new traditions have developed where, like, you do thing at the synagogue and then you have a party afterward, but you're just automatically on your 13th birthday. Bar Mitzvood. That's right. Do you watch out. Live. Have you ever seen Jacob the bar Mitzville boy? No. It's really cute. Is it new? No, she's been around for a while. It's a woman who vanessa Bear does it, but she has a little curly wig and a yamaka and sits down low in the chair. And the whole concept of the skit is that she is this awkward bar Mitzvah boy who can only read like a prepared speech. And so they'll ask her questions and she'll just kind of bat her eyes and then start reading from her prepared speech again. And she's like a New Yorker and it's really very cute and fun. So, Chuck, you know, we did a pretty good episode on circumcision, on male circumcision. We didn't do female circumcision yet. Not yet. But in that episode, we talked mostly about Western circumcision. But in a lot of cultures, including Malaysia and some parts of South Africa, circumcision is part of the ritual of entering puberty. So you'll be circumcised when you're like 11, 12, 13. Right. And it might be part of a larger ceremony as well. Like, Aborigines in Australia perform circumcision at puberty, but it's also paired with what's called a walk about. Yeah. When they're sent out to walk. Right. Basically, they're like, you go away from us and go learn to hunt and survive on your own, but first we have to do something to you. Yeah, well, they also have and I was trying to find out how, if this is still done with great regularity, but the Aborigines practice male birth control rituals. So after circumcision, they will pierce a hole through the base of the penis, put a splinter in there to keep that hole open. So basically, you urinate and ejaculate not through the end of your penis, but through this hole, which makes it really hard to reproduce. I got you. I imagine that's making it hard to reproduce, yeah. And I don't know if this is, like, what the modern Aborigines do or if it's just an ancient custom. It's like their one child policy, maybe. So I guess then when you pull the splinter out, it heals up enough to restore reproductiveness well, no, the splinter is pulled out and there's a permanent hole there. So then how do you reproduce? Well, you plug it up with your finger. I think compared to that, I'm sure if you're a Pueblo boy, you're like, oh, I just have to take an ice bath. Let's do it. Exactly. Which is one of their rituals. There's a tribe called the Etoro tribe of Papua New Guinea, and they have forced homosexuality as part of the rites of passage for a boy. What you essentially do is a boy is paired with an elder man and they ingest seamen. And that is part of the ritual to become a man from a boy with this tribe. So they just drink? There's no sexual act? There's drinking of sperm? Oh, no, it's with a sexual act. And then later on, you are paired as a man with another boy. And that is I mean, it's a tribe of, like, 1300 people in Papua New Guinea, and they become a mentor. They believe that in the semen is your most concentrated life force. So that is passed along to a boy. I had not heard that one either. There's a tribe in East Africa where they shaved the boy's head and then cut them to the bone on their forehead, three deep horizontal cuts. And they have a scar called a gar, and it's a symbol of manhood lying on ant beds. The Luciano Indian tribe, when you become a man, you were to complete the ceremonial act of laying on an ant bed and being bitten and stung by ants without reacting. You just have to keep, like, a stone face. Wow. That's one of their rituals. And they also are given a hallucinate drug to exacerbate it or make it better, you think? No, this is afterward, I think, called Kahi, and that's supposed to help them see visions. I guess it's kind of similar to the vision quest of the Native American. Yes. Which is the thing, too. Yeah. So those are some of the more interesting ones. Thanks to Cracked magazine. Yeah. Remember, I gave up cultural relativism in some respects. Yeah. But I don't feel like it's my role or position to persuade other people to feel one way or the other about something. It's up to the individual. I hear you. I got one more. The Matis. The Mattis hunting trials. This tribe is a Brazilian tribe. When they send their boys out to come in and hunt for the first time, they put a bitter poison in their eyes that's supposed to improve their vision and enhance their senses. And if that wasn't enough, there's a series of beatings and whippings that take place to make you a man. And then at the end of that, they burn an area of your skin and put this ground up frog goop in with a wooden needle. And it's a poison that's supposed to increase your strength and endurance. So I guess that Western American like light punched the arm. We got a pretty good symbolism of all this other stuff. I'll take that, my friend. It's true. Boys are treated roughly and definitely more rougher than girls are around the world. Absolutely. Although I saw some of the girls puberty rituals, and some of those aren't pretty either. Yeah, well, we need to cover that. Absolutely. We need to do female circumcision and female puberty, I guess. Agreed. Those will be coming right up. I'm sure if you want to know more about male puberty, you can type those words in the search bar house to force.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this coincidence. We get a lot of these where people experience coincidences related to what they're listening to. And this is from Andrew in Ohio. He said, On December 13, I was on the way home from work, and as I do every morning I'm sorry. On the way to work, I load you guys up on my phone and I'm taking to some learning adventure. Today's adventure was how broken bones work. So I'm listening and thinking, you guys are talking about you've never broken a bone before. And I start thinking neither have I. And you guys both say, Knock on wood. Exactly. And I think, I don't need to knock. What? It won't happen to me. I get to work, still listening, walking toward the back with a box in my hand. I tripped on the carpet fall and punched the ground with my right hand. He broke his pinky bone clean into sort of where the palm of the hand is, like the bone just below the pinky. And he sent me a picture and it was just snapped like a twig. And the brake was so bad, I had to have surgery to put two screws and a plate in to hold the bone together as it healed. As of now, I'm pretty much healed up. I've lost some feeling in the pinky, some range of motion, but I can say I've got a titanium plate in my hand. So if you like it's a trade off. Forget Iron Man. I am a titanium plate hand man, which he says is a working name. So he said, thanks a lot, guys. If you happen to read this, please shout out to my fiancee, Ali Spence. We're getting married in June 20, and I couldn't be more excited. So that is Andrew Hall of Worcester, Ohio. So congratulations, Ali and Andrew. Yeah, congratulations, guys. Watch where you're going, buddy. Yeah, and don't tempt fate, man. No, I don't need to knock wood. Look what happened. Knock wood. If you want to let us know how superstition bit you, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at s yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housedefworks.com. And as always, to enterwebt Stuffyysheno.com, for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime 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." | ||
Does acupuncture work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/does-acupuncture-work | Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese practice rooted in the precepts of Taoism, and for thousands of years it has been used to treat a range of ailments. The western world has historically dismissed this treatment -- but why? Tune in and learn more. | Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese practice rooted in the precepts of Taoism, and for thousands of years it has been used to treat a range of ailments. The western world has historically dismissed this treatment -- but why? Tune in and learn more. | Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:08:44 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=20, tm_min=8, tm_sec=44, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=13, tm_isdst=0) | 33439316 | 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. There's charles w chuckle Bryant. 2011. This is stuff you should know. 2011 our first one. And we've been doing this for years, like, for seven, eight years, something like that. I think it's our 12th year. Yeah. Overall, we've been doing it since 99. 99. Yeah. Because everybody's worried about black helicopters. Yeah. And that was our second podcast, I think, was on the Y twok bug, wasn't it? It was. Doesn't it pan out to be almost nothing? You know the iPhone has a bug, like a Y, two K bug that's leftover. Yeah. Apparently that's a Y. Two k grandkid. Well, I think if you're depending on your iPhone to wake you up, then I don't know. Do you? I don't use anything. But we'll look at you 2011, man. Yeah. Future man. Omega man. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever heard of a little condition called amblyopia? No. Amblyopia is also unfortunately referred to as lazy eye. Yes. And I used to have a friend in college named Grant, and Grant did not have Amblyopia unless he'd been drinking. And like, you could tell how much Grant had drunk depending on how pronounced his Amblyopia was. And I knew Grant for a while before I finally noticed this, and it was surprising when I finally did. And he's like, yeah, it happens sometimes. Did you ever take English from that guy at Georgia that had the Michael Jordan? There was an English teacher named Michael Jordan and he had a lazy eye. And on the first day of class he said, this is the eye that's looking at you, just to clear it up. Because his was like, as my friend guy called it, a disco. I it was way out of whack. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. See, I have a soft spot for people with stravismmus, which is any kind of walleye. Lazy eye, cross eyed, disco eye. I've never heard that one before, but same thing, right? Yeah. I actually wrote a pretty cool blog post on it once. You should check it out. All right. Strabbisms blogs of how stuff works. It should bring it up, right? Yeah. But Chuck, I recently ran across an article that showed a study of kids aged seven to twelve years with Amblyopia right. Were cured of their lazy eye through acupuncture. Really? Yes. And this is an accredited article in the Archives of Ophthalmology, which is a publication of the American Medical Association. Wow. And basically they had a control group, which was kids who had their eye patch, their dominant or good eye, non lazy eye patched for 2 hours a day, which I guess kind of forces the lazy eye to correct itself. Right. That's the pretty standard treatment. Or the other group were given acupuncture five times a week. What a cruel study. We're going to fix you kids, but we're hoping you don't show any improvements. You would think so. But get this. The kids who had their eye patched, 16.7% had their amblyopia resolved. Really? 41.5% had their amblyopia resolved in the acupuncture alone group. What was it again? 16%. 16% 41%. Yeah. That is huge. But, you'll know, my incredulousness when I was saying no, this was published in a respectable journal. Right, right. That's because this podcast was recorded in the west. Yes. Eastern medicine is still poopooed in many circles around here. It is. But with acupuncture specifically, this is one of those things that has made the crossover largely into the west. And it kind of has Western thought puzzle a little bit like what's going on with this. Right. Let's talk about both approaches to acupuncture, like explaining what's going on. Because one of the predominant thoughts about acupuncture is that it works somehow. Yeah. Right. So if you're Chinese, Chuck, how does acupuncture work? If you're Chinese, Josh, you believe that your body has the Yin and the Yang, a couple of opposing forces, and that your body has an energy running through it called Qi, even though it's spelled Q I. And that when your body is in balance. We talked about balance and homeostasis and all that in the east. Right. Then you have good chi. Energy is flowing. When things get blocked up, that means your chi is blocked. That means the Yin and the Yang fall out of balance, and that means you get sick. Right. And your energy flows along pathways in the body called meridians. Right? Yeah. And you've got, I think, a dozen of them from point to point we'll get to the occupants of later. Right. Well, let's get to them now. The accused, 2000 of them later. Okay. I'm just kidding. There's 2000, right? Yeah. Along these 15 meridians there's, I think, right. Twelve meridians. Sorry. There's a total of 2000 little points. And these are accu points. And some of them correspond to, like, that part of your body, and others correspond to others. Like you said, we'll get into a little more later on. But the point being, energy flows along these meridians, it can get blocked at these points. If you manipulate these points, the chi flows freely and yin and Yang are balanced, and you may have a bad tattoo as a result. Yeah. Stimulate these points. And there's lots of ways to do that. What happens if you are in the west? How does acupuncture work? Well, in the west, they would say that it stimulates the central nervous system, releases hormones, neurotransmitters, boosts the immune system, dulls pain, stuff like that. Got you. Same thing, same result. Two ways of explaining it, isn't it? Yeah, that's what I think. So, Chuck, you mentioned that this was Chinese, didn't you? Ancient Chinese. Right. Where did it come from? How long has it been around? Well, more than 2500 years in China. And it's rooted in Taoism, which is all about harmony between the humans and nature and the earth and stuff like that. The yin and yang, again, can't have good without bad light, without dark, all that good stuff. And if you have too much of one or the other, you either can't see or you can't see. Yeah. Too bright or too dark. Either way you can't see. Right? It's true. Kind of deep. I think they said the first place that appeared in text was in the NAIJing, which is the Yellow Emperors Classic of Internal Medicine by Huang B. I like how succinct the Chinese are in their language. Yeah, me too. Two words for yellow emperors classic of internal medicine. Yeah, nijing. Two one syllable words, and that's at 300 BC. And he described hawing describes diseases, and it was, from what I can tell, one of the first medical books to actually be written. And he described various acupuncture points in this book. So, boom, there it is. Then, about 500 years later, acupuncture is completely laid out in this twelve volume text called the Comprehensive Manual of Acupuncture and Moxibustion. Yeah, I didn't know about moxibustion. We'll get into that. That's kind of cool. But this Comprehensive Manual, like I said, it's twelve volumes and it basically says, like, this point here will do all of this. You got this problem right here. Right, but there's only 365 EQ points. Yeah. Early on, one for each day of the year. Yeah. And then eventually you're like this just stupid. There's 2000 let's just come out and say there's 2000 accu. I wonder if the Twelve Meridians had something to do with the twelve months. Maybe so. Huh? Or the twelve days of Christmas. The twelve signs of the zodiac, perhaps early on, instead of needle. Well, they were needles, but they were made from stone and bone, which probably wasn't a lot of fun, so they decided we should probably use metal, like bronze and gold and silver. And that worked for a little while these days. Stainless steel. Yeah, thankfully. And now that you mentioned that, it occurred to me that we never defined acupuncture. Oh, everyone knows what it is, right? I thought everyone knew what roller derby was. All right. Acupuncture is an Eastern medicine where small needles are stuck into various points of the body and manipulated in certain ways. Or not. Yes. And because you're living today, those are little, tiny stainless steel, hair thin needles. Not like knitting needles or anything. Not like a bone. No, but it was at a time I already said that. Yeah. So in the 19th century, early 19th century, people started going to China and were introduced to acupuncture, brought it back to the west and Europe to a certain degree. And of course, the doctors in Europe, probably before the doctors in the United States, were like, hey, this is kind of neat, let me experiment around, especially in France with Georges de moron. Yeah, he was, like the champion of acupuncture in the west. He went to China he's a scholar. He went to China at the turn of the 20th century, which means the he saw firsthand that acupuncture worked, and he brought it back and championed it in France. In France. Actually came up with their own type of acupuncture. I bet it's because of him, actually. I would think so, because he was probably the first dude to get it going. Right. We're going to talk about that now. You want to skip on to that later? We'll get to it in a second. Okay. Then eventually, like all things, made its way to the United States in the article that said President Nixon's visit to China was a big deal as far as introducing a lot of Chinese ways to the States. Like China Fever. Yeah. The first blast of China fever. Right. And then in the US. There's a guy named James Reston who writes for The New York Times, where he did and he had appendix surgery, which I'd take to be ependectomy. Right? I think so. And he got acupuncture to treat his pain, and it worked, and he wrote about it, and that was the first mention. Now, here we are today. Right? Here we are. It is viewed as a legitimate medicine, right? Yeah. I've got a stat that says 20 million Americans have undergone acupuncture, which is a lot higher than the article, but it may just be more recent. Right. Because that was the 2002 National Health Survey. Yeah. The FDA said that Americans spend a half a billion dollars in the 90s alone on acupuncture. That is a lot of them. And that was the people are all kooky for this kind of stuff, so it's probably even more. I would think so. Not the cynical 90s. It was also legitimized in 1996 when the FDA decided that acupuncture needles should be considered medical instruments. Yeah, that was a good thing. Yeah. It makes the whole process a lot safer now because you have to use sterile needles. Disposable. Right. Or they have to be sterilized somehow. You're not going to get an infection, and if you are, you're really going to the wrong acupuncture. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. And like you said, how many billions of dollars do we spend on a Chuck? Half a billion, 500 million in the know? That's sort of an old stat. But the FDA, I don't even know what that means. I don't either. Yes. That's the stat they gave me. So, Chuck, we've been focusing just on the Chinese version, although we did foreshadow that there's a French version, too. Yeah. TCM. Traditional Chinese medicine. Yeah. Let's talk about the different kinds of acupuncture. Well, that's the Chinese kind. That comes out of TCM. There's the Japanese counterparts, a little more subtle. Needles are generally a little shorter, a little thinner, don't pierce the skin as much. And there are two kinds route and local. Obviously. Route, if you treat the whole body for something, and then locals, when they get, like, a stick in the ear to fix your foot, you may lived in Japan for a little while, and she told me that there were two couples in her little province, little town that performed acupuncture, and both couples were blind. Really? Isn't that crazy? I would trust that. Yeah. It seems like it because, you know the body you feel around sure. For the points. Yeah. Lots of touchy. Like, if I need a doctor to have eyes to know where my kneecap is, then I don't want to be at that doctor. You should be able to feel your way around to the kneecap. Sure. All right, so the five element deck crack Jerry up for some reason. Five element acupuncture is Chinese as well, and that treats the body and mind. And that's based on the idea that the earth and body and everything in nature is governed by the five elements water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. So that's kind of neat. Yes. And apparently you can manipulate the balance of these elements through acupuncture within yourself, right? Yeah. And then here, finally, everyone who's been hanging on for this one. This is the French one auricular, right? Oh, yeah, that is the French one. Yeah. The French apparently decided that the ear is all you need to do. There's 200 accu points located on the ear that correspond to different parts of the body. And by manipulating these accu points, you can do the same thing. That can be done with traditional Chinese acupuncture. Right. And apparently that's kosher in China, because the ear is viewed as a sensitive spot for manipulating chi. The flow of chi. Interesting, isn't it? Well, yeah. And with all the accused points on the ear, I wonder how piercing affects that. If there's one thing if I could spend, like, $500 to do something to my body, it would be to cover up these old ear piercing holes. Yeah, I got one, too, but mine looks so stupid. Think about the dudes with the gauges. It's cool now, kids. And of course, you don't want to be the old guy saying, just wait until you're older. But it's one thing to have a tattoo you're not proud of and another thing to have, like, a big hole in your ear. Yeah. Or both. Yes. I think it's generally both. Isn't it just kids. Korean hand acupuncture is the last one listed here, and that's essentially the same thing as the auricular, except it all goes through the hands. Right. And then, Chuck, you mentioned moxibustion, right? Oh, did I? So moxibustion is acupuncture. We just mentioned the different types of acupuncture. There's also different things you can do while you have needles sticking out of your body. Yeah. These are related. Sure. Things that you can do. Moxibustion is one of those things. So this is the stimulation of acupuncture using heat. Right. And moxa is an herb that comes from the mugwort plant. And traditionally in Chinese medicine, you take about a rice grain size piece of moxa, put it on an accuspoint and set that thing on fire and then let it burn and create pain and leave a scar. Now, this can be done in conjunction with the needle treatment as well. Is that right? No, I think this is in lieu of it. That's direct moxibustion unsurprisingly. Then there's indirect moxibustion, which is basically wrapping, mocks and paper, lighting the paper, which makes the moxa smolder, and then holding it near an acupuncture. Or wrapping moxa around an acupuncture needle. Lighting that thing. Got you, right? Yes. You can also use electro acupuncture or sono acupuncture to either move an electrical current through the needles, or in the case of sono, there are no needles, but you use sound to affect your accu points. Right. When I went, they put a heat lamp over the needles to heat up the needles while they were in. You went? Yeah, I did acupuncture once. Awesome. Once. It's kind of not the point. You're supposed to go like a chiropractor and get it until you're fixed, but yeah, I think I mentioned it once before. I found a cheap place in La. It was like a school. You could get for, like, $10, you can get acupuncture. It was awesome. Was it? It was real rough. Why didn't you go back? I wanted to, and then some big job came up, and I got distracted. It was one of those deals. It wasn't that I didn't believe in it. You set up like, huh? And ran out with all these needles out of your bag. So, Chuck, you then know what to expect, right? I do if you go get acupuncture, at least from this one lady. Okay. Did it follow? Kind of what the article details? Yeah. Dim lights and soothing heat lamp. She left me alone. Closed the door almost on the CD player. Yeah. I'm low. It was very relaxing. I think there was music, actually. Well, yeah, sure. Deep Purple. I mean, that was my experience. I've never been locally here. Well, we were talking about the accu points, right. And how they correspond to different parts of the body, and they're actually mapped. Right. It's not just like it sounds like this. So let's try your cornea. It's not like that. It's numbered out and charted. It's standardized. Sure. Absolutely. So the twelve meridians we talked about, they relate to different parts of the body, right. So you've got, like, the bladder. You have the kidney, the large intestine, the spleen, the gallbladder, the liver, the pericardium, which is what is that over your heart? Right? I think that's the covering of your heart. It's got cardio in there. It's got to be stomach, heart. Okay, man. Now I'm second guessing myself on the pericardium, long swallow intestine, and the triple heater that's the closer. Yeah. So you've got these different meridians, and then there are different numbers corresponding to the different accu points along that Mardian. So, for example, you have GB. One is a certain accusing, and the gallbladder Merdian. Okay. Yeah, but that's how it's spelled out. But that doesn't necessarily mean if I want to fix the gallbladder, I'm going to stick you in the gallbladder meridian. Precisely. You could stick it in the shoulder. Who knows? An acupuncturist would know. When you go to an acupuncturist, when you have a malady, you're going to tell him or her what's going on here? She's going to take a history, get an idea of what your problem is, like a regular doctor. Right. And then consult this map and say, okay, well, this guy's having lower back pain, so I'm going to go stick some needles around the UB 54.4 acupunct with some alcohol. That's a big part of it, yeah. If you're not swabbed with alcohol, get out of there, take the needle out of the package so you know it's nice and new. Then I'm going to stick anywhere from two, three, five to 15 needles in some area that will correspond to that meridian right. To that pain. These needles are going to be stuck in anywhere from a quarter of an inch to three inches, which brings up a potential danger with acupuncture organs. You have organs that are closer to your skin than three inches. So you can't conceivably have a kidney punctured, a lung punctured. This is why you want to go to a certified acupuncture. Yeah. And I want to say it's very rare, so don't let something like that scare you, because we could tell you American surgical stories that are equally as horrifying. Like, they removed my kidney and they weren't supposed to, that kind of thing. So don't think, oh, my gosh, I'm going to get stabbed through the lung with a needle. That's called a big mistake, and it happens in all medicine. Sure. Everybody stabs people through the lung with a needle. You might feel a little bit of pain with the initial prick of the needle, but after that, it's not like you feel the needle inside your body. Yeah. You said it was relaxing, right? It's very relaxing. I didn't even feel the needle going in, to be honest. Just a little tap. And they're really tiny, the ones they use on me. Very thin. They'll leave it in there five to 20 minutes. For me, it was about 20 minutes, I think. And they can stimulate them while they're in your skin, like we said, with the various ways, like heat, electricity, or they might even twirl them with your fingers if they're feeling saucy, if they want to do it by hand. You said that you're supposed to go more than once. I think the average is something like twelve weeks. Once a week for twelve weeks, yes. It all depends on your issue, which if you're on Medicare, you're probably not going to do because it costs anywhere from sixty dollars to one hundred and twenty dollars. Probably more than that for an Acupuncture session. Right. And if you have to go twelve times, you want insurance that's going to cover it. Unfortunately, Medicare doesn't. Even though the federal government recognizes acupuncture needles as medical instruments. Right. That's a bit of a double standard. It really does. Our insurance covers it, actually, which is good. And a lot of major insurance carriers cover it. I'm going to give it a try. Are you? I've been meaning to. I have a muscle in my neck right here that has turned into those metal cables that are braided. I have one of those in my neck. Really? Yeah. Man. I need to see if they can do something about that. You need to walk around on that thing. She does. Yeah, but I mean, it's kind of like, oh, traffic. Oh, this dozen eggs has one broken in. It something, you know, you need to relax, my friend. You know how they have that tiger heart place in sort of Eman Park, old Forest Ward? It's on edgewood. You should go there. It's an acupuncture tiger heart. Acupuncture. You getting kickbacks from no, of course not. It's on my way to work, though. Is it safe? Josh, I know you mentioned the one issue with the stabbing through the organs, but other than that well, like you said, for the most part it is very safe, especially now that it's more regulated. I think 40 states have some sort of standard and require the Acupuncture to be certified for the most part, and this is news to me, there are plenty of Western physicians who practice acupuncture. Yeah. You can be a med school doctor and practice acupuncture, or you can go to an acupuncture only program. The cool thing about that is it requires a lot more hours to get accredited without the medical degree. Right. It's like two to 300, 200 to 300 hours if you're a doctor, to become an accredited Acupuncturist. If you're just doing the Acupuncture thing, it's like 2000 to 3000 hours. Yeah, I would trust that for sure. That is a lot of hours. And you have to do it within a certified master's program. Yes. So you have to be a smart person to be an Acupuncturist. Apparently. I would say so. You might bleed a little bit, don't worry, too bad. But if you do have a bleeding disorder, if you're on blood thinners, they recommend you probably shouldn't do it. Or if you have like a pacemaker or anything else regulating your heartbeat electronically, it's probably not a good idea because accidental electro acupuncture is not good now. So Chuck, we've shown that it is becoming more and more accepted in the west. But as far as hard science goes, western hard science. Well, I guess hard science is Western. Hard science isn't it. Yes. The jury is still out. Right. But there's been a lot of studies that show well, kind of mixed results, but there's been plenty that show like the one with the lazy eye lazy eye study. The famous landmark lazy eye study that just happened. And there's been plenty of others that have shown that acupuncture definitely does work. Right? Yes. Should we talk about those? Yeah. Osteoarthritis 2004 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they found that acupuncture significantly reduced pain and improved function. And they studied 294 patients and this was in the knee, people with knee pain. And these were people that couldn't get help through regular medicine. And after eight weeks, they had far less pain. And that affected me. Yes. So that's one pain. That's an easy one. Sure. Because it's pain. Yeah. What about chemotherapy induced nausea? Yes. Nausea, period. Yes. It turns out, as we said, nausea in general has been shown to be aided by acupuncture. There's a 2000 study in the JAMA right. The Journal of the American Medical Association that studied electro acupuncture and people well, 104 women with breast cancer who'd received high dose chemotherapy. Right. Yeah. And they found that the women with the acupuncture had about a third of the vomiting episodes of women who did not receive acupuncture for treatment. Yeah. And they were both on nausea reducing medicine. Right. But anyone who's ever had chemo can tell you that a lot of times that stuff does not work. Yeah. And then a meta analysis of eleven different studies found that nausea in general, like similar results for any kind of study of acupuncture. Relieving nausea. Right. That's right. And fertility. Fertility. If you're undergoing in vitro fertilization, there was a study in Six and OT Six and the Fertility and Sterility Journal, which is a hoot to read, and they said that women undergoing acupuncture had an eight to 18% more likelihood, better chances of getting pregnant. Not bad. The problem is they also were slightly more likely to miscarry than the non acupuncture group. I want one. A percentage there. They didn't give one. That bothered me was slightly mean, like zero one or something or one or two. Slightly is journalism for I don't have the numbers in front of me. Fibromyalgia. Yeah. Fibromyalgia. Mayo Clinic, buddy. Yeah. 2006, they did a study of 50 patients and found that the symptoms of fibromyalgia that include muscle pain, fatigue, joint stiffness were significantly helped. Another journalism. Right. What is significant significant is a lot greater than one. I've got a couple of more quickie graph stats here. They did some asking of questions, polling of people who had acupuncture. Isn't it? We've been on this is a rough one. They asked people how satisfied they were with their acupuncture treatment, and 24% said very satisfied. Yeah, exactly. Somewhat satisfied. Led with 34%. 24% were extremely satisfied, and only 8% were not at all satisfied. Those people are never satisfied. That should have been the last question. Are you ever satisfied with anything? Are you a jerk? Are you satisfied with this question? Besides acupuncture, have you ever utilized any other treatment based on traditional Chinese medicine? And 80% said no. Wow. So even if you don't believe in it, that mean you won't go laid out on the table and get stuck with needles. And that's really the only interesting ones on here, actually. So we've got all this information, all these studies that show that it works, polls, Journal of the American Medical Association, all this stuff. But the problem is people still poopoo it. There's still a lot of skeptics who view acupuncture the way others may view hypnosis, and that the underlying mechanism isn't qi or hormones or neurotransmitters. It's the placebo effect. Right? Yeah. And that's tough, because with placebo and, like, a pill, you just get a pill that probably looks like the other pills for acupuncture. They're going to stick you in needles, but they're not going to stick you in the occupants, and they're going to skip your acupunct purposefully. So you get these needles stuck in you. You might think I'm getting better. Yeah. But that's the same as any placebo effect. You're still getting a pill that you don't know whether or not it's going to work. I think the larger point, rather than poopooing medicine in the placebo effect, is investigating how to manipulate the placebo effect, because if we can heal our own bodies without drugs or sticking ourselves with needles or doing whatever, then why not? It still has the same effect. True. Good point. Can we end this now? Yeah. That's all I got acupuncture, is give it a shot if you want to give a try. I'm definitely going to do it. I was talking to everyone, but I know you were specifically, Josh, give it a try. We want to go ahead and apologize for this one. It's the first one that we recorded, cable Nick. I'm sure Jerry will wash it out. I can't pronounce words. If you want to learn more about acupuncture and see one really superfluous chart, you should type in acupuncture. That's one C in the handysearchpart houseoffworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Yes, josh this is a homelessness email, and we got a lot of response for the homelessness show, ranging from I'm homeless to you guys are great. Thank you for highlighting this, to, hey, it's not my responsibility to care for veterans on the street. I had a guy actually say that to me in one of his replies that I had engaged him in. Regardless of what you believe, if you're saying it's not my responsibility to care for homeless vets on the street, then but I did go off I just want to say one thing. I went off on CEOs at the end pretty harshly, and I should have been more specific. I was referencing a story I'd read that day about, and I. Wish I would have looked it up, but I didn't have time. These certain CEOs are in the news that day for taking these huge bonus record bonus payouts in the middle of the financial crisis while their employees were being laid off. I read this. I come in and sit down and read about talk about homeless people on the streets. I got a little hot under the collar, which I should have been more specific in what I was criticizing, because I'm certainly not criticizing all CEOs. And I'm not saying that they're to blame for homelessness or it's their job to fix homelessness. It's everybody's job to fix homelessness, and I wasn't clear enough in that, so I wanted to clear that up. Well put, Chuckers. Thank you. That's great. Is that it? Lacyos? Do a lot of big time donating. There's one guy who runs a carpet manufacturer, dalton Carpet in Georgia. No, I can't remember his name, but he's like, the greatest CEO of all time. Really? He's a good guy. I have to be a CEO one day. Really? Are you kidding me? Not get out for a man got a higher and fire I couldn't do? No way. All right, so with that, I'm going to read up a letter from a homeless person. Hello, guys. My name is Blank. I told her I wouldn't read it. The podcast on homelessness really hit home with me. I'm a single mother of two. I've been homeless on and off for the past three or four years. I've always had a job, but my divorce basically bankrupted me, and I've had to start all over again. I think she's married to the CEO. I became homeless again back in March 2010, and by June 2010, I was finally selected from about 1800 people in the city of Tulsa to be approved for section eight. So I feel like now I'm finally on my way to permanence. This whole thing has affected my kids greatly, but we're managing to stick it out. I believe there is stress of divorce and the stress of being homeless. It has caused my son to have lower test scores in school. My daughter's doing okay, but most likely because she was only one when her father and I divorced. My son was three. Anyway, I just thought you might like to hear from one of your fans. It is true that getting assistance is very difficult. There just aren't enough funds to go around. And I know how it feels to be invisible. People at my work have no idea that one of their own employees was homeless, and they still don't. And it's not something I like to broadcast. It's really very embarrassing. Just know that homeless people may be working, but they won't say they're homeless because of embarrassment. Better get back to work. I would say so, too, so you can get that job. Thanks for your great podcast, and thanks for listening to me as well. So that's a great example of one of the many emails we got. It is. It is. Great. Thank you very much. Blank. And I have to say I'm conflicted because we spend a large part of the homelessness podcast, like, railing about how they shouldn't be treated as anonymous or invisible. They wrote in and said, don't use my name. Let's see if you have a I don't want to hear about acupuncture. I don't want to hear about what do you want to hear about, Chuck? Something. Give us something good. It's been so long since we had something good. What about I was talking about American surgery horror stories. If you've ever known anyone that had the wrong organ removed yeah, let's hear about that. That's good stuff. If you have a wrong organ removal story and we know someone out there does because we asked for sinking ship story got two, plus a plain one. Yeah, you want to send it in an email. Right? Stuff podcast at how stuff works. We're so sorry about this one.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The house upworks. iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
How Murphy's Law Works, the Redux | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-murphys-law-works-the-redux | Years back, Josh recorded this show without Chuck, and the old version's omitted facts bugged him. In this new version, the pair delve into the people, science and rocket tests behind Murphy's Law. Join Josh and Chuck for this properly-executed episode. | Years back, Josh recorded this show without Chuck, and the old version's omitted facts bugged him. In this new version, the pair delve into the people, science and rocket tests behind Murphy's Law. Join Josh and Chuck for this properly-executed episode. | Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:00:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=0, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=228, tm_isdst=0) | 29558158 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Two Chuck brian, who is with me as always, but hasn't been with me, as always. What do you mean? There is a dark, dark time in my life, Chuck. I call it the pre Chuck era. You're too kind. And there were several many podcasts that I released with other people. I don't feel good about it. Okay. But it's out there. There's one that always stuck out to me that I was like, there's so much more information. You remember back in the day, we used to try to hit these things at like five minutes? Yeah. To say this has evolved is an understatement. Right. So there was one that I was like, five minutes is not enough for this. Let's do something like 37 minutes instead. And it was Murphy's Law. Yeah. So I wrote this article a long time ago. It was like how Murphy's Law works. I was raised on these unnatural laws, like the Peter Principle, which we've broadcasted on Parkinson's law, which is work expands to fill the time allotted. Yeah. And then Murphy's Law, which is, of course, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Right? Yeah. So I was kind of always aware of this, and I pitched this idea, like how Murphy's Law Works. Like, right after I got here at How Stuff Works and I got the assignment and started doing this research, I found out that there's this awesome backstory to this, which I know you know now and have for a while, because we made a Toyota commercial based on part of it. You're telling me this now? Exactly. So I guess what I'm saying is I wanted to redo how Murphy's Law works. A reboot, and let's do it. And no disrespect to previous podcasters, but this was just too short. Too short? Too short. You can't cover Murphy's Law in five minutes. No, you can't. So here's the expanded version, and we're not going to start rerunning things. Don't worry. There's plenty of topics out there. This one just really kind of I always wanted to redo this one. It was stuck in your crawl, and now it's a town, not your crawl. Idiom, Josh. That's what we're talking about. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And you make a good point at the beginning of this. It's an idiom, because we've made it an idiom. And you don't notice and make remarks about when things go perfectly right, you might feel good and be like, hey, everything's coming up roses today. Or maybe that's an idiom. It's not an idiom, actually. It's a saying. But you don't say, boy, I got in this lane of traffic and it's just speeding along. And I should make a saying about that. You can, but very rarely do you. Like, humans tend to focus more on the negative. Exactly. And that's what Murphy's Law is. It's a focus on the negative. That's right. We look out for the bad, in a way. And Murphy's Law itself, Chuck, is not that old, to tell you the truth. You're right. And it wasn't Murphy who originally coined this idea. There was something called Sod's Law that's still around in Great Britain which says basically the same thing. Any bad thing that can happen to some poor Sod, which is short for Sodomite. Is it? Yeah. No comment. And then there was a magician named Adam Hall. Shirk, apparently in 1928, wrote something called On Getting Out of Things an Essay on Magic, which is not on the Internet. I looked all over for it. Yeah, I did, too, actually. It said, in a magic act, nine out of ten things that can go wrong usually will. And I thought maybe Adam was just a bad magician when I read that. Right. Really? So he gets credit? Like, just about any origin story of Murphy's Law includes Adam Hall shirt, and it should. But it wasn't called Murphy's Law. No. Until a guy there actually was a guy named Murphy, and he actually did live not too long ago. He died in 1989, I believe. This article says 1990, but it's 89. He's going to go back and change that. I need to. And he was a captain in the Air Force, and he is attributed, with not coining Murphy's Law, depending on who you talk to, but spurring the idea of Murphy's Law, which was coined by somebody else. Right. So let's set the stage. Chuck, it's 1949. We're in California. Right. Got you in my hands. Exactly. We're at Edwards Air Force Base. We need to get into the Wayback machine here. Oh, man, it's been a while. Are you ready? Sweet. Buckle up. Okay. All right. As I said, edwards Air Force Base. But the air is much cleaner. It's very nice. There's Chuck Yeager. Right. Look at them go. Look at him. And then over there on that railroad track is kind of in the middle of nowhere, is the rocket slide, the GWiz rocket sled. That's a neat name. So let's talk about that. Okay. What is it? Well, this was part of the project MX 981, and they were test to determine how the human body reacted to G force. Yeah. There's a longstanding idea that the human body could withstand 18 GS, and all airplanes were designed to withstand 18 G's of force and nothing more. Right. Which means that they were kind of hamstrung by this magical number, but no one knew exactly where that number came from or if it was true. What's screwing is that they had no way to find out except for these rocket sled tests. That's right. Using a real live human being. Because if you're going to test something, you can't throw a crash test dummy in there. You couldn't in 49. Well, yeah, these days they have sensors and actually, not to be PlugY, but Toyota came up with the thing that measures total human model for safety. Yes. And it measures internal damage. So it's very sophisticated now, but back then, if you want to find some of the stuff out, you had to put a human in there. Well, at first they use Cadavers. Yeah. But that's then they use dummies. Like Sierra Sam. And then on the G Wiz rocket tests, they used Oscar eight ball. But they didn't have sensors for it. No. So they had to use John Paul Staff, who volunteered, who was a really incredible Renaissance man. He's a colonel. Yeah. In the Air Force. He was a physician. And he flew around in an airplane without a canopy. Remember that? I've heard that. He also basically made it his life's work to get seatbelts made mandatory in automobiles. So he staged the first ever automobile crash test, and he did it at the expense of the Air Force. And the Air Force was like, hey, whoa, what are you doing? What are you expensing these to us for? These are cars. We fly planes. And he came up with statistics that showed that more Air Force pilots died from car wrecks and from plane wrecks, and they said, okay, that was just the kind of guy he was real stand up dude. He was so what he did was he jumped in the GWiz, said, hey, I'll do it. I'm Colonel John Paul Staff. I do this kind of thing. And it would go about 200 miles an hour down a half mile track, and then stop in less than a second. And what they're trying to test is say that one more time, go 200 miles an hour and stop in less than a second. That's crazy. Yes. Basically, they're trying to test what might happen in a plane crash. So they were finding the force of gravity, how much a human could withstand. And remember, 18 was that magic number. And in very short order, John Paul Staff withstood 18 GS, and then 20, and then 25. And I think he made it up to 46.26 GS. Wow. Was the most he experienced, I think the highest roller coaster, we always go to that, but the roller coaster with the highest acceleration is like, two, seven GS. This guy did 46.26. And he suffered for it, too. Yeah, big time. Broken bones, concussions, broken blood vessels in his eyes. Yeah. He'd have whiteouts, which I'm sure when he was going backwards, they'd turn them around sometimes so he wouldn't get the bugs in his face. And he would have whiteouts, which is all the blood is pooling in the back of the head. So he has no blood in his eyes, which means he can't see. Right. Or he'd get red out to where all the blood was pulling in the front of his face and he couldn't see because there was too much blood in his eyes. I wonder if they were like, hey, let's put them sideways. Like a pink out. Yeah. One eye is red, one is white. Yeah. So this is all going pretty well for Step, if you consider that a success. And then Captain Murphy shows up on the scene and says, hey, I've got these sensors that will give you a much more accurate read of the GeForce. Right. So let's get my assistant. I don't know why he didn't do it himself. No. This is Project MX 981. It was one of the projects assistance. Murphy but why did himself why didn't he do it is what I want to know. I don't know. Because there's another saying, if you want something done right, do it yourself. It's true. And I would have rubbed that in his face. Yeah. They didn't, though. All right, and supposedly tell them about the sensors. Well, the sensors would give you a more accurate reading, and then the assistant evidently hooked them up wrong, and there was one way to hook up each one of these, and he did it the opposite way for each one of these. Well, there's one correct way right, to hook up the sensor, and then he did it the wrong way on every single one of them. Right. And then Murphy said out loud to somebody that if there are two ways of doing something, one of these will result in disaster, he's going to do it that way. Or he said something along the lines of, if there's any way they can do it wrong, they will. It depends on who you talk to. There were living witnesses in 2000, right, when this guy for Improbable Research, who hosts the IG Nobel Awards, wrote a pretty comprehensive article on it. And he interviewed these people, and they said he roughly said that, or he said something like you said, but ultimately he was grumbling, and it was loud enough, and he was saying it about these people that he just met who had incorrectly hooked up the sensors. Okay, well, let's hook them right, and do it again. It's not a big deal, right. So Murphy, apparently, if you talk to the witnesses, was kind of thought of as a bit of a jerk. That's what I would think, which is something his son still to this day disputes. He says that that is not in his father's character, that his father was not a jerk, and he wouldn't have been so rude or Boris. But most of the witnesses say he said something like that. That was the seed. How did the tree come about? The tree came about because Stapp was apparently a pretty gregarious guy. Obviously, if he's taking part in these tests with a plum, then he's going to probably be a pretty fun guy to be around. Well, he had two books. Chuck of Idioms. Yeah. One was called Staff's Almanac. The other was for your moments of inertia. And he had already come up with his own little saying, staff's ironical paradox, which is the universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle. So he was already generally on the lookout for new bits of wisdom. He's stealing these things from people, basically, and he stole it from Murphy. And at a press conference the next day, and this is where it took off, obviously, because it's a press conference. He said that we have a good safety record because we are aware of Murphy's Law, which is whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And they all got a big laugh, said, that's brilliant. And they all ran to the payphones and called it in. Yeah, it makes it into, like, some aerospace publications, and then it disseminates out. It's just like just a perfect gem. Perfectly encapsulated. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. It's just a universal truth in unnatural law. Right? Yeah. And it kind of gave a kickstart to this whole there's a trend in the people being pity because they're Peter Principal. And actually, I found out Lawrence Peter, who came up with the Peter Principal and Captain Murphy became lifelong friends, wasn't that special, but it gave rise to all these other ideas, these unnatural laws. It was kind of a trend. Like I said in the Think, people wanted to put their name on something, right. So I selected a few out of there's lists on the Internet that are just you can scroll for hours and never hit the bottom of these things. Right. But you want to read some of these. It tours observation. The other line moves faster, which makes sense. Boobs law. You will always find something in the last place you look. What's another good one here? Franklin's Rule. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he will not be disappointed. Yeah. Minkin's Law. Those who can, do, those who cannot teach. It's just mean. It is mean. Yeah. Especially the teachers. It's so disrespectful. And then Patton General Georgia Patton had a law that a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow, because by then, Charlie's killed you. Right. He wasn't Vietnam. No, but you just met a guy named Charlie. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, people obviously like naming things after themselves and coming up with pithy little sayings that people like to say. Right. And there are two ways that Murphy's Law can be categorized. It can be categorized in the realm of pity, sayings from the like, the Peter Principle, which, as you remember, it did make sense. It had some gravity to it. Peter. Yeah. Or you can look at Murphy's Law and the coining of it in 1949 by John Paul Statt as the formulation of the basis for all engineering thought that came after that point, which was the creation of failsafe, the creation of redundant systems, and the idea that you should plan for everything going wrong. So that if it does go wrong, it's covered and the system, it won't break down. Sure, it gave a saying to that practice. It was already in practice. But people didn't start building failsafe because of Murphy's Law. You know what I'm saying? I don't know, man. Well, seatbelts, that's a failsafe. Yeah. And that is not just from Murphy's Law. That was from staff himself. That's true. He's pushing this legislation through. So let's talk about the principles going on behind Murphy's Law. Fatalism. It's pretty much it. Fatalism is the idea that we are just walking around subject to whatever happens to us, whatever fate dictates. Like if you're in a line of traffic right? Yeah. And it seems like all other lines are going except for yours. Right, right. This is explainable. It's explicable, like you're not paying attention to the other lines of traffic when your line is going because you're paying attention to not hit the person in front of you. Right. When you're just sitting there, all you notice is that the other lanes are going. But if you could really statistically explain how often the lanes of traffic are moving, it's probably fairly even. Yeah, probably. So. I always kind of well, actually, I go in the lane that I think is going to be moving, but because we're fatalistic, it's like, why does the universe hate me? I'm totally powerless to make traffic move. Right. And then free will was the opposite. Not the opposite, but that's the other idea, is that we have free will for all of our choices, and all of our consequences are due to things that we have made happen. Right. And the attendant with free will is the risk of failure. Right. So when we have a 50 50 chance of getting something right, we're going to get it wrong or we're going to notice mostly when we get it wrong because then we have to do it again. And it's just so much trouble to try to put the plug in the right way. Yeah, right. The three pong failsafe. Plug. Three pong pong. Yeah. But other prongs electrical sockets, if you look at them, one's bigger than the other. That's a fail safe nowadays. Sure. After Murphy's Law changed everything for that. It was just Deathville for everything. Well, yeah. Well, let me put it to you this way. There was something like 25 million licensed motorists in the US. And like 43,000 deaths on the highways in like, 1960, I think. Something like that. In 2000, there was 75 million licensed motorists and about as many deaths. So yeah. Before Murphy came along. And no failsafe. There were no failures of the no one had any idea what they were doing. I'll dispute that. But did I ever show you the video of the car crashes? Like the old blood on the what? Blood on the asphalt. They did this high speed car crashes with an old like when you see those old tanks like oh, man, back then, are you like an impala or something? Yeah, like those big old tanks. They were tanks because they're tanks. Right. I bet you were safe in those seatbelts. But they compared the crash to a modern car. And the old car, man, just squashed and crumbled like a tin can. Really? Oh, dude. Yes. Because cars are just engineered these days as our cows oh, with couple zones and things like that. Yes, man. And it might be made of plastic, but it's amazing when you watch this thing back then, they were huge and made of metal, but enough impact that metal just becomes nothing. Yeah, pretty interesting. Speaking of cows being engineered, you remember that cow on village in Athens that had the port hole in it so they could open it up and reach inside and I think fertilize it or they were doing something. I never saw that, but I saw that cow. It was crazy. Murphy's Law happened to that cow. I wrote about that they have those little portals into their stomachs so they can study things like that. Like right there on the side. Yeah. And then also, Chuck, I want to point out richard kipling. Right. He provides us a good example of that whole why me? Attitude of humanity and then the mathematical explanation of why you pal. Right, rode your kippling once lamented that no matter how you drop it, the bread that you dropped out of your hand onto the floor always falls butter side down, which means you can't treat it any longer. Right. And it gives you the vapors. Right. So if you think about it, a buttered piece of bread is heavier on one side than the other. So thanks to the force of gravity on the way down, the bread is going to flip over. Is that true, though? Yes, but it's heavier. How do you prove this? Give me some bread. Well, I just wanted this proven and not I think it's interesting, but well, think about this. I just wonder how much butter would literally take to cause it to flip over. I'm sure how many feet? There's a certain amount. And I think also this is going to happen more frequently with plain UN toasted bread and butter rather than toast with butter melted in it. Okay. Which may be distributed evenly throughout the bread. Okay. But the point is, yes, it's going to flip over, but it's not going to flip back over because the heavier side is now being dragged toward the Earth. But if it does fall butter side up, then that's just good luck. That's fate. Okay. So again, there's a certain amount of, I guess, math or science to Murphy's Law. There can be if you really want to look for it. And your name is Joel Pell, right? Yeah. He's another funkiller, like the laughter guys, I know math people will take issue with that, but I take issue with everything having to be stated as a math formula. Well, this guy, he begs to differ. He does. He's a biological engineer at the University of British Columbia, and I think in 2005 he came up with Murphy's equation, which basically he figured out how to quantify the probability that things will go wrong when they can go wrong. Right. Are you going to read it? It's pretty impossible to read out loud. Yeah, I don't think I can. Because what's the opposite of something power when it's like down below into the right rather than up into the right? I have no idea. Well, basically he figured out that the importance of the event I times the complexity of the system involved, c times the urgency of the need for the system to work. U plus the frequency of the system has used equals p the probability that the Murphy's Law will kick in. Right. And one is definite, I think ten, it's not going to happen somewhere in between as it might happen, it might not. So what he did was he basically plugged in the possibility of his clutch going out in a rainstorm 60 miles, 100 km from his house, and he came up with an answer of one, which means that his clutch was definitely going to go out. And he further demonstrated that now that he's stranded out in the rainstorm and he needs to get somewhere by foot, he needs his flashlight to work, what's the probability that Murphy's Law will happen and the flashlight will be out? He plugged it in and came up with a one again. So he very facetiously proved that Murphy's Law is real and his equation works. I hope this guy got stuck in a rainstorm flashlight. That's what I hope. Poor Joel Pell. I know. I had to correspond with him for this. Oh, really? Yeah. He did get permission to use his equation and he said, hey, sure. He was a cool dude. Buzz. Yeah. Really? Yeah. All right, so Chuck, we talked about like, prongs being designed with failsafes. Seatbelts are a fail safe diesel pump. Nozzles, they are designed at a wider diameter than regular gas pumps, so you can't fit it in your gas tank. Did you know that? Yeah. That wasn't always the case though, because I put diesel in a truck one time when I shouldn't have. Right. And when did it start? After Murphy's Law became wise. It started in the mid ninety s, I think, or that's the last time I screwed up like that. What you got? I got nothing else. All right. Thank God for failsafe. So thank God for John Paul staff and Captain Edward A. Murphy, Jr. I have a Chuck's key law. I got my two house keys. I have an outer security, like a clear door and then my regular door. Two different keys that look the same on my dog leash. Almost the time I use the wrong key, I'll bet if you pay attention to it, you use the wrong key about 50% of the time. That's Murphy's Law. Well, then something's up. I also have my directional thing. I have a poor sense of direction. It's awful. I didn't know that. Almost 100% of the time, I will go the wrong way. If faced with a choice, should I go this way or that way? And if I try to trick myself and go I want to go right, then I'm going to go left. It was right. Nice. That's Murphy's Law, too. I know, and it ruins my life. But you can't just hijack Murphy's Law and type your name on it. That's Chuck's Key Law and Chuck's Law of direction. Right? That's Murphy's Law. All right. If you want to learn more about Murphy's Law and read my article on it, it was one of the first articles I wrote. I like it. You can type in Murphyslaw in the search bar athouseupworks.com thank you for listening to this one twice. Yeah, thanks for doing it with me, ma'am. Well, it was due. We were due for this one. Yeah, I think I said handy's first part, didn't I? I think so. All right, well, it's time. For what? We're going to wind up the old Facebook ask jock and chush questions. Yeah. And people did. So I always get, like, a hundred of them in a couple of minutes and I have to shut it down. Yeah, people want to know. All right, so let's just run through some of these. Josh, you got one? No. Go ahead. All right. Who's your favorite Simpsons character who is not a Simpson? And I even saw this one yesterday, and it's so hard. I like Lionel Hutts a lot. He's good. I like the whole Flanders family. I think Ned is a great, complex character. Like the one where he has the nervous breakdown and it turns out he was part of a spanking protocol research study. I like it when he's occasionally ripped. Well, he is all the time. Sometimes he's wearing a shirt clearly different when he's in the ski suit than when he's in his sweater. Yeah, that ski suit one was hilarious. Stupid sexy. Flanders, what about yours? I'm going to go with a cop out. I'm going to go with a pair with Ralph and Chief Wiggum. Yeah, they're good. Pretty good. Or Smithers and Flanders. I mean, those two that are hard to beat as a duo. I mean, you can't leave out Seymour Skinner. Yes. Or a poo. Yeah. Or Barney. We can keep doing this for hours, actually. I like Mo. Are you a Mo fan? Yeah, huge Mo fan. Okay. We could do this for hours. Go ahead. Chuck, do you have a job outside of the podcast? I do. I'm the chef and housekeeper at my home. I think. I mean here. Oh, no. Do you not? Since when? Sure, we write stuff. Yeah. Right now. Blog write quizzes. We manage Facebook and Twitter. We manage the stuff you should know. Brand. Yeah. What do you want written on your tombstone? You go ahead. How about, died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship? That is suspicion. You're going to say that? Yeah. That's a good one. That was fine. I know. Kelly Cronley. I'm sorry. And Drew Clinkel asked about the Simpsons. Thanks, drew and Kelly. My tombstone, I want to say weather. This is from trash goblin. Toby. Is this from Twitter? I guess it is. Have you seen Hodgman's mustache in real life? And is it as scary as I have heard it is? We've both seen Hodgman's mustache in real life. It accidentally brushed my shoulder. I was like, really? What's that? No. Okay. I was like, how did that happen? It is not scary. I think John wears it well. Yeah, and it's not an ironic mustache. He's grown his hair out a little bit. He turned off hippie, haven't he? Yeah, it's kind of fun. He's like Wooderson. I like it. Let's see. Could it be this is from how awesome is Joe, aka Joe and Twitter. Okay. Could it actually be possible for human to be raised by ace like Tarzan? I would say the answer is undeniably yes. And I'm going to wind it up for my last one with something people ask a lot. What does COA mean? And that is from Joseph Gubbles. No, do not explain it. That's a trick. He's been trying to figure it out forever, and if he can't do it on his own, he has to figure it out on his own, chuck or else he's never going to learn. All right. Sorry, Joseph. That was a SmackDown. What's our favorite episode? Chuck. Of what? Of stuff you should know. Oh, I thought we were on the Simpsons. Oh, man. I get asked this a lot. It's always different. Today I'm going to go with lobotomy. It's a good one. You? Nothing. None of them. There's just so many. I know. It's hard to choose. Like, I'll look through occasionally and spot ones I know and think that because we're always asked this. And I always say the same, like five things, like lobotomy, body farms, cannibalism you know what? I recently listened to the FDA regulate herbs. I think I was telling you. Good. And that is worth listening to again. All right. Some people are making their way through again. They've already made it through and they're making it through again. The whole catalog looking at you. OMG. Chris, there's a name for people like that. Josh masochist. Superfans. Same thing. Yes. If you are a superfan, we want to hear from you always. We're pretty friendly guys, so we'll say hi back. Usually. If we don't, don't take it personally. Keep saying hi. We read your email. We answer a lot of them. Twitter. That's s yskpodcast is our Twitter handle. Rom. Facebook at. Facebook. Comstuffynow, and you can send us an email like you just mentioned to Stuffpodcast@housetuffs.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff From the Future. Join Housetofwork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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 Kild Gareth and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
How the La Brea Tar Pits Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-la-brea-tar-pits-work | It's surprising that a few 12-feet-deep pools of asphalt have proven to be one of the most significant troves of Pleistocene fossils, but the La Brea Tar Pits, located in the heart of Los Angeles, are giving science a clear picture of a puzzling time. | It's surprising that a few 12-feet-deep pools of asphalt have proven to be one of the most significant troves of Pleistocene fossils, but the La Brea Tar Pits, located in the heart of Los Angeles, are giving science a clear picture of a puzzling time. | Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:23:09 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=14, tm_min=23, tm_sec=9, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=175, tm_isdst=0) | 30150820 | 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's over there making our lives difficult. And that, as as usual, means it's time for stuff. That's right. Yes. How are you, my friend? I'm good. Yeah? Feel well? Healthy. A little tubby, but, yeah, I'm okay. That just means you've been living, right? That's my motto. It's sugar cookies. Yeah. Which I like. Yes. Got to have sugar cookies sometimes. So I leave for La. In the morning. Where? The home of the library of tarpitz. I didn't realize that you're doing the intro. Or should I call it pueblo de nostra, senora la Riena de Los Angeles. Juana. It's hard to hear that. Los Angeles without thinking. It really is. Yeah. But yes, that was the original name of Los Angeles, Chuck. Did you know that before this? Yeah, I did not. Sure, that's a mouthful. I can see why everybody just calls it Los Angeles. Or if you're really hip. La. Yes. Or if you're a jackass. City of Angels. No, that's that's like movie people. That Hot Lanar. Yeah. Some people say that you can get a magnet still that says Hot Lana. Yeah, well, no one in it or from Atlanta says that. That's a total outsider thing. You don't think they make Atlanta magnets in Atlanta? Yeah, but they sell them at the airport, right? Atlanta people selling it. It's like saying Nevada instead of Nevada. Is that really how it's supposed to be pronounced? Nevada? Yeah, man. You don't hear everyone every time. You don't see those emails from angry Nevada. Nevada's. After a while, they just kind of all become a blur. Yeah, we get taken the test for that. And I said, you know what? Everyone outside Nevada says Nevada. I hate to break it to you. Yeah, like, everybody and they say, you know what? Everyone outside Atlanta says atlanta? I don't think they say that. Some people do. But now I don't hold a grudge against you. If you say it, I just pretend you aren't there. Okay. You just ignore hot Lana. So that was my intro. That was a good one, man. I think you should do one and people should vote. Here is mine. Chuck, have you ever been to Los Angeles? I have. You used to live there, didn't you? Yeah. And you've been to the Brave Tar Pits, obviously. A bunch of times, surely. I've been once. You mean? I went to LACMA. Yeah. I had no idea. It was, like, right there. Mid Wilshire, Miracle Mile. It's like you walk out the back entrance into a Japanese garden at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA. Yeah. And you just keep walking a little further, and all of a sudden there's a huge mastodon. Yeah. And then you go into the museum. The time forgot it was closed while we were there. And I'm really sad, especially after reading this article. The Page Museum is what it's called. Did they update it? I think they might have updated it. No, I mean, it was closed for the day. We spent all of our time in LACMA and then came out got you. It was closed for the day. I think they may have updated. I think they did very recently, since I left, because when I went when I was living there in late 2018 to 90s, early 2000s, it was delightfully old. Yeah. Well, it was open in 77. Yeah, it looked pretty untouched. Yeah. Like mechanical mastodons inside that were all, like, clunky. Oh, no, I'm really missed it. We got to go back. Yes, it's pretty neat. The Herky jerky mastodon. Yeah. You get to tell they're old. Not in the ways that mastodons are supposed to be old. No. From the got you. So, no, I haven't been to the Page Museum, but I have been to the tar pits themselves. That's neat. And tar pits actually is a misnomer. Yeah. They should be called asphalt pits or bitumen pits because tar is derived from coal and these pits are derived from petroleum. Yeah. So there's the fact of the podcast, sadly, is that the fact of the podcast yes, the oil, crude oil seeps up through fissures in the Earth's crust, and then some of that evaporates, and that leaves behind that tar asphalt. Asphalt. But let's go back even further than that. These tar pits, Libreo tar pits, which are basically for anybody who hasn't been there, if you're walking around the grounds of the tar pits and there's just basically black ponds that look like they have oil slicks on top of them, then when you look a little closer, you're like, oh, it's all oil. Yeah. Every once in a while, there's a bubble coming up here or there quite a bit. And again, there's like a huge mastodon coming out, like a model coming of one of the pits. It's pretty cool. Well, not quite coming out, but trying to. Right. He's never going to come out. If that played out as a film, he would not make it out. Right. And that's the whole reason that the tarpits even have fences and plastic mastodon in the first place, because many millions of years ago, Los Angeles was underwater. There's a lot of aquatic life that lived and died in that area and went to the bottom. And over time, we're compressed into the fossil fuel. Petroleum fossil fuel. Yes. And then as the ice age came and the waters were seated and were locked into glaciers up north, that land became drier. And as a result, like you said, that bitumen started coming up through fissures in the ground and has been ever since. Those are the labrador pits. That's right. And in those pits, we're talking about the Pleistocene Epoch, which is about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. Yeah. And the neat thing is, except for a handful. Well, more than a handful, except for some of these huge land mammals that they found. A lot of the animals are the same as they are now. And this was the last time we had major climate cooling. So studying these fossils, we can learn more about our climate from studying these things. Then I don't know what I was halfway through, like, wait a minute. I don't know what part two is. I think you made the point. Yeah, but that's how you can learn a lot from future climates. By studying past climates. Right, exactly. And that's one of the things that they're doing now. There's kind of a second wind that's going on. The laboratory tarpitz. The first one came about, we should say, since laboratory tar pits made their first debut about 40,000 years ago, they've been successfully trapping animals of all sorts. And not just animals, plant life, too. Yes. Mostly carnivores, though. Yes. And there's a reason that there's mostly carnivores. They figured it out because there is a disproportionate amount of carnivores in the Labreya tar pits. 90%. Yeah. Which is way more than there were carnivores, proportionately speaking, during the Pleistocene Epoch, specifically this last 40,000 year era. And they think they have it figured out. Why? Well, it makes total sense. Animal gets stuck in tarpet, bigger animal comes along and wants to eat that animal. Right. It gets stuck in tarpit. And maybe even a bigger animal wants to eat both of those. It gets stuck in tarpit. Yeah. Well, plus also a lot of carnivores hunting packs. Sure. So if they're like, well, this stupid mastodon can't get out of this black pond, I'm going in after them. Let's all go in after them. Everybody gets stuck. Pretty much. It yeah. That's why there's more carnivores. It's why they're disproportionately represented. Yeah, I said he talking about the mastodon outside. The fake one, I believe, if I remember correctly, a mama. Oh, yeah. There's babies in there, and there's babies, like, on the shore, and the mama is trapped, and it's really kind of sad. It is. It's what they picked there. But I guess that was the realism of the Pleistocene Epoch. Yeah. It's mommy goes hunting and doesn't come back. That's right. It's like bambi. Yeah. And I think I've told this story before. I was shooting there once on a TV commercial, and I was far away from the large pools, and I was standing there, and I looked down, and there was a little two foot diameter pool of thar right by my feet. They're all over the place. Yeah. I mean, they're not all walled up and fenced off. And it was bubbling. You know what that is, by the way? It's methane, I guess. Yeah. From bacteria they found out. Sure. So that was only, like, five or six years ago that they learned that, and they discovered, like, 200 new kind of bacteria. That's neat, petroleum loving bacteria that's great. And then it's still burping even in these tiny little puddles. Yeah. And even the big puddles are only about 12ft deep. It's just like 4 meters, something like that. For our non Liberian friends. Yeah. So the tarpants have been just trapping animals, like you said. Even there's lots of recent animals in it. They still find cattle bones. Rodney Dangerfield. Yeah. He was found in there. Apparently, there was a Los Angeles Police Department scuba diver that dove into the pits to retrieve evidence for a cold murder case and was successful, apparently. But he said, like, I've dived all over the place looking for evidence. He said that was the craziest dive I've ever made. He went in the tar? Yes. How? He scuba dived in the tar pit. Wow. Yeah. The article I read wasn't really big on detail. It wouldn't even say what evidence he was looking for. It must be less dense as you go because the tar that I've seen, it's like road tar. It's so thick. Right. I don't see how you could move. I would think scuba diver gets trapped. I think it's probably more dense toward the bottom. And if you're amassed it on, you're, like, it's probably quick sandy. And this guy was probably avoiding the bottom. Plus, I'm sure there are a lot of people, like, pulling him out. Yeah. I think that bad. Rob Lowe movie. He did a variative body in there. Yeah. What was that? Bad influence? Bad influence? Bad behavior. Familiar bad something. Bad movie. Yeah, it was probably pretty bad. This is before Roblox had a big comeback, right? This is the post sex tape years oh, yeah. When he was just trying to hang in there. Trying to hang in there. Yeah. We didn't make it back, Roblox. But they got all kinds of, like, sabertooth tigers and direwolves and original native horses to North America that don't exist anymore. Yeah. There used to be horses here. There used to be camels. And they're not like the European horses that everyone thinks there's horses here. You're focusing on the horses. There used to be camels here. I know. And like you said, saber tooth tigers. They found about 4000 of those direwolves they found about 2000 dire wolves so far. And then they also found something called the American lion. This thing was the coolest animal in North America ever. Right. Yeah. They got up to 8ft long, 4ft at the haunches. They weighed something like, up to \u00a3775, which is 350 kg. These are giant mammals. They were about 25% larger than an African lion. Yeah. They were huge. If they wanted you dead, you were dead. Not like these lions these days. Right. They're lazy. This American lion would have just taken your head clean off. Yeah. And all sorts of predators or flying predators in the sky. Yeah. In the tar, apparently. So far, they found 660 species, 59 mammal species, 135 bird species, tons of everything from like mollusks to the new bacteria you're talking about. The library targets have been so vital in providing a picture of life during the late paleozoic, that the time period from 300,000 years ago to the end of the not paleozoic. Did I say that? Yeah, I meant Pleistocene. Yeah. So the 300,000 years to the end of the Pleistocene is called the rancho labradian, all one word land mammal age. Yeah. They renamed it for all this activity. Right. Yeah. That's how important these little pits of bitumen are. And we'll talk about how all of this was discovered in just a moment. So, Chuck, if these are basically pools of bubbling, crude, sticky asphalt, how did a bone ever get pulled out of it? Well, because of progress, my friend, and the fact that Los Angeles was not going pueblo de noesto senora ariana de la San Jillis. Wow, that's a deal. It was bound to be developed because of the weather there in the beautiful pacific coast. Right. So progress people came along and started making a city there, and it's such a volatile area. They realized, hey, this is dangerous, this area right here, till, let's start drilling for oil. Yeah. And it was, I think, the Hancock family of Hancock park fame, which is right there as well. I'm more of a MacArthur park person. Yeah. Wow. It's a good song. Okay, I thought you meant you just, like, scoring cheap drugs and someone leaving a cake out in the rain. Yeah, MacArthur park is not the greatest area. No, but it was a good song. Yeah. But Hancock park. Boy, is that nice. Sure. Yeah. I say that like it should be obvious, but I don't know where it is. Yeah, it is nice. Okay, so we're talking about progress. Yes. The Hancock family in 1870 started drilling for oil. Right. And they basically the pits have been used since by paleo Indians for things like waterproofing canoes and stuff like that. Yes, that stuff. You want to patch a hole in a canoe. Sure. You can do a lot worse than asphalt. Yeah, because that was before. What's that like a numerical tape that they make. It's like one of those products you see on TV type thing. The only one I'm familiar with is that spray that the guy on the clear plexiglass boat that too holes drilled in. Yeah, that's good stuff. But we don't buzz market here. No, because we don't remember the names of anything. Yeah, that's true. But back then, this tar, man, I mean, that was like that was magic to the native American, and it's just sitting there. Just don't get too close. And then when the spaniards came in and started using that area for cattle rustling, they used it also for waterproofing, for their roofs. They also used it as fuel. And then once the Hancock family started digging for oil, they kind of left the tar pits alone. But as far back as 1875, a guy named William Denton was the first person to describe a fossil taken from the Brayotarpit. Somebody gave him a sabertooth tiger tooth, canine tooth, and then inspired him. It did, yeah. And so the nascent Natural History Museum from Los Angeles contacted the Hancock family and said, hey, why don't you let us start tooling around there? And they let them starting in 1019 one, they were allowed to basically do some kind of random, small misguided excavation. Yeah. They were only concerned about the big Daddy bones. Well, that came in the 30s when they started really digging the pits. I thought 1913 is when they started their first full scale you're right. I'm sorry. They also did it in the 30s, too. Well, from 1913 till now. Right, okay. So in 1913, they started digging pits around the Labrador Tar pits, further pits, 96 of them in total. Yeah. They had to dig down to these. They weren't just big natural pools of black tar, because people would have seen that previously and like, hey, what's up with all that stuff? Right. So they would dig down, remove all of the bones, and like you said, they were really only interested in the big ones. So they kind of discarded and left alone a lot of the bird bones and plant fossils and all that stuff. That's boring. And the other thing they didn't do was catalogue the bones together. So they basically just threw them all into piles. And there's a picture on the Page Museum's website of one of the early lead excavators just surrounded by boxes and boxes of bones. I'm sure they're like, what do we do with all this stuff? Yeah, they found something like a million or so. A million and a half bones, I think. Yeah. They dug 96 pits in total. Well, we'll talk about the new progress, but before the new progress, they had close to 4 million fossils. And that sounds like a lot, but they said you only have to get, like, once every ten years. Some big animal. Well, yeah, that was another thing, too. That doesn't make any sense. In 40,000 years, how could you have 4 million bones? I think it makes perfect show up, they were saying. Well, yeah, if you do the math, I think if you have 30 or ten animals stranded every decade, it would account for it. Yeah. I'm surprised it would more than that, because, I mean, animals wander into tar pits. Yeah. They might also get smart and avoid tar pits when when they see their mommy go in and not come out. I guess so, because those little baby mastodons didn't look like they were going in after. No, they were out of there. They went to the beach. Yeah. They went to McArthur Park. That's right. All right. So I said they dug 96 pits. Not all of them bore fruit. Quite a few of them did. And pit number was at 91 was noted for the bounty of fossils it provided. It's always the fifth to last one. Isn't that the same? It's always the fifth to the last. And they for about 40 years, they really concentrated on Pit 91. I don't think they're digging there right now, although they may have started again. I think they're hot and heavy on Project 23. Should we go ahead and go to Project 23? We'll get to Project 23 in a second. Let's do a message break real quick. Okay, so let's talk about Project 23. Yeah, I think Project 23 started in 2006, and that was basically a plan to continue digging and find more fossils and take better care with the small guys to get a more complete fossil record. And they call it 23 because they did it well, this whole thing started because LACMA wanted to build a parking garage. An underground parking garage. Yeah, which you can't do unless around that area because it's so volatile without getting some help from archeologists. And so they ended up digging 23. Just big chunks of land, essentially, in these crates. If you buy a fully grown tree from a nursery, it comes in a huge box, huge wooden planter. Have you ever seen them like that? That's what they used, yeah, and much larger, even in some of them, capable of, like, close to 60 tons of soil and tar and bones or whatever else in there. And that's why they call the Project 23, because there's 23 of them. Yeah. And this was 2006. So they're using much more sophisticated techniques than they were using even in the 60s when they were really hitting Pit 91 hard. That sounded so stupid. Please forgive me, everyone, but they're using sophisticated techniques, and they had the luxury of coming at these deposits from the side or from underneath sure. Rather than having to go down through the tar pits from above. So they really scored a lot of, like, just a trove of deposits of bones. Including a wooly mammoth named Zed. Yes. 80% of them. Yeah. It was a Columbia woolly mammoth. That was the most intact skeleton ever found of a Columbia wooly mammoth. Yeah. And the woolly mammoths you see reconstructed at the Page Museum, like you said, they used to just put all the bones together. So those were bones made up of all kinds of wooly mammoths. That is all Z, or 80% of them is all Zed. And they name a Zed in honor of Zero, the British way of saying Zero. And the reason they named him Zero is because he represents basically like a new start in understanding of not only that species, but all of the life around the era. Yeah. Patient Zero? Pretty much. And the cool thing is, I mean, I like all the camping of the Page Museum, but one of the really neat parts about it is they have what they call the fishbowl. They have the room where they're doing this work is all glass, and you can walk through and see all the skeletons that they've put together and all the funny old dated woolly mammoths that are going, yeah, you can pound on the glass and go, nerds. To some scientists, we can do that. At the very end of it, they're in there brushing, and they have microscopes and all sorts of neat little tools that scientists use. Right. You want to wait till the end anyway, so you can run off right after you say that. Yes. And they're recording all this stuff. It's very detailed. What they're doing is they're getting a fossil record from that time like they didn't have before because they were lazy in the 19th, 13, and on. Right. So one of the reasons why they're looking for this fossil record is because this is a particularly curious time period that the LaBrea tarpits encapsulated, literally, for humans evolved. Well, remember with the early Americans, the debate over that. This is around that time, there was something called the late Pleistocene extinction. There were a lot you'll notice a lot of animals, large animals that used to be in North America that aren't any longer. There's no camels. There's no indigenous American horse any longer. There's no American lion. And all of these animals, what are called megafauna, started dying off at about the same time in North America, and scientists aren't really sure why. And I think that's one of the reasons they're so excited about Zed is they're hoping he can kind of tell them. There are three competing or combination hypotheses for what caused this extinction. Well, humans killed them. That's one that humans either overhunted all of them or overhunted a keystone species like mastodons that led to collapse of the ecosystem as a whole. It doesn't seem likely to me. I know the timeline suggests that, but I think that's correlation okay. That's just my opinion. The other one is climate change itself did that. This is the end of an ice age. Temperatures were rising. Sea levels were rising. It's possible that a lot of these species just couldn't possibly adapt, possibly because they were large, because this late Pleistocene extinction was mostly among mammals or animals, \u00a3100 or more. And then the third one is something called hyper disease, any highly infectious disease possibly introduced by man and then transferred from man to animal. I wonder if they found any human bones in the tar pits at all. I don't know. I haven't heard about that. Yeah, I didn't come across anything like that, either. You think they would have made pretty big hay, that kind of thing. Actually, Josh, I did something we rarely do, and I just looked it up mid show, and they did find a human skull called the LaBrea woman, evidently, like, early on in 1914. And I think that's the only human bones that they've ever found. Wow. So there you have it. There you have it. Do they have any idea when she lived? Approximately 100 years. Wow. She was like between 25 and 30. That is neat. She was old, supposedly. That's a fallacy. Yeah. Once they had a high infant mortality rate back then, which skewed the average life expectancy downward. But once you survived infancy, you could expect to live, like, to a nice ripe old age. But anyway, it's possible that Zed will give us an idea of what the heck happened at the late Pleistocene. Extinction. Yeah, because North America in particular had a peculiarly large die off. Like it happened elsewhere in roughly the same time in other continents, but in North America it was big. Massive. So what happened? Maybe the humans killed them all. Maybe I'm wrong. Ask Zed. Well, not necessarily, but there were humans in other places too, where the extinction wasn't nearly as pronounced. Maybe there were vegetarians. So go to LaBrea Tarpitz. Yeah. Go see Zed with his ten foot long tusks. It's an La institution. If you were just fan of movies, they've shot all kinds of movies in there. Bravo movie. Yeah, it was a great movie. Miracle Mile, Anthony Edwards. Did you ever see that? No. You should check that out. That's a little known cult classic about nuclear war and the last 24 hours before the bomb was supposed to hit La. Really? And it all takes place at the Miracle Mile area. There are scenes in the tarpits and there's a diner there, right on Wilshire that I think Johnny's Diner, that's not even open anymore, but they just keep it there because they filmed so many movies there. Got you. Yeah. Highly recommended by me. Nice. Well, I will see your miracle mile. Yeah, very eighty S. I get ready for that synthesizer. Right. Score. I've got one for you. Have you ever seen Night of the Comet? Dude, I love Night of the Comet. That's a good one, too. Nothing to do with nuclear bombs or La, but it's great. Super 80s, too. Yeah, I love that movie. There you have it. I was behind Anthony Edwards at the rally. They were sourced sanity. Oh, really? Yes. I'm thinking of the right guy. Right? The guy from Top Gun. Yeah. And, er yeah, sure. And Miracle Mile Prevention. Sure. Yeah. I don't remember his name, that one. But that was his best role, I think. We saw the I don't know if you saw him, but when we were in La for a TV show that we had what? Remember when they brought us out for the press weekend thing? I can't remember what that's called, but we the junket. Yes. The two Revenge Of The Booger and the Carrotine guy were both there promoting their new show and they walked by me and I was like, Holy cow, that's two thirds of the Revenge Of The Nerds gang. Yeah, I remember you saying that. Yes, it was pretty exciting. I felt like I missed out. That's all right. Not seeing them, it really wasn't a big deal. Matt Damon a Michael Douglas there too, promoting the Liberati movie. Yeah, I remember seeing them and going, what are they doing together? And that is what our TV show has to do with behind the Candelabra. If you want to know about more amazing connections, you can check us out on social media. We're all over the place. We're on Twitter at SYSK podcast. We're on Instagram and Pinterest. We're on Facebook.com. Stuffychannel. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com the triumphant return of that URL. And if you want to know more about the Labreya tarpitz I did this totally out of order. What is wrong with me today? You got a case of the Mondays weird Wednesday. Anyway, I guess we'll leave it in, huh? Sure. No sense in recording something in error over again. Well, since no one ever knows how to get in touch with us, it's clear that most people tune out by this time anyway, right? Okay. Well, anyway, if you want to know more about the library tarped, type that in the search bar athouseofworks.com and that will bring up this list in her mail. Amnesia Expert is where I'm going to call this. We called out for amnesia experts, and we got one. And she says, I sort of am. Her name is Maya. She's a PhD student working on her dissertation in neuroscience. She said, My work focuses on spatial working memory, and our lab actually models human amnesia and rats. While there were a few things that were nitpickfully wrong, I most wanted to write in about your discussion of short term and working memory. While in the podcast, he stated that there were two separate things, they were two separate things, and that working memory forms a bridge between STM and LTM. In fact, the term short term memory is no longer really used in the memory field. Working memory now encompasses what used to be referred to as short term. The working part is in reference to the fact that these items can be remembered as long as the brain works at rehashing the information, like, say, repeating it to yourself, rather than for certain arbitrary period of time. That's why they use a Clydesdale to represent working memory. There's also competing theories about the actual limits of working memory, but our lab believes, and has shown that it is capacity dependent, that the traditional idea of seven items really holds true for simple things like numbers or letters. In fact, the more complicated the information, the fewer items your working memory can hold. That's amazing. For example, while you can easily remember the ten digits by repeating it in your head, you could only remember one or two faces using the same strategy. So that is from Maya, and good luck on your PhD studies. Thanks for correcting us, too. Maybe it would have held a little more weight if they. Come after you got your PhD. But we appreciate you writing in either way. If you want to be derided by me or chuck on listener mail, or if you want to just correct us, we appreciate that. In all seriousness, you can write to us. As I said before, stuffpodcast@housestepworkscom. And while you're on the computer, you might as well check out our beautiful, luxurious home on the Web stuff You Should Know. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
Are You My Mother?: How Animal Imprinting Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-you-my-mother-how-animal-imprinting-works | What do little baby ducklings have to do with Nazis? A lot actually. Find out about animal imprinting experiments and the debate over their ethics. | What do little baby ducklings have to do with Nazis? A lot actually. Find out about animal imprinting experiments and the debate over their ethics. | Thu, 18 Jun 2015 14:32:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=14, tm_min=32, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=169, tm_isdst=0) | 34501375 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum Select Card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage Miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com welcome to Stuff you should know from Housetepworks.com. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's, Charles, that you took Brian. You're imprinting all over me. Stop. Is that what I'm doing? Yeah. You're rubbing your feathers all over me. Poker. The feather duster that I'm tickling you with. Poking me with your beak? Yeah. I'm not your parents. You know that's, right? Thank God. What a weird intro that was. Yeah, that was an scene. It's called animal imprinting. I'm sure we've talked about this before, but is it Ann seen or end seen? We need Joe Randazzo to weigh in on this one. No, we don't. It's ann seen. Sure. Common. I'm positive. We have talked about this. I know we have, but I don't remember the outcome. Well, it was me saying it's unseen. For sure. And you're going, sure. That's why we're talking about it again. Yeah. Okay. It's ansene so. Animal imprinting. It's a thing. It is. In the strictest definition, it is only for birds. Yeah. And specific type of birds called precocial birds. Yeah. They're very precocial. Yeah, exactly. That means that they hatch out of the egg and look around and start waddling and they're like, oh, look, this is water. I have this weird. And they urge to get in there and swim. Oh, here's a little bit of duck food. I think I'll eat some of that because I have a drive to do that, but what is that wonderful smell? Oh, I think this might be the duck that gave birth to me or laid me as an egg. And now I'm going to imprint myself on you. It's either that or it's a grown human man. Yeah. It can be anything, especially with ducks, but especially, specifically, precocial birds have a process where they form an attachment to a parent, and it's been shown over time that that parent doesn't necessarily have to be a biological parent. It cannot even be in the same species. It doesn't even have to be a living thing. No, it can be a toy train. Yes, it can be. Or a pair of gumbo. And humans have known for a very long time about this process. It just wasn't until like the 1900 that we started to get a real grip on it. But apparently there's a Roman treatise around, I guess like the 30s in the real mean like 30 Ce. Not 1930s. No, like 30 not the swinging thirty s. And it basically says, like, if you want to train some wild ducks, go get yourself some duck eggs, put them under a hen that you have domesticated, and that hen will raise those ducks as their own and they'll be unwild. Yeah. In rural China, back in the day, rice farmers would imprint new ducks with a stick so they could then use that stick to guide them out to their rice population where they would eat snails. Right. The rice population. So they're literally following the stick around like it's their parents, so they would lead them to work for them, basically. And the whole thing is the stick was what they were introduced to at a very specific time in their life, usually within a couple of hours. And they said, stick, you're my mom, I'm going to follow you everywhere. When you're not around, you're going to freak out. It's so weird. Yeah. And ducks are a really great they're like a classic example of imprinting because they're very emotional creatures and they form very strong attachments and they're very social creatures. So either they're all those things because they form very strong imprinted bonds, or they form very strong imprinted bonds because of all those things. Yeah. Well, I think it's natural selection at work. At the heart of this whole thing is it nature versus nurture. And imprinting is a really great natural experiment to investigate the whole thing. And what it seems like we found is that it's both that apparently, especially specifically precocial ducks are hardwired to go seek out and form an attachment. But depending on what they encounter at the time, e g their environment, also known as nurture, they can form that attachment with a stick. Yeah. Or a toy train. Or a Nazi. It's very cute, actually, when you think about it. They're just like, love me, whatever. Yeah. Right hand puppet. What was that? Dr. Seuss book? I think it was Love Me hand puppet. No, I think it was. Are you my mother? I don't know. Never heard of it. Like Horton makes an appearance in it. It's like some animals walking around like, Are you my brother? Yeah. That's awful. It is pretty sad, but it's just basically a doctor who spoke about imprinting. Oh, cool. Well, you mentioned Nazis, so to me, that's my cue to segue into the life of conrad with a K. Lorenz, who was Austrian, born at the turn of the century, and he was big into animals, and he studied regular medicine and then decided, this is great, humans are fun, but I'm really into studying animals and their behaviors. Right. That was his bag. So he became a zoologist. He did. He got a PhD in 33 and started work alongside Oscar Heinrich, who is a fellow scientist with Austrian or German, I'm not sure. He's probably one of the two. Well. So Lawrence is working. He's already established himself as a scientist when the Nazis come marching into town. Literally. One of the things he had to answer for years later when he won the Nobel Prize for his imprinting work was his zeal and enthusiasm, basically, with which he welcomed the conquering Nazis and took his ideas about domestication and applied them to the lens of Nazi theory. Conrad Lawrence was a racist in the purest and violist form of the word. Yes. There's no escaping that. No. And he flat out denied even being a party member until it was proven. And then he was like, oh, I was I forgot about that membership. And he very much tried to wiggle his way out of that years later by saying, I think how it ends up is he's not the only academic that was on the wrong side of history. No, sir. Back then. And he came out years later like, oh, yeah, but I sort of got swept up. I didn't really mean it in this way. And science has kind of divided some people forgave him and others did not. Yeah. And I think science as a whole has forgiven him largely like science with a capital S. But there are plenty of scientists out there who are like, the guy was a Nazi, and he used his theories to help the Nazi regime. Like, he was a Nazi psychologist in Austria who was paid to examine German Polish people. Yes. And basically determine that the mating of a German person and a Polish person produces undesirable offspring. Well, you throw that out into the Nazi void and see what they do with that info. Yeah. They're not going to be mating with Polish people. So this guy, he was an evolutionary theorist of a very brilliant magnitude. Great zoologist, but also a Nazi. And a lot of people call in to question, like, the work that he produced. But again, as a whole, science seems to have forgiven him for the most part. Yeah, that's a great sort of a COA. It's more like the more, you know, type of thing. You got to make the star. Exactly. So that aside, let's get back to his work with Oscar Heinroth. They were contemporaries, and Heinroth he was actually the first dude, even though he didn't call it imprinting at the time, he used the German word purgun. Is that how you say it? Yeah, like an afternoon sort of a perigun. Oh, that's good. That sounded Swedish chefy, though. Yeah. I'll probably get taken a test, but from my memory of Germany College, that's right on the money. So, like I said, he didn't call it imprinting at the time, but he did study the gray lag geese and found out that right out of the egg, that they can attach to humans. And it was a big you know, although they did it in Rome, in ancient China, germans probably thought they made it that up. Right. Discovered it first. Exactly. Yeah. And another thing that Lawrence is criticized for, aside from the Nazi affiliation, was that he very readily made what's called an anthropic shift, where he took his findings about animals and was very eager to extrapolate them onto humans as well, which some people are like, whoa, buddy, you haven't shown that connection yet. Yeah, you can't. That doesn't always work. No, but we'll see, like, come to there's an understanding that yes, there is something similar in humans and other mammals, too, as we'll talk about. So there was one experiment early on where he took some goose eggs and separated them out into control and the experimental group and, of course, the experimental he raised separate from the mother completely. All this sounds kind of mean, too, by the way. Yeah. So all in printing and experiments are about as immoral as they get. It's like ripping the baby right out of the egg or womb away from its mother. Right. To see what happens. Right. Like, here, this gum boot is your mother. Try growing up normal and socialized with a gum boot for a mom. No. Agreed. Yeah. Almost across the board. These are immoral, unethical experiments. Agreed. So the experimental geese only met with him, not the goose mom at all. And then eventually, to test this out, what he did was he put the groups together, marked them, put them under a box, and then basically, sort of like the old experiment, like Brady Bunch thing to see who calls the dog, which, when the dog will come I forgot about that. He had someone lift the box. He's on one side of the room, the goose is on the other, and the ones who he had raised came straight to him. Yeah. Which I'll bet when they lifted that box, it was adorable. A bunch of confused ducklings looking around like, what was that? Right. You're my mommy nazi man. The bearded Nazi is my mom. So he finally named it Felial imprinting, I think. Phil imprinting. Yeah. And it's basically exactly what it sounds like. It's that if you introduce something or yourself to precocial bird at a certain stage of development, it will say, you're my parent. Right. Yeah. And he initially called that the critical period right. Is the amount of time you had to do that. Yeah. So his studies weren't quite as well designed as later studies, but he basically said he assumed probably first ten minutes, maybe an hour after Hatching is this critical period. And then he also took it a step further by saying it's irreversible. So once this duckling thinks the gum boot as its mom, it's always going to be, you're stuck with that duck until you eat it. So Lawrence, like, really put a lot out there, and he really moved evolutionary biology ahead to a degree. Ethology is the field that he helped found, but we'll talk about some follow up studies that supported and overturned some of his findings right after this. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. 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So Chuck Lawrence comes up with filial imprinting, right? Yeah. Then later studies in, like, the especially by a guy named Eckhart Hess and AO ramsay, who built a lab in Maryland specifically dedicated to studying animal imprinting. And they have really great control conditions, and they really refined Lawrence's findings. Yeah, and they studied Mallard ducklings again with the ducks, and they found that the most sensitive period was 13 to 16 hours after Hatching, which was higher more hours than I think Lorenz had found. Correct? Yeah, he had it down to like three or 4 hours, right, Top? Yeah. I guess the duckling likes to have a little time to swim around and get some food and maybe take a rest, and then they'll start getting down to imprinting. Yeah. And I thought this was super interesting. They also found that the ducklings that had to jump through more hurdles and go through more to find the parent formed a stronger attachment. It just kind of makes sense that you work harder for it. Right? I guess it's like that Morrissey song, the more you Ignore Me, the closer I get. Man, he's the best. The best, yeah. Also the worst as far as canceling shows and dude cannot I don't ever completed a full tour. There's no way. It's like a headache. Like every Moroccan tour. Eventually, if you're on the end of that tour, you might as well not even have tickets. Yeah. Because you're not going to be seeing Morris. All right. That's my little soapbox about Morris. Finish your tour. That's right. You mean I had that happen to us. You had Morris tickets in C. Was it recently? It was in the last, like, two years. He should call every tour. Like the Morris Potential Tour. Potential tour or first half tour. Yeah. So back to the ducklings. They also found that they would imprint onto little paper mache ducks that they made. Yeah, it was very sweet. Colored balls. Yeah, colored more than the white ones, which is interesting, I guess. I know they must react to color more, even though well, vision wasn't really a part. I thought it was just sound. It depends. Smell and touch. So there's a PBS nature special called My Life as a Turkey, and it's about a researcher who is studying animal imprinting and specifically with turkeys. I read that one turkeys have astounding vision, just amazing vision. Like they can spot a screw head from a football field away. That's small. How do you know? Did they say screw head? Right. Well, yeah, they're known for going and rooting out screw heads at long distances. Wow. They just stop and point like a pig in the truffles. Right? Exactly. That's what turkeys are used for. Turkey has very great vision. So I could see color being an environmental cue, I guess. Smell movement, touch is a pretty good one. Yeah, it's a big one. All right, so another thing they tried that did not work, which I thought was interesting is going back even before they hatched and using auditory queues in the egg. And they found that didn't make any difference. But it's a good thing to test. The guy on the nature thing, though, found the opposite. Oh, really? Yeah. He would talk turkey to the eggs. Oh, I thought he talked turkey once they were born. No, while they were eggs. He talked turkey to get them used to it. Right. Yeah. And that was pretty good turkey. Thank you. And then after that, when they were hatched, he talked turkey again to them, and apparently they came right over. Okay. But smells also a big one, too. Huge. The inside of the egg probably smells a lot like the mom. Yeah, that makes sense. So all these environmental cues add up to what this little hatchling is basically mindlessly following, because, again, all of this imprinting stuff has found that animals at least are hardwired to go seek out and form these attachments. Yes. And they also found that critical period was even longer when they kept them isolated from birth. So if they kept them completely socially isolated, they would have up to 20 hours to imprint. And this caused researcher name slukin. Great names. He said it's actually not a critical period. Let's call it a sensitive period. Right. Semantics, if you ask me. Yeah. But it makes a pretty good point. It's basically saying, like, this thing is not yes, it appears to be hardwired, but it's also malleable in the face of nurture, in the face of the environment. It can be postponed, it can be altered. It's not nature versus nurture. It's nature and nurture in conjunction with one another. That's right. And so all of this filial imprinting that Lawrence first identified and really started systematically studying and that was later carried on in birds, also led to the discovery that birds also imprint sexually as well as filliaoli. Yes. And depending on what they attach to fillially, their sexual attachments or sexual preferences will also be altered later on in life. Right. As they mature. So, in other words, a bird that is raised by a human will eventually try and mate with humans yes. Even in the presence of other birds of that species. Right. Crazy. Yes. And the reason why they think is because the bird is basically identifying with what it's taking as its own species. Right. So it will say, well, my parent is a human, ergo, I must be a human. Right. And therefore I want to get with a human. Yeah. It's a very confused bird. Right. But there's something that they've also found that refines this whole thing even further, that is that sexual imprinting is basically blocked. They're sexually blind is what they call it, to the person that raised them. Yes. So while they might be attracted to humans, they're not going to be attracted to their human parent. Right. And there's actually something which we should do an incest episode. That sounds like you just pulled that out of thin air, but it's remarkably similar. Yeah. There's something that's been noted in humans called the Westmark effect, which we'll have to do an incest but super interesting. Yeah. Especially coming from a clinical standpoint of viewpoint. Yeah, sure. And not just like, let's do a show on incest growth. Look at it sociologically. This sounds like a study. Back to the birds. Another interesting finding here. When they studied the sexual imprinting, initially it was with jack dolls, which are sort of like crows, and they found that there were different types of imprinting occurring as they mature. So in other words, one of those jackdaws ate with humans, flew with crows, but mated with jackdaws. Right. So that suggests that they were partying. Dude, it's a well rounded jackdaw. Yeah, but it suggests that there are different sensitive periods rather than just one four to 16 hours after hatching. Right. And maybe you have a filial imprinting, like, pretty early on. That's the first one. And then sexual imprinting comes after that. Who knows? Who knows? Well, we'll talk more about remember I said Lawrence was accused of making the anthropic shift a little too soon? Well, he was vindicated to a large extent because a lot of this does apply to mammals as well. We'll talk about that right after this. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s y SK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comssksk. Squarespace. Before we talk about mammals, those quote that I meant to read before the last break, he talked about the guy who talked turkey, Joe Hutto. And he has a quote. He said, when the first polt emerged, he made his turkey sound. And as Joe recounts, the polt turned his head, its eyes met Joe's and, quote, something very unambiguous happened in that moment. Quote, true love. Isn't that cute? It is cute, but a little creepy. He's like, we met. Our eyes met across the room and it was unambiguous. Yeah. So, anyway, sorry about that. I just had to throw that in there. Nice. Joe hotto. Turkey lover. Yeah. Go watch my Life is a Turkey PBS. I'd say turkey lover. And Jess, he was a scientist. Oh, yeah. He's not a creep. No, creeps don't use words like unambiguous to describe connections. They say, Get in my van. Right. All right. So, mammals, this is not exactly, strictly speaking, imprinting, but they've sort of expanded over the years the definition to include, like, what happens if you rip a monkey away from its mom? Which has been done. Yes. By a guy named Harry Harlow in the Despicable. Scientists involved in animal testing. As a matter of fact, Harlow's tests with filial imprinting among mammals, and monkeys in particular, led to the animal rights movement. It definitely gave it steam and a lot of public support after articles and news stories were released about Harlow. And when he was vilified, he did not buckle under public opinion. He is very famously quoted as who could ever love a monkey? Everybody but you. That's what he said in response to being criticized. Who could ever love a monkey? Like what's your problem, idiots? It's a monkey. Yeah, I don't get that. People out there like that, though. Sure. They shouldn't be in charge of running tests about filial imprinting with monkeys. They can just sit on the sidelines and hate animals. Yeah. Or watch TV or something. Yeah, agreed. Watch the broderick movie about monkey theft. Project X. Yeah, that one. Yeah. Just watch that on a loop. But the working title was monkey See, Monkey Dew. You're probably right. All right, so back to mammals, right? Yes. They did some studies in the 1990s. A researcher named Keith Kendrick, and this one doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. They switch sheep and goats at birth and they were allowed contact, social contact with their own species. But they were raised by their adoptive parents. Like the baby sheep was raised by the goat. But they're still allowed to commingle with other sheep. And it still worked. It turned out that they preferred to mate with the species of the adopted parent or adopted mother. But they also found, very remarkably, or notably, that it's reversible as well. Yes. They wanted to see how it would hold up. Right. So once a year, they would bring them all back together and be like, Mingle, there's some cheese plate over there. Well, they play a little music. This is after right after they had removed them from the opposite species, put them back with their own species, and once a year they said, hey, remember those goats that you like so much? Oh, it was like that, yeah. Okay. And what they found was that among females, we could say females because we're talking about a different species. That's right. The females showed a preference. They reverted to their intra species preference. So they showed, like, a sexual preference for their own species after about one to three years after being returned. Yes. Right. Yes. But males, even after three years of being commingled, again, they still showed a preference for the species that they didn't print it on. Yeah. The goats are still like, oh, man, I remember the sheep. Right. And the sheep know the same thing about the goats. I look forward to Sheep day once a year. Exactly. Where we can go party cheese plates. Oh, man. I thought that was really interesting, though. I mean, there's no explanation, I guess, but how the females and the males reacted years later. All males are stubborn. Yeah. I think maybe that's all it is. Yeah. Not quite as agile as another way to put it. So that's cheap and goats. Yes. The experiment is called the Old Switcheroo. Harry Harlow did some experiments, and he actually as mean as his experiments were, he actually managed to basically disprove an ongoing debate that had been ongoing up until that point. Yeah. Whether or not you form an attachment or animals form an attachment based on classical conditioning or based on some sort of evolutionary mechanism. Right. And so the classical conditioning people said, no, it's all about food. So the animal goes up and imprints on whatever is giving it food. Right. And what it's doing is it's making an imprint, an attachment with the person that gives it food. So you're looking for the food and you insert the person who gives you the food, and then you can remove the food and you still have the attachment to the person that gave you the food. Classical conditioning. Just standard Freud stuff, right? Yeah, I punched that button. Cocaine comes out. Exactly. Well, that's more skinnery, but yeah, conditioning. So with Harlow's experiments, he took monkeys, stripped them from their mothers, in some cases, let them get nice and attached to their mothers and then stripped them from their mothers. Yeah. Nice guy. Had all sorts of different designs. But basically the upshot was he introduced them to two different mothers. They're both inanimate objects. One was a monkey mother made of wire with, like, spikes. It was a toaster. Well, they referred to it as the Iron Maiden, but this one had food. The other one was an inanimate monkey mother who was made of terry cloth. It was soft. Yeah. A little bit like a teddy bear monkey. Teddy bear. So to a monkey, all of these monkeys showed a preference for the terry cloth monkey mother. Of course, they. Would go to the wire monkey mother when they were hungry and would eat, and they would immediately go back to the monkey mother when Harry Harlow came in. Blah, blah, would scare them all. They would all go over to the terry cloth mother. So he basically showed that it's not food. Right. By extension, it's not classical conditioning. It's softness, it's comfort, it's contact. Exactly. It may be physical protection, but apparently it is contact. And to make an anthropic shift, you can extrapolate that on humans, too, because there's a drug called oxytocin that is released especially on skin to skin contact, which is why touching and raising an infant and holding an infant is extraordinarily important, not just for its development, but also for establishing bonds in contact with that kid. Yeah. And especially for adoptive parents. They say a lot of skin on skin contact as soon as possible is key to establishing that bond. But that's really neat, because it means, like, the imprinting is all about it basically proves family is what you make of it, or family is whatever you find is your family. It's not this predefined structure from infancy. It's whatever you make of. Yeah, that's true. And then Harlow, I like him less and less the more you talk about them. But on the other side of the spectrum, what we've learned through all this research is if you work in wildlife conservation, they're not just willy nilly and how they handle animals anymore. They go through great pains and efforts to like we mentioned, the hand puppet. They have Operation Condor, where they will raise these baby condors who are abandoned, and they would dress their hand puppet up to look like a mama condor, to feed it, and basically to do everything they can do to make sure that they can live a regular life in the wild. And they're not looking for that iron spiked iron maiden in the jungle, and even down to, like, migratory patterns. They'll use the ultralight planes to later teach these birds, and they will dress up the plane to look like a condor or whatever, a duck, and fly the migratory pattern that they should use the route. There's one of the researchers inside the glider that's dressed up like a condor on the PA going, for me and the cutest thing ever, they found out that I think it was in Japan that pandas didn't do so well when they were handled by humans too young. So now they wear panda suits. Yes. Isn't that adorable? Yes, it is. It's like you go to work, you punch in, you put on your panda suit, and you cuddle with baby pandas. Well, it's not just human contact that can screw up like, say, a panda. Yeah. What they found is one of the things that Harlow found was that imprinting has a lot to do with socialization. So that even if you just stick a baby with the wire spiky, iron Maiden monkey mother. But you give that monkey 20 minutes a day to socialize with other monkeys, it should turn out okay. Okay. But even if it has the terry cloth mother and is kept in isolation from other monkeys, they in turn tend to make inadequate mothers is what they call them, where they just neglect their children or smack them around or just do all sorts of stuff because their mother was an inanimate object. Unethical stuff. Yeah. I feel like we owe the band Iron Made in a big apology. Yeah. They're like bad names. Yeah. This is just supposed to be a torture device. Not for animals. For you, I do. There's a cute salon slide show called 20 Heartwarming Stories of Inner Species adoption. That's literally the best thing on the Internet. Isn't that sweet? Is when you find a horse cuddling with a puppy right. Or raising it as its own. Yeah. There's apparently a lioness who is well known in a preserve somewhere for stealing antelope calves and not eating them. I saw that dude. But raising them as her own because she wants a kid. It's unbelievable. Animals teaching us the way, right? Who could ever love a monkey? Like, who cares what you look like? Who cares if I'm meant to eat you, you know I'm going to raise you as my own. Yes. Well, I think they often display like true nurturing love more than a lot of humans do. Yeah. True debt. If you guys want to know more about this kind of thing, you can type animal imprinting in the search barhouseofworks.com and also go check out our classic episode, Animal Domestication. Good one. Pretty good. And you can find that on stagedode.com. And I said search bar in there somewhere. So it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this gang article recommendation. Hi, guys. My name is Ciara. I just finished listening to how street gangs work. I thought I would offer a piece of literature as a suggestion to people interested in reading more about the subject. It's called gang Leader for a Day by Sodhir vin quotes It's a sociological approach to street gangs in Chicago. Started out as a Harvard dissertation with vintagech asking what's it like to be poor and black and turned into seven years of befriending a crackdown and gang leader in the projects. It's a really great read. Very interesting to see a first person account of gang life from someone who was not raised in the community which gangs prevailed. Especially when you learn that gang started to protect black people at its base level. So even when you see the gang violence brought forth in the book pages, you also get to see the gang members doing everything they can to protect their community members. There's a New York Times article, if you're interested, about the book called if You Want to Observe Them, Join Them. I think it was like 2008 ish. But I read it. Awesome. So thanks for all the work you guys put into the episodes. I love constantly learning something new, except for when it's about space. I don't want to learn anything about space, okay? It'll make me lose my mind. Weird. Thank you, Sierra. Thank you, Sierra. Much appreciated. Go listen to our episode on the sun that would make most people lose their minds. Elevated to the moon. Yeah, or Mars. Or the moon. Got a lot of them, by the way. She's like, yeah, I've avoided them all. We want to know what will make you lose your mind, topic wise. Or, actually, in general. Yeah. Or if you've ever imprinted on something non human. There you go. You can send us all that info via Twitter at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comsto. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushennow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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c5df3cb6-5460-11e8-b38c-d3d3852dd57a | Selects: Star Wars Holiday Spectacular | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-star-wars-holiday-spectacular | 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 our annual 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 our annual special edition of SYSK. May the force be with us all. | Sat, 18 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=352, tm_isdst=0) | 52200266 | audio/mpeg | "It's that time everybody. Its time to kick off the holiday season with the annual playing of our episode on the patently terrible Star Wars holiday special. I hope the select finds you merry and bright, cozy and ham happy, filled with the holiday spirit. And I hope you guys are all having a wonderful Christmas time. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W chuckers Bryant and Jerry Jerome Rowland. Who was the wiki mother? Yeah. Mala. That was the Wookie wife. Oh, and mother. Yeah, sure. Tubaka'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 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 in August and still going fresh. Yeah. 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 1978. Let's do the math, shall we? Quick math break. I believe that 2014 was the last Live 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 rookies in the Star Wars universe have every three years. Yes. It's like their Christmas. Yeah. 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 fins, basically. Yeah. It's a very interesting part of the Star Wars cannon. 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, like, 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 with this galaxy. Yeah. At first, that sounds like hyperbole. Like, come on. It's because it was Star Wars. 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. 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. 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. 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 Pasternak 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 one. 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 he 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 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, 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. 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 wasn't still isn't accessible to all audiences. 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. Yeah. Just go ahead and get your little fingers ready to email us if it wasn't driven home that I'm not a 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. 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 say 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'd 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 Wookies, and I want it to take place on their home planet of Kazuk, or Wikipane at 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 K-E-E spell it K-A-S-H-Y-Y-K. Which I mean, I guess it sounds like Chubbucks is a planet. Sure. Also called G 5623. Wookie planet C or Edion 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 Kazakh and Wookies and Chewbacca and his family and everything about Wookie dome. 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. Kazakh 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. 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 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 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 kind 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 has 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 they were producerssungwriters 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 time effect. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Jerry. So, Chuck, you just said singer songwriters. Yeah. What would that have to do with star wars? Yes. 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. Yes. 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 seasons. It's a big red flag. Sunny and Cher had just had its last season. What else? Like, he hall was still going on. Probably they didn't know what he haw still on. Solid gold had yet to come on and take up the mantle. That wasn't a variety 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 with that country chic thing that happened. Yes. It was a big deal in the cities. 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 something. Yes, 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'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 called 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 Akomba and he had made his name for welcome to the Film or east. It was a concert documentary with Van Morrison and the Birds in 1071. 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 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, 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 offscreen going, now look at the camera and just give a nod. Just look at the camera and give a nod. And he 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, 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 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 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 Kazoot. 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 Camel shows up via Skype Call and says he really explains everything that had just happened. Like you're Chewbacca's father. Itchy you're Chewbacca's son, Lumpy. And you are Chewbacca's wife, Ola. Yeah. Thank you. So before everybody starts freaking out, we know that that's actually their nicknames. Their real names are his father is Atuk. It's really hard to pronounce. Mulatto Buck is his wife, and his son is Lumpo, orump as, named by Lucas, but Lucas also named him Lumpy, Itchy, and Maula. 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 Kazuk. Did you say Ketchup? Ketchup. Or Cats up, if you're fancy. But Chewbacca is having trouble getting back to Khachuk 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 him 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 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. 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. 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, 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. But that leads to another problem. Well, we'll fix it with this. And no one 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 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 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. Yeah. 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, waiting for him to come back for Life Day. 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 show. Both. He's great. Yeah. He actually, if you watch what he's doing, he's 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, he played well. I don't even know the names, actually. We could look him 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. 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. The Empire had come because the blockade raided the house and other properties. So he tries to trick them by, I think, rigging a commle 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 living harvey kitel. Oh, I did say Harvey. Harvey Corman. Oh, man. Harvey kitel murdered someone in the middle of the installation. 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 be 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 Eyesley? 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. Trader is in trades humans for money. No, he sells goods. Yes, 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. 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 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 Griffin 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. Yes, it's really strange. All right, so there's also a I know it seems like we're jumping around, but it's mind blowing. This is pretty much like blow for blow. Actually, I forgot earlier on in the special, this is 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 who look 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, Ark Carney's 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 like 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, yeah, it's sort of a weird trip. 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. Yes. Lumpy, like 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 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 can 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 poke. They crash on a planet or something. Yeah. In Hawaii, 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 off? Yes, 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. But you're probably disturbed. 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. 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, I 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. 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 Chewy 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. Yeah. 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 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 greedo, 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 Vaudevillions, 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 wookies 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. 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. Right. And we should also point out the Tree of Life has never been mentioned up to this point. I had no idea what that was. Makes a sudden appearance at the end. And when you say Q song by Q song, you mean Princess Leia starts singing. Yeah. 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 the 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 said 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 it 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 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 Special from 1978 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 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 learn 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 they had some insert shots of, like, imperial cruisers and tie fighters and stuff. Yeah. Remember when Chewbacca leans back and puts his hands behind it? Yeah. That's in there. It's like just a highlight reel from the movie saying, Be 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 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 a 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. I wouldn't have made it through the first time. Let me take that back. I'm a pro. Yes. So I would have made it through the first time. I wouldn't have watched it the second time if I 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 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 an exchange where Lumpy, you can make it out. It goes. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. And those guys are awesome. They are. At least 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 athouseupforce.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's theory of it being drug induced is somewhat surprising, or even unlikely, given the 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 than 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 stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.com. Stuffyheaknow is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcast or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows." | |
86b45b9c-3b0e-11eb-9699-bf8eae831d4c | Y2K: Much Ado About Something | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/y2k-much-ado-about-something | Y2K was a special time when we all thought nothing bad would really happen at the stroke of midnight, but secretly worried the world would end. Turns out the mitigation efforts worked and we hardly noticed. | Y2K was a special time when we all thought nothing bad would really happen at the stroke of midnight, but secretly worried the world would end. Turns out the mitigation efforts worked and we hardly noticed. | Thu, 19 Aug 2021 14:32:43 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=14, tm_min=32, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=231, tm_isdst=0) | 41738320 | 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 this is stuff you should know. This is a really good one, too. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because we haven't recorded it yet, but I think this is going to be pretty good because it's very interesting and surprising and still kind of unresolved. Yeah. What city were you in? You have to tell me what you're doing, but what city were you in on December 31? I was in Hot. What about you? Okay. I was there, too. Okay. That's when I lived in the big warehouse on the West End, and we had a big party, probably the biggest New Year's Eve party I've ever thrown. And it was one of those parties where people come that don't know you. Oh, wow. And all of a sudden, it was like, all right, here we go. That kind of party. That's like Weird Science or 16 candles or something. Yeah, it was great. The guy from The Hills Have Eyes showed up on a motorcycle who's also in Goonies. Are you sure? Oh, no, you're right. No, it was I think it was he was just in makeup. No, the guy from the Guineas was football player John Matuzak. Right. Same guy. Oh, that's the guy from the Hillside Eyes. No. I don't know. I'm just trying to end up really digging a hole. Yeah, I am. Yeah. So that's what I was doing. I was throwing a big old party and not worrying too much about the Y two K Bug, or my bank account being empty because I didn't have much in it anyway, or being stuck in an elevator or falling out of the sky in a plane. Yeah, it was a good time to be young because you didn't really care that much. You didn't have as much to lose as if you were like some, I don't know, middle aged fat cat or something. You're probably sweating it a little more than you were like, in your twenty S at the time. Probably a lot of people are listening to this right now are like, you guys just said Y two K buck. What is that? Well, let Uncle Josh and Uncle Chuck tell you all about Y two K because it was one of the weirdest times to ever live through. And Chuck, you and I were Cold War kids. We lived through a time where people thought that we could go to a nuclear apocalypse with the Soviet Union at any given moment. It could just happen to everybody. That's how we lived. And the Y two K Bug still managed to stand out from that backdrop. Yeah. So the idea was and we'll get more specific, but the one sentence descriptor is computer code in early days was written with just two digits. Not 1950 whatever, just 50 whatever. And the idea was that was going to cause a lot of problems. When the calendar flipped to 2000 and anything like I said, from elevators being stuck to Wall Street going down to elevators being stuck, there were all kinds of crazy scenarios that you might or might not have worried about as that date approached. And that was the Y two K bug or the Millennium bug. And some people really freaked out and some people took advantage of people freaking out and some people didn't worry at all. And we're going to tell you all about it. Yeah, that was a really great elevator falling down pitch. Thanks. So the thing about the YTK bug is that if you hear about it today, you're going to hear a couple of different responses, potentially. And probably the more prevalent of the two is that it was all just a big hoax, a sham, right. Maybe a big money suck. It was a bunch of people just being paranoid, whether that was rightfully so or the paranoia was justified or not because of the situation or the context that this is happening in. We'll talk about that later. But every once in a while you'll run into somebody and these are the people you should probably listen to who say, no. It was actually a really big dealer. It had the potential to be a really big deal. And the reason it wasn't a big deal is because the world, I should say smart people in the world got behind solving this issue, came together and solved this issue and that it was only people who weren't really paying attention, who saw nothing happened and said that was all just a hoax or a sham. And it's really interesting because to this day, depending on what media coverage you read and I'm not even talking like left and right, I mean, just like the author, it can change from author to author. Those two different approaches to the explanation will be used depending on who you're reading. And I just find that fascinating that we still haven't resolved it fully. Oh, yeah. Like you could go to any party, any dinner party and bring this up and get probably equal amount of those reactions. I bet. Yes. Get everybody really riled up. All right, so I said that it has to do with computer programming. And in the early days of programming, like I said, they were not using the first two numbers of the year because they weren't just lazy. Those computers didn't have a lot of computing power. They had about one or 2 memory. And it requires eight bits or one byte to represent a single alphanumeric character. So if you could save 16 bits per operation that you're running by just not using 19, then you're saving a lot of memory. Like, well, needed memory. Yeah. I mean, this is at a time where those bits were vital. Today we're just like drowning in Ram and gigs. Yeah. And bites. So I saw somewhere that somebody went down the list of what a mainframe. A mainframe? Like just those huge rooms yes, basically. But where there's a whole room full of whoppers that those things maybe had 2GB of storage and just like some paltry amount of ram. It's such a cliche to say now that there's more data storage and a calculator that we use today than they used to go to the moon, but it's absolutely true. And so to save that amount of data made a lot of sense. But then the other thing that kind of legitimized that decision is that these people are writing code in like the they're like this stuff is going to be gone. Someone will change this. Wiped out and rebuilt from scratch by the time this becomes a problem in the year 2000. And they were really wrong with that idea. Which it makes sense that they would think that. But it turned out that it was really wrong because a lot of the software in the world that was running really important stuff like things like financial markets or things that monitored drinking water purity or things that ran freezers that kept smallpox from thawing out. These were all run on software in a lot of cases that were built and kind of tar papered over with fixes and patches and expansions that were originally created in the 50s or sixty s. And that's not a good thing to figure out when you're like five years out from the millennium when this problem is going to actually happen. Yeah, and it also was complicated by the fact that these programmers weren't all aligned on how to even enter dates in a uniform way. Some people used the Julianne format, which is the two digit year and then the three digit account of the days in the year, so January 1, but not everyone did it that way. So it's not like you could just go through and say 19.2 point, I don't know nothing about coding. Right. But just some simple line of code that just basically changes everything in a uniform manner. No, even in the software itself, even if one piece of software did use the same kind of date throughout that one piece of software, that software, that code was written to accommodate x number of bits for a date. So if you just went in and added two extra digits for the date field, that could throw off everything else in the software without you having any way of predicting what it will throw off. So if you went in and made that fix, it could create even bigger problems than if you just didn't make the fix to begin with as far as the software operating was concerned. Right. And the other thing we need to point out is that the fact that it was the millennium didn't matter. It mattered. And we'll get to the sort of cultural hysteria that kind of followed. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that it was a millennium, but it could have been 1800 to 1900 as far as the software new. And it would have presented the same problem exactly, that it was just that the prefix was changing. And what the big concern was is that when it turned over to zero, the computers hadn't been taught that that meant now the 21st century, now 2000. Technically not the 21st century, don't ask me, but that they were going to go back to 1900, which is what they were programmed to think, and that that could cause all sorts of cascading events, everything from Chuck's fable falling elevator to aircraft computers powering down mid flight and just planes falling out of the sky. Yeah. Or computer. I had the idea that computer systems were just going to go and like, smoke would come out of them and everything would just shut down. Power would go out, your cable would go out, like just nothing would work anymore. That was the way that everybody was touting it. And talking about it was even worse than that. People talking about nuclear warheads launching themselves or blowing up, like in their silos and that kind of stuff. There was a real apocalyptic vibe to the public idea about it. But even to the sober, level headed people who are actually working to solve the problem, there's a big problem with an airline computer resetting itself because it thinks it's 1900 while the plane's in the air or planes weren't around. Right, exactly. The other problem too, Chuck, is that they weren't sure if the computers reset themselves and shut down if they would have any way to get in there and start them back up again. Right. So it's not like I saw somewhere. It's not like it was going to fix itself once it got a couple of seconds past midnight on 2000. That wasn't necessarily a given. The other thing that really drove this so there were two things that happened. The public was panicking, the people working against it were concerned and actively managing it. But for the people who were actively managing it and who were concerned, another thing that was driving it was well, actually, it was driving it for everybody. Yeah, I'm going to settle on that. We had no idea how widespread the problem was. Even by the mid to late 90s, there were like 40 billion microchips out there in the world doing their thing. We had no idea what percentage were going to be affected by the Y two K bog. We had no idea what missile guidance systems or what satellites or what ATM machine systems were going to be affected. So we had to dive in and figure out once people started getting this point across, like, guys, this is actually a thing. And apparently people were raising the flags, or at least one person was raising the flags as far back as the think right in the why don't we talk about him and some others right after this? Okay. All right. So you mentioned a light in the darkness, a man on a mountain. That's right. Proclaiming. This could be an issue. And that man in the 1970s was Bob Becamer, or Bob Beamer, and he really played a big role in the creation of a ski code. And he was the first person and this is in the 1970s, like I said, to actually write in papers like, hey, this could be a problem down the road. This is something we should probably take a look at. If you're a Blockbuster Video, you're probably not going to really try and get ahead of this too much. You can probably start working on this in, like, if you are the financial sector and you are Wall Street, you're going to start working on this in the 1980s because there's just so much more at risk. Somebody's late fees running up is not a very big deal. You can correct that. But the financial market not being open or available or crashing is a really big deal. So they started throwing a lot of money at this in the late 1980s in the financial sector to try and correct this ahead of time. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, later we'll see later on in the After Effects, they credited this basically the upgrade that the New York Stock Exchange dedicated itself to in the face of the YTK bug as the same reason why the global financial markets didn't like their systems didn't collapse after September 11. Yeah. Because of this. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So if Bob Beaver was the first old hermit prophet who came down from the hills to warn everybody, peter Dejaer was the guy who got all the press for it. He was the one who really basically dedicated his life to making sure that everybody was good and scared about this. The public, but also the people who are pulling the levers of government, the people who are running the corporations, the people who are running the financial markets. He met with a lot of different people, gave a lot of different scary presentations. I saw that it wasn't just some pat presentation he gave everywhere, necessarily, too. I saw he met with the Canadian government and was trying to get across, like, this is a really big deal, and it's a really big problem, and you're not equipped to deal with this as it stands now. This is a new thing for you. And he pointed out that the Canadian government meets its deadline goals for projects 16% of the time. He said, this cannot happen. Like, you can't miss this goal, this deadline. So he would kind of go in and make it apparent to each group based on their own needs or their own desires or their own perspective. But he did that. He also gave lots of interviews. He was on 60 Minutes and he made a bunch of money. I think during 1998, he made in today's dollars something like two and a half million dollars consulting and giving speeches and lectures. But from what I understand and he gets a lot of guff today, as we'll see. But from what I understand, he was a true believer who in some ways maybe saved the world from some really big problems that we will never fully understand because we didn't experience them. Yeah, this is a hard one to judge in retrospect. It's like, how do you judge the thing that didn't happen? Right. Exactly. Is it a cry wolf or did we slay the wolf? So Peter Yeager kicked the whole thing off of the 1993 article called Doomsday 2000. And in his defense, his editor probably came up with that, not him. You think editors typically write the headline, so it's possible. Who knows? He could have suggested it. He was that much of a doomsayer for sure that he would have been totally comfortable with that. Yes. And this is where the American public, like, eventually it made its way to 60 Minutes and once Morally Safer is on there on a Sunday night talking about it, then you know the American public is going to get on board. And they did. And it brought out some kooks. It brought out people preppers and survivalists. There were a lot of internet scams going around at the time. There was a lot of religiosity sort of really heated up, like sort of doomsday preachers and stuff like that started coming out of the woodwork a little bit more. Anyone that thought that they could make money off of this thing through fear kind of came out of the woodwork. And when something like that's happening, you've got that on one side and then you've got a lot of people on the other side just thumbing their nose at it and saying, this is all a big scam. This is all a hoax. We got all these kooks that are trying to separate us from our money. It's just a big scam and we don't have anything to worry about. It's weird. It almost sounds familiar in some weird way. Yeah. So what we've been experiencing, huh? Yeah. This is definitely like it was a peek behind the curtain of what could come. Although it was not nearly as stark. Although I don't know, maybe I wasn't paying as much attention then as I am these days. But it didn't definitely work. It didn't seem like there was anything approaching the incivility and just outright anger that we experienced today, especially in America compared to them. But there were definitely two sides to this issue and they definitely were entrenched against one another. It just wasn't like neither side hated the other. They just thought the other one was dumb. Right. And one of the big reasons that it was such a big kerfuffle culturally was that sort of it was all about timing. The calendar flip aligned at a time where computers were really becoming super entrenched in everyone's daily life. Of course, people have been using computers for a while, but as far as really everyday stuff like running your bank through there and paying your bills and credit cards and acting as your own travel agent and the government, everything was reliant on computers by this point. This is the first big wave. Right. So it made a good point in here, as far as your average person on the street knows, is their computer comes to them in a box and they take it out, and it's just a little magic machine that runs on ferry dust, and we know nothing about how it works or how it should work. And so all of a sudden, everyone has got these little magic boxes that they don't really understand that they're super reliant on, and there are people out there saying, things are about to get really bad with your magic box. Yeah. And a lot of people are just like, all right, I guess it's time to freak out a little bit. Yeah, I mean, people definitely did freak out. And also, I think part of that freak out is kind of like you were saying, the Y two K bug is the first time it was revealed to us just how dependent on computers we'd become. We never really saw that before up to this point. It was all like, g whiz. My insurance claim went through 50 times faster than it would have five years ago. Instead, now it's like all these things that we're dependent on are about to pull the rug out from our civilization. And that really kind of got people scared. Even if people weren't sitting there analyzing it. I mean, we're analyzing it in hindsight. At the time, people were just scared, freaked out, nervous, angry, upset. But then the fact that this was taking place already during a major calendar change, not just from the 1900 to the 2000, but like a new millennium that really kind of had people already primed it's the weird timing of the whole thing. Do you remember how big the X Files were? Yeah. Imagine the X Files now. It'd be like a hob. Some people would watch it, some people would be really into it. It might make a little splash there for a little bit. But the X Files are one of the biggest TV shows in the world. At the very least in the west. Because it was super tapped into this millennial and not the generation. But just like the end of this era or the new era. That this angst that everyone was carrying around to some degree. Whether you were aware of it or not. You were worried. Some small part of your brain was worried because the calendar is about to change over to the year 2000. Yeah, I think the show that does that best. Now is Black Mirror. Definitely. I love to meet some X Files, but I'll take Black Mirror over X Files. Man. Yeah, it's really tough to rival Black Mirror. It is. And I know people. Boy x Files. People are going to be so upset. I loved X Files. I did. Scully. I just watched them the other day. It still holds up. Yeah, it was a great show. It was a lot of fun. But a show of its time, right? Exactly. Man, those overcoats they wear were gigantic. They were big. Oh, my gosh. Shoulder pads. Yes. Everybody's walking around like David Burn and stopped making sense. Yeah. It was so weird. Yeah. So the cost of this thing was going to be pretty big. It ended up being pretty big. It depends on who you ask. If you see numbers on the Internet of $500 billion, that is probably not true. That probably came from people that were consulting saying it may cost up to $500 billion to fix all this all over the world. But they were spending tons of money. I think there's an article from the 1999 Washington Post that talked about General Motors spending about 625 mil, exxon about a quarter of a billion procter and Gamble 90 million. Then the federal government has to spend a ton of money on their own systems, so it added up to many tens of billions of dollars. Let's just say that, yeah. Also, I don't want to let this opportunity pass by without shouting out contemporary journalism. One other thing, Chuck, though. The US. Senate conducted a special committee investigation into spending on the Y two K bug, and it came up with what I can tell is the most widely accepted number at the time. This is $2,000. $100 billion were spent in the United States alone. And that about eight point private sectors. Yeah, about 8.4 billion of that was by the US. Government. Okay. And that, again, that's in $2,000. So it would be substantially more today. And that the US. Is almost certainly the largest spender on this issue because we were also, at the time, the most dependent country on computers, or the country that was the most dependent on computers in the entire world. So we had the most to lose, we had the most to gain by spending this money. And the Senate report concluded, even within three months afterward, that it was money well spent. Yeah. Well, there you have it. Case closed. Case closed. Although I should probably say that to the end. In 96. The Congressional Research Service said you know what? We need to do something about this. And Senator Daniel Moynihan went to Bill Clinton and said, hey, we need to do something about this. So Clinton launched the council on year 2000 conversion. Congress passed the year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act. And all this sounds very fancy, but it is quick to point out, and we are as well that the government can't get in there and just fix all the bugs of all these companies. They got to take care of it themselves. So a lot of it was just, hey, you got to get on this. Like, you got to get ahead of this. You're on this right stock market, and you're on this General Motors, aren't you? And sharing information for sure. But a lot of it was just kind of cheerleading. Yeah. And that worked. Like getting people kind of snapped in line, saying, like, hey, the US. Government is telling you this is a real problem and you need to do this by this time or else you're going to have some big troubles. That gets people's attention. For sure. In a lot of senses, that was enough. But the government also had all of its own systems and software to look at and go over and make sure that it was in working condition or fixed if it needed to be fixing. And then they reached out and helped other countries, too. I saw that. I think starting in 1996, they started an exchange program with Russia to make sure that nobody was going to accidentally nuke anybody else. Right. And as a matter of fact, on the turn of the millennium, there were US. Observers and Russian observers in one another's countries just basically to work together to make sure that this got all worked out. But I think also it's just kind of a show of faith, like, we're not going to nuke you, or we're not going to let you get nuke our own people are there kind of thing, too, which I thought was kind of cool. Yeah. Other countries took a little more strict approach. The Dutch Central Bank said, if you we won't loan money to companies who weren't compliant. China said. You know what? All the top airline executives have to take flights on January 1, so you better make sure your stuff is running correctly. Yeah. Think about that. The government ordered airline executives to be in the air at midnight, or they would, I guess, probably go to jail. Yeah. And that sounds harsh, and it is, but I think it is an interesting incentive, to say the least. It's pragmatic at least. Make sure your stuff works. Everybody but the Y two K compliance is what I was talking about. That was like, you could buy products around that time that said Y two K compliant. Like it could be a clock radio that says Y two K rate. All kinds of products were labeled Y two K compliant. Certainly anything to do with computing. Yeah. And there was actually nobody watching to make sure that that certification was actually accurate. I think the Defense Department put out some guidance on what to do to be Y two K compliant, but they were like, find it, fix it all good. Were the steps they were that vague. There was nobody certifying it. And to me, yes, cheerleading from the US government and raising awareness and maybe lending aid financially. That was some really good role that it played. But I feel like also it could have said, hey, if you're running this kind of operating software or you're producing dates using this time, here's a good fix you might be able to use or to create some sort of Y two K compliance guidance or steps. I feel like it could have done a little more in that respect. But there was nobody like, you could have bought anything, and it could have had that sticker on it, and it really didn't necessarily mean anything. That's right. And, Chuck, there were some other governments had different responses. I saw that Canada had 13,000 troops ready on high alert just in case the s went down. Yeah. That was part of Operation Abacus. Yes. There's a really great Globan mail article called YTK the Strange True History of How Canada Prepared for an Apocalypse That Never Happened but changed US All. It was a really good article. It was good. And then one of the other things that Canada did was the CBC sent a pair of engineers to a remote broadcasting station with some video, which I would love to get my hands on. I couldn't find it anywhere. They were to broadcast instructions on how to survive post apocalypse. Basically, that was their job. Oh, wow. Yeah. So everybody is sitting there ready and waiting, and it's finally December 31, 1999, and whether you're ready or not, it's all about to click over. Right, Chuck? That's right. So we'll take another break here and we'll talk about what happened on December after this. All right. What happened? Man, I've been on pins and needles for 120 seconds. Not much, actually. Some stuff did happen, but for the most part, nothing really happened. I mean, for you or me or just about anybody else out there, the millennium came and went, and the Y two K bug fizzled out like a dud. That's right. I remember waking up late in the day on January 1. I hung over. Everything worked. My phone worked. My power was on. There were no planes falling out of the sky. I would rode that elevator up and down all day long. But some things did happen. And like I mentioned, video stores sometimes. There was one in Albany, New York that had assessed a late fee of over $90,000 to a customer, for the general daughter, no less. Oh, is that what it was for? Yeah, the movie. Yes, that was the rental. Oh, boy. I think I actually saw that for some reason. Yeah, it was Travolta, right? Yeah, Travolta. That was in the post Pulp Fiction boom. Let me see. There was a National Laboratory nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee had some malfunctions. I think there was some other nuclear malfunctions in Japan, but nothing big, obviously, where it would have been catastrophic. But really mostly minor things happened. Yeah, there was, like, 30,000 cash registers in Greece that were all running the same. Software showed that the year is 1900 on receipts. Like, nothing particularly bad. I think in the US. The most jarring thing that happened for the government was some spy satellites where they went offline for three days. But for the most part, people were able to see what the problem was, deal with it, figure out a solution or a patch, and then bring the thing back online with minimal interruption or problems. And the fact is that these interruptions that did happen were typically pretty small, pretty inconsequential, and were dealt with pretty quickly. Yeah. In England. In Sheffield, England, the National Health Services came under fire because there was a misreading of the age of pregnant mothers. I believe 154 women in the program were affected. And they were getting testing, like prenatal testing, to see if there was a chance that their baby could have down syndrome. And it led to two pregnancy terminations and four births of children with down syndrome. And for the life of me, I couldn't find out if there were lawsuits or what. I just saw articles that talked about penalties against the NHS. And it's one of those things that was really hard to find any kind of follow up. Right. That was not one of the inconsequential ones I mentioned. No, obviously not. From what I could tell, Chuck, that was far and away the most consequential outcome. Everything else is usually pretty either inconvenient or aggravating or comical. Like the guy who got the $91,000 late fee for his video tape. But the fact that aside from the NHS issue, the fact that it was generally small stuff that happened for some reason made the public say, oh, well, this was all just a hoax. It was all just a scam to suck money out of our preppers pockets and get us all riled up and scared and probably control us with George Bush's New World Order that ministry talked about. And the whole thing was all just hooey. That we were all riled up for nothing. Which I think goes to show that the public, by and large, is a dumb dumb. Yeah, I think we're seeing that now because Ed makes a great analogy here. He says, hey, if the Y two K buck had been a flood and we spent hundreds of billions of dollars in countless work hours building a dam to hold back the flood, when that flood arrived and the dam held, you wouldn't say, Well, I didn't get wet, so the whole thing must have been a hoax. And that is almost a perfect analogy for what happened in retrospect with the Y two K bug. A crisis that would have been potentially really huge and catastrophic was averted. And rather than saying hooray, we did it, we pulled together. People just kind of said, you guys got me all upset for nothing. Nothing happened. Yeah, I mean, let's say it was all just minor problems that they didn't bother to fix beforehand. And all of a sudden, instead of a few minor annoyances and aggravations, there are thousands of those and those compound on one another somehow and create sort of a domino effect. It's not just that they corrected the main systems, like the financial markets and the nuclear codes and all those things that they needed to correct. They corrected a lot of stuff that had a downstream effect just to make our lives a little less disrupted. People looked at Italy at the time. They were a country that didn't do a lot and they didn't have a big fallout. But other people who were a lot smarter and don't make knee jerk reactions said, yeah, but you know what? Italy is really small compared to us. They weren't nearly as computer reliant at the time as we were. And America was fixing their stuff, which helped fix stuff for all of the world because they were reliant on us and our systems. That's right. So there's a pretty good argument you could make for all those people are like, no, it's totally fine. See, those people didn't do anything. They got a free ride, basically, because so much of the software that America was fixing is used around the world. That's a really important point because that's a point that a lot of people make. They'll point to countries surprisingly like Japan. I can't believe it, but Japan did very little to deal with it. And like you said, there were some minor problems at some of their nuclear plants. But the fact is, a lot of them benefit a lot of those countries benefited from the US leading the way on this. Yes. And one of the strategies that other people who didn't think we should be pouring all this money into it beforehand was called fix on failure. They said, Why don't we just wait and see what happens and then we'll start to correct things as needed. But that's just not a very like, we didn't know what we did know. Like you said earlier, we had no way of knowing what it was going to cause. And so fix on failure was not a viable option because trying to patch something that is in chaos all of a sudden is not the best way to work. No, I mean, this is about to date this episode, but the Spirit Airlines problem of the last week or so is a really great example. Oh, man. There was some problems with shifting cruise around because of weather, and all of a sudden some flights started being ready without the cruise. And then that led to more cruise being shifted around. And it was just this cascade of flights where they were every day canceling 50, 60% of their flights and just leaving people stranded. And it was a really great example. What was the name of the pipeline that got cyber attacked with ransomware. That was a really great example of just these people waiting in line for gas around the whole Southeast and the East Coast for more than a week at the time at Y two K. The idea that we could have just fixed this stuff really kind of shows our naivety for how embedded or how we didn't really understand how embedded we already were with computers and how dependent we were on them. And you can't fix nuclear missile guidance system after it fails. You need to do that ahead of time. So that fixed on failure idea, right? It was a pretty bad idea from the get go. It was you mentioned one of the good things that came out of this was the fact that post 911, our financial markets didn't crash largely because of a lot of the work they did for Y two K and making those systems more robust and updated. And that happened kind of across the board. The investment that a lot of people, I think a lot of people and companies are like, well, I guess now is a good time as any to really just sort of update everything and to get our systems more up to Snuff for today's. Some of the stuff was still running on code from the had been built on and built on. So that really helped drive the tech boom in a lot of ways and that companies were investing a lot more for the first time in tech. And also there were hundreds of thousands of new developers that were trained and hired to deal with this and they were all of a sudden we're looking for jobs and some of them didn't find jobs. So they got creative and started writing apps and writing code for other programs and it really fueled not only here in India, I know it was a really big deal that their It industry now compared to where it was then. It's just like night and day because of everyone that got hired to help with Y two K. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. They make the case that the tech boom was a result of people coming into this industry who wouldn't have otherwise been there. And also the spending, the spending was just ridiculous because not only were people hiring It people to fix their software, some companies were like, forget this, we're just going to completely upgrade our systems. And these systems could have kept hopping along or hobbling along for another 1015 years, say, and then that system would have had to have been replaced and then some other company does it another five years earlier, five years later, rather than that, the United States. And actually in a lot of ways the world's computer systems got upgraded all at once. And that kind of lay that foundation with the industry being flush with tech workers to just really take off, which is great. I saw in the same article about that Senate report, Chuck, that said it was money well spent. Somebody estimated that for every dollar spent on fixing the y two k bug, it led to a return on investment of about six or $7. And that was an estimate in 2000. Now, today, in hindsight, if the y two k bug drove the tech booms that started in the early 2000s, late 90s, it's countless. It's probably in the trillions of dollars worth of value that it led to. So I think we kind of busted that myth in a way, didn't we? Kind of like the world of worlds radio broadcast. I think so. As usual, Gen X is correct. Go, Gen X. If you want to know more about how Gen X rules, you can go on to the Internet and look at this thing that we built called the Internet and learn some more stuff. What do you think of that? I think it's great. Since I said learn some more stuff, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this bob and girls from our child labor podcast. Hi, guys. I'm Amanda Marusars. I'm a long time listener. I love everything you guys do. In your child labor episode, you mentioned you were unsure the dangers of working as a bob and girl or boy. But let me tell you, I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts, where they claim the industrial revolution was born. If you're from this area in elementary school, you visit the boot cotton mill museum for school field trips. We learned about the history of cottonweaving processes at the time. Something that always stuck with me being a little girl at the time of these trips was the bobbing girls. They recitalists of horrors that these child laborers went through, from getting their fingers snapped off in the weaving machine crevices to getting their hair caught and essentially getting scout. Man, I knew it. I totally knew it. There was going to be something really horrific about it. I just wanted to polish off your episode with the most graphic details that seven year old me could remember being plagued by. That is from Amanda Maru. SARS. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Amanda. That's exactly what I assumed was out there. So thanks for filling in the blanks for us. I love it if you want to get in touch with us like Amanda did, especially if you love everything we do, like she says, we love hearing from people like that. You can get in touch with us via email at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How the U.S. Postal Service Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-u-s-postal-service-works | The USPS is currently teetering on the edge of going under and there are a lot of plans to save it, from cutting Saturday service to creating federally-protected email addresses linked to individuals at birth. Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the histo | The USPS is currently teetering on the edge of going under and there are a lot of plans to save it, from cutting Saturday service to creating federally-protected email addresses linked to individuals at birth. Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the histo | Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:22:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=20, tm_min=22, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=73, tm_isdst=0) | 42158373 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. I'm Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now. Warren Peace Report. Warren Peace.org Cedar. I'm Steven. How are you doing? Good. Jerry just said, let's do this old school right before she recorded. And I have no idea what she meant. She's back. I thought she meant, let's make it crappy in five minutes long. Right? We need, like, little empty tinkins to speak in, dude. Make it sound right. How are you doing, Jerry? That's great. Jerry gave us a thumbs up. I know. In our new murder room, Jerry is within our eyesight again after a long layoff where she was not within our range of viewing utilities. It's kind of weird because now I'm looking at you, but I can clearly see my peripheral vision that she's on Facebook. She's waving, she's brushing her teeth. She's rearranging the severed human heads that are in jars all around the place. That's creepy. You want to talk post office, man? Yeah. You want to give the disclaimer that we're only talking about the post office in the US of A? I think he just did. Okay. We don't know how it works in your country. No. And actually, it's probably not nearly as interesting as what's going on with the US. Postal Service. The USPS. Because I don't know if you know this or not, Chuck, but the USPS. Is in a lot of trouble. Yeah. Their solvency, the amount of money that they have to keep the lights on and keep everything going, is expected to run out in October of 2013 if they don't do something. Yeah. That's this year. Yeah. I think they lost $16 billion last year. Yes. And 5 billion the year before. So that's three times as much money in a year. That's bad news. Here's the caveat to that $16 billion loss, though. 11 billion of that was in payments to the future benefits of postal workers that have not yet retired but will. And the Postal Service is the only federal agency of any sort that is required to prepay its employees benefits for the future. In 2006, a Lane deck session of Congress said, you know what? You guys need to make sure that your workers are taken care of. Right. So you guys have to start prepaying over the next ten years. And they have been and they've been bleeding money. I mean, like a $16 billion loss, but 11 billion of it was to these future payments. I guess that would make sense then. If you took out that eleven, they would just be at about the same losses before a mere 5 billion a year. Right. And that's a lot of money to lose. It is, but they're figuring out ways to make up for that extra loss. And one of the big ones that's on the table now is cutting out Saturday delivery. Yeah. August 1, I think they figure they can recoup $2 billion a year by doing that, so then they're down to three. The thing is, the post office is a part of the executive branch, and it's all over the place. It's a part of the executive branch, it's part of the federal government, but it gets $0 in tax revenue, and it's also a thrillkill cult. That's the horrible secret of the US. They're all over. Right. So they get no money besides what they can make off of their own revenue. Yeah. They're essentially a corporation. Right. But they're also under the purview of the federal government. Yes. It's a weird, weird thing. And they can't act without asking Congress, and Congress hasn't exactly been forthcoming lately. They haven't approved the Saturday thing yet, have they? Congress? Here's the thing. Isn't that still up? They've been trying to get Congress to approve that forever. The Senate passed a bill that said, after two years, we'll let you cut out Saturday service, we'll give you $11 billion in overpayments that you guys made toward the retirement stuff, all the stuff back. They went to the House, and the House didn't do anything with it. Right. Yeah. So, you know the fiscal cliff? Oh, yeah. Well, the US. Congress passed the stop gap measure, basically a federal budget that says within this period, we're still able to operate. Right, right. And the USPS. Ha ha. You didn't include our mandate from 1981 that we have to carry out Saturday service in that stop gap. So technically, under current federal law, we don't have to carry out Saturday service. And they're arguing it legally. So they're just saying that's the loophole they're going to use to shut down Saturday service. Yes. They're saying packages, medicines, just packages. They're going to deliver packages on Saturday. And here's a really good reason. Their revenues from packages have increased 16% over the last ten years, whereas first class mail letters have gone down 32%, I believe. So they're making almost all of their money because it's only $45 to mail a letter from Florida to Hawaii. 46. Is it 46 now? Yeah. But they make however much shipping in the shipping game, which is where they make all their money, which is, ironically, the one place they don't have a monopoly. As far as the mail goes, I'm glad to see mail order medicine on that list, too. Express mail packages and medicine. Because at first I was like, who cares? I don't. Yeah. I don't need my mail on a Saturday. Right. But you need your medicine on a Saturday or else you go blind. Well, that's why they included that as something they would still deliver. Right. And post offices that are already open on Saturdays will still be open on Saturdays. Yeah. So if you want to go to your PO. Box, maybe there'll be some mail, maybe there won't be. Who knows? I bet you've had a PO. Box. I've been thinking about this haven't you? No. Really? Yes. Have you? No. You just struck me as the kind of person that would have had a PO. Box at one point. That's where I get all my guns in the mail. So I'm pretty worked up about this, as you can see. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. Who would have thought that the postal service would ever be interesting? Sure. I think parts of this are very interesting, and we would just want to go ahead and say hello to all of our postal carriers out there that listen to our show, who won us over during the Bush era, because we've gotten emails from you guys and gals. Yeah. Including one of our favorite people out there is a postal worker, Van Austrian. Oh, yeah. Is he? This one should really be a tribute to Van Nostril. He's a carrier. He's always been kind of cryptic about what he does, but I'm under the distinct impression that he's employed by the postal service. All right. So Bangalores, van Nostrin. This is for you. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about the postal service. Man. I'm all jazzed about the USPS. Dude. I'm glad you are. So for a little while, even after the advent of electronic mail, the postal service, the amount of mail they were delivering was still increasing. As of 2007, it was on an upward trajectory. Sorry, 2006, right? Yeah. 213,137,000,000 pieces of mail that year. Yeah. It's down to 167 now. Yeah. When was this written, do you know? I think 20 07. 20 08. Okay. So then they had 700,000 employees. Now they have about $580,000. So they've been in trim the budget mode, I think, for the past few years. Well, the reason why, in 2006, they also made $72.8 billion. I mean, those stamps add up, you know, in 2011, they made 66 billion. Wow. Not bad. Yeah. But they're still losing a lot of money. I mean, that's what, $7 billion in difference in just five years? Yeah. It's not good. It's not good. So where did all this come from, Chuck? It came from back yonder day. People have always needed to communicate, obviously from long distances. And in 1639, colonists here in the New I guess they weren't United States yet, but in the New World needed to get word back to England occasionally and say things like, hey, quit bugging us, or, hey, send us more tea and crumbts. Right. So the first official postal service was established in 1639. Richard Fairbanks Tavern in Boston was the official mail drop for overseas there in Massachusetts. And that was the place to go if you wanted to mail something. Yeah, and I couldn't find what happened or where it went on the other side of the Atlantic. Probably not pub. I would imagine that you just went to that pub and said, hey, is there any mail? And they said, no. And you turn around and travel to 500 miles back to your village. So that was step one. Step two was about 40 some odd years later. 1683, William Penn established. Very famous person, obviously the first official post office in Pennsylvania. Yes. Named after that's. Right. And I love the side note. Here in the south, private messages were just sent between plantations. Yeah. So they would probably just give it to a slave and say, carry this over to that guy. Right. And then flash forward a little bit more. 1691, the British Crown gave a man named Thomas Neal a 21 year grant for the postal service in the United States. And he paid like seven shillings a year. So that's nothing. Right. He still died in debt. Did he really? With a monopoly. So the postal service has always been kind of tricky to call money from. Interesting. Yeah. So that continued until 1774, and a lot of big stuff was happening around that time, like, hey, we don't like you anymore in England. Controlling us over here and taxing us. So we're going to start and establish our own constitutional post office for any kind of mail going from anywhere. Basically intercolonial mail. Yeah. It was very cutting edge at the time. Sure. And actually when the British were carrying out the postal service on behalf of the colonies, in the colonies, there was a guy named Benjamin Franklin who was appointed the postmaster of Philadelphia, and he actually killed it as postmaster. Of course he did. He's, like, totally improved the roads. He said, we're going to start working like, 24 hours a day. We're going to have lots of shifts. We're going to put up milestones. Like the postal service helped improve the connectedness of the colonies, thanks to him. So when the Continental Congress said, hey, we want our own postal service, ben Franklin became the first Postmaster General. Sure. And of course, he ran it like a tight ship. And he's one of those dudes. I get a feeling if we could resurrect him and bring him out today, he could fix what's going on in this country. Yeah. And he'd say something pithy and ask for a glass of sherry. Exactly. So this is to me, when it gets super interesting, was in the 19th century when westward expansion happen, california gold rush. All of a sudden, we needed to get stuff from the East Coast to San Francisco, let's say, right. As quick as possible. What's crazy as quick as possible was to go down New York around Florida yes. On a steam ship through the Caribbean and then across, like, Panama and then up on the Pacific side to California. That was the fastest way to get mail for a while. Yeah. And how long? Three to four weeks. To send a letter from the east coast to the west coast. And that's the best case scenario. Right. That's how the east coast communicated with the West Coast for a while. Yeah. Of some stage coach routes were established. There was a southern route and there was a central route. Yeah. And the southern route you could supposedly use year round. Sure, because it's lovely down here. But then the central route, it was faster, but they said you can't use that year round or storms. Yeah. And it also killed me, man. The way they used to name companies back then was so, like, it made perfect sense. You basically just said what you did. Like, one, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company said, we're going to carry your mail to the Pacific by steamship. And then the Overland Mail Company like, well, we're going to do it over land, so that's what we're going to call our company. Yeah. So they got the contract. The Overland Mail Company along the southern route took about 25 days. And then one of my favorite parts of American history was born. The Pony Express. Yeah. And it's just so amazing, like the idea that they had to do this. It was a different company that was competing that wanted to get that contract away from the Overland Company. Right. The COC and PP. And they said, you know what? We know the central route shorter. We're going to prove that we can use it year round and we're going to set up something that it's just going to blow this 25 day thing out of the water. And they set up the Pony Express. Yeah. And they had stations, what, every 1020 miles, and a rider would ride from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento or be part of a line of riders? Well, yeah, that's the key. They go about 100 miles and then they change horses every like, ten or 15 miles. Yeah. So the same rider would change horses because they rode the average 10 miles an hour, which doesn't sound fast, but you got to factor in, like, the Sierra Nevadas, where they're just crawling up these mountains. So these dudes were riding hard and on flat ground, if they're averaging 10 miles an hour. Right? Yes. And they're going 24 hours a day. They're going 2000 miles, 10 miles an hour. That's what, 20 hours? Yeah. No, that's 200 hours. So what is that? That's less than ten days. So that cuts that Overland Company's rate by 150%. Yeah. There was always one set of riders going east, one set going west. Yes. I think when you were relieved by another rider, you'd hang out at that station and wait for somebody to come the other way and then relieve them. Yeah. They were paid really well at the time, $25 a week, which at the time, unskilled labor made about a dollar a week. Did you read the first ad they ever put in? No. Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18, must be expert writers, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. And that's maybe legend, but supposedly that's what it says. But apparently they were young, little light life, skinny, kids because you didn't want some big dude like me up on a horse. Right. The horse would be like, I don't want to ride anymore. So they were like these young boys. I think the youngest one is, like, 14. Oh, wow. And supposedly Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider, although people have disputed that now. Oh, yeah. He's the stuff of legend. Well, he's by far and away the most famous Pony Express writer, if, in fact, he did. But anyway, think about the amount of infrastructure built up along this central route to have a station every ten or 20 miles. You've got all these employees going, and they proved it. They proved that the central route could be used year round. So they got the contract then, right? No, the Overland Company got the contract to use it, to use that same route that was already established. And the Pony Express is like, you have to be kidding me. Yeah. And so the US. Government said, no, you guys do half, and then let the Overland Company do the other half. Yes. And they were mad for about a year and a half and really angry. And then the telegraph line was completed, and everyone's like, oh, well, I guess we're all out of business now. Yeah, that was it. Pony Express sold to Wells Fargo and basically shut down. Yeah. I think American Express ended up branching out of Wells Fargo, too. Yeah. Like, these are old, old companies, like, these modern banks and credit card companies. It's interesting how far they go back. But think about that, man. Even as far back as the mid 19th century, new technology was putting mail delivery out to pasture. And then mail delivery would evolve and figure out how to come back. Yeah, it's pretty cool foreshadowing. It is. So this is a big jump forward to the mid 1960s. Yeah, a lot happened in between then. It didn't, actually. We started to go move further and further out into the suburbs. There was a huge population boom in the post war era, and businesses started to realize the value of direct mailing. And all these factors put together meant that the Postal service was totally overwhelmed. Yeah, completely. Because it became such a big deal. Everyone was writing letters and they were using the same old, I guess, hand delivery methods, sorting methods, sort of. They weren't automated at all, and they needed to be. Right. And so there was a postal reform that was undertaken. Yeah. And this was in 1971, the post office department. And I didn't even know this. This was shortly after I was born. We weren't the United States Postal Service until 1971. That was when we officially became the USPS. It became an independent establishment, was no longer a part of the cabinet of the federal government, but was part of the executive branch and got the monopoly, basically, to deliver mail, even though it was supposedly just a company and they re up the mandate from, I think, 1792. That said, the postal service is one of the most essential services of the federal government. Yeah. No person is cut off in this country. None shall not get delivered. Exactly. Everyone's going to have a mailbox and everyone's going to get mailed to that mailbox every day because we need to help keep intellectual freedom going and ideas in business and commerce going all the time. And the Postal Services the federal agency that carries that out. And I'm sure that put a financial burden on them when people started building in these especially rich people when they started building in these remote areas. Because then all of a sudden you had to add that to your route. Well, it's 60 miles up a mountain and it's the only house. There's a guy who services the Grand Canyon. There's a group of Indians that live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He has a donkey train that goes down there every day with the mail. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's a federal mandate. You have to be able to get mail. Everyone has a mailbox. He's like, don't you guys use smoke signals? Come on. They do. In fact, I actually wrote an article on smoke signals. Yeah. I was going to say we should podcast on it, but it's like super basic. It would be like a five minute podcast. Well, we'll have to figure out some other way to use it. Agreed. That's interesting. So do we cover going postal now? It's sort of just thrown in the middle of this article. Yeah, it really was. It was talking about how packages are delivered and all of a sudden it says and then people started killing each other in 1986. Yeah. Which is actually the post office has the dubious distinction of kicking off the workplace shooting trend in the United States. Was that the first one? As far as I could tell. Well, all right. So. 1986. Edmund, Oklahoma. Patrick Henry cheryl killed 14 coworkers. Another one happened, including a supervisor getting killed with a samurai sword. Yeah. November 1991, Thomas McElvain shot and killed four coworkers, wounded five others, then shot himself. And then in 2003, two more incidences of postal workers killing fellow postal workers. It was like just between 86 and 97, 40 people died at post offices from postal rampages. Yeah. And gave birth to the term going postal, which is used as vernacular for just losing it, basically. And if you're interested in that at all, there's a really good documentary, I think it's on Netflix streaming right now, called Murder by Proxy. Oh, yeah. And it's all about the postal shootings. So weird. Like where they came from. There's a lot of scrutiny of the management techniques of people at post offices. There's got to be something to it. Oh, yeah. If you watch it. How many other industries had that many office shootings? Retail, actually, the homicide rate is three times higher in retail than it is at the post office. But you don't say going retail, right. That just means you're going shopping. Well, it's like drinking the koolaid. They really drank flavor aid, and that's right. Koolaid is the one with that distinction. Yeah. All right, so that's going we had to mention it, but I don't want to dwell on it, but it was weird in this article, the way it went right in the middle of it came up out of nowhere. 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 homepage, and enter code stuff. Zip codes. This is kind of cool. Yeah. Zip codes were introduced in 1963 and then officially put in place in mandatory in 1967, because just so much mail going on, you had to categorize it more specifically. Right. That was part of the post office being swamped. This is the first step toward automation. Was like a standardized code system. Long well, they did have other ones, but it was like one was in New York city or something like that. Yeah. This is just a nice little cocktail party. Factoid stands for zone improvement plan. I never knew that until I read this. Did you know that? I had before, but I'd forgotten. Okay, so it's a zone improvement plan, and here in the United States, at least, it's a five digit number, represents a location, obviously, where you're trying to send something. And now they have the zip code plus four in some areas of, I guess, major urban areas have a little more specificity. Right. They deliver it to your like, they put it on your stomach if you put the zip plus four, I think certain buildings even will have their own plus four if it's a big enough building. Right. Or if you get a lot of mail as a person. Is that what you're after, is the plus four for your well, it says that some high volume mail receivers. Get it. I'm like, if it was cool mail, I'd love to get the mail. So the first digit there represents the state. Here in Georgia, that's a three. It increases as you move west. And there are some states that share each digit. Yeah. Like two. It's taken up by a lot of states. There's the District of Columbia, north Carolina, south Carolina, Maryland, virginia. West Virginia. Man, all twos. I would be mad if I lived in one of those states. So then you got the second 3rd digits. Those are regions within the state. The first three of those create what's called the SCF code, the sectional center facility. And then the fourth and fifth digits are even more specific. Basically, it just hones down as you go left to right until you've got Josh Clarke's house. Right. Like this state, this section facility, this post office. Yeah. This neighborhood. Yeah. And then maybe this building, this high volume mail receiver named Josh Clark. That's right. So you've got the zip code that allowed automation. And a little known fact is, the US. Postal Service doesn't just handle a ton of the US. Mail. It handles 40% of all of the mail in the world. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. So before the zip code, this was really difficult. It also went from if you're mailing something from New York to San Francisco, it went through every distribution facility in the country in between New York and San Francisco before it got there. Really? Yes. Now, zip codes. Well, let's talk about what a letter does. Okay. And this is all thanks to zip codes. So I write a little love letter. I'm going to mail it to Emily, which is weird because we live together. Right. Just being romantic. That's actually a great example, though, because you can mail something from your mailbox to be delivered back to you, I reckon. I've never done it. That's the poor man's trademark I've heard about that. Is to mail something to yourself in this whole field. I think it depends on the judge. Yeah, probably. Okay, so you put it in your mailbox. Postal carrier is going to pick it up. They're going to take it to the post office. They're going to put it on a truck and then take that from the post office to a processing plant where we have our long awaited machines doing some sorting. Shape and size? Yeah. Well, first they sort everything out and make sure everything's facing the right way up, right? Yeah. And then the packages are put on one belt and then letters are put on another. And the letters let's just stick with the letter that you wrote. Okay. It goes into a slot, so it's facing upwards and upright, frontwards and upright. And then they put a little barcode on the back of the letter and I think ultraviolet ink. Well, first thing it does is it gets a postmark and cancellation line saying, basically, you can't use the stamp again. Don't even try it. Don't be cheap. We've seen the whiteout tricks. We've seen doctoring up a stamp, which is probably a federal offense. It probably is. And then, so after that, the barcode is printed on the back of the piece of mail. And then there's an optical scanner that reads the address, which is pretty cool. And they're really accurate, too. But if your handwriting is terrible, they have a new system now where this conveyor belt takes a picture of it, send emails, a picture to a human being at a computer who reads it that's what I think it is. Types it in, and then so it stays on the line. It doesn't have to come out any longer. That's pretty new technology. Yeah. And then, so, based on this address, including the zip code, it prints a barcode at the bottom. If you look at a letter, any letter you get has a little barcode on it. And so that's what's read that's right. The thing on the back is invisible, I think, right? Yeah. It's fluorescent. This is just showing off. We have invisible ink. Other processing machines then read those barcodes and then sort them in their little bins according to zip code. And it's just basically placing everything in what will eventually be a trade that will be delivered back to a post office or a sorting facility. Or does it go straight to a post office? It goes to no other processing plan. Right. So imagine each processing plan, like regional, I guess, has a bunch of mail coming in on trucks that sort and then sends out and then based on its zip code that it serves, it gets a bunch of flats from other distribution facilities that's right. That are already according to the zip code. So let's say it's getting a flat of mail by zip code. It then also sorts through those that's right. And it actually sorts them into an individual carriers route in order. And that's what's delivered to the post office. So it arrives at the post office ready to go on the truck. Yes. Okay. And that doesn't mean that the postal worker doesn't have much to do. They still have, like, circulars magazines, bulk mail they have to go through and put it for every address, all that crap. All that my recycling bin, basically. Yeah. Although the coupon remember our junk mail episode from years and years back? We got so much from people who are like, no, you can't get rid of junk mail. Right. That's the only thing keeping us in business. Yeah. So if you're going to address a letter, there are a few guidelines. You got to put your address legibly on the front. Got to put your little return address in the upper left corner. Yeah. On the front. Don't put it on the back upper left corner there. And don't use periods and commas. Like if. You write PO. Box. It's not p period. O period box. Although that doesn't matter. Apparently it allows for greater efficiency in reading your letter, maybe, because I always put, like, Atlanta. Comma ga, period. I do, too. And they still get there. But don't you wonder if they get there, like, earlier? I don't know. Maybe. So supposedly you need to be able to read the address at arm's length. So don't write tiny. Right. And don't write so big that they can't do other things to the envelope, like scan and stamp and things like that. And then you've got to put your return address because if something happens, you want it to come back to you. Yeah, although I don't do that much anymore. A lot of times I'll just put like Atlanta, Georgia. Really? You don't put your return address on there? No, but I rarely mail things, and a lot of times when I do it's for work. So I'll just put Atlanta, Georgia, house of work or something. I got you. And it's not the kind of thing that if it doesn't come back to me, I would care. I got you. If that's some precious thing, I would put a return address. I have a feeling that you're going to get some email from postal carriers that are like, I hate people like you. Because whether you care if it comes back to you or not, I'm sure they have to get it back to you. There's a lot of type of delivery services. We won't go over here. But I did want to say that Media mail is a great little trick. Not a trick, but a great tool if you're mailing things like books or DVDs, because it's super cheap, but it takes a while. But that's part of that mandate from 1792 that they want to keep the intellectual juice of America flowing through the Postal Service. So things like that, like creative stuff or books or correspondence. And I think that's how if you've ever ordered a book on Amazon for like two cent, you're like, oh, how can they sell a book for two cent? It's because they charge you like 495 for shipping, and they probably pay like eight cents to mail it with media mail. That's the greatest scam of the 21st century. Well, not really. I mean, they're making their money via shipping instead of the book itself. But publishers don't like it, of course, because they want to sell their books new and not for two cent on Amazon. So I think we said that the Postal Service has a monopoly on delivering mail, but not on delivering packages. Right? Sure. So because they're kind of in competitive business against like Ups and FedEx and DHL and all those guys. Those guys have gone ahead and invested in infrastructure of, say, like air delivery, air transportation of mail. And the Postal Service has tried that before. They tried a guided missile in 1953, which they shot full of mail from a submarine to a naval station in Florida. But it was just too expensive. Right. So the postal service said, hey, ups. Hey, FedEx, you guys have a bunch of planes. Can we start putting our mail on it? And they said, sure, for a few billion dollars a year. And the postal service said great. But at the same time, they stepped forward into the 21st century by doing so. Yeah. And the Postal Service having access to everyone's mailbox is often tapped by Ups, and FedEx deliver what's called in the business the last mile. So a lot of times, especially if you're a rural person, if you get something from Amazon, it was shipped by Ups, but eventually it made its way into your postal carriers route and being delivered by the Postal Service. Yeah, there's way more mixing of package mailing than you would think. It's like a swinger party or something. Pretty much. And part of that deal in 2001 with FedEx was, hey, FedEx said, can we put our boxes at your post offices? And they said, sure, for $126,000,000. And they said, can we hit your ride on your plane? They said, sure, for 6.3 billion over seven years, but it seems like a good agreement. And they did the same with Ups. And we scratch our back, you scratch yours. Your back, we'll scratch yours. Yeah, that all works. Yeah. Why didn't everybody scratch their own back? I don't know. Okay. Because it's hard to reach. Yeah, I guess. So if you realize that the Postal Service needs a few billion extra dollars, you say, why don't you just up the postal rates? Yeah, well, the federal government keeps its thumb on that. They want to make sure that anybody who needs to mail a letter can do so without great expense. Yeah, it's a big deal to change the postal rate. It is much more than you would think. There's a layman like me, it would just be like, yeah, just add a few cents. Who cares? Yeah, that's the problem. Just print it's forever. Stamps. Genius idea. You don't have to go back and reprint a bunch with the amount. Great idea. Or the $0.01. Remember in Fargo when the Wade got the $0.01 yet with the ducks? Yeah. And she was like, everyone needs the $0.01 whenever they raise the rates. Yeah. He's like, I didn't think about that. But yes, there's a very long, protracted, difficult process of raising the postal rates. It's not a very easy thing now, and it involves a ton of bureaucracy. Should we get into that or just leave it at that? It's up to you, man. I think we should just leave it at that. Okay. So if you are going to mail something from your house, you need your little mailbox. And I just installed mine in what seemed like a sensible manner. I didn't realize that there were actual rules. In fact, you are supposed to contact the post office before installing your mailbox, which I had no idea to make sure it's like the correct placement and height. The post office person or the mail carrier doesn't have to get out of the truck. Oh, well, they'll burn it down if it's not the specification. So you want to contact the post office? I didn't, but I guess I just lucked out because they say generally 41 to 45 inches from the road surface to the inside floor of the mailbox or point of entry and then set back six to eight inches from the front face of the curb or road edge to the mailbox door. Right. I guess I just got lucky then because I get my mail without any burning down of your now or without a post office box, which we talked about. They've been around for a couple of hundred years. And that's if you want to have a little key to your little own box in a post office and get your mail there, you can certainly do that. It's handy. If you're starting out a business and you want to make people think that you're not working out of your house, you can get a post office and say, look, I have a PO. Box, which means I'm working out of my bedroom. Right. It's like code, I think. Or are you getting guns in the mail? Is that what people do? I'm sure there's a lot of people who try to get guns in the mail than their PO. Boxes. Yeah, sure. Okay. Or if you tend to move around a lot in the same town and you don't want to worry about changing your mail and forwarding your mail, you could always just get a PO. Box. Yeah. So those are some reasons you want to talk feature the post office if it's around after October 2013. Sure. What is the future of the post office? Well, there's a lot of stuff coming down the pike. There's the cancelation of Saturday mail. Yes. This August, they're really going hard after package delivery services now. What, trying to oh, with like the flat rates and stuff like that. Yeah. Just really like courting businesses to say, hey, consider us instead of Ups or FedEx. Right. And especially with prescription medicine. Sure. Because we have an aging population that's going to do nothing but increase in size. So you're going to need more prescriptions through the mail. So, hey, let's get into that. Yeah. And you can get stuff like that certified and insured and signature delivery approved and stuff like that. It's helpful. Part of the post office is pledged that your letter carrier won't take your medication before delivering. It might hit you up for some. Right. But there's also a line of clothing coming out. Postal service line of clothing coming out, I'm not kidding. Called Rain, Heater, Snow. And we almost didn't mention this. So the postal service is Creed, right? Sure. Neither rain, nor snow nor sleep, sleep hold on. Rain or sleet or snow, neither snow, nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. And that's actually not the Post office's official model. They don't have one, but it's been linked to them. And it's actually an adaptation of something from Herodotus, the Greek historian, who was making a comment about how the Persians, even during their war in 500 BC, they were one of the first ones to establish a real postal service. And even during war, the postal service didn't stop. There were still documents being delivered, and Herodotus was commenting on that, and that's where that came from. It should include like, or loss of limb. It did originally. That's an adaptation. It wasn't loss of limb, but it was something like, yeah, some sort of sickness is befallen you right. They were putting the mail before themselves. The show must go on. Right. So there's a line of clothing called Rain or Heater, Snow. And then they're also talking about creating federal email addresses that you get at birth. Just like you have a physical address, you would also have an email address, but your email address is attached to you rather than the physical location you live at. And if you say you need to correspond with the IRS or Social Security Administration, something like that, you would send this very secure email through this postal services portal. Everything else you could just use like Gmail or Yahoo or whatever right, for everyday stuff. But this is like the big stuff, the really important stuff. And then the Postal service would also offer like a digital lockbox for a will or your medical records or something like that. Yeah. And listen, as every conspiracy person in the country now says, no way, I want a federal email attached to my name that I have to send things through. Yeah, well, that's the number of the beast, obviously. Yeah, I don't know that I would want that either. I'm not a big conspiracy guy. Oh, it's not that you have to send it to that. It's that if you send it through that if somebody hijacks it or reads it, they're going to be in a lot more trouble, federally speaking, than they would be if they read your Gmail. Yeah, because isn't it illegal to open a federal offense to get someone's email? Exactly. And there's this guy who runs a think tank for the Postal service who's like, it's not just about mailing documents. It's about protecting the connectedness of the United States and Americans. So how do we do that in a digital world? And it's thinking about this. So if you're even the least bit interested by this episode that we just recorded, there's an Esquire article called piece I didn't there's an Esquire piece. It's called do we really want to live without the Post Office? And it's by Jesse Lichtenstein. And it is really good, man. It's a really good overview of, what does Jesse think we need it? He or she, I think, kind of leans toward we need it. And the more you start to read about it, the more this weird kind of civic affection for the post office developed, where I'm like, yeah, we don't want to get rid of the post office. You want the post office. Who doesn't want the post office? It kind of develops. Yeah. Maybe it was a simpler day, or maybe that people stuck with their routes longer, but I remember my postman growing up. It was the same guy for years, and we lived on we didn't live in a neighborhood. We lived on a street in the woods with like, six houses. And so I would run out and check the mail and wave at them, and we would give them gifts at Christmas. That's awesome. And now I have no idea who my postal carrier is, which is my fault. I need to just go out there. I think you do. Yeah. And also, the postal service is responsible for the largest food drive in the United States every year. Oh, really? Yeah. You know that food drive where you just put, like, canned food in your mailbox and your postal employee picks it up? Really? You can do that? Yeah. I've never heard of it. It hasn't been very well publicized, but at least around here, I guess. But it's a huge food drive. At the very least, postal carriers are taking and eating cans of braviolet for dinner. This is delicious. I love this food drive. Yeah. So don't just put cans of food in your mailbox. Check into when that is supposed to be. That's got to be the worst day of the year for letter carriers. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Can you imagine? It's a lot of weight. Yeah. You got anything else? No. Respect your postal carrier. You want everybody to go out and meet their postal carrier? Yeah. Why not? Give them a hug. Actually, don't do that. They might mace you or something. Yeah, but give them a wave. Yes. If you want to learn more about the post office, you can type those words into the search bar athouseofworks.com. And be sure to check out the esquire article, too. It's very cool. And I guess before we get into that, chuck, you want a message from our sponsor? Let's do that. Yeah. Hi, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software, all you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, now it's listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this fan who thought we were wrong and did a little research, and we may not be wrong after call. That's a nice title. We had a bunch of filmmakers right in when we talked about the subliminal messages being inserted into movies in the 1950s by James Vickery, because we said it's one 3000 of a second or something. And a bunch of filmmakers went, there's only 24 frames per second. So if you switch that one frame, it would only be 120 4th. There's no way. There's no way. And where did you get this number? Where did you get this number? I went back and looked and I was like, I see this number in various places. So we got this email from Brian Henry that disputed this, and then he wrote back with this. Hey, guys, looks like I may have spoken too soon. I was assuming that Vickery was just changing the film itself, which would result in the messages showing much slower and at the maximum, 120 fourth of a second. But I did some research and apparently he used something called a I've never heard of this before. A gistoscope. I think you got it. The gistoscope. Okay. To project the messages on the screen, not the movie projector, he said. So this way he would have had a lot more control over the speed of the messages. And so to all the filmmakers out there who wrote in and challenged it, I wrote back to a few that was like, jeez, I don't know, man, I'm looking for it. And some of them were even kind of snotty about, like, you should research it more. So apparently put that in your titles. Just scope and smoke it, is what I say. Yeah. And that is from Brian Henry. Yeah. Thanks, Brian, for the research and being a good guy, saying, hey, I was wrong, he was one of the nicer ones about it. Well, thank you. If you want to let us know that you were wrong, even though you had told us that we were wrong at first, we love those. Yeah, you can tweet that to us at Syscap. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffusionnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and you can write all over our website, which is called stuffyoushineknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows. Morbid. My favorite murder and small town murder. You'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true Crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-03-03-sysk-oak-island.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Is there treasure on Oak Island? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-is-there-treasure-on-oak-island | Off Nova Scotia, the tiny spit of land called Oak Island has been host to waves of treasure hunters for more than 200 years. Some of them lost their lives in the search for a treasure reputedly buried in a deep pit. But is anything really there? | Off Nova Scotia, the tiny spit of land called Oak Island has been host to waves of treasure hunters for more than 200 years. Some of them lost their lives in the search for a treasure reputedly buried in a deep pit. But is anything really there? | Sat, 03 Mar 2018 15:15:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=15, tm_min=15, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=62, tm_isdst=0) | 35652852 | 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. Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen the Oak Island mystery. It's one we've gotten requests to do for a long time, and even after we did it, we've still gotten requests to do it. So here it is again. It's a good one from 2015. And as an added bonus, keep an ear out for a surprise cameo by a global de Laurete. Before we knew it, it was called enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. So this is stuff you should know. So you're no disclosure accent? No, sir. What was that? Just a howdy. Okay. It did sound funny, though. That was my Heat Hall version. We talked about he haul. You loved the show, didn't you? No, I never really watched it. I'm thinking of my other podcast. Yeah, really? I didn't watch. He hall much. Yeah, I did. I was from the south of Toledo. Thought that was like, Yoko stuff. No, I mean, it was on every once in a while. I just passed by. Right. Mini Pearl. She had the hat with the price tag on sale. That's all anyone started there. And then there was like, some guy with a banjo, I think. Sure. I think this is one of the most off requested shows. Oak island. Yeah. I didn't really know much about it, but it seems like every other week someone is saying, Oak Island guys do Oak Island. Yes. We're going to do Oak Island. We want everybody to be quiet. That's right. That's what we're doing. Did you know much about this ahead of time? No, not at all. I did. It's one of those things like, you hear about and you hear a little more and you don't really dig in. The whole thing is just kind of this neat legend that's kind of out there. Yes. I don't know how I missed it. And then once you start digging in, you're like, I understand. You say that was a skeptical tone. Well, I think this is one of those cases where there's no treasure. I don't know. There's some weirdness there are some things that make me say, this is very odd, but I also understand the skeptical point of view. Sure. So what I've just kind of demonstrated is a little bit of a middle of the road approach to Oak Island, which is unusual. Most people approach Oak Island either as true believe or treasure hunters or total skeptics. Right. Like, there's not a lot of middle of the road. It's a divisive island. As far as islands go, it's only, like, 107 acres. It's not a big island. It's off the coast of Nova Scotia. 140 acres. Yeah. That's not big. Yeah, but for as small as it is, it's pretty divisive. Yeah. I don't see what the big deal about being skeptical about a buried treasure. Who cares if you're skeptic? You have to poopoo everything. Absolutely. Anything that's even remotely frivolous has to be squashed. But this isn't even, like, supernatural or anything. I guess there's the curse thing. Yeah. That's it. That's all TV. That's not even lower, from what I understand. Oh, really? New. It's like literally just a media creation, like, strictly from the TV show before that. I mean, like, people didn't really see it as a curse. There's just buried treasure on Oak Island. Yeah. And if it's the you're digging for things, there's a good chance you might die. Yeah. It's dangerous. It is. Doesn't mean it's cursed. I read this really great article written in 1965 by Mildred Restaurant yes. From the New York Times. No, this was in autoimmagazine and it was written by her. Yeah, I read one. It might have been the same one. I wonder. It was like, within a very short time of her husband and son dying. Yeah. I thought, wow, this lady is really composed. But then I read a little further and found out that Mildred Restaurant and her husband Robert. Who moved their family to Oak Island so Robert could hunt for the treasure in started out they met because they were both circus performers with nerves of steel who rode motorcycles in a huge globe sphere while he would go. Like. Upside down. And she would go side to side and they would miss each other hundreds of times in an act. And now after that, I was like, oh, yeah, this lady, she's tough as nails. Yeah. Have you never seen one of those acts? Sure I have. Okay. I just didn't realize that that's what they did. Sure. Got you. Yeah. And it seems kind of odd to have that. I thought it was a newer act. No, it's totally 50s screams. 50s. Really? Yeah. See, I thought it screams seventy s. Oh, it does too. Yeah, you're right. Sure. Yeah. Evil caneval is why that screen is that. All right, so let's dive in here, eh? Well, yes. The rest of us, when they moved to they were hardly the first people that moved to Oak Island and set up residence there in order to find the treasure. But prior to 1795, oak island was just another island. Yeah, it's still just another island. Well, just because of all of the attention that has been paid to it. It's been changed forever. That's true. Prior to 1795, though, it was just like, whatever, there's Oak Island until a local kid from Nova Scotia named Robert McGinnis daniel McGinnis. I decided to go explore. Yeah. And you won't find any two people that agree on these legend stories, even with Daniel McKenna, because none of this stuff is really written down until much later in the 1795. Nothing was written down in 1795. Nothing was documented until, like, the 1900. Well, sir, Star Trek came along. Certainly things like this weren't documented because he was just a boy. He was 16 years old. He was on a fishing expedition. And as the story goes and we'll just use the most commonly agreed upon story here. Okay. He was just kind of traipsing around the island and found, like, a block from a pulley attached to a tree, an oak tree, and then a big sort of cleared out area underneath it where it looked like someone had maybe been digging and reburying something. Yeah. There's, like, a depression under this tackle block from a pulley. Yeah. It was cleared out, and he was like that's. Anything? There's a pirate stretcher down there. Yeah. I mean, being a 1795 teenager sure. He was like pirates all over the place. Yeah. And it's entirely possible. We're talking the 18th century. We're talking a time when piracy was still very much in the public imagination. Yeah. Buried treasure was a hot thing. Yeah. I mean, there is such a thing. And at the very least, if no single pirate ever buried his treasure, there is a lot of rumor about buried treasure of pirates. I think it makes total sense. Sure. You can't carry that stuff around all the time because you get robbed and looted. So you bury that junk. Bury it, come back for it later. Right. Make a weird, funny looking map that looks like a sweaty pillowcase and put a big X in the middle of it. Sure. And then put that in a coffee can and then bury that in your backyard. That's right. You got to bury twice because it's so nice. The pirate. Really? Can you say it like a pirate? No, you would do that. All right. So he starts digging. His interest is piqued. He gets a couple of friends, comes back the next day, anthony Volhan and John Smith. This is likely a pseudonym, you think? Probably. And so they start digging, reportedly go down about 10ft, and found a layer of, like, a platform of oak logs. Yeah. Which is you're not supposed to find that when you dig into a hole under a pulley. No, you're not supposed to. No worries. First they found a stone that they took to be man made, like, 2ft down and then 10ft down. They found an oak platform. Yeah. And then supposedly every 10ft after that, they kept finding these platforms. And we'll just go ahead and call this the Money Pit. That's what everyone calls it. The main location is the Money Pit, because just the first oak platform alone says there's treasure buried here. That's right. So basically, they got down as far as they could for three teenage boys with picks and shovels and said, we're not finding anything and we need help, basically. Yeah. We need to bring in some old timey equipment. Yes. Bigger tools. Get some old timey funding, and maybe get some old timey other people involved. And they did, but it took, like, nine years before they came back, I think. Yeah. And they filled it back in because they didn't just want to leave a big empty hole there. It's an obvious sign that there's a treasure there. So, like you said, 9 hours later, they did come back with investors. Nine years later. What did I say? Hours. No, I said yours. I will bet you all the money on Oak Island that you said ours. At any rate, it was nine years, and they came back informed with some funding from the onslow company. And that will be a common refrain here. And apparently I did some writing on modern treasure hunting, and it's all about the funding. It's just like any business, these dudes have boats and equipment, but they're like, if you want a piece of this action, we need some dough to go out there and find the stuff. It's like selling future contracts. Yeah. Potential treasure. Exactly. And it's not just treasure hunting that does that. Like, lots of archaeological expeditions are funded like that. If your local universities we got enough problems as it is. We can't fund your dig. Right. You can go to private investors. Sure. Who ultimately, it's still treasure hunting. It's just church up and called archaeological things. So they come back as the on slow company and dig down deeper this time. And they did find some interesting things, notably things that shouldn't be there, like coconut fiber and charcoal and putty. Coconut is obviously not native to Nova Scotia, so they're like, someone has put something down here. Well, yeah. Also at the time, coconut fiber was used as a packing material, though, so clearly somebody was using it as some sort of construction material, wasn't accidentally dropped there. That's right. So legend has it they dug down until they hit 90ft and then found a flat stone with a coded inscription that they could not make sense of. Since then, other people have supposedly translated it to read, 40ft below, \u00a32 million are buried. There is no stone today. There is no rubbing. There is no photograph. No, it's called the famous cipher stone. Yeah. And it was supposedly lost in, like, 1919, but yeah, there's no no evidence. Yeah. And so anything you run across, like in a book or on the web or something, is conjecture. Sure. There's no document of this cypher stone, but they do think that something that accounts for the cypher stone did exist at some point, but no one knows for certain right. Exactly what it said. And if you're wondering, \u00a32 million of what I assumed that they meant British currency. Yeah, that would be funny if it was just like, \u00a32 million of pirate scat, right? Coconut husk. So they get down to about close to 100ft and then go home for the day and drink rum, I would imagine, and then come back and it's full of water. And they tried to bail it out, but they were basically like, this is well, I guess this point, it was early 18 hundreds, but we're still screwed. Right. So, Robert Mcginnison, what was the name of the company you came back with? Onslaught Company. The Anzlaw company. What you just described is the process that people have followed and the troubles that people have run into ever since. And we'll talk about some of the following expeditions because McGinnis troubles didn't put anybody else off. No. Right after that. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes. LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US. Based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock.com stuff. That's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. 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. Okay, so, Chuck, something really weird happened to the McGinnis expedition. The second one. Yes. When he grew up, became a man, came back with the Onslow company and dug down became a man. They went to bed after drinking a bunch of rum, like you said, and then they woke up, and the pit had filled with water, and it's basically been filled with water ever since. Yes. Which is a problem if you're a treasure hunter. You want dry conditions as much as possible to get to the treacherous water is an impediment. And it became such an impediment that ultimately McGinnis and the Onslow Company just kind of gave up. I guess they ran out of funding. Right? Yeah. Which has also been a refrain over the years. Right. You can only take so long until the person eventually who's funding you says, I'm going to pull the plug. Right. But years later, a question was raised about that flooding. People started to wonder, was that actually an engineered booby trap? Right. And that's become a question among treasure hunters for centuries. On, yeah. Of course, the skeptics will say, no, it is just seawater, because later they found out that it was actually saltwater, and there are other similar underground water tunnels on the island. So they're like, no, this is just going on on this island. And the believers will say, no, it was a booby trap set by the pirates. But the believers in this case have kind of strange evidence to back up their ideas. So in 1849, after the McGinnis expedition, the second one left many years after the Truro Company, which is kind of tough to say, they showed up to the island to look for the Money Pit and they started digging again, right? Yes. And when they started digging, they ran into the same problem. The shaft that they dug filled with water. So they started to think, well, wait a minute, maybe this is purposeful at the very least. Maybe there's some sort of sea caves. And if there are sea caves that are filling this thing up, potentially we could stop up the sea caves and then we can avoid the water problem and keep digging. So they sent people from the expedition to look all over the shoreline of the island, and they found something really astounding that, from what I understand, still to this day, is the one thing that confounds all skeptics when it comes to Oak Island. They found what can really only be described as a man made drainage system that basically accepts the incoming tide and potentially funnels the tide to the Money Pit. Yeah. So they continue to dig and drill because they were encouraged by finding, like, things they said were metal or maybe even gold on the augers and even more coconut husk. Yeah. So they were like, there's something down there. But like you said, it kept flooding. And this is when they realized it was seawater. And they noticed, hey, it's actually filling up and falling back down along with the tide. Right. So that's when they built a temporary coffer dam to kind of see what was going on. And that's when they found this five finger drain, which there's really no explanation that didn't just accidentally happen. No. And what gives it away is it's 145ft wide, and it's about the height of the difference between high tide and low tide. So it's clearly meant to funnel the tide into this drain. There's five drains. They're obviously finger drains. Finger drains are like French drains basically, and they all connect into one larger drain. But the real dead giveaway was the appearance, again, of coconut fiber. Coconut fiber was used to keep the sand out of the stone drain, and a layer of coconut fiber on an island off of the coast of Nova Scotia suggests man's intervention. That's right. But what that means, who knows? Again, treasure seekers will say that they put this to keep you from finding that treasure. Right. It was evidence in favor of the idea that the Money Pit is boobytrapped. Yeah. And I think skeptical say that. I think there was a theory that there was a lot of weird Freemason rituals going on, and maybe they buried some stuff there and not treasure necessarily, but maybe they built this drain to keep people from digging into there. Yeah. Modern treasure hunters are like, great, let me find whatever the Mason's buried. Yes. Even if it's not gold ingots. It could be, like, the secrets of the Freemason. Yeah. The Ark of the Covenant. Yeah. All right. They said that could be down there or the Holy Grail. Do you want to talk about some of the legends of what's down there? Yeah, we might as well. Okay, so the predominant one that Robert McGinnis initially thought of was that it was pirate treasure because he was a teenager in the 1790s. Right, right. Successive people have come to see the Money Pit. If it is sabotaged like it is in the construction that went into it as something that would have had to have been carried out by a group more sophisticated, better funded, and better organized than Captain Kid crew. Yeah. More sober, at the very least. Yeah, exactly. So one of the rumors of what treasures buried down there is that the Freemasons buried something or the Knights Templar buried something, because the Knights Templar, they were like the militant arm of fundamental Christianity in the 10th century during pilgrimages A K, the Crusades to the Middle East. Right, yeah. So that means they got a lot of dough. Over the years, they accumulated great wealth, had a big falling out with the Catholic Church, of course. Yes. Supposedly, they were found worshiping Baphomet, the goat headed breasted Satan. That's sort of like the statue. Right? That's exactly like the statue Oklahoma. Yeah. The one that's being constructed by the Satanic Temple right now. Yeah, I put that on our Facebook page. It was very divisive. I can imagine. No surprise. Yeah. I thought it was just a nice, cool looking piece of art. I mean, man, it's pretty well done. Yeah, it looks nice. The night simpler, has all this dough. They have a falling out with the Catholic Church, for obvious reasons that you just pointed out, and then they buried their treasure. So I guess the Catholic Church wouldn't get their hands on it. Right. But among that treasure, supposedly, is the Holy Grail, which is what the knights were looking for. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, which is what Indiana Jones is looking for. In Indiana Jones, no. Raiders are the lost Ark. And so some people have said this is where the Knights Templar buried their treasure. This is where the Ark of the Covenant is. Then other people have said, whatever. The Knights Templar never made it to Nova Scotia. But the Freemasons obviously took over the secrets and protections of the Knights Templar. They're like the modern day Knights Templar society. And they probably buried the ark and or the Holy Grail. Duh. Yes. And apparently a lot of Masons have been on these excavation teams over the years, which, of course, is evidence that they're looking for their old stuff. Right. It also is entirely possible that there is a rumor among Masons that this is true. Whether it's true or not, that could have gotten some Masonic adventures to go. Look, another theory that's been thrown out there is that Marie Antoinette, during the French Revolution, got all her jewelry together and gave it to a woman and said, Flee. And she fled to Nova Scotia. And then the French Navy came along and constructed this elaborate system to bury her jewels. Right. There's another little possible theory, and supposedly evidence that backs that up is that the woman who was given the jewels, who was entrusted with the jewels was spotted in Nova Scotia sometime after that. That's right. What was she doing there? Barry and jewels. Another unusual Nova Scotia link is that of Francis Bacon. Yeah, I like this one. So remember Francis Bacon from the Scientific method? He was the guy that really first put that down in written form. Brilliant man. Possibly Shakespeare. It's one of the theories is that he was the real Shakespeare and the idea is that he hid his manuscripts in the Money Pit on Oak Island. And that seems kind of far fetched. But apparently, Francis Bacon owned land in Nova Scotia. Yeah. And he was a preserver of things in Mercury. And supposedly they found flasks of mercury on the island. I don't buy that one because I've always believed that Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Francis Bacon or his sister or any of the other various crackpot theories about who really wrote that stuff. I like Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, you know? Yeah. Just the thought of it. Or do you think the evidence is I don't know about the evidence. I don't know enough about it, but I like the thought of it. He seems like a pretty cool dude. So some of the other treasure hunters started flocking there in the mid to late 1800 because that was just a big time for treasure hunting. Yeah. Well, the California gold rush is going on, which is why the 49 Ers are called that. That's right. And I think there's kind of a treasure fever going through the land. That's a good way to say it. Yeah. So the Eldorado Company in 1866 went out there and there were various methods over the years to try and block off the flow of water. They tried digging shafts and tunnels, they tried to divert it, they tried to intercept it. And basically all that ended up doing was causing a nightmare for future expeditions to the point where people had a hard time even finding the original money bit to begin with. Right. A lot of the landmarks, I guess you'd call them, were just utterly destroyed. Yeah. Supposedly in that article I read from Mrs restaurant, she said that there weren't any more oaks on Oak Island any longer. Oh, no more oak trees. Yeah, because of excavation. Just tore them all down. So it'd be very tough to find your way around if whatever directions were written at a time when there were plenty of oak trees that used oak trees as guides. Like, go to the oak tree and turn left. Exactly. Yeah. The excavation has definitely changed the face of that island tremendously. One thing we do have that is tangible, as far as I don't know if you call it evidence or not, because it really doesn't say much, but Frederick Blair in the 1890s came with the Oak Island Treasure Company and he actually found something that still exists. It's a little bitty tiny piece of parchment paper and it looks like a curse of letters. VI are on it, but it's small and it really leads to nothing other than something man made. Is there? I don't think anyone's had any conjecture about what that means. Six, maybe \u00a36 billion buried, 600ft down. Right. Who knows? And then the 20th century has seen or saw since. We're in the 21st century now. Successive waves, pretty constant waves of people coming looking for the Oak Island treasure. One of them was a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who also was a Mason. Yeah, he came along as an investor and apparently always pined to go back to Oak Island to search for the treasure, like it got in his blood. All right, so after this message break, we are going to look at a few more of the things that have been discovered there over the years and what this all means. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yeah. LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. So, Chuck, I was saying in the 20th century, saw wave after wave of treasure hunter come, dig, and then leave penniless. Sure. One of those people, though. And we also talked about how Oak Island has been utterly changed. Probably nobody changed the topography and geography of Oak Island more than a guy named Robert Dunfield, who was an engineer, I believe or no, geologist. And in 1965, he built a bridge a highway. Yeah. Causeway. Yeah. From the mainland to Oak Island. And right after he did that, right after it was completed, he started moving heavy equipment and just started digging like crazy. Yeah. He got down 100ft I'm sorry, 140ft. Down 100ft wide. And kept everything a secret until 2003. And they didn't find a lot. They found some porcelain dishware from the 1600s. What was that doing there? Could find for sure the early 16, hundreds even. But he, of course, didn't find a lot either, ultimately, in the way of riches, because he kept having problems, despite his machinery with collapsing caves, heavy rains, more tide water. But he did say there was a cavern under some limestone. He did confirm one of these underwater cavern rumors, right? Supposedly, yeah. Which accounts for potentially a natural formation. If you're a skeptic, if you're a believer, then it just confirms the booby trap thing. Yeah. He finally left after basically, he was the guy who demolished the most landmarks. But shortly after he left, a pair of guys who formed what's called the Triton Alliance, david Tobias and Dan Blankenship, they started working, and they actually brought along some high tech stuff for 1970, which was like an underwater camera. Video camera. Yeah. It's probably the size of a small car right. That they lowered down there. And they drilled a hole, and they called it Borehole ten X, and it was filled with water, of course, as all holes in Oak Island do. But they lowered this underwater camera down there, and they swore to God that they saw evidence of human remains and treasure chests. That's what they said, whether you're convinced or not, Tobias in blanketship. We're convinced enough that Blankenship still lives on Oak Island. Yeah. He became sort of the main guy that remains today as the main guy. Right. And. This is 1970 when they showed up. He's still on that island, and he's supposed to be 80s. Yes, he's old. No, but it was the 1970s when they showed up. And he still lives there now. That's what I'm saying. He is Agent Wise in his eighty s. I got you. Yeah, he's an old feller. We hammered that out. He's apparently an ordinary fellow, too, because there was another guy named Fred Nolan who is a famous Oak Island explorer where they ran a foul of one another. Apparently Blank and Ship had a rifle, obviously in his hand during the argument, and the cops had to come out and take the rifle away. Really? Yeah. And supposedly now nobody is allowed on Oak Island, although I guess you can if you're filming a TV show. Except for Dan Blankenship, who's the only resident. Well, he's part of the TV show. Okay. So he was like, come on. Yeah. What's that? History Channel, I think. I don't know. Yeah, there's a couple of the people that he's working with today. Rick and Marty Lagina, I think are brothers from Michigan, and they are the subject of the TV show, which I'll have to check out at some point. Sure. That's supposedly where the curse came from. Is that show really? Yeah. Did not know that. So it's been a presence since last year. Right. Frederick Nolan also is the one who in 1981, discovered five large cone shaped boulders that when you look at it above, looks like a cross, and it is forever known as Nolan's cross. What does it mean? Who knows? Maybe the boulders were just sort of in the shape of a cross by accident. Well, Fred Nolan bought five plots of land. Bought them. So he was a resident there and inhabitant there, too. I'm not sure what happened to old Fred Nolan, though. Yeah, I'm not sure. It's a good point. He may have been lost to the curse of Oak Island. So we keep using present tense. It's entirely true. As anyone with History Channel knows, there are still people who are looking actively for the treasure of Oak Island. Right? Yeah. Like, they believe that if you put all the evidence together, nolan's cross, coconut fibers, the finger drains the evidence from blanket ship and toe bias their video stuff. Like, if you put all this together, there is evidence that there is treasure down there. Somebody just needs to dig deep enough in the right place and then bam, they're going to find it. Right? Yeah. I mean, man, they dug so deep, though. And so wide. Yeah. How much deeper could they have gone back in the pirate days? I don't know. It just seems very unlikely to me there's any treasure there. Well, then you would be in the Skeptics camp and you would definitely not be alone. Yeah, but Skeptic thinking there may have been something buried or some weird thing going on there, but I don't know about treasure. Right. Who knows, though? Skeptics will also say these are natural sinkholes instead of traps, like we said earlier. They will also say things like, there's all kinds of underground caverns around here. There's nothing special. I don't know what they say about finding things like porcelain plates. I didn't see anything like that. But when the stone is lost, this inscripted stone, when there's no evidence really to point to except this tiny piece of parchment paper, right? I don't know. It's pretty flimsy. Well, none of the excavations started to be documented until the 19th century, so all of McGinnis's early work is all based on hear saying conjecture. It's all up for debate whether he was a teenager was the tackle block for the pulley. Was that added to the story later on? Right. If so, then all of a sudden, that depression under the tree branch just becomes a depression under a tree branch. Right. The pulley was the thing. Excuse my physics joke, but the fulcrum of this whole thing. Yeah. So if you start to look at it on its face, all of this legend, you realize that most of it is just legend, and that the only real physical evidence is that scrap of parchment paper, that no one even knows whether that was planted or not. Well, yeah, that's one of the things skeptics often say, is that anything you found there could have been planted just to get money to fund the digs. Right. Like, look, we found this parchment and this porcelain plate, and there's some gold dust on our auger. Did we mention the coconut fiber? The coconut fiber again. Right. So send us another, like, I don't know, ten mil. We'll keep digging. Right. So there you have it. Oak island. Again, though, those finger drains are just weird. Yeah, that's weird for sure. It's cool. Who did what there? Yeah. Basically, they just need to strip mine the entire island all the way down. There you go. I don't know why anyone hasn't thought of that yet. Yeah, just completely strip it of all its natural beauty till there's nothing left. Sure. And just shrugg your shoulders afterward, say, there's nothing here. Right? Yeah. Go, man. If you want to know more about Oak Island, apparently you can watch a weekly television show on it. You can also type Oak Island into the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this poison ivy. Follow up from JB guy. I have an interesting story about how you can get poison ivy from more than just touching it. When I was eight or so, we lived in California, had a big fireplace. One day, we decided to get our own firewood from outside and got a couple of big logs. My sister, we were both at about seven at the time. She and I used the fire to roast marshmallows and make smores. Great night, right? An hour or so later, one of my sisters came into my parents'room saying she couldn't breathe. Her face had swollen to twice its normal size, and her eyes were shut. Her throat was barely able to pass air through it. An emergency room trip and a shot or two of steroids later, she was okay. But it took a while to find out what happened. Apparently, the poison ivy had been removed from the logs we got, but the SAP was still in the wood, and when we burned them, the SAP was present in the smoke. And my sister was highly allergic, inhaled it, got it in her throat and lungs, and it blew up her face like a red balloon. Best side note of this, we had passport photos. The next day, we were moving to Germany, so her passport pick was a giant, red, swollen, balloon face. That's awesome. That is. JB in Fortville, Oklahoma. Way to go, JB. That was a good story. You get the blue ribbon for it. And I guess she had that passport photo for a full decade. Unless she just had it retaken. Yes. Would you live with that passport photo? No. I totally would. I think it'd be funny, except for the whole this doesn't look like you think. Yeah, that'd be a drag. It would be a huge drag. TSA likes a hassle. Yeah, but I'm well known in my family for making funny faces any time I have a photo ID of any kind taken right, just for fun, I've always done it. That is so fun. Emily likes it. You got anything else? No. Okay. Well, thanks again for the awesome story, JB. If you have a great story, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can post it on our Facebook page at facebook. Comstuffysheno. You can put in an email and send it to stuffpodcast athouseaufworks.com. And in the meantime, while you're waiting around thinking of what to say, go hang out at our home on the web stuffyoushaneko.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-07-sysk-restaurant-health-inspections-final.mp3 | How Restaurant Health Inspections Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-restaurant-health-inspections-work | If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know the feeling that occurs when the health inspector pays a visit. While nerve wracking, it's the best insurance patrons have that their food will be prepared and served in a proper environment. Learn all about | If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know the feeling that occurs when the health inspector pays a visit. While nerve wracking, it's the best insurance patrons have that their food will be prepared and served in a proper environment. Learn all about | Tue, 07 Nov 2017 16:28:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=16, tm_min=28, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=311, tm_isdst=0) | 52124197 | audio/mpeg | "With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One NA member FDIC hey, friends. Dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all. Rooted in compatibility, Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship, and it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstaffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Rowland. Put the three of us in the room together with some raw chicken and some old mop water, you got yourself stuff you should Know. So actually, Chuck, before we get started, we have a very special guest here with us today, our good friend and colleague, Jack O'Brien. Yeah. So, first of all, say hello, Jack. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Sure. As a little means of set up here, we want to let everyone know how this kind of came about. We are expanding our podcast network, which is great and fun and awesome for everyone here. And one of the super cool things that happened is our boss or company owner said, hey, guess what? We have just got Jack O'Brien away from Crack.com to come over to our network to kind of launch the comedy wing of our network. And I think that the people need to hear about your first efforts here a show that I think is great, and it's quite a challenge, too. But tell everyone about the Daily Zeitgeist. Right, so The Daily Zeitgeist is a Daily News pop culture podcast. Basically, we're trying to take a sample of what's going on in the big kind of national cultural unconscious. So we talk about news, we talk about pop culture, we discuss things like that. We look at tabloids because those are news sources that more Americans see than just about any others. Since everybody needs to buy milk, that's the sort of stuff we look at as well as the actual news. Jack, you said something that I think probably passed a few people by. This is Daily, like, Monday through Friday, you guys research and record and release a new podcast monday through Friday, right? That's what we do. It's actually been fun, and I think we're kind of hitting our stride, getting into a bit of a rhythm. Totally. Yeah. It's just a lot of fun to kind of I get to read really interesting ideas and really interesting news articles and talk about them every day, so I couldn't ask for a more fun job. So where can everybody find this Jack? Where's The Daily Zeitgeist? Well, if you know how to spell Zeitgeist, you can search The Daily Zeitgeist on just about any podcasting application. I would recommend Apple podcasts, just The Daily, and then type in Z. And we should pop up and you guys send a $5 bill to each new subscriber for limited time, right? That's correct. Every single one of them. Cool. Yeah. Very limited time. Very limited time. We want to wish you an official welcome to the family. You came to Atlanta, and we hung out something, and then we met briefly out in La at that podcast conference. But it's just really awesome to have you guys aboard, and I look forward to seeing what else comes out of the comedy wing. I appreciate it, guys. Thanks for coming on, Jack. Thanks for having me. Lifelong dream, long time listener, first time caller. See you, Jack. Bye. All right, man. Well, let's get on with the episode. So, Chuck, have you ever been to a restaurant and seeing something that you weren't supposed to see and been like, oh, I just ate here? I used to work at restaurants, as you know, and some of them are pretty gross. I worked at a couple of myself, and I never saw anything that was like, this is wrong. But I realized over the years that I'm in the minority in that sense. Dude. My first job as a bus boy, I saw some of the most horrific things in my life, mainly because it was the people that work there, they were dirty folks. They were dirty folks, and they were people that didn't care about their own personal health and hygiene in any way. It was all gross. Gross. I saw a guy one time should I even say this? Yes, please. Dish. And you're talking about kids working in the kitchen that are gross, like high school dropouts. And hey, I'm not knocking you. If you dropped out of high school, go get that GED and keep at it. That's right. But these were not those people. They couldn't even spell GED right. They're like, I didn't get my gad. Yeah. So these people, they were gross people. And I was 13, and I couldn't speak up. I didn't know. Like, I'm not going to go to the owner of the restaurant at 13 because he didn't care. But I saw one of these dishwashers go into a walk in cooler, and he was so mad about the schedule that they put them on. He took the lid off of a big 15 gallon pot of Brunswick stew, and he put his shoed, foot, and leg into it. No, all the way to the bottom, and then took it back out. And let me tell you, man, those shoes I've never had more disgusting clothing in my life than the clothes that I worked in at a barbecue restaurant. I know. They're like the whole reason crocs are in business is because it's the only thing that won't slide across the greasy, dirty floor of every single restaurant in every single city in the entire world. Everything about that job was disgusting. They would drop meat on the ground and say, Good catch. And laugh, and then pick it up off the floor. It was, like, up to Sinclair's. The jungle. The jungle. Like, right before my little 13 year old eyes. I grew up on that job. In many ways, the only way that it could have been more like the jungle is if somebody actually died in the Brunswick stew and they just kept them in there. It was so foul. Dude, that's grody, man. I don't even know what our restaurant inspection score was. I saw nothing like that at the restaurants I worked at. I worked at a handful of them. Nothing like that. Yeah, I worked at a bunch more, and that was nothing like that. So that was the worst of the worst. Oh, my God. They're all burning in hell now. So gross. I drove by that place the other day on the way to Emily's parents. I went a different route, and now it's like a chichis a title max. Okay. Which I don't even know what that is. You can put on your car title there for extremely exorbitant interest rates. Got you. Will the ghosts of rednecks past dwell within those floors? Wow, man. Was the barbecue any good? I guess it's the moot point, right? I still ate there, dude. After the shoe thing? Yeah, man, I was a kid. I didn't know. I mean, I didn't have Brunswick stew that day. Okay, good. Or ever again. I don't know. I didn't know any better. I was dumb. You ate the Brunswick stew check, didn't you? I got a lot smarter after that. Well, again, I've never seen anything in person, but I've been on the Internet and seen things. Like that guy who peed in the coffee apparently every day. But I think that was at an office, not a restaurant. There's, like, this laundry list of fingers being found in food. I saw an article, I think, on, like, NPR or something, and it was, like, just basically the top five times fingers were found in food at restaurants. It happens a lot. Yeah. Just quickly, I should say that I feel bad for restaurant owners sometimes, especially places like that, that it's not like some nice kind of place in town. You can do all you can do, but you still can't account for some little jerk employee that's mad about something that wants to spit in someone's food on camera. You can't watch everyone 100% of the time. And that's usually what is a case. Like, that. Like, this dumb, dishwasher kid, he just goes in the walk in and says, watch this. Right? There's a case to be made then for not hiring young people. You hire people who have built a background for themselves, like a career for themselves already. Those are called good restaurants. Right? That's the difference. Yeah, I guess that is the difference. So, in a sense, it's very much the owner's fault for being a cheap bastard and hiring people who put their shoe foot in the Brunswick stew. Okay, so my point is this, Chuck, that the shoe foot fingers, like all these little things that are just horrible and horrific and disgusting, would be vastly worse and vastly more frequent were it not for a lone group of people. The thin blue line between us and utter chaos when it comes to restaurants. The health inspector. Yeah. I'm so excited about this episode. Yes. It's going to be a good one, man. I don't know. When you send it over, I was like, all right. But then I started reading, and it was interesting and awesome. There's history to it. Yeah. And one of these consumer advocacy shows that we love to do. We're doing our little rough Nader impression. Man. I love that guy. Great American. He's the tops. So restaurant health inspectors are something of a newish invention. They're certainly not really old, because at least in the United States, it wasn't until that book you mentioned, The Jungle, was published in 19 Five, that people, like, really sat up and took notice. And Congress acted almost immediately past the Pure Food and Drug Act the next year. That's the impact that upset Sinclair's the Jungle had. Yeah, rightfully so. And in the book, he went undercover. He was a muckraking journalist, God bless him. And he went undercover to basically just take notes on all the horrible things he saw in the meat packing industry, in slaughterhouses, and he chronicled all the inhumane things that he saw in the way the animals are treated, but he also saw the inhumane ways the workers were treated. But his book had this impact, and Congress actually acted, and they created the Pure Food and Drug Act. And one of the things that came out of that was what came to be known as the Food Code. And the Food Code is basically like, here are the things that you should be doing in your restaurant to prevent from running a foul of the law or creating foodborne illnesses. Yeah. And like, previous to the states, we're kind of taking care of their own health issues as best they could on their own. But then when that book came out, people were like, wait a minute. They're shipping meat across state lines, so the states aren't taking care of it themselves. Right. This meat is going out everywhere. So it became a federal thing to be regulated. They made a federal case out. They did. And along with the Pure Food and Drug Act, very importantly, the Federal Meat Inspection Act was passed in that same year. Because I think everyone, I mean, even back then, like if you're grossed out in 19 six, then they weren't as sensitive as we are today. So there was some gnarly stuff going on. Dude, a guy falling into like a hot dog grinder. Come on. So the Food Code, the early Food Code that is was sort of of kind the same stuff that we see today. Generally we have refined everything over the years with science as to what's truly dangerous and not and how it gets dangerous. But even back then they were concerned about like proper meat storage and food storage and temperatures of things and the hygiene of employees in the premises themselves. Yeah, because basically what constitutes good practices hasn't changed all that much. But to respond to changes that do come about, that do change best practices or our understanding of the science of like, foodborne illnesses the Food Code was republished every year starting in every two years. They updated it and republished it and then in 2001 they moved it to four years. But that to me is like that, friends, is the reason we pay taxes. So that there are people who are going around finding out the most cutting edge understanding of how we get sick from foods at restaurants then also finding out the exact ways to prevent this from happening publishing it into a book and distributing it to the states who then put it into practice. It takes money to do this kind of thing, but that's why we pay taxes. The next time somebody tells you that they don't care about government regulations and that we live in a nanny state you remind them of what it would be like if they ate out at a restaurant without this kind of stuff. Yeah, those people. We don't need government regulating stuff. All right, so then you will be eating eyeball, right? You'll be eating human eyeball in your next frankfurter. I will feed it to you myself. So the Food Code today, just like the very first one back in 1934, is voluntary. It is not federal law. It is still up to those states to go out and write their own rules. It aligns generally with the federal regulations and what the FDA recommends. And then it gets a little more confusing because when it comes down to actual restaurant inspections there is no federal or state inspector that comes in there. It's the city or the county who is going to be carrying this out and they work with the state and then in turn the federal government to kind of all be on the same page, right? Yeah. I think it's almost kind of like the government is the one who has the funding to go actually look around and survey and find the science and put these best practices out. But it's the county or the city where the rubber meets the road, the shoe meets the pavement. More like where the shoe meets the Brunswick stew. That's so ridiculous. Not the Brunswick. Steve stew. That's, like, one of the best things out at barbecue. Let's take a break, shall we? I'm going to go brush my tongue with the toothbrush. Okay. And I'll be right back. All right. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future by combining real world skills training and traditional academics. Students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. 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 at IBM. Comconsulting. Okay, and we're back in Chuck. Let me smell your breath. How's that? Man, that is nice little stream. Yeah. If I do detect, is that Tom's toothpaste you used? No. Okay. What toothpaste do you use? I'm using crest right now. Which one? The orange one? No, that's my favorite. Yeah. So the color of the packaging is orange, but the type of mint, it's, like, called citrus mint. But if you didn't see that, you wouldn't be like, oh, this is citrus mint. It's just its own type of very pleasant mint flavor sensation. Yeah, I just use the regular, not the white, but I think it's like, the blue Crest right now. Pro health, I think. Yeah, pro health. And then I do use the Listerine now. I've been on that for a solid couple of years. Yeah, because it's six and one. Six benefits in one. Why are we talking about this? I don't know, man. We're not even getting paid for that. Maybe mine is aqua fresh. It's either Aquafresh or Crest. Whichever one makes citrus meant. That's what I use. But do you remember Aim? Oh, yeah. What was that? So that stuff I think it's still around. It actually doesn't do anything as far as brushing your teeth goes, as far as toothpaste goes. But remember, it came out in three different colors, like green, red and white, and it was just pretty. But it's bad toothpaste. I'm not a big fan of it, but I love looking at it. How about that? Yeah, I remember that. All right, so back to food inspection. Now that our mouths are clean, there are usually three kinds of food safety inspections. You got your reg, the one that's done on the reg, all right? It's known as a routine inspection. And that's the one where they come in. Might be every six months, might be every year and a half or so, depending on some stuff we'll get to here in a bit. And that's the one where you go in and you just see the thing on the wall that gives it the score. That's the one where you're working in the restaurant and the owner and the manager freak out. They're like, oh, God, no. They do. The second they walk through the door. Although I will say in New Jersey, where I worked at the store in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. We were always great. They took it really seriously. Every time the inspector came by, they were like, Come on in. That's the way it should be. A big shout out to the store in Basking. Rich New Jersey, way to go to the store. That place is great. And they had a restaurant group and they had like six restaurants, and they were all done the right way. I don't think you could really have a restaurant group without approaching food inspection and health standards in that way. Too yeah, I mean, it's just dumb not to. And from what I saw too did you read that mental floss article I sent? Yeah. So one of the things, it's called Twelve Secrets of Restaurant Health Inspectors. One of the things they point out is that usually the bigger the chain, so whether it's a restaurant group on up to a global chain like one of those guys sure. Oh, wow. Jesus, buddy. You're probably going to see something close to 100 every time. And the reason why is because they have a lot of skin in the game. They have a lot to lose. Right. They pointed out with Chipotle, like there were one or two locations of Chipotle where some bad cilantro got some people sick with E. Coli, but all Chipotle suffered as a result. People just stopped going. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars and came probably pretty close to going under there for a little while. And I think they're still definitely calling their way out from under it. So they don't just rely on state, county or city health inspectors. They do their own they hire their own third parties to come in and carry out health inspections much more frequently than the government's doing, just to make sure that they're up to standards. Yeah. So your local fast food chain is more likely to be super clean than the mom and pop in theory, but in my opinion, you're also more likely going to find the kid in the kitchen that goes, hey, watch this. Yeah, it's definitely a trade off because it's definitely not to say that mom and pop places are inherently unsafe. If it's a family business, you have just as much skin in the game as a global restaurant chain because this is your family's livelihood. So, yeah, you're going to take it seriously. So getting back the other two types of inspections real quick, besides the routine, are the follow up investigation where they do say, like, all right, you need to fix these things. I'll be back next Thursday, or I'll be back tomorrow, depending on what's going on. Right. Or I'll shut down your restaurant while you fix this stuff, it's so bad. And then there are inspections that are triggered by consumer complaints. Yes. That's the one where they use the bat signal, but instead of a bat, it's like a fork in the sky, and then the restaurant inspector swoops in. It's like I'm here. I'm here. Everybody calmed down? Yeah. So I mentioned that restaurants will be inspected maybe every six months, maybe every year, a year and a half. It's not willy nilly. They are assessed a risk factor as an establishment by the county or whatever local municipality is carrying this out. And that has to do with a bunch of things. Sometimes it's the kind of food, like, if you're serving sushi, you might get inspected a little more sushi because you're serving raw fish. I didn't say sushi. That done. Sushi that done, did I? No. Oh, no. That's Steve Ruel. Steve Ruel. Sushi shamushi. I thought it was my tooth. No. Or if you're cooking meat or whatever, raw meat. You might get inspected a little more than a deli that just has prepared meats and foods. Yeah, those cold cuts are already cooked. It's not like they're serving you raw turkey slices like it's already cooked. They're just putting it together under a sandwich. That's a low risk restaurant, comparatively speaking. Yeah. You always get to me, even though I love a euro, is when I see the thing on the spit next to the heat lamp rotating around. Right. I always just think, how safe is that? I would guess if it's operating in the United States, safe enough. Okay. That's the whole point of restaurant inspectors. So you don't have to ask that question, that you can look at that and say, somebody who knows what they're doing has inspected that and determined that that is not a threat to my health. Maybe it just creeps me out to look at it. No, I'm with you. I understand. I also want to say there are some places where you go in and you're like, this is clearly in violation of some health codes. I have no idea how this place is allowed to stay like this, but it's still worth it. And I would direct you to Anne's Ann's Ghetto Burger. Oh, yeah. Right by your house. Yeah. That's just down the street. Yes. Have you had one? I've never had an end because I thought that she left and it closed, but it's still going. Is she still running it, do you know? I don't know. She had been threatening to retire for 20 years or something, but I knew she wanted to get bought out and didn't want to just close it down. So hopefully she was able to retire. That's my hope. All I know is The Wall Street Journal said it was I think it may be the best hamburger in the United States. The Wall Street Journal ain't lying. Yes. But if you go there, that's like decades worth of grease just on the vent around, or the backsplash, like the stainless steel backsplash or whatever, splatter guard behind the griddle, and you're like, how did she get away with that? And then you take a bite of it and you're like, oh, because it matters not at all compared to this burger. Well, maybe she is compliant because that is the second risk factor involved with how often you're going to get inspected, which is if you have a list of complaints or a record of violations on your record, then you're going to be on their frequent visitor list. Right? Yeah. And especially if you've ever been the source of a foodborne illness, you're a high risk automatically. Yeah. Probably permanently. Yeah, I would think so. And depending on where you are, you're going to get lots of visits after that's. Probably. Aside from maybe people getting shot in your restaurant, a foodborne illness is probably the worst thing that can happen in your restaurant. Yeah, I would guess. And whether you're a new restaurant. Well, if you're a new restaurant in particular, I should say, I think the standard is that depending on where you fall as far as what kind of restaurant you are, whether you're a deli serving cold cuts or a sushi place serving raw seafood, you're assigned like an initial risk assessment. And then depending on that risk assessment, if you're a sushi place, say they're going to come visit every three months for the first year, or if you're a deli, they might come once every year and a half. And then depending on how you perform in those inspections, those regular routine inspections that are basically predetermined by the type of restaurant you are, that schedule can either diminish or increase. So let's say that deli is found to be in violation pretty frequently every 18 months. They're going to start getting inspected every twelve months or every six months. Or that sushi place that's getting inspected every three months or six months. If it's just painfully obvious that they are top notch pros who are taking this quite seriously and never get caught for anything, then that three or six months may end up turning into a year. Who knows? Yeah. You may have heard reports on the news, too, that food inspectors have racist policies where they will go after ethnic restaurants more often. No, I hadn't heard that. Is that right? Yeah, I've seen reports on stuff like that. Wow. That they get inspected more frequently. If you're having an ethnic restaurant, that's pretty rotten. But there is a food safety expert at North Carolina State named Ben Chapman that says there's really no data to back that up. He said, but there could be biases through consumer complaint systems. Oh, I see. And they did sort of just a snapshot from Yelp reviews, which say what you want about Yelp reviews, they're pretty much the worst thing ever. But if you look at Yelp reviews, you do a search for food poisoning, and close to 70% of the time, they were ethnic restaurants where people complained about food poisoning. I see. This food is weird. It is possible. I don't recognize it, that some bias comes in through that, but that makes sense. Then, Chuck, if Yelp is a proxy for the number of times somebody might call in a complaint, that's one of the ways that food inspector goes out to inspect a restaurant is when somebody the public calls and says something or complaints. So, I mean, that makes utter incomplete sense. Have you ever called and complained about a restaurant? Have you ever called the health department? No. I never have either. And there's actually, after researching this article, I was like, I can think of at least one time when I could have and should have called. Just got undercooked chicken, and you and I both got very sick for the whole weekend. And I kept calling this place, what are you guys going to do? You have to do something. And they just got less and less interested, more frequently. I called them by the fourth or fifth time, I was like, we're still suffering. I just wanted to let you know. We're just laying around throwing up, and they didn't do anything about it. We're sorry. I think they actually didn't believe me, maybe. But now that I've read this, I'm like, I totally should have called the health department on those guys. What city was this? It was in Atlanta, I think. I remember that, actually. We were sick for an entire weekend. It's a pretty nice place, too, right? Yes, I totally remember that. Right across from where we used to work in bucket, actually. And they could not have cared less, and that's what ticked me off. Oh, you were calling the restaurant over. I thought you call the health inspector over. No, but now I'm like, why wouldn't we just call the health inspector now? I would call for sure, now that I've done this research, because it's not like what you're doing is helping. Other people from the same fate. So you're not being a rat. Right. Which is another thing that health inspectors look out for. All right, well, let's talk about that. This is how this goes down. They're unannounced visits. Like I said, I've worked at probably four or five places over the years, and two of them were pretty bad. The aforementioned barbecue place and then where I worked in college wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great. It was a typical college town Mexican joint, but it wasn't like the super professional other restaurants that I've worked at. But in those first two places, I remember when the restaurant inspector walked through the door, a panic set in. Invariably, one of the GM or whoever the manager was, would immediately confront a nice not confront, but greet the person and send the understanding was someone go back to the kitchen and tell everyone that the inspector is here. And judging from that mental floss article you sent, that's exactly how it works. And for that reason, the very first thing a good health inspector does is kind of barge through there and say, I'm going straight to the kitchen right this second. Because they know what's going on, right? They have to, or else a whole bunch of violations get covered up really quickly. Very quickly. And so in that mental floss article, basically, they said they needed to do, like, a brisk run walk through the kitchen as fast as they could. Isn't that scary? It is, but that's what they do. You scales. Like, what do you do? Just stand there and freeze? That's what they should do, is be like, everybody freeze. And then have their finger and thumb in the shape of a gun because I don't think they're allowed to actually carry guns. Well, this one helped. Inspector in the middle class thing said, we want to see the things that won't be there in another three to four minutes. Right, but that's the thing. But I mean, it could be anything if you are sitting there making food and you have a cup of Coke. Right. You're not supposed to have that then. Yeah. And your cell phone in the kitchen. It's another big one too. I'll bet that is probably the most frequent violation today. They're covered in poop. Have you ever just stopped and looked at people on the street, like, with their phones? They'll just be stopped mid something. They have, like, a shovel, like, propped up against their shoulder, just looking at their phone with their mouth hanging open and it's like crazy. We're turning into, like, a society of zombies, man. How do you stare at your phone? I've seen you do that. You do it in a smarter looking way. I do the thing where I'm, like, stroking my chin thoughtfully and closed. Exactly. I've got, like, one eyebrow arched. All right, so the first thing they inspect, obviously, the kitchen, the manager, the owner, whoever is there, on point is with the inspector the whole time because they're saying, like, hey, like, little things like, that ketchup bottle is disgusting. Why don't you go ahead and have someone clean that up? I won't dock your point, but just get it clean. And the guy wipes it down. He's like, no, that brand, it's hunting. It's disgusting. But the first thing they inspect are the dynamic areas, which are the kitchen food preparation areas. Basically anywhere where there's food actively out is the first place they'll go. Right? That's the static area. That's the dynamic. Okay, you start with 100 points, by the way. I don't know if we mentioned that, which I think is kind of optimistic. It's saying, like, I want to believe the best in your restaurant. So everybody starts with a hundred and then we start deducting from there. Yeah. Then it just gets sad. So one of the first things they're looking for is employee hygiene. Because remember what you mentioned, like, way back when the Food and Drug Act was created, the Food Code was first established. There were a lot of basic tenants that were put forth back then, and one of them was the people who cook the food need to be clean as a whistle. And that's one of the big things that the health inspectors are looking for. Like, are they wearing gloves? Which, by the way, is not to say that if an employee is wearing gloves, that you're totally covered. The gloves are supposed to be a fail safe to good hand washing. So you want them to be washing their hands very frequently and then wearing gloves on top of that. But then on top of that, not doing things like using their cell phone with the gloves on, because you've just automatically contaminated them and totally defeated the purpose of using gloves at that point. Right, so there's a lot of hygiene things that are being taken into account. But how do you tell whether people are washing their hands when you're just walking into a kitchen? Of course they're going to wash their hands in front of you in the way that they're supposed to be. But how do you know they're doing it routinely? Chuck well, yeah, and we should say that there is a way you're supposed to wash the hands. You don't rinse them off and just dry them with the towel that's sitting by the sink or just below on them. You rinse, you put on the soap, you scrub for 20 seconds and then you dry off with a one use towel. Good old unsustainable made out of tree paper towel. Yeah. Or if you're a really fancy restaurant, you can just have, like, cashmere towels laying around, as long as you throw them away afterwards. But you have to throw them away. But your little trick, I know where you were leading. How you can tell is this one very crafty restaurant inspector in the middle of the article said they go in the first thing they do, because it takes them a couple of hours at just sort of a normal sized restaurant. Four or 5 hours at a big hotel restaurant. He said he puts an X on the paper towels, and if he goes back at the end of his inspection and that X is still in the paper towel, then he knows hands are not being washed. Right. Very sneaky. Pretty clever. Yeah. So I guess we just gave it away, though. So now all the people are going to go check their paper towel rolls. I bet there are other ways. Yeah. That was just a set up to nudge them into the actual way he's telling it. Like wash your hands. Food is another big one, too. Right. You want to make sure that the food is being properly stored and properly cooked. And apparently there is a danger zone between, I think, like zero and 140 that you want to hit or that you want to stay outside of. So basically, you want your food, especially like raw meat, to be stored at a temperature frozen, or else kept at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees Celsius or below for fridges. And then when you cook it, you have to cook it to at least 160 degrees internal temperature for beef, pork, all those guys, and then 145 for fish. And if a restaurant is not doing that, that's a big one, as we'll see. Yeah. I mean, the best way to think about food storage is without getting into the specific temperatures, is if it's supposed to be cold or frozen, it should be cold or frozen. If it's supposed to be hot, it should be hot. Is that middle ground is where you're in big trouble. Exactly. They talk about Lukewarm being the big enemy. Right. That's never good. Lukewarm. I'm trying to think of a time when lukewarm is preferable with anything. It just sounds gross. I like my food really hot, too. Yes. That's the one thing I will send something back is if it was clearly made a little earlier than the rest of the party at the table. And it's sort of lukewarm. I'm like, no, man, I want steam coming off this thing. Yeah, that's they throw the microwave. Yeah, they do. And then they're like, oh, I guess you want a little spit on that, too. Apparently, soup should be like the way you reheat things is a big deal because obviously the Brunswick stew, you don't just throw it out every night. You put it back in the walk in so some jerk could step in it. But when you bring soups and broth back to heat, you have to reboil them entirely right. From their refrigerated state, which makes sense. But that's never very good for food if it's already prepared. Once you reboil it, probably you're just going to want to throw that away then. Really? Yeah, man. It toughens everything up or else it overcooks it it's already been cooked once, so when you bring it to a boil, you're really cooking it again. And for food borne illnesses, that's a good way to treat it, but it doesn't necessarily make for the most appetizing food. All right. I don't know if I agree with that, but that's all right. That's what I'm going with. Frozen meat. You don't just say, hey, Jimmy, throw that frozen bird out on the table and leave it there until this evening. Right. But you don't just leave food out to thaw. There are proper ways of thawing and bringing things back to the correct temperature. Right. And then, so let's say you have a place where you're cutting up that thawed chicken that was properly thawed, and then you set the knife down and somebody else picks it up and they start cutting lettuce with it. That's cross contamination. That is extremely dangerous because, as you know, very few people cook their lettuce before they eat it in a salad. It's raw. And so now it has raw chicken juice on the lettuce that you're eating, raw and uncooked, and you can die from that. So cross contamination is a big one they look for. It can be a little more simple, like with something like silverware. From what I saw, if the silverware is dirty or smudgy, that is a big problem because that means usually that the whole kitchen is dirty. That's like a big red flag that apparently health inspectors will tell you that if the silverware is dirty, it usually is indicative of just a dirty restaurant in general. Yeah. And I've always heard I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but you know, like, just the plastic soda cups that a lot of restaurants will have. Have you ever heard that it's not possible for them to get to the temperature needed to kill any bacteria on them because they'll melt otherwise when you drink out of them, they've not really been sanitized from before? I have not heard that. But as someone who has worked as a dishwasher, you don't say, well, I'm going to wash these things. At this temperature, you just throw everything through there? Yeah. You don't have any choice in what temperature it's all prescribed for you. You're just basically putting them on the tray and sliding them through, pulling the door down, and then it washes them and you lift the door up and pull them out. Yes. And I will say one of my dreams, though, is to have one of those in my home. I can't remember what they're called, but they are wonderful. It's pretty great. Yeah. It just washes everything, like, super fast. So that's the dynamic areas, right? Yes. There's also the static areas where it's things like well, the dishwashing area actually apparently is a static area. It doesn't change very much where you store cleaning products, that kind of stuff. I guess you get points deducted if your cleaning products or your toxic chemicals are not in their marked original package. Yeah, that's not good because they can be mistaken for oil and vinegar or something like that. Yeah. And they're going to check the static areas include a lot of things that you don't think would even fall under the purview of a restaurant inspector. They're going to look at your HVAC systems and your vents and your smoke detectors. They're going to look at your dining room and the floors and the ceilings and your ceiling fans and your Dumpster behind and then your grease trap. They look at everything. Right. Which is good. And another one that they take a look at that I think is probably a big problem for restaurants in a lot of ways are ice machines. There's a lot of parts to ice machines that are out of view. This thing scared me in Mental floss. Now that can grow mold pretty easily. And not just the ice machine, right. Where they're like, scooping ice out, which is another thing, too. Like, there better be an ice scoop, right? Yeah. It can grow mold in the ice machine, but also those shoots where ice comes out of, like, a beverage dispenser, those are usually serviced by the company that makes the beverages that it's dispensing. Right. And so it would be up to that company to clean those out, which means that they get even less attention than the rest of the restaurant. So the next time you're getting, like, ice out of beverage dispenser, get your flashlight out of your pocket and look up there and see if you see any mold. And then just raise holy hell if you do. Yeah. And I'm not a big fan of the serve yourself soft drink stations anyway out there with the public. I don't think the public should ever have access to something. That's why. Well, that's not the reason, but buffets are just so gross and creepy. I haven't been to a buffet in, good Lord, I don't know, 20 years. I know, but the thought of a buffet I know they have the sneeze guard, but people, like, scooping in and serving themselves their own food from a trough is so weird and gross and archaic that I can't believe people still do that. Well, I mean, also, even if you're using a serving spoon to scoop something out, which you are, so did the person before you. Right. And that means you're touching the same serving spoon and then going back and using your hands to go eat. So you just touched whatever the other person had on their hands, and now you're coming in contact with your mouth. It's a flawed system, for sure. It is. Because what you're saying is, I'm going to count on the 300 people that have eaten here today before me are all completely hygienic. All their hands have been washed. Yeah. Timothy Poop hands isn't among them. No one did a single gross thing. Like if a tater tot fell off the spoon, flicked it back in with their finger. No one did anything wrong at all. No way. Not even at, like, Whole Foods or someplace? Those are all gross to me. Oh, yeah, whole Foods would count with that too. Although I do like to build your own salad thing every once in a while. That's the exception. Good salad bar. Yeah, it's tough to turn down. I'm with you. Well, let's take a break, think a little more about salads, and we'll be right back. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. 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. All right, Rebecca, Charles, let's talk about point deductions, eh? Yes, let's remember we said that restaurant inspectors are very optimistic and they start out with $100. It just goes down from there. And again, since these are done, like, city by city or county by county, everybody has their own methods or whatever, but usually, and I think the FDA has pointed out that there are five things that you're really looking for, like five general categories. Improper storage of food as far as temperature goes. Yes. Inadequately cooked food equipment that's contaminated sources that are unsafe, that are an unsafe supply of the ingredients. Right. So, like, if it turns out, like, the goat is coming from their buddy's farm, that might be a problem. And then personal hygiene of the people who work there. Right, right. And so depending on some of those, especially if there's multiple ones of these, these are big ones, they will probably be a high priority type one or critical violation. Any of those. Yes. And then there's also other ones where, like, this is not that big of a deal, but it's definitely something that needs to be paid attention to those fall after those usually. And they can be anything from, like, a dented can that could conceivably contain botulism, but definitely hasn't been proven to contain botulism being thrown away to there being a hole in the screen door that's left open for some reason. Yeah. And as far as deducting individual points that you'll see on the wall when you walk in and if you don't look at that piece of paper when you walk into a restaurant, I don't know what's going on in your brain. You should always do that. Sure. But like, a static violation, like, hey, there were some chairs that had bad legs, your ceiling fan was pretty dusty. Those will be, like, a point each. Maybe a couple of points for a minor infraction, like, your cleaning product. Like, I found a roach, the chef has a cell phone in the kitchen. That's a couple of points all the way up to four and five points. And that's when you're talking about your fridge is broken and it is not up to temperature and everything in there is at risk. And that's when they can actually shut you down until you get it fixed. Yeah. I got the impression from this article that it's a rarity that the health inspector wants to err on the side of the restaurant staying open and solving everything as quickly as it can while also its business not suffering unnecessarily. So if your restaurant gets shut down temporarily, that violation was significant enough that people were at an immediate risk of getting sick from visiting your restaurant. Exactly. Yeah. It's a big deal. In other words, it's as big a deal as you would think. Yeah. But with those point deductions, if you go in and you see, like, a 72 on a restaurant score sheet, it's probably not 28 individual small violations. Right. There are probably some four and five pointers in there, and you should probably think about eating there. Or it says in this article, you can go to the website and really break down because those aren't for the public to necessarily be able to digest easily. But if you do look at them, if you can get close to them, you can actually look and see the little category for each thing. Sometimes behind the register, they may not like you poking around. Well, the health departments usually put them on the web these days. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, you can investigate online. Okay. But in the restaurant itself, it is marked. It's a bunch of tiny little letters and categories, and you can give it a look. And I wouldn't spend too much time there. Like, just go by that initial score. And if you're really like, well, I got to see what those 18 points were deducted for, I would just turn around and walk out. Right? Yeah. Especially if there's an identical place right across the street. Yeah, but that is a pretty good point, because when you think about it, most people just see that big score prominently displayed, whether it's like an A or a B or a C or like an 85 or a 98 or whatever. And it's not really meant to be shorthand for the public, I guess it isn't a way where it's like, hey, buddy, you're really taking a gamble here at, like, 75. But when it's really high up, it does seem to be kind of an indicator. Like this one is okay in my book. That's not really what the restaurant inspection report is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a lot more granular than that. And so to really tell whether you're running a risk of eating in a restaurant or not. You actually do have to go to the trouble of looking up what the violations were and then even then. Judging for yourself. Because short of the health inspector deciding to shut the restaurant down and making the decision for you that you can't go there. They're not saying. Like. Don't eat here. If it passes inspection enough to stay open, then as far as the county health department is concerned, it's good enough for you to be eating there. But that might not really jive with your own definition. So to get that information, you have to go find out why points were deducted. Yeah, and you can't. It's either the mental floss or our own article point out that just because some place has a bad rating doesn't mean they haven't fixed things, and it's fine now. And just because as a great rating doesn't mean they're not in violation that day. These inspectors come every six months to a year for a couple of hours during a lunch shift, and it is a snapshot of what occurred on that day. Right. So there is no fail safe for a consumer. You just got to do the best you can. Cross your fingers, just roll the dice, everything is okay in there. Or just cook at home and boil everything, including your lettuce. Boiled lettuce. Delicious. What? I didn't know if I was missing out on something. No. You got anything else on restaurant inspections? Just this one more little tidbit from a mental floss that I thought was pretty great is that this one restaurant inspector said that he can smell cockroaches in the air at this point. Yeah, that's a real problem with cockroaches that, don't you think, to be able to smell. I guess it'd be an infestation is what he's saying. He said you can walk in, take a deep breath, and he said it's kind of a nutty oily smell that after years on the job, I can identify it. He's like, I still get hungry every time I smell it. I got a lot of roaches in my house right now, and it's really pissing me off. I don't clean the house. It's not gross. It's just this summer was just real kind of muggy and dank. Do you have a lot of cardboard boxes in your attic or basement? No, I don't know where they're coming from. Like, we see them outside all over the place. So maybe it's that swale pond from Permaculture episode. Maybe. Yeah, the Permaculture lady is like, I forgot to tell you, you're going to have road trip. That's the only new thing I don't know, man. Good luck and godspeed, though. Go find the most sustainable way to treat it. I'll be interested to hear what you come up with. Well, so far it's been the flip flop method. Poor roaches. If you want to know more about cockroaches or restaurant health inspections or flip flops, you can type those words in the search bar houseofworks.com. And I said that, which means it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this a great gross way to finish this grossish podcast. Excellent. Hey, guys. I wanted to reveal you with the story of how you two contributed to my fantastic relationship. My wonderful girlfriend. Last summer and fall, I was traveling across the country, camping, going to national parks, and I wound up in Moab, Utah Canyonlands and Arches, and met a smart, fun girl at a brewery. And we made a date to go hiking the next day, picked her up, and we went on a wonderful little hike, and disaster struck. Turns out months of cheddar brought worst, and beer wasn't great for my digestive system, and I felt horrible. And I had an inescapable urge to take the Browns to the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, I was miles away from a leaf, and I ran out of excuses to keep stopping and standing still for a moment. Hey, look at that arch again. So I had to tell her the horrible truth on our first date, and I was sure it would ruin it. Eventually, I made my way to a bathroom, shoved some poor people aside, and safely made it back to town. But I was horribly embarrassed. And sure I'd ruined everything. On the way back to town, she asked if she could put a podcast on, and she played me your episode about poop. Oh, nice. How about that? She's got a good sense of humor. Great sense of humor. I've never been as happy to hear two men describing fecal matter. At that point. I knew anyone could spend a date almost pooping in their pants into an excuse to share their podcast favorites as a keeper. We've been together over a year now, and we love listening to your new episodes while we hike in camp and poop. I guess they've got remember the Love Seat, that Saturday Night Live commercial where it was like the two toilets facing each other? You could hold hands while you poop. Exactly. I couldn't be happy to find a new favorite thing to listen to and a wonderful new girlfriend at the same time. So I want to thank you guys if you ever get back to Denver. Maybe next year, we don't know yet. I'll be buying tickets as soon as I hear the announcement. That is from Tom. And he said, if you do read this in the air, please give a shout out to Alice. Nice, Tom and Alice. Yeah, way to go, kids. Thanks for writing in, Tom. Nice story. If you want to get in touch with us, like Tom did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. Join us on facebook. Comsto. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshehno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music my Favorite Murder from exactly right media. My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. 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432f557a-53a3-11e8-bdec-f7b173153489 | Chopsticks > Forks | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/chopsticks-forks | Today Chuck and Josh sit and converse on the simple, elegant chopstick. | Today Chuck and Josh sit and converse on the simple, elegant chopstick. | Tue, 17 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=77, tm_isdst=0) | 48879560 | audio/mpeg | "Doo doo doo doo. Wait, what's the opposite? How about doo doo doo doo sad Trombone. Vancouver and Portland, Oregon. We can't come see right now. We're sorry to say it's not us. It's the Coronavirus. It told us not to come. That's right. Local authorities are shutting down shows of the size. We are not able to come. We are postponing. We will have more information coming. As far as rescheduling, I believe how it works is your tickets are good if you want to come to that other show, but we don't know all the details yet, so just bear with us while we try and figure this out. Right. And in the meantime, you can get in touch with the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and the Chan Center box offices to figure out what's what. Yeah, they'll probably have good info, but we really apologize for any inconvenience, and we will eventually see you guys, we promise. In the meantime, stay well. Wash those hands and don't panic. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know all about the song Chopstick. I wonder if you're going to make a joke about that. Jerry beat me to it. She was like, what are we recording today? And I told her she's like, the song didn't. Oh, is that Chopsticks? Are there two Chopsticks? No, I'm just teasing this heart and soul. Oh, okay. So what I said from Big, that was chopsticks, right? Totally. Yeah. Robert Louisa yeah. Man. I should have continued trolling and said James Khan. Oh, wow. That is a very James Khan like role, though, isn't it? Totally. I think he played that role in Bottle Rocket. Well, he was a crime boss in Bottle Rocket. Yes, sort of. Well, not a good movie. We watched Misery the other day. It still holds up. Oh, man, I remember seeing that for the first time in Athens when I was in college. So great. Kathy Bates can do no wrong. She did great. But if you watch James Kahn, he did really well, too. Sure. His whole kind of trepidatious manner toward her was really well done and not overdone at all. And he did a great job as well. And he had to lay there in a bed for weeks and weeks and act. Yeah. Sounds like a dream. Yeah. And if he balked at it, they would attach a catheter to him and make him pee in his own mouth as punishment. Little known facts about that movie. Oh, so Chopsticks, right? We should point out here that in researching this chopsticks and customs and etiquette, if we covered all the countries and all that stuff that use chopsticks, we'd be here all day. So there's kind of a focus here on Japan. Well, Japan, they seem to be a little the most sensitive to transgressions with chopsticks. Out of all of the Asian cultures, I think perhaps they have the most rules against them, at the very least. Yeah. But when you read them, they could all be summed up as just don't be a dumb American. Yeah. Or don't have any fun whatsoever with your chopsticks, is another way to put it. You're like, what's wrong with making them antennas in a restaurant and going, Right, I'm a walrus now, why can't I be a walrus? Right. But we are talking chopsticks, not the song. Sorry to disappoint you, everybody, but I saw that song is actually called Chopsticks because it was originally called the Celebrated Chop Waltz. Okay. Written by a 16 year old schoolgirl from England. Seems about right. Sure. But we're talking about the utensils. When you think chopsticks, obviously, you think, like, Asia. Sure. And you don't think that there was ever anything but chopsticks in the history of Asia. And while chopsticks are actually surprisingly old, I think they go back about 7000 years. I also saw 5000 years. I'm going with seven. I think they're actually about as ancient as that. They weren't like the go to utensil for Asia until this millennium. Yeah. The spoon was kind of the go to. Yeah. Who knew? The word chopstick, they think, may be pigeon English. Chinese pigeon. English, meaning chop. Chop. Or quickly. Right. But this is one of these etymologies. It's sort of tough to pin down, it looks like. But that's the English word for it. In all of the chopstick using cultures, they have their own word. Like in Japan, it's hashi. It's kuwaizi. In China. Nice. I'm not sure if I said that right at all. Geogarok in Korean. All right. Not as nice and dewa in Vietnamese. All right. I'm sorry. Half of the world's population. I love that you started strong in Japan, though, because you feel pretty confident in your Japanese pronunciations. That's a good way to go. Yes. I have a great tutor. That's right. So 5000 years ago, they were used initially for cooking and we'll get more into the ins and outs of the history. But they were made from twigs, probably. And it was much, much later, like you said, that they were table utensils. Right. And it was all very much like practicality based. Yeah. Because initially they figured out pretty early on, the Chinese, from 5000 to 7000 years ago, that's a really bad idea to stick your hand into a pot of boiling water to get something out of it. Say, like a bone or a piece of meat or something like that. It's way better to use a twig and it's even better to use two twigs as if they were kind of a pair of detached tweezers. Sure. That's apparently where they initially started to come into use was during cooking and food preparation, not the actual eating process. That's right. There was a big population boom in China at one point. Some might say there continues to be some might say. And the resources became a little more scarce. They started cutting their food up into little tiny pieces for reasons it helps it to cook faster. Right. I didn't see anything about this, but I wonder if that also just made it more shareable among a larger family. I could see that. That's a great point, too. Isn't it fascinating, though, the idea that a population boom led to widespread use of the chopstick? Yeah, it's interesting. And then Confucius also was a vegetarian and noted knife hater. He has a quote about knives. The honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen, and he allows no knives on his table. And I think that was a little more because a knife was equated with eating meat. Right. Less than like, it's a garbage tool. You don't need a knife to eat a plant, basically. Yeah. Some might argue you might want to cut a piece of broccoli. Maybe, but you don't have to. I just summed up Confucius, that's the level of arrogance that I'm operating at now, and I think some of the early it started in China, and then pretty soon Korea, Vietnam, Japan. We're all using them. But I think that Chinese chopsticks were joined what do they call now, if they're joined and you got to split them apart? Warabashi. That's Japanese. It's the term for disposable chopsticks. Okay, but I thought the Chinese chopsticks were originally joined like that. Yes. No, it was Japanese. Okay. There was a single piece of bamboo that was, like, split, kind of like giant tweezers. Okay. Yeah, I'm reading this now. Sometimes. I can't wait until just now reading this. Well, no, I get sometimes, and it's the dumbest thing, but I get confused between former and latter. Oh, yeah. It's not that I get confused. I just have to go back and sort of picture it in my brain. It just takes an extra second, I think, for everybody. That's right. It's definitely not intuitive, so don't feel bad. I also thought this thing about food poisoning was interesting, was that in Dynastic times in China, they would use and I guess people that are a little more well healed would use silver chopsticks because they thought that if it came into contact with something that was poisonous, then the chopsticks would turn black and they would know not to eat it. I mean, it just makes sense when you're rich and wealthy, more people want to kill you, so it's better to have something that shows that somebody's trying to poison you, like your chopsticks turning a color if you're being poisoned with cyanide or something like that. The problem is it doesn't actually work. And I don't know why they didn't just think that through from the get go, like, oh, well, let's get ourselves some cyanide and stick a silver chopstick in it and see what happens and see that it doesn't work. But apparently it does work in the presence of garlic or rotten eggs because they put out hydrogen sulfide so it will turn silver a different color. I don't know how garlic ever made itself into a staple of Chinese cooking, but there we have it. Yeah. And the other thing I thought was interesting, and we should mention, too, this came from a variety of places. Tegan Jones at Kismoto. Lisa Brahman from Smithsonian Mag. Q Edward Wang from Cambridge blog HuffPo, believe it or not, got in the works and some other places. But I thought that q Edward Wang's history was really interesting because he mentions that wheat is kind of the first reason before rice, which really surprised me. It was very surprising. I think he knew all along that was a big reveal. Yeah. But that's what gave chopsticks a shot in the arm. So first we have cutting food into smaller pieces to have it cook faster. So you use less firewood because there's a population boom. And then as wheat becomes kind of fashionable and widespread, you start to use chopsticks because you're making things like noodles and dumplings. And prior to this, millet was the go to green, and millet's really small. It's much smaller than rice, and you certainly aren't going to turn it into like a noodle or a dumpling. You make a gruel out of it. And so for thousands of years, the go to Utensil that people used to eat with in China was a spoon because they were eating gruel or porridge or whatever. Everybody hated life. But when we came along and they started turning into noodles and dumplings, they said, oh, yeah, I remember those things that we use those twigs to cook with. What if we made a smaller version of those to eat with, too? And that's where the chopstick at its first real boost in usage around Asia. Yeah. Try to eat a big spoonful of noodles and just watch as they flop off and sling delicious sauce all over the place. There is literally nothing more frustrating than trying to eat noodles with a spoon in the entire world. Yeah, sure, you could chop them up into tiny little pieces so they rest in your spoon with some broth, sure. But who wants to do that? Like the person that cuts up their Boschetti at the table into tiny bits is a six year old. Yeah, or just thoroughly unamerican. True. One of the two. Maybe both, depending on how sophisticated the six year old is. The other thing I thought was interesting, too, for Mr. Wang's article was he talked about stew, which is gang and Chinese. They ate a lot of stew back then, and chopsticks would be very useful for picking up things like the more solid objects in the stew, like the vegetables. Right. So you've got wheat coming into vogue. You've got smaller pieces, vegetables, stew being eaten, chopsticks are like, come on, we're going to do it. We got to do this. We just need one more thing to get us over the hump, and people are going to know us everywhere around the world. And that one thing was a particular kind of Vietnamese rice that ripens early, apparently. And it's a shorter grain or a medium grain, which means that it's easier to it clumps more easily. It also has a lot of, like, starches to it. So it's just kind of clumpy, sticky rice. And here in the west, we're not really used to that kind of rice, so we're like, how are you going to use chopsticks to eat this stuff? Try eating some Uncle Ben's with chopsticks. You can't do it. It's like trying to eat noodles with the spoon. Yeah. Or you would just do that move. And this is what I didn't understand when I was growing up, because I was a little naive when I saw chopsticks, I would just think about scooping up the rice on top of them very awkwardly. And it wasn't until I was a little bit older and had good, clumpy Chinese rice, right, and Japanese rice, I was like, oh, it's very easy to eat with chopsticks. Yeah. And you're just like, oh, okay, I've got it. Okay. Because it sticks together. It's like a nice little morsel of food, and it sticks together just about the right size, and it's totally different. So when you eat Chinese rice or Japanese rice or even Vietnamese rice, the stickier rice, then you understand, okay, you can use this as you can use chopsticks for this. And the Chinese figured this out as well when rice became much more of a staple of the Asian diet. And all of a sudden, now you didn't need a spoon anymore because everybody's like, to heck with millet. Who wants gruel? Nobody. So they threw their spoons out the window, and then they started just eating chopsticks for everything. You could use it for everything. Now it's all you needed for your meal. Yeah. And that all in one solution, I think was that happened in China and Japan and Vietnam for sure. And Korea, I think, was the one standout. Because I believe in Korea, the spoon and the chopstick still go hand in hand. Yeah. And I believe it was Key Edward Wang, who maybe wrote this, but he basically said it seems to be a conscious decision, right, in Korea, almost as if they were being contrary or something like that. Maybe they just want to do their own thing. Well, they eat a lot of very hot stews and soups. Have you ever had boute jigae? I don't think so. I'm not even sure I'm saying it correctly. Have you ever been to eat at, like, H Mart or an Asian food court or something like that? Sure. If you go to a Korean place, they usually have I think it's called Buddha jigae. It's like hot dog soup, basically, my lord. And it's like this kind of I'm not even sure. I guess it's like a chili paste broth with lots of great processed meat in it and ramen and jalapenos. It's just so good. But that thing comes to you boiling and you're supposed to eat the chunky parts out with a chopstick. But I guess it always comes with a spoon, too, so I think you're supposed to actually eat the broth with the spoon rather than sip. I tell you one thing I do love is the design of the and I'm calling it the Chinese spoon. I don't know if it originated in China, but you know the soup spoon I'm talking about? Yeah. Like the one you use for miso soup. Oh, man, they're just the best. Yeah, they do, because you can get a really big spoonful on there and it's, ergonomic it's the way to do it. Unless you're just going to pick up the bowl and drink it, which is great, too. Yeah. Up with the miso soup spoon. All right, let's take a break because I'm so hungry. After you said hot dog stew, my stomach is growling. And we'll come back and we'll talk more about chopsticks. I don't remember what episode it was, Chuck, but do you remember when our stomachs growled in sync with one another? That was very recently. It was, yeah. You can still reminisce about recent stomach. I see. I'm nostalgic for that thing that happened last week. Pretty much. So apparently I'm not sure how accurate this is, but the four main kinds of chopsticks, apparently in China, the chopsticks are a little bit longer and a little more blunt on the end. Yeah. And I think that might be a nod to Confucius basically saying, like, don't have knives at your table. Don't even have vaguely sharpened chopsticks. Even like, nothing stabby. Nothing. You don't want to be stabbed at your table. I think in Japan they are a little sharper and a little shorter, but you're still not supposed to be stabbing stuff. No, don't stab that piece of tuna. No, you can just tell if you've ever done that while you're doing it, that you're violating some unnatural law or something like that. Feels wrong, doesn't it? Yeah. Let me see here in Korea, apparently they are shorter as well, and they are also blunt, but they can be metallic. Yeah, that's one thing that we'll see because we're going to talk about, as with everything in existence, there's some horrid environmental impact with chopsticks as well. But the Japanese are like, give us cheap, disposable, wooden or bamboo chopsticks and basically nothing else. They're just crazy for it. Whereas some of the other Asian cultures are like, no, we can use reusable ones, but the Japanese are like, no, we want nothing but disposable, cheap chopsticks. That waibashi. I assume that you and Yumi have your own chopsticks at home. Oh, yeah. And do you bring those to restaurants? Oh, no, no, never do. We should. No, I know, everybody should, but I usually think when I'm there, I'm like, oh, man, I should have brought my chopsticks. Well, you know, I mean, like, if you go to any Asian store, they have, like, cute little it looks almost like a pencil case, but it's chopsticks inside and it's meant for you to carry them around with you. But no one does that. You just don't. Even though, hopefully, in ten years, when we're all like, okay, this is out of control, and this is really bad, everyone will be doing that. You just don't do it. And yet we have some that I could just put in my jeans pocket and walk around with if I wanted to, but I don't do it. Yeah. I take my straw now and I use it because I now keep it in my purse. Your Merse? My Merse, which goes everywhere with me. Yeah. So I need to throw some chopsticks in there. Sure. And it's a good feeling when you say, no straw. I've got my own, and I would love to be able to say no. You keep those wooden chopsticks. Yeah. Take that straw and shove it where the sun don't shine. Wow. Yeah. I'm not that aggressive. It's so funny. Depending on where you are in the country, though, like, if they bring you a straw and you say, no straw, please, they look at you like you're just a straight up democratic socialist hippie, like you're trying to undermine the government or something like that. It's kind of hilarious. Yeah, sure. But other places now are there's a couple of places in my neighborhood who have postings on the wall when you walk in talking about the impact of straws and that straws are upon request only. Right. And if you got a problem with that, you can take a straw and shove it where the sun doesn't shine. Right. Or you take that problem to the voting booth this fall. Right, exactly. So are you prepared? Because I have a feeling you do a better job than me at this, because you so often have great convoluted ways of describing visual things. I'm going to do a great job describing it to you because you can wash my hands, but I think for everybody listening, it's going to be very problematic. All right, how do you use chopsticks? All right, I'm going to get you back for this one, Chuck. I did it intuitively, by the way, which is what I suggest. Yeah. I never read a thing. I think reading it and having it explained makes it way harder. I agree. I think it's just one of those things you have to watch somebody do in practice. I mean, it's just all practice, but essentially there's a couple of things to remember, is that both chopsticks are laying. Do you want to go step by step through it? No, I think I want the Josh method. Okay, well, it's the same method or the Josh description. Okay. So in the valley between your thumb and your forefinger yeah. Okay. The webbing right there, that's where the chopsticks rest. The thumb taint. The thumb taint. The jowed. Your hand showed. Oh, my God. Hand showed. Great fan name. It really is. Wow. So the two chopsticks lay right there. Okay. Okay. One of them, the bottom one is basically meant to be immobile and stationary. It just basically stays there. And it's the top one that you're moving. You're kind of holding with your forefinger your index finger and your middle finger. That's what you're using to move this top one. And so it's really the bottom one that stays basically stationary, and the top one is the one that's moving, and you're just using it to kind of pick up and tweeze food or rice or whatever with it. If you get really good, you can pick your friend up with it. Right. Or catch a fly if you're sensei level that's right. With chopsticks, for sure. But that's essentially it. And you don't want to hold it too tightly. If you're gripping it too tightly or your muscles are too tense, you're not going to be able to kind of make that tweezer motion very easily, or you're certainly not going to have much control. It's kind of paradoxical that the looser you have your hand to a certain degree, the more control you have over the chopsticks and the tension that you're directing toward the end of the chopstick. So keep your hand loose but in control, and just make sure you remember that the bottom one that's kind of resting all the way along your thumb, the free letter is basically stationary, and the top one is the one you're directing with your index finger and middle finger. Yeah. I recommend halfway through your meal, switch those two out, because that bottom one is just along for the ride and it needs to do a little work. You know what I mean? Yeah. So just switch them out and make that one the topper and make it do a little sweat. Sweating. I think that's pretty good, Chuck. Do a little sweat. I think we deserve a Peabody Award for describing how to use chopsticks. No visuals. You did talk about the environmental impact a little bit, but it is a real problem. I mean, you see these tiny little things and you think, what's the big whoop? Like, a tree can probably make a gazillion chopsticks, so they need, like, true maybe ten trees in China to make all the chopsticks they need. Do you remember that? Just one thing. Do you remember that cartoon might have been a Simpsons or something like that, where they chopped down a tree and they show them processing one single tree into just an individual toothpick? No, that's pretty sure it had to be the Simpsons. But imagine if they were like, no, we make one chopstick out of just a single tree. I didn't think about toothpicks, man. How many toothpicks can you get out of a tree? I don't even know. They're on the horizon. Right. But when you think about the fact that China alone produces 80 billion disposable chopsticks every year oh, my God. Then you get a little bit more of a sense of exactly how many of these trees and it says here, I'm trying to find out what year this is. It was fairly recently, but they've had parliamentary meetings and stuff about this in China, and they estimated that it takes about 20,000,020 year old trees to cover their annual rate of production. Yeah, a guy named by Wajin, pretty sure I said his last name correctly, he's like a representative from the G Lean Forestry Industry Group, and he really, like, rocked everybody at a parliamentary meeting where he basically said, hey, do you remember that old figure that everybody has been touting for years that we actually use 57 billion chopsticks a year, produce 57 billion chopsticks a year? So that's way off. It's actually 80 billion. And like you just said, we need 20,000,020 year old trees to meet that a year. And people said, wow, that's kind of a problem. And so around the world, of that 80 billion, I think China, half of them stays in China. Of the other half yeah, I wondered about that. 77% goes to Japan, and Japan was actually the one that started all this. They came up with disposable chopsticks waribashi all the way back in 1878, and it's just been crazy for them ever since. You can go to a pretty high end restaurant in Japan and they're going to have wooden chopsticks. That you pull apart. Yeah, that you would pull apart. There are also plenty of restaurants in Japan that have reusable ones, and they're much more elegant or whatever, but it's not like you wouldn't just walk in and be like, what is this? Disposable chopsticks? Are you kidding? Because they're just such a part of Japanese culture. So they use 77% of the other half. Korea uses 21%, and then 2% comes to the United States. Is that all I have to catch? That was 2011 figures, which is the latest I could find. Yeah. I'm kind of surprised that I would think China and Japan, it would just seem like everyone would have their own and it would be a very prideful thing to take care of your chopsticks and to have something cool looking. It just kind of surprises me that they're so down with the disposable. It surprises a lot of people, especially Japan is, like, really well known for being meticulous with recycling and reducing waste and stuff like that. Yeah, it's just this one thing. They really love their disposable chopsticks, and they just throw them away. They're not being recycled or composted or anything like that. They're just being thrown in the trash. So what I read is that some restaurants will offer tea for free if you bring your own chopsticks, or maybe like, get that tea for free anyway, basically. But there's not a huge amount of movement in Japan where China and I think I read this in a New York Times Green blog or something like that, china has made some moves like taxing disposable, adding an extra tax to disposable top sticks, I think more regulation, basically overall, I think, which is really saying something. There's like, apparently a whole sub industry to the disposable chopsticks industry that is small enough that it escapes a lot of oversight. And they can be really problematic. Like, there can be a lot of chemicals in these chopsticks. They're just like an all around basic nightmare, and it's just such low hanging fruit. All everybody has to do is just have their own chopsticks, but people just won't do it. And I'm guilty, too. Like I said, we have reusable ones at home, but we don't take them out of the house ever. Yeah. Plus the paper used to encase the said chopsticks. That's a lot of paper, too. Yeah, it is. And what do you do with that stuff? You just rip it open and burn it at the table. Yeah, it's true. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. We'll take another break and talk a little bit about Etiquette right after this because we're all doing it wrong to a certain degree. OK, Ms Manners, lay it on that's doctor. Mrs Manners. That's right. So this is mainly Japan that we're concentrating on with Etiquette. And like you said, I think they take it a little more seriously than some other Asian countries because it turns out that chopsticks can and have had an important part in burial rights. Yeah, in funeral rights. Buddhist funeral rights. Like, a lot of the taboos, I guess you'd call them, over chopsticks in Japan and in other Asian countries, too, are kind of based on, like well, that's kind of something we do with funeral rights. So that reminds us of that. Japan is not crazy about being reminded of death or mortality or pain. Same here. All that stuff is very unlucky. Like the number four is unlucky because the word for four, I think she also sounds very much like the word for death. Right, I think I remember that. So they don't have four elevator floors, is that right? I don't know if they do or not, but let's just go with that. They don't because it sounds pretty great. So etiquette level one is how this is presented. There's a couple of levels here as far as, like, you really shouldn't do these things, but if you really want to ramp it up, you shouldn't do these things as well. I felt these were kind of willy nilly, didn't you? Well, I mean, this is one person's opinion. Right. But the. Things that you really shouldn't do are the following. Do not, if you, like, get up to go to the bathroom, don't stick your chopsticks sitting upright in your bowl of rice. No. And that has to do with the household Buddhist altar, because it is a bowl of rice is offered to a dead person spirit. And this apparently is from Buddhist funeral rites as well, because there's a photograph of a bowl of rice and chopsticks in the middle of that would be for boatin, I think. They'll have, like, a photograph of the deceased, and they give them a bowl of uncooked rice, and they stick the chopsticks up in there. Oh, okay. I read that. So it's reminiscent of that. Okay. So it's got that death thing going on. The death angle, yeah. And then the other thing I saw about that, too, is that it also was reminiscent of, like, a bowl of sand with incense sticking out of it that you would also put on a Buddhist shrine to the deceased. So they're, like, way too reminiscent of death for that to be okay. Okay, that makes sense. Now, there's another one that's very similar. Don't leave your chopsticks crossed, like, resting on your bowl or on your plate. Just don't cross your chopsticks. It's impolite, basically, for the exact same reason as sticking them out of the bowl. Right. And I think that one is when you see, like, on food instagram food posts a lot from waiting, say cross the chopsticks because it looks cool or whatever. Look at how cool this looks. Yeah, not cool. Apparently we talked about steering ing. The advice here is to treat them as if they are actually connected, even though they're not. It's a good way to remember it. Like pretend connected. That's right. Yeah. And remember, this is like I think that goes back to confucius, where it's like, don't have a knife at your table. Don't use your chopsticks as beer food. That's right. Apparently, it's bad luck or not bad luck or maybe bad luck to use two different chopsticks. Yeah, they should have the same mommy and daddy. This person said that it's just unsightly and that it's also reminiscent of funeral rights. That one. I couldn't figure that one out. Yeah, there's another funeral one, too. A lot of funeral rights involved chopsticks passing food from chopstick to chopsticks. Like, if you're like, hey, you got to try a bite of this. That's just hard. You hold it up, but it's a little bit showy. If you can do it, look at us. But if somebody grabs it with their chopstick, that's how they pass bones from cremation during funeral rights, too. And they're like, no, that reminds us of that as well. Yeah. And there are some of these that are just like, I can't believe people do this. Do not wash your chopsticks off in your beverage. Yeah, that's gross. Did someone do that? I don't know. Apparently somebody has. The other thing about this is the fact that they have restrictions on this. Social restrictions means that people have done it before, but they also go so far as, like, most of these things all have individual words. That's how agro the Japanese are about this kind of etiquette. They have words for that, like, washing your chopsticks off in your drink is not just called washing your chopsticks off in your drink. Yes, there's a name for it. Let me see here. Do not treat them as toys. And we talked earlier about putting them in your mouth, like their fangs or walrus tufts or antennas or drumsticks. Just not a good look. Right. Here's another one that is. This is sort of one that I think happens a lot, is you might see American women maybe do their hair and put chopsticks in them. When you see that in Japan, those are not chopsticks. Right? It might look like chopsticks, but they're actually called Kansashi. Yeah. It'd be kind of like sticking a fork in your hair. Right. If you're walking around Japan looking like that, they'd be like, why do you have that fork in your hair? It looks a little off, but yeah, they look just like those things. But there is a separate thing. That's right. What did you call them? Kansasi. Yeah. Nice. It's a beautiful word. I didn't make that up. Right? I know. Okay. Another one is you'll very frequently see people do this, and I've done it, too, and it's apparently acceptable under certain circumstances. But when you break your waribashi, your disposable cheap chopsticks apart at the end. If there's splinters or there's like a piece of wood sticking out, you can rub them together, kind of soften the wood or get the splinters off. But you're not supposed to do that. It's just like a matter of course, because you're basically insulting the restaurant. You're saying these are so cheap, the chopsticks that you're providing your guests, that I've got to rub them together, and you definitely don't want to make eye contact with the owner while you're rubbing it together. Like, this is what I think of your establishment. People do that all the time. I do it. It's almost like habitual. It's habitual for me, and I started doing it when I first started using chopsticks because I saw the person I was with did it, and I was like, I guess that's what you do. You get those little splinters off, and now it's a total habit. And my whole thing there, I don't think that one's a really big one, especially in America. It happens so much. I don't think anyone restaurant owners super insulted by seeing this. Sure, yeah. Especially in America. But they are super cheap, and they do splinter, right? Well, in that case, yes. That proprietor has brought it on himself or herself for providing everybody with such cheap chopsticks that they're splintering. I will always remember this now, I'll tell you that. Yes, I agree with you. I think that this is probably not that big of an insulin, especially in America. It probably falls in line with how you're not supposed to put your wasabi in the soy sauce or something like that. Well, if you want to just do it. Sure. If you want to be remarkably polite, then you wouldn't do any of these things. Some are way worse than others. And I think that one probably falls into the lesser category, even though it's under this advancing this is why I was saying this seems willy nilly. Yeah. And we also covered some of this in our sushi episode, because, if I'm not mistaken, don't you eat sushi with your fingers? Or am I wrong? Don't you eat with your fingers, or do you not? No, I don't. I love showing off how great I am with chopsticks. I use them every turn, every time I can't. Yeah. I eat millet gruel with chopsticks. That's how good I am. I've seen you just flip up a shrimp and catch it in the other one. What a show off. It's pretty great because you have chopsticks, you have four you have two in each hand. Yes, basically. And you do a little sideshow there. It's really impressive. Edward Scissorhand. Josh Chopstick Finger. But no, you're supposed to eat sushi. It's specifically nigiri. Right. With your hand. That's how it was originally done, if I remember correctly, from our sushi episode. I think so, yeah. But yeah, we use chopsticks these days. Here's another no no, is do not use chopstick as a rake. Like, don't lift up a bowl of rice and just sort of rake rice into your mouth. So that's Japan, I saw in China, that's perfectly acceptable, normal. Okay. Yeah. It gets dicey. It's not the same everywhere. Yeah. Here's the thing. I don't know if we said this before. So in Thailand, they don't use chopsticks almost as a rule. In Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China. They're totally ubiquitous. Almost the only thing you're going to find that you eat with. And so that means that even a bowl of soup, like miso soup, you're supposed to use your chopsticks for that. Like the little chunks of tofu. Took me a second. You use your chopsticks to eat those out of the bowl, and then you slurp the rest or sip the rest, depending. But with rice, you would hold the bowl up kind of close to your face, but not like up in your face, just under your chin and out a little bit. And then you eat the rice with your chopsticks. From there, lifting the rice up to your mouth, not shoveling it into your mouth from the bowl. Right. And I saw with soups and things, also is if you really want to ramp up the etiquette, you should try and drip into the bowl. All right. When you are picking up the tofu, you want to kind of shake the tofu off so it doesn't drip on you are on the table. Yes. If you really want to excel etiquette, you would just not eat anything. You just sit there quietly with your chopsticks side by side, still in their wrapper, just smiling politely at everyone like it didn't break any rules and I'm really hungry. That's right. There's a couple of more here. Don't point with your chopsticks. It's tough not to do. Do you point? I don't point at people or anything like that. Can you pass me that thing right there? Yeah, you just sort of give a little nod like, hey, that pot sticker over there. Yeah. Because they're fun to hold and point with and do stuff with. I don't know, maybe it's still novel enough to me that I have to remind myself not to point, or Yummy has to remind me not to point with the chopsticks. Or when you're talking and you're expressing things with your hands and you're using your chopsticks. Or if you want to just do a little maestro routine right. That's looked down upon. Or if you're using your hands for something else, you don't stick your chopsticks in your mouth and just hold them in there while you're like moving plates around or something like that. You set them down. And here's the other thing, too. If you go to a very nice restaurant in Japan or in the States, and it just happens to be a Japanese restaurant, how about that really prolonged this thought. They're going to give you a chopstick rest. Oh, sure. Keep your chopsticks on. So they're kind of lifted off of the table the end that you put in your mouth. If you don't have that, you can take that paper wrapper and roll it up and make your own chopstick rest. That's right. Because you're setting your chopsticks down on a table that could be have germs, right. And speaking of germs, also, Chuck, you never, ever use the chopsticks that you're eating with to serve yourself from a communal plate or bowl, that's for sure. They should give you like a spoon or something like that to spoon it onto your plate. And then you use your chopsticks because that's just Germany and disease. Apparently there's like a supplement to that. Or if they don't give you a serving spoon, people flip their chopsticks over and use the thicker end to shovel the food onto the plate, which is not necessarily any more hygienic because that's where your hands have been rather than your mouth. Well, but that's the more socially acceptable thing to do than just using the business end of your chopsticks. I don't know why that's so funny to me. But the ends, though, I mean, if you're using them right, you're choked up a little bit, so they're not really being touched by your hands. True. Like you don't stick the ends in your palm. That's right. That's true. You choke up on it like a baseball bat. Yeah. They say in Korea, apparently, that the further down, though, you hold the chopsticks, the longer it's going to be before you get married. Well, yeah, I mean, we could talk about some of these kind of fun facts. Fine. Let me see here. One is if you are given an uneven pair, you will miss a boat or a plane. And this came from Malaysia. I'm not sure if that's ubiquitous all over Asia. I think it's Chinese. Okay, I think what else here? This is kind of fun. If you use chopsticks, it involves over 50 muscles in the fingers and 30 joints. Well, overall in the fingers, arms, shoulders and wrists, yeah. Pretty cool. It is. How many use for fork? Like two, maybe. Give me a break. I saw a couple of things. One is that there was a study that found that eating popcorn with chopsticks makes eating popcorn much more enjoyable than eating it without chopsticks with your fingers instead. And they even controlled for the amount of extra time it takes to eat popcorn with chopsticks. It's not just that you're eating slower, so you're relishing it more because they had a control group using their fingers eat at a very slow pace, too. And apparently they think it's just the fact that you're doing something differently makes you appreciate the thing that you're doing or that you're eating that much more. Like if you pour water out of, like, a separate water bottle, like at a restaurant, how they have like, the little chilled water bottles they'll bring over, that water would taste better than water. That you just pour it out of the tap, even if it was the exact same water, because it's being conveyed differently. Yeah. And that's also how you would get popcorn to last through the opening previews of a movie. That's right. Because you're not just shoveling it into your mouth like I do. It's so bizarre, man. I do the same thing I've tried to do, like, a couple of kernels at a time, and I do that for the first few, and then before you know it, I've just got handfuls that I'm pushing into my mouth. Right. That's how you have to do it. You have to use the palm of your hand to really shove the entire fistful in there. You can't just use your little fingertips. It doesn't work. You'll choke on them. And I don't know if it's sort of a subliminal desire for me not to be distracted during the movie, but in the ideal world, I would just sit there and munch a couple of pieces at a time for 2 hours. Like, just chew them a million times? No, just eat a couple of kernels at a time and just really elongate the whole experience. Put those chopsticks in your mirst and take those to the theater. People would be like, look at that guy. Hey, though. You have to be careful, though. Yes, they would. You have to be careful, though, who you brandish those chopsticks around, because so you put this together. Kudos for that. One of the facts you came up with is that there's something called consecutive consecutive phobia, I think I said, which is literally a fear of chopsticks. Yeah, there's a fear for everything, but yes, but I was reading a blog post on it, and some maybe PsychNet, I think, and they were saying, like, there are basically two categories of phobias, ones that are semi rational. They use the example of a fear of sharks. Right. Well, if you did run into a shark, there's a chance you could be killed by that shark. So it's not just totally bonkers to be afraid of sharks, but the phobia of sharks is an irrational fear. Like, maybe if you live in Kansas, you got no reason to have a fear of sharks. This one, they said this basically qualifies in the bonkers category. There's virtually nothing that chopsticks can do to hurt you. So to be irrationally afraid of chopsticks where you feel like heart pounding anxiety, is a genuine diet in the wool phobia. But some people do apparently experience this, although it's super rare. Yeah, that's interesting. But you'll avoid entire types of restaurants because you can't be around chopsticks, and you'll get anxious just thinking about being around chopsticks. That's so sad, because Asian food makes up a large portion of my diet. Well, luckily for you, you don't have consecutive leopobia. No, I mean, when I think about sushi, I think about FA. Right. I think about ramen. I think about good old fashioned szechuan Chinese food. Oh, yeah. Think about Korean. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I could eat that all the time. Dude, you've got to get some booty jigga. I'll take you to go get some good I and can't wait. You got anything else? I got nothing else. 45 minutes on chopsticks, baby. Not bad. If you want to know more about chopsticks, go get yourself some that you can reuse and eat. Conscientiously with them. And don't forget all the manners, but just go eat some Asian food, because no matter where it's from or what it is, it's probably pretty good. Agreed. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this two for two. Hey, guys. I wrote a few years ago about Alan Alda and thought I'd share a Sammy Davis Jr. Story. Oh, wow. And this is from Andrew Lindberg in Pittsburgh, and he got his Alan Alda in read, and when I told him this is coming on, he wrote back, two for two, baby. Nice. Yeah. There's people out there who are like, oh, for ten. I know. I'm so sorry. I assume it's not like we're keeping track of people like that. Turn the screws on. Oh, you do? Yeah, that's me. He says so. In the 80s, Sammy had been cleaned out by his ex wife and was selling barbecue sauce. He was in Pittsburgh to promote it. And my friend Larry, who had a local TV show at the time, got a chance to interview him. When they arrived at the hotel, they were told they would get 20 minutes with Sammy, but when they talked to Sammy's manager, he said only ten minutes. So instead of having time to set up a two shot interview, and for people who don't know the lingo, that means both people are in the same camera frame. Okay. They kept the camera on Sammy, and Larry would then go back and add his footage later. So he would, I guess, react the questions with a ghost Sammy just to edit it together. At the end of the interview, they needed just one two shot of the two of them together so they could edit it realistically. And Sammy's manager said no. And Larry looked at Sammy, almost begging because they needed the two shot. Sammy took a long drag of a cigarette and said, get your two shot, babe. The manager then said, oh, well, I guess I'm the ahole. To which Sammy said, as a matter of fact, babe, you are an a hole. So this is how the story goes, apparently. And then Andrew says he's been listening since eight and went to that live show in Pittsburgh. Please come back. Wow. Yeah. And he has a podcast now called the Pittsburgh Podcast. Nice. And he said we average about 1500 listens an episode, which is pretty darn good, Andrew. Yeah, it is. Nice work, Andrew. For a self styled show, that's not bad at all. Especially a local one, too. Pittsburgh Oddcast. Yeah. So, Pittsburghians, if you're from the Berg, check out the Pittsburgh podcast in Andrew. Or even if you're interested in it. Sure, Pittsburgh. You might live in Philadelphia and just be a burghead. Exactly. Well, that was a pretty great one. Thank you very much. Two for two. That's pretty impressive, Andrew. And if you want to get Chuck to do any Sammy Davis Junior impressions, write in with your own Sammy Davis, Jr. Story and see how it goes. And you can put that in 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 are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the Freedom 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." | |
87669690-3b0e-11eb-9699-5fa7b70d2b37 | Cookies! Cookies! Cookies! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/cookies-cookies-cookies | No, we didn’t find another international distress signal we forgot to mention in our Mayday! Short Stuff, we’re just that jazzed about our episode on cookies. Are they even better than cakes? It’s up to you to listen and decide! | No, we didn’t find another international distress signal we forgot to mention in our Mayday! Short Stuff, we’re just that jazzed about our episode on cookies. Are they even better than cakes? It’s up to you to listen and decide! | Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=364, tm_isdst=0) | 48006869 | 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 Bryan over there. And this is stuff you should know. The delicious dish. It's a delicious dish. If you hear my dogs barking, I'm sorry, they will not shut up. I really don't hear them. Well, I can't see them, either. I know. I can hear them always. They're very barky. It's the shelter in them. Yeah. We house at our friend's dog, Scotty. Scotty's dog Benny, came over for two weeks. Aren't they best friends? They kind of just coexist. Oh, really? Okay. We kind of joked that he didn't know how to be a dog. Benny learned how to be a dog while he was here. Oh, yeah, a little bit, being around our guys for two weeks. But Scotty got married, by the way, so congratulations, Scotty. Gosh. Congratulations, Scotty. I got to send, like, an ice cream maker or something, and I got to officiate my first wedding, which was fun. What is going on? Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Quite an honor. So that explains why you went through catechism. That's right. I finally did it now. Yeah. So they got married, went on their honeymoon for two weeks. We had Benny, but I don't know why I started with that. Oh, Benny doesn't bark. Because Benny does know how to be a dog, but he learned how to bark while he was here. Man. That's not something you want your dog to learn, because I have the bark in his dogs of all time. He said. Oh, that's that okay. I've heard of that before. That's fascinating. Let me try. What has nothing to do with cookies? No, but everything henceforth in this episode will have to do with cookies. Yeah. And I'm baking cookies tonight, by the way. Thank you. Yes. Restarting researching this. I was like, I'm baking cookies, too. And I want to give a huge shout out to Sally's Baking Addiction, whose brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe is hands down, the finest example of a chocolate chip cookie I've ever encountered in my life. Yeah. Days later, still chewy. Amazing stuff. And it's worth the little extra effort in making brown butter. Just totally worth it. I can't overstate how good that recipe is. So you're not one of those weirdos that likes a good, crisp chocolate chip cookie? It's a little bit crispy on the edges, a little bit chewy in the middle. It's a balance of everything. But I can go either way. It's got to be, like, a pretty lousy chocolate chip cookie for me to not want it, you know? Yeah, I'll take a crispy one, but, boy, the fresh out of the oven kind that folds down like a hot slice of New York pizza. Yes. Dude, I actually went and purchased actual cow's milk to drink while I ate these cookies. It was that special whole milk. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there were like chunks of fat just knocking around at the top of the milk bottle. We're going to talk a lot about the cookies we like and don't like in here and what makes certain cookies great, of course. But I guess we should just go a little bit with the history and the fact that a cookie is sort of like a cake, but the ratio of ingredients is different in that with a cake you end up with what's called batter, and with cookie you end up with what's called dough because of the ratio of your ingredients. Yeah, and also sometimes the ingredients themselves can differ. But if there's any other baked good that a cookie resembles most closely, it's probably a cake. In fact, I think the Cambridge and Collins Dictionaries both define cookies as sweet, usually round, flat cakes, which it seems sensible, but when you really dig into it, you're like, this actually doesn't fully hold up. Yeah. A cookie is a cookie. Yeah, because a cake, if you want to get jiggy with it, a cookie is its own thing. You hold a cookie, you eat it with your hand. It's a self contained thing. A cookie is just one cookie, and you can eat multiple cookies. But a cake is like one big unit that you cut into subunits called slices, and you usually eat it with a fork. So a cookie is not a cake, and don't call it that ever again. Right. Unless it's a cupcake. Also not even close to a cookie. That's right. But you do eat that with your hand, which kind of undermines that whole idea that a cookie is just a dessert you eat with your hand. It's a handcake. I guess so. But isn't that really a cupcake, not a cookie? Oh, no, that's what I'm saying. A cupcake is a handcake. Okay, got you. Well, then we're on the same page, finally. It's also not a bread, even though you might hear gingerbread or shortbread bread, as we know. And cookies kind of come from all of this tradition of bread baking and biscuit making and stuff like that, in a way. But gingerbreads and short breads, they don't have leavening agents like bread does. They're not going to rise like a bread is supposed to rise. And bread flour has got usually more gluten going on in it. Yeah, I mean, like if you look at cookie dough and then you look at bread dough, it's like two totally different things. Yeah, two different things. So not really a bread, not really a cake. You might say a pastry. It's a pastry. No, wrong again. Because pastries at their base usually have some sort of flour, some sort of fat, and then water. I didn't see water. I looked up a bunch of pastry recipes, croissants and Danishes. I didn't see water in any of them. Put water in all of them. None of them had water. It's implied in the recipe just worked with them. Okay. All right. It's so universally known that you put water in pastries that they don't even include it in the recipe. The one recipe I did say I saw that had water was a bear claw. Really? Yeah, like a bear claw. A croissant doesn't have water in it. Not the recipes I saw. That's really interesting. So a lot of people do say cookies are a type of pastry. I've seen elsewhere that that's not the case. No, it's a cookie. So I came up with a definition of cookies, if I may share it myself. Chuck sure. A cookie is quote, and I'm quoting myself here, so I don't know if it's right to actually say quote, but usually small, often round, usually flat, handheld dessert consisting of at least flour, a fat, like oil or butter and sugar. That, friends, is probably the greatest definition of cookie anyone's ever put to paper. The only issue I would take is usually round, because I've seen a lot of shaped cookies, but that's why I said usually. Okay, what would you say? Sometimes round. Frequently round. I might bump that up to often. I said often round. I thought you said usually. No, usually small, off and round. Usually flat. Okay. All right. Boy, I like it. Okay, great. So we've got the definition of cookies. And I appreciate you indulging me, because I really did kind of wade through a lot of the Internet to put that together. But there was something in there that's really important, too, which is sugar. And you think, well, yeah, of course sugar cookies are sweet. Well, there's other things you can sweeten cookies with besides sugar. You got molasses cookies, you got honey cookies. There's a lot of different cookies you can make. But if you dig into those recipes, you're going to find they still use sugar. And sugar is an extremely important ingredient, as we'll see. A lot of people say basically, cookies didn't exist until sugar came along. Yes. Depending on where you are in the world, they're going to call them different things. If you watch Ted Lasso, you're going to know they call him biscuits in England and also Australia. In Spain, they're gelatos. The Germans call them Kecks. I don't know. What that christmas cookie. I don't even know how to pronounce that. Well, you took German. You don't know. I was going to ask you. I don't know. Man that's five consonants to start the word, please. Chen. T-L-D-C-H-E-N-I would say it's probably, like, Petschen or something. Okay. But again, no vowels in the beginning of that. And most of that word, yes. What about Italy? Oh, you're talking about the biscuiti. Very nice. Yeah. Which you can find wrapped in a little jar at your local coffee place. Yeah, I'm not a fan of it. Scotty it really depends. But now, for the most part, I'm not, which it's a good thing we're not alive in, like, the 14th or 15th century, because we wouldn't have had many options, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I get it. That almondy taste is fine, but if I'm going to burn calories on a cookie, it's not going to be a bascotti I got, you know what I mean? So the word cookie itself, Chuck, comes from the Dutch, who have the word kokj, K-O-E-K-J-E means small or little cake, once again. Right. So there's a lot of different words for cookies, that's the point. But cookies are their own thing, and over thousands of years, people have said, these are great, I like this. I'm going to contribute to humanity's understanding of baking by creating this cookie and that cookie. And now, finally, we're living in what I consider the pinnacle of the age of cookies, because I can't imagine we're going to come up with better cookies that aren't just variations of what we have now. I feel like we created all the great cookies and that really, if you dig into it, most of the greatest ones, the apex, the pinnacle of them were created here in the good old US of A. Agreed. But not the first cookies. They're young, country, and most people say that cookies have been around since Persia, around 7th century Ce. They had sugar for a while and they had been making cakes and things like that. You had to be pretty wealthy and that's sort of a repeated thing you'll see in here. As far as the early days of sugar being available, you had to have pretty much a lot of money and be part of royalty or at least super wealthy to eat these sweet confections. But at some point, there was a Persian baker who said, all right, I got to test out. I'm making a cake. I want to see if this oven is ready. We don't have thermometers or anything like that, so let me just throw a little bit of this, I guess, dough in there and see what happens. And it came out, this little baby cake, and tasted awesome. And so whatever accents the Persians might have used said, this is fantastic, let me keep doing this. I've discovered a new thing. Yeah. They said, like, why don't I just make a batch of test cakes only? And that cookie was born. That's the story. It's not entirely clear if that's true. It's spread all over the Internet, and not just in the copy paste way. It does seem to be that food historians tend to think like, that's possibly what happened, but even if that is true, it ignores a lot of the previous evolution that led to cookies that came before the Persians. Yeah, and we kind of mentioned this early. It comes from the tradition of baking bread, of course, something that we've been doing for 14,000 years, but those have those leavening agents, the mediterranean used honey, and they made these honey pastries for a long, long time. The Russians made these cookies called Prynix, something like that. Yeah. Have you ever had one? No, have you? I don't I don't know. Okay. They're made from honey, rye, flour and berries, and those go back to fourth century BCE. And then we have our good old biscuits. Yeah. Which they seem to kind of have evolved from the Romans, who created something called rusk, which is, you know what you don't like about biscotti? Yeah. Take away anything even remotely likable about biscotti and you've got rusk. Right? Yeah. Hard tech. What, like, the Navies adopted and uses hard tech. And the reason that I think it was initially created was because the Roman soldiers who were going further and further afield. Conquering all these different lands. They were supplied with this rusk as rations. Because what they would do is they would bake bread. And then they would cut the bread into pieces and they would bake it again. Which would remove almost all of the water content. All the moisture content from it. And you'd still have the nutrients, but none of the moisture, which means that it would stay or keep for a very long time. Like it wouldn't mold because it didn't have any water to create mold. Yeah. I mean, when you hear that story, like, why would they purposely just keep baking it and making it taste worse and worse? Right. But it was just a necessity for rations. It would make sense preserving it. Yeah. And there's a name for that baking process, right? That's right. Biscado from Italian means twice baked. And that's where you get biscotti. Yeah. Not only is that where you get biscuiti, Chuck, it's also where you get biscuits with the UK and Australia, new Zealand and a few other places referred to their cookies as biscuits. That's a derivation of biscado. That's right. Pretty neat. This is making me nothing but hungry. That's okay, because there's plenty of cookies in your future. I can see it now, and I also see Chuck in our future. An ad break happening this minute. Very nice. That's all that coming. Okay. So as we said, most food historians who think about these kind of things say, yeah, it was Persia. Persia is the place where cookies were kind of invented. And the reason you can't really argue with that is because if you are of European ancestry or live in a country that was founded through European colonization, there's a pretty good chance that all of the cookies that you've ever been exposed to came after the introduction of sugar and cookies and spices by the Persians to the Europeans through the Crusades. That's right. The Crusades happen. And anytime there's a conquering nation, one thing is for sure going to happen, and they are going to spread. They're going to find all the delicious, wonderful things that that culture does, and they're going to steal them and take them back to their homeland. And that's how things spread throughout the world. And that's what happened with cookies. Yeah. And sugar. That's right. So it started in these Arab countries, and they said, let's bring back ginger and cinnamon and cardamom and the sugar and all this delicious stuff, and let's start making our own cookies. Yeah. And one of the reasons why all of this stuff was in Persia at the time, Chuck, is not just because the Persians had already started cultivating sugar, they had easy access to it, but they had access to things like ginger, too, like you said, which came from Asia or East Asia, I should say. And the reason that they had access to this is because they were pretty well located along the Silk Road, but Europe, and especially Western Europe, was located very far off of the Silk Road. So even though this stuff was pretty commonly traded further east, you could not get it in Europe unless you were one of the most fabulously wealthy people on the planet at the time. Yeah. And as time crept on a little bit, there was a little more access to things like sugar, but it was still kind of like a special occasion thing. You didn't necessarily have to be super wealthy, but it wasn't like all of a sudden the working class of Europe was all of a sudden just baking cookies all the time. Right, but that did give birth to a tradition, which is, if it's a special occasion thing, like, oh, I don't know, Christmas time, then that became a tradition. Is making cookies and handing out cookies to neighbors because you're not going to bake a bunch of cakes and deliver 35 cakes to your neighbors because that's a waste. But what you could do, like our old friend Mona Collin Teen used to do with us, I don't think she listens anymore anyway. She'll never hear this. But it was really nice. I mean, maybe ten or twelve different varieties every year, a big box of them was great. It was great. But that's where that tradition comes from around Christmas time, on special occasions, baking batches of cookies and sharing them with friends and neighbors. Yeah, because they were splurging to show off for baby Jesus. Sure. That's what you do. So one of the things I came across, though, was that a family in medieval Europe or middle aged Europe baking cookies around the holidays were probably breaking the law because the trade guilds were really powerful at the time. And among those trade guilds were the bakers guilds, who had managed to get laws enacted that said, you can't even bake for yourself in your own home. You have to buy your baked goods from a baker who's a member of a trade guilt, a trained baker. And apparently everybody said, nuts to that, we're not going to listen to that. And over the course of a century or two, that kind of enforcement went away because who doesn't want to bake in their own home? Yeah. I mean, I'm a union guy, but I draw the line at some point. Yeah. Baking in your own home is that line. Yeah. And it literally became the will of the people and they were just like, no, we're not doing this anymore. We got a bake at home. Some of the first recipes and some of the first cookbooks in North America were cookie recipes. Yeah. And not just that. Like, even earlier than that, there was cookbooks that came out in the 16th century, the early 17th century, and they started having cookie recipes in them and cake recipes in them. And the reason why one of the reasons why was because the European powers had started to colonize places where you could grow sugar. Because people had gotten a little taste of sugar and the demand was so great that they went out and actually conquered new areas so that they could grow sugar. Which lowered the prices of sugar. Which meant that the average household was way more likely to be able to afford it and say. Like. The 16th or 17th or probably 18th century. And that, as a result, led to these cookbooks coming up. Like there's one called the Good Huswife's Jewel. Chuck did you say housewife? No, Hus Wife. What is that? Just, I guess, a variation of, I guess an old timey English way to put it, H-U-S wife. But if you look at there's a recipe for fine cakes in there, and if you look at it, you're like, how did anybody produce anything like this? We expect extremely precise recipes these days when you open a cookbook. Well, for baking especially. Yeah, because, I mean, it's a science experiment. It's a chemical reaction you're doing with baking. Cooking is a little more like an art. Right. So with The Good Husba's Jewel, with the recipe for fine case, you could find ingredients like, take two or three yolks of eggs in a good quantity of sugar. Yeah. And I think each one was signed, like, Good luck. Yeah. Figure it out. Yeah. But apparently people got it right enough of the time that these things really started to take off and people would bake cookies more and more. Yeah. We mentioned shortbreads earlier that came from Scotland, and the name shortbread might sound a little weird, but it was sort of a hybrid. It basically means crumbly cookie. Yeast was swapped out for butter and sugar was added in when they had this leftover bread and these hard biscuits, and it became shortbread and they used short mint crumbly, so that's where the crumbly comes from. And there was a tax on biscuits, and then the Scottish Heritage Site says that they called it bread to get around the tax on biscuits. That's the only reason it's called short bread. Basically, it should have been called crumbly cookie. Exactly. Yeah. Somebody, some tax collector is like, that's a cookie. They said, no, it's a bread. It's a short bread. Be quiet. Yeah. That got me looking into the etymology of how the cookie crumbles. Oh, yeah. It was one of those sort of disappointing ones where they just said, like, 1940s, 1950s America. Okay. Not Scotland in the 18th century. Yeah. It couldn't be traced back to, like, a specific person, basically. Some people said it might have come from, like, saliva in France. But I just love that line in the apartment. Billy Wilder is the apartment. He says it a couple of times. He says that's how it crumbles cookie wise, instead of that's how the cookie crumbles. Who said that? Was it Jack Lemon? Jack Lemon said that? Yeah. That's just a nice little turn of phrase by Billy Wilder. Good stuff, man. I ended up watching Casablanca the other night. It just happened to be on, and I caught it toward the beginning. It really is maybe the greatest movie ever made. It is amazingly good. I like it during my James Dean Humphrey Bogart teenage phase, but as an adult, watching it, I haven't seen it in many years. It's astounding how good it is. The acting, directing, the lighting. It's crazy. I need to do it. Chuck. You will like it. It is such a good movie. I can't imagine anybody's ever seen Kathy Block and been like, that sucked. Probably. So have you seen the apartment? No, I never have. All right, well, I'll trade you. Got to seen that was on Movie Crush. That was our good friend, Scott Ocherman. That was his movie. Pick the apartment or Casin Blanca. The Apartment. And Scott is such a pro and such a sweetheart. He re watched the movie and reread, like, multiple chapters of Billy Wilder's book in preparation for that episode. That's what a pro he is. And design an original movie poster for it. Yeah, he signed for me. That's nice. That sounds like Scott Ocreman. Yeah. All right. Shortbread is where we were. We were with cookies. Well, we were talking. I think the point we were trying to get across is that the Europeans had, like, a bonanza golden age of cookie development after sugar became widely available, say, starting in the 1501, 601, 700. So you've got shortbread created in Scotland. Macaroon was created way earlier in Italy, but it spread its way to France. And then England got its hands out of the macaron. Right. The macaroon different. The coconutty kind that's crispy on the outside and very chewy on the inside. And it's kind of like a ball, almost. Yeah. Not a fan. Oh, I like them. I like a macaron. I like a macaron, too. I don't really discriminate. Again, it's got to be a pretty bad cookie. Usually. It's got to be a mass produced industrialized cookie. If somebody cooked it at home, I'm probably going to like it. Yeah. No, I'm with you. And then gingerbread cookies, too. Chuck they made their first appearance in the 15th century. Yeah. So we mentioned grease coming over from china, but the cookie itself, I believe, started in Greece about 2400 BCE. And medieval England, preserved ginger was what gingerbread was called. But that's not like the dessert that we're talking about. The dessert is that delicious sort of molasses gingery cookie that eventually they started making into people shapes because of queen Elizabeth I. When dignitaries would visit, she would have cookies shaped like them. I think that was different in tribute, and that's how they came to be made. I think that was gilliam you just did, actually, I think didn't we, on a Christmas episode, do something on gingerbread houses or gingerbread men? Yeah, I think we did. It may have been our live one that we did in 2018. I'll have to look. Remember, we've got the handy list of everything we've ever done on Christmas. Right. So you want to take a break and then talk about cookies coming to their rightful place where they will truly enter their true golden age america, USA. Yes, that's right. We should insert, like, a bald eagle scream here. Oh, man. We should. We'll be right back. So one of the reasons all the people check who are like, stop talking about how great america and its cookies are one of the reasons why our cookies are so great is because america has always been a melting pot of immigrants coming from all these different places. And one of the things that all these immigrants brought with them were their cookies and their cookie ideas, their cookie traditions, and all that stuff got blended together and inspired people to come up with new stuff, too. And now we have even better cookies. But they improved upon the traditions of the immigrants who came here in the first place. That's right. And depending on where you go in the United States today, you're going to see traces of those original immigrant populations and the cookies that they brought by. Probably how popular the cookies in that region still are today. If you go to the midwest, maybe, I don't know, michigan, Ohio, you might eat a pistol. I think it's Pazel. Pazelle? I think so. Yeah. Sister. I remember people calling it in Toledo. Okay. They're probably like, oh, my god, chuck screwed that one up. It's like a pizza is a round, flat thing. A pizzelle is like a little round, flat thing, basically. All right. But it's not like a pizza. Have you ever had one? Yeah, I think so. It's like a little waffle, but not a stroop waffle. Yes. No, it's like a waffle. It's a little thicker than a stroop waffle part. It's almost like a crispier, doughier funnel cake that's much thinner and flatter, and it's awesome flavored with anise. And it can be really good, but it can also be really dry and not good. Yeah. But it's made in a little, like, waffley iron mold. Yes. I think it's one of those things where you really want to eat a pizza, like, fresh out of the iron. What do I call it? A Pitzel. Pitzel. Yeah. That's not right. I knew that wasn't right. It's a Pitzel cookie. I believe that the Scottish shortbreads eventually became tea cakes here in the south, which can be a thing. Evidently. I haven't had a lot of tea cakes, but I think it's, like, part of the old sort of Southern tradition. Yeah. And like you said, too, Chuck, americans were cool with cookies from the earliest stages of the country. The first ever cookbook that was written by an American, printed in America, was printed in 1796. It's called American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. And she had a bunch of different cookie recipes in there. She did. She had a few gingerbread cookie recipes. I think one reportedly is by George Washington's mother and all kinds of fun names. Kinka woodles. Or how about a tangle breach? I like that one. That's pretty good. What about Plunkets or crybabies? Crybabies sounds pretty good. It is. But that's also the name of that little remember the Sugar Daddy bar? The Sugar Daddy bar. It's like a very chewy I don't know what it should be. Okay. So they cut those into little kind of rabbit poop size pieces and I think coated them with chocolate and called those sugar Babies. No, they're not coated in chocolate, which I think is a failing. So that's what I always associate with Crybabies, even though they're called Sugar Babies. Okay. Either that or that. Johnny Depp John Waters movie of the 90s. Yeah. Crybaby or the 80s Jolly Boys. That was another cookie name for metal cookbook. These are kind of fun. Snickerdoodle not in there. No. And apparently Snickerdoodle has some sort of German derivation, but I'm not sure about that. One thing I found researching cookies, Chuck, is that there's a lot of contradictory information out there. Sure. We invented this. We invented it. Well, the sticker doodle is sort of a play on the sugar cookie, as is the ice sugar cookie, which is the only kind of sugar cookie I like the iced one. You don't like snickerdoodles, huh? I'd consider that a snickerdoodle. I'm just talking about a standard sugar cookie. I like a Snickerdoodle. Sure. Okay. Yeah. And it's a sugar cookie. But I meant like, the plain white sugar cookies. Yes. It's almost like you're kind of like you didn't finish. There's no frosting on here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you're ever just hard up for something like that, just some, like, regular break and bake sugar cookies and, like, a tub of vanilla frosting is all you need to recreate a world of wonder for yourself. But yeah, you said the Snickerdoodle and the sugar cookie, I think, came from German immigrants. The Merivians, Pennsylvania, very famous for their stars as. Well we have a Meravian Star Light which I'm a big fan of but they were called Nazareth sugar cookies because of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Yeah or some people call them Amish sugar cookies and some people say well why wouldn't they just call them Moravian sugar cookies? Because that would be too confusing because we can also thank our friends the Amish or the Moravians, the group who moved to North Carolina for inventing the Moravian spice cookie which is a very crispy, very thin little cookie made with molasses and ginger and cinnamon that you have around the holidays. Yeah it's close to gingerbread but crispier and thinner. Yes. And that was an American made cookie as well. So both the sugar cookie and the Merivian spice cookie were invented by the same sect of German Protestants who arrived in Pennsylvania and North Carolina respectively. Mind blowing. Very cool. We got to talk about the state cookie of New Mexico, the Bisco Chito. This was brought in by the Spanish colonists sort of codeveloped by the Pueblo people there in areas like New Mexico, what we now call New Mexico and biz Cocho means cakes in Spanish. So biscocito means little cakes. Yeah. And Biz Cocho should be like oh yeah, it's kind of like biscoto which it is. It's derived from that as well. Like biscotti. Yeah, exactly. They're all cognates. I have not had a bisco cheeto cookie yet in my life. I haven't either but I plan to. Cinnamon and Anna sounds like a very winning combination. Yeah, I looked them up on the internet. They look tasty. They do, they definitely do. But then I propose that it's maybe the most famous cookie of all. Would you agree or disagree? Am I overstating things? No, I think the chocolate chip cookie is at least from our view of the most famous cookie of all time. Okay so that cookie is one of those few origin stories that you can say definitively this person did this, this is when they did it and know there's not some other person out there who says that they were the ones who did it and there's some evidence that they may have done it three years earlier. That's not the case. The chocolate chip cookie was invented by a woman named Ruth Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts possibly in 1930, maybe 1931. Apparently she didn't remember exactly when she did it but she is the person who invented the chocolate chip cookie and what's awesome about it is she invented it by accident. And where was it? At the Toll House Inn. The Toll House Inn. There you are everyone. She was baking. She needed Baker's chocolate. She didn't have any that's that unsweetened chocolate that gives fudge and cake a lot of flavor and the color and she said I don't have any of that. So I got the semi sweet chocolate, I'm going to chunk it up real good. And when she put it in there she found that those chunks did not just melt and become a part of the entire cookie. They held their shape and they came out like little chocolate chips because of that lower cocoa butter content and bing bang, boom. Chocolate chip cookie. Yeah. And she served them anyway, I guess she tried one. It was like, this is pretty boss. And they became like an instant hit at the tollhouse in. So it was called the Tollhouse cookie. And I guess word spread enough that I don't know if she approached Nestle or Nestle approached her, but they struck a deal that they could print her recipe for Tolhouse cookies using semi sweet chocolate chips on their bags of semisweet chocolate chips. That her cookie recipe was now helping to move pretty good in exchange for a lifetime of free chocolate. She said she apparently thought it was just fine. She actually did end up cashing in. She fully sold all of her rights to the Toll Househouse cookie, what we call the chocolate chip cookie to Nestle, I think. I don't remember exactly when she did that, but they had it until like 1983 and then lost the rights. Chuck yes. I think at a certain point it was just like, sorry, this belongs to the world. Yeah, you can't own this anymore. I saw a 1978 poll that said that more people associated the term tollhouse with cookies or chocolate chip cookies in general than they did with Nestle or any of its products. That was not the case for me. I always call chocolate chip cookies a chocolate chip cookie. Did you ever call them toll House cookies? No. Chocolate chip cookies. That was a weird pole. Or people who were polled in this weird pole were very weird back in 78. Agreed. Although I don't remember. Maybe we did say that when I was seven. I don't remember it at all. I mean, a TV commercial said it, but that didn't count. But that was a commercial for the Nestle bag of chips. They were told chips. That's what I always thought of them. Man do you remember the butterscotch chips? I would just eat an entire bag of those things by myself. Just right out of the bag. Yeah, I mean, peanut butter chips, butterscotch chips. If you throw the plain M, amp M, those are all good variations, but your classic chocolate chip cookie is just a hands down winner. Yes. And in particular, Sally's baking addictions. Brown butter Chocolate america also birthed the peanut butter cookie and the brownie, the oatmeal raisin cookie, I guess. Can we skip to brownie real quick and talk about that bit of pedantism? Yeah. Because I'm sure some people like brownies aren't cookies. Well, that's me. Oh, really? Yeah. It's one of those things where it feels like a pedantic argument to call a brownie a cookie. Technically, it's a pan cookie, but to me, a brownie is a brownie. Okay? And if someone comes up, I think it's the other way around. To say no, a brownie is a brownie is to say no, technically, brownies are cookies. Well, yeah, I mean, if anybody says it to you, just say, hey, you want a brownie? And that just takes care of that. Exactly. Why talk about it. Just eat it. Right, but the point is this I'm just not letting this pass by. A brownie is a type of cookie. It's a bar cookie in the same way that a lemon bar is a bar cookie. Nana Nemo is a bar cookie. I'm pretty sure I'm seeing that right. And it's just a cookie where you take the battery and you build it, you bake it in a single mass and then cut it into squares rather than baking them individually. But it's still a cookie. Not to me, it's not. That's fine. That's totally fine. I couldn't not explain it further. Consistency is different to me. The little flaky top is different. It's just all different. Okay, well, let me ask you this, Chuck. What about a chocolate chip brownie that is nothing more than a square, slightly thicker chocolate chip cookie? No. Do you mean a pan baked chocolate chip cookie? Yeah. Well, that's not a brownie. That's a pan baked chocolate chip cookie. But it looks exactly like a brownie. It's the same shape, but it has different consistency and doesn't have that flaky top. So to you, just the brownie is its own thing. Yeah. Okay, what about a lemon bar? It's a lemon bar. Okay, I can get with you on both of those, actually. Again, this is a pedantic argument that no one should ever have. Those are my favorite kind. What you should do is just sit down, eat those cookies, eat those brownies, eat those bar brownie cookies, throw some ice cream on top, some hot fudge, some whipped cream, put a lemon bar on there. I'm not a big lemon bar guy. Oh, I like them, but they have to be totally by themselves. You wouldn't mix that with anything. No, I'm not a big fan of lemon cookies either. Like, lemony sweets aren't my favorite. I got you. I love them. I feel like how if you take your likes and my likes and my dislikes and your dislikes and put us together, we form a fully formed whole thing. We would like everything. So check. There's a couple of other kinds of cookies we need to shout out real quick. The cut out cookie where you roll them out and cut them out. That's why they're called that. Like Christmas sugar cookies are often cut out cookies. These are fun. I don't love to eat those as much. Like a Christmas shaped cookie with the sprinkles on top. Not my favorite. I'm sort of a dropped cookie. Purist. Yeah, dropped cookies are kind of like a chocolate chip cookie where you scoop them out by the spoonful and drop that mound on there and they kind of spread and flatten out as they bake, producing a round, flat dessert tree. That's right. And by the way, brownies, we know the etymology. What would it be? Just the origin story. What? Fanny Farmer in Brownie. There's a story that a housewife in Maine forgot baking powder in their chocolate cake and it became a brownie. And that's in like some cooking encyclopedias. Not true, because that was in 19 and twelve and Fanny Farmers recipe was printed in 19 five. Yeah. And Fanny Farmer actually did a lot more than just invent the brownies. She also is credited for inventing the oatmeal raisin cookie too. Really? Yeah, she's very prolific. So here's my deal. I listened to a Judge John Hodgman the other day, and Jesse Thorn, a friend in Bayliff of that show called Raisins a BS addition to Any Sweet Treat, which I generally agree, but I like an oatmeal raisin cookie. And I'm not the biggest raisin guy, a good one for sure, but that's pretty much the limit of raisins in desserts. Unless it's just a Fistful of raisins. Great Clint Eastwood movie. They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. What about the ice box cookie? So those came along after the invention of the ice box, obviously. But usually you take the dough and you roll it into a log, chill it, and then you cut it into slices. And those slices are baked as cookies. Yeah, if you look at a pinwheel cookie, that swirly shape comes because it's rolled up and chilled. Or the logs of ready to Bake cookie dough you find in the dairy aisle. That's a nice box cookie. Technically, I disagree, because that's not rolled flat. That's just a big tube. No, it's not rolled flat. A pinwheel cookie is not rolled flat either. It's rolled into like a tube, a cylinder, and then you cut the cylinder into slices. No, it's rolled flat and then it's rolled so it's got rings. I got you. Yeah. I think the final product and the fact that it's a tube in the fridge makes it an ice box cookie. Alright. That's not just me saying that either. You got your classic sandwich cookie, which everything from an Oreo to a macaron to those great peanut butter ritz chocolate dip things that Emily's grandmother used to make. Those are really good. Who, by the way, is turning 101 this year. I'm not on Facebook anymore, but Mary's turning 101 in a couple of weeks. Hey, you did Facebook. Good for you, Jack. Yeah, I deleted my account. I was out of there. That is what they call mental health. I didn't miss it at all. No. Did it take any kind of transition period for you? The only thing I missed that was actually genuinely hard was the Movie Crush page. And the movie crushers page. Those were awesome. And it was a great community. It is a great community, I hope still. But that was the hardest part to leave because I really, really enjoyed my interactions there. It was a very kind little corner of the internet. But having said that, it was all for my well being, so I had to let that go even. Anyway, Mary's 101 soon want to let the stuff you should know army, that I'm glad that came up actually, because she's not doing the best here at 101, but she's hanging in there. Well a super duper Hooper. Happy birthday to you Mary 101. That is amazing. That is really impressive. But back to sandwich cookies. You also get your Struct waffle. I think I mentioned the Macaron. Get to Malamar's, catch Moon Pies. What about Oreos? Yeah, it's classic. Apparently the Whoopie pie is the original sandwich cookie and that we can thank our Amish friends for as well. Supposedly the name came from Amish workers on job sites going woopy when they opened their lunch pail and found a Whoopie pie inside. Yeah, I like a whoopie pie. If it has too much cake to filling, it becomes a little cumbersome for me. Definitely has to be just right. But researching this chuck, it made me wonder if Oreos were meant to be like kind of some sort of manufactured Whoopi pie. Maybe. I will say this, the only Oreo worth eating is the double stuff. Do you like the golden kind or the chocolate kind or both? No, I don't try the variations. I like the regular. Okay. What about you? I like them pretty much all. There's only been a couple of weird Oreos that I was like. No, not this one. Okay. There's all kinds of crazy flavors now, right? Yeah. The birthday cake and the Rice Krispie Treat oreos were pretty great. The birthday cake thing has infested every area of the sweet realm. Yeah, for good reason, though. I mean, you get some frosting in there. Well, that's pretty much it. That's an excuse to put frosting in something that wasn't otherwise there. Oh, what a cookie so bad. Or in the case of an Oreo, you're putting frosting inside of frosting. And that is amazing. I got something else here. I know we got a few more little tidbits cookie dough. I tried to find out sort of the rise of eating cookie dough and it becoming a thing. And no one really knows when it started to be a big thing. I mean, they think nostalgia obviously has a big part of it with liquid, the better off the mixing things. But they said that this new generation, like Gen Z has taken it to a new level. And in college towns, cookie dough is triple in sales. What it is in a regular town, partially because dorms don't have ovens, but partially because the younger generation just eats this stuff up. Yeah, this is all safe to eat. Now. I know everyone thinks it's eggs, but it's usually the flour that causes problems. What? Yeah, it's bacteria in the flour. And so they said salmonella and eggs. If you take care of your eggs, it's really not much of a problem. Yeah, most eggs are pasteurized now. Yeah, well, that too, but if you buy the cookie dough that you're allowed to eat in the grocery store, like just right out of the thing, like cookie dough for eating it has got treated flour. It's called heat treated flour. That sounds good. Which means yeah, they just bring the flour up to about 165 degrees Fahrenheit for a little while, and then that takes care of any bacteria. And then you can just eat cookie dough. Like it's going out of style. Crazy. I did not know that. Thank you for that one, man. That's the fact of the podcast right there. And the cookie dough ice cream that started in by Ben and Jerry's in their Vermont scoop shop. Yeah, that's good stuff. Apparently it was anonymous suggestion on their suggestion board shop. Man, that was nice. So somebody really lost out on some big royalties. They left another anonymous suggestion saying, can I have a little bit of money for my idea? You got some other good facts here, don't you? Yeah. Best selling cookie in the world, chuck, what is it? Oh, jeez. I don't know. Oreo? Is it? Oreo? It is. Or at least in 2014. The latest I could find was okay, but I think that bears remind me, I know we've talked about it before, that Oreo is actually the knock off that Hydrox was the original, and Oreo came along and knocked off Hydrox and then became the greatest selling cookie in the world. Oh, that's right. I love that story. I like this bit you have on famous Amos, too. The very famous Amos Cookies. I don't think I knew this walley. Amos was an agent. The first African American agent at the William Morris Agency. And he would bake these cookies to give his acts to be like, hey, how about some cookies? You want to stay with me? Right? And they were really popular, and he spun it off and founded his own company. Yes. And then I got one more. Chuck, people leave cookies out for Santa, right? Sure. You'd think that'd be pretty old, but actually, apparently they've traced it back to the Great Depression in America. Santa cookies. Yeah. That they were teaching kids to show gratitude and appreciation for the gifts that they were getting. And some parents started that, and that was where kids started leaving cookies out for Santa. That's what I saw. I saw in multiple places. Yeah. At a very unlikely time. That's very nice. Yeah. So that's it for cookies, everybody. I think the only thing left to do is to go eat some cookies. Do you know how many people are going to bake cookies tonight? That's great. That was kind of the point I wanted everybody to bake. And I also want to shout out some of our sources, the Nibble, What's Cooking America, and many, many others. And since I said many others and Chuck said yum, that means it's time for listener mail. Well, what? It's time for us to talk about sketchfest, okay? Because we're returning to the live stage, everybody, and we want to see you. It's a vaccinated only show. It is a masked show. We're going to do it as safely as possible. And this is on January 21 at the best comedy festival in the land. Yeah, we'll be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, and you can get tickets@sfscatchfest.com. And it'll be the first time in two years that we will have been on stage. So it's going to be fun to see for you guys one way or another, whether we bomb or not, that's will be great. It'll be a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to it. I really miss getting on stage, so this can be great. So we'll see you guys January 21, 2022. And Chuck, speaking of 2022, this is our last regular episode of 2021. So first I want to wish my dear, sweet wife Yuani very happy birthday today. I said, hey, which would you rather know more about, contortionists or cookies? And she said, cookies. So I dedicated this episode to her, and I think we should wish everybody out there a very happy new year in the hopes of 2022 is a really great year, don't you? That's right. Thanks for all the support, not only this year, but over all the years that allow us to have one of the best jobs in the world means everything to us, and you all mean everything to us. And so thanks a lot. I hope you had a great or at least a better 2021 in 2020, and maybe things will be even better next year. Yes. If you want to get in touch with us to tell us how great your News Eve was, you can send it in an email to stuff podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
3fd6140c-121b-11eb-ba6a-8bba3916b742 | Short Stuff: Hanged, Drawn and Quartered | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-hanged-drawn-and-quartered | The words "hanged, drawn and quartered" are an accurate description of the grizzly execution process. They're just not in the right order. | The words "hanged, drawn and quartered" are an accurate description of the grizzly execution process. They're just not in the right order. | Wed, 14 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=195, tm_isdst=0) | 13348418 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Dave. He's here with us in spirit. I can feel him. I can feel his presence wrapped around us in a big hug. And that means, of course, that's a short stuff. Very loving, harmonious episode about disemboweling being beheaded and having your innards burnt in front of your very eye. Yes. We're talking about old timey punishments, and one of the reasons that you hear about things like being drawn and quartered and all this disgusting stuff taking place is that kings and nobility would do this stuff. Really? I mean, that was the intent, was to try and say, hey, you don't want this to happen to you. Don't do this kind of stuff. They weren't only status. They might have been that, too, but it was really as a countermeasure to try and keep people from committing crimes. Yeah. It was like basically saying, this is what happens if you mess with me, the king. It just shows, like, not everybody can do that. Even historically speaking, not everybody can order somebody to do that to another human being and get away with it. And that's kind of what the monarch was showing. Like, this is what happens. And so it was reserved for the worst possible crimes you can think of, which was the crime against the monarchy, like, treated. Yeah, and we're specifically talking about being hanged, drawn and quartered, which is a real thing, but it's just not quite in that order. I don't know why we say it that way. It's kind of weird, right? And they left out some pretty important parts, too, but they were just one of the more lazily named I don't made up a word, but I said no. It was one of the more lazily named punishments. But it started out in the 13th century, the think the first person was a pirate who will talk about by the last name of Maurice. And then it went all the way up until the 19th century, even. It wasn't until 1870 that it was taken off of the books, where it was finally outlawed in England as a punishment for crime. Yeah. I think we should read here the actual English law text. So here it goes. That you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the neck. Easy enough to understand. And being alive cut down. Okay. Your privy members shall be cut off. I think we know what that's all about. Private parts like, how are you and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head separate from your body, and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the king's pleasure. There it is. Yeah. Astoundingly you can still kind of get what they're saying in a lot of ways, but we'll explain it just to be a little more graphic. So the first part is drawing right where you're put on like a sled, a board, something like that, and you're dragged behind a horse. And typically you are dragged in London from Newgate Prison to the execution grounds in a place called Tyburn, which, now that I am aware of this, I want to go to Tyburn next time we're in London. I'll bet they have some pretty gruesome, like guided tours. Yeah. And when you say dragged on a sled, it's not like fun Santa sleigh style, right. Or snow day style or Indiana Jones style. No, probably even worse than that. I think the idea is that that part is also painful and humiliating. There are people along this little parade route, like, throwing garbage at you. When you finally get there, you're in pretty rough shape, and then they hang you from a rope, but the intent is not to kill you, so they don't, like, pull the gallows and you drop through the trap door and break your neck. The point is to hang you to where you're choking and you're asphyxiating and you think you're going to die, but then they don't let that happen. Right. They're like, no, we're going to bring you back or cut you down before you can possibly die. So now we've got the drawn part, the hanged part. Now we get to, for my money, the worst part, where your genitalia is cut off. And by the way, we should say, from what I could tell, this is specifically applied to men. And I think because of this part, out of propriety, or sense of propriety, women were burned at the stake instead. So being hanged, drawn and quartered was specific for men. But they would cut off your junk and they would burn it in the fire in front of you. So by this time, I mean, you could possibly bleed to death from that. But you probably seen this happen. Yes. You were around long enough, I would guess, to watch your junk burn up in front of you. Then after that, step two is they would cut you from the groin to the sternum and disembowel you. Right? Yeah. I mean, who knows how long you live? I know we did an actual episode, one of our early ones, before they were even, like, ten minutes long. Kind of like these, except not as good. How long you live when your head was cut off? No, that was a long episode. I think it was like a good 40 minutes. Oh, I don't think it was nearly that long. I'll bet you $5 it was 40 minutes. I bet it wasn't over 30. Okay, $5. Look it up. Where was that? We don't know how long you live when you are disembowed like that, but I would imagine that you bleed out pretty quickly, but you still might see your gut spill out, which, I mean, we're really kind of hitting that part right there, Chuck, that you're seeing this. And I think it's because if you just take half of a second and put yourself into the position of somebody who this is being done to, like seeing your body parts being tossed in a fire in front of you when you know they're supposed to be, like, in your body or attached to your body still, the psychological impact of that has to compound the pain exponentially. Too it's a really mean thing to do on top of everything else. And also just to drive this home really quick. Too. There are a lot of people standing around chanting for your death, yelling at you, maybe throwing garbage at you while this is going on. Too so your townsfolk are being mean to you. Too that's right. So let's take a break. We've covered, drawn, and hanged. And what do you even call that last part? Disemboweled. Disemboweled. And we'll cover scattered, smothered, and covered. Right. That was beautiful. Thank you. Nice work. So we're getting to the scattered, smother, and covered part. Don't forget chunked and topped. I think that's the final. I think there's one more after topped even. Yeah, there's something with chili's, I think chili is topped. Is it no chili. There's also, like, jalapenos. I think you can get on it. Oh, so scattered, smothered, covered, chunks, topped, and chiled, I guess. I don't think they call it that, but yeah, that's all the way by the way, for those of you who don't live near a Waffle House, I think there may be ten of you listening. These are ways that you can order your hash browns. Yeah. How did you order them? Scattered, smothered, and covered. And then I would get chunked. But I don't eat pork anymore because pigs are way too smart to eat. No more chunks, no more chunked, which is unfortunate because pigs are also far and away the most delicious animal we have domesticated for you for taking a stand. Anyway, so scattered, which means that it's not in a hockey puck. Smothered, which means it has sauteed onions in with it and covered, where they put a slice of non cheese cheese on it. Right. What about you? A shame to admit that I was a very boring person. I just liked my hash browns plain. I would get a double order, okay. And that was it. I would just get a double order. A hash brown. Wait a minute. I wouldn't get scattered. Some other door covered. Okay, I understand, but would you put, like, ketchup on it or something salt and pepper, like egg yolk mixed in there or anything? Sure. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'll mix it up with the eggs and whatever else is on the plate. You're not like, totally insane. I'd like the driest order of hash brown you've ever made in July, because that's the beauty of it. They're never dry. Even without that stuff on them. Some parts can get I've had some dry hash browns. All right. I think we should move on. Sure. All right. So the last step in this process is the quartering. And this involves kind of what it sounds like. I don't think we mentioned before. After you got disemboweled, they would cut the heart out, throw that in the fire, you're almost certainly dead. After that, your head comes off during this last process, it just falls right off from the horror. And then finally you are genuinely quartered is in. Your arms and legs are cut off. They boil those in some spices to make the flesh last as long as possible because your body parts are going on tour. That's right. So parts of you are being sent to different nearby areas. That is under the king's control to basically say, like, hey, this is what happens to traders. This is the leg of this guy who was drawn and quartered. You all know what hang. Drawn and quarter it is. And look at this. This is the result of that. So don't try anything against the king. That's kind of what the point was. I didn't see anything about the torso because there would be some torso left over, but it just seemed like they would cut their arms and legs off. That was the quarter part. But that also makes it confusing with another form of torture and sometimes capital punishment, which was being quartered right. By horses, which is a totally different thing that England didn't even do. Yeah, you've heard about when you have like, each limb is tied to a different horse and then they yeah them in the different directions. But apparently didn't happen in England, apparently might have probably happened in France under King Henry the Fourth after an assassination attempt. And then the first person to be hanged, drawn and quartered, you mentioned was the pirate Maurice because he spoke at the Pompotist of Love. That's right. That was back in 1241, right? That's right. And then, of course, William Wallace, the Scottish rebel. He was drawn and quartered as depicted in the Mel Gibson snuff film Braveheart. And then another very famous person who was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered was Guy Fox, the Catholic revolutionary who was trying to blow up Parliament. But he escaped the worst of it because he was clever enough to jump down from the gallows head first and break his own neck. So he was already dead when they did the worst of the stuff to him as part of his punishment. Yeah. And eventually things might have turned when a naval clerk named David Tyree was drawn and quartered because he had a lot of press coverage. The rest of this stuff is just there's not a ton of detail. But the press really came out and wrote about what happened to Tyree and things seem to have kind of turned after that to a little bit more of a I don't know if it was just like they figured that it was too cruel to be doing. Or if they just decided it just all takes too much time and it's a little too much. We needed to sort of get on with that kind of thing. Too extra, sort of. Because there were five men convicted in the Cato Street conspiracy in 1820, and they were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. But they ended up just hanging them, putting them up there on the gallows and cutting their heads off and saying, can we just call it a day? Yeah. And this guy that the House Stuff Works article interviewed. His name is Richard Clark. He runs the website. Capital Punishment UK. He says that part of the reason why this went out of fashion was because well to do Londoners started gentrifying areas around Newgate Prison and tyburn the public execution grounds. And they're basically like, no, we don't really want you doing this in our backyard. It really tends to bring out the riff, raft and the bloodthirsty, and we kind of want them over there. So they just did away with it entirely in 1870. Yeah, that was it. That was it. For being hang drawn in quarter, humanity took one small step forward toward progressing to its ideal form. And that's it for short stuff, right? What does that mean? We're out. Okay. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcasts ever. You listen to your favorite shows." | |
3a30554a-361f-11ea-91d6-7bf53389c747 | Short Stuff: Jigsaw Puzzles | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-jigsaw-puzzles | Who doesn't love a good puzzle? Tune in to learn a few facts and figures about jigsaw puzzles right now. | Who doesn't love a good puzzle? Tune in to learn a few facts and figures about jigsaw puzzles right now. | Wed, 05 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=218, tm_isdst=0) | 14128317 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. Let's get started. Starting now. Do you like puzzles? Sure. Wait a minute. Is this like, literal jigsaw puzzles? Okay. Yeah, I've got no problem with jigsaw puzzles. That's as far as I like anything these days. Chuck, don't you know the world's ending? Well, I didn't mean like, do you want to fight a puzzle? I mean, do you enjoy sitting down and doing a jigsaw puzzle? Yeah, sure I do. I mean, it's been a while, but yes, I like a good puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle in particular. I like, say, like a very heartwarming one. Like maybe a jigsaw puzzle of a Thomas Concede painting or flowers or kittens or something. And nothing's terribly hard, just something like occupying rather than challenging. Yeah, I didn't do a lot of puzzles. I mean, I guess it did when I was a kid and then probably didn't for a long time. We weren't a puzzle family, really, but there was one week in college where a dude down the street from me, a friend, got a big puzzle. And it was just one of those things in college where you've got time and three or four of us got together and drank a lot for, like, a week and did this huge puzzle and just had so much fun. And that's the last puzzle I've done except for doing little puzzles with my daughter. That sounds like a fun that's a great puzzle story. For some reason, it was a lot of fun. I imagine that whole weekend, starting with a musical number where your friend sticks his head out the front door. He's like, It's here. And you stick your head out and you're like, It's here. It's here. The puzzle finally here. That went down. That's exactly how it went down. This is a lot of jibberjabber for a short stuff, isn't it? Yeah. So we should just go ahead and get to it and say that. A man named Sir John Spillsbury they called him The Doughboy he was an engraver in England and a map maker in the mid one thousand seven hundred s and he gets credit in 1766 for creating the first jigsaw puzzle when he put a map on a piece of wood, cut it out, cut the countries out and said, Here you go. Teachers use this to teach geography. I love things where it's just like, there it is right there. That was the first time it ever happened. That's the beginning of it. There's your origin story. It's nice and tidy. So it was kind of a teaching tool at first, but also people were like, it's kind of fun putting the countries in. Let's do this at home, too. Or at our friend's house over a long weekend while we drink. So it kind of took off. And then in very short order, it also became a marketing tool, too, where companies would kind of maybe give away a jigsaw puzzle that was a photo of a mobile gas station or something like that. So they became very ubiquitous pretty quickly. Yeah. And they still do stuff like that to promote your company? They can be little marketing tools. I know Kodak has one that they sell that they say is the world's largest, at 51,000 pieces, plus 28 and a half feet by 6.25ft. None of those things are even close to it's. Not the biggest at all. No, they're really full of it, Chuck. I think they can just say whatever they want. They're kodak, what are you going to do? Yeah, so Kodak does sell that one. It's like $400. I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at. It's a giant, huge puzzle. Our problem with it is that they call it the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. And I'm guessing it's not just us who have a problem with it, but the people at the Guinness World Records probably have a bit of a problem with it, too. Either that or Kodak's lawyers were like, we have to word this just perfectly or else we could get in some trouble here. Because it turns out that this Kodak world's largest jigsaw puzzle is fairly mediocre compared to some of the other jigsaw puzzles that are around that take the cake for world's largest anything. Yeah, there was one in 2018 in Dubai that Guinness recognized, and it was in honor of the Year of Zayed, which is a year long tribute to the person who founded the UAE. The UAE. Shayk zayed Bin Sultan al Nayan. Nice. I think I got it. And this thing was almost 66,000. That's pretty impressive. Have you seen it? Yeah, it was awesome. I mean, the pieces themselves are giant. They're like about a foot or so square and the whole thing was a little kind of light cardboard. But when put together, it was quite impressive, for sure. And Kodak had 51,000 pieces in change. There was one in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam that the 1600 students at the university, they put this thing together and it had over a half a million pieces. Right. So that was, I think, of a giant lotus flower. Right. Beautiful. It is. So there's definitely bigger puzzles than the one that Codex Touting is the world's largest jigsaw puzzle, but some people say, okay, that's great. Yeah, that's really time consuming, but any schmo with all of the pieces can put that thing together. Other people, and this is totally unsurprising to me, that there's like a whole subculture of people who are like, I want to be challenged by a jigsaw puzzle. As it turns out, you don't have to have a football field sized jigsaw puzzle to be challenged. You can do it with some very small surface areas. There's one in particular called Ice Puzzle Nine. That's just nine pieces, but it's possibly the hardest jigsaw puzzle on the planet. All right, well, let's take a break there, and we'll tell you more about ice Puzzle nine right after this. Have you seen this thing? I have. Have you seen the video of someone putting it together? No. I saw a video of the guy putting jigsaw puzzle 23 together or 29. So this is a designer, and I think he did both of these. Name you Asaka. And if you look at ice Puzzle nine, it's a tray, a blue tray that's about as big as your two hands put together. It's very small, and it's only got those nine pieces, and they don't look like your standard puzzle pieces. They can be flat in places in curvy, just like a puzzle, but like a jigsaw puzzle. But there's just something a little different when you look at it, you think, well, how hard could that be? And then I went to a YouTube that showed a guy putting it together, and it was so easy. And I was like, how do people not get that? That's how easy it is. And the only thing I can think of is that it's easy when you see someone doing it, but very hard when you just have the puzzle pieces. Okay, it must be because this famous puzzler, Chris Ramsey took him 2 hours and nine minutes and said that it was exhausting. Right? Yeah. He doesn't seem to be the guy who would take, like, a dive for a puzzle maker. Like, he seems legit. There was another one. I saw a video call from a guy named the Puzzle guy. Who have you ever heard Croatian people talk speak English? I think this is the video I saw. He did Jigsaw Puzzle 29, too, and he had some real trouble with it. In fact, at the end of the puzzle, when he had the last two pieces, he was explaining how he couldn't get them to fit when he accidentally got them to fit and was actually surprised that he finished the puzzle. Is that when the accident really took hold? Yeah, but it's great. Man. I love that accent. It's so great. People speak English. They just sound so just friendly and amiable. It's awesome. But as he was putting this together, one of the big problems with jigsaw puzzle 29, which was also made by Yusaka, as you were saying, it has five corner pieces, so one of the corner pieces actually fits into the inside of the puzzle, and it just seems to be extraordinarily difficult to put together. One of the reasons why it's tough, as all the pieces are exactly the same. It doesn't form a picture, or I should say they look exactly the same. Not shape wise, but color wise, this translucent blue or whatever. So you just have to tell from the shape. And then some of the shapes look like they should fit certain sizes of, like, holes. Is that what they're called? The shapes go in the holes the spaces. Spaces, but they just don't quite fit. It looks very madden. It was maddening just to watch the video. Yeah. Seeing Ice Puzzle Nine, I wish I hadn't watched it, and then I would have just bought it to see how I would do. And I don't want to give it away, but when you put the last piece in, the idea is that you have to get all the pieces inside that tray. It's not necessarily what you think of as a puzzle, which is they all fit perfectly together and form a perfect picture. That's the only kind of hint I would give, is that there can be space in that trade. They just got to all fit in there. Right. Does that make sense? It's a good hint. I don't want to ruin it. So speaking of ruining, man, did you see the video of Dave Evans from Dorset, England, who basically created I guess it was certified as the world's largest hand cut wooden jigsaw puzzle? No. So this guy, this poor guy, he created a jigsaw puzzle, an enormous one. It was like 20ft by 8ft, and if you're in the UK, it's 6 meters by two and a half meters. It was just this giant puzzle, and he had it completed. He spent two weeks putting it together after assembling, like, cutting it, and then it took him another two weeks just to put it together. And he had this giant piece of plywood in his workshop showing it off, and somebody was filming it, and it just collapsed and he walked into the frame. It just, like, about to lose his mind. He just can't believe that just happened. I mean, that moment was captured. Yeah, that moment was captured on video. And his reaction was captured on video. It's worth checking out because you just agonized for the guy. It took him another 16 days with a bunch of assistance to put it back together. Well, here's another interesting record. And these are the records that kind of crack me up. There are two people seemingly battling it out for the largest collection of jigsaw puzzles. Record. Louisa Figurredo, I guess of Sao Paulo, Brazil. And then Georgina Gill Lacuna of the Philippines have over a thousand puzzles each, and they keep kind of going back and forth. Right. And this is just such a weird record because the only thing you have to do is just buy more puzzles. Yeah. That's it. That's all there is to it? Yeah. Where does it end? I guess one of them is going to have to kick the bucket. I guess so. But then someone else takes over the collection and they're like, I'm going to buy eight more puzzles. I'm winning. You would hope so. You would hope that your arch nemesis would have enough class to be like, my puzzle collection must be destroyed upon my death. Oh, that's what you do. You just set it ablaze or distributed in a bunch of different pieces to different people. No. Set it ablaze. Don't give it to children who need it. All right. No. How about this, Chuck? If you're in favor of setting it ablaze, you could give them to children in need, but you have to stipulate in your will that a piece is taken from every single one of those puzzles, and those pieces are set ablaze. How about that? Yeah, that's the worst. We've gotten a lot of hand me down puzzles, which is what happens when you have a kid and all of them are missing pieces. You should just know not to even take a hand me down puzzle because it's going to happen. So you want to talk about this last thing, this 1700 person puzzle? Sure. March of last year, 2019, more than 1700 people got together to form the largest human jigsaw puzzle on record. And this one was cool because it raised awareness for autism spectrum disorder. And the piece itself that they formed out of human beings is the symbol for the autism speaks organization. And I think I don't know if there was controversy, but surely no one got mad about this. But the question did arise, is it a puzzle if it's just a puzzle piece, or is it a puzzle piece if there's no puzzle for it to fit into? That, too. Yeah. And Guinness said, you know what? This is, everybody? This is a largest human image record. In other words, everyone getting together. And when you look at it from space, it looks like something else. Right. Some marketing research assistance saved the day. Oh, yes. I guess the last thing we have to say about jigsaw puzzles is that one great Simpsons reference where there are some people sitting at a bed and breakfast putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It's clearly of a donkey, and a woman puts a piece in it, like the donkey's shoulder and says, oh, it's a donkey. Right. Well, you're not watching what we do in the shadows, are you? No, I'm saving it all up, I think. All right, well, for fans, just let me say that's like Jackie Daytona and his toothpick. Okay. There you go. I don't want to know anything else about it. Well, thanks for joining us on Short Stuff, everybody. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio how stuff works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, 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/2017-04-06-sysk-empathy-final.mp3 | How Empathy Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/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 | 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 | Thu, 06 Apr 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=96, tm_isdst=0) | 50668424 | 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. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to sacks by cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Hey, you may have noticed this past Saturday, you got an extra episode of Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, SYSK Select. That's right. It was not a mistake. What we decided to do here after nine plus years is maybe you don't know that we have 900 plus episodes, so we're going to start throwing out a I don't want to call it a rerun. Well, no, it's a hand selected curated episode by us. Yeah, a classic, if you will. But Josh will pick one out. I'll pick one out. It might be newsy. It might just be one of our favorites. And we're going to run those on Saturday. If you haven't heard it, check it out. If you have, we'd love for you to listen again. Sure. So check it out in your podcast feed. As simple as that. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. 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, Noel. 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 a 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 are, 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 was 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 legitimate. He's 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 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 roots in Tennessee and Mississippi. If you know this by reading my Wikipedia page right? Does it say that you parked chocolate on there yet? 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 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 that 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 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. 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 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 so unestablished that I can just say that stuff. 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 give 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 quite agree with either, but he's great. He's really good at poking holes in the concept of empathy. 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. 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? Yeah, 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, the 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 math, 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. Smack. 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 Teliac 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 primatologist, 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. 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. So 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 at 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 put it pretty well. He said, this is the challenge of our time, globalization by a tribal species. And 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, only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. Hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun is shining, the daylight lasts longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story, isn't there? There sure is. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, you can tune into the podcast series on Amazon music My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right Media. That's right. Part true crime and part comedy, my Favorite Murder takes you on a journey through small town mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. That's right. Hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark Banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales, and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great, and it's a fun show, and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. All right, so I promised some talk about race, and there's something called the racial empathy gap. Studies have kind of if you walk around as a living, breathing human being, you can probably tell that 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 hearts started to beat a little faster. Yes. 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 everybody's like, Shut up. It 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, I will 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. Yes. 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. Yeah. You're not following the law. You're following your own bias. You're a piece of garbage. Well, that's 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, look at this kid. Oh, I don't want to ruin his future. Yes. I don't want to ruin his future. Like, that could have been my son. He looks kind of like me. It was clearly biased 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 kids. 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 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 notice 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 great. Can you feel someone else's pain? Yeah. Can you feel someone else's pain? It's 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 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's a Simpsons recently where Kirk Van Houten is back in college, and he goes to high five. He's like a lacrosse player, and 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 Seisman takes his hat off and throws up into it, man. I think we talked about that in the episode. Yes. 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 thus 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 yeah. Your brain is hardwired to not accept that. I know. It's pretty it makes you faint because your brain is 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. Yeah. 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. So 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. So there's good evidence that this does have to do with, say, empathizing or whatever, but still, it's just 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 insulin cortexes cortices. 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 and 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 Methu. Matthews 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, it 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. Yes. 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 are 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 who's 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. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about Summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah, and with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. All right, 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. I know they're related. Yes. Psychologist Simon Baron 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 described 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. Like, 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 toward 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 a 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. 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 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 outpouring 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 Jeselnik, yeah, he's yes, he has a Netflix special, I think it's still on, called Thoughts and Prayers. And 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 was 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 affective. Empathy, as far as the 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 experience 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 quote. And they gave people and this is one of those, like a nine item questionnaire, how much can you really learn? 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 never took a wife. Right. He got around. But the women that took tuk 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. 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. But 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 the 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 nuggets. 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, bullying. 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. Yeah. 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, 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 that 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 and comfort or console another little kid who's in distress. Boy, that's why when I hear about neglect, like baby and infant neglect, it's just, ah, 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. Yes. It'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 are you 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 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 is 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 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 alexithemia. Right. 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. Finders full of empathy. That's a call back. 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 Alexateemia, individuals with autism without it, individuals with alexaia 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. Yes. I don't know why either. This makes sense. We need to do an entire episode on autism. Yeah, maybe. Alexeymia 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. Well, 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'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 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, well, 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, like, 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. Again, 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 hookworms. 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. Brought back a childhood memory, and I finally had to write 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 edge. This never happened. I called my mom, who is 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 hookworms 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 any mic. 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. Old mom, 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 syskrodcast or hit me up at Joshlark. You can hang out with us on Facebook@facebook.com Stuffyshow or Facebook.com charleswchuckbryant. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseworks.com and join us, as always, at our home on the web, stuffiesto.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. 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d62f27d4-3b0d-11eb-aa42-57e6aadcacf3 | The NAACP | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-naacp | The NAACP has long been one of the most robust and effective non-profits in the USA. And while it has faded a bit from its glory days, it still remains a vital cog in the battle for equality. | The NAACP has long been one of the most robust and effective non-profits in the USA. And while it has faded a bit from its glory days, it still remains a vital cog in the battle for equality. | Thu, 04 Feb 2021 13:59:52 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=13, tm_min=59, tm_sec=52, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=35, tm_isdst=0) | 43670108 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's out there somewhere. And this is stuff you should know edition. That's right. I was thinking about this while I was researching Chuck. No one ever says NAACP. I've never heard anybody say it. Everyone says NACP, which I think kind of gives the whole thing kind of like an old friend kind of feel to it, you know what I'm saying? Well, yeah, since you brought that up, there have been people questioning the name in modern times of national association for the advancement of colored people, and some people have floated african Americans. So in AAA, I guess, could be a way that you would say that. But this was, I think, from 2007. So the leader of the NAACP at the time, I think there's a there's so much in the name, so much currency at this point. Yeah. That switching it is kind of tough. And also he said, we're kind of about the rights of many kinds of people, so we don't want to just say African American. There's lots of lengthy articles, but it seemed to make sense. Actually, what I've read is that the NAACP is kind of in this lengthy process of kind of reinventing itself or re establishing itself. And it seems like one of the things that they are starting to kind of go for is especially economic equality for all people. So that really kind of jibes with it's almost like they grew into the name finally now in the 21st century, which is surprising. It's kind of neat. Yeah. Should we hop back in the old wayback machine? It's been a little while. We got to put some air in the tires first, but yes. Did we get in that thing at all last year? I don't think so, which is surprising. We should have been getting that thing every day. Yeah, I know, and we totally didn't, but okay, so here we go. We're getting in the way back machine. All right, well, we're going to go back to my as well, go back to when the organization was founded. And the reason why was because, well, for lots of reasons. But I think this sort of inciting incident was in August of 19 eight, when in Springfield, Illinois, there were two gentlemen arrested on suspicion of rape and attempted rape and murder. And the cops, they were a little afraid of what might happen because, as you will see in this episode, there was a tendency for extra judicial violence, aka lynchings, to happen if people got worked up. So they said, let's get these guys out of here. Let's take them to another town. The mob of people show up and realize that they have been moved and did not take kindly to that. And rioted in Springfield. Yeah. So as a result of this Springfield riot, there were like 2000 black residents of Springfield, Illinois, who were displaced. They just didn't have homes anymore because they've been burned to the ground. Six people were murdered, two people were lynched. Two innocent men were lynched. Basically a stand in for the two men that they had originally intended to lynch. Yeah. 16 people ended up losing their lives over those three days. And nine black people, seven white people, five died from conflict with the state militia that was called in, and two white people died by suicide. And for many years, up until, I think, semi recently, the seven white people that died, those deaths were attributed to being killed by black people that were there, and that is not the case. They were literally rewriting history in that case. Wow. One of the other big things about this, too, is aside from the fact that it happened, this happened with enough frequency like that, it was a real problem. But one of the other things about these race riots or massacres of black residents, usually that evolved out of a lynching was that they went unpunished. Often times they were uninvestigated. There just wasn't much, if anything, done about them. So it became clear that this is a larger issue. It was already very clear among the African American community in the United States, but it kind of caught the attention of some connected white social justice activists who were working at the time, too. That's right. So in a man named W-E-B. Dubois, which is one of the great all time names. Oh, yeah, you've got three initials, and that's what you're going to roll with. And Dubai is a pretty killer name, too. But he was a humanities professor, he was a writer. He was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from a university in the United States. Harvard, no less. That's right. He got together with 40 other social activists in New York, and it was mixed races. It was a group of black people and white people, mixed religions. There were Jewish people there. It was described as a group of black and white activists, jews and gentiles in the Library of Congress. And they chose February 12 to get together because that was Abraham Lincoln's birthday, and that is where they established their first charter as a group. Yeah. The first time they met, they were not considered the NAACP. It wasn't until their second meeting the first time, they called themselves the National Negro Committee. And then in 1910, when they met again, they said, well, let's call ourselves the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And the NAACP was officially born, although they consider the actual founding back in 19 nine. And like you said, it was multiracial. Multiethnic. And white people were involved because they were very much concerned about the quality of life and the viability of getting ahead for African Americans in the United States at the time and for this organization to really kind of find its legs and find its footing and survive it's, like, crucial first few years. It needed very well connected, very wealthy white supporters. And so there was an integration at the highest levels. And then eventually, within a few years, it was kind of like, okay, it's time for us to step back. We've established this thing, and it can kind of go indefinitely from here. Yeah. So getting back to that charter, I think the words are pretty important. It said it was to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens in the United States, to advance the interest of colored citizens, to secure for them impartial suffrage, and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, employment according to their ability, and complete equality before the law. And I think it's pretty important because it really kind of lay the groundwork for what? I mean, there have been all sorts of activist groups over the years in the African American community, and theirs was always sort of about, let's attack this in the courts, and let's attack these systems in the courts where the cards are so stacked against us by law, and let's get some of these laws overturned. Yeah, that's still been their strategy basically throughout. It was the strategy from the beginning and it still is today, which is not an opposition, but it's complementary to other strategies, like direct action, which is like going to a counter and sitting in and protest a segregated lunch counter, or not giving your seat up on a bus. And during the civil rights areas, we'll see the NAACP had an involvement in direct action, but it's always been known as just shooting for the biggest trophies of all fundamental change at the national level, legislatively. That's what they've always kind of been about, the NAACP. Yeah. So some of the folks in the very first group, the first president was a constitutional lawyer named Morefield Story. Great man. There was a woman named Florence Kelly who was also an attorney, who worked a lot in employment reform. Do you remember her from the Francis Perkins episode? She was the woman who inspired Francis Perkins. I do. Great. Yeah, she is great. Who else? Well, they needed to make some way in the press. That was sort of one of the big problems at the time, as lynchings weren't being covered in the press. A lot of their rights that were being trampled on weren't covered in the mainstream press. So they had a good group of writers, essayist, journalists that would get in there and they founded their own paper, which was huge. The Crisis, which is still around today, their magazine, but mainly just trying to get recognized in mainstream newspapers with their work. Yeah. Again, some of the early supporters and people who are founding members had big time connections in the press. Like one guy. Oswald Garrison Villard. He was the publisher of the New York Evening Post and the Nation magazine. So he could very easily get stories about things like lynchings into his paper in his magazine where other places wouldn't print that kind of stuff. And then, yes, the subscriber ship of the crisis grew. It had a bigger and bigger impact. So, yeah, kind of part and parcel, it seemed like, with this legislative action was generating public support through the press. It's kind of like this two pronged approach. All right, should we take a little pause for the cause? Yeah. All right, we're going to take a break and be right back to talk about some of their early successes right after this. So if you look at some of the early successes in the first part of the 20th century, one of the big ones you can point to is in Oklahoma in 1910 where they had a state regulation that limited the rights of black citizens to vote. It was a grandfather clause, basically, where they said, you need and I think we talked about this in the voter suppression up. Yeah, for sure. But you need to be able to pass the literacy tests in order to be eligible to vote, unless you had a grandfather who voted in 66. Right. And side note, this is before black people were allowed to vote in Oklahoma. So they basically were saying if you're illiterate and you're white, you can vote. If you're illiterate and you're black, you can't. Yes, that Oklahoma law was particularly egregious. It was one of, I think, like seven or eight states that had a grandfather clause. But Oklahoma said not only if your grandfather could vote in 1866, if he lived in another country in 1866 and would have been eligible to vote or could vote in that country, your grandfathered in. So basically, as long as you weren't black, you could vote even if you were illiterate. So the NAACP filed suit against this in a very famous case called Gwen Versus the US. And Gwen was named after Frank. Gwen who, along with JJ. Biel, were a couple of elections officers who had basically been charged with disenfranchising black voters through the grandfather clause. And the Supreme Court heard this and said, you know what? This is the NAACP group. I've not heard of them before, but they present a pretty good case. So we're going to go ahead and overturn this grandfather clause. This is 1915. NAACP had only met for the very first time six years before, and all of a sudden they're overturning race based discrimination laws about voting at the Supreme Court. And that definitely caught the attention of people in the civil rights community. For sure. Yeah, that's why when you look back through history, the state's rights argument that we still hear today is such a tricky thing because states should be allowed to do a lot of things as they see fit, but you can't disenfranchise voters willfully disenfranchise voters. And that's when the federal government comes in and people start crying foul, that they want to be able to run their elections their way, which means we don't want black people to vote, and you just can't do that. I've been thinking about this recently since we did our clan episode, because I noticed that every time the clan went away, it was after the federal government intervened because the states wouldn't. Right. And something I came up with, like just a good rule of thumb or good litmus test is, does this law discriminate against anybody's? Right? Anybody. It doesn't matter what group it is. Forget the group, take the group out of it. Is it a discriminatory law? And I cannot think of a single instance where a discriminatory law would be beneficial for the greater good of the country or for the health of democracy. I can't think of one. Unless you're discriminating against somebody's. Right. To discriminate against somebody. Maybe that would be the case, but that seemed to be a pretty good rule of thumb to me that I just came up with. Does the law discriminate? Yes. Well, then it's probably a pretty bad law. Hey, Josh. Yeah? That's about how far into the future I should try my hand at it. What is that? What year is that? I don't know, but we're all just basically wisps of ones and zeros, I think, by then. Another big thing that kind of happened early on, we talked about Birth of the Nation in our episode on the clan, and the NAACP got together and said, let's boycott this terrible movie. And the boycott didn't do a lot in terms of shutting anything down in terms of Birth of a Nation, but it did draw them finally some mainstream publicity and got them written up in newspapers, at least, right so. They had some early successes, especially with overturning the grandfather clause, but I don't know if it was after this or around this time. They really kind of redoubled their efforts back onto the original intention, which was to do something about lynching, to get an anti lynching law, national federal law passed in the United States. And what's crazy is that that still hasn't happened, and that is recently as June of 2020, we failed to do it yet again, which is just nuts to me, but the NAACP was really trying to get this to get legislation passed. Even back then, it just made sense. Now, today, it's just shameful that we don't have something. But the thing that kind of redoubled or refocused the NAACP's efforts on anti lynching legislation was the lynching of a teenager named Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas in 1916. And even as far as lynchings go, this was particularly gruesome. Yeah. I mean, not only was the act gruesome, which was he was tortured, hanged, set on fire, and beaten, but it was in front of estimates range from eight to 17,000 people, like, basically the size of a small hockey arena, medium sized hockey arena. You're like, I'm not going above medium well. I'm trying to think these days, how much does your average MBA hockey arena hold? Is it more like $20,000? I'm such a terrible judge of anything like that. So let's just say a medium sized hockey arena. I think they got it across. And the only reason I'm saying that is because if you go to a pro sports game or a big concert, try to imagine that many people gathered together to watch a man, a human being, be burned and hanged in front of your face. And I try to put myself not in the mindset, but out of all those people, like, how many of those 15,000 people were 100% fully charged, do this, do this? And how many, as it happened, were like, my God, what has happened to us as human beings and Americans? Were there any people there that regretted what was going on? I'm sure some. And if they didn't regret it during, I'm sure some regretted it afterward. But I think one of the things that made Jesse Washington's Lynching so disturbing to the rest of the nation was that it was reported that there was a carnival like atmosphere where people were enjoying themselves and enjoying their time. Gathered together with all the other residents of Waco in Lynching, this teenager. And the NAACP sent an investigator there to basically document the whole thing, and she came back with this report that became something called the Horror of Waco or the Waco Horror. And the NAACP said, we're going to get this out there. We're going to tell the world about this. And they definitely did. And it had a really big impact. You know what it reminds me of? The only thing I can compare it to these days is when a high profile death row inmate is executed and outside the prison, they have those parties and stuff. I don't want to wait until the capital punishment debate here, but there's something about that bloodlust that just feels really gross to me. Yeah. And that's my official statement. You're talking about somebody's life. Anytime vengeance is driving things. It's usually time to take a pause and reflect on what you're doing. I've got all the rules of thumbs coming out today, Josh. 2022. Yeah. So they put out these pictures like you said were covered in mainstream newspapers. And, you know, I think it shocked the country. Obviously not enough, but it was a big wake up call, I think, to a lot of people what happened in Waco. And the NAACP was able to really pivot on this and bring up something like the Dir bill, which I think was the first piece of anti lynching legislation sponsored by Leonidas, another great name, Leonidas Dyer, Republican Congressman for Missouri that died in the Senate. I think it passed the House in 22 and then died in a Senate after a filibuster from the Southern Democrats. Yes, the Dixiecrats. And that was the first of many, many attempts. Yeah. Apparently by the middle of the century, there were 200 anti lynching bills that were introduced and died in Congress just by the mid century. And like I was saying, as recently as June of 2020, there was an anti lynching law that passed the Senate unanimously, 100 to zero. And then it went over to the House, where it passed 415 to four. Then the only thing the House did was change the name to the Emmett Till antilynching law, which means that it had to go back to the Senate to be passed again because that one change had been made, the name had been changed. And when it got back to the Senate, rand Paul from Kentucky said, I don't feel good about this, even though he was part of the unanimous Senate that had passed it unanimously just before, and no other change was made except for the name. And that really ticked a lot of people off. But still to this day, that law was blocked and the United States still does not have a law that makes lynching a federal crime. Yeah, this was really big news, so I'm sure a lot of people know about this. But if you're curious about Rand Paul's defense was, he said, quote, this bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion. Our national history of racial terrorism demands much more seriousness than that. So what he was contending was he wants the language changed because in the language now, it says the standard in federal hate crimes is serious I'm sorry, is bodily injury. And I think he wants it changed to serious bodily injury. In other words, if someone gets punched in the face, it would be called and considered a lynching in the way it's written now. And he said there should be a substantial risk of death and extreme physical pain in order to qualify as lynching. Otherwise, he said, it disrespects what real lynchings were. So take that for what it is. For what it's worth, the Senate formally apologized in 2005 for failing to outlaw lynching. So they apologized in 2005 and still it hasn't been put forward on the books. Yeah, so like we said, the NAACP, for decades and decades, leading up to the civil rights era, was very much focused on preventing lynching, on getting lynching outlawed. I'm bringing attention to the huge, massive issue of lynching in the United States. They had a flag that they would unfurl outside of their headquarters in New York. Whenever a lynching was reported, it just said, a man was lynched yesterday. Yeah, I read it and I was like, wow, that must have been something that I saw a picture of it. And it's one of those ones where a picture is worth 1000 words when you see it, it really drives home what they were doing and really kind of makes you really like the NAACP, like, yeah, go get them. Let's get lynching outlawed. Yeah, I mean, you talked about the numbers over that time period. The 4000 plus comes out to more than one lynching a week in the United States over that period. That was verified, known, and reported. So clearly, probably more than that. So, yeah, this is happening literally on a weekly basis in the United States. Someone is going out on their own vigilante style and hanging, not always hanging a black man. Sometimes worse. Yeah. Sometimes they would just burn the whole black section of town down. Like in 1917, St. Louis saw a race massacre just like there had been in Springfield not too long before. Yeah, it wasn't just lynching. It was just mob violence and enforcement of segregation. I think the thing that set off the St. Louis riot was a black family moved into a white neighborhood. If I'm not mistaken, that was the instance that set it off. So that was a real problem. Racial violence was an even bigger problem than it is today. Back before the civil rights era. Right. So during the civil rights era, obviously the NAACP is going to be very active, saw some really great successes there, sort of leading the way, lobbying in the capital, trying just scores and scores of cases in the courts, helping people register to vote, taking part in Mississippi's Freedom Summer in 1964. If you don't know if you know the name Rosa Parks and know what she did, you may not know that she was the Montgomery NAACP secretary, so she actually worked for the organization. Yeah, I don't remember. Do we do a whole episode on Rosa Parks and the bus boycott? Or was it part of another episode we did? I can't remember all of our videos and everything is just a big stew in my head at this point. Well, we did the one on the Freedom schools for sure, and I don't remember what we did, but we talked a lot about Rosa Parks and I don't know if it was her own episode or not. If not, she deserves her own episode. But yeah, she was a secretary for the NAACP in Birmingham or Montgomery. I'm sorry. And if you start to look at some of the big events of the civil rights era, you start to realize that, oh, wait a minute, that was an NAACP field officer, or those people were members of the local NAACP branch. There were a lot of legal strategies and cases that were launched by the NAACP that appeared to just be direct action like Rosa Parks that had enough and wasn't going to get up that day. When you peel back the layer a little bit, this is part of a larger strategy of trying to force lawsuits in court cases so that they can go all the way up to the supreme court. And sometimes they were very effective. Yeah. I mean, notably in the mid 1915s, they set their sights on the school system and separate but equal. They wanted to take that down. And brown versus board of education, one of the landmark cases in the history of this country. Thurgood marshall and NAACP lawyer, who was actually later on in the late 60s, became the first black supreme court justice. He argued that segregation in public schools, it is flat out, very clearly unconstitutional. And this is one of those times where every justice on the court agreed and said, yeah, that is not constitutional in any way. Right. So I think they said that we need to desegregate with all haste. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was vague enough that it was lickety split. Yeah, they're like, what exactly constitutes lickety split? Sure, it's faster than a turtle's crawl, but is it as fast as a hair running? And the supreme court went, but there was a huge backlash to that. It wasn't just like especially the southern states were like, all right, we had a pretty good run at a segregated school system. It's run its course, and now it's time to desegregate. That's not at all how it went. At the very least, local municipalities and even states tried to come up with new laws that provided loopholes to segregation. Some states said, well, fine, maybe we'll just abolish public schools altogether, and then we don't have to follow this federal law any longer. There was physical violence. There was just a tremendous amount of pushback to the idea of desegregating schools. And the whole thing. Like. Really kind of found its fruition at central high school in little rock. Arkansas. Which was I don't know if it was the first high school to be desegregated or if it was just the one that was the most nuts or the first one that was the most nuts. But the governor of arkansas said. Not on my watch. And he called out something like 10,000 national guard troops to be there on the first day of school. I think september 4. 57. To block the entry of the kids who are known as the little rock nine. Nine african american high school students whose bravery is just breathtaking when you stop and think about it, who were trying to go into this newly desegregated high school to go to class. And they were blocked for something like, I think 20 days before they could finally make their way in. Yeah. This was after the little rock school board unanimously voted to integrate their schools. They were going to start with high school that year and then follow the following year with junior high and elementary school. And like you said, those nine. And not only brave kids, but families of those kids, because they all had to endure what was coming. Obviously, they tried, and this is the part that's really confusing because governor falbus went to Newport, Rhode Island, to meet with president Eisenhower about this. It's described as a brief meeting, and Eisenhower supposedly thought that Faubus had agreed to enroll these students and said that to go ahead and keep those troops there to keep everything safe. And I don't know if that was a genuine misunderstanding. I read lots of accounts of this, and it seems to have been a misunderstanding. He got back to little rock, though, and there was a court order on September 20 from a federal judge that said, you got to get those troops out of there, right, and let these kids go to school. And they literally slipped them in the side door, and a full scale riot erupted. And he allowed this violence to happen, couldn't stop it. And they called up for federal help at that time, and that's when Eisenhower had to step in and issue executive order 107 30, which called in the 101st airborne, the white troops of the 101st airborne. They withdrew the black troops, and they didn't stay there all year, but there were army units there for the remainder of the academic year. Yeah. And one of the little rock nine was a senior, and he graduated. He became one of the first African American students to graduate from public high school in the US. Or from an integrated high school. I think four of the nine, four of the eight who didn't graduate were willing to go back the next year. The others are like, forget that, man. This is crazy. We literally need the army to enforce it. Yeah. I mean, one girl was pushed down the stairs. One girl had acid thrown on her face. They were berated and harangued on a daily basis, not just by students, but by parents and stuff. It was just one of the ugliest chapters of American history was desegregation of schools and desegregation in general, but schools in particular, because we're talking about kids here, you know what I'm saying? Kids who are being subjected to that is bad enough for adults, too, but for even teenagers on down, it's just disgusting. Should we take another break? Yes. All right, we are going to take a break, and we're going to come back and wrap it up with the post civil rights areas and where we stand today with the NAACP right after this. So, Chuck, the NAACP definitely had a huge hand, along with a bunch of other groups, including the southern Christian leadership conference and the student nonviolent coordinating committee, just a lot of different groups to help get some massive legislation passed. Remember, we said from the outset the NAACP had always been focused on social justice and change and improvement in the lives of African Americans through legislation, through basically federal government intervention saying, okay, everybody is equal now. We're going to enforce that. And they did it. They got it passed with the civil rights. Act, the Voting Rights Act, fair Housing Act, the sweeping reforms that were passed in the 60s, they basically achieved their goal. And what's ironic is from almost that point forward, they were like, okay, well, how do we proceed from here? And there's been a lot of opportunity for people to take potshots at the NAACP and question the relevancy in the post civil rights era, which I think when you really kind of dig into it is generally unfair, but in some cases, it's been warranted too. And you can make a case that the NAACP is still to the state trying to figure out their bearings again in a post civil rights era. Yeah, this kind of started in the 70s when there was a bit of an ideological shift in protest and how that looks. And instead of in the courtroom, we did great episode on the black Power. No, we did Black Panther, but it was part of the black power movement, and that was a little more in fashion at the time, a little more in your face kind of activism. The NAACP, I think, was sort of looked at a little bit as like, that's your grandfather's organization, I got the impression, too. Yeah. And we want to get up in your face and really make some news and make some change that way. I think revenues stayed pretty high in the mid 70s until they started getting hit with a lot of lawsuits. They were always in court defending things as well as trying to get legislation passed and prosecuting things, but that left them on the verge of bankruptcy. At one point, there were a couple of high profile presidents that were fired. There were allegations of financial mismanagement. They had to lay off a lot of its workforce in 2007. And so it's been a little bit tougher road to ho since the civil rights era. In 2004, the IRS got involved because they are a nonprofit, and they said, you're supposed to be a nonpartisan group here, and you're saying things in particular this speech in 2004, which is pretty much very anti Bush, and you can't do that as a nonprofit. So it's been sort of a more irregular path that they've been on, and they've been trying to find their way, I think. Yeah, the NAACP has kind of been stuck in this between a rock and a hard place thing where they're accused on one side of being way too moderate and not nearly active enough. Then on the other side, they're accused of being anti Republican, and they actually came out against that IRS threat and investigation. It was a two year investigation into whether or not they should hold their 501 C three status. And they came back, they blasted back rather than just kind of taking it. They said, well, wait a minute, this is the Bush administration's IRS saying we shouldn't be talking smack about President Bush or criticizing President Bush. That seems fairly politically motivated, and the IRS ended up dropping that investigation and they kept their 501 status, so good for them on that tip. But one of the other big problems I read you kind of said like, there was this especially during the Black Power movement of the 70s, they were criticized as not being in your face enough, of being just too bureaucratic and slow moving. The same exact accusations are being leveled against them still today. Sure, very much in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement. And one of the big problems that the NAACP has is it's a really centralized organization. There's, like, I think, 2200 branches across the United States. There's a lot of different branches to keep up with. There's a 64 member board. It's amazing that they get anything done, but that large board has a lot of control over the individual branches. Like, apparently if you're a branch, if you want to go out and join like a march against the death of George Floyd or against police brutality or something like that, you want to get into the streets, you have to get permission from the NAACP board first. And that board is aging as well. And there's a lot of criticism about it being slow moving, about being out of touch, and about it being way too bloated a bureaucracy to have a big impact like it needs to have on the immediate lives of black people and people of color in general today. So there's a huge transition that the NAACP is undergoing right now. And I don't know that they have found their way, but they seem to be rather aware that they do need to find their way again, because it's an organization that depends largely on membership dues. And if people think you're irrelevant or don't even realize you're still around, they're not going to join and give you membership dues and it's going to make it harder to actually get anything done. Do I need to say it? Please do. Josh Clark streamline. Get rid of that red tape. Josh Clark 2022. Instead of like that Nixon like, peace sign for victory thing, I'm going to somehow replace my fingers with all thumbs. It's going to be like rule of thumbs every which way. I love it. In 2011, NACP really kind of formalized their march into the 21st century, I guess about eleven years too late. Not too late, but calendar wise. And they said that their focus were what they called the six game changers, which right now are economics, sustainability, education, health, public safety and criminal justice, voting rights and political representation, and youth and young adult engagement. And they're still at it these days. You can see them protesting, litigating, lobbying. It might be over Confederate statues in public squares. It might be in the form of doing a sit in in the office of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It might be reaching out to Black Lives matter and people who are part of that organization to see how they can work together, they're trying and they're doing their best. I think now it's about a half a million members, about $29 million as an organization. And what did you say? It's more than 2000 branches. Yeah. Which is a big lumbering organization. It is. One of the other problems I saw that they were running into is that like I said, they were kind of victims of their own success. When you're agitating for legislation, when the legislation gets passed, what do you do next? And one of the things that NAACP is credited for is paving the way for African American office holders. And I was reading something from Wan Williams. Who I guess is conservative now. He defected from NPR over to Fox years and years ago. But he was saying that the irony of the election of Obama and other black office holders is that it makes the NAACP seem less relevant because then people say. Okay. The NAACP got these guys into power and now we can rely on them to make the changes that the NAACP has been trying to make. And so it's kind of like, yes, they've achieved the changes that they've wanted to, but now they have to figure out, OK, what's left, what else needs to be focused on, and how do we change that following the course that we've plotted in the organization that we've structured for ourselves. So it's going to be really interesting to see what the NAACP does over the next ten or 20 years. I think the six game changers is pretty good foundation. I agree. So hazard is the NAACP. We're glad that we live in a world that they're around, although we're sad that we live in a world where they're needed oh, boy. Do I need to say it? I just grew an extra thumb. Okay, well, since Chuck just laughed like that, I think everybody's, time for listener mail. This is from a six year old and if you want to get on listener mail, just be six. That's my advice. Yeah. Hi, Joshua, Chuck. My name is Christopher. I'm six years old and from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My mommy introduced me to your show recently because I'm very interested in learning about everything and I love your podcast. Cool. This kid is like, basically my daughter's age, by the way, who could not care less about what I do. Well, that's actually not true, but she certainly doesn't listen. Okay. I had a movie crashing on the car the other day. She said. Is that Josh? No, she didn't. That's awesome. I can't remember who I was interviewing. Did she say that every time? No, she wondered if it was you. Was it Mark Ruffalo? Because people say I sound like Mark Ruffalo. No, but he tweeted about us once, didn't he? Trail of Sears? No. Navajo Code Talkers. Okay. To get him on the show. Yeah. You do. I really like the episode on Origami. It's one of my favorites. I also really like the one on Monopoly and also the one about peanut butter. I think the more I listen, the more favorites I'll have. Have you done an episode on Harry Potter? If you haven't, maybe you should. I'm reading through the books now with my mommy. Adorable. I'm hoping that you might read my letter on listener mail and I'll get to hear it. If you do, can you tell me which episode? But if not, that's okay. I just wanted to let you know that I think you guys are really interesting and smart. Love, Christopher McElroy. And then get this. My mom had to type this for me, but I told her what to write. Very nice. Dictated by Christopher. That's pretty great. Thanks a lot, Christopher. We appreciate you. We have not done a Harry Potter episode, but maybe we will someday. And if we do, it will be because you asked for. How about that? Great. And Chuck, we just got to introduce a six year old to the history of the NAACP. I love it. Yeah. So if you want to be like Christopher and get in touch with us and tell us that you're six, you better be six. If you say that, you can hit us up via email at 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. Your favorite shows." | |
90bf7858-3b07-11eb-ba77-b709dc31f809 | Theremins: World's First Electronic Music | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/theremins-worlds-first-electronic-music | In 1919 a brilliant Russian scientist accidentally stumbled onto the first electronic musical instrument in history – the theremin – which you play not by strings, keys, or even percussion, but by moving your hand in the air around it. Prepare to science! | In 1919 a brilliant Russian scientist accidentally stumbled onto the first electronic musical instrument in history – the theremin – which you play not by strings, keys, or even percussion, but by moving your hand in the air around it. Prepare to science! | Tue, 29 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=364, tm_isdst=0) | 48739567 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. So I was in the at and T store for an upgrade. I left with at and T's best deal on a smartphone and a choice of plan. But on my way out, here comes this new guy, a non carrier phone and a plan that raised eyebrows. I felt for him when I tell you we left the store grinning from ear to ear with the same deal. I love watching people prosper. You feel me? That's when I learned that whether you joined today or have been with at and T for years, they'll have the same best deals for everyone on every smartphone. Eligible plan required. Offers vary by device. Restrictions may apply. See att. Comdealsfordtails. 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 out there. And this is stuff you should know. That's a pretty good thermometer impression, don't you think? Hey, not bad. I am a little bit proud of myself because the thermomen, it turns out, is very, very tough to play and it's even tougher to imitate. So that was something of an accomplishment for me. Have you ever tried to play one? No, I haven't. I have not, no. It's weird that you had to think about that. I was just trying to think, like, I think there's one in the house stuff Works office somewhere. Oh, really? Stuff Podcast office. I want to say that there is. Well, I'm there, man. Let's go get it. Okay. So look around. We'll wait. We won't edit out you going and wandering around and looking for I'll just talk to the people and keep them busy. That's weird. I'm obviously not going to go look for it, but I had no idea that was one here, I think. So I could be making that up. It doesn't it seem like the kind of thing that would be there? Totally. So for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about therapy's. And if you still don't know what we're talking about, let us describe this. We should play a clip, too. We'll be able to do that, right? Yeah, sure. Well, here you go. We'll play a clip of something that will figure out what it is later. Ready? Yeah. So there's whatever we selected post production to put in to demonstrate thermons but that eerie, high pitched kind of wailing sound. That's a thermometer. And the thermomen was the world's first electronic musical instrument. And it was created by accident, as we'll see. But it uses electromagnetism, actually, electromagnetic interference to produce a pitched sound, changing in pitch and changing in volume. And you can create this sound, this music, I guess you would call it, without any kind of mechanical energy whatsoever. You're just moving your body or your hands in and out of the electromagnetic field around the thermal. And that's what produces the sound. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And as we'll also see, it's key that you use a hand because your body, it has to be something that conducts electricity. Like you could technically could use metal or something like that, but you wouldn't have the nuance that you're able to achieve by very sort of micro movements in your hand and your fingers. Right. And when you're playing it, it sort of looks like almost like you're conducting an orchestra the way you hold your hand. It's very evocative of conducting, I think. Yeah. And it's funny to say that because Thermon Who is actually named Termin, he said that it was like creating music out of thin air, just like a conductor does. So that was very astute of you, Charles. Thank you. So, yeah, you mentioned termin. This guy. His Russian name, I guess, was Lev Sergey Yavik termin. T-E-R-M-E-N-I guess Leon Thermon found a little more western. Did he change it? I don't know. Here in America we just change it for you. Right. You come through Ellis Island, you get basically a whole new name that Americans can pronounce more easily. I'm pretty sure that's what happened. That's a good point. So when Lev was in his early 20s, in the sort of early nineteen hundred s and nineteen nineteen ish, he was working at the Physical Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. And he was working and as you'll see, for majority of his career worked for the Russian state. But he was working on an invention that was supposed to measure the density of gas in a chamber. And essentially he was trying to develop like a land based sonar device that used electromagnetism to detect objects that came within a certain area. And he was like, hey, I'm a pretty young, hip, creative guy. I wonder if I add sound to this thing. And not intending to create anything musical, but just let me add sound to it to indicate that this thing is even on. And he did it. And Bon Jovi, he was like, that sounds pretty cool. Yeah, because it would make sense that you want to add sound to it because if you're detecting something coming within proximity, it's kind of like a metal detector. As you get closer and closer to the metal, that sound that it makes increases. It's basically the exact same thing, except you're not detecting metal you're detecting electromagnetic interference, basically, with the thermomen. But because he was a young hip guy, like you said, and also a classically trained cellist, he said, I think that I could turn this into a musical instrument. And he did pretty quickly. He fiddled with it a little bit, maybe did a little put another doohickey or two on there, and all of a sudden he had, like I said at the beginning, the world's first electronic musical instrument. Like, if you're into dance music or electronica or anything like that, you owe a great debt of gratitude to Levt Herman. Sure. Should we use some of these things that you found, some of these descriptors? Yeah. So this initially had like two or three, and I just started adding to them. One of my favorite things to do is to go around collecting people's hapless descriptions of what a therapy sounds like because nobody nails it. But all of them come close and they're hilarious in their attempts. Yeah. So here's one across between a violin and a soprano voice. That's not bad. I think that was the original one. Yeah. Especially when you get some vibrato going, you can see how one might liken it to a voice. Yeah, it doesn't sound like a voice to me, but I get the comp. OK. How about this one? A purified and magnified saxophone. I think if there was ever a complete failure in describing a thermon sounds, it's that one. Yeah, it sounds like a saxophone. Like a cheap keyboard. The saxophone button on a cheap keyboard sounds like a saxophone. Yeah, maybe that's what they meant. Totally missing their point. Let me see. The howling of a haunted wind. That's pretty good. I love that one. This one, I think, comes from Thurman himself, Acello, lost in a dense fog and crying because it does not know how to get home for cello. Just walking around in the dark by himself. How do I get home? Let me see here a cross between an amplified child slide whistle, so it doesn't say and what that was a mistake. I put or instead of and that's all one. Okay. And the human voice and the squawks that emanated from early radio speakers. That one's pretty good because one of the key components of a theorem in is that slide. Because as you will see, and if you listen to therapy and music, it's all about that slide. They're not punctuated with Staccato notes. No. And as a matter of fact, I was watching a tutorial by currently the world's foremost therapist. I believe her name is Carolina Eck. E-Y-C-K. She's German. So however you pronounce it in the German. And she makes finger motions to cut off the last motion to create a space in between notes. To separate notes. Rather than she uses the technical jargon for what she's talking about. And I'm not quite familiar with it. But another way to put it she's cutting spaces into the notes so she's not sliding it around like a trombone. No. Or a slide whistle that's lost in the dark. You do a pretty good slide whistle. Do your slide whistle. I had one of those when I was a kid. It was the best thing ever. I never even did. I'm self taught. Oh, boy. I know what you're getting for Christmas. Oh, nice. Remember that time you got me an empty can of Billy Beer? Oh, yeah, that's right. And that was 100 years ago. No, it wasn't Billy beer. I'm sorry. It was just plain, generic beer. The white can with just the black, like Helvetica font that just says beer. Yeah. My friend Eddie's favorite beer of all time. Has he actually drank it? Yeah. When we went to there was, like, four of us that went to La for spring break in college and stayed with my brother, and we went to the store, and they had the generic beer. And Petty is a beer guy, and he just flipped. He bought, like, three cases of it. Wow. For exactly. So Thermon has got this instrument going. He's pretty proud of it. Word gets around Mother Russia, and word gets to Lennon, who at the time was chairman of Russia's, sort of newly, I guess. Installed is one word for it. The Bolshevik government. And he flipped over it. Lennon was a thermometer nut, and he was like, you know what? I'm going to send you on tour, comrade. And this thing is going to want people to champion electricity as a whole just by these demonstrations. Right. Just so that they can possibly get a therapy themselves. They're going to install electricity in their house. That's my plan. I'm learning to forget reading lights or warmth. Right. It's the Thermometer that they'll want. So he tours Russia for a while, basically promoting electricity, electronic music, soviet know how, that kind of stuff. And his tour is so successful that they send them on to Western Europe. And he toured Western Europe with what we're known as his Ether concerts. Ether Wave concerts. Not Ether concerts. Those are totally different. Yeah. And one of the best known things about Lev Terryman, is that while he was touring Europe, just wowing crowds, he was also spying for the Soviet state, which he did for a while, actually. Yeah. I know I say this a lot, but this has got the makings of a pretty good movie, too, don't you think? Sure. Yeah, I think so. I'm not quite sure. You'd have to really be a master to pull out the humanity and the compassion and the viewer for this guy, because he's morally ambiguous in a lot of places, I think. But in the end, just the kind of treatment he got, I think, kind of makes him a sad sack case. Gulag treatment. Feel bad for. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll get to that. But so he's touring around. He like you said, is a spy for the Soviet regime. And because of this tour, he's being allowed he's getting all this access to places where he can be a pretty good spy, actually, patent offices and industrial complexes and stuff like that. So he's getting access and doing a pretty good job spying for the Soviet regime. And he ended up taking up residence in the United States. I didn't see whether that was part of the Soviet plan or his own plan, I'm not sure. But he found himself quite at home in New York when he showed up in the US. And started becoming kind of the toast of the town. I read that Albert Einstein kept a lab at Termin's apartment in New York on 54th street. When he visited him, he would just do some work while he was there. He became pretty well known, especially among avantgarde musicians and composers. He's just kind of known as, like, a cool guy. He had a very scandalous marriage in that he married an African American prima ballerina whose name is Lavinia Williams, and I think he lived in the United States for a good decade. He showed up in 1928, and he lived there until 1938, I believe. And along the way, because he became such a toast of the town, and his therapy, which had been known for a while, is thermon Vox, which is Thermon's voice, finally got shortened to therapy, and RCA said, you know what? I think these things are going to be a hit. We're going to buy the rights from you, or at least lease the rights from you and start producing our own. Yeah, because he obviously was wise enough to get a patent in the US. In 1928. That was his second wife, by the way. I couldn't get a whole lot about his first wife other than it was clearly in Russia because her name was Ekaterina Pavlovna. Okay. It's a pretty Russian name. And he was married three times. He had a couple of daughters, I think, with his third wife. And I'll talk a little bit more about his kids later. But he gets his patent. RCA, like he said, jumps on board the thermon bandwagon and manufactures a version of the Thermal, like an at home therapy for $175, which is a really expensive musical instrument. That's $2,700 today. Especially during the Depression. Yeah. I don't know who they thought they were going to sell them to. RCA. They were going to sell them to everybody. Yeah. RCA made it sound like they were onto something really big, but it was such an expensive price point. It was such a niche product. They sold the first run that they built, but only to rich people who wanted to throw parties. And while people with their thermomen, basically, I guess one of the other big problems with it is that they marketed it like there's no strings, there's no frets, there's nothing. That was slogan no strings attached. Yeah. Basically they said that anybody can learn to play this, make music with the wave of a hand. And the problem is, the Thurman is really hard to learn because it doesn't have things like frets or strings or chord progressions or anything like that, and there's no other instrument like it on the planet, so it's very difficult to learn. And I think RCA made a first production run of like 400 units, and they managed to sell 380 of them, some of which are still in existence today. And I was looking him up. Apparently, if you can find one that's just in terrible shape, you could still probably get $3,500 for it. And one that's in really good condition, mint condition, would be about 13 grand because there's such collector's items, but also because of the original electronics inside the circuitry. Yeah, it makes a sound that's really difficult to replicate because we have such an embarrassment of riches with advancements in electronics today that it's hard to make something sound old timey and original. You know what I mean? Everything sounds so rich and advanced. So I think that's one of the reasons why people will pay 13 grand for an original RCA therapy. I bet Jack White has one. Yeah, I'll bet he does too. So when he was in the United States, living there, doing some spying and doing some thermomen playing, like he would put on big, big concerts. He put on a full thermomen orchestra, which is to say, I think they were like six of them at Carnegie Hall. So these were big events. And like you said, he got married to a second wife there and was leading this double life, really. Like no one knew what was going on, obviously, as a spy. And he got a little more and more nervous his World War II approaches that he might get ratted out. He's really enjoying his life in America, and he's like, I don't want to do this. The FBI has got a file on me. He didn't say that because he didn't know that, but the ghost of Leon Thermon said that later on, and he was getting pretty deep into debt. And so in 1938, he left the US after ten years there. Didn't even tell his wife he was leaving his second wife and stayed gone until the early ninety s. Yeah. And part of that was not by his own decision. He stayed going. In part because as Stalin came into power, he didn't fancy the old regime. And Thermon was definitely associated with that old regime. He was a favorite of Lenins. So he was thrown into the gulag as the USSR really started to gain strength and power. And apparently as World War II started to approach, the Soviets realized that they'd actually thrown a lot of valuable scientists in their minds into gulag. So they went and got them out, including Lev Tearman, and put them in a different kind of gulag called sharashka. Yeah, I got it. Sharushka, which is basically like a prison for scientists, like Science Camp that you can't leave. Exactly. And you can't see your family or friends or connect with the outside world, but you can spend all of your time thinking about ways to come up with new devices that the Soviet state can use. And that is actually where Lev Tyman came up with his other great invention that he's known for, which is called The Thing or the Great Seal Bug. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good time to take a break. Okay. And we'll come back right after this. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. 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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. Comfyk. Okay, Chuck, so frankly, you really left everybody hanging with that last thing, so let's talk about the Thing or the Great Seal bug. OK. Yeah. Boy, all these years in, I got to teach you about a cliffhanger. Yeah. I to, like, plot along at the most boring pace and stop at the most boring, predictable times. So before the Thing, he invented something called a Burun buran. And that was another listening device that sort of functioned as a laser microphone that you would use today, where you would point it at a piece of glass, like someone's behind that glass stalking, and it would sense the vibrations in the glass. Wow. He invented that? Yeah. He invented the buran. I've heard about that thing, but that was nothing. Sort of as far as impact goes, compared to the Great Seal bug or the thing like you mentioned. And this was really pretty extraordinary that this actually worked. Not that his invention worked, but that the Scam worked. So what he did was he put a passive bug inside a wood carving of the Great Seal of the United States. They presented it to Admiral Herriman, who was the American ambassador to Moscow, and he hung it on his wall and allowed himself to get spied on for years. In Herriman's defense, he was a very trusting sort, which made him a terrible choice for the American ambassador to Moscow. But it was a passive bug. It didn't use electricity, so there was no possible way for anybody to sweep for it, right? So I'm sure they swept this Great Seal eight waves from Sunday, and turn nothing up. And they're like, all right, put it up. And the reason it was passed is because it didn't use electricity, and it was activated by microwaves. The microwaves would turn an antenna on, and you could be a few doors down and just beam, like a microwave beam toward this thing, and it would activate the antenna. And then the place that it was put in, the eagle's beak created kind of like an ear, a wooden ear that amplified the sound in the room, and the antenna would pick it up and transmit it automatically. Seven years they were able to spy on these conversations, and it could have gone on forever, but it was discovered by accident. There was a British radio operator who picked up the signal. It's like, hey, something's going on here. And I guess they eventually probably just tore that room inside out until they found it, would be my guess. Right. That radio operators like, Is that average Harrison talking? I know that voice. The best part of that story is that they got the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts, the Young Pioneers, to present the plaque. And I was raised as a child of the Cold War, so I strongly suspect the Young Pioneers were in on it. They knew full well what they were doing, of course. Communists. Yeah, they were in on it. It was a young Vladimir Putin. Probably Chuck. You never know. He kind of disappeared from public view because of the Gulag experience and being in science prison camp. And then a New York Times critic named Harold Schoenberg found him quite by accident at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was working at the time. He was writing a story. I wrote a story that basically kind of outed him and said, hey, here's Leon thereman. He's right here in the Soviet Union. Yeah. And he was probably like, finally. I've been waiting for you guys to dig me up. But the Soviet state said, you know what? This is not a good thing. We can't have this guy talking to the press and becoming a cause celeb again. He's just done too much dirt. He's been in a gulag before. He bugged the ambassador like he just knows too much. We don't want people paying attention to him. So they ruined him. They ruined his career. They had him fired from the conservatory. They trashed all of the inventions he was working on. And he ended up spending the next couple of decades living in poverty in a group home. In a room in a group home. Basically because of that New York Times critic finding him and writing that article again. Which is sad on the one hand. But on the other hand. It brought him back from any sort of obscurity he kind of been pounded into. Yeah. So this lasts until about the 80s, when the Soviet Union opens up just a bit, and he leaves and goes to Europe. He goes to the US. As we said at the beginning in 1991, and then was able to sort of reap a little bit of his reward as a pioneer in electronic music or music period. There's a documentary called Thermon Colon an Electronic Odyssey from the Early Ninety S that is not great, but it does feature him in the end, which is pretty cool. Like, the last third of it has actual interviews with Leon Thermon and him playing it and stuff like that. Sure. I mean, he must have known that he needed to show up his legacy while he could because he visited the US in 1091, and he was dead two years later back in Russia, and he was still working on stuff to the end. He was working on a dance floor that was made up of his turpestone, which was another invention of his, which was like a therapy, but rather than using your hands, he used your whole body, and you danced. Well, he was making an entire dance floor out of this. You could have a bunch of people dancing, making the worst possible sounds you can imagine all at the same time. And he was in his ninety s. Yeah, he was like 97 when he died. So, yeah, he was working on this in his 90s. So he was a hip cat until the end. So while he was gone, something happened in the US. In the thermon kind of blew up and blew up. As far as the Thermon go, it wasn't like it became a staple in music or a staple in pop music, but it was used largely at first in movies, science fiction, the Alfred Hitchcock spellbound, most notably, maybe The Last Weekend. And unless it was science fiction, it sort of came to be a signal for psychological distress. Like, if somebody was under the influence of drugs, or if there was somebody locked away in what they would have called an insane asylum back then, you might hear a therm and kind of say, by the way, this character is off their rocker. If your drug trip feels to you like a thermometer sounds. You're on a bad trip, buddy. You think? Sure. All right. But you could trace the kind of the breakout popularity or at least the introduction to the general public of the thermometer to basically two people back in the rosha who was the guy who scored the last weekend in Spellbound. And Samuel Hoffman. Who was a therapist as a composer who worked with some other kind of more popular composers. Les Baxter and Harry Revel to make some really great music and a couple of new types of music lounge and exotica. It's right up to your alley. I listened to Music Out of the Moon today, like, eight times. I listened to perfume set to music. How is it? It's okay. Not as much thermal as I wanted. I wanted more thermon. Well, a little therapy goes a long way, for sure. Well, that's true. But there were parts of Music Out of the Moon where you have to really listen because it merges so well. It harmonizes so well with the other stuff. Like maybe vocalists harmonizing the thermon or harmonize with it, which is now that I know about thermons, that is incredibly masterful to be able to harmonize with the human voice using a thermon. Yeah, totally. But those two guys definitely kind of introduced that to the public. And one member of the public that got introduced to the thurman who is really responsible for breaking it out was a guy named Robert Mug. Might recognize whatever you might recognize from his synthesizer that he was the guy who invented the synthesizer. Apparently, Robert Mog, his first and last love, I saw someone say, was the thermon. Yeah, he got together with his dad and he built thermon kits to sell to people. It's kind of one of the cool things about thermon. You can buy one ready to go, but all along, since the beginning and up to this very day, you can buy a kit to kind of build it yourself because they very much cater to circuitry and electronic wonks who love to get in there with their soldering iron and mess around. So kits were very popular from the beginning and that's kind of how Mo got it started. As a company? Yes. By selling these thermal kits. And I think it was 1954 when he started selling them. And by the 60s, they were, like, really ready to be used. There's a lot of room in psychedelic music for the thermometer. And so it pops up on some Rolling Stones albums, apparently. Brian Jones, right? Yeah, brian Jones played the Thermal for a couple of albums. It's a whole lot of love. Sure. Robert Plant has his climax and then don't tell me that's meant to represent anything else but that. Everybody knows that. I've known his fourth grade. Could you imagine if you were having sex with Robert Plant in the 19 seven s? And that's literally what he started doing. Jimmy. Page just comes out of the closet playing with Fairman along the company. Oh, my Lord. That'd be great. There's a couple of places where you'd think it pops up, but you would be wrong, Chuck. Yeah, well, it's not controversial. The Beach Boys song Good Vibrations is probably the most popular song ever to really heavily feature very distinctly what you think is a thermomen. It's actually something called an electrotherapy. Brian Wilson calls it a thermo. Everyone sort of calls it a thermon, but it's a trumbonan Paul Tanner invented. It basically a very simplified therapy that you could play with knobs to make it easier to hit the right tones. That, to me, makes it not a thermomen. Yeah, it's an electrotherapy. So there's not a thermomen on Good Vibrations, as a lot of people think. It's also not a theorem. And you're hearing in the Star Trek theme, a lot of people apparently think that it shows up in the Star Trek theme and it turns out is Soprano Louie Jean Norman hitting all those incredible notes. I don't think I've ever heard that theme. Okay. That was Baker. Apparently. We just made a cameo in that version. Yeah. So those are two places the thermal doesn't show up. It does show up elsewhere in movies like Ed Wood and Mars Attacks. Both, I think. Tim Burton movies, right? Yeah. I bet he's all over the thermon hellboy. It was also in First Man, which I have still not seen, but I guess where Neil Armstrong throws his young dead daughters bracelet into a crater in the moon and they use thermal, which seems like a very bold choice for a recent movie to me. I'm surprised you haven't seen that. I'm a little surprised, too, as well. I'm surprised I haven't seen it because I have a crush on Gosling. Who doesn't? Man? Lars and the Real Girl is just one of the best movies ever made. Yes. Also starring a friend of us that you should know, Paul Schneider. Oh, yeah. That's great. So a bunch of pop music really latched onto it in the group called The Silver Apples used one of my favorite records from the band called Mercury Rev. And their album, Deserter Songs, heavily features the thermomen. In a couple of their songs. There's a separateira song that has a therapy, and it's played by Jason Neustat, who is the basis of Metallic at the time. There's a trivia answer for you. Seriously, he's like, stand back. You can't crowd the thermomen. It changes the pitch. That was your Jason Newsted impression. Sure, I guess he just looks angry, doesn't he? That's hetfield you're thinking of. Newstad always had that frown. Well, all of them did, really. They were metal, don't you know? And then there was a band called Lothar and the Hand People, and Lothar was the name of the thermon who the band considered the lead singer. And the Hand people were the people playing Lothar, the thermon yeah, that annoyed me so much I didn't even look it up to listen. Oh, really? I think it's awesome, man. That's just so sixty s to me. I love it. I think it's 2000s trying to be 60s. No, but they're from the they are? Yeah. Okay. They're legit. I'll look into it then. Have you seen what was the name of that band that they just beat up like appliances? I think they're Swedish. And they made the rounds. They were like kind of viral several years back. I have no idea. They did like a total Eclipse of the Heart cover, but beating up an oven and a dishwasher. Oh my God. You'd actually like them. That's really pretty great. And one guy, he's like so scrawny that he can't keep his pants up. So his pants keep falling down every time he hits the stove with the sledgehammer. Like he hits the stove with his belt? Yeah. Basically put the belt on. The guy needs a belt more. I don't even think a belt could service him any longer. I think he needs like an extension cord length. He's got as tight as tight as he possibly can. He's thin. You just unknowingly made another music reference. What the great, great band, silver Jews from the late, great Dave Berman. He has a line in one of their great songs. He has a great holding up your trousers with extension cords. Well, that's funny. When are they from the also featuring friends of the show, Bob Nastanovich. Yeah. No, I knew that. It's basically pavement, isn't it? No, it was Dave Berman, but Malkmus was on the one. Great, great. I mean, they're all good albums, but so great. American Water is one of the best albums of that decade. I wonder if he was making a surface reference because that's what I was making a reference to. I think Nelson Muntz, he uses an extension cord for about oh, really? Pretty. Yeah, he's neglected. I knew this was going to take us down some musical side roads. Sure. And I knew you were going to mention Robert Plant Climax because you say that like every other week. I can't stop talking about it. Should we take another break? I think so. And then we're going to come back and explain how a thermon work and then how to play it. Booyah. How's that for a cliffhanger? I'm hanging learning stuff with your shoe. 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. 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Okay, Chuck, so a thermon works through electronic magic, basically, I think we should just leave it at that. We could. Now we can't. I really went to a lot of trouble to try to figure out how these things worked in the most simplistic terms possible. And that's really saying something, because the people who write about how thermons work are the people who build thermons, which means they're the people who understand things like amplitude and currents and electromagnetic interference and all that stuff. Basically, you've got two different circuits. You've got a pitch circuit and a volume circuit. If you've ever seen a thermal, it's basically like a box. And if you're standing at the box getting ready to play, it on your right, the player's right is it a single antenna going up vertically that looks like one of a pair of rabbit ears that you would use on an old timey TV antenna. Look it up, kids. And then on the other side, the left, there's like a round, metal, horizontally oriented antenna that comes out the other side of the box. The one on the left, the round one, that's for adjusting volume. The one on the right, the vertical rod, is for adjusting the pitch. Yeah, it's sort of volumeattack. And attack is one of those words that unless you're sort of into playing music, you don't know what it means. But you'll see it pop up on various instruments labeled Attack, and it's called the musical envelope, the four stages of sound and it starts with attack. That's sort of the beginning of the sound, like right when you strike a piano key or right when you pluck a guitar string. And then it goes from attack to decay to sustain to release. And the volume and attack, it's not quite the same thing. But as far as what we need to know about the thermon sorry, the horizontal and controls volume and attack. Okay? And then the one on the right, the upright one, it controls pitch. And the way that it produces pitches, it's got two different oscillators in there. And oscillator is just something that produces alternating current electricity in waveform, right? It produces waves, and one of those oscillators produces one at a static frequency. It's always the same frequency no matter what the other one adjusts. And so when you get your hand we left out a really important thing. The way this whole thing works is because you live, human person are holding an electric charge right? Now we talk about, oh, we did. Okay, so that's called your capitants, and when your capitance, your electric charge, whatever that may be, and it's going to be different for each person. So I think kind of the implication, Chuck, is that every different person who walks up to a particular therapy is going to produce a different sound. Doesn't that seem right? Oh, I don't know. I never really thought about that. I would think so, because I wouldn't think we're all walking around with the same capitants, although I could be wrong. But regardless if that's wrong, totally disregard what I just said. The point is that when your electrical charge, presented in the form of your hand interferes with the oscillating current that's being created and generated and run through this antenna, it changes the oscillating frequency. And so these two things subtract or add together their frequencies to produce this sound that raises or lowers in pitch, depending on how close you are. The closer you get, the higher the pitch, the further away the lower the pitch. And that's basically how it works. Same thing, basically, with your left hand, with the volume of attack. That's it. You're just basically interfering with the electromagnetic fields produced and carried through these antennas using your own electrical charge. That's how they work. Yeah. And if you watch the documentary, there's one scientist that attaches it to a waveform visualizer who sort of explained it a little better and not better than we did, but just in more detail. I can say it. No, he just said it's remarkable that Leon thermon or Turman invented this thing without the use of one of those, like he was going completely by ear. And I think if had it not been for his training as a cellist, it may not have ever even been anything, because you have to have a really and this sort of segues into actually playing the thing right. You have to have a really good ear for pitch to play a thermon, because like you said earlier, there are no markers like frets to look at, to know where to go to hit A-G-I saw four and a half octave range and also saw five and a half. But you got to know in the air surrounding you in space where exactly to put your hand to get the tone that you want. And if it's off a little bit, it's not going to sound right. So the learning curve is long. It's a tough instrument to really get good at. Extremely so. Yeah, because if you know how to play a guitar, you can walk up to a guitar and be like, oh, here's the frets, or whatever, I can put my fingers here and I'm going to make this sound with the thermometer. It's literally different places in the air. And so, yeah, you do have to have a good year. One of the other things you have to have that's essential to playing the thermon is a steady hand. Yeah. Or I guess not necessarily, but it definitely helps because if you see somebody kind of moving around, like they're just totally whacked out or whatever, playing a thermon, what the sounds they're making is not what it's supposed to sound like. A thermon is played very delicately. There's a very famous theoremist named Clara Rockmore who said, you play a thermon with butterfly wings and she's basically saying, like, your fingers are supposed to be delicate and controlled like a butterfly wings. And so if you watch people playing pharmacy, they're standing totally straight and still. It's just their hands and their wrists, basically, that are moving and making these really delicate motions through the air that is producing all of these different sounds. Yes. And the reason you have to stand still, obviously, is because any movement of your body is going to affect the sound. That's why I made the Jason Newsstead joke in that documentary. There's an old I don't know who she was. God, it might have been Clara Rockmore, maybe. It probably was Clara Rockmore or Lucy Bigelow Rosen, maybe. But she was like, back off in her accent and she was like, I'm trying to be nice about it, but you can't come any closer. And I tell the first violinist in an orchestra the same thing. Like, you have to have space around the instrument itself or else it's going to affect the sound. Right. Hey, you know who else played the thermomen? Who's a thermon master. Who? My friend Toby. Really? Yes. Toby is a cool guy. He is very cool. He was from Dallas and the Polyphonic Spring is from Dallas, and apparently half of Dallas is members of the Polyphonic Sprees, except for poor Toby. And so he went to the dude from Tripping Daisy, I can't remember his name, but the leader of the Polyphonic Spring said, I want to join. What instrument do you need? And the guy was like, I don't want you to go learn to play thermon and come back. And so Toby went and taught himself thermon and came back and joined the Polyphonic Spree. That's right. I think it's Tim something or other. Yeah, I was into them for those first two albums quite a bit. Oh, man, they were so great. What great music. Because it was so earnest, too, you know, they weren't being ironic. Not like that Sharp guy and that band of hippies. Who's he? Edward Sharp and the magnetic zeros. It was the same kind of deal, like, hey, let's get 40 people in a band and not have 1 bar soap between us. No, never heard of them. They had one big hit that you would know. Oh, that Home. Won't you come home? Home is where I really want to be. It was no idea. I mean, I wasn't into it and it was a huge, huge hit. Was that Judy Garland doing that song? Oh, boy. So Toby is the greatest thermal player I've ever met. That's awesome. So you play, like we said, with that a lot of times. Like I said, it looks like you're holding a little whatever you call it, the conductors. I want to do a show on conducting, by the way, just to learn what that thing is, the little stick. The stick. But it looks like you're sort of holding that because a lot of theorem and players tend to touch their thumb and their forefinger together and you're sort of wiggling your fingers for vibrato and you can learn basic therapy and make the sounds that sound good. And then there's like next level thermoning where you really get involved with your fingers and very subtle movements to create different sounds. Yeah. So it is like a really difficult thing to do and to learn to play in no small part because there aren't frets or anything like that, but also because of the precision movement of your fingers and hands. And you also can't really get into the music either. You have to stay still because if you sway or swing your head left or right or anything like that, you're going to mess with that part of your body is going to come into the electromagnetic field and you're going to mess up the sound of the music. That's right. And that's why hip hop concerts, they say, throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care. Except for the therapist's. Right. Very big hip hop. Throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't play there. I think we should just edit this part out. I very well may. I'll be very surprised if that ends up in the final cut. Chuck, one thing we didn't mention that seems obvious, unless you know about musical instruments. Might seem obvious. I don't know what I'm saying. It's obvious to me, but it's going through an amplifier. Like, if you're sitting at home, like, yeah, but how does the sound come out? It's an electronic instrument. So it's plugged into an amp. It is. And actually that volume circuit that you're interfering with, you're actually changing the voltage, I believe, of the amplifier. That's how when you move your hand closer and further away, you're affecting the voltage that's released by that whatever transformer is supplying the amplifier with the electricity. Yeah. You can get a thermon for not a lot of money or a thermon kit, or I would say get one of those new ceremonies that Mog is building, because those are just super cool and they sound amazing. And they make it a little bit easier on you. Yeah, because they recognize chords. Right. So when you move your hand, like, through the air in a certain way, it goes through the chromatic scales. It's not just random stuff. It actually kind of is like a very forgiving and corrective of what you're doing. It figures out what you're trying to do and then makes it sound like you want it to. But the most amazing thing is there's a dial where you can dial back that level of forgiveness. As you get better and better at playing the therapy, you can just make it so that it's not doing that for you at all. And you have to do it yourself, which is pretty awesome. Yeah. And it also sounds Cynthia and cool. I mean, I like the sound of a regular therapy, but that therapy, I had never heard of it until today, and I was like, I might have to get one of those at some point. All right. It's pretty cool if you're like a maker kind of person and you like music there, you've probably already made thermons. But if not, check out a guy named Arthur Harrison's site, thermon US. He sells kits and has all sorts of articles and stuff like that. And then there's a guy named Ken Moore who hacked into, like, the Xbox Connect and the Nintendo Wii and figured out how to turn them into therimons. And there's one where he does, like, really admirable attempt at the Star Trek theme using his Wii thermon. Just look up, Kenmore. We thermon Star Trek theme. And thank me later. It's a cool community. I love circuitry and electronic gadgetry wonks. And those communities were like the hams. They just really get into their shutting the door to their little room and working on very small, very difficult to understand projects and hacking stuff and creating new things. It's just really in the spirit of creation and invention, I think, in which it was always intended. Nice. Yeah. I mean, the thermometer is all that and then some. Chuck it's a whole bag of chips. You got anything else? Yeah, I sort of promised earlier a little bit of talk about therimon's legacy with his kids and grandkids, and he did have a daughter. He had a couple of daughters, but he had one named Natasha Thermon from his third wife, who was a thermon master in Russia. And then 29 she's 72 now. And then 29 year old Peter Thermon. His great grandson is also a Russian composer and a theorem and master. Pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Yeah. That's neat also that they just adopted the westernized version of their grandfather's name, too, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. Now, you got anything else? Nothing else. Well, before we go, Chuck, because it's that time of year and this episode is going to come out around Yummy's birthday, I want to take a second to say happy birthday to my dear sweet wife Yumi. Happy birthday, Yummy. Thanks. Happy birthday, Yumi. And since I said happy birthday, Yummy, and Chuck did too, that means it's time for listener mail. So this is a listener mail from Richard Roberts, and this was just supremely heartwarming. Our book is out. Stuff you should know. Colon an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Huge thanks to everyone who pre bought it or bought it after its release in audiobook or hardcover form. But The Stuff You Should Know army page has just been lit up with people posting pictures of them with a book, of them reading it, of their kids reading it, of their dogs eating it already that's happened. And this comes from Richard Roberts. From the stuff you should army. Hey, guys, thanks for doing what you do. This podcast is wonderful. Just wanted to email you and let you know about a lovely gesture I just witnessed on the Stuff You Chanel Army Facebook page. One member posted to say they didn't buy the book due to their financial constraints at the time, but that they were so excited that it popped up in a search at their local library. And before you know it, in the comments, there was a mini fellow Stuff You Should Know army fan scrambling to buy a book for this complete stranger so that she could have her own copy. I think I took some screenshots or I took some screenshots, which I attached. I know you don't always do shout outs, but the philanthropic book buyers and the original poster might get a kick out of it if you did, and it's a nice story that people might enjoy. And that is Richard Roberts from Down Under and Jacko Dubois is who stepped up first and is buying this book for this person and sending a book to this person. That's all, Jacko. Send us an email and we'll send you something nice. Don't know what it is yet, but just send us an email, Jacko, and we want to pay it forward right back to you. That's a lovely idea, Chuck. Very nice. Thanks, Jacko. And thank you. That was Richard that wrote in. That was Richard. Thank you, too, Richard. If you want to call out a very nice example of paying it forward or a random act of kindness or anything like that. We'd love hearing about that stuff. You can send us an email 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, 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." | |
41a967fe-53a3-11e8-bdec-ef348e149949 | Do Dietary Supplements Work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/do-dietary-supplements-work | The world takes $40 billion of dietary supplements – from vitamin A to yohimbe bark – every year. Yet, the jury is still out on whether most of them work. In America, the FDA isn’t allowed to approve supplements, and no one can say what is in your pills. | The world takes $40 billion of dietary supplements – from vitamin A to yohimbe bark – every year. Yet, the jury is still out on whether most of them work. In America, the FDA isn’t allowed to approve supplements, and no one can say what is in your pills. | Thu, 09 May 2019 13:08:47 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=13, tm_min=8, tm_sec=47, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=129, tm_isdst=0) | 52672968 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. This is stuff you should know. The podcast. How are you? I'm good, man. Good. Let me search down on my soul. Yes, I'm doing pretty good. How about you? Well, you know, I'm tired, everyone. I'm back in my house after seven months of renovating. Yeah. And I had probably a week long move easily. And that's with hiring movers. Right. Like, they move the furniture, but movers can't move everything. No, they really can't. I mean, I guess they can, but what's weird is the smaller and easier the thing is to move, the less likely the mover is to move it. Maybe. And I found myself wondering at one point, like, how do rich people move? I was like, they don't move like this. They just go to a new house and buy new stuff and leave the old. Maybe I thought Richie's doing it because I thought when I hired a mover, I was like, the big time, because I'm not asking friends to help me move. Right. But then I was like, rich people still don't move like this. They're not packing things and moving things in a pickup truck 30 times. No, they're not. They probably haven't ever even seen a pickup truck in their life. Someone probably handles all of that, and it's probably really expensive. I think it's less expensive than you think. You may not have just been shown the correct pamphlet where you seem like the next echelon up was where they pack your stuff. I think it is definitely. I'm sure more expensive than what you paid to not have them do that. Yeah, but I don't think it's, like, prohibitively expensive if you're already shelling out that much money for movers. You know what I mean? Yeah. So the two things, the two stereotypical moving things have happened to me, which is toward the end of the boxing up, when you're first all careful about labeling and everything, and then at the end when you're just shoving things into boxes into, like, a garbage bag. Pretty much. And then on the flip side, now that we're in our house, it's that thing where I have the worst bo right now because I can't find my deodorant. Jerry and I can attest to that. I'm too tired to go to five minutes away to buy deodorant, so I'm just like, choosing to stink. Yeah. Thank you for making that choice. Not just for yourself, but for me and Jerry, too. Oh, yeah. I'm too old to be moving, man. No more. Okay. So this is the last time, huh? I told Emily I'm going to die in this house. This is the vow. Just hopefully not soon. Or you could shell out for the one where they actually pack your stuff up. The rich guy. They just pack me up, send me out the sea there you go. Viking funeral. Okay. That'd be pretty cool. Yes. So obviously what we're talking about today is dietary supplements. Yeah. Might as well. Which I can't believe we've never done this one. We have done one called does the FDA protect Americans? Right. Which after researching this, I'm guessing we concluded no, maybe. I do remember talking about thalidomide in there. So I think we were like yes, in some instances, they have protected people. They don't so much anymore. But I'm surprised we haven't done it, especially with my dad having been the herbal Elvis that's right. For so many years. Emily is all on that now. She's the herbal queen. What is she on? Well, she's not on anything, but she's not buying supplements. She's growing plants and distilling her own plants. That's really cool. Yeah. Like, we have a big copper whatever it's called, distillery still. Yeah. You have a still in your house? We have a still that your wife puts unspecified plants into. Well, it's herb. She's growing them in the yard and then putting them in the still, and then we get liquid out. And then you guys are taking it like the extract as a botanical supplement. Yeah. That is fantastic. Yeah, it's cool. That is great. So what kind of like if she's going to the trouble of making sure the dirt that's growing in is, like, amazing and all that yeah. Okay, that's great. I want a bottle of something. Yes. I'll get you up, bro. I'll get you a bottle of something. Okay. I don't even care what it is. I'll get you some chickpeas. All right, I'll take some chickweed. I'll hold that under my tongue for 30 straight seconds. Okay, so your hip you understand what a dietary supplement is? Well, on the herbal side, but I don't know. I've never been good about vitamins and stuff like that. I'll get on a thing where I'll be like, I'm going to start taking a multivitamin. Right. And then there's six bottles of 95% full multivitamins. That sounds awfully familiar. Yes. I've tried to start taking B. Twelve and D? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm okay about it, but I forget frequently. It's never like I don't feel like taking that. It's just I forget. Well, you know what they say, spoiler alert. They say, just eat good food. You don't have to take this stuff. Yeah. Food first is what that's called. Yeah. It's all in the food. So most people, Chuck, do not actually go to the trouble of distilling their own extracts, their own botanical extracts for dietary supplements. Most people buy it and then, like you said, forget about it. But because so many people are buying it, whether they forget about it or not, it's something like I've seen anywhere between a $4 billion industry and a $40 billion industry in the United States. Yeah. And growing, like, fast. Yes. Which is a pretty big spread actually. But it's significant that there is a lot of dietary supplements that are being taken, especially in American. There's this old adage that Americans have the most expensive urine in the world. Yeah. Because a lot of people say those aren't really doing anything. A lot of the pills that you're taking are just passing through you, and it's harmless because you're not absorbing the stuff or there may not even be anything in there. You just paid a bunch of money for some pills that don't actually have what they supposedly have in it. And if you think that, you know that's hilarious, and you laugh for a little while, and then you stop laughing and you go, well, wait a minute. Why would that be the case? It turns out the FDA actually doesn't regulate dietary supplements. That entire four to $40 billion industry basically exists on the honor system. Yeah. And as it turns out, and we'll get to the specifics later, there are things in actual plants that help absorb the good parts of the plant that these supplements do not have. So in some cases, maybe it is just coming out your pee. Right. So when people think about dietary supplements, the first thing you think of is vitamins. Yeah. Or I think of, like I have no idea why, because I don't ever have never done this, but I think of weight lifter guys that make shakes and things. Creatine pig extract of some sort of, like, gland, I think. Is it really? Yeah. I have no idea. That's why some bodybuilding supplements are glandular extract, which sometimes you can end up with like a bacteria or hepatitis or something like that in your supplements or a hoof growing out of your back. And again, because there's nobody watching the people who are making this stuff. That's right. So anyway, back to vitamins, turns out remember electro? Execution? Electrocution, yes. Vitamins is short for vital amines. Did you know that? Is it really? Swear? What's an amine? An amine is a type of protein, I believe. What is vital? It means that you really need it. It's important. And it was coined back in 1912 by a Polish biochemist named Kazmir Polaski. I thought you were going to say no, casimir portmanteau casmir funk. What? I'm not kidding. I'm about to walk out of here. Let's get the facts of the podcast out of the way. This is April Fools. Vitamin is short. It's so hot in here. I know. Vitamin is short for vital amines, a term that was coined by Polish biochemist Kasmir Funk back in 1912. All right, well, now Josh is leaving, everyone. It's because my smells. Glad you learn smells. Right. All right, so I did not know that. I did not know that was a portmanteau. Or is that more an abbreviation? No, it's a portmanteau. It sounds like it, yeah. Is that a combination of words? I believe so. I think so, too. But people have been doing this for many thousands of years. In fact, some of the first inscriptions in Sumeria and Clay tablets talked about herbs. This is nothing new. And that's why it's very popular now. Because I think people are saying, hey, they've been doing it for 5000 years. Humans have been looking to plants to heal us. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people who kind of say, well, wait a minute, we were using, like, botanicals, vitamins, minerals long before medicine was around. I'm kind of suspicious of the medical establishment getting in between me and vitamins. A lot of people are very suspicious of that. And I think that's one of the reasons why the dietary supplement industry has boomed is because a lot of people are it appeals to the average person the idea of just taking something natural and your body healing as a result. It feels good to treat yourself like that. Yeah. Here in the States, would you say you're on D in B twelve? Yeah. Well, D is one of the most after the multivitamin, the most popular, of course, along with C and calcium. And then as far as the specialty supplements and this is a big one, omega three fatty acids. I see those all over the place. Yeah. Like good fatty fish. Of course. This is the extract of that. Did you squeeze them? Squeeze that salmon, bring it out of them and then throw the salmon back. Good shot of salmon juice. What else? Probiotics fiber. Of course, that counts. You're right. Which is kind of surprised me, I guess. But dietary fiber, that makes sense. Basically anything that grows from the ground or that you can get from animals is technically considered a dietary supplement. Yes. It's not necessarily a vitamin. There's only 13 vitamins. Yeah. But like garlic and ginseng and things like that, they all fall under that banner. But they are not vitamins themselves. And like garlic and ginseng plants, those would be considered phytomedicines or botanicals. Right. And then you got minerals like iron, zinc, stuff like that. All of them. If you really want to put them all under a banner whether it's a dietary supplement or not those are considered micronutrients because you need very small amounts of them for your body to function as opposed to macronutrients like fats, carbohydrates and proteins and pizza, which you need a lot of. Yeah. Right. And some of the confusion comes in with the fact that there are many studies on both sides that say completely contradictory things about very specific vitamins. So it can be tough for a consumer to sort of weed through all that and know what the heck is going on. Especially because of the lack of regulation which I guess we might as well go ahead and talk about what happened in 1994. Yeah. Where were you? I was in Athens. Are you there yet? I was probably hanging out in Athens on my way up there. I wasn't there quite yet. Now you're in what was that town between? Yeah, I was in Winder. Yes, everybody, there's a town between Athens and Atlanta called between. Oh, is it really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, and it's called that because it's between Athens and Atlanta. Sure. It's their big claim to them, apparently. That and being a speed trap, don't speed through between. I've never heard that before. Although half of the town calls it Betwixt. No, they don't. I'm just kidding. Okay, well, you got arcane with that joke. I know. So in 1000, 1994, a big change happened in Congress. They passed what's called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. And previous to this, there was a lot of tightly controlled regulation by the FDA and all of that changed in 1994. Was this because of just some sort of general deregulation up with consumers and push? No, it wasn't. No. What happened was Senator Orin Hatch of Utah, which was home to a lot of supplement producers, hatch, and hence a lot of supplement producing donors, lauren Hatch saw this thing through, said, no, we need to open up the supplement regulation or supplement industry. And the best way to do that is to remove regulations on it. So it was a big deregulation push, but specifically to the supplement industry because of one senator. Oh, no, I get that. Okay. But I just meant sort of that typical, hey, let's just let people run wild and make money, right? Yes, exactly. And it was because of Oren hatch got you. And technically, Tom Harkin did, too. He's from Iowa and one of his biggest donors was Herbalife. So he kind of joined together and got this historically bad bill pushed through. But remember, this is the Congress. Sorry, everybody. I realize this is like nanny state trigger for some people, but this is the same Congress, or virtually the same Congress that prohibited the CDC from studying gun violence. Right. Like, this is the kind of mentality that was going on at the time. So what happened during that the passing of that act is they kind of set up some agreements, which was looser regulation for sure. But if you make some of these supplements, you cannot make claims like, hey, this will help cure a disease. You can't make like, medical claims like that. You also have to be very specific with your labeling. It had to be labeled a dietary supplement. And you can make a claim that, hey, it could have the positive effect on your body, but you can't say it like cures anything. And then you also had to tag it with, this statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Right, so that was the big trade off. But it almost sounds like they're saying, well, okay, they can't claim to be drugs. Right. But there's also some semantic trickery there because if they're not claiming to be drugs, the FDA can't regulate them like drugs. Right. So basically, Congress it is what Congress says it is. It's not a drug. So it's not a drug. As far as the United States goes in doing this, they basically said, FDA, you can't regulate this stuff anymore. Everything that you've used to get pharmaceuticals out to market that have been proven safe and effective, we're going to do the opposite. These things are presumed innocent until they start hurting people, and then you can intervene. And then even when they intervene, their go to technique for a dietary supplement that was proving harmful was to send a letter to the producer saying, maybe you should recall this. And the producer could either say, sure, let's do this, or here's the finger. FDA, you have zero power over me whatsoever. Right. Let me look at my ledger sheet and see if I want to shut down my company. Right. Pretty much while I'm on my yacht. Yeah. And I found a study from, I think, this past year that found something like 746 recalled or adulterated dietary supplements in the US. Right. 746. Jeez. So this means that they have been found to have anything from actual prescription drugs in them that aren't on the label or other things that aren't on the label, like fillers things that people might be allergic to. It might have some sort of chemical in it that's not supposed to be there. Who knows? There's very little of what it says it has in there. Right. That's a different kind of adult rate. These are pharmaceutically adult rated. They found 746 of them had been flagged as adulterated. Only 360 had been recalled. The other ones were just left on the market because the company said, we're not going to do that. We're going to keep selling them. And then this Journal of the American Medical Association study found even further that I think of the 360, something like ten or 11% were still on the market even after being recalled. Wow. So that's kind of the state of affairs with dietary supplements, which everybody takes. Should we take a break? I think we should. I think we've just lost about a third of our listeners. The conservative one. All right, well, I'll go find my deodorant, and I'll be back right after this. Okay, so we're back, and I'm totally calm. I still smell, and people are still selling supplements that are tainted and otherwise misleading. Yeah. Unregulated. That's where we are. Okay. So the FDA, for their part, supposedly has established some manufacturing practices, but again, it's, I guess, just voluntary, whether or not you adhere to these. Absolutely. But I guess there's a page somewhere on their website or letters that go out to say, here's what you might want to do. Yeah, it's like manufacturing good guidelines, basically good practices for manufacturing. And there are independent organizations that do test things. A couple of them are one called ConsumerLab.com, not NSFW. It's like, come on. NSF international. And then one call, and I'm sure this is great, but it just sounds so like something from a movie. US. Pharmacopia. Right? It sounds like something like a future company from a movie. Right? Exactly. That does not do what they say they do. But those three, they exist because they're fulfilling the role that the government should. Yeah. Or I guess if you believe in government oversight, the government should. Right. In a way, the fact that those businesses that make money off of this exist, it's an example of the invisible hand at work. Like, there is a need that came along, which is people need to know that what they're buying actually has the stuff sure. And that it's safe, and these companies that make money off of it came along and fulfilled this need. That's what an orange hatch might say. Like, look, not only are they booming, but we've created all these other companies that are doing what we used to do. Right. But from what I understand, us. Pharmacopia, they have a really good website, I believe, where they basically say, this has been tested. It is Pure. It has what it's supposed to have in it, in the amount it's supposed to have in it. It doesn't have any extra stuff in it. You guys can buy this and they put a label on the bottles. So for sure, look for that. If this is something you're already doing, you're interested in trying out, right? Definitely. Do some research. This is not the kind of hobby you want to just wait into by walking into a store and going, this sounds great. Right. A lot of people do that, look for this stuff. And then bear in mind also, I don't know about US. Pharmacopia, but I know that Consumer Labs goes to stores and gets their samples that they test, and they don't say, hey, just send us some stuff. Right. Send us your absolutely Purest batch for us to test and give you a ceiling. They actually go to stores, and so their ratings and reviews are based on tests that they've done independently. Right. Not the stuff they sweep off the floor and put in capsules. That was supposedly what when I worked at Golden Pantry in college, they had the and you probably know this as a former smoker, but the really, really, really cheap cigarette. I've heard that before. And they always told us that that's just like literally stuff they sweep off the factory floor at, like, Winston Salem or whatever, camel or whoever makes the cigarettes. That seems like one of those urban legends that I think is probably true. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, not all urban legends are wrong. That sounds totally true. Why are they so cheap? Right. Basics. Remember those? I don't remember basics, but I sold a lot of bucks. They had a big deer on the front of it like a big deer buck. This is when cigarettes were, I don't know, let's say $2. And these were, like, $75 a pack or something. How much are cigarettes now? They're super expensive, aren't they? I think they're anywhere between five and $12, depending on where you are. Maybe 515, something like that. I know New York has, like, they had $12 packs of cigarettes. I can't believe people will pay that much money for a pack of cigarettes. All right. That's why we need government to prevent us from smoking cigarettes. So regardless of the fact that let's say you find a supplement, it's got the seal of approval, you still should, like, do some research, talk to your doctor. It doesn't mean everyone's body is not the same. You shouldn't just be downing supplements because you think, oh, well, this sounds like it's good for me. Right. Everybody needs different things. There is a list here of supplements that are most likely to be safe for you and might be effective yeah. Based on overall science and research and studies that have been done on these things. Yeah. So we'll just tick through those. Calcium, cranberry, fish oil, glucosamine sulfate, which I give my dogs. Lactase. Lactobacilicus. That's the probiotic. Right. Psyllium. How do you pronounce that? Pygm. Yes, I think that's right. Pi, GM. Good old Sammy. That's s adinacil, l, methionine. Yeah. St. John's. Wort. And then vitamin D, which, by the way, get this about vitamin D. So if you're a vegan, very frequently people are like, you should take some extra dietary supplements. They're like, I take vitamin D. The problem is not all supplements are vegan. Right. Especially vitamin D. The reason vitamin D is very rarely vegan oh, boy. This is where most vitamin D and listed specifically says vegan vitamin D. Oh, no. It is extracted lanolin from lambs wool that is sent. What did you think it was going to be? I don't know, some sort of testicle? Oh, no, you got to pay extra for the testicle. Yeah. So they extract lanolin from lamswoll, send it to China, where it's exposed to UV light to mimic sunlight. Wow. Because that's where we get a lot of our vitamin D exposure to sunlight. And then it's put into pills, and there you go. So if you're a vegan, you wouldn't want to eat an animal product. You really have to look out for that kind of thing. Well, and also one more thing about vegans and vitamins. One of the big controversies that prove to some people that you're not supposed to be a vegan is that we need B Twelve quite badly. We need it for, I believe, bone health. I can't keep up. I've seen so many different things that vitamin D in the last couple of days, but we need B twelve. How about that? Okay. B Twelve is only gained, as far as we know, from animal sources. If so, facto we need to eat animals to get B twelve. And the way animals get B twelve is the gut bacteria in their guts produce B twelve, and then we eat the animals that have the B twelve built up in their tissues. Right. So that's how people who eat meat don't have B Twelve deficiencies. But vegans say, where are the animals at? Cows getting that b twelve. Right from their bacteria. Where's the bacteria coming from? They say it's from the soil. So there's this big controversy. Is the B twelve producing bacteria actually in the soil? And if so, are the factory farming methods like washing produce that we use actually washing off the B twelve that you would get enough of as a vegan? Yeah. Man, it's fascinating. Waiting into these waters is so perilous. We've got to do a plant based diet episode sometime. Yeah. Who is it? Coach? Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, one of the older coaches in the NFL, but one of the more vital old guys. He switched his diet to completely plant based, like, raw foods diet, I think, within the past couple of years. Now he's dead. Yeah, he dropped it on the spot. Now he said it's just and he's not the only person, obviously, in the news talking about this stuff, but I just read something recently where he was just like, you would not believe the change in my life and body. And I was like, yeah, I imagine if you just eat raw vegetables, that would be a great thing for your body. Sure. We'll find out. And I'm not saying that with a sneer. That would be hard for me. Yeah, it's probably something I should do. I should just eat raw vegetables for the rest of my life. You know, Chuck, I don't know that it's healthy to deal in should, so there are also some supplements that they say should be avoided because there are links to side effects that can be pretty serious. Yeah. That list you just read like a half hour ago about ones that are probably okay for you and probably actually are beneficial, they came up with the opposite list of that, too. That's right. Right. Well, it was the same, like, study that came up with the double edged sword. Bitter orange is one. And that one can be especially problematic because from what I read, that can just sort of ramp up your sort of, like, speed in some ways. Yes. Especially when you mix it with caffeine or speed or like meth. Yeah, like, wow, this method has given me a real nutritional deficiency. I should probably start taking vitamins. That's what most meth addicts do. Well, bitter orange, though, is something people do use to lose weight, and it can lead to heart attack and stroke if you take enough of it, usually, and we'll talk about this more, but this stuff combining with other things is kind of where you can get into problems. Right. I saw a lady one time at a restaurant where I was working pass out on the middle of the floor, and it's because we learned from her friends after the ambulance came, she had just come off of a weeklong like, I'm doing nothing but eating cayenne pepper and lemonade. No, but just, like, water and vitamins or something. And then to celebrate the end of the week, she was, like, drinking and eating steak. Oh, good. And she just hit the deck. That's a real problem. Refeeding. We're going to do an episode once on this man who didn't eat for a year. We're going to do that. Yeah. And they were smart enough to figure out that he couldn't just start eating slowly, work food back in. But you can die from that after a while fast. If you don't refeed go through the process correctly, you can just drop dead like you have a heart attack, basically, from eating food. Yeah. This lady was fine. Or I'm assuming she was fine, because as they were wheeling her out, she did the thing that all pro athletes do. She just gave the thumbs up on the girl. She's all right, everybody. She's okay. So what else is on there cheaper? All colloidal silver. That's a big one. It's the one that turns in blue. Wasn't it a senator or somebody with a beard? The blue man. I think there was a congressman or a senator that turned blue. It's, like, permanent. Is it? Yes, I saw that. It tends to be permanent. Oh, boy. Yeah. Once you turn blue, you don't go back. Is the old thing. Coltsfoot, which I had never heard of before, supposedly good for asthma. Also linked to liver damage and cancer. Right. Geranium. Country Mallow. That has ephedrine in it. Yeah, city mallow is great. Country malo. No good. Kava. That was so dumb. And what else? Yohimbai. Yohimbae sure. Is frequently used for erectile dysfunction, but unfortunately, it's an MAOI, which means that if you drink, like, orange juice on this thing, you can drop dead. Wow. This list is obviously it's not comprehensive. And also, I wanted to just say one more thing real quick. So I am not attacking supplements. I take supplements myself. And the idea of taking something even synthesized, but that's based on scientific investigation and in nature nutrition and all that, I find that endlessly appealing. I love that. Sure. And anything that can help you be a healthier person, I'm in favor of. So I don't want to give the impression that I'm just like, gleefully shooting holes in the idea of people taking supplements, because I take them. Yeah, I don't think that's coming across that way. Okay, good. You seem like you're in a good mood is all because I gleefully shoot holes in a lot of stuff. Oh, sure. I'm just not doing this now. So here's the thing, too, which this article points out. Having a good list. And a bad list is all well and good and it can be helpful if you don't know what's going on, what's going on, and you want to start at zero and learn a couple of things. A list like that is good, but again, you have to know your body and talk to your doctor about stuff and like what other medications are you taking and what's your end goal? Yes. So you want a doctor who is not opposed to supplements and who's knowledgeable with supplements does any good doctor with their salt, especially one that came around post 90s, should be all about supplements and should know what supplements work, what to recommend to you, to also know what you're on and what you can't have, what interacts poorly. Yeah, I think finding that doctor in the middle ground though, can be tough these days because on one end of the spectrum you have what Emily calls the hokey pokeys, which are like oh no, don't take any pharmaceutical medicines ever, only take these plant things. And then at the other end you have doctors that are like I believe in science, so only take prescription drugs, don't mess around with any plant based thing because you're just going to pee it out. Right, and I find that it's hard to find someone in between. Right. I think also even if you do find one that is in between in spirit, they might not have all the information because you touched on it earlier. There is a lot of conflicting and competing studies. Like this article from How Stuff Works says that back in 2013, after years of being told that they should take vitamin D and calcium for bone health, that post menopausal women were told stop taking those things. Not only do they not help you, but the additional calcium may lead to everything from a heart attack to kidney stones, because kidney stones are typically made of calcium deposits. Right, and then another study, I think came out that same year and said, no, keep taking those things. Not only do they help you, they probably actually don't produce kidney stones. Yeah. And you know that if you go on to CNN or NBC or Fox News or whatever in their websites, they have both articles screaming, both headlines, the opposite, nobody ever goes and follows up, right. And everybody's kind of shouts whatever the new study is finding. So it's really confusing even if you're trying to pay attention to this. And if you dig into trustworthy sites like say an FDA site or the National Institutes of Health site or something like that, there's plenty of links, but they say a very minimal amount because there's so little substantial science that conclusively says this actually helps or this doesn't help. And that's the thing too. There's very few things that say this does not help, you are totally wasting your money. Totally. So they can't really say one way or the other it's all just really middle ground right now. We actually need science more than ever to really study this stuff. But they are studying it. They're just coming up with differing results. Somebody just needs to god needs to come down and be like this and just point at the Bible. Yeah. Vitamin Church. Like Ned's, the answers are within. Did Ned say? Vitamin church. Yeah. And a healthy dose of vitamin. Church. That's great. One thing we do know is that and this is across the board, everything I research said this. If you see anything that says this is totally safe, this has no side effects, this will give you an erection for sure. This will make you lose weight. Like, those are the big or is it going to transfer all your weight to your erection? Or, gentlemen, would you like to last longer? Like, anything related to sexual performance and, like, weight loss is just super. Hanky well, it's not only that. The claims are frequently hinky. A lot of times the claims are correct. Like, this crazy, like, botanical for erectile dysfunction works really well, but don't drink corn juice. No, it's because they use Viagra. Right. One of the ways that bodybuilding weight loss and sexual enhancement supplements become adulterated is they have actual pharmaceutical drugs in them that aren't on the label. Some companies have figured out that the FDA is totally powerless. And a really good way to sell cheap pharmaceuticals, generic pharmaceuticals, to Americans is to put it in a supplement, not put it on the label, and go basically around the FDA by going through the FDA. So are these sold by the actual pharmaceutical companies under sort of like a sub business title? I think it's largely fly by night company. Well, and do they partner with them or do they just buy a ton of Viagra? No, they know a guy in China who get pounds of, like, cheap generic viagra or Prozac is another one that pops up, especially in weight loss. Yeah. Steroids some drugs that were up for FDA approval as pharmaceuticals, and FDA said, no, too dangerous. They turn up in dietary supplements. It's one thing to waste your money and just pee out expensive urine. It's an entirely different thing to take prescription drugs unknowingly and without any sort of medical supervision, because the government agency that's supposed to be keeping an eye on this stuff is expressly forbade from doing that. Yeah. When we were talking about the high fructose corn syrup, the fact that that's in everything, you don't even know it, and sort of the same thing here. The foods you're already eating may be good enough. Chances are if you're eating really good, like whole foods and things like that, you're probably not diving headlong into the supplement thing. But if you're already getting like a ton of vitamin D in various foods that you don't even realize, and then you take it on top of that, or God forbid. If you think I'll just quit taking my medication because I think this will help, none of that is a good idea. No. And then we should probably just talk about ephedra really quick because that was a very big deal in the 90s you could buy at a gas station. Yeah. And it was marketed as a weight loss thing. And I'm sure it probably worked in that capacity. Gives you a real good buzz. It said on the package. Did it really? Probably. There are probably some it said in, like, a bolt of lightning or something. Well, 15 deaths were attributed to it by 1996. And then I do remember in 2004, the FDA finally banned it. And it wasn't necessarily because of this, but a very high profile death. And Major League Baseball happened. Do you remember who it was? Yeah, he was a pitcher. I think it was Steve Beckler. I think and he died, I think, during spring training, if I'm not mistaken. And they linked it to a federal and they finally were like, maybe we should step in and do something here because America's pastime is at stake. It'd be like if an apple pie just dropped dead from a feeder. Get rid of the apples. No, sorry. The other way around. So let's take our second break. Chuck. Yes. And then we'll come back and talk some more food. Okay? Yeah, let's do okay. Hey, Chuck. Hi. So we're back. Before we talk about food, let's go further back. Okay. Hundreds of millions of years ago. Oh, goodness. Okay. Yeah. It's a big surprise. So we're not even the wayback machine. We can just teleport. Yes. Mentally, we've become interdimensional beings. Yes. So we have figured out that vitamins were around in, like, the early Earth. I don't know if we said originally, I think we said your body needs these things, or micronutrients, but your body needs them for all sorts of things. They help in all manner of chemical processes, from helping your cells divide to your bones to grow, like, really important stuff, which is why we need them. And your body makes some vitamins, but we have to get them from outside sources a lot. 13 vitamins are essential to humans. And what we need, other animals don't necessarily need. Like, dogs don't need vitamin C because their bodies produce enough. Right. Our bodies don't produce enough. So we need vitamin C from other sources. But what they figured out is that in the ancient Earth, bacteria and other life made vitamins on their own. And then over time, as we evolved into higher and higher forms, we apparently lost a lot of that ability. Not all of it, because we can still make some, but to the point where we need to get it from other sources. So more sophisticated animals started eating more primitive animals to get that source of vitamin, right? Yeah. And that's where the whole process began, where we started to evolve, co evolve with other life on Earth. And our bodies realized, well, we can get this vitamin from this plant. Right. Or we can get this vitamin from this animal. And that's how this kind of food web developed, was basically for a reliance on vitamins and other things like fats and proteins and other nutrients. But this nutrient exchange, that is when one life started to eat other life. And that's kind of where vitamins came from. And it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that we figured out how to synthesize vitamins. Yeah, that was a game changer in like the that thing you sent about cereal was just mind blowing. Yes. If you keep going, the fact that we synthesize vitamins allowed the processed food industry to boom. Yeah, because it's like here now, we can put things back into food that we synthesize. And in the case of cereal, like what I was saying, there are some vitamins that are sprayed onto the end product. Yeah. So if you see something that says fortified or enriched sure. That's what that means. That means that they dump some vitamins into the dough or sprayed it on the outside of your cornflakes. Mentioned that just spraying cereal with, like, give me a can of vitamin D. Just spray it on. Well, the hypothesis is that without enriched foods, we would all be dead from rickets and other sorts of horrible malnourishment disease, blind from lack of vitamin A. All the things that could happen to you if you don't get enough vitamins. What happened to the average American because of what we eat? Well, because of processed foods, right? Yeah. But the reason it doesn't is because they put vitamins back in. Right. Because some people say, you know, you might not even need supplements. Forget eating whole food, but they put so many vitamins in processed foods that you could conceivably live. Okay. Except for the added sugar and the added salt, you could live vitamin wise. Fine. Well, sure. That's a sugar and the salt thinks a big caveat, though. It is a big caveat because that leads to other problems like cardiac I see what you're saying, though. Like you could maybe get all the vitamins you need from processed food. Right, but that's not what we're recommending because we're not doctors. But doctors say are we to food now? Like food food? Sure. Also oh, yeah, one more thing. I want to shout out Carl Zimmer, who wrote Vitamins old, old edge in, I think, the New York Times. Yeah, he did a great job about the history of vitamins. Is that a friend of yours? No, he's like a great science writer. Do you remember our blood type episode? Sure. That was live in Atlanta, right? Yes, it was based a lot on his article on blood types. Didn't we do a blood type test on stage? Yeah, I turned out to be A positive. Right. Jerry, aren't you a positive. That's right. Me and Jerry have the same blood type, so I know. One of us gets a leg amputated, the other one has to cough up some blood. I know. And I'll be right there to manage the whole process. But you two would just be arguing the whole time that someone would bleed out before you settled on an arrangement. Saying the same thing, though. But it just sounds like an argument and I would just as you both drifted off into the great beyond, I'd say that's. So you guys all right. That would not be good though, because then I would have no career and I'd miss my friends. There you go. Secondly, so eating foods that Mother Earth gives us to contain these things is clearly the best thing to do. Allegedly, some studies have shown that we absorb synthetic vitamins better than the stuff in food, depending really saw that. But again, science is all over the place. Well, yeah, well, since you brought that up, and as I mentioned earlier in the episode, there are a lot of studies that say that you actually don't absorb those as well. I guess there are counter studies from vitamins. Yeah, I'm sure they're probably where does the funding come from? I don't know. I don't know. It's a really good question. But phytochemicals, they are plant chemicals that have properties that can help, really help protect you from disease. Those aren't in the supplements though. No. The phytochemicals are what you get when you eat the raw broccoli. Right. I think you can get supplements, very high end supplements that have phytochemicals and other stuff in them. Rich people supplements. So like, you know, in the future they're like, here's a meal and a pill. What they're kind of hinting at is a fully fortified pill, like in the vitamins we take. Now, if you take vitamin D, you're getting vitamin D. True. Whereas if you drink some milk, you're getting a whole bunch of other stuff along with that vitamin C. Right. And those things work together in your body. And so you're giving your body a shot of all these things that work really well together. And that's the argument for eating the food. Oh, for sure. Phytochemicals, they think, enhance what's called bioavailability. And that's what we've been talking about, which is how much you're actually absorbing. And I guess just pick a study because one might say you pee it right out, and another might say a supplement, and another might say you don't. That's where it's just maddening, you know? It is one of the things that I think us pharmacopia, those groups, they test to make sure that the pill or the vitamin or the supplement actually dissolves in the stomach. Right. So that you do have a fighting chance of absorbing the nutrients in there. Or does it say on the bottle, don't pee for 3 hours after taking it, just pinch it. Here's another study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, it showed that omega threes and fatty fish, like a salmon, let's say they were better able to maintain proper blood pressure. People were I'm sorry, mice were then with that same omega three supplement, the fish oil pill that you will take. Yeah. And that's a big deal. There's no substitute, I don't think, for the real thing. Well, they found on the actual level of your blood vessels, that the naturally occurring DHA holds open your blood vessels, whereas the synthetic version doesn't. And it actually fights the natural version, the natural version in your bloodstream, too. But, I mean, that's just DHA. That doesn't necessarily extrapolate to vitamin D or vitamin B twelve or anything like that. Well, that's why you got to really dig in if you want to start taking supplements, do your research. But I think the idea that there are such things as phytochemicals that we don't necessarily need to live, like resveratrol and grapes or lutein and spinach or Lycopene is a big one that you find in tomatoes, things that give it a plant, it's flavor, it's odor, and it's color. Those things, those are phytochemicals. And those are the things that act as antioxidants. They regulate hormones. They do all the stuff that we don't have to have to function. Right, but that actually take like that. You go from surviving to thriving. It seems like, when you incorporate phytochemicals into your diet yeah. You want a shiny coat and glowing skin. Exactly. You don't need that stuff. Yeah. Here's another thing. The RDA, and I think the RDA, it's not just with the recommended daily allowance that doesn't just cover supplements. I mean, that's kind of for calories and all that. Yeah. I mean, that's a whole range of things, but amazingly, that has not been updated since 1968. Yeah. Which it was a different country back then, too. There are a lot more farmers. Yeah. And it's recommended they're trying to cover all of America. So it's not like the RDA for each person. They liken it to a sweater. In this article that you sent, it's like trying to create a sweater that would fit 97 out of 100 Americans. Americans. Americans, yeah. And that's just not possible. No. I mean, this author, Catherine Price, who wrote Vitaminia, she's putting it like 95 Americans will find it too large. It will fit one, it won't fit four of them, but it'll fit kind of some or it'll fit over some people, but it will be wrong for them. That was their point. Yeah. And supposedly they're going to update the RDA from 1968 in a couple of years. 2020, next year. That's what I saw. We'll see. I'm interested. I can't sleep. I'm sure it's behind schedule. I can't wait. The other thing that you got to wonder about sometimes is what the long term effect of something like this might be. Taking vitamin D for a year or something. Is different than taking vitamin D for 25, 30, 40 years throughout your life. Yeah. So there's something called hyper vitaminosis, I believe, which is basically Odin on vitamins. And some vitamins it's really hard to do, others it's a little easier. But this author, Catherine Price, is kind of putting out this hypothesis that we may be existing in some kind of subtoxic state where it's not acutely toxic, we're not feigning and vomiting, and, like, our liver isn't shutting down. Right. But we're suffering from diseases we might not otherwise suffer from that we haven't linked to the fact that we're taking too many vitamins. Yes. That's like this low level sort of poisoning or something interesting. That's enough. Like, you could survive, but you might die of something you wouldn't have died from if you hadn't taken vitamin A that you didn't need for 30 years. And it's a hypothesis, it's not proven, but I've seen other people suggest it, too. Yeah. And poison control, too. Oh, yeah, it's a big one. It's a huge one. Every 24 minutes, poison control centers in the US get a call about a supplement reaction. It happens a lot. Yeah. There's about 23,000 Er trips from supplements in the US. Each year. Yeah. I mean, you think poison control is just like, I swallowed something with a skull and crossbones on the label, but that's really not the case now. And especially true with kids. You should treat these things like it sounds harsh to say, like it's poison. Right. But if you get a toddler in the house, don't leave your supplements down where they can get them just because it says all natural. Right? Yeah. That's part of the problem, is they have this kind of veneer of wholesomeness because they are natural. And this is stuff that's reported to poison control. You supposedly can report something to the FDA, but how many people are doing that now? A lot of people, if they do suffer an adverse reaction, will contact the company, the manufacturer. And the manufacturer, on paper, is supposed to report the incident to the FDA. But again, it's on the honor system. Right. Or you just go to the doctor and they say, maybe you should lay off whatever you're taking. The wacky tobacco. Yes. Vitamin church w. Yeah, maybe lay off that. And then you never report it. So the long and short of it is, I think they said something like 90% never get reported to the FDA at all. Right. So I don't really know how to wrap this one up because the day is just so out on so many things. For the most part, it does seem like you're going to do little more than waste your money on something you don't need. But I think the movement today is to say no just before you really start a supplement regimen, before you go all Ray Kurzweil, because he takes, like, 250 pills a day. Really? A day every day. He's a futurist. Google's chief imagineer or something like that. No, that's a Disney term. He takes, like 250 pills a day. Before you do anything like that, the recommendation du jour is try eating more of a Whole Foods diet. Like, go spend all of your money at Whole Foods. I think Jeff Bezos is driving that one. Yeah, I agree. This is a tough one to wrap up, and I believe we will get equal parts emails saying from people who swear by it, it almost takes on a religious quality to people that think it's complete bunk. And a couple of people saying like, Levorn, hatch alone. Well, since I said Levor and hatch alone, I think that means it's time for listener mail. It is. And I'm going to call this josh and Chuck Are feminists. Hey, guys. I'm consistently impressed by how clued up you are on feminism. And by feminism, I mean equality in general, because you always point out times in which men struggle in society, too. From my point of view, you also regularly look through a race lens, disabled lens, and gay lens. Although I cannot speak for how well you are doing there, to me it seems incredibly inclusive and sympathetic. Thanks. You're welcome. Got you. I think you, too, may be the only two adult men I've ever heard speak the way you do, and I massively respect you for that. It's so important to have influential men speak in these ways. I don't think that you ever really push those arguments down people's throats, but instead, matter of fact, we're stating these issues during an informative podcast in a man's voice that's having influence and is having an effect somewhere. I've even heard he criticized some second wave feminist ideas and trump them with third wave feminist ideas. I think it was in the makeup episode you guys were discussing feminists of the 70s shunning women who wear makeup, and Chuck said, I think they may have got that one wrong. And then you two proceeded to have the most progressive chat ever about how women aren't just wearing makeup for the purpose of pleasing men. Makes my head explode with excitement, guys, to each their own. Keep doing what you're doing. That is from Alice Chibner Kiwi living in Edinburgh. Thanks a lot. Great city. Agreed. Great country to New Zealand. Yeah, I mean, she's winning on both fronts. That's where a lot of the sheep landline and vitamin D comes from. Oh, I bet. New Zealand. Thanks a lot, Alice. We appreciate that. It was very nice to hear. If you want to give us compliments, man, send them in. You can find us all over social media. Go to our website, stuffytionnow.com. And as always, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows hey, everybody. 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Sir Isaac Newton: Greatest Scientist of All Time? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sir-isaac-newton-greatest-scientist-of-all-time | There have been a lot of great scientist throughout history, but Sir Isaac Newton might just take the cake. But while he was a certified genius, he was also a little screwy. Dive into the life of this fascinating chap in today's episode. | There have been a lot of great scientist throughout history, but Sir Isaac Newton might just take the cake. But while he was a certified genius, he was also a little screwy. Dive into the life of this fascinating chap in today's episode. | Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:33:18 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=15, tm_min=33, tm_sec=18, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=19, tm_isdst=0) | 50906693 | 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. 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. Hey, everybody out there in the United States, we are coming on tour in January to select cities. Yes. So probably the city where you are is really cold. Come down below the frost line and say yes. And if you're in a cold place, we might see in the spring or summer, don't fret. Sure. But for now, we are sold out in San Francisco, san Diego and Austin. Right. You can still get tickets in Dallas, Atlanta, Birmingham and New Orleans. And if you live in Mississippi, you might want to go to Birmingham if you're interested in seeing us. Yeah. Or surrounding areas around Birmingham. Sure. Anywhere in the Southeast. Yeah. Maybe Atlanta and Birmingham are your best shots at this point. Yeah. And you can make it to New Orleans or Birmingham from the state of Florida, too. Yeah. Over in the Panhandle. Yeah. Yeah. Just creep up north a bit. Come on up. So it comes to you, if you want ticket information, go to Sysklive.com, which is our wonderful website powered by Squarespace that's right. Who are also sponsoring our tour. Because they're cool. That is right. Yeah. So we'll see you guys then. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is stuff you should know. That was my Isaac Newton. Impressive. Really? Yeah. You didn't have an accent. That's what he sounded like. Okay. It's a very common misconception that British people in the 17th century sounds like British people. They actually sounded exactly like how I just did. All right, well, you did extra research then. It's pretty good. I traveled back in time. We just had a nice ten minute discussion, Jerry and you and I, about or me or I who cares? Yes. About pop culture. Things that we've ingested since our break six weeks ago. And that could be a show. Everyone wants to know what we watched and absorbed and how we feel about it, but they never will. We talked about making of a Murderer or making a murderer. We talked about Hateful eight and Star Wars, right? And the revenant. Yeah. People want to know, but they never will. You got to keep it mysterious. Right, guys? That's right. And all this leads to Isaac Newton, who it was. So, you know, wolfram, science, world. Who? Wolfram Science World. It's a very bonafide science website. No dumbing down there. I've heard of it. So Wolfram put it like this. He's the bomb diggity. It is no exaggeration to say that Isaac Newton is the single most important contributor to the development of modern science. And Wolfram Science World knows what they're talking about when it comes to contributors to science. Yeah, you know what? I will agree with that, even though we will see he was many things, including a little screwy, super screwy. But what I gathered after researching this dude is that science this was 17th century stuff going on. Science was the Wild West, and he came in like a sheriff and basically brought order and discipline and said, this is the way we should do things if we want to be taken seriously. Guys. Varmints you can't just say things like, the world's flat. You got to prove it. Or this is kind of the thing. He really kind of rose to prominence while the scientific revolution is already going. Sure. But he very much contributed to it because still, at the time, you could be like, well, the Earth spins because God spun it and it is God's will. And people would be like, Absolutely. Scientists. Not the case after Newton came along. No, you got to prove the stuff. There's got to be a method in place. You got to test things again and again. I didn't note this. He was one of the or if not the first person to average data. Yeah. What do they do before that? Just cherry pick something, probably they're like, oh, that looks like a nice round number. I'll use this one. So, like, if he measured, say, how long a top spun? Because that's what scientists measure. Right. A lot of top spinning. If he measured it four or five times and he got different measurements every time yes. I guess before they would just pick whatever one they like the most. It just seems so he was the first one to average. Yeah. It just seems so second nature to think, well, averaging something is what you should do. Right. But back then, it wasn't, so that came up a lot while I was reading this article. This is a very good article by Jacob Silverman, the one on Jeopardy. Jeopardy champion. The way that he portrayed Newton, I think it gets across that we take Newton's work so for granted these days. Yeah, absolutely. That's the way the universe works. That to think otherwise is just totally alien to us. And that's just such evidence of how much that man single handedly changed the world. Absolutely. But you also can't say single handedly. His genius is unequivocal. Right. Yeah. But he also did definitely stand on the backs of giants, on the shoulders of giants, people who came before him, as all scientists do, and the work of his peers. But he also liked to take a lot of the credit for himself sometimes. Unnecessarily. He was a very complex man. He was a scientist who deeply believed in God. He believed that there was law and order that could be deduced, that could be investigated. But it was orderly and rational, because God was an orderly, rational creator. Yeah. He saw logic and he thought God was that logic. Right. He also thought that the stuff that he was uncovering was actually ancient wisdom that was being recovered. Christian civilizations. That gets a little screwy. Yeah. That had kind of DA Vinci coded this knowledge in things like pyramids and stuff like that. Yeah. And that he was hand selected as a select few to uncover this knowledge. Yeah. So much so that he made he made a name for himself. Chuck and once you start to really investigate Newton, you can just kind of see him, like, tittering to himself as he's talking to himself in his chambers at Cambridge, calling himself this out loud to an empty room. Yeah. He changed his name or didn't change it. I'm sorry. He had a special name for himself, jehovah sanctus Unis, which means Jehovah the Holy One. And he got that name by rolling a 20 sided die several times. Yeah. So that was his special, I guess. Council of Unique Scientists like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That was a superhero name. Yeah. And he was an alchemist as well. He very seriously pursued the study of turning plain old metal into gold, of finding long life elixirs. He was a very complex man, and a lot of people like to put him in this rational scientist compartment as, like, how we view scientists today, typically. And it wasn't that you just can't look at science the same in the 6th, 17th century as you do today. No, because different. It wasn't like this guy was helping form science today. And at the time, it was he was seeking answers to the universe wherever there weren't many boundaries to him. Like, if he could come to conclusions about the universe through weird mysticism, then whatever. He still came to the same conclusions that he did through mathematics, which, by the way, a major part of which he helped develop single handedly, almost. Yeah. It's kind of a weird time because you could, on one hand, be a very rational thinker and say, you have to prove this, but you can also say, that lady didn't float, so she's a witch and that's why she drowned and be completely, like, normal. Right. Say it with a straight face. Yeah. Like, Newton, I can turn this mercury into gold. Right. Yeah. There's an elixir that will let you live forever. Sure. And I can also say you should average data and write the principal. Right. I can also literally discover gravity. Yeah. There was no such thing as gravity as far as humans were concerned before Isaac Newton came along. All right, so that's a great setup. That was even better than our Dangerfield setup. So January 4, which was yesterday in real time, was his actual birthday. Did not know that. Weird timing. Depends on the calendar. Barry It depends on the calendar. Christmas Day or January 4. Right, yes. But like, a year apart rather than a week or so apart. Right. Because one of the great myths is that he was born on Galileo's the day he galileo died. Right. Which means that he's not true. Right. Galileo Reincarnated. Is that what people say? Some people got you. Some people. Like Isaac Newton, probably. I don't think he said that, but yeah, that was using the old Julian calendar. When you use the Gregorian calendar, his birthday was actually January 4 of the following year or of the year before, I think. Oh, wow. He got younger. No, of the same year. So, like, if he was born December 25 on one calendar, for the other calendar, he would go back in time to the beginning of that same year. Right. So almost a year apart. And the reason that there is a weird discrepancy is in 1582, the Catholic nations converted from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar 400 or so years before Newton. Or a little less than 100 years. But it wasn't until the 1750s that the British Isles, Protestants converted to that Gregorian or Catholic calendar. We should do one calendars. Oh, we definitely should. More complex than you think, but in the continent and in Great Britain or the UK, which one? I don't know. Still after all these years. So it's Great Britain and Northern Ireland, right? The United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. I'm just going to let you go down this road. Oh, man. Anyway, they used to notate dates with old style and new style, depending on what calendar got you. So, anyway, that's the whole discrepancy between his birthday. That makes sense. Sure it does. All right, so let's go back in time. Let's get in the Wayback machine. Yes. And go back to one of those two days, depending on our calendar that we have in the Wayback machine. How it's programmed? Well, the Wayback machine is programmed to Gregorian? No, to Unix, so it's fine. Great. So we are back. When he was born, as a little baby, he was premature and very sickly, and here's how things can go in the world he wasn't supposed to live. And what would the world have been like without Isaac Newton? Pretty dark. Yeah. Or at least it would have taken longer. Maybe. Yes. Maybe it just would have been someone else. The clapper would have been invented, but we would just assume it worked because God willed it too. That's right. Born in 43. No, that's Darwin. He was from a family of farmers that did pretty well for themselves, although his dad, Isaac, died a few months before he was born. It was an illiterate farmer who was successful at his work, but very big that his father died before he was born because he never quite got over that. He ended up living for a short time with his mother and new stepdad, Reverend Barnabas Smith. But he sounded like a jerk who did not, like Isaac said, I cast thee out. And he was cast out and lived with his maternal grandmother basically for nine years, from age three to twelve. Yeah. I mean, was pretty much raised by his maternal grandmother. Yeah. And he was apparently old enough to realize what was going on because any psychoanalyst would have a field day with Newton because he grew up to be a very insecure man who had a tremendous amount of difficulty trusting people. Because he was rejected yes. By his mother. And who suffered from, what you would probably call these days hostile attribution bias. Okay. Where any slight or something was clearly intended by the other party, somebody else was hostile and out to get them. Not necessarily making them paranoid, but just any slight was intentional. Even when it was unintentional. It took a terrible way to live. Yeah. It took everything personally. Interesting. So this led over his life to a couple of nervous breakdowns that also had to do with the fact that he worked tirelessly and didn't sleep well in a lot of ways. The prototypical scientists like he never got married and was just consumed with his work and didn't take care of himself and sort of obsessed with his life's work. Yeah. And some people have posthumously diagnosed him, including Simon Baron Cohen, who's an expert on autism and Asperger's Borat, his relative. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. I don't think it's his brother, but they are related. Oh, wow. I was totally kidding. Well, you're totally right. So what are he diagnosing with Asperger's. Oh, yeah. But that's definitely come under fire lately. So there's something called I don't remember what it's called, but in his second nervous breakdown in the he stopped doing any kind of scientific research after that. And he apparently declined mentally compared to his previous state, which means that he came down to about normal levels, I would guess. But they think that it was actually mercury poisoning. Oh, really? Yeah. From all the alchemy. Yeah. And that he wasn't necessarily autistic. It's an easy catch all to put him again in that compartment these days. But we don't know enough about him to say that whether he was autistic, one of the evidence was that he didn't play with the other kids. He just said to himself, so they're like, well, that shows a lack of social communication skills or being able to connect with others. But then if you look back at historical data, he tried to hang out with his peers at school, but they didn't like hanging out with them because he was too smart for them. Right. So they shunned him. Right. So does that make him autistic, or does that mean he had autism, spectral disorder, spectrum disorder, or asperger's you can't say, he may have, but easy to go back now and put people on the spectrum. But they do think because he was exhumed a few hundred years after his death and they found a lot of mercury still in his system wow. Or in his bones, I would guess. And they think that he inadvertently poisoned himself, and that led to a second nervous breakdown and mental decline. Interesting. Yeah. All right, well, let's take a break here, and we'll talk about his schooling years 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. 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And start taking charge of your future today. All right, so Newton in school wasn't a great student in high school. Who was the mascot? Was there one? I don't think so. Okay. Because I thought they were the guy that would be, like, really great trivia. Yeah. Newton's high School mascot. What was yours? In silentos. My what? Remember Cilento, the kid who watched me 99? You guys went to the same high school. Remember I told you? Oh, we were the Red and Raiders. Raiders, okay. Yeah. And my elementary school was the Redan Lil Raiders. That is cute. Didn't it? Yeah. L-I-L. So he wasn't a great student. He was also a terrible farmer, because, of course, being the son of a farmer, they were like, you need to work on the farm. And there are some people that think he purposely he was clearly smart enough to do this, but purposely failed at it. So he didn't have to do it. Yeah, because he was really into book learning. So that makes sense to me. He did continue his education because he wasn't farming. Went on to Cambridge, but had to act as a valid to wealthy students for a little while. Yeah. He just paid way through basically what we would consider undergraduate school. Yeah. And then he got a scholarship, which allowed him to continue through his graduate studies. But all that didn't happen in, like, some smooth things. So he went to school first. His mom came back for him, took him out of school, tried to set him up as a farmer. He failed at that. Ended up going to Cambridge, working his way, working to pay his own way through. Why, though? If they had money, did they not want to pay for school, I wonder? I think maybe his mom wasn't happy about it or something. I'm not sure, because that's the only thing I couldn't figure out. Because she did have money, for sure. But he had to pay his own way through Cambridge, at least undergrad. And while he was there as an undergrad truck, he pursued his own studies. Yeah. He basically got a syllabus each quarter, tore it up and said, you guys don't know this yet, but I'm Isaac Newton, and I'm going to invent a great figgy cookie and a lot of other great stuff. That is a great figgy cookie. So he basically failed out almost educating himself. But there was a man named Isaac Barrow who was the Lucasian Chair professor, and he took a notice of Newton and said, I think there's a little more to this kid than appears to meet the eye. He was the Robin Williams to Newton's. Matt Damon. Precisely. Precisely. Except Damon was a custodian and Newton was an actual student. But he did clean rooms, too. Yeah. So there is a pretty deep parallel there. How about that? So Newton got his hands on something by the guy who came up with the Mercator projection I can't remember his first name, and basically took this book and expounded on it. And it was just mind blowing stuff that he did. And he did it as, like, a 21, 22 year old crazy. And Barrow got his hands on it and said, you need to stick around. So he ended up getting him basically a four year scholarship for postgraduate studies. Yeah. And not only that, but for various reasons, which we'll get into here and there, newton was reluctant to publish a lot of times, and Barrow was the one that really helped him say, like, you need to get this out there. This is great stuff. You've got Matt Damon. Yes. Like, you know what kind of movies you're going to be in after this. Yeah. You're going to be Private Ryan. Yeah. You're going to be Jason Bourne and the martian. Sure. You can't think of any other Matt David movie? Scam? Sure, of course. Oh, you're going to be the scoundrel in The Departed. Yeah. Great movie. It is. I thought Jack really overdid it in that one. Oh, I loved it. Although, dude, I'll tell you something, another movie I saw recently was The Shining. Yeah. I didn't see it recently because I see The Shining probably every three months. Yeah, I saw it again recently. I think that that might be the best movie ever made. It's pretty great. No joke. I really think The Shining might be at least my favorite movie of all time. Kubrick. He can set a mood. It is so good. Yeah. And you can watch it. I can watch it any time. Yeah, me, too. Any time of year. Any time of day. Any day of the week. Christmas morning. Watch the shine. Exactly. And I'll enjoy it just as much as I would on Halloween or something. It's my honeymoon night. Let's watch the shining. All right. All the normal times. Sure. Well, actually, not. Eventually, he was forced to leave Cambridge for a little while because the bubonic plague swathed through London to the tune of about 100,000 people dead in six months. That's quick. So they closed Cambridge and said, Everyone goes home. He went home and everyone go home to London. Get out of London. He went home and had what they call later a year of miracles, the Anus Mirabilis. And it was a little bit mythical and that supposedly he came up with all the great stuff of his career in this one year. Right. Probably played up for the newspapers or for his own reputation of the page, because in reality, he did come up with a lot of great stuff, but he clearly didn't come up with everything in that year. He might have started a lot of good conversations in his head about things. Right. But it was a little trumped up that it was the year of miracles. So probably, like you said, there were some things I'm sure that he thought of during this year, but he loved it. Again, he placed his entire career in this one year, including the apple falling from the tree. Should we go and cover that? Sure. Did it happen? Probably not. And even if it did not, historians are like, that is a fairy tale on its face. You can tell it's a fairy tale. But Newton himself was like, oh, no, this happened. This is really true. This is where the theory of gravitational force sure came from. Yeah. Like, he was laying on the ground, supposedly looking up at the moon, wondering how's that thing just sitting up there. It's spin off into space. Yes. Apple falls. And he puts it all together. Sounds kind of unbelievable. It sounds like folklore to me. It does. But again, he promoted this story, definitely for somebody who was just a hare's breath away from being shut in. And there was a D in there. It was breath. Not breath. I know the difference. He didn't have virtually any friends. He had not one, but two nervous breakdowns in his lifetime. Very insecure. He was also like an astute self promoter. Yeah. He had a lot of contradictory sort of traits, I think, for sure. So as we said earlier, he was very much noted for his precision with notes and experimentation with the averaging of data and what else? The scientific method, of course, putting these things into place. Yeah, the scientific method was already around and come up with the scientific method, but he definitely refined it and created the scientific method as we recognize it today. Under ideal scientific inquiry, when the scientist today follows that scientific procedure, what he's doing, basically, or she is following in Newton's footsteps. Yeah. Like, Newton took this thing and said, here's the best way to do this. You make some observations. From these observations, you come up with a theory, and then you figure out an experiment to test that theory. And then you either discard the theory or you test it again until the theory becomes basically, for all intents and purposes, proven. And like you said, as a result, after this, coming up with it, when he laid this stuff down in his principia mathematica, which is his big not his life's work, but his biggest published work as far as being widely accepted and remarkable and game changing. Yes, universe changing, quite literally, or at least it changed our understanding of the universe. When he laid all this stuff down, it wasn't like you could just say it is because God wills it anymore. It was like, here is the framework for science from here on out. Right. All of this this is the best practice, and there's math behind all of it. And that was another thing, too. So let's talk about you want to talk about this principia mathematica? Well, yeah, I mean, there was just a little thing in there called the three laws of motion. No biggie for physics at all. Right. So there's inertia a body that is at rest, tends to stay at rest, acceleration, which means things go super fast sometimes when they're falling, and action and reaction, which is the cue ball theory. Yeah. And while he didn't completely invent those, galileo started a lot of that talk, a lot of that Jubber jabber. Right. But Newton really solidified it all. And it's remarkable to think that all these years later, that's still the thing. Well, he solidified it. What Galileo did was he said, I've observed this, and it seems to be universally applicable, right. That if a ball is sitting there on a table and nothing's moving it, no wind is blowing, there's no force acting upon it, it's not going to spontaneously move. And people went, Galileo, that's amazing. Can you explain why? And Galileo was like, no. Newton came along, and he said, I can explain why. Right. And he added a third law of motion to that. And the whole point was, he figured out that everything that has mass has some sort of force acting upon it. Right. And as a result, also can exert force on other bodies that have mass. And what he figured out that force was or that magical thing was gravity. Universal gravitation. Right. Which his law of universal gravitation, which is also in the principia. And again, I don't think you can overstate this, Chuck. Yeah. People knew that the Moon went around the Earth and that it was somehow adhered to the Earth. Right. But they didn't really know why. And out of nowhere, no one before him had ever suggested maybe it's a thing called gravity. Newton, his perspective of the universe gave us the idea of gravity. It wasn't there before. Newton. It's amazing. It was there because of Newton. It's here now. Yeah. Like, that's a huge contribution. Just that alone. And he's not one of these scientists. It's like a 7th century scientist said this, and he was close, but it turns out he was wrong in every way. But it was a good start. Although Einstein did go on to change and not adapt. Well, I guess he adapted, but Newton was wrong in some cases. But some of these laws are still spot on. Right. And this is like the mid to late 1600s. Yeah, it's amazing. Our understanding of gravity has been refined tremendously by Einstein and the idea of relativity and quantum mechanics and all that, but for what Newton was doing yes. He explained the universe. He was the OG. He was he was the first person to say, you know what? This white light you see isn't actually white. It's actually a spectrum of colors. And everyone is like, what? He did this as a student, and he said, Watch this. And he got out of prism, and bam. And everyone went, Whoa. He got out of prison prism. Oh, I got you. Yeah. And then we had the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. So you can thank Newton for that as well. That's right. And he published that in 17 four, which is way after he experimented with prisms because he was reluctant to publish things a lot. So let's talk about it. That was published in Optics with a CK. Yeah. Like magic. I guess they dropped magic. Yeah. Sometimes magic is spelled with a king. It's like the real thing got you. So let's talk about that, Chuck. He published Optics in 17 four, but he was doing these experiments in, like, the he didn't publish this stuff, in part because he could not handle being challenged or criticized. No, he didn't like that. He did not like it, and he got into it a lot. Like, part of the scientific revolution that was going on was that scientists around the world, at least in. The west. We're arguing with one another. We're picking apart one another's theories. We're corresponding with one another about ideas and sharing all these thoughts. But a lot of it was contentious. And Newton's first nervous breakdown came because Robert Hook said that he stole some of his ideas, and then they had it out in the journals, through letters, back and forth through their whole life. Yeah. And then the Jesuits didn't accuse him of stealing any of their ideas, but he was corresponding with the monastery, and they were like, we like your thoughts, but we think your experiment might be slightly flawed. And he went for jerk. He's like, what? Yeah, and then he had a nervous breakdown, which was finally completed in 69, I believe. 79. I'm sorry. With the death of his mother. Yeah. So he was doing experiments. He started to kind of come out with them publicly. They were challenged and questioned. He went berserk. Yeah. It probably stems from his rejection from childhood, of course. That's what I would guess. He withdrew and then throughout the didn't do any kind of publishing or research. Yeah. It kind of went dark. Yeah. Then his mom dies, and then he finally comes back out of it, thanks to the help of Isaac Barrow, and then later on, other colleagues, like Edmund Haley. Yeah. Of Haley's comments. And then finally publishes. But if you notice the date of the publication of Optics, that comes after Robert Hook, who is his lifelong archnemesis, has died. That's right. And they never worked it out. There wasn't some. Like Levon Helm robbie Robertson deathbed. Hey, I still love you, man. Right. Like, they booning they died no, come on. They died. Bitter rivals. Yeah. Newton and Hook. I know. A band reference is probably lost on most people. Just Google it. Google the band. Yeah. And there's also, like, 100 dudes that are like, yes, what a reference. What else did he do? How about a little something called the reflecting telescope? Yeah, that's a big one. Back in the day, refracting telescopes were all their age, but you couldn't really focus that well on them, which is sort of key with the telescope. They'd be like, Is that a star? Yeah, sure. Let's call it a Stark and let's name it after me, but these mirrors he said, you know what, dudes? Let's use lenses. It can be about 112 to size and in focus. Boom. And all of a sudden, like, if you drop the average size of a telescope down, that would have been good enough. Yeah. Even if it's still yeah, but he actually improved it as well. That's right. And that got him into the Royal Academy when he presented it at the urging of Barrow. Again, I think that was Barrow that actually did the presenting. Oh, he did? Yeah. But he said, It's this guy. And Newton just stood off to the side. This was the guy to my left with his security blanket around his shoulders. He had his wooby. And he also created a little something that I hate called calculus. Don't even hate calculus because I am that unfamiliar with it. Yes. I had to take a calculus class, and I wasn't good at it. The remarkable thing is he created calculus because the limits of geometry, he was like, we need more higher level of math to figure this out. And I'm going to invent it. Not to figure it out. To explain. Yes. To make sense of what he figured out. Yeah. So his calculations great with things in motion, geometry isn't. And he was all about well, not all about he was keen on things in motion. Yeah. Well, you kind of needed them. Like, you could say, well, an ellipse. You can describe it geometrically, but you can't really describe an orbit of something. It's motion in an ellipse just through normal geometry. So I'll just invent a super sized version of geometry to help explain my discoveries. Yeah, it wasn't called calculus, though. It was called the Fluxians, which I think we should bring back. Totally bring it back. Yeah, everyone should call it the Fluxians. Might as well. I refer to calculus. So infrequently that I can just call it the fluxing, and people be like, what does that mean? Yeah, I'll say look it up. All right, let's take a break here, and we will get into the later years of Newton's life when things got a little weird. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes. 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Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. All right, so we mention his lifelong rivalry with Robert Hook. Not the pirate. Not the pirate. Was there a pirate named Robert Hooke? Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Was it Robert? I don't know. He didn't have any on there. No. I want to say it's. James Hook, I think. James Hook. I think you're right. So not the pirate he also had a rivalry with well, he had arrived with many scientists, but another dude who claimed he invented calculus. Oh, Leebenz. Yeah, leebenz. So that's a weird story, the story of calculus, who invented calculus. Because, think about it. People don't invent new, more refined forms of math every day, do they? Well, no, they don't. They think they might not even say, well, when they come down off the acid, they realize that it's all just chickens cracks. Right. And get this tinfoil hat off my head. So when not only Newton said that he created calculus, leibn said that he did as well. Within a decade or so of each other, there was quite a bit of hubbub over who actually created calculus. And to make the whole thing even more murky, they had corresponded with one another about the ideas of calculus. Yeah. And scientists aren't not all scientists, so please don't write in and say, I'm not like that. But scientists, a lot of times in history, some of the more notable scientists aren't big on being like, yeah, we totally help each other. It's usually like, no, I invented that. Right. Because that's their legacy, I think, that they're fighting, for sure, and sometimes it's definitely pride themselves on their legacy. And Newton was probably one of them. Yeah, and big money. He and Lebenz had this ongoing dispute, and they had their supporters as well, who disputed and it wasn't just Lebenz versus Newton who created calculus. It was also the Isles versus the Continent, the Catholics versus the Protestant. There were a lot more divisions to it than just these two men. But from what I can gather, historians now believe that Lebens and Newton independently develop calculus on their own. Really? Is that the modern way of thinking? Yeah. Newton probably beat his note suggests that he came up with calculus before Lebenz, but that Lebenz came up with it on his own as well. Okay. Wow. That's pretty remarkable. It is. It's almost like a soccer score. Everybody wins. He also in the dark years we talked about, when he sort of fell off the radar and wasn't publishing much. That's when he was getting into the alchemy, which we said ranges. What it really was was sort of a precursor to chemistry in some ways. And now we look back on it with a little more understanding. At the time, though, it was illegal up until, like, I think about his birth, right before his birth, it was actually illegal because it was, I guess, one of the dark arts or something. Yeah. And they were burning people at the stake for practicing alchemy. Right. Which, again, at the time, it was a little fruity, but it wasn't so much so that science wasn't necessarily so close to the concept of mystical truths as it is today. Right. So you could conceivably be involved in scientific inquiry and find yourself going down this alley of alchemy. Even still, Newton was like, this would be bad for my name, and I might be fired if they found out that I was into alchemy. So he kept it close to guarded secret. Yeah. Not only did he, but his family, after his death, kind of kept that stuff quiet for a while. Right. I think it was the early 1990s when all of his works were finally published, and they were like, whoa, this guy was really all over the place out there. We also mentioned earlier, briefly, that he thought that alchemy was like an ancient riddle, and it was up to him and other up to him jehovah sanctus unes yes. To figure it out. And the answer is out there. And he's won in a line of great men chosen to do so. It's a little screwy at this point, right? Or am I being cold? He believed in the Philosopher Stone. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him having a scientific mind that was open to all sorts of stuff. And again, this is the 17th century, so let's cut him some slack. Yeah. But he did believe in the Philosopher's Stone, which is thought to aid in alchemy, cure disease, and some think or thought that the key to eternal life was in the software stone. Philosopher Stone. Sorry. Right. That's a whole different thing. A little different. And Chuck, not only was he into alchemy and mysticism as well, he also was very much into obscure Christian stuff, too. Yeah. So, like, one of his pursuits that he amused himself with on the side was chronology. He believed the Bible was a literal history of the world and that the prophecies in the Bible were directly from God, who could see to the end of time and knew everything that was going to happen already. Right. So everything in the Bible, he called a history of future events. Basically, that's a better name. And so his whole thing was, if you can go back now that we understand timekeeping better and astronomy, you could go back and sync things that happen in the Bible to current astronomical dates. You can put a current date on them. So you could say when this happened, when the walls of Jericho actually fell, because he believed all this stuff happened, or when something might happen in the future. Exactly. And apparently he did just that. He interpreted this one section of the Bible about the end of the world coming, and he dated it to 2060 coming up. We'll see. So I read a little blurb from a scholar on Newton who said, like, this is something he did to amuse himself in private. It was never meant for public consumption, but he probably would have believed that he got that date. Right. Oh, really? Yeah, he worried about getting dates wrong and didn't think that people should mess around with stuff like that because you are fallible in setting dates like that. Which is probably why he never meant it for publication. But he probably thought he was right and that had he lived in 2060, he would have seen the end of the world. He also dabbled in something called Arianism, which has nothing to do with white people. It was actually a priest named Arius from Libya. He a Libyan priest who came up with this. And the idea is that the Holy Trinity, father, Son, Holy Spirit and Christian theology, it disrupted that and said that Jesus may have been created by God, but he is not divine. If you believe in Arianism, that's what you believe. Right. And Newton was an inherent of Arianism, which wasn't super popular at the time, forever, probably. It was basically stamped out by the 7th century. And here's Newton in the 17th and 18th century. He's a holdover. Yeah. He's like, oh, this makes a lot of sense to me. What an obscure, arcane thing to think of. And he got into religion in college, actually. Another weird thing to do, even at that time. Yeah. That's when you get out of religion. Sure. That's when you start to question things. Right. That's when he got into it. Apparently one of the first things that he did, he was a bit of a prude. One of the first things he did was write down a list of every Cinna ever committed. Yeah. And they weren't exactly groundbreaking. Like Silverman points out that one of them was he broke the Sabbath by baking pies one Sunday. How dare he? Like, this is the kind of sins that he's like. He also said he wanted to burn his mother and stepfather alive in their home, which was one of the things he recorded. So he did have a darker side. Did he really? Oh, yeah. Oh, he really did. Yeah. That wasn't a joke. Oh, I thought I was like that was a weird joke. No, he had quite a rain from baking pies to burning his parents alive. Like just wanting to though, right? Yeah. Okay. He didn't make an attempt to right now. No, the sin was threatening to or wanting to. I'm not sure if he got you verbalized it or if he just bought it in his head. Yeah. But he was a rejected little kid who wouldn't want to. So we were talking about Arianism, though. There's a very heretical thought that Jesus isn't divine, but that you should still worship him. Right? Yeah. It was a very unusual line of thinking. Right. And like, critics of that kind of thinking say, well, that worships, that creates polytheism because you're worshiping God, but you're also worshiping Jesus who's not divine. You are wrong, wrong, wrong. And the Council of Nassia, which was a learning council that basically decided what went into the Bible in the fourth century, said, no, the Trinity is absolutely correct and anything against that is heresy. Right. And you should be burned at the state. So even that, I get the impression that his fellow Dawns at Cambridge knew that he was into Arianism, or if they didn't, they may have suspected that he had unorthodox beliefs about Christianity, and so that just created an even wider gulf between him and the people who he saw on a daily basis. Well, he definitely thought that Catholicism and some other branches of major religions were very corrupt and not to be trusted. Yeah, he's an odd guy. We can't get that across enough later in life. But he did not sit on his laurels later in life, he accepted a position at the Mint, and apparently that sort of sounds like the old, I'm going to retire as a CEO and work as a consultant. Like, I'll make more money than I did ever before. Right. For not doing much work. Yeah. Apparently that was the deal with the Mint. You got appointed later on in your life to the Mint and you kind of just made a lot of dough and didn't do much. He was like, no, I'm going to actually do something. He, like, three years later, became Master of the Mint, and he is the one responsible for changing the English pound standard from sterling to gold. Is that right? Yes, he was actually trying to get things done and he went after counterfeiters. Went after counterfeiters. Pretty interesting. Yeah, not bad. He was also, later in life, elected the President of the Royal Society of London, which is the Academy of Sciences in the UK. He was a member of Parliament. He was elected to Parliament, yes, he was twice. And actually, he was knighted in 17 five, and the Queen apparently knighted him for political reasons. She wanted to help. He was standing for Parliament again and she wanted to help his chances of being elected. So she knighted him not for his scientific achievements. Interesting. But because of the election of 17 five, it didn't help. He still didn't unseat the guy that she wanted out of office. Right. But he got knighted anyway. Good for him. Yeah. What a complex dude. Yeah. There's a T shirt, just a picture of him, complex dude underneath, and we didn't really talk quite enough about it, but he definitely stole people's ideas in certain ways. There's a guy named John Flamsteed, and Newton used a lot of his work to help form the basis of his theory of universal gravitation, and Flamstead, I guess, rubbed Newton the wrong way and Newton just removed any reference to Flamstead in the second edition of the Principia. I think all scientists build on the backs of those who came before them, but it would be cool to say, like, and this would not have been possible without the work of Lam Steed. Right. Not like, you know what? Let's redact that and take his name out of there because I mean jerky. I don't like how it's spelled. Yeah. We'll end with his epitaph, though, because it definitely gets the point across. I think correctly. His epitaph says, mortals rejoice. It's so great. An ornament to the human race. Wow. I thought it was business in front, party in the rear. He invented the mullet. Are you ready? I'm ready. If you want to know more about Isaac Newton, type those words into the search bar@housedefour.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this don't yuck someone's yum. Hey, guys. After listening for years, love you guys. Your Christmas episode had me yelling at my iPhone and I decided I need to send a note. You were both adamant about never even trying fruitcake and then went on to insult it with open barrels. I probably would have agreed with you three weeks ago because I also never touched a fruitcake or eaten one. However, last week I finally looked at the ingredients, was amazed. Sugar, molasses, ginger, fruit loaded with rum. There is rum in the batter and when done baking, you actually drizzle with more rum, wrap it in cheese sauce to soak it in even more with rum. The only bad thing I can figure out about fruitcake is that this particular recipe needs to sit and rum for ten weeks before eating. Wow. So just because you have not tried fruitcake, you shouldn't be such naysayers. Give fruitcake a break. My nephew has several rules, and rule number four is don't yuck someone's yum. You know, that's absolutely true. We were total yum yuckers. Yeah. And as soon as I read this, I was like, man, I was a yum yucker. I need to try fruitcake. Apparently there's this thing going on where Slate was like, beer has too much hops in it. What's the deal? I've seen a lot of it. Somebody did a take down of it that went viral that was like, what is it to you if you don't like hops and you're beer drinking different kinds of beer? Why do you have to publish an article about how you don't like hops at the same time? It's like, really? Is that taking away from your enjoyment of your hoppy beer to know that somebody at Slate doesn't like it? I think what I've heard the complaint of, and this is on the stuff you should know, message board and otherwise, is that nonhops enthusiasts are aggravated that the craft beer movement these days is way too hoppy and it's hard to find things other than pale ales and IPAs. But that's not true. There's plenty of craft beers out there that aren't IPAs. Seems to be that way. A lot of IPAs, but it seems like a lot of people love them. That's probably where they're making them, right? Like, I can't stand barley wines, but you don't hear me saying I can't stand barley wines, right? They're disgusting, much less takes the time to write an article about it. Yeah, who cares? Yeah, I guess I'm conflicted about all this. Both sides are wrong. Big shout out to our friends at Creature Comforts in Athens and their delicious tropicalia, which made, I think, their brewery was one of the top five best new breweries, according to Maybe Forbes, some big magazine. And a huge shout out to the Bowler Beer Company, who sent us a bunch of huge bombers that were awesome. I gave the barley wine one to Noelle, by the way. Oh, really? He just soaked his beard in it and let it seep in. Yes. And while we're talking about free booze, I was lucky enough to take home the shaker and spoon box that got sent to us. What's that? It's like Blue Apron, but for cocktails. They send you everything but the booze, including, like, a zestr. I needed a zester. Like, all the different kinds of demerra syrup and everything you need, plus cocktail recipes. You've been enjoying it. It's already long gone. Enjoyed. Got you. They were great. It's just like, add bourbon and follow the recipes, but they're like really sophisticated, smart recipes that you may never try that are, like, all the ingredients you need and easy instructions. So it was good. And the guy said, I think his name is Mike he said, if you and Jerry wanted a box, we would totally hook you up. I strongly recommend it. Yes, there were more than one tincture in the box. And to follow up, this is the longest listing mail ever on the Boulder Beer Company. Your hoodie T shirt that you sent me is one of my favorite new shirts. Yes. I wear it all the time. Yes, he does. All right, hold on. We might as well thank Littered Sweets for the nice catch. And thank you very much to Mona Collins and her family for sending the box, the annual Box of Christmas Goodies, the precursor to our administrative oh, and thank you to the Heck. They sent us, like, a bunch of caraba's gift certificates that we're going to use for lunch. Oh, really? Yes, and a bunch of other stuff, too. But, I mean, they send us a significant amount of caraba's gift certificate. You got this in your wallet? Yes, I got them tucked in my cheek. So that is from Carolyn from New York and her nephew. We didn't mean to yuck the yum. Yes, you're right. Nephew. Yes. Sometimes kids can set adults straight. Yeah, just don't do it much or you'll get the old belt. Just kidding. If you want to get in touch with us to send us stuff, to send us an email to take us task, who cares? You can send us an email to stuff podcast@householdworks.com. You can join us on Facebook.com, stuffychnow. You can tweet to us at syskpod. And you can hang out with us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.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 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, learned Moore@halopets.com." | ||
How Dying Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-dying-works | Chuck and Josh have covered just about every aspect of death except dying itself. Here, they fulfill the death suite of podcasts with an in-depth look at just how people die, what happens to the body during the dying process and how people accept death -- | Chuck and Josh have covered just about every aspect of death except dying itself. Here, they fulfill the death suite of podcasts with an in-depth look at just how people die, what happens to the body during the dying process and how people accept death -- | Thu, 19 Sep 2013 21:38:54 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=21, tm_min=38, tm_sec=54, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=262, tm_isdst=0) | 61180096 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles, debbie. Chuck Bryant. How you doing? Hey. And Jerry's over there, jerry, for the first time, just saw a meme that's been out for a couple of years. Yeah, that's like when you rick rolled me, like, two years after it was popular. You're like, Isn't that the best? Well, I was lying in wait. Yeah, I bet that happened, so and there's nothing more obnoxious than sending someone something two years ago. Well, I'm so sorry. I tried to show you something funny, right. But yeah, jerry just saw the do we even say the mummy mouth reporter, maybe? Yeah, the lady who supposedly had a migraine but appeared to have a stroke, reporting from the Grammys in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Yeah, I still don't know whether it's okay to laugh at that, because I don't know, really, what happened to her. Well, we didn't laugh. We very solemnly showed jerry yeah, and she laughed terrible. Jerry, gerry station. I've got one for you. Okay. I've got a bit of an intro. It's not much, so get your hopes up. All right. Have you ever heard of the Population Reference Bureau? No. You have? Because I've mentioned it before. I've mentioned this article before. It's on Prb.org. It's called how many people have ever lived on Earth? Okay. And I don't know what we mentioned it in maybe the Population episode or something, but it's a really cool little article by this demographer named Carl Haub Haub. And there's even a video of him explaining it if he couldn't get what he was going with. But Hobb, he reckons that modern humans, people who are virtually indistinguishable from you or me, aside from the fact that they're not wearing, like, any clothes, really sure showed up about 520 years ago. Okay, so Hobb puts the population of humanity at two in 50,000 BCE. Okay. Yeah. So from that point to 2011, he extrapolates, does the math, does a little demography thing, and Hobb comes up with the number that 107,602,707,791 people have ever lived between 50,000 BC and 2011 Ce. That's pretty neat. It is. It's a lot of people. He says that means about 6.5% of that are alive right now. Or we're in 2011. All right, so we're dying off. Yeah, that's the point. All 107,602,707,791 of those people had one thing in common. One thing aside from being humans. Taxes. No, not even pre tax. Yeah, they didn't have tax. And 50,000 BC. They had running from sabertooth tigers and death. Death. It was death. That's the one thing all 107,602,707,791 of those people had in common. You know, when I was thinking of your intro driving here today, I thought, that'd be funny if Josh was like, how long people been dying, Chuck? And you know what? This wasn't that far off. Nice. I was like, he wouldn't do that. You're like, that'd be way too boring. What a stupid way to oh, that's a good number. I like that. 107,602,701,000 7791. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And that includes you and me, pal. You know what that means? You're going to die. I'm going to die. Jerry's going to die. At least two or three times. We're all going to die. Yeah. This is our dying podcast, and we have covered just about every aspect of dying can you die from a broken heart? How rigor mortis works. What's the worst way to die? Is there a best way to die? Did we do that? That was kind of in the is there was a way to die? Yeah, we've covered everything from autopsies, peak oil, what can be done with the dead body? Ninjas. Yeah. Well, ninja, at least. You should know better than that. Yeah. We really have danced around everything except just how dying works. And this is going to be a sad podcast in many ways and gruesome in some ways because we're going to touch on some of the stuff we hit on in, like, rigor mortis and autopsies and the actual dying process. Right. But, I mean, so brace yourself. And I've mentioned this guy scores of times at least, but as the no, it's Charles Manuel thinking of okay. The great psychologist Ernest Becker. Shout out to our pal Joe Randazzo, who's, like, in the Becker now, isn't it Ernst, or is it Earnest Ernest? Okay. You're thinking of Max Ernst. Okay. Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death, seminal work that basically says we're all just doing everything we can to think about our own demise. And there is some sort of health, whether it's spiritual, emotional, there's some sort of health or wellbeing, I think from facing the fact that you're going to die sure. And talking about it. Yeah. So let's talk about death, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's do it. Okay. So Molly Edmunds, who used to be on Smithy Stephan, never told you we call it Smithy. Sure. Wrote this one. And I think it is interesting, and I usually don't like it when articles say, like, the definition of blah, blah, blah, but it's kind of interesting that in the first encyclopedia, it was just the separation of the soul from the body, and now it's 30 times that long in the encyclopedia. Right. And that's just sort of indicative of how we used to think of it and how I don't know if it's ironic or not, but how medical science has complicated that over the years. Yeah, well, it's definitely ironic because we used to be confident that we understood death. It's like that person isn't moving anymore. If you ask him what he wants to eat, he's not going to respond. If you choose something for him to eat, like a block of cheese, it's not going to be swallowed. That's death. And since there was perhaps a lot more religiousness associated with death, and dying than there is today. That kind of underscored the belief in death. It's the soul departing from the body. And what more do you want to know, egghead? It's death. Well, yeah. And way back a few hundred years ago, you'd call in a priest and they check the body, see if it's breathing, and say, yes, they're dead. And that was pretty much it. The doctor wasn't even involved at that point. Well, there may not have even been such a thing as doctors, and if there were, they were wearing, like, masks that made them look like crows to protect them from the plague. So they weren't any better at ascertaining death than a priest was. That's true. When doctors did come along and they invented things like the stethoscope, they could actually check and see if there was a heartbeat. Before that, there was bowel force test, which I couldn't find out a lot about this other than you stick needles into the heart with little flags on it and see if the flags move. I think that's pretty straightforward. Really? Yeah, I think that's about it. Okay. The test. I'll buy that. And there were other tests that, like, a priest who may have come to say whether you were dead or not, would use, like placing a feather above the mouth or around the mouth or nose to see if it moves. The old mirror mirror trick. Yeah. That's still useful. It is, but only if the mouth is still moist. If it's a dried mouth, it's probably not going to fog up a mirror. Well, if it's not breathing, it's not going to fuck up a beer. Right, exactly. So I said that medical science is complicated. It and that's exactly what's happened over the years, because as we progressed with medicine, we discovered a lot of ways to actually reverse death, like bring people back from the dead, whether it's something as easy as CPR or as complicated as machines to help you breathe and feed you. Right. And not only that, we've entered this really awkward period in human medical history where the machines that can tell us whether someone is alive or not are more advanced than our machines that can bring a person back from death. Yeah. So we have ways to sustain the body. Yeah, I see what you mean. But not necessarily the person, depending on your definition of death. Yeah. Like the faintest trace of a brain wave, maybe. Right. Yeah. So we went from holding a feather under somebody's mouth or nose to see if they're alive, too, using the MRI to see whether there's electrical activity. And we're finding that all of these old signs, these old outward signs of death don't necessarily mean that the person is dead. And even if the person is dead, we have technology, like you were saying, to resuscitate them. The question is, if we resuscitate them and they're still not talking, they still don't tell you what they want to eat. Are they alive? Well, yeah. This hasn't been that long. In the 52,000 years or whatever that people have been dying, it's only been the past 60 something that we've had to come up with terms like persistent vegetative state and irreversible coma because of those machines that can resist or sustain a body. In 1958, that was when a French neurologist described the coma deposit, which was a state beyond coma, basically brain death. Although that didn't come along until technically until 1968, when Harvard Medical School basically defined it for the first time. Although they didn't call it brain death at the time. What did they call it? Just irreversible coma, like, you're not coming back. Got you. Brain death was kind of tagged on later. So yeah. So coma, DePass, persistent vegetative state, brain death, all of these things would indicate again that you're dead. The problem is we have these machines that can keep your body warm and keep your chest rising and falling, can keep your body going indefinitely. But the thing is, there's something that's not there. And does that mean you're dead? There's been a lot of talk about exactly what constitutes death. Defining death is a very difficult thing to do, especially with through the advancement of medical technology. It's kind of changed every time you come up with a okay, I got it. This is the definition of death. Right. Medical technology can provide some picture of a state of consciousness or life that throws a wrench in the works. Actually, after 1968, it took until 1981. A presidential commission is when they finally, in the United States, wrote a paper called defining Death medical, Legal, and Ethical Issues and the Determination of Death. That was the basis for the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which basically rejected the Harvard idea that the higher brain, which is like, when your personality and your memories are gone, the cortical brain, that means you're dead. And they rejected that in favor of the whole brain, which includes the brain stem, which is what keeps you breathing and functioning, they reject it in favor of that. So Harvard was like, right? I don't know. I think I subscribed to the higher brain death. The definition of death? Yeah. The brain stem. Yeah. It's pretty significant. Sure. You can be born with just a brain stem. We talked about Mike the headless chicken before. Yeah. He had his head cut off, which included his brain, but his brain stem was still there, and he's a chicken, so it didn't really matter. But there's a huge division between the two because there's a big difference between breathing and being able to swallow for yourself and making a conscious decision whether, again, what you want to eat right then yeah. Or having memories or just reacting to people, aside from physical reaction to stimulus. Yeah. And that's one of the there's a whole article on brain death. Maybe we'll do that one I thought we did that now. I think we did it in the Oregon donation procurement episode. We talked about brain death and testing for brain death. Like they shoot ice cold water in your ear canal. Definitely remember covering at some point how yeah, I think it was in the organ donation. Or maybe living wills. Obviously, we might have touched on it. Did you do that one? We did. Well, we did wills, but we hit on living wells. Okay, but you mentioned organs. I don't think we said that. That was a big kind of a quandary in the late I'm sorry, mid 1950s and then really in the 1960s is when we went organ transplant crazy, actually, kind of not just the United States, all over the world, doctors said, hey, we can actually give people a shot at life because we can now transplant kidneys and lungs and hearts. The problem was, and this is sort of one of the sad things that Molly points out is that the definition of death kind of came about, was hurried along, maybe because we needed organs from these bodies exactly. That were still technically alive, which is very ghoulish proposition. I mean, it makes sense from a very utilitarian standpoint. It's like this guy doesn't even know he's laying there. Yeah. And he's got a great kidney that could go to his sister, who knows that she needs a kidney, she's going to die, and she's got kids that she wants to hang out with and can put this kidney to good use. So let's figure this out. But as Molly says, most developed countries have signed on to the brain stem, where it's like your brain can no longer keep you alive on your own. You can't swallow, you can't take a breath for yourself, so you're dead. The problem is that's different. It's a narrower definition of death, I guess, and I think that probably rules out a lot of people who might otherwise be used to harvest organs. Yeah, harvest, I know. All right, so let's talk about death itself. It's funny that you well, it's not funny, but out of all the different ways people can die, I thought it seems simplified to break it down into three ways, but that's really kind of the three ways. Yeah. I think we talked about that in Autopsies, too, right? Yeah. It can be an accident, obviously. That's called the motor death. Yeah, the violent death, which is also an oopsie, I guess. Well, not an oopsie. No. It's tragic homicide or suicide. So, Chuck, let's talk about what it's like to die from different types of death. You dug this up. Yeah, because I really wanted to know, what is it like to drown or to be burned alive? Yeah. And people have survived some of these things and come back to tell the tale that's obviously the only way we're going to find this stuff out are from lucky people drowning. I've always heard drowning is a good way to go because it's not so painful. Yeah. Like the brain supposedly releases endorphins at the end. Yeah. Same with freezing, I've heard, too. Maybe true. Although drowning victims have reported, aside from the panic, a tearing and burning sensation when your water starts filling with lungs, and quickly, hopefully really quickly after that, is the feeling of calmness that overcomes and tranquility. Yeah. A heart attack. You got the squeezing pain in your chest or your left arm. Yes. Like a weight on your chest. Right. What I didn't know is that because of the heart not delivering oxygen to the brain any longer, you can lose consciousness within like, 10 seconds. I didn't realize that. I felt like there was a lot more to it. Well, it depends. Everyone has their own signature heart attack as well. Sure. If you bleed out, I imagine this is not one of the best ways to go. After about a year and a half of blood, you're going to be thirsty and weak and anxious. Anything over two, you're going to be pretty confused and dizzy and probably lose consciousness pretty soon after. And all of that would relate to how fast you're losing blood. Sure. And it would probably be very unpleasant depending on how you're losing blood. Like why? Because you would imagine that if you're stabbed in the gut or something like that, you got the attendant pain in addition to this dying from loss of blood. Yeah. Or like Man Reservoir Dogs. Yeah. Like one of the most hardcore ways to open a movie. Yeah, or not open. But they cut right to that scene after the diner scene, right after the walk. Yeah. Electrocution. If you're in your house and you get electrocuted, it could stop your heart right then and there. And if you're in an electric chair, you may have actually heated your brain up to the point where you die or suffocated to death. Right. But there are indications that being electrocuted with enough voltage got you that instantly you lose consciousness. Right. That's the idea. Probably with the quote unquote humane. I'm sorry? Quote humane, end quote. I'm going to stop doing that. I'm going back to quote unquote. Yeah. What if you fall from a height? If you fall from a height, supposedly time slows, which is awful. It's like, well, you're going to experience all of this. The idea that you really can take it all in, that's really awful. They did a study of jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge, which is 75 meters. What is that, 230, 40ft. It's high enough. And they found evidence that a lot of them died from exploded lungs. Exploded hearts? Their organs were all cut up from their ribs, which would indicate that was pretty much instantaneous. Yeah, we talked about that on something, too, recently, I think, or maybe I heard it someone else talking about it. It's a pretty bad way to go. What the Golden Gate Bridge or just falling down from a height. Yeah. I can't remember who I was talking to about jumping in the water. I was like, what actually kills you when you jump in the water? From the eye. And it was like your organs smash into each other and explode. Yeah. I guess from any height. When you die from that, it'd be from organ explosion or whatever. Yeah. Or the brain, obviously, if you go head first. Hanging. Yeah. The long drop back in the day. Although you can get hung in certain states if you choose. Really? Yeah. Washington State. I know you can. You can choose that as your method, and they'll build you the gallows. And the idea there is you want your neck to snap, otherwise you die slower and suffocate. The problem is there is a study of 34 prisoners that found four fifths of them died partly from asphyxiation. Really? That's the wrong way to hang somebody. If you don't snap their neck or they don't lose consciousness immediately, they sit there and hang and die of asphyxiation. That's a bad way to go. Wow. And speaking of bad, I think being burned to death may be one of the worst. Isn't that what we came up with on the worst way to die? I think so, because you feel it and you'd think, like your nerve endings that's what I thought. Like, oh, your nerve endings are probably, like, stop responding quickly. But apparently that's not the case. No, not only is that not the case, apparently your fire further sensitizes your nerve endings, so you feel even more pain. Wow. Yeah. But luckily, most people I think the vast majority of people who die in fires actually die from smoke inhalation before they ever feel pain. From fire. Yeah. I don't know about before they feel pain, but hopefully quick enough. Well, carbon monoxide sinks, so there's a lot of smoke. You are down low to the ground, and that's where the carbon monoxide is. So you're inhaling mostly that. So it's possible it's before. That's true. And then the natural death, which is passing of old age or disease. And here in this country, we have kind of whipped up a lot of the disease over the years. They sniffed them off the case, right? Well, it depends. Like some of the ones that kill undeveloped countries, like diarrhea, like dying from diarrhea. You don't have that much in the US. But we have chronic disease like obesity and diabetes and cardiopulmonary disease. We have that down pat. I've got the top five here, actually. I think they're all in there, aren't they? Heart is number one. Cancer is number two. Lower respiratory is number three. Stroke is four, and accidents are five. Yeah, and it's a huge drop. Cancer and heart are close to 600,000. And then number three at lower respiratory is only $138,000. So that shows you what cancer and heart disease are doing right. In the United States at least. The upshot of all this is that most of us are not going to die suddenly, either by accident or by violent death. Yet dying of old days didn't used to be a thing. No, it was like a lot of ways to die, but that wasn't one of them. You ticked off some traveling night or there was a dispute over grazing rights. Yeah. You walked into a bear cave. Yeah. The plague is another old ages. It's kind of a new thing, but it's one of the most prevalent forms of death in developed countries. It actually has its own name, frailty. Yeah. Which is great. It's sad, but it's great that now we can live out our lives and we're about to talk about it, but sometimes the body, just like any other machine, just stops working. It's not designed to keep going indefinitely. And ultimately the system shuts down as the subsystems shut down. Dude is shutting down every second. Right. Right now our bodies are shutting down very slowly, and for that reason, because you and I are both dying. I guess once you're born, you start dying. After you stop growing, you start dying. Right. Is that just a positive outlook? But I mean, like, you're shedding cells and we're in the midst of the dying process. Just this natural system is in the winding down, although it takes decades and we still have plenty to do. Like you said, you're dying, I'm dying. Yeah. That's why they have a more specific definition of death, which is called active dying. Like, you and I are not actively dying right now. No. Instead, if we are actively dying, we're in the midst of the dying process. Yeah. It is started. The dying process has started. The descent, if you will, has started. Right. So all this kind of happens since different types of cells die at different speeds. That's what it is. It's cell death. Right. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but oxygen doesn't happen to different parts of the body. Your cells are going to die. Exactly. And so as the cells die at different speeds, different systems are going to shut down. But just from watching frail people die of old age, they kind of have the order in which it happens kind of down path. So there's the pre active dying phase, which can take about three weeks. Starts about three weeks before or death. Two or three weeks. Yeah. And then there's the active dying phase, which can take a few days. And obviously that's not set in stone. None of this is set in stone. But this is all just kind of accumulative knowledge from observations of people dying in, like, hospice and things like that. So you get the pre active phase of dying, and like I said, it starts a couple of weeks ahead of the actual death. Because this is a big deal, right. Now what we're talking about, like, it's becoming very clear in our modern age that death is not an instant. It's not a moment. There's a process. Yeah. Well, unless it isn't an instant, but old age dying. Yes. Or, like, other kinds of dying. But how about non accidental dying? Okay. We'll call it that because that's, like, the instantaneous thing. Right. And even sometimes in a very short scale, that can follow some of these, you know? Yeah. Forgot audio. Yes. I was nodding my head. So the pre active phase of dying. Chuck, what do we got? Well, you're going to get sleepy. You're not going to have much energy. You're going to start sleeping more and more. Your skin might become cooler to the touch, might turn a little bluish gray. Yeah. Cyanosis is what's that called. It's just becoming oxygen deprived. Like, apparently your body is like, okay, don't really need to use the legs anymore because we're bedridden. So I'm going to start focusing more of the circulation on the inner organs. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Well, that probably causes the modeling, too, which is your skin can become sort of like splotchy with reddish blue splotches as well. Right. You're going to be a little restless, probably. Yeah. You're going to possibly come off as confused. You're not going to be hungry. No. You're going to probably withdraw from social activities. You're going to become a little withdrawn. You might want to settle unfinished business with family. You might request family come visit you for that kind of thing. Oh, sure. The non physical parts, that's definitely something you'd be interested in doing. Right. But that's, like, apparently something that people intuitively know. Apparently patients know when they're dying. I've seen that happen. And one of the signs that mentioned in hospice care, palliative care, is that the patient may even state, I'm dying. Yeah. Like I started it's common. That's pretty common. Yeah. And that's sad. That when you realize, like, all right, this is it. I feel myself. I'm going to be gone soon. But that's neat, though. Especially if you have that time. Yeah. If you're like, okay, I'm going to put everything in order. Sure. Then die happy or peacefully. That's neat that you have that time to take care of that. Yeah. If you're fortunate enough to go that way, for sure, back to physically, you won't be able to heal from a wound or an infection any longer. Yeah. You might lose control of your bladder and your bowels over the course of some time. You might be in pain, but chances are here in the modern world, they're going to take care of you in that respect. Right. And again, that's called palliative care, where at some point, it's very obvious that you're going to die, and a lot of it can be based on what you want. Sure. Even without your wishes. There's probably a point in time where medical science says there's nothing we can do for you. We just want to make you comfortable. Exactly. So we're going to give you pain meds. Your care is being transferred over from a physician to who wants to save your life and keep you going to hospice workers, healthcare professionals who are trained to just keep you as comfortable as possible for the duration of your life. Right. Man, hats off to those people. Yes. Like all health care professionals, of course, but, man, hospice nurses, that is tough stuff. You got to be made of the right qualities as a human to be able to tackle something like that and still get up and go to work every day. Like they're literally in the business of dying. Yeah. I mean, very valuable service people provide. So that's the pre active phase. I'm getting ready to die. I got a couple of weeks, and all of my systems are starting to wind down. In the active phase, the systems are starting to shut down. You may not have consciousness, and if you are able to be aroused from unconsciousness, you're going to slip right back into it again, possibly. And apparently families find this very disconcerting. You're probably going to talk about people who are dead as if they're in the room where you can see them or hear them. Yeah, this is the mind flipping. They don't know. Hospice workers, from what I can tell, tend to just treat it like it's real treated on its own terms. They're not saying it's real or it's a hallucination or something like that. And they advise families not to treat it like a hallucination, not to correct them. Yeah, that makes sense, because you're there to provide comfort, not say, no, Grandpa, Grandma's been gone for years. Exactly. Why would you want to do that? There is an exception to that. You would want to do that if they're fearful from their visions, okay. Then you can say it's not real. It's just your brain that's not real, or whatever. Again, all about comfort. Yeah, but you don't want to contradict them if they're happy or even saying it in a neutral tone. It's only if they're fearful that you want to say that. But apparently families are kind of like, oh, God, that sounds crazy. But it's a natural part of the active dying process. Breathing is going to become really weird. The patient's going to stop breathing for disconcertingly, long periods of time. Yeah. This is called Cheney stokes. Respiration stokes. Sorry, cheney Stokes. Name for John Cheney and William Stokes. Obviously the first dudes who described it. Sure. They always get all the press, quick, deep breaths, sometimes very slow ones, like you said, sometimes stopping altogether. And that is caused by receptors in the heart and brain stem basically being too sluggish to respond to different amounts of oxygen and CO2. And it's just kind of lagging behind. Again, think of it as a machine that's just slowing down, and those. Receptors can't pick up on it in time. So it doesn't know how to tell you to breathe. Basically at a steady rate. We should say that there isn't evidence that that is physically painful. True. Again, awful. For the healthy person in the room. Yeah. For the family watching it, you think that the person is suffering. There's not evidence that they are, in fact suffering, but it seems like it. And that, from what I understand, with palliative care, not only making the patient comfortable is one of the priorities. Making the family comfortable is a priority as well, because how you die has a very lasting impact on the people who are there to witness your death for your family. So explaining that they're not suffering is helpful, but not necessarily enough. Yeah. And I think, actually the podcast itself could help some people because I don't think a lot of people do this sort of research when they go into a hospital room in the last hours of a loved one's life. Yeah. And they may not be told, even if it is explained to them, it might not sink in what they're being told, because seeing somebody gasping for breath and then being told that they're not really suffering, those two things might not jibe well. Yeah. Your instinct is to probably try and get help. Like they can't breathe clearly. Let's get a nurse in here. And the nurse is like, no, that's part of it. Yeah. Another one that's very disconcerting. Another sign of active dying is the death rattle. And I did a I guess don't be dumb on death rattles. Oh, really? And basically, either you have fluid in the lungs or when you clear your throat like I just did yeah. That's a normal ability. Until you start dying. You can't clear your throat anymore. Yes. These are your laryngeal muscles. Right. Basically spasming. What, clearing your throat? No, the death rattle. No, the death rattle is just breathing through the myer. It's both. It's either liquid or it's the muscle spasms. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So did you find that that's painful? Because I found that it doesn't cause pain. It sounds terrible again to the people in the room. Exactly. Yeah. And I don't think we pointed out this is the agony phase of death. And it's Greek for struggle and agony. Yeah. That sort of just encapsulates it. I think that's probably why they call it the active phase of death now rather than agonyl. Do they don't even call it that anymore. I think some people do, but I think the active and agony are the same one in the same got you. It's just they're in the agony phase. Right. Or they're in the active face. Your muscles, aside from your vocal cords, might start convulsing and spasming. You can get all perky jerky and do things that wouldn't seem like you should be able to do in your state, like card tricks. I don't know if you could do card tricks, shuffling card tricks from one hand to the other. Grandpa never could before. Yeah, I knew he could get some humor in here somehow. What else? Well, let's see. Your blood pressure is going to drop, your jaw is going to drop. You might end up in a really weird, rigid position. Yeah. I think we said your extremities are going to be cold to the touch. Yeah. Actually, the death rattle, as a result of the spasming of your laryngeal muscles, that can also produce what was described in what I read as a barking sound. Oh, yeah. And I didn't search that out to see if that was recorded anywhere, but I'm curious what that sounds like. I've heard everything from gurgling, like gurgle. It sounds like there's marbles in your throat. Right. Barking. That's a new one. But I think everybody has their own signature death rattle, you know? Yeah, but the rule of thumb, apparently, among hospice workers is once the death rattle comes, it's a sign that they got about 48 hours or less left to live. Yeah. And all of these are tells, really. And all of them and we'll talk about what happens after the body is dead, too. And that helps with finding out in forensics, I think we pointed out plenty of times at the time of death, depending on the various things that happen when they find you, but all of these are almost like markers on a clock. Yeah. And if you're in hospice care, you know these things like, oh, this means this. Well, there are signs and symptoms of the system shut down that the person's body is going through. The senses apparently also are lost in a healthy person or a person who has all five senses they're lost in a certain order. And touch and hearing are the last to go. Oh, really? And another that's kind of nice. Another very important point that hospice workers make is never ever talk about the patient like they're not there because they can hear you up until the end. Like hearing is kept so long as the person could hear before then. There's not any damage from during the active dying period. They can hear you until the moment they die. And you need to be careful what you say. Yeah. And I think that's a really nice thing that the last things that you can experience are the touch of a loved one or the voice of a loved one. Right. She needs to see them. You may not even be able to respond to that, but you can still hear. That's true. I would definitely pick that oversight. I'd rather hear someone's words as I pass rather than having silence and just seeing their faces staring at me, so long as the words are, wait, one more thing. I think it would be almost cruel to be able to see and not hear at the end. Yeah. He wants to see your family upset. You want to feel them hold your hand and say, everything is going to be all right. So you raise a good issue if you have a dying family member, especially if they're dying of frailty or they're just dying like they're in the dying process. So they're about to enter the dying process. Yeah. You could do worse things than to go online and educate yourself on how to be around them. I think people don't intuitively know how to be around a dying person. There are certain things that you should do, certain things you shouldn't do. Like, for example, they say that you should talk to the person, not the condition. So don't treat them like they're frail or dying. Like, treat them like they're your old friend, who they are. It's extremely important to make sure that they're in a peaceful, calm environment. Sure. So maybe yelling at somebody over the will is a really bad idea. These seem like no brainers, but I guess some people need to be told this stuff. Yeah, but I mean, think about it. It can put you on edge being around a dying person. Like, do you mention the fact that they're going to die or do you think that's around it? If they make a joke or something, can you laugh or do you laugh too hard? Do you not laugh enough? I think it's not necessarily like yeah, I think it's just put you on edge. Not everyone is as sensitive, too. I'm going to add one. Don't bring your laptop in there and watch reruns of the office. Yeah. Are you speaking from experience? No, I'm just going to add that. Okay. That's on my list. Okay. Get off your cell phone. Yeah. Pay attention to them. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's what you're there for. As hospice workers put it, you're giving them a very heartfelt gift by being there with them while they're dying and maybe receiving a gift, you know. Sure. In many religions and cultures, it's very much an honor to be a part of this whole thing. And even if you're not religious, you could just feel that way. Spiritually is a human. Okay, well, let's pause here because, Chuck, it's time for a message break. And we're back. Okay. So are we dead yet? Are we at that point? Yeah, the person has passed. You just sounded very cheery. Yeah, well, I mean, like, we rattled off some pretty, what seems like suffering, but now the suffering is over, if there was any. The person is dead. Immediately after you die, your pupils are going to dilate because the muscles controlling the iris are going to have their final rest. So your pupils are going to dilate and then have you heard of the terminal tier or the Lacroma mortise? No. This is usually in the right eye, and there's no real explanation for it, but it is a final tier that you shed. Wow. And it doesn't always happen right after you die, although it can. They did a study in the early 90s in New Zealand, and out of 100 deaths, 14 of them right at the time of death, had the lacromortis here, and 13 of them in the final 10 hours. And they say to look out for that if you're the family, because it can be a sign. And also they try to talk you into the fact that it's a comforting thing to see that Pier being shed. Wow. Yeah. And since we're on eyes, you know the old thing where you close someone's eyes after they die? Yeah. Or you put silver dollars on if it's the Old West. Yeah, I guess people do that, too. So you're not having someone a dead body staring at you. Right. Because if they're looking dead forward, straightforward, they're, like, following you all throughout the year. Yeah. And it's definitely a movie trope, but if you don't close the eyes I never knew this. Something called T-A-C-H-E Noire. I don't know if it's tash or taiche noire. Okay. That is a dark reddish brown strip that forms horizontally over your eyeball. And I guess it's just your eyeballs dry out and has the air. So if you don't close your eyes and I looked it up, you're going to see this weird horizontal stripe across your eye, plus the effect it has on the living. The difference between seeing a dead body with their eyes closed and a dead body with their eyes open is like a galaxy between the two. As far as discomfort goes. Yeah. Somebody should edit together every time it's ever been done in a movie. Yeah, just like, super fast. All right, so that's all I got on the ice. So, Chuck, I want to alarm you right now. Oh, boy. You have living in your guts right now. The very organisms that are going to decompose your body when you die, they're just sitting around waiting for action, waiting for the signal. Yes. When you die, there's a lot of stuff that's still alive that's still going on, even though you're brain dead. Whole brain, higher brain, heart dead, your heart stopped, you're dead. That's another definition of death. I don't know if we mentioned your heart's not beating anymore. Right. You're dead. Yes. There's no bringing you back. Your brain hasn't had oxygen for a while. You died of hypothermia and they warmed you up. So now you're officially dead. You're gone. Right. But there's still a lot of stuff remember the Poop Shake episode? Yeah. We can forget. We talked about the microbiome. We have this whole other part of our life, our living organism that's still around, that's still operating, and a lot of stuff living within us, including part of our microbiome. They're still carrying on processes. Like, apparently you can harvest skin cells for 24 hours and they're still alive. Just use them for all sorts of stuff. Yeah. You can harvest them. And then of course, inside your intestines, there's little tiny organisms that are still living and are going to help do the work that comes next. Starting a couple of days after death. Like if you just fell over in the woods and no one was around. I always loved the setting. Right. And you just left there. Within about three days, these organisms of microflora is going to go to work on you starting in your intestines. Yeah. And this is after the various mortises, correct? Yes. I guess we should kind of go over it, but I would recommend everybody go listen to what causes rigor mortise. Yeah, for sure. It's on the website. You can go to stuffyshireo. Compodcasts. What causes mortise? We'll just run through the mortises real quick then. Algor mortis or the death chill. That's the first thing that's going to happen. That's where your body starts dropping in temperature about a degree and a half Fahrenheit per hour until you are just like a nice red wine at room temperature. Yeah, actually, that's not quite true. Red wine is like 64 degree. I guess it depends on what kind of room you're in. Yeah. If you're in a 64 deg, it's perfect. All right, what else? Well, after algor mortis, you get rigor mortis a couple of hours after death where the body settles into a stiff state. Yeah. And that lasts for what, like 24 hours? I don't remember we talked about it. Yeah, I think so. And then between those, you have live remortis or sugulation it's where like all the blood coagulates at the bottom. Yeah. Basically your red blood cells are pretty heavy and they just sink. And it's about 20 minutes to 3 hours after death is when you're going to be in liver mortise. Yeah. And then after that is rigor. That's right. Okay. Now back to purification. Right. That's the best thing to talk about. Yeah. That's basically like these organisms going to work, breaking down your body. And they do it pretty quick. Yeah. The pancreas apparently has so many in there that it just itself. It eats itself. The pancreas consumes itself. That's pretty efficient. Your other organs are going to eventually be consumed, turned into liquid. You're liquefied from the inside out. Yeah. You're going to turn colors in this order, green and purple and black, which is just like a black eye, I guess, in that same stage. Yeah. Except it never fully heals. Within a couple of weeks, you're going to be liquid inside. The organisms that are eating you produce a gas as a byproduct from their consumption. So you're going to be bloated. Your tongue is going to stick out. It's going to turn dark, too. Your tongue and that gas really stinks. Your eyes are going to protrude. Yeah. There's something called purge fluid. That is a putrid reddish brown fluid that can be expelled through just everywhere. You've got an opening. Right. Can come out of your mouth, your nose, your vagina. It can be mixed with feces and come out of your rectum. There's something else that can come out of your vagina, too. Yeah. This is maybe the worst thing I've ever heard. I had no idea. Yeah, I had no idea. I know all about death and all that, and it interests me. I had never heard of this before. I don't even want to talk about it. You don't either. Maybe we should type it into the computer and make the computer say it. Do we have that ability? Coughing Birth oh, wow. That was pretty good. That's a good computer impression. So, wait, that's what you do when you don't want to say something yourself? You pretend you're a computer? Yeah. Emily and I, most of our fights are like that. Really? Yeah. Pretty cute. I go into war games mode. What was it again? Computer Cough coughing birth. So basically there's gas. That this is a real thing. We're not making this up. Yeah. Post mortal fetal extrusion is another name for it. So the gases that build up in the body before the body ruptures, which comes a little later, can become so pressurized that a pregnant woman who has died with the fetus still in utero, the gases can push the fetus out of the vagina, which is coffin birth. Yes. And this doesn't happen much anymore? No, thankfully, because we take care of dead bodies pretty quickly. Although they did find evidence of it in the case in 2008 where this one was found, like, in the woods, but it was described a lot in 16th to 18th century medical literature. Oh. You know, it just drove them crazy, too. Sure. She was obviously alive for weeks afterward. Yeah. And archeologists apparently, too, have to rethink sometimes when they find because sometimes you would die during childbirth. But they buried the baby with the mother. Right. And so you would find the bones, like, cradling each other almost, but then they've had to go back and look at somewhere they find between the legs the bones of the baby, and they think that might be the case, like, of a coffin birth. Right. Boy. So there's the worst thing in the world. Yeah. There's probably death metal band with that name. If there's not, there is now. So the gas is ultimately eventually, once they really get down to business and they're no longer just what's it called? Where the fluids coming out of little orifices here or there purge fluid. Okay. So once it's like enough with the purge fluid. Yeah. We're just going to tear the sucker open. Your body ultimately ruptures. Yeah. And your skin is already blistered at this point. Your hair, nails and teeth are falling out. They don't keep growing. No, it's your skin receding from drying out, from desiccating. Yeah. So pass that around. In school kids, when someone says that your fingernails keep going after death. You set them straight. Tell them, Josh. Sing. Oh, God, I just realized there's kids listening to this. And then the old degloving, which we've talked about before. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Remember that? Yeah. That can happen to you. If you drive at ten and two and you have an airbag, the gases that expand the airbag out of your steering wheel are very hot. And if you're not driving at nine and three and you have your hands at like, ten and two or something, you're going to be declared really alive. Yeah. But your skin is just burned right off your hands. Or it's burned and separated and then eventually comes off. So ten and two is not how you should drive any longer. None, really. That's what I've learned. Yeah. I drive it either just a straight up 06:00 with one hand yes. Or noon. Or just a straight up noon. Noon. I rarely have two hands on the wheel. You don't drive with, like, your knees, with your hands behind your head relaxing occasionally. If I'm relaxing? Yeah, or playing the guitar or something. Okay, so deep globbing. Yeah, deeploving is I know we talked about this, and that's probably rigor mortis, but that's when you're four body farms, maybe. Yeah. That's when basically your skin is removed, still attached to things like fingernails and things like that. And they call it degloving for a reason. I don't think we'd need to explain. No, it makes perfect sense for Destocking. Sometimes it can happen to your feet. Well, I hadn't heard of that one. Did you just make that up? Well, they said gloves or socks if it's your feet, but I did make a Desaling socks. I have to use that from now on. Yeah, that's good. That might be a new thing. So the body, once it ruptures, your organs, are already liquid and all that's left is a skeleton, which will eventually turn to dust, too. Can we be done? No way we can't be done because we do need to talk a little bit about assisted suicide. Yeah, I just heat that up for you, boy. You shouldn't. It's quite a controversial subject, like we said. I don't know if I said or not. This has just been such a huge whirlwind of input of information in my head in the last 36 hours studying for this that I don't know what I've said yet or not, or what we talked about in another podcast. So we talked about dying of frailty, of old age, and that it's increasing. Supposedly, five out of ten people in the United States will die in the intensive care unit. And I saw this Ted Talk from Newcastle, Australia, with this guy, I can't remember what his name is, but it's about dying, I think it's called. Can we talk about Dying or something? And his point was, you're going to die in the ICU whether you want to or not. If you die of a degenerative disease or frailty, unless you say you don't want to die there because the way medical science is currently set up, you are going to be treated most of the time up until the bitter end with life saving measures. Sure. And you're going to die in the ICU with tubes hooked up and things beeping, and like, other people having crash carts taken in and out of their room and people making a big ruckus up until the point you die unless they give you palliative care, or you say, I don't want to be sustained like that. I don't want to go to the ICU. And this point was, if half of Americans are going to die in the ICU, you have to assume that maybe not all of them would want to die in the ICU. Right. And therefore, they need to think of things like, I want an advanced directive, a living will. I want a living power of attorney to somebody to say, no, do not put them on a ventilator. Do not put them in feeding tubes. They don't want that. They just want to die. Or they want to go to hospice. They want to go back home. Right. That's another big one. Like, they don't let you go back home. Right. Especially if you can't speak for yourself to medical science these days. That's crazy. You don't leave the hospital when you know you're dying. You stay in the hospital, and we keep doing stuff until you die. Right. That's not the way it drives with a lot of people. But if you don't stop and think about it and then write it down or tell somebody who can speak for you, you're not going to go home, you're not going to go to a hospice. You have to do this ahead of time. And part of that that's kind of come out of this idea is, okay, well, if we have autonomy to say, I don't want you to intubate me, why don't we have the autonomy to say, I want you to give me some stuff that's going to painlessly end my life? Because it's either that or facing a tremendous amount of pain and suffering through this degenerative disease. You're basically saying I'm ready. I am ready. It is my life. It's like the Richard Dreyfus movie from the 80s. Whose life is it, anyway? I think I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, I think so. It's a movie okay. About assisted suicide and should you have the right to be able to it's a hot button issue, for sure, but apparently most Americans or the majority of Americans actually support it until you start using a word like suicide. Right. When you pull them and say, are you in favor of doctors helping someone to painlessly in their life or something at the end of life? That's for sure. Yeah. And then they're like, okay, so you're in favor of physician assisted suicide? No. Right. Yeah. What's that word? Doctors who are in favor of euthanasia is another term for it. Look at palliative care. It's like half of a step away from physician assisted suicide. Like you're keeping somebody, if they request it, knocked out on morphine for the rest of their life. So they're never going to regain consciousness. Yeah. You dug up this one article by a British physician who argues that AG on a gasping reflex. Apparently when part of the apnea is that your body has a reflex where you gasp for air. And it's really disconcerting to family members even though they don't think that you're suffering. Yeah. It looks like you're suffering. And this doctor argued, well, we have drugs that can block this response so that the person can't gasp for air. Right. And what's going to cost them their last couple of breaths? But these last couple of breaths make it appear like they're suffering and the family remembers that their kids suffered, so why wouldn't we do that? And there's this conversation that's taking place more and more and more that ultimately it's kind of like who is somebody to say that somebody can't choose to end their own life painlessly through the use of drugs? Yeah. Or like Hunter Thompson did. Well, I mean, that's another way to go and anybody can do that. Sure. But there are some people out there who don't want to die violently or to leave that through their family. Like that's the part that I was upset about with that was his wife, like finding him and stuff. Yeah, his wife and his son. Yeah. Not only that, he did it in his own basement, which I can understand doing it at home, but he left quite a mess in his own basement for his family to clean up. But if he had other options these days, like doctor assisted suicide, he might not have had to make a mess in his basement for his family. Yes. And Chuck, we know that Hunter Thompson is far from the only person to make his own exit his own way. Sure. Another very famous person. Sigmund Freud did too, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know that assisted suicide? Yes. Literally physician assisted suicide. He was diagnosed with cancer of the palate because he smoked tons of cigars. Right. Which were sometimes just a cigar to say. And for 16 years he lived with that diagnosis. And finally, toward the end, he asked his surgeon, his physician, go ahead and hit me up with, I think, 5 grams of morphine, like just a ton of morphine. And he died 3 hours after the injection of it, which was more than his usual 2 grams of morphine. Right. Or cocaine. He loved cocaine. Yeah. But he had developed what was called todd angst. That's German, which is a dread of death. Yeah. So he lived with that for 16 years, but he decided along the way. Like, I fear this, but I'm going to take it into my own hands. Physician assisted suicide. And there's definitely more than one side to this coin. There's very strong opinions on either side, but I think at the very least, even if you remove emotion from it's an extremely interesting conversation in that it reveals so much about our attitudes toward death. Totally. And autonomy, and who has the right to decide whether they're going to die or who has the right to tell somebody that they can't do that. Whose life is that anyway? Yeah. Richard dreyfus and then chuck. One other thing that we want to hit on is regret. Yeah. I actually saw this a few weeks ago, just by chance, and then you send it to me. I think it was in England, a hospice nurse. I spent a lot of time researching life regrets over the course of a certain amount of time and came up with the five most common life regrets. And I think this is like a good way to end it. Number one, I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me. Right. That was the number one regret. Number two was I wish I didn't work so hard. It didn't surprise me at all. Yeah. Number three, I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. Number four, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. It's a very sad one, and I wish I'd let myself be happier is number five. Yeah. Like she was saying that they didn't realize until the end of their life that happiness is a choice that you make. It's not something that happens to you, it's something you go search out. It's a state of mind that you strive for. Sure. And to figure that out, like, at the end, that's a regret. Yeah. So call to action, people. Yeah. Really think about this stuff. You don't have to wish these things on your deathbed if you start doing something about it now. Exactly. Dying. Chuck. You know what we might have just done? We might have just finished the death of the death suite. I bet there's something else. Yeah. Only time can tell. But I don't know how much more aspects of death we can cover. And I'll tell you what, I'm going to put all of them together in a blog post, the death suite, so everybody can go listen to all things death via stuff you should know. What a gift. Yes. In the meantime, if you want to look up more about dying, just type dying into the search bar. How stuff works. I think it has its own channel. There's so much to it. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. This is a nice one. We don't normally do shout outs, but this is a nice one. And I thought, what better way. To end such a depressing show. Hey, guys. And Jerry, love the podcast. Josh, I have to thank you for teaching my fiance, Danny and me about the flashlight trick to see spider IDs. Yeah, I still haven't done it, man. I never think about it at night. Jerry, you said you tried it, right? And it worked? Yeah. Okay. I need to do it. I need to set a reminder. And my response to people who've been like, can you explain it again? Practice. That's my explanation. Just practice. Just try it from a different angle. Okay. Just practice. It's a real thing. It's not a trip. It is completely amazing. And this is from Peachy, by the way, and it's wonderful and frightening at the same time. But the problem now is that whenever we walk our dogs at night, I just can't have my normal fiance. I have this dude with a flashlight stuck to his forehead stopping at every field to let me know just how many spiders our dogs are stepping on and how we are always surrounded. Thanks for the show. And now for a shameless request. I know you don't often give shout outs, but it would be the most amazing thing ever if you could give a shout out to Danny on the podcast. The air is sometime before our wedding on October 13. Oh, nice. Let him know that I love him more than anything, and then I'm excited to share my life with him, even if he does have a flashlight stuck to his forehead for the rest of our lives walking our dogs together. I know this is totally blown away, and I would even let him listen to that podcast first. So thanks to Jerry. Thanks, guys. That is from Peachy. Way to go, Peachy. In Thousand Oaks, California. I think Peachy just expressed it very nicely. Yeah. So, Danny, Peachy, congratulations. Best of luck. Best witches from US. I told her, listen up for it on the dying podcast, and she thought that was kind of funny. And it's like, great. Yes. And Danny, maybe put down flash once in a while. Yeah. And Peachy, don't use the word fiance so much, okay? That's a life lesson from Chuck right there. No, I would like to hear that. If you want to see if you can talk Chuck into a shout out, take your best shot. You can tweet to us at syskodcast. You can talk to him directly on Facebook. Comstuffyshome so he spends all his time. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and you can join us at our website, our very own website. It's called Stuffyouhinnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Like a good neighbor State Farm is there with 80,000 agents across the country who are ready to help you. 24 7365. That's getting to a better state." | ||
What is a hangover, really? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-a-hangover-really | After a night of heavy boozing, many partygoers find themselves the victim of a hangover. But what exactly is a hangover, and what causes it? Join Chuck and Josh as they break down the science behind hangovers -- and how to avoid them -- in this podcast. | After a night of heavy boozing, many partygoers find themselves the victim of a hangover. But what exactly is a hangover, and what causes it? Join Chuck and Josh as they break down the science behind hangovers -- and how to avoid them -- in this podcast. | Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:02:07 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=18, tm_min=2, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=288, tm_isdst=0) | 30685958 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charlie Charles. Chucker Bryant. And that means this is stuff You Should know, right? Yes. The over 21 years old Chuck Bryant. Yeah. That's a big deal for this one, chuck, we're just going to go ahead and COA right now. Say that this is about drinking, and if you're under 21, you should not drink. Chuck, have you ever consumed an alcoholic beverage? I have. Still COA. If you're over 21, you should drink responsibly. Yes. Don't drink and drive. If you have a heavy machine. Yeah, heavy machinery is a big one. If you have a problem, you can contact Alcoholics Anonymous. Right. I've always wanted to test that one. Get really plowed and just sit down behind a bulldozer. I always imagine forklifts with heavy machinery. I go straight to the dozer. Well, yes, I have had an alcoholic beverage before. What was your experience with it like? Did you feel a little lightheaded, a little crazy, a little uninhibited? I wanted to kiss somebody. Did you end up kissing anybody? I did. I kissed my dog. Didn't you make out with a friend's sister at a YouTube concert once? I did. Were you under the effects of alcohol during that time? I was. Okay, this was the give me a break. Chuck, did you end up with a hangover that day? Yes, I did. The same day? The next day? Yeah, sure. How did you feel? I had a headache. I had a poor sense of well being. I had sensitivity to light and sound, diarrhea, loss of appetite, trembling, nausea, fatigue. You have the whole list. Dehydration, anxiety, trouble sleeping, weakness. Wow, that's a bad hangover right there. That's all the symptoms, you know, the one that always gets me the worst whenever I have a hangover is the loss of the sense of well being. I feel like I am right there on the edge of danger. Everybody's gunning for me. I feel horrible. Really? Yeah, it's really bad. I've always assumed it affects my serotonin level, so I didn't see anything in this article about that. Right. I thought I was going to have to get taken to the hospital in Portland, Oregon, one time. Did you? Yes. The next day, Emily asked me as a friend's wedding. She said. Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital? And I went, Maybe. I was serious. Wow. So let's talk about this, Chuck. What are the mechanisms that lie behind the cursed and dreaded hangover? Vaisalgia. Yeah. Is that the correct pronunciation? That's how I took it. That's the medical minority medical name for hangover is vestalgia. Yeah. And it comes from a Norwegian word for uneasiness following debauchery, and a Greek word for pain, algae, which is weird. I've never seen Norwegian and Greek put together. I haven't either, but yeah, you come up with vitalgia. Can I say that the Bible verse, too. Yeah, there's a Bible verse that talks about hangovers. It's Isaiah 511. Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink. In other words. I feel really sorry for you that you had to get up early if you got hammered last night. Yeah, sure. Words have never been written in the Bible, at least translation there. Yeah. Okay. So we've got that down. We have the word origin and a Bible quote, as is pretty much whenever you talk about a hangover. So what's going on there, Chuck? Well, there's a bunch of things. Let's go ahead and start with vasopressin. Yeah. Here is, by the way, everyone, a cocktail party conversation tidbit. So it's your next cocktail party. You might want to just bring this up. Okay. It might be kind of depressing to bring this up, actually. At a cocktail party. Well, this is how you explain breaking the seal, which I know that you have experienced. Sure. It's crazy. Once you urinate and we're going to stick to the clinical terms here, Chuck. All right. Let's keep it above the breaking the seal. That's clinical. Once you urinate that first time after you've started drinking, it seems like you just keep going and going and going and you can't stop and you actually can't. Right, right. So vasopressin. Vasopressin, yes. When you drink booze, it enters your bloodstream and the pituitary gland blocks the creation of vasopressin. And without this, your kidney starts sending water straight to your bladder, basically right to the tune of four times more than you actually drink. So you drink 250 alcohol, you can shoot out up to 1000 MLS or a liter. Is that the clinical term to shoot out? Yeah. So that's no mistake. If you've ever had a few beers and you're thinking, wow, this is so weird, I use the bathroom and now I can't stop. That's depressing right there. Right. And that's called the diuretic effect. As the presence of alcohol increases in the bloodstream, you expel a lot more water. Right. But you're not just expelling water. Also, we should say this leads directly to dehydration. If you're expelling four times more liquid than you're consuming, brother, you're getting dehydrated. Yes. Which is one of the signature results of the hangover. And you get the headache because of that and other things too. You do. And the headache we've talked about this before, I don't remember where. So we probably shouldn't try to come up with a timestamp. But when you have a hangover, your brain actually shrinks the next day. The other organs in your body are like you brain, you've got a bunch of water, give me thirsty. Exactly. So a lot of the water is shuffled from your brain to other organs, causing your brain to actually shrink in size, which pulls on the membranes that connected to the skull. The meninges. Right. And you know what? When you have a really bad hangover, you wake up and you feel like the membranes of your skull are being pulled in a different way. It definitely feels like that, yeah. So when I read this, I was like, oh, so that's what that is. Or like, there's a 400 pound ham fisted man with hair on his knuckles, like, doing little twirls in your head. Yeah. Have you ever speaking of breaking the seal, I don't think they did this in Athens at Georgia, but I know some friends at Georgia Southern, there were bars there that had the drink till you pee for free promotion. Have you ever heard of those? No, but it sounds awesome. Basically, starting at 06:00, they monitor the bathrooms and everyone in the bar gets a drink for free until the first person in the bar goes to the bathroom. I don't think they have that in Athens. They didn't when I was there. And of course, because it's a college, there's like dudes peeing and beer pitchers in the corner sure. Just to not have to pay the two whether or not there's that contest or promotion. So it's science. Science, okay. That's vasopressin, right? Yes. Resulting in dehydration. But when you're urinating everywhere, every which way, whether it's in a beer pitcher or otherwise right. You're also expelling a lot of other needed stuff. Yes. Like electrolytes, salt, potassium. Salt, potassium, magnesium. And these all affect how your cells function, how your muscles function. Right. And you're getting rid of it without putting it back in. So you're going to feel lousy. Yes, indeed. You are going to feel lousy. So you're dehydrated. You've lost electrolytes. Right. And the electrolyte imbalance is really important. If you have too much salt and your electrolyte imbalance is too high, you die. Sure. If you have too little, you get the shakes. The tremors, which I understand is the most uncommon symptom of hangovers, which makes me nervous because I get the shakes just about every time the next day. I've never gotten the shakes. What? I've never gotten the shakes. Wow. It also points out in this article that hangovers are subjective, so for each person, they might experience different, like, oh, I've never had a hangover, but all I get is thirsty. When you get the shakes and you have a loss of a sense of well being yeah. That's like Nic Cage and leaving Las Vegas? Kind of. Wow. Yeah. I've always been like, wow, it'd be great to have a grocery cart in a liquor store. What a great scene. Should we talk about glycogen real quick, too? Yeah. That's another thing you lose. Yes. Glycogen is a key energy source, and it goes to the liver and turns into glucose. Is that correct? Right. Well, the liver turns it into glucose oh. And then sends it out. Basically, your liver like, what the heck is going on? And does something and all of a sudden, you've just lost all of your energy. Right. I'll just pee everything out just to be sure. Exactly. Basically, it's what's going on. Yeah. And that actually accounts for the weakness the next day, fatigue. And actually, that's not the only thing that accounts for fatigue. You don't sleep very well after a night of heavy drinking. Glutamine. Yes. You have glutamine, which is actually a stimulant. Natural stimulant. Yes. Which is the only good kind of stimulant. And when you drink alcohol, the production of this natural stimulant is actually blocked. Right. So when you stop drinking eg go to sleep, your body tries to make up for lost time and overproduces glutamine. So it means you're not getting as good as sleep. Exactly. And the next day, you also feel restless and anxious. Right. Maybe you get the shakes. Sure. That's another cocktail party tip. If you start saying all these things at your next cocktail party, you probably won't be invited back to the next cocktail party, though. No. I think you could wow some people. It depends on how cool your cocktail party is. I guess I could see them all saying, though, like, why are you telling us all these awful things about drinking my kind of cocktail party? Everyone will be like, this is great for me. Another one. Right? Screw glycogen. Screw vasopressin. So what else, Josh? Well, we could talk about the impurities of liquor. Okay. Well, the different alcohols. Yes. The rule of thumb is the darker the alcohol, the more impure it is, and therefore the heavier the hangover. Yes. Which is why I think everyone pretty much knows that your worst alcoholics, they start drinking every morning when they wake up, they're probably drinking vodka. Yes. It's actually a good thing to drink if you are an alcoholic, because you're going to be able to be as close to a functional alcoholic as possible. Right. How about that study with the bourbon? Yes. They did study between bourbon and vodka, and 33% of the people who drank amount of bourbon relative to their body weight had a severe hangover, and only 3% had a hangover. When they drink vodka, that's a big vodka, white wine, that kind of thing. Light rum? Yes. Gin? Yeah. Conversely, dark rum is bad. Red white tequila is good. Basically, if it's dark, it's going to kill you. I'm in bad shape then, because I'm a bourbon red wine beer guy. That's funny. I'm like, whatever's in the glass guy. Right. That's good. It's fun to have at the cocktail party because you're not picky. No. As long as you don't run an ice. As long as there's not a cigarette butt floating in it, I'll drink it. And then sometimes even then. I don't think that hasn't happened before. Chuck basically, what I took from this article is when you drink, you are poisoning your body through Connor, through impurities in the alcohol, but also through the body's natural processes of breaking down alcohol, too. Right. Actually, there's a byproduct produced when the liver metabolizes alcohol called acetaldehyde. Yeah, take this one, because I read it, like, three times and I was still a little lost. Okay, Chuck, allow me, please. So, basically, when the liver metabolizes alcohol, it produces a byproduct that's a toxin called acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde is actually more toxic to the body than alcohol itself, which is crazy. But we have a natural mechanism for neutralizing acetaldehyde called, appropriately enough, acid aldehyde dehydrogenase. Appropriately. So that stuff goes into tax the acidaldehyde. Right. Then we have this other stuff that is called glutathione, right. And it contains high levels of a substance called cysteine. And cysteine actually is attracted to acetaldehyde. So the two things combined, acid aldehyde dehydrogenase and the cysteine and the glutathione combined to neutralize the acidaldehyde. Right? Right. And it does it pretty quickly. You are going to feel some ill effects, but the less you drink, the easier it is for these two substances to neutralize this byproduct of the alcohol metabolize. Okay, here's the problem. You have a limited store of glutathione in your liver, right? So you use it up pretty quick. And women have even less than men. Exactly. Which accounts for why women tend to have more harsh, harsher hangovers than men. Sure. Not just body weight, although that does matter. Right. So use up your glutathione stores, and once you do that, your blood is just basically circulating this toxin, acid aldehyde, while the liver generates more glutathione. Hence you've got this horrible hangover and why, ultimately, time is the only remedy for it. Yeah, well, let's get to that in a second. Let's get to the remedies. Let's talk about liquor before beer. Never fear. Or is it the other way around? Year before liquor never sicker you're, right? A little bit of truth to that. Turns out I love it when folk should be true. Totally. It turns out that the carbonation and beer speeds up the absorption of alcohol. So if you start with beer, your body is going to have and then move on to liquor, your body is, in fact, going to have a harder time processing those toxins, even though there's a certain age. My friend Justin and I, Justin, we were talking about this a few years ago. Someone was remarking about we had a big night out and like, well, was it liquor before beer, beer before liquor? I can't remember. And I just said, you know what? It doesn't matter anymore. No, you're going to be hurting. You reach a certain age, and it either doesn't affect you or it's going to affect you no matter what. Those are college rules. I've noted through my own personal observations that at about age 24, you get you start getting really severe hangovers. I haven't figured out exactly why yet, but that seems to be about the age when you switch over from, I can do this constantly to oh, God. Why? Why? I've got the shakes. I have a loss of sense of well being. Right. Yeah. I'm vomiting. I have diarrhea. I don't know why. Maybe that's when puberty ends or something to do with hormones still floating around in the body. If your puberty ended at 24, then puberty doesn't in your 20s. Really? My puberty ended when I was, like, 14. I know, but it started when I was seven. Hi, I'm Chuck H. Seven. Where are we now? Are we talking about vomiting? Yeah. Turns out that actually does help. And also, Chuck, since we have a drinking game based on this, and we're talking about hangovers allow me. Okay. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. That should keep them for a little while. Go ahead, Chuck. Alcohol, what's going on there is it is indeed better to vomit, because when alcohol is absorbed directly through the stomach, and when that happens, the lining of your stomach is going to become irritated and say, hey, thanks for putting all this poison in me, and it's going to start secreting hydrochloric acid. Right. And the hydrochloric acid is actually what makes you vomit. Right. It sends messages to the brain. The stomach is really connected to the brain via hormonal signals, big time. Which don't necessarily end after puberty. Right. And your stomach says, you've got to get rid of this stuff. And it turns out that you probably shouldn't make yourself throw up because it's dangerous. It could become a problem. If you're drinking so much and you're making yourself throw up, then you probably do have a problem. You should check into a clinic or something. Sure. Check into Promises in Malibu, if you got the cash. But it will make you feel better, because obviously your body is not going to have to process whatever alcohol is still in your stomach. So there you have it. What are we on to now, buddy? I think we kind of nailed what it is. So should we talk about some of the cures that people spout? Yeah, there are plenty of hangover cures. Everybody's got one. Yeah. And actually, I'm surprised to find that some of them actually are real. Now that you understand what causes a hangover, you can actually identify what will help cure a hangover. Sure. Because really what's going on is you've expelled electrolytes. It's biology. Exactly. You've expelled your natural energy stores. You are dehydrated. Right. And your brain is strong. Yeah, sure. So what do you do to make yourself feel better, Chuck? My personal favorite is hair of the dog. Will that help me or no, it will not. You know where that comes from? It's the Bible again, isn't it? No, nazareth. Medieval times, though, the hair of the dog that bit you. Supposedly, if you got bit by a rabid dog, you would take some of that dog's hair and apply it to your wound and that will cure you. This is the same culture that buried a cat at midnight to cure war. Exactly. Yeah. So just like that is false hair. The dog is false as well. Having a drink the next day to make yourself feel a little bit better will not work. It might make you feel a little bit better in the short term, but ultimately, you're just adding more toxins that your body is going to have to process, and you're kind of just staving off the inevitable hangover. Unless you just drink all day again. Sure. And then you'll have to hangover the following day. Double hangover. Yeah, exactly. Unless you just keep going until you die. Yeah. And then you never catch us up with you. You won the game. I was taking a walk with Emily yesterday with the dogs. This shows how twisted I am. And I saw it was 08:00 in the morning, 730 in the morning, something like that, and there was a guy down the street from us in the parking lot cracking his first king cobra. And I said, you know what? I said, 99 times out of 100, I see those people and I think, God, how could you live your life like just getting bombed the moment you wake up every day? I said, but every once in a while, I think, what a way to live. Right. She said, what is wrong with you? Basically keep you in line, doesn't she? Well, she doesn't let me get up and get drunk every day, if that's what you mean. Yes, it's keeping you in line. Okay. She does. Chuck one of the things that kills me is drinking coffee. I learned a long time ago that if I ever have a hangover, I stay away from coffee. So I was surprised to find in this article that actually, it does have some benefits. Agreed. Which are it will actually alleviate your headache a little bit, because it's caffeine, and that's a vasoconstrictor. So it reduces your blood vessels, it reduces the swelling. So that will help a little bit. It'll help cure the headache some, but it will dehydrate you. Because it's a diuretic. Because it's a diuretic, which is how you really got into this trouble in the first place, so stop being stupid. I would say coffee along with a lot of water might be a good idea. Possibly. That's just me. Right. Okay. So what else? Fatty food. Fried food the next day. Yes. Which is odd, because I know I crave fried food the next day. Cheeseburger. Me, too. Bacon, chili cheeseburger, dude. Emily bacon chili cheeseburger. Emily it's like two hamburgers a year, and they're on hangover days. Yeah. She doesn't eat beef at all, but when she wakes up with a really bad hangover, she's like Quarter Pounder. It's strange, because obviously she's not the only person who experiences that craving, but that doesn't necessarily help and could actually make you vomit. It could tip the scales when you've got a bunch of hydrochloric acid in your stomach, but it could help if you ate a bacon chili cheeseburger or two bacon chili cheeseburgers before you started drinking. Why? Because it contains oil and the fat and the grease will line your stomach, take longer to digest. Absolutely. And in fact, in the Mediterranean, they have long drank a little bit of olive oil before imbibing. It's an old thing they do. I'm not trying it. I'm not either. I like olive oil, but I'm not going to drink a tablespoon of it. No, me neither. Okay. How about a banana? I'm just going to pull that one out of my head. Out of your banana tree. Bing remedy. Yes. Okay. Loaded with potassium, electrolytes, and just because, remember, you lose potassium, which is an electrolyte. So if you can restore the balance. So banana will help your hangover as well. Eggs. Yes, since we're on breakfast, because they contain cysteine. Right. Which is something that's attracted to acid. Aldehyde. Right. So eggs and a banana and water would be a great way to start your morning if you had a hangover. Not just water, but water loaded with sugar and salt, actually. Right. Because the carbonation would do the same thing as it did with the beer. Right. Beer before liquor. So you want uncarbonated water loaded with salt. Sugar, not a Red Bull. No, because it has caffeine, not an energy drink. uncarbonated non caffeine water with salt and sugar, which I think I just described as supports drink. Right. A banana and some eggs. Or you know what else you can do instead of water? Put some fruit juice in there. Fruit juice is the kind of sugar you want, fructose. And studies have shown that it increases the rate at which your body gets rid of the toxins. And that's a good idea. It also gives you vitamins, of course. Okay. What about, saydrin, acetaminophen? Acetaminophen is well, you want to avoid, et cetera, because it has caffeine. Right. Which can help, but ultimately, no. Right. And acetaminophen I believe you don't want to take because that can mess with your liver. Ultimately, yes. If you have alcohol in your system, if you take acetaminophen for a hangover, you are probably going to feel a little better. Actually, you'll probably feel a lot better, but in the long run, your liver is going to fall apart. Yeah. You're doing your body damage. You're going to expel that through your urine. So what you want to do is get a non caffeinated anti inflammatory prostaglandin inhibitor, which is also known as aspirin. Yes, which is good. So aspirin will help. It's shown that prostaglandin actually wreaks havoc on your body during hangover. So if you take a prostaglandin inhibitor, you're going to feel a lot better. And apparently there have been studies that show yes, aspirin helps, especially if you take one before you go to bed and you take two when you wake up. But beware people with tender stomachs often vomit from aspirin. Right. You know what my cure is? Let's talk about each other's. Curious. Have you got one? Surely you do. What do I do? Do you want to hear mine? Yeah. Mine is my deal is I can't sleep in anymore. It doesn't matter if I was out till three in the morning, I'm still going to wake up at seven. It's just the way it is. When you're old, you'll experience this one day I get up at seven, like I normally do, and I drink a pound, like three or four glasses of water, take a couple of aspirin and then I get right back in bed and see if I can get like another hour or two asleep. And then I wake up in a great that works pretty well, especially works with Advil. If you take a couple of Advil and you have even like a half hour, preferably an hour extra to sleep. For some reason, Advil always makes me sleepy. It makes me fall asleep very easily, never figured out why. But yeah, you wake up an hour later and you are set. It's a great one because sleep is only real key to curing a hangover, they say. Yeah, well, time well, that's usually what I rely on is time. And I pound a few Coca Colas in the morning, which is not good for me, but it works. Right. And then black aspirin, is that what they say? Yes. And then I don't make eye contact with anybody because they're all out to get me. That's how I make it through the day when I have a hangover. And again we should say please don't find any of this funny, entertaining or amusing if you're 21 years or older. And if you are 21 years or older, please find it amusing. Responsibly. Right. We should talk about some of these over the counter, like anti hangover pills that you can buy. You heard of these? Yeah. Like Chasers. Yeah. They're basically multivitamins. And here's the deal. Well, some are activated carbon, which can work. True. But here's the deal. If you read on the package it will say something like this drink a full twelve ounce glass of water before you start drinking and take a pill. And then after your second or third drink, drink another glass of water and take another pill. And then do that again. Then before you go to bed, drink a glass of water with the pill and then wake up and drink a glass of water with a pill. Right? So you're basically taking a vitamin dalling, tons of water. And that's the key, is the water you're hydrating yourself. So it's a bit of a rip off, right? But not necessarily because it is recommended that you do take a multivitamin. Not sure the next morning, but just take a multivitamin. Don't pay for some hangover cure. You know what else helps is to actually be cognizant and not a total drunk while you're drinking? Yes, if you drink glass for glass, water for alcohol, number one, it keeps you hydrated. But number two, it also paces your drinking so that your body has more time to process this alcohol. It's not just like boom, boom, boom. I've gotten better at that. Have you? Oh, yeah, sure. If I have, like, a big night out, I try to be pretty aware of drinking a couple of glasses of water here and there. And I always will pound two or three glasses before I go to bed. Good for you, Chuck. That's the way to do it. All right. So there you have it. That's the hangover, right? Yeah. A couple of other things you can do beforehand is eat. Obviously, alcohol in an empty stomach, it's going to get you there quicker, but it will get you sicker and make you feel worse. You love riding, so, water, what else you say? Multivitamins drinking moderation, of course, is the key with everything. Watch what you're drinking. Red wine, bourbon. It's going to make you feel bad. Yeah. It tastes sugary sweet on your tongue, but it'll make you feel worse. Yes. I'm in trouble, though. I wish I could learn to drink vodka. I just don't dig it. Fuck is so wonderful. It's a nice yeah, I drink gin and tonics occasionally during the summertime months, but I can't drink those. Gin actually makes me crazy. I have a self imposed ban on gin. I won't drink it. I don't allow myself to drink it because it makes me nuts. And apparently I'm not the only one. In the 17th century, the UK actually banned, or I should say England banned really gin, because the makers were so nuts. So gin was banned in England for a little while because people went like I did. Sure, different alcohols do that. Tequila is notorious for making people violent and act out of sorts. I've never had a problem with tequila. Me either. My buddy Scotty has a red wine thing. Completely personality shift when he drinks it, but yeah, he becomes a completely different person. That's so odd. You know Alexander the Great died from a red wine drinking competition. Really? One of his soldiers challenged him to it and they apparently drank like 5 million gallons apiece. And Alexander the Great one off and died. Boy, I bet the alcohol back then was rough too, man. Yeah, they loved their wine. Those are the good old days. Well, if you want to learn absolutely every last detail there is to know about a hangover, you should read this fine, fine article by freelancer Lacey Perry called How Hangovers Work. You can just type in hangover in the handy search bar howstep works.com. Also, check out our Kiva.org page. $2,500 and growing so far. Yeah. Very proud of you guys. You can help fund a loan for an entrepreneur in a developing country for as little as $25. And the best part, you get it back. We have a team that's to be found at www.kiva.org teamstuffysheanow. Right. If that's too hard, you can click on community and then search stuff you should know. And we've been posting a link at the bottom of every one of our blog posts, too. Yes, we've got close to 100 members and about $2,500 raised, and it's pretty cool. Let's do Listener Ma'am. Let's do Listener ma'am. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this don't kill me. I'm just the enumerator. This is a good one. Hey, guys. I hope this finds you well. My name is Mark, and I live in Fish Kil, New York, which is an interesting town. I was listening to the Gross National Happiness podcast and you mentioned the census worker being killed. I thought I'd send an email. I was a Census Bureau worker in 2000. I was a carefree 19 year old. On summer break, my friends and I saw the ad in the paper and took the exam and became official enumerators, including a shiny plastic badge from the Treasury Department. Cool to boot, he says. So our task was to travel door to door and talk to the people who didn't return their survey. Some people got the short form, some got the long form. And I remember the forms were assigned at random. Usually the long formers didn't mail them back in and that's who they usually had to confront. Is it going to shake down? It's shaken down. People were downright mean when I knocked on their door. This is a good one. One man asked me to hold on for a second. He closed the door and within a few minutes I heard the garage door open and he drove out and waved goodbye. Such a jerky move. One woman answered the door with a baby in her arms, shouting something at me. I heard dogs barking and the next thing I knew, she had let the dogs loose on us. And I was running safely back to the safety of my Buick Regal. I quickly learned my lesson. And when someone would open the door and give me the skinny on their neighbors who didn't mail their forms back in, I was happy. And I was even happier when it was a grandma who would offer me a cold drink, because the old folks, they're just like, come on in. Let's talk for a while. So lonely. Exactly. I did not know, however, that enumerators were killed. I must have missed that part of the training. Most of the range would be anti government. They would say I was the man told to get off their property and all the expletives that go with it. It's not easy being in a numerator, so give them a shout out. So shout out to all you enumerators out there. Okay. And that's pretty much it, he said. I thought I'd chime in. Actually, I was chiming in this morning in the car and then realized that I was alone. Mark so lonely. Mark, the former enumerator, is a funny guy, and he says, by the way, podcast suggestion how Hippie Rob works. That's a good one. That would be a great one. Yeah, that's the audience. I'm trying to track them down. Sure. Yeah. So thanks, Mark, and good luck. If you enumerate in the future and all your enumerators out there counting heads. I'm sorry, I didn't know it's so rough on you. And let's see if you're in a numerator or a denominator or you know the current whereabouts of Hippie Rob. Put it in an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more house stuff work? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
How Fear Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-fear-works | Fear results from your brain's reaction to a stressful stimulus, and -- though it may be unpleasant -- it plays a crucial role in the life of every human being. But how does it work (and why)? Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the sensation of fear. | Fear results from your brain's reaction to a stressful stimulus, and -- though it may be unpleasant -- it plays a crucial role in the life of every human being. But how does it work (and why)? Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the sensation of fear. | Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:31:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=17, tm_min=31, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=153, tm_isdst=0) | 41714482 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship, and it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. comUSK and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck Bryan is looking deeply into the eyes of Nicholas Tesla right now. For some reason, I've never noticed that he literally is staring at me the whole time. Yeah, I once wrote an article for How Stuff Works.com about why the eyes and some paintings follow you. Oh, really? Yeah. Why didn't you tell me about that? We've never broadcasted on it because it would literally be like a five minute podcast. Well, maybe we can bring it up to your podcast. Maybe it's worth reading, though. I think if you typed in Eyes and Painting or something like that in the search bar at How Stuff Works.com, it would bring it up. I figured it was because the eyes were cut out and there was a psychopathic killer behind the painting. That's the second page. Okay, got you. Also, while we're just doing plugginess right, why don't you follow us on Twitter? It's a party over there, right? Our handle sometimes not what you think right off the top of your head, but it makes sense when you hear it. S-Y-S-K podcast. Right? Yeah. And we're not like Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga. We don't say stupid stuff about being backstage. We're actually a cool news aggregator. Right, okay. And then also, we're on Facebook. We have the stuff you should know. Facebook page. Chuck and Chuck. You kill it on that. Interacting with people coming out, shaking hands in your robe with a little shrimp in your mouth and being in the green room. Hey, how's it going? Good to meet you. Thanks for coming out. I can't imagine anything more disgusting than me coming at someone with a robe and shrimp in my mouth. Well, it happens every day on Facebook, right? And then I guess now are you ready for the intro? Yes. Yes. Chuck, I want you to go back with me to all right. Freshman in college, baby. I am a freshman in high school, right? And I am in my room in Kennesa, Georgia, and my parents house, and it's night time and I'm reading. I don't remember what I'm reading, but I'm like, sitting on my bed reading. I'm actually laying with my elbows up on my bed reading, right? And I look over and noticed that my closet door is cracked slightly. This is abnormal. Usually my closet door shut tightly. Still? Yeah. Even still, to this day, I don't see any reason to leave it open. Funny how those little things stick around. So I remember making this little comment to myself, like, that's weird. It's probably somebody in there, right? But I go back to reading and I get this annoying sensation that's, like, getting my attention out of the corner of my eye. And I look over and now the door is correct by about three times more than it was before. Well, I have tremendous amounts of sense. So I throw my book down and start running toward the door of my room, right? As I get to the handle, my hands on the door. Now I start to turn it, the closet door is thrown open, and my dad comes out going I'm not kidding. This is a true story. I went from a standing position with my hand on the doorknob to completely flat on my back in like maybe a half of a motion. It wasn't even one full motion, right? I was on my back screaming, staring at my dad, screaming in terror. Looking at him like you were looking at Nikola Tesla. I see that it's my dad, but I'm so afraid that I can't stop screaming. My mom has time to make it up the stairs into my room and start yelling at my dad, asking, what did you do to Josh? And I'm sitting there looking at them, having this argument, still screaming, going back and forth. Wow, your dad's a character, man, he is a character. Elvis. He looked so sad and so remorseful. He realized all my reaction. But I don't think I was wrong in noticing a little glimmer of disappointment in his eye. Like, what happened to you, kid? When did you get to be such a panty waste? So there is my fear story, Chuck. That's my great fear story. We used to antagonize Eddie. You know my friend Eddie. Yeah, in college. I was roommates with Eddie for years and we used to scare him all the time. So awful. Like coming home from the movie. What was the one with the author? The James Con misery came home from misery. That was a rough one, mate. Booton literally unscrewed light bulbs all over the apartment. Like hid in closet. Oh, man. Eddie was smart enough to turn on the television for light. We didn't count on that. Next time we unplugged the TV. Yes. It's tough to get him past that. Yes, it was always fun. And he got a kick out of it too. You could tell which we'll get to later. So yeah, we're going to get to a lot in this one. Right. This is how fear works. This is going to be a good one, I think. I think it already is. Okay, thanks for your story. So, Chuck, I think we should start out by basically defining fear. Webster's Dictionary defines fear as such. We were in high school and that was just the way to start your campaign. You thought you were so smart. Yeah, it defines it doesn't, but we define it as a chain reaction in the brain. Starts with the stimuli, can be many different things, and it ends up with the fight or flight response in the end. Exactly. Which we know that you know about the firefly response, having listened to this podcast faithfully since 2008. Yes. Right. So we're not going to go into too much detail about the firefight response because you already know this, but suffice to say that fear is an autonomic response. Yes, it is the autonomic nervous system we've never mentioned this before. It's really nervous. It is the nervous system that responds to stress and it's made up of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. Yeah, I don't think we have talked about that. Haven't, no. But it's like the umbrella nervous system that's like, whoa, okay. And then calm down. Right, right. And autonomic almost means automatic in this case because it's just triggered. We don't plan, it happens. That Pointer Sister's song could have been called autonomic. It's so interchangeable. So yeah, there's not a lot we can do and we don't necessarily know what's going on. Like, analysis of the situation isn't necessarily a part of being afraid. It's more like get out of there. Right. Yeah. We'll find that there are other ways that that can happen. Right. Coming soon as in a few minutes. Yeah. So let's just go over what parts of the brain are responsible for fear. Right? Yeah. And this will come up in a minute here when we describe how the paths go. There's a lot of foreshadowing. We just ended it. But the thalamus picks up on things that you hear and see and smell in the way of sensory data. Sensory cortex interprets this. You get the hippocampus. It stores the seahorse. Yes, that's right. It stores and receives a conscious memories and starts to establish like a context for what's going on. Right. In this case, fear. Yeah. Amygdala plays a big part. It decodes the emotions and determines the threat and stores old fear memories. Fear memories. Like if something really bad happens to you, it has to create like a real fear memory. The Amygdala is where that sits. Okay. And then finally the hypothalamus is where it always ends up, no matter which path it takes. We'll talk about those paths. The Hypothalamus is the on off switch for the fight or flight response. It's go time. And the only part of your brain that can tell the Hypothalamus whether it's go time or whether go time has passed is the amygdala. Amygdala, right. It's the gatekeeper to the autonomic nervous system. I'm still just as thrilled about the brain as I was when we first started studying the stuff. I know. I think I'm more thrilled. So, Chuck, Josh, there is a guy named Joseph Ledie, have you heard of him? No. He is a neuroscientist at NYU and he came up with two categories for our fear response. He's the dude. Yeah. Okay. And they happen simultaneously. But there is what he's dubbed a low road and high road. And like I said, both of them happen at the same time. But the low road is basically like the quick, nasty, dirty response to fear. Right? Like, holy crap. Right. So let's say there's a pretty good example in this article by Julia Layton. Oh, this is Julia? Yeah. Actually both of the ones we're recording today are Julia. Yeah. Way to go, Layton. She's good. So let's say that you're sitting at home, right, in your underwear with a beer perched on your stomach and you're just watching some wrestling. Have you been watching me? I have webcam set up in your house. You do a lot of stuff because I encourage you to without, you know it. Okay, so you're sitting at home as such and all of a sudden your door just starts rattling, right? Yeah. Okay. There's something that's going to happen called the low road fear response, and that is the sound and the sight of your door rattling is the sensory data that suddenly goes into what? The thalamus, which sorts it and says, hey Amygdala, I need your help. It's like forwarding the email. Yeah. Like there is a potential threat here and we need to respond. Sure. And the amygdala says, you know what? You are 100% right. Thalamus. I'm going to contact the hipster campus no, the hypothalamus. Right. And basically get the firefight response going. Yeah. Just in case. Let's go ahead and turn it on. Right. So your beer is spilled all over the floor because you've left up out of your easy chair. Okay. At the same time this is going on, the high road response is taking place. Thankfully. Yes. So the high road responses, it takes longer, but it gives you a much more thoughtful analysis of what's going on. There's a couple of extra stops along the way that lead to reason and context and that kind of thing. So this time it goes to the sensory cortex first. And the sensory cortex says, you know what? This has happened before. No. It says, like, there's more than one interpretation. Has it happened before? Right. And the hippocampus says, remember that time in that big windstorm, the tree fell outside and you thought the boogeyman was coming to get you, so remember that right. Like, the hippocampus goes and gets your memories to analyze them for context compared to this. Yes. The sensory cortex is saying, like, what else is going on here? Right? Yeah. Is there a windstorm? Exactly. Is their patio furniture moving? Are there trees scraping on the window? And all of a sudden you're like, oh, okay, it is wind. Right? That's right. But let's say that your brain, your sensory cortex said, no, what I hear is a guy shouting, like, I'm coming in. Right. And your hippocampus is like, well, last time that happened, a guy came in a ski mask, and I was hogtied for three days before anybody around me. Right. It was not the wind. So that leap up out of the easy chair is your low road response and standing there while your brain is interpreting the rest of the data and then coming to the conclusion that, yes, there is somebody coming through the door and then running out your back door, that's the result of the high road response. Yeah. Or if you determine inside the brain that, hey, this is just a windstorm, then it sends the message to the Amygdala saying, hey, go tell the hypothalamus. Just shut down the whole system. Not the whole system, because you'd be dead, but shut down the fight or flight response. It's just trees. And Emily is on the ceiling still at this point because her high road is probably longer than mine. Yeah. And the low road very quick. Yes. We heard gunshots one time in La. And Emily literally was like, on the floor. I turned around, I was like, did you hear that? And she was on the ground prone position. That's awesome. Wow. But I grew up rough and tumble, so I heard gunshots a lot more than she did. Did you have a hard scrapple youth? I did. I didn't know that. Not like the streets of Akron where Emily grew up. Okay. The tender streets of Akron, Ohio. Yeah, they are very tender. All right, Josh, so you pointed out, which is very important, that both of these things are happening at the same time. And that is why, even if you realize very quickly that there is no imminent danger, you're still going to be coming down from that fight or flight response for a little bit, because your low road has already been triggered. Right. And it all ends in the hypothalamus either way. Yes. 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Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. Are we done? I guess so. That was really rapid, man. No, we're not done because we got to talk about emotions, right, and why we get scared. Well, yeah, there's very little argument about what emotions are for. And basically they are motivators, right? Yes. They are survival based motivators. Specifically, the basic ones are just, let's see, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, joy, and sadness. Those are the six basic emotions that an anthropologist named Paul Ekman identified in the 19s. Right. Yeah. You see that? And we're talking about fear right now. But you could make this is the case for all of at least those basic, if not all the emotions that a human can experience is that their motivators are saying there's something going on with you specifically right now in your environment or in your life, in a kind of a medicine. Right. Or both. Right. Yeah. With fear, it's normally something's in your environment. Yeah. And it's clearly a motivator to survive. Right. So let's say that you're a caveman. Okay? So I'm back on the couch with my bigger wife, and you're sitting there, you see a snake, you just don't have a very good feeling about it, so you don't go up and touch it. Right. But your friend ERG sitting next to you is like, well, what is this? And ERG gets bit and dies a horrible, nasty death right in front of your eyes. What happened to tuktuk? No, you're tuktuk. Okay, so you tooktok have just formed possibly the first fear memory in response to snakes. You doing a very crude interpretation of natural selection and evolution. You are going to be able to go, mate, and perhaps that fear memory will somehow epigenetically be passed on to your offspring. Yeah. And then it's a trade eventually. Yes. So fear is a survival based motivator, right? Yeah. And caveman is an app description. Because if you feared the right things back in the day, like snakes and tigers and lightning, then you had a good chance of surviving and procreating, and all of a sudden you had a stronger, smarter, wiser population. Exactly. But all those going on long ago, and a lot of people argue long before we were humans, but back when we were still prey to snakes, like primates that still stuck around, and that's probably where they first started. But we didn't have any idea that this is evolution at work. And it wasn't until, like, the late 19th century that Darwin really kind of got the attention of the world and said, hey, these are inherent traits that are passed down. Fear is not something that's necessarily learned. It's something we have instinctively. And he conducted this pretty cool little experiment that he wrote about in his book the Expression of the Emotions in man and Animals, which is published in 1872. And he went to the zoo. Right? Well, yes. Specifically, the debate at the time was about the face of fear, the Edward Monk holy crap. Face that everyone gets when they're scared. You took it as being scared. I thought that was a scream of joy. The face of fear. Yeah. I've had Monk. Oh, really? I thought he was like, I just got the best deal on this muffler. It looked more to me like Home Alone. Oh, my gosh. No, that was joy, though. At the time, he was glad his parents were gone. Right. No, he couldn't believe it. That was, I think, surprised anything. Right. And then later, joy and then later sadness. Yeah. When he learned, well, we all know eventually the family is important for happiness. And don't fear the creepy old man in your neighborhood. Actually, you probably should. You probably should. I think Chris Columbus did a great disservice to children by making that such a moral. All right. Yeah. I always interpreted monks, because it was called the scream, as terror. Regardless, that face we all make when we're scared out of our pants. He went and Darwin went and stood in front of a clear plexi I guess it was probably glass at the time, I would think, and had a puff at her jump leap toward his face. Even though he knew he was protected, he still reacted with that fear face and jumped back. And he said, basically that my will and reason were powerless against the imagination of danger, even though he's never experienced it. Right. So I've never been bitten by a snake or actually, they said that people that have never even been a room yeah. In a room of the snake are scared of snakes. Yeah. So he came to this conclusion that fear and likely all of our basic emotions are very much passed down through the generations. Right. Yeah. And he came to that conclusion because he couldn't control himself when the snake which he'd never been bitten by, lunged at the glass, which was safely in between them. He still couldn't control it. So he concluded, yeah, there's a lot more going on to this than just something I've learned, because why would I be afraid of a snake? Right. And I know, rationally, that there's glass there so that this stuff is so ancient, our modern trappings of civilization eg. A glass and a zoo can't subdue it. Yeah. The same at baseball games when they foul the ball back and they know it's terrifying. You know, there's a screen right in front of you, and you will never get hit by a baseball, but people still jump back, and that may be less fear and more just an autonomic reaction to something coming at you. That was Darwin's point. Really? Yeah. It's the same thing. Yeah, because if we didn't experience fear like a baseball coming out, that's like and then, boom. Same with anything that we move to get away from. You always feel like a goober, too, at the game when that happens. Well, that's a higher emotion that supposedly are specific to humans and a couple of other higher primates, which is embarrassment that only exists in relation to other people. Right, right. I don't think I said the word goover in, like, a decade. It's a good one. Just flew out of my mouth. I love goobers. I've said, can I have another Goober? Was that the peanut and chocolate? So Chuck Darwin basically said, I'm right, you're wrong, you idiots. And fear is now seen as a basic emotional response. That's an inherited one. Yeah. And it's the same as it was in the caveman days, except it's not lines and tigers now. It's people breaking into your house. Home invasion, terrorist attack. Well put. Thank you. And then there's another point that Darwin made. I don't know if he hammered at home, but we can anticipate things, right? Yeah. Like, we don't have to see a snake bite ERG to be afraid of a specific snake. Right. Or have experienced yourself, even. Right. And it doesn't go away with each snake. Like, each new snake doesn't necessarily not represent a new threat. Right. Snakes in general do. Right. Yes. That's because we can anticipate things. Right. That's another survival mode that fear triggers or that, I guess, is centered around fear. We can anticipate being afraid. And apparently studies have shown that we can become physiologically and psychologically just as afraid when we anticipate being afraid of something than when we're actually confronted with that thing we're afraid of. Yeah, well, which is like a fear of flying would be a perfect example of that. Yes, it would. You can be just as scared, probably, as if you have actually been in a plane crash if you have a really intense, phobia flight. Dude, I can tell you that even if you've never been on even a remotely scary flight, you can very much be afraid. anticipatorily of a plane crash. Yeah. It's very scary. You've gotten pretty good though, right? Dude, I am great. I slept through the last takeoff I was on. Really? I could not believe it. Yummy was like, who. Are you checking your pulse? Yeah. Nothing I was on. No scotch, no pills, no nothing. You weren't on scotch? No scotch. Well, that's called fear extinction. And we'll get to that. More foreshadowing the precursor. That was very anticipatory. So, speaking of conditioning, which we were not, let's talk about a very cruel experiment in the 1920s by Mr. John Watson. Lil Albert. Lil Albert was an eleven month old baby. I think they call Albert a toddler. They call him an infant. And that's a baby. Yeah. Starting to tiddle. Just starting to toddle. So little Albert, they wanted to teach Albert fear of white rats. The problem was, I guess it wasn't a problem. It was probably pretty good for the sake of the experiment, was that he loved white rats. And when the white rats would come around, little Albert would even reach for them and guests try to pet them. And until they started playing this loud, booming noise. No. You know what they did? They took a claw hammer and a piece of metal and banged it right behind his head. Every time he went to go, that was the loud, booming noise. Yeah. So it didn't take long before Albert was crying and moving away from the white rats, as expected. And not just white rats, chuck rabbits, really. Fur coats, cotton balls. They showed that fear isn't just an instinct that we inherit, it can be conditioned. And little Albert became sickfried fishbower. Here's the worst part. Are you ready for it? That's not true. You ready. Well, no one knows who little Albert is. Well, he wasn't sick of fishbocker. Well, you don't know. So John Watson was planning on reversing this fear conditioning. Yeah, sure. But was caught having an affair with an assistant and was fired before he could so he just grew up scared. Exactly. And Watson went on to get into the advertising game and was successful and actually married, I think, the lady he was having an affair with. But burned all of his notes, I think, before he died in 1958. So no one to this day has any idea who Lil Albert is. When was this? The 1920. So Lil Albert would be old or dead. It'd be like 90. Yeah, probably dead. Probably died of fright at a young age. Isn't that horrible? It was pretty horrible. But out of this horrible old timing experiment, which, if you're interested, I wrote like, top five horrific psychological experiments for the blogs. This is one of them. I agree. What came out of it was an understanding that fear is conditioned. Right? Yes. And if you can condition somebody, if you can teach somebody to fear, you can teach people to unfear. Yeah, right. But before we get to that, Chuck, with more precursors, I think we should talk about some of the most common fears. Yeah, I didn't realize that. Phobias. There are only three main types, and I guess it's sort of a loose a lot of them fall under these umbrellas. So that must be the deal. Because agauraphobia fear of places where escape might not be easy or help may not be available. Oh, that's like a fear of big, open places. Yeah. But I think in a broader sense, it's just fear of I may not be able to get help in case I need it. You know, one of the characteristics of agoraphobia in some cases is being afraid. If you're out on the beach being afraid, you won't have anything to grab on to just flying off the earth. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Like, you can't go into big, open spaces. It's like the opposite of claustrophobia. Joan Cusack on that show, that awesome Showtime show has agoraphobia. She can't leave the house. And it's like, really kind of heartbreaking, maybe because it's Joan Cusack and you want good things for her. You want good things for the whole Cuesack family. Yeah, that's true. Social phobias obviously have anything to do with people. And then specific phobias is the third category, which is a bit of a cop out because that's like everything else that you're afraid of, including are you ready? Phobophobia. Fear of fear of fear. Fear of fear. Yeah. That's everybody. No, this is like a debilitating phobia that you don't like, that you're afraid of becoming afraid at some point. So what, do you just set your life up very safely? Like, don't watch horror movies. Don't. Okay, well, should we read this Gallup poll? Yeah, and I couldn't find a more recent one. No, this is probably fairly accurate still, though, 2005 and sort of sad. They pulled teenagers in the United States and their top ten things that were afraid of terrorist attacks was number one. I wonder if that's still the case. I'll bet it's not. Maybe spiders, death, failure, war, heights, crime, being alone, the future, and nuclear war. And I made my own top five as a teenager, as a Baptist teenager, like back then. You did? No, I did it. Oh, okay. Got you. But this is what little Chuck was afraid of. And this isn't a joke. In order. Sex, satan, alcohol and drugs. Sex and Satan was my top five. And honestly, I even took notes and scribbled things out, and that was about as accurate as I could get it. And you overcame the first one with the second one, with the eight of the third one. But they popped back in at four and five. Yeah, when you sober it up. So common fears, Josh. Dentistry. What did you say? Dentistry or not? I thought that's what you thought about becoming a dentist, but going to the dentist, flying, speaking in public heights is. A huge one. Yeah, we've gotten better at the speaking in public thing, but we still get very still get terrified. Yeah, but we don't have to ever be okay with that. No, not like super like Tony Robbins, free and easy. Because I imagine he's a cool customer before he goes on stage. Sure. He's not throwing up. Although he might take beta blockers. Those are for stage fright now. Is that right? Yeah, it's one of the you know how every drug on the planet says, well, we've also discovered it helps with this, the beta blockers. Evidently a lot of musicians use it. Well, we should start doing beta blockers. Okay. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and 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 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. Chuck, we're just talking about universal fears, or what a lot of people think are universal fears. And there's some behind there's some ideas behind universal fears, like snakes, spiders. That they are incredibly ancient. Our fear of them is probably prehuman back when we were chimps who are getting eaten by snakes. Right. Or who interacted with spiders on a regular basis. And that's why we can fear them without ever having had a bad experience with one, right? Yeah. Or humans in the case of rats, because rats carried disease that killed large populations of people. They think that's why we're scared of rats today. That one is a little hinky to me because we've only been aware of germ theory since the 19th century. I don't really buy that long enough. No, I think maybe rats too many rats chew the eyeballs out of, like, a sleeping friend. That's why I think we're afraid of rats, not disease. I've never seen that happen in a movie. Really? Chew the eyeballs out of a sleeping friend. No, I'm saying, like, in real life. In real life? No, I'm saying years and years ago. Okay. Do you understand? Really? No, I think I get it now. Like, way back in the day, back when we were living in caves or terrible shelter, tuck Tuck would see the rat to the eyeballs out of Herb while he was sleeping and tucked up was like, I need to steer clear those rats. Okay, but there are some that are not necessarily universal that are actually culturally bound, right. Or at least regionally bound. Like, a good example in this article is if you live on the coast, you're probably going to have a greater fear of hurricanes than somebody who lives in the Midwest, who's probably going to have a greater fear of tornadoes, especially lately, for goodness sake. Yes. God, what is going on? Tornadoes, man. And then there's some that are like, you literally have to live in this particular society to experience this fear. Kind of. Not necessarily, because I sometimes experience this fear. There's one in Japan called Taijin Kyofusho. Nice. Kyofusho. Right. Which is basically a culturally bound Japanese fear of inadvertently irritating offending or offending somebody by being overly respectful or polite. Not only are you afraid of offending somebody by being disrespectful or not polite enough, there's a threshold where you could be overly polite and offend someone, and there's a fear of reaching that point. Right. Or if you're the President, you might now have a fear of giving a toast in England incorrectly. I have a fear of seeing that again, that was mortifying. It was so uncomfortable. If you don't know that President Obama recently went to England for a state visit and apparently had a gap or two in his toast in front of a lot of people. Like, he raised his glass first, and the Queen is supposed to do that first, and he had his glass, and did you see? She just kept looking down at his glass. Well, he was giving a toast during the national anthem to her, right. Not realizing that everybody was being quiet, not because they were listening to his toaster, because they were respectfully being quiet during the National Anthem, which he was trying to talk over. The aftermath was so awful because he looked around, he realized that no one else's glasses raised, and he just quietly put his glass down. It was awful. He also signed the Queen's guest book and dated it, like, May 11, 2008. So apparently Obama's living in 2008, I think he was nervous as all get out of in Ireland. He drank a pint of Guinness with everybody. Well, that's because that's the only rule Ireland has. You go to England and they probably give him a dossier of, like, don't do this, do do that. He's probably chicken in his boots. Well put, Chuck. That's why we don't go on state visits to England much. So Chuck yes. We have talked about fear, right? Yes. And we also talked about what we foreshadowed, I think, fear extinction. Right. John Watson was planning on basically making little Albert's fears go away through a process called fear extinction, which is a type of conditioning, but it's like the reversal of it. Yeah. We should point out the reason this is important is because fear is okay in doses because it is a survival tool. But it's not good to live in constant fear. It's not good for your body because it just wreaks havoc on your internal systems because of fight or flight is so intense. Exactly. It lowers your immune system. It raises the heart, blood pressure, all that stuff. I think we talked about that. And can you scare someone to death? Yes. So fear extinction. Well, any kind of fear conditioning is, say, hitting a claw hammer on a piece of metal behind the baby's head whenever he touches a little white rat. Right? Yes. The opposite of that is having the baby touch a little white rat and not making that horrible sound. You can also say condition rats to fear a sound like just the tone, like a ding. By giving them an electric shock in their cage. Every time that ding sounds, they're going to come to fear that sound. If you make that ding without delivering the shock, eventually this fear memory, this condition fear is going to be unlearned. Yes. And one thing that they learned out of that that was pretty interesting is that they theorized that the extinction memories form in the amygdala, but instead of staying there, they're transferred to the medial prefrontal cortex to be stored. So it's still triggered in the amygdala. But that's where the new learned non fear resides. Right. They think that's what they think now because it's the brain. It's all bunch of theory to deal with. Extinction, too, is exposure. So one of the things that they'll do is, let's say if you're afraid of heights, don't inch you closer and closer to the edge of the building until you realize like, all right, nothing's happening here. It's cool, I'm not falling off. And then eventually if you're exposed to this enough, supposedly you can reverse some of these fears. Right. That's generally behavioral psychology, just little by little because you're making memories every time. I didn't get bitten this time. That's weird. So maybe I'll go a little further. I didn't get bitten again. And then ultimately you're like, I'm probably not going to get bitten, so I don't need to be afraid. And that's when you get bitten, then you're done. Did you used to watch the Bob Newhart show? Yeah. Which one? The old old one. Old one? Yeah. Not the old one, but the old old one. The one from the 70s? Yeah, sure. There was one. Susan Platchette. Yes. There's a great one called Flying the Unfriendly Skies where he took a group, one of his groups that was afraid of flying onto a plane. And it's hilarious. I was watching it today, and Penny Marshall is the stewardess. Really young, just starting out. Penny Marshall, bob newhart equals national treasure. Agreed. I said it. Yeah. So, Chuck, if the cognitive behavioral treatment is not working, how about some drugs? Man yeah. What's the deal with this? Well, there's a protein in our brains called NMDA nmethyl Despirate. Right. And it's in the amygdala. And if you inhibit it so this is a double negative. If you inhibit it, you also inhibit fear extinction. Okay. So science is reason. If you promote an MDA right. Then you will also promote fear extinction. And they're finding that that's actually the case. There's a tuberculosis drug, an antibiotic, that promotes the production of the protein NMDA, and they give it to people and then give them exposure therapy as well. Right. Because the whole deal is they don't want to try and replace it with the drug, but it just speeds up the classic conditioning experiment. Yeah. And I guess a trial with rats has proven this is possible. They condition them to fear a sound or a light or something with electric shocks. Yes. Goal conditioning. And then said, well, here, we're going to inject you with this tuberculosis antibiotic. And the rats that were on the drug learned fear extinction faster than the ones that were doing it without the drug. Right. Can we talk about one more experiment that we didn't cover? Yeah, and this is neat, but this itself is just sort of hinky to me, because we talked earlier about the thrill of being afraid. That's why people go to horror movies. That's why they get on roller coasters. And people say that it can be akin to sexual arousal. And this dude named Arthur Aaron did an experiment, which I thought was a little odd. He had men walk across a suspension bridge, two different bridges. One, and these were 450ft long over a 230 foot gully. One bridge was very stable, one bridge was not and very shaky. And he had the men walk across this. And the other end of the bridge, he had his very attractive female assistant waiting, asked him some red herring questions that didn't have anything to do with the experiment, and then said, oh, and here's my number if you have any questions. Apparently, three of the men, of the 33 men, only two sorry. Called the woman afterward who walked across the stable bridge. The guys that walked on the shaky bridge, nine of the 33 called her. Bam. Proven I guess they just were like, I can do anything. What's your number? Or they're like, hey, I'm very turned on because I almost just died. What's your number? What's your number? Or I'm going to call you. So, Chuck, what do you do if you don't really want the drugs? You're not debilitated. And I should also say the National Institutes of Health say about 19 million people in the United States alone suffer from mental illnesses that involve irrational fear responses. So everything from, like, phobia, panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, 19 million people in the US. Alone. I want to talk more than that. Really? Yeah. Okay. But let's say you're not one of these people where you're not clinically afraid, but you still don't like heights. Or you can get on a plane, but you are not happy. What are the eight tips? Well, one, Josh, is that it doesn't matter why you're scared. So it's not like to develop a big understanding of your fear. Helps you overcome it, actually delays that progress is what they say. Yeah, that's what Prevention Magazine says. Because number two says, learn about the thing you fear. Right? I guess not why you're scared, but to learn more about it. Like, maybe injecting rationality. Like, this is how often a plane actually goes down or something like that. Yes. Take baby steps. Train yourself to not be afraid. Hang around someone who's not afraid of that. Like, if you're afraid of heights, hang around with me. Because I'm not afraid of heights. Right. Talk about it. Because sharing out loud makes things better. Duh play mind games with yourself. And they use the classic example of picturing a crowd naked if you're speaking in front of them. I've heard that does not help, and it may actually make things worse. I could see that. And don't look at the big picture. Just look at each little one step at a time and seek help. If you have really irrational fear, go talk to someone. Seek help. Indeed. And seek this article. You got anything else? No, sir. So seek this article by typing fear F-E-A-R not F-E-R-E into the search bar athousteporkworks.com. It's going to bring up this article and some other cool stuff, right? Yes. And since I said that, Chuck, you know what time it is. That's right. You know what the real is? It's time for listener, mate. Josh, I'm going to call this hello from Kazakhstan. Yeah, I just read an article in the New Yorker about Kazakhstan, and it's new capital. I believe it's called, like, Astana. Yeah. Astana. The president of Kazakhstan has sunk billions into creating a new capital in the middle of the steps of the country. Good for him. And Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world by landmass. Really? It also shares the longest border in the world. It shares it with the Soviet Union. Wow. Go ahead. You're just recalling all this, too. Very impressive. And I told this guy that I would make fun of his accent and read it as Borat. And he said, I love it. Nice. Yeah, you're right. Clearly. And he literally titled it Hellos from Kazakhstan. Your podcast is being played in Astana, Kazakhstan. That's the capital. All right. So he lives I discovered your podcast when I once bought an ipod. Gizmo. I started my discovery of American culture when I won scholarship to study my 12th grade in American high school. That was an awesome year for a guy who has never been to McDonald's in his life and has never sat in nice single seat student desks. I guess they sit on benches. I guess so. Also include the traditional yellow school buses. I live with great host family who further show me culture. After graduating high school, I want another scholarship to study at Canadian College. As you have guessed, in four years in Canada, my mentality got synced with Northern American culture. Now I'm back in Kazakhstan and got a job in it. Stop that. No, you got to keep going. Oh, no, you got to finish. I'm writing all this because every day on my way to work, I listen to podcasts and you guys always bring back good memories of USA in Canada. For 50 minutes I feel as if I am in USA in Canada. Hope this feeling never goes away. You also make me smile and laugh in buses. And I look like idiot to other gray faces in bus. Other what? Gray faces. I guess it just means stinky commuters and kind of stuff. Got you. But the last I wish everyone here understood English to listen to you guys. So they should start their day with smile. Thanks for great work and share of American culture. Izgi Nietman, which means regards. Okay. And that is from Giza. He was thrilled that I would be making fun of his exit. That is awesome. Thank you, Giza. We are glad to keep you entertained and say hello to Borat for us. Yeah. Who is actually British. You know John. Okay. All right. He's playing Freddie Mercury. Is he really? That'll be great. Heck yeah. Wait, our guy? No. Giza, thanks a lot. We appreciate that. If you are afraid of something weird, we want to hear about it. That includes you too, Gazat. We want to know. Send us an email at stuffpoodcast@housetofworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House of Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | ||
452bba28-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-232f899fd47d | Short Stuff: iSmell | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-ismell | Two men once had a dream - to add smell to the internet. And they almost gave it to us. | Two men once had a dream - to add smell to the internet. And they almost gave it to us. | Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:35:58 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=18, tm_min=35, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=332, tm_isdst=0) | 12521854 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Shorty. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. I'm Josh. We're all feeling kind of short, so this is short stuff. I'm feeling tall. Are you sure, why not? Always feel like I'm six three. How tall are you? I used to be 510. Now I'm like five nine and a half. Oh, wait, I just realized this is a short stuff. We have no time for this. Sure we do. So, by the way, everyone, I know that when we started releasing these, they were in the regular stuff you Should Know feed on Wednesdays and then also in a standalone shortage feed. And I think we just weren't quite sure how to handle that. Now we're just going to stop that other one and just let them live here in the main feed, right where they've been all along. But we're going to send our old little standalone friend out to pasture and shoot it. All of which means to say is, if you are only subscribed weirdly to that one thing, not the regular feed, just come on over and join us on the regular feed. We're bringing them home, baby. All right, so here's our dirty secret, is we talked about this one time in a single live event that no one listening saw. That's exactly right. And it was such an interesting little piece of Internet tidbit lore. Yeah. So perfect for this. It just cannot be left alone. So, yeah, we decided we were going to talk about the eye smell. Little I big smell. That was their slogan. It is like a little lie because it was tied into that whole Apple push of the late 90s, early 2000s, when Apple was riding high and untouchable. Yeah, I guess you can't trademark something like that, right? I guess not a little eye, because not everyone, but seems like it's been co opted since then. Sure. There's like Ihome does all their accessories, and clearly companies that are not getting any kind of approval from Apple has that whole eye thing going on. Yeah. So the eye smell just very simply was a little I guess you would call it a peripheral, a little device that you would put on your desk, plug into your computer via USB, and then when you're browsing the Internet, depending on what kind of website you would come across, it would squirt out a scent that matched what you're looking at. Maybe not squirt. Maybe more like waft. It was probably like what do you call those? The little perfume? Atomizer. Yeah. Not like one of those trick flowers that they didn't, like, squirt some oil onto your face that wouldn't come off or anything like that. Why did I visit Napaautopartscom? Right? The problem with it was not what it was or what it did. Because if you stop and think about it, that's pretty awesome. Or how it works. Right? We'll get into like the nuts and bolts of it, but it was a revolutionary device. Amazing. Some people say that it was simply ahead of its time and that it was still simply ahead of its time. Other people say that just from the get go, it was like the definition of ill conceived. Yeah. So shall we go back to the 1990s yes. That the.com bubble is riding high. grunges in decline. Yeah, it was if it's like, kind of mid ninety s. What was coming out? What came after Grunge? M and M. Oh, I don't even know what that is. You know who M and M is? I have no idea. Okay, well, it's spelled out you see Eminem. Oh, M and M, the guy, the rapper guy. That's right. Yeah. I thought it was like, Eminem was some sort of style of music that I just didn't know about. Oh, no. I'm talking like, Eminem. All right, so the.com are in full effect. And if everyone remembers that time, there was just a lot of money being thrown around all over the place for any great new Internet related idea. For sure. I think these guys, a pair of dudes named Joel Bellinson and Dexter Smith, who went on to form what was the name of their company? I think it was digestants digitscents. That's right. Okay. They formed digestants with $20 million in venture capital. And there's this really great everybody go read this article. It's a Wired article from 1099, and it just does a profile of them and their company, and they have, like, this venture capitalist dude who's, like, the prototype for the Silicon Valley VC guy. It was like, he's the guy. He's the archetype. It's amazing just to see him appear and be like, this is the first guy. He's like, patient zero. Yeah. The original hoodie where exactly? Amazing. They got together and they formed this company called Digisence, and apparently it was based on a couple of things. They were pretty well off having written some software for genetics databases. Yeah. And this is the so these guys were one of the few, if not the first to do this. So they were set. But that experience had also kind of given them an awareness of genetics and digitization. And they realized you can code something as organic as DNA. And they had that little bit in their pipe that they were smoking when they were down on Miami Beach one day on vacation together. And they started smelling perfumes everywhere, as the legend goes. Yes. So the story goes, they smelled many different perfumey scents in the air and said, I've got a great idea. I know how we can lose $20 million of someone else's money. Right. Digital Scenting. Which is why they called their company Digi Sense. And like you said, because they already had this sort of genetic digitizing things relating to genetics down pat, I don't think had too hard of a time transferring that to the fact that we talked about this on our own longer stuff you should know is that specific odorant molecules fit together perfectly with specific proteins attached to olfactory receptors. In other words, go listen to our episode on smell. Precisely. Right. So I guess it would have been the smell one. Oh, yeah, it was either that or the china's pollution sniffers. Yes, them. Yeah, probably both. So these guys knew that going into this, or they went and I think did the research, but they were like, oh, we can work with that. We can take this and turn it into a digital representation or digital model of an odorant. And not only can we do it once, we can do it thousands of times. The first step these guys took was to create, from what I understand, the world's first database of digitized fence. They could go into this database and be like, oh, okay, here's the code for gardenia, and it's this odorant and that odorant, and you put it together, and if you can basically print out an actual odorant and put them together into your brain, you will smell gardenia. Even though this is not from earth or nature, it's totally digitized. And that alone, chuck, is like, hats off to these cats for doing that. But that was step one toward digit sense, Ismel release. That's right. And we're going to take a quick break and come back with the master stroke that was step two right after this. All right, so we're back. The brilliant master stroke that I teased really was brilliant. And all this was the fact that they could do the digitizing of scent alone was great, but they sort of learned just like color combinations in order to pump out any smell you wanted to to someone sitting in their cubicle via the internet, they didn't have to come up with millions of different smells. They could lean on those 128 primary odorants and combine them in whatever way they saw fit to make specific odorants, like billions and billions of different cents just from those 128 primary orders. It was really smart. It was because up to that point, it's like, okay, this is a good idea, but how can you get billions of different cents into a little desktop peripheral? You can't. So the ability to break it down into just a palette of 128 now all of a sudden, the I smell is starting to become an actual reality. And from what I remember, the I smell itself was actually kind of cool looking, if you ask me. It looks like an apple alien wind sale or something like that solar sale. But I think the tray heated up the specific odor and then a fan blew across it. And not only would it heat up one order, it would heat up different combinations to different degrees, and the fan would blow across it, and then that's what would waft out of the I smell. That's right. So you load a web page with pixels that have those sent instructions. You're on a web page for a landscaping service and they decide it's a great idea to give you the scent of fresh cut grass as you visit their website or if you're at a travel agent site, because this is back then when people still use travel agents, they would squirt out maybe some coconut and suntan lotion, but not squirt waft. And basically the idea was to enrich your Internet experience. Cost about $200. I think the cartridges were about $50. But they last month. A month, sure. Which is that's not a terrible price for something. Not at all. And it worked great. They tested it. It worked fine. What they didn't do was consumer testing. That is does anyone want to smell the Internet? No. These guys did so much R and D and so much they were so heads down on the I smell that the fatal flaw of the whole thing was they didn't stop to ask themselves, do people want this? They just presumed, yes. This thing is so awesome. It's so revolutionary and there's so much development put into it. Yeah, of course. Everybody's going to want the price TAG's, right? It doesn't slow down your web page. The pixels that they created with the send information were so efficient. It took up, I think, two bytes of space, which is like a 17th of Google's tracking pixel. Everything about it, it was perfect, but no one wanted it. It was just as plain as day. Except for me. I've always wanted one of these. Yeah, they actually debuted at the 2001 CES Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, which is where all the big products make their splash. Nobody liked it. Everyone hated it. They never sold a single one. And $20 million in VC funds went to down the scented drain. Yes, there was at least one prototype, and you can see pictures of it on the Internet. But as far as anyone knows, that was it. They never built one. They certainly never sold one. Pretty amazing. And then in 2006, PC World said, this can't be forgotten. And they released their list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. And believe me, there's been a lot of worst tech products, but the I Smell was included on that list and was honored forever. Amazing. Yes, the I smell. All right, well, that's it. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website, stuff You Should Know.com, and check out all of our social links there. You can also send us in Jerry, an email to stuff. Podcast@howstuffworks.com hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-23-sysk-fecal-transplants.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Fecal Transplants: You Gonna Drink That Poop? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-fecal-transplants-you-gonna-drink-tha | In this week's SYSK Select episode, there's an emerging field in health care called medical ecology that's concerned with understanding how the 100 trillion microbes living inside us keep us healthy. The field's first breakthrough is the fecal transplant, | In this week's SYSK Select episode, there's an emerging field in health care called medical ecology that's concerned with understanding how the 100 trillion microbes living inside us keep us healthy. The field's first breakthrough is the fecal transplant, | Sat, 23 Sep 2017 13:47:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=13, tm_min=47, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=266, tm_isdst=0) | 32246915 | audio/mpeg | "Hello. Stuff you should know. Listeners, welcome to the Saturday Selects chuck edition. This week. I'm going with one from January 24, 2013, entitled Fecal Transplants Colony. Going to drink that poop? This one came up recently, and I can't remember exactly why in my real life. Oh, I know why. Because I was watching the great Tignetaro show One Mississippi, which has a second season that's starting kind of right about now. And on that show, I think she had a fecal transplant, and I think she did in real life. So it made me think of this one as just being a really interesting kind of despite the fact that they're poop shakes. Cutting edge medical technology, I guess you would call it, or at least procedures. And on a serious note, it really helps people out who have real problems. So we do make quite a few jokes. But it was a pretty cool show, so give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it. 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 we are still flying by the seat of our pants. We just now decided which of the two episodes we're going to record first that's never happened. I looked at Josh while he was talking. I pointed to the thing and he just nodded. We're going to do poop? Yeah, we're doing poop. Yes. I can't wait to hear intro for this, because I can't imagine what kind of intro you would have for drinking a poop shake. Exactly. Zero intro. Okay, now that you've put me on the spot all right. I had only recently heard of this. Yuumi. Pointed it out to me about six or so months ago, and then prestobamo change. Oh, we've got an article on the site finally. Yeah. This is pretty new article, right? Yeah. And it was at least October. Well, earlier. This has come up a couple of times in our show already. Yeah, we did a little video that's now vanished on fecal transplants. That's right. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's where it came up. This article is by a dude named Nicholas Gerbis or Gerbis. I don't know who he is. He's a freelancer. But this guy is top notch. Yeah, he wrote some funny sentences. He did. But it's like every sentence in this article is underlined and highlighted. Yeah, very good. Comprehensive article on poop shakes. Good, thick stuff. So, Chuck, did you know that if you are infected with something called the norovirus, which is very frequently contracted in dorms, prisons, cruise ships, aren't they all virtually the same thing? Pretty much. When you poop, each gram of stool has literally billions of neuroviruses in it? Yeah. And I believe one of the ways you can contract this is by eating sushi from fish that had been swimming in contaminated waters. Right. Oh, is it the same one? The norwalk virus and the neurovirus or the same one in the same. Oh, okay. Yeah, that sounds familiar. That was in the first Pilot 1.0, right? That's right. But yeah. Okay. So the norovirus, you can get it from eating sushi. You can also get it if you happen to be friendly with a person who is just filthy and has the neurovirus and doesn't wash their hands after pooping and then shakes your hand or feed you like a gummy bear or something gross with their poopy fingers. And you accept that gummy bear and maybe their fingers get inside of your mouth just a little bit, and all of a sudden you have the neurovirus and you are in big, big trouble. For the most part, though, it was always regarded as like this kind of just a terrible thing to have for a few days. It's extremely virulent, extremely easily passed. It could survive for days, weeks on a surface. But ultimately, you just pooped a lot, you vomited a lot, and then it was done. Not so any longer. Thanks to the rise of mis prescribed antibiotics. Yeah. About 50% of antibiotic prescriptions are considered unnecessary. Yeah, I try to avoid it. It's good, and it's nice that you're doing your part. I try to do my part, too. And it stinks that we have to suffer, right? Yeah. Because other people are getting antibiotics at the drop of a hat. But that's the point. And one of the reasons why you and I choose to suffer if people haven't caught on yet is because if you expose a virus or bacteria to an antibiotic, something intended to kill it, and it doesn't kill it, that antibiotic or that virus or bacteria has just been effectively, naturally selected. And it goes on to reproduce and reproduce and eventually develops resistance to these antibiotics. And so the medicine we have becomes useless to it. That's happened with norovirus. It's also happened with another very nasty virus called Clostridium difficile. Yeah. It is Moody difficile. And difacile is what, French and Spanish for hard and difficult. I think so. And the reason they call it that is because this is a very intractable bacteria. Yeah. And they call it an emerging epidemic, which is kind of scary to say that, but especially in hospitals, in nursing homes, because it generally affects old folks. And I guess they're so jacked up on antibiotics that their gut can't kill this thing once it gets in there. Well, yes. Or if they're on antibiotics for something else, like they're in the hospital for something else that they're given antibiotics. The antibiotics go in and just wipe their guts clean of good bacteria and bad bacteria. Normally we have bacteria that fight C. Difficile, but if it's all gone, then yeah, you're in big trouble. The clostridium comes in and finds root and gives you a lot of problems and maybe kills you. Yeah, it is a big deal. Gastrointestinal infections as a whole are way up these days, the death number doubled from 1999 to 2007. And I think more than 17,000 people year in the US die from gastrointestinal infections. Yeah. 83% of the gastrointestinal infection fatalities are in patients 65 and older. Yeah. Sadly, the next biggest age group is five and under. Yeah. The old and the young. And it's a really nasty way to die. Yeah. And two thirds of those are the C. Difficile specifically. Right. Which is why they're calling it an epidemic. Yeah. And the way you die from this is you vomit and diarrhea so much that you become dehydrated. When you become dehydrated, your electrolytes are out of balance, the electrical system that keeps your heart and rhythm malfunctioned. So maybe you have a heart attack or you have a stroke or you go into shock and die. Yeah. And even if you're young, it's important to stay hydrated when you're sick like that. Even if you have the stomach flu or something and you're vomiting up stuff, you've got to try to at least keep some water down. And if you can't, then you should probably go to the hospital and have fluids introduced intravenously. Yeah. It's not a bad idea. Better safe than sorry. I always keep an IV in the trunk of my car just in case I start to dehydrate. So I think we made the case that C. Difficiles is a big problem, right? It is. And the fact that they call it intractable, it's just really hard to get rid of. Even once you get rid of it, there's, like a 20% relapse rate. Oh, really? Yeah. And when you're on antibiotics, you have seven to ten times greater chance of contracting it. And even two months after you finish the course of antibiotics, you're still three times as likely to contract as normal. So you really want to stay away from the antibiotics? If at all possible. Yeah, of course. If you need them, take them. We're not advising you to not take things to make you better, but if you have the sniffles, if you have, like, a nasal infection or something like that, a sinus infection? Is that what they call them? Yeah. You kind of need to tough it out for the greater good of humanity. All right, let's talk about bacteria and what is called the microbiome. That is an ecosystem in your body of little tiny bacteria. Like 100 trillion bacteria in the human body doing all kinds of good stuff. Yeah. And there's ten times the amount of foreign bacterial cells in your body than your cells, actual human cells. Ten times more. And that's a good thing. We've talked about good bacteria and bad bacteria before and probably the monsters inside this thing. Right? What was that one? Yeah, probably digestive system too. Yeah, that too. But anyway, to recap quickly, we have lots and lots and lots of helpful bacteria. And there's a burgeoning field in medicine. Some might call it a fringe on the fringe right now, but it's called medical ecology, and it's kind of neat. It's basically like instead of going to war with your body, they're saying you should be more like a gardener and manage your body like a garden of all these live things inside of you. Flora? Bacterial flora. Yeah. You don't want to kill these things. No. Especially not the good ones. And that's what we've been doing with antibiotics. We just send something in there that kills everything. That's right. There's a really cool thing. Have you heard of the Human Microbiome Project? I have. This is based on examinations of 242 healthy folks that they track for two years, and they're basically sequencing genetic material of bacteria recovered from sites on the body, and they've recovered more than 5 million genes at this point. So they're really, like, mapping this stuff out for the next wave of medicine. Coming through. Down. Right. That's got to be a pretty good first step towards tailoring medicine to avoid killing good stuff. Yeah. And this goes along with your hygiene hypothesis that we just talked about when we recorded yesterday and the five second roll. Yeah, that's probably out already, right? Yeah. Okay. But yeah, the hygiene hypothesis is that if you're exposed to bacteria, your body, your microbiome begins to include bacteria that can defend against the bad stuff. If you're exposed to it early on, you have a greater advantage toward being healthy as an adult, having fewer, allergies that kind of stuff. Have you ever had a friend that had a kid that was a little cookie with the purell? I've seen it like before. You touch my baby here all over you. Yeah, usually when the baby is very young, although I also have friends that won't touch babies because they think they're just dirty. It's hilarious. I was like, I don't hold babies usually because I'm afraid I'm going to drop them. And I thought you just carry football. That's probably one of the problems. Well, that's how you carry a baby rhyme. Go facing the armpit, elbow over the body, pull the wheel tight and run like hell. I think that is it. I don't think so. I think you'd cradle and nuzzle. Well, anyway, I thought my friend was afraid of dropping the baby, and he's like, no, I don't touch them because they're just like bags of germs. Well, all humans are filthy, dirty, and babies just don't appear that way because they haven't been around long enough to stink really bad. Right. They smell all downy sweet. And from the day you're born, you start smelling worse and worse and worse until the day you die. They have puppy breath to start. I remember going, man, I remember my father's bathroom experiences being a kid and being like, oh, my Lord, am I going to smell that way one day? Yeah, I remember that too. And then that mixed with shaving cream smell. Yeah. Man. I don't like it. Now, I smell that way, I know you don't, you smell fine. So back to bacteria, if we're talking about millions and millions and millions of these in our body, our mouth has hundreds of thousands of bacteria species, not just bacteria, and they are in our teeth and our gums on our tongue, they're in our lungs, which we didn't think we used to have them in our lungs. Apparently there's 2000 gut is where you're going to find some serious action, 25,000 to 30,000 different species of bacteria, yeah, and they live in colonies, we're starting to learn condominiums colonies, where I guess bacteria kind of likes to stay with their own ilk. Sure, but if you put it all together, you've got like a whole neighborhood of bacteria. But I am pretty confident that once we start to figure out, like this colony tends to live in this part of the body and this colony lives here, I'll bet it helps things function more correctly. And if you move colonies around, I'll bet you find dysfunction life balance or not life balance. Well, I think that's one of the reasons why it's still fringe. Like you just kind of put your finger on it, like there's balance and all that too, but sort of esoteric. Right, but as you and I know, homeostasis is the goal of everything. That's right, we've talked about it before. So you've got it in your mouth, you've got bacteria in your gut, and I think the fact that bacteria have more cells in our bodies than we do kind of supports this idea that Nicholas Gerbis pointed out, is that bacteria are probably the most successful life forms on planet Earth, yeah, what are these guys doing? Well, they are breaking down things into other things, they break down nitrogen in the soil to make it absorbable for plants. They produce vitamins in your gut? Yeah, bacteria do, yeah, how about that? They produce oxygen that we breathe through waste processes, they help maintain your protective qualities of your skin, which is nice. Those plants, they turn the tables on those plants, they break down nitrogen in the soil for plants to take up, and then when we eat the plants, they break the plants down into a digestible slurry. What's it called? Bolas, I think, chime and bolus, or is it bolus? Bolus then chime. They also help prevent and reduce swelling, which is a big deal because swelling can be one of the danger factors if you're sick or injured, a lot of times people die simply because they can't get the swelling down in order to perform procedures they need to perform. Yeah, so thank you, bacteria, for helping with that. And then we were talking about babies, too, Chuck. If you wouldn't hold a baby, then you probably shouldn't shake hands with the baby's mother, because that's where the baby gets most of his or her initial bacteria from the mother. There's about 600 different species found in breast milk. The sugars in breast milk go directly toward cultivating bacteria in the baby's gut. There's a change in the vaginal microbiome where they think that possibly the baby is basically coded in this upon entry into the world. Yeah. That's called lactobacillus JohnsonI. And that is present when you're pregnant in your vaginal microbiome. Right. And they think that you get coded on the way out. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you're like, okay, I've got some defenses here, and these guys are going to be my friends for the rest of my life. Well, the lactobacillus actually helps them digest the milk. So little beebees that come out. That's why they say if you're born in a cesarean fashion, then you might not have what you need to digest the milk. You might have problems there. You might have fewer defenses against IBD, inflammatory bowel disease and what else? MRSA. Staph infection. Oh, yeah. I think that there are studies that suggest that you're more prone to MRSA infections on the skin. This is still very much under debate. Sure. Huge debate between cesarean and natural birth stuff. It's like a hornet's nest. Oh, I bet. But they think that there is a definite link, they imagine, between irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disorder sorry. Which includes like, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. And it's a big deal. You can lose parts of your intestines. You can die, you can become malnourished. And there's like a $1.7 billion expense in healthcare just from inflammatory bowel disorder alone in the US. And they believe that that's linked to some sort of problem with bacteria in the gut. So all of this small talk about bacteria has been leading to the set up of this podcast, which is drinking the poop shake. Yes. The fecal transplant. And they call it a transplant. And it makes it sound a little more like a medical procedure than I thought it was. There's no cutting, there's no lasering. There's nothing like that. This has been practiced something like this has been around since fourth century China. I couldn't find anything on that. Could you really? Now we should email the author here. Okay. But it has been around in earnest since 1958. Doctor Ben Isaman from Denver General Hospital pioneered this. I guess it's a procedure. I was going to say technique. And they really didn't come around in earnest until about 2000. So here's how it works. Your donor gets screened for hepatitis and HIV and other disease causing germs that you don't want. They take the stool of the donor poop poop. They blend it with saline or this is so gross. 4% milk in a medical blender. Yeah, sure. Not a cuisine art, I bet it is a cuisine art. It's expensive that you would use milk. If you want to propagate moss on something. Sure. A little bit of buttermilk, little bit of sugar, and just take some moss and throw it in a blender altogether. Press blend, take it, and paint it on whatever you want. That's right. And it will grow. CrMAs podcast for that one. Yeah. So basically, you have the stool sample, the poop, 4% milk, and a milkshake machine, and you mix it up and you feed it to the patient. You don't have to drink it? No. There's different ways to introduce it, but one of them, it does end up in your stomach, and I don't understand how you don't just immediately throw it right back up. All right, so the two methods that Josh will explain are nasogastric and nasoduodenyl. Yeah. We never figured that one out in our digestive episode. Remember the duodenum? Yeah. Duodenum. Duodenum. Yeah. That's a tube that goes through your nose, and if it's nasogastric, it ends in your stomach, which means you have Poop going directly into your stomach. And don't think that 4% milk makes it any easier to take through your nose, through your throat, into your stomach, or the nasoduodenum goes through your nose, into your stomach, and then into your intestines. So it bypasses your stomach. Okay. And it goes directly to where you want it, the intestines. Wow. You can also do an enema that's designed to stay in rather than flush back out. Oh, an anima. Yeah. What do you think I said? I don't know. I just they should call the other ones Alama Kaleidoscope. Right. Although that would work if you turned it around and I guess broke all the glass out ahead of time. That would just be like a funnel, then. That's true. But the point is, you have someone else's poop, a healthier person's poop in your stomach, and they expect that about 40% to 60% of the living bacteria found in that poop is going to stick around in your intestines. What you're doing? The whole point of a fecal transplant is to repopulate your gut flora so that your immune system can get back in order. That's why they thought to do it. Yeah. They have another cocktail that they're working on, which is just a bunch of, like, bacteria that I guess you could take as a pill. Right. But, man, this works. Sure. Yeah, it seems to. One of the stats we have here is that people who have undergone this, and it's still well, we'll get to how often it's practiced here in a second. But one study found that long term follow up, 77 fecal transplant patients reported a 91% cure rate after just one of these. And 98% if you marry that with additional probiotics and antibiotics or an additional Poop shake. Right. For C. Difficile yes. That's 91% to 98%. That's awesome. I don't think that there's anything that has that kind of success rate. Maybe aspirin. Maybe so, but yeah, it's definitely been shown to work, and it is fringe, but you can still get it done in hospitals. That's where you want to do it. Yeah. You don't want to do this at home. This is not, in fact, a couple of the best sentences in this article or in this section. First of all, the preparation. You prepare like you would for a colonoscopy. But who read this again? Nicholas Gervis. Gervis. Gervis. Put it this way. We'll call him Nikki G. Nikki G says the patient prepares for the procedure via the traditional taking up prisoners date with the thunder bucket ritual used by colonoscopy patients. Yeah, he went from, like, science writer, science writer, science writer. Mad magazine. Yeah. And then he also says, this is not a great DIY project because stool is a level two biohazard. Number two, if you don't test the samples for disease, you could end up in pain. And then third, remind us never to drink a frozen margarita at your house. He just went funny for one paragraph and then right back to the business. Right. Well, he says that you want to screen the stool that you're putting into the patient. And insurance doesn't cover this? Not yet, no. But they think it will as early as this year, earlier this year, soon, early 2013. But even still, it's not very cost prohibitive. It's about $1,000. I saw there's a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, that does it for $1,300. That's pretty cheap. It's not bad. And most of that cost is for screening the stool for disease I thought have been the milk. No. Yeah. Or pressing the blend button. Right. Or holding your breath, all the nose clips. So one of the interesting things here moving forward is how this is going to be, like you said, affect insurance, and how it's going to be classified if and when it becomes, like, super legit. Because what is on the horizon is that the FDA has declared feces a drug in this case, because it's being used as a drug, in a way, it's already a class two biohazard. Right. So now it's a class two biohazard drug, according to FDA, which is good because that means it's on the way to becoming investigational status. Right. Do you remember with the dog show episode where we were talking about how there's the other breed? I can't remember what it was called, but it was like a breed that didn't fit in anything else. Miscellaneous, maybe. And that's how the AKC begins to recognize a breed. Like, it first places it in this miscellaneous. Oh, sure. I get the impression that this is the same process the FDA is saying, like, that's a drug, and by doing so, we're halting all of this stuff. You can't just do it any longer. Really? Nilly. Like, now there's a law attached to it, but we're also classifying something that we officially recognize that you can now apply for funding to study and say the FDA recognizes this is a drug. We want to understand it better, so give us some money. So interesting, though, how are they going to regulate. Like, this is a drug that is Poop. How are they going to regulate that as far as because we should point out that most of the time, the donor is a family member. Family, but it doesn't have to be or even a blood match. But I think because you share the same environment, you're probably likelier to have a similar gut flora. I think it probably has to do with it just being so gross, too. Don't you think maybe that you don't want to just take some random person's Poop and drink it? See, the thing is, I'd almost rather have a stranger's poop. Yeah. Because what if I were doing this and the donor is just staring at you? My poop is going in your stomach right now as a random stranger. You can't do that. Talk about surgical theater. Yeah. It's going to be really interesting how they move forward with this. But like we said, huge results. And according to the CDC, C. Difficile kills 14,000 people annually, so it's a big problem. And they said can help with metabolic syndrome, maybe. Yeah. So metabolic syndrome is a collection of risk factors, like insulin resistance, having a lot of weight around the middle, and basically it adds up to a higher risk for type two diabetes. Coronary artery disease. Yes. Stroke. Yeah, stroke. And they found that a Poop transplant can actually reverse the course of this disorder. Yeah. They found this in mice, right? Yeah. They think that what's going on is that it improves your insulin sensitivity, reduces triglyceride levels, and they think that it has to do with the way that you metabolize sugars. Wow. And they also found in rats that if you take the Poop from a lean rat and transfer it to an obese rat, the obese rat loses weight. No other interventions whatsoever, all just from a Poop transplant. And again, they think it has to do with the way that the bacterial colonies help us digest flute food, help us absorb nutrients. So who knows? Like, Poop transplants could be the weight loss wave of the future. Well, they definitely know that the bacteria in a skinny person's gut is different than an obese person's gut. It's humans. So there could be something to that. We're just now beginning to wrap our heads around the idea that the gut there's something there. There's this thing called the enteric nervous system. Yes. And it's basically your lower brain, and it's located in your intestines. Your intestines have a sheath of neurons, about 100 million neurons, which is as many neurons as in the heads of 105 bees, by the way. But it's more than, like, your parasympathetic nervous system has wow. And the vagus nerve do you remember we were talking about orgasms? Oh, yeah. Women who are paralyzed can still have orgasms because the vagus nerve goes around the spinal column directly from the pubic area of the gut to the brain. They found that 90% of transmissions in the vagus nerve go from the gut to the brain rather than vice versa. They're also figuring out the neurotransmitters. A lot of them are produced in the gut. Like, 95% of all of our serotonin is found in our gut. Right. So there's definitely something going on. They're like, well, yeah, this second brain developed to carry out digestion, and all this stuff independent of the brains of the brain can do other stuff. Right. But scientists are also saying, like, what we're looking at is way too complex to just be dealing with digestion. So what else is there? Now they're starting to figure out, like, oh, there's neurotransmitters. There's a lot of smarts in this gut brain, and they're linking it to things like Parkinson's. It's been linked to autism spectrum disorder. They're starting to figure out, like, we need to pay more attention to what's going on with these microbes in this gut because there's definitely something here. I feel like this medical ecology thing could be a big revolution in science. I agreed. I think they're on to something for sure. Yeah. So I'm sure it'll get more proper funding as it gets more legit, and FDA will have a lot to do with that. I have a feeling this is going to become too legit to quit in very short order. Poop shakes all around. You got anything else? No, sir. Do you want to say fecal transplant one more time? Fecal transplant. If you want to learn more about fecal transplants, you can type those words into the search bar. Athousohorch.com and it's time now for Listening. Josh. I'm going to call this condoms in the river. Oh, man, I know. Who this one this one is mind blowing. Did you read this one? Yeah. Guy has been an avid listener for some time. I came aboard around Aphrodisiacs, got hooked, and listened to the entire catalog. Josh, you requested any info to make sense about the ubiquity of condoms on New York City streets. While I can't shed light on how they got there, I can share with you some first hand experience what happens to them from that point. I'm a sailboat captain for a sail training and charter company on the Hudson River, and I learned very quickly after starting to work here that you don't touch the river water right after it rains. This is because the New York City sewage system is so old that the rainwater from storm drains and raw sewage are mixed together and treated by one system. When we get a lot of rain, the system is overwhelmed and the overflow is released untreated into the surrounding bodies of water, including the Hudson River. Now, after a long rain, you'd expect to find what I suppose you'd call a representative sample of condoms among the floating garbage. But I'm still trying to figure out why. Condoms represent a grossly disproportionate percentage of the overall floating trash. What should be. Doritos bag. Condom. McDonald's straw yo play Light and Fifth Cup. Condom is actually condom. Condom, condom. Spiderman action figure underneath a condom. Condom. Condom. Dead rat. The situation is disturbing enough on its own, but I teach a kid sailing camp during the summer as well, and the younger kids inevitably ask me what all those white things are, and I just say, those are Coney Island whitefish. And we had someone else right in that called Coney Island whitefish. So I guess this is what they're called. Okay. What if he's like, those are French letters, so those are Connie on whitefish. And then I walk away without further explanation. It's best, the best way I can think of to avoid further questions from the kids and potential lawsuits from parents. Other things I've seen come up from the Hudson River, in case you're curious, include mating crabs, a sunburned pig, an entire telephone pole and three dead bodies. That's disturbing. And that is Jonathan, actors, singer, sailor and speed dating. Host. I know. This guy is quite a renaissance dude. Yeah. Thank you, Jonathan. If you have any awesome, incredible stories, we want to hear them, whether they pertain to the podcast or not. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey. It's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Host by Karen Kilgarith and Georgia Hardstarks. This true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
c40b1806-5460-11e8-b38c-0b2dfcb30a44 | SYSK Selects: Your limb is torn off - now what? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-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 to microsurgery techniques. | 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 to microsurgery techniques. | Sat, 29 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=60, tm_isdst=0) | 33423876 | audio/mpeg | "Hi there, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen so your Limb is Torn Off. Now what? It's a great classic episode filled with neat stories about things like exposed innards and sewing muscles together. It's a good one, and it has a really great intro, if I do say so myself. It's from January 2014, so enjoy. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know because Jerry's over there too. How 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. 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 that was back in the old days, the unhealthy days, when I smoked and everything. Yeah. Your body didn't know how to heal. Right. So 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 Knowles Jr. But everybody calls him Eddie. Two DS in A-Y-I find that unwholesome. Yeah. And I didn't know Eddie could be short for Everett. I 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. Yeah. He was a little e, 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. Yeah. 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 was clearly in shock. So he grabbed it, ran, and got a woman, because at the time this was 1962, a woman was the only one who could provide any kind of initial emergency care. 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 guys 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 NOLs Jr. Of Somerville, Mass. On May 23, 1962, became the first recipient of a full, successful limb reattachment surface. First human recipient, right. Yeah, that's a good point. They had done that before in dog 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, they've reattached blood vessels, but they had never had a full amputation in 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. And he called his buddy, and he's like, I think we got one. Get in here. Like you said, they'd 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 yeah. 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 pink and warm. She shook it, made it do 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 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, like humming 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 reattach the arm bone. That what is that, 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 it 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 is sad 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. Go Catamounts. Nice. There's 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. 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 limry 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 limerist. 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. An experiment in their basement, I guess so. 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 humans limbs and hence present more cases to practice on? I think they're 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 toe thumb. Yeah. And that became perfected in the 60s. Totem. That's a good band name. Yeah. And then in the 70s, 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 the hand knuckles forward. All the fingers had no skin from the looks of it. They inserted it into an arm, into a bicep, the fingers, and they lived there for a while, 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, is that new? 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 to 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 just nasty stuff out there, but amazing. And 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. Okay, so, Chuck, we understand microsurgery now. It's Frankensteinian, right? Yeah. You're basically just sewing 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. Yeah. 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 his job. Yeah. I actually changed my Siri to a dude, so it's not her anymore. Oh, yeah. She's 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 1960s 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 I see 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. Well, 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 credit. So, for example, if you have a whole arm or a whole leg cut off, like, remember death proof. Yeah. That girl has her leg, 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 in action, may be 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 it. Makes 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 the article and be weird to look down and see your arm reattached. But I imagine no weirder than looking down and seeing your arm not attached. It would 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, I'm 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 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. Okay. 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 muscles used to. 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 yeah. 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, dude. I tried all sorts of Google searches and images of her kept popping up. So I don't know, 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. Was it? I thought it was in show. 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. Alright, 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's got to be above the bone. Like, let's say you get the tip of your finger at, 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. Yeah, 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 Nice, which I've just discovered still exists not too far from my house. Is it a magic shop? It's like everything. They had models, they had magic kits, they had whoopi cushions, and sort of like a catch all. Yes. I liked both of those, but I never went to one that was the same. Yes. 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 doctors 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 the skin graft 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 even if you cut off just the tip of your finger. Like, that nail bed is never growing back. This guy's nailbed grew back. That's awesome. Extracellular matrix is awesome. That's basically like the glue that holds ourselves 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 in skin cream and stuff like that. Sure. So typically what they use is this was a powder from pig bladder. But I saw a video on the New York Times side 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've 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 the stuff doesn't have pig cells. No, it doesn't have to be harvested from a pig body. Yeah. But they still remove the cells and all the DNA with like a chemical bath and basically what's remaining is the matrix. And they ended up drying it out and it looks like and 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. Yeah. They used to think that 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 and you lose a toe, the toe is growing back. You grow a vestigial tail that goes away. Your feet and hands start out being webbed, 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 extra 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. Yeah, 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 pick bladder 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 in there. Well, 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 it's 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 Mcgeehi. Oh, yeah. Wellness McGee. Yeah. That stuff triggers the old mirror neurons big time for a week. So that's basically it. They've been experimenting with war veterans, iraqi war veterans, and actually, the New York Times video I saw that it was a war veteran who was having this done to his thigh. His 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 will bring up a couple of cool things at the very least. Also type in extracellular matrix, which is pretty cool sounding. And that'll bring up another article, too. And since I said those things, it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this correction. Get these from time to time. We like to read them 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. He 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, 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 Cattell is a pretty good reference. He read a book called The History of Syphilis. Somebody wrote a book called The History of Syphilis. Anyway, and that was Claude. Q-U-E-T-E-L. So he's French? Nice. Isn't that what that's called? I don't remember anymore. I don't either. Anyway, I just wanted to point out carson. Yeah? That is from Kathleen Pierce. Nice. Thanks. She's into disease. Thanks for painting 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. Right? Yeah. And nothing better. All you have to do is tweet to us. Sure. To initiate contact, you can tweet to us using our Handle SYSK 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 stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And although you can't complain, you can enjoy our website stephashiano.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. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-05-30-sysk-voter-suppression-final.mp3 | Are Election Laws Designed to Suppress Voting? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-election-laws-designed-to-suppress-voting | Are laws that are meant to protect the sanctity of the polling place in reality designed to make it harder for groups that traditionally vote Democrat to cast their ballots? | Are laws that are meant to protect the sanctity of the polling place in reality designed to make it harder for groups that traditionally vote Democrat to cast their ballots? | Tue, 30 May 2017 16:34:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=16, tm_min=34, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=150, tm_isdst=0) | 66977221 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Me. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. Jerome Rowland. You put the three of them, us, together in a room, shake it up, pick out some of the chest hairs. You got stuff you should know. That was gross. I thought you'd like that. You're ready to get angry on this one? I'm trying to keep it cool, man. I woke up yesterday and said, I really want to take off a significant portion of our listeners. So what topic could we do? And I thought voter suppression. Perfect. Well, you know what, man? I've been trying to think about why this bugs me so much. Voter suppression obviously bugs me because it's not right. Sure. But what really bugs me, I think, is that if you're in Washington, DC. And you're in government, like, everyone knows about this stuff and everyone talks about it, frankly, when microphones run around. Right. Do you watch the show Veep? I love it. I've only seen season five, but man, this is so good. Supposedly that's kind of how it is. Sure. Like, when the microphones aren't around, they all talk about politics in very frank terms, but as soon as you get on television or in front of a microphone, you have to tow the party lines on both sides with this rhetoric crap and it ends up you can't even really talk about the things. Well, no, but plus, also, I think one of the reasons that is the way it is is because you got to feed the sheeple like a certain like you said that company line or that party line. Because if you really talked about what was really going on, some of the people who agree with your BS would otherwise disagree with the actual thing that's going on. You know what I'm saying? Well, yeah, and let's just go ahead and say it in this one on voter suppression, historically, the Republican Party has purposely done things to try and keep certain people from voting because they probably vote Democrat, right. And they can't just say that, so they say, no, it's really about voter fraud. That's a big problem. And Democrats want those votes. And they say it's because they just want a very inclusive Democratic process. But that's not true. They want those votes because they're probably going to be Democrat votes, right. And Democrats will do anything, including voter fraud, to get people to the polls or to get those votes. That's the argument that's going on right now. Yeah, but you know what I'm saying, though. Like, neither one of them can say those things. So they have to stand behind these two kind of bogus reasons. And it's just infuriating. Right. So the reasons, these bogus reasons, ostensibly bogus reasons are that if you take measures to make it a little difficult to vote, what you're going to do is protect the integrity of the electoral system. Right. This is the Republican's viewpoint. If you do that, then there's going to be a couple of things. One, you're going to cut down on fraud, which, again, the Democrats are just total fraudsters when it comes to voting as far as Republicans are concerned. Right. And then it's also going to in some cases, sure, it's going to make it a little difficult for some people to vote, but the Republican way of thinking is if you really care about voting, you're going to do whatever it takes to get to that poll and register and vote. And if you don't, if just a couple of simple barriers will keep you from doing that, then nuts to you, man, I don't care about your vote and teas for the Democrats who you probably would have voted for. That's the argument in public that you're talking about that you're saying is bogus, when it's really these people who are having access issues to voting because of the laws of the GOP is putting up are more likely to vote for Democrats. So hence, these are targeted attempts to block people from voting for Democrats. Yeah, that's the reality of it. Allegedly, we should say, chuck, just calling it voter suppression is kind of controversial in and of itself. Well, yeah, no one likes to use those words because on the one side, like you said, it's not about voter suppression. It's about what's wrong with having to have an ID to go cast a vote? Right. On its face, it makes sense. Sure. They say you have to have ID to buy alcohol. If some clerk decides that he wants to see your ID, you have to show it to him or you can't buy alcohol. What's the problem with that? Well, right. And then you go to some parts of Texas and they say, well, you can use your gun license to vote, but don't use your student ID. That doesn't count. Right. The fact that they're all very targeted and everyone will see as we go through this, it's very targeted, and we'll bring up specific cases where they find out, like, oh, man, leading up to the election where Barack Obama's first presidential election, we saw a surge in increase in black voters in this county. So let's go to that county specifically and introduce some legislation that's going to make it harder for them to get to the polls. Right. Specifically there, yeah, it's maddening. Oh, it is. It's infuriating even. I was reading kind of the other side on this by a guy named David French who writes for the National Review. And he was saying even he was like. If that happens. What you just described. It should be vigorously litigated. That there's no excuse for that. For anything that's specifically targeting. Like. Minorities or the elderly or making it difficult for any group purposefully. Making it harder for them to vote. And targeting people like that. Then yeah, it should be litigated and those rules should be thrown out. Well, and that happens. It is litigated. And quite often reports do say, like, you can't do this, and they say, all right, well, we won't do it again, but it worked on this election. Right. Well, one of the reasons why we're currently in the midst of a really massive wave of voter suppression laws that are sweeping the country right now, and one of the reasons why it's being allowed to go on is because just like in Citizens United, the Roberts Supreme Court said, you know what, things are fine. We're just going to got an important provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But it basically said, these states in these specific districts in these states have a history of voter suppression, and we, the federal government, are going to keep an eye on you so much so that you can't make any changes to your voting procedures without the federal government approving it. Right. And in 2013, I believe the Supreme Court said, you know what, we're fine. We're post racial. We had a black president, we don't need that anymore. And they overturned that provision of the Voting Rights Act and it's allowed again this massive wave of voter suppression laws to be passed in this country. Man, we're already riled up. It's tough not to be. What are you going to say? Should we take a break? No, not a break. I was going to say, should we just go back and talk about history a little bit? Yeah, let's, because the history is much easier to stomach. Yeah, right, okay. And you put this article together with our own article and a bunch of other good stuff. Yes. Nice work. Thanks. But you point out that very astutely that it's not in the Constitution, the right to vote. This has been left up to the states over the years, even though we've had amendments since then that obviously allowed certain people the right to vote. It wasn't just originally included, like, hey, everyone can vote. Everyone has the right to vote in this country. Right. Originally, the only group that citizens of the United States could vote for was the House of Representatives. The Senate and the president. And the President still this is the case were elected by an Electoral College, right, correct. So eventually they added Senate seats for people to be able to directly vote for. But in the first presidential election in 1789, the one that George Washington one was elected to the presidency, the first presidency of the United States, like 6% of the population in the US at the time were eligible to vote. And that was it. Yeah. It was only white men and freed African American slaves in just four states. I saw six, six states. I was really surprised to see that, but yeah. Who own property, right. That's a big one. Right. So that left, like, eight guys, right. They were allowed to, but yeah, you had to own property. And that was the big division at first, even apparently more so than by race. It was by whether you are a landowner or property owner. Right. Yeah. And you had to be 21. There were certain religious restrictions, too, like you said, that ended up 6% of the population could vote. Right. I'm going to cut them a little slack on the first election, say they were trying to get it together, but 6% is an alarmingly low number. But they probably thought that was the 6% of people that mattered. Right. I guess it's more inclusive than the 1%, but it's still pretty low. We're in the single digits here. But like you were saying, a class distinction was really kind of the biggest deal. And that changed a bit when war veterans who fought for independence from Britain stepped up and said, hey, a lot of us are not landowners, and we help free this country. Can we vote? And little by little, states said, all right, you don't have to own property. It's 1850, and let's just say all white males can vote. And some African American males, but definitely not women, right. Not yet. Just give us another seven decades or so. We're just trying to keep our heads from spinning over letting people who don't own property vote. Exactly. In. That bizarre. Did you know that the first group to agitate for voting rights was white men who didn't own land? Or veterans? I didn't know that either. So something really big happened in the middle of the 19th century that changed things as far as voting went. That was the Civil War and the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, followed by the 15th Amendment that granted suffrage to all men in the United States yeah. Regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. But again, not women. Right. And it should have said, supposedly, because that 15th Amendment is what unleashed sort of the first before there was just voter suppression. They were like, no, you just can't vote. And now they said, well, you can vote. And so they had to be creative with their voter suppression. Right. And at first, there was a period of reconstruction in the south after the Civil War where federal troops I guess it was led still by General Ulysses Grant, if he wasn't president by now, where federal troops were occupying the south under Marshall Law. Right, yeah. And they were enforcing the 15th Amendment and other laws that had come into effect after the Civil War. And it was like black people could hold office, they could vote, they could live in this transition period from slavery into freedom. And they were doing it under the auspices of the Union Army. But then the Union Army withdrew pretty prematurely, I think, in the early 1870s, and it went from the reconstruction south, which ended up lasting just a few years to what became known as the Jim Crow South, which was basically slavery by any other name than slavery. Yeah, that's when the Dixiecrats which were conservative Democrats, I guess conservatives of the day, that's when they started to get creative and said, all right, well, we have this new 15th Amendment, so let's try and think of a lot of ways, even though the law says that black men can vote, that we can keep them from doing so. How about a literacy test? And not only just a literacy test, but maybe one only in English. So that way there's no way an immigrant can vote if they can't read English. Or maybe some poll taxes where you have to pay a dollar to register to vote. But in 2016, money that was like $800 actually looked it up. It's $9,000 in the early $1,900. I looked up like Texas, it was a dollar $50 to register, and that would be like $43 today. Yeah, but for a poor person who is maybe waffling on whether or not to bother voting, sure, charging them $43 is probably going to seal a deal. And George actually had a cumulative tax apparently for many years, where every year, like if you were 40 years old every year from the age of 21 that you weren't registered to vote, you would have to pay per year when you first registered to vote. Oh, wow. So that was clearly targeting like a freed slave in his 50s would then have to pay accumulative tax from the age from 21 up to 50. And again, that just basically meant no one was going to register. But there are a lot of grandfathered clause laws, too, which basically said that if you were registered to vote prior to the 15th Amendment or your grandfather was registered to vote prior to the 15th Amendment, you were eligible. Now under these Jim Crow laws, but most black people in the south were not registered to vote, nor were their grandparents prior to the 15th Amendment. So that basically just stripped them of their voting rights automatically as well. And you mentioned the literacy test, too, Chuck. Did you look into those at all? Yeah, I mean, some of them somewhere recite the US constitution 20 pages long, and they would be administered by white Democrats. And again, Democrats at the time were the party of conservatives. We should do an episode on that. On when the parties switched. Yeah, names. We've chatted about that before. So it would be left up to this poll worker who is administering the literacy test. It would be left up to their judgment whether the person passed or failed. Yeah, like it was up to them. It wasn't an objective test. It was a subjective test. Yeah. And so the end result of this is in these suppression campaigns worked so well that only 3% of eligible voters, african American southerners were registered to vote by 1940. And, you know, it's probably one of the worst parts about that is that I'll bet in 1940 that the average white person considered black people politically disengaged in this country because of statistics like that. Right. They don't even vote. Yeah. They don't even care about politics. 3% of them are registered to vote, even. Yeah. And this wasn't limited to the south. Up north and nationwide, there were things going on, notably for naturalized citizens. It was very long residency requirements, basically, to try and keep immigrants from voting for a long time, especially the Chinese, apparently. Do you know that? I did not. There's an 1882 law, it's pretty on the nose, the Chinese Exclusion Act. And it said, if you're Chinese and you're an immigrant, you're not allowed to become a citizen. Which meant they couldn't vote. And this is on the books in the United States until 1943. Yes. This stuff is an ancient history. That's why it's so shocking. So 1920 comes along and women were finally given the right to vote thanks to the 19th Amendment. And you mentioned the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally got rid of the Jim Crow voting laws officially in the south. But that didn't mean that suppression, intimidation didn't still go on. No. Whenever the federal government decided that it needed to lend a hand and assist the black population of the Southern states in gaining their citizenship, there would be a huge backlash to that. And initially it meant the formation of the clan. And then after the Civil Rights Act, the clan again experienced this huge resurgence in popularity and membership and acts of white terrorism just became the norm. And now that we're looking back on it, we think of, like, the civil rights movement. When I think of that, I don't think of it as actually agitating for civil rights. I think of it as agitating for full citizenship and equal treatment under the law and everything that makes up civil rights. But you don't think of it as, like, really at the basis what the civil rights leaders were agitating for, where things like protection of their voting rights, access to the polls, just as any white person would enjoy. And that march, that very famous march from Selma to Montgomery. Did you see that movie Selma? No. It's a great movie. Have you seen either 13th or 13th? No. I'm dying to see that one, too. Dude, that one. That's amazing. It's just amazing. It's really well done. And the stuff they're talking about is just so eye opening. It's great. It's one of those ones you'll watch more than once, I'm sure. Yeah. But that march from Selma to Montgomery was a march for voting rights. Yeah. And it actually helped usher in this Voting Rights Act in the Alabama State Patrol, I believe. I'm like horseback with batons and whips and nightsticks and tear gas just ruthlessly beat these unarmed peaceful protesters in the street of Selma, and it was all captured on national television and broadcast and it really changed the mood of the nation as far as that goes. And it actually was supremely counterproductive to people who were against black voting because it helped protect black vote by the federal government through the Voting Rights Act in yeah, another thing that came with that act was an official ban on any quote, test, or device to qualify voters on the basis of literacy, education, or fluency in English. And then it took all the way until 1966, until poll taxes were banned, which was kind of way later than I thought. Well, it was like the next year. Well, no, I mean just period. Oh, yeah, those Jim Crow laws were basically done away with after a century. They were around for a century in one form or another. Unbelievable. Yeah. And then finally during Vietnam, they finally lowered the voting age to 18 and 1971, post Vietnam, because veterans were like, hey, I can be drafted and shot and killed for my country, but I can't vote. And they all went, yes, it's a good point. It is a good point to argue that way. You want to take a break? Yeah. Man all right, we'll be right back and talk about the eleven voter suppression techniques. All right, we're back. And before actually we move on to some of these eleven techniques. My question for you, sir, the basis of all this is voter fraud is what the argument is for a lot of these, especially with ID. So is voter fraud real? Everything I came across that strike me is legitimate, although I'm not sure how legitimate, like, say, a conservative might find it. But like the Brookings Institution, to me it's definitely less leaning. But I would also say that it's quite a legitimate think tank. Right. But the studies that I've come across all say, no, it's not really a thing. Like it's basically a specter, it's a potential possibility, but in actuality it's not a thing. And one thing I saw was that this came I'm not sure where this one came from, but 86 convictions, 300 million votes cast in the last few elections. I would say that's probably about ten to twelve elections, there's only been 86 convictions for voter fraud. And the other issue with this, specifically with voter ID laws, is that most of those cases of fraud where people have actually been convicted of voter fraud were mailing ballots. And so like, a voter ID card is not going to do anything for that. Right. Because you don't produce ID to mail in a ballot. So the idea that there is a big problem with voter fraud is ostensibly not real. Although of course Trump is going to carrying out an investigation and he's formed a commission, so I'm very curious to find out what they find. But even if it were a real thing from the pattern that we're seeing, the voter ID laws aren't going to help anything anyway so far as it actually makes a difference in an election outcome. It is negligible. No. And I have to say it's not like the people who say especially rank and file GOP members, right? Not necessarily like high elected officials, but just like the average GOP party member. It's not like they're lunatics for believing that there's such a thing as widespread voter fraud. Right? Like this is a big drum that's beat on the conservative side in conservative media. But there's also like instances in the past that can be pointed to saying, like, see, this is what they do. Like Acorn definitely didn't help anything. Right? Acorn was a community organizing group that had been around since, I think the they were dedicated to getting lower income minority people who traditionally had trouble accessing the polls or voting, getting them registered and getting them to vote. Right. So they were very much aligned with the Democratic viewpoints of universal access, universal participation in elections. And they were very much a left leaning organization. They were associated with Obama very famously, and then equally famously, they were this disgraced organization because they were accused of voter fraud, a voter registration fraud, to be specific. And the way that this happened was they would send out people to canvas neighborhoods and they would give them a quota. And if they met their quota, then they would say, get paid a bonus or something like that, right? So these Acorn workers were given and these are just the same people who are also maybe on the next Tuesday coming by your house to see if you wanted to donate to the Sierra Club too, right? Right. They were given an incentive to create fake registrations, and a lot of them did. When these investigations were launched in multiple states into Acorn and voter registration fraud, it was found that these people weren't trying to pave the way for fraud at the polls, but that they were creating fake registration forms, very frequently duplicate registration forms for the same person to get paid for work they hadn't done to get paid from Acorn. Right. That was the extent of it. So Acorn ended up disbanding, but they left a huge blemish on the argument from the liberal side saying we don't engage in voter fraud. You're crazy for even thinking that now forever. Conservatives, especially people who are, let's just say conservatives, can point to Acorn for the rest of time and be like, look, you guys did that, right? So yes, there is such a thing as voter fraud in my mind, and you can't persuade me otherwise. And as long as there's that kind of division, you're not going to be able to persuade anybody if there's no such thing as voter fraud. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, should we talk about the eleven techniques? I'm pretty tired, man. Yes. All right, number one. Number one on our list, voter caging. Who was that? Was that your Carson? Oh, no, sort of a Casey case of me. Oh, I hear you the top 40 guy. That was pretty good. Did you ever hear that great outtake when you had to read the dead dog letter? Yeah, pretty wonderful. That taught me to just shut up on a mic. Was it Dead Dog? Was that it specifically? But it was a pretty funny outtake. Oh, man, god bless them. All. Right. Voter Caging is when you send mail unforgettable. That's really a mouthful. Mail which cannot be forwarded. Send that mail to an address that is on the voter rolls, and then when it's returned undelivered, basically they challenge and say, this person no longer lives at this address, so they can't vote. Right. Which in and of itself is not scientific. It's not illegal. When you target, say, Democrats, I think specifically minorities, it becomes illegal. You can't target any minority group, but I believe you can target the opponent's party like registered party members. But the whole point is you're saying this person doesn't live there or else they would have gotten their mail. And because they don't live there, their vote can't count. They should be purged from the roles. Right. Very famously happened in 1958 when this literature was sent to 18,000 registered Democrats, and then again in 1981 when Republicans sent thousands of letters to minorities, blacks and Latinos in New Jersey. And that one actually caused such a stir that the RNC got together with the DNC and said, you know what? I'm going to consent here with a consent decree and we're not going to do it anymore. Right. They didn't just do the goodness of their hearts. The DNC sued the RNC for that 1981 election because there was a lot of dirty stuff. And to this day, the RNC, if it undertakes any voter suppression techniques, wants to create any changes in voting regularity. It has to get approval by the courts first. Correct. But that doesn't stop it from happening because now it's just third party groups can do it now. Yeah. Because they're not part of the RNC officially or the DNC. Right. And so it still happens. Yeah. What about these flyers? So these kind of fall into larger category of misinformation campaigns. Right? Right. You got flyers, you got robocalls. These are just so brazen. They really are like literally robocalls that say, hey, your Democratic candidate has basically already won, so you just stay at home and relax tomorrow. Yeah. Don't forget to vote on November 5, latino voter, even though election day is November 4. Yeah. And I was about to say, how do they get away with it? But it says right in here, who is it? The co director of the voting rights group Advancement Project. Basically, they're usually anonymous. So, like, how do you go after someone? Do you wait around at mailboxes? You could arrest the mail carrier. I guess I didn't think about that. I was thinking that they were just dropped in the mailboxes, but I guess they are mail. These guys with these handlebar mustaches and, like, black capes come and hand deliver these things. So basically, there's no way to trace this stuff. So as a minority, in a minority neighborhood, you might get a flyer and a robocall saying a wrong date, like you said, or don't bother your candidates, won, or mail your absentee votes to this address, which is incorrect. Yes. And this is, like, really underhanded stuff, super illegal stuff. But again, unless you can trace it back to somebody who specifically and purposefully carried out this campaign, you can't do anything about it except go public and say, no, don't listen to that. Yeah, well, because what happens is you get a Hispanic voter on the nightly news that says, I got a call that said I could vote by phone. And half the people watching that probably think, well, this guy probably didn't even understand that phone call, so it's chalked off as that, when in fact, he really did get a phone call saying he could vote by phone. Yeah, that happened in Nevada in 2008. I think that it. Sorry, Nevada. It'll always be Nevada to me. I'm sorry, Nevada. I know it drives you guys bad Poop, but it's true. Nevada. What else? Chuck, this is a big one. I got one. You ready? Yeah. Felony disenfranchisement or felony disenfranchisement? Yeah. So there used to be apparently the Greeks are the ones that came up with this, but it was really codified in the west through medieval Europe, where if you were a convicted bad guy, you would undergo what was called a civil death, right? Yes, yes. So much so, Chuck, that you could be murdered by another other person and you are no longer protected by the law. So the other person would get away with it scout free. Right. Yeah. One of the things that you lost was any kind of representation you might have are being able to participate in any kind of community processes, right? Sure. That carried over to the United States, but it really started to gain ground over right after Reconstruction, during the beginning of the Jim Crow period, where a lot of state legislatures enshrined in their state constitutions that if you were convicted of a felony, you lost your voting rights, and in some cases, you lost them forever. You had to appeal to the governor to restore them. Some states said you lost them while you're in prison. Other states said you lost them after, say, if you were paroled whenever your sentence was fully finished. But to some degree, felons lost their right to vote, and it stuck around. Yeah. I got the current stats here. Okay. There are only two states right now that allow an incarcerated felon to vote. Do you know what those are? One is. Vermont. I want to say New Hampshire, but I don't know. That would be an obvious guess. But Maine so close. Crazy Mainers. It's that Canada rubbing off on them. Your voting rights restored automatically upon release. DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana new Hampshire north Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, rhode Island, Utah. You're like the FedEx guy from the east. Rights restored automatically once released from prison and discharged from parole. Probationers, can vote. California, Colorado, Connecticut, new York. Restored automatically upon completion of sentence, including prison, parole, and probation in a bunch of other ones. That's good. How about this, everyone but these last two, okay? Voting rights restored dependent on type of conviction or outcome of petition to the government alabama, Delaware, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee, Wyoming, and only restored through individual petition to the government florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia. Right. So the ones that you did not hear were upon completion, including prison, parole, probation. So people might say, don't do the crime, right? Sure. On the one hand, it makes sense, like you've given up some sort of civil liberties because you did commit some horrible heinous crime. Other people say, okay, well, then maybe once you've done your time, you should get your rights back. The problem is, in the United States, there is a real racial disparity between people who are convicted of felonies who are black and everybody else, right? Yes. So overall, 7.7% of the United States African American population as a whole does not have the right to vote because of a felony conviction for the rest of the United States overall, just 1.8%. That's including all every other race. Right. So out of the gates, there's disproportionately more convicted felons among the African American population in the United States than everybody else. Right. But then when you start boiling that down to voting rights on a state level, it becomes painfully clear that this certainly seems strategically targeted, these laws in Florida, one in four of Florida's black residents in 2016 couldn't cast a ballot because they were disenfranchised for being felons. Yeah, florida was one of the ones. That one of the four states where you had to have an individual petition approved by the government. Right. One quarter. And that's not saying one quarter of the voting population of African Americans in Florida. That's the whole population. Right. Since African Americans have traditionally voted Democrat, any law that says you're a felon, you can't vote. Right. You can just leave it at that and make your own surmises about it. Right. Surmises. It's a word now, sir. Masons that's what I was looking for, voter ID laws. That's sort of obviously a big one, because it's probably when you hear most about in the news, as of this year, 32 states have laws requiring or requesting ID when voting. West Virginia is coming in 2018, so that would make 33 states. And we mentioned Texas earlier that's one of the states where they say, like, oh, well, you can use your gun permit, but you can't use your college student ID, even though the state has issued both of those. Right. Because if you're a student, you're possibly more likely to vote Democrat. If you are a gun owner, you're probably more likely to vote GOP. Right. And if you're talking nationally, 11% of Americans don't have current state issued photo IDs. There's a lot of reasons why. Maybe you're elderly or disabled or both, and you can't drive. So A, you don't need a driver's license, but you have a hard time getting to the DMV just to get an ID, like a non driving ID, status ID to vote. And once again, historically, these people might be more apt to vote Democrat. So it's hard to not look at it along those lines. Right. And a lot of people say, well, there was this commission back in, I think, 2005, american University sponsor a bipartisan commission to look into voter ID laws right. Yeah. Whether they suppress voting or whether they would prevent fraud. And it was led by former Reagan chief of staff James Baker and former President Jimmy Carter. Right. Two opposite sides of the coin. Yeah. But two statesmen, you could make the case. Sure. So what they found is that both groups concerns were valid. Yes, voter ID could prevent voter fraud. Yes, voter ID laws would suppress voting. So they suggested the government minority, specifically yeah, minorities, women, the elderly, and the disabled are the ones who are most likely to be affected by voter ID laws. And the poor, right? Yes. Sorry. The elderly, the poor, women, the disabled, and minorities. Yes, all five of those groups tend to vote Democrat, too. So voter ID laws could be enacted to prevent fraud, said this commission. But if you're going to do that, you need to basically give out ideas, and you have to make access to these IDs extremely easy. And so Texas, who has a very strict ID law, you have to show a photo ID to vote, and only specific ones said, okay, well, then we'll undertake this. We'll give away free IDs, but you got to produce some documents to get the ID. So, for example, you might need to produce a birth certificate. If you don't have your birth certificate, you have to go get a copy of it. And if you were born before 1950, then you have to go to whatever county you were born in because they're not computerized records. You have to go to the county clerk's office, get it, pay $42 for the copy, and then come back and get your ID. And hopefully you also remember the other two pieces of documentation that you have to bring with you to get this free ID. And this investigation, actually it was a court case found that in the 15 months leading up to the 2014 midterm elections, texas free voter ID registration drive managed to issue just 297 IDs for the entire state over a 15 month period. Well, and this whole thing with you have to go to the county where you were born if you're basically elderly. Right. Have you ever driven across Texas? Well, plus, if you're poor, remember that poll tax you calculated, the dollar 50 pole tax in Texas, it came out to be about 40 something dollars. Well, it costs $42 to get a copy of your birth certificate to get that free ID. Some people say that's a modern poll tax almost down to the penny. That's a modern poll tax. If you are poor, if you're broke, if you have trouble making ends meet, $42 is a lot. Yeah. And if you're on the fence about voting, like you really want to vote, and that's if you can get there to begin with. Right. I was born in Lubbock, but I live in San Antonio. Right. And I don't have a car. So all of these things like these are a person who believes if you really want to vote, you're going to make it through hell and high water to vote. Yeah. All of these excuses that we've just thrown out are just falling on deaf ears. Right? Yeah. But if you really step back and put it into context and really think about it from a realistic point of view, like, these are hardships. This is tough stuff. And if you're a voter and you really want to vote, it could dissuade the average person from doing that. And from everything I've read, it is really easy to overlook how difficult it can be to get an ID for people who already have an ID and use them every day and have probably had one ever since their parents took them to the DMV when they were 16 to get their first driver's license. It's really easy to act like it's not a big thing to get an ID, when in reality, the poorer, the more disabled and the more minority you are, the harder it actually is. Yeah. There was a study in 2014 by Rice University, and not to pick on Texas, but this Rice University, I think Texas brought this on them. University of Houston, Texas 23rd Congressional District, found that 12.8% of registered voters who didn't vote cited lack of required photo ID. So almost 13% didn't vote. And they said this because I don't have the proper identification. And only 2.7% of those people actually didn't have the right identification. So a full 10% had the right ID and didn't vote because they didn't think they did. And you know what? We'll take a break and talk about it after this. But the reason that's not happening is because of things like billboards and poll watchers and other intimidation techniques. So we'll talk about that right after this. All right, so I set that up with the study from Rice University. 13% in the 23rd Congressional District in Texas did not vote. They didn't think they had their right ID, even though 10% of that 13% did have the right ID and just didn't vote because they were, I don't know, misinformed by a billboard and scared to go to a polling place. Yeah. Has that ever happened? Sure, it's happened. There's been plenty of billboards that have like prison bars or something on them. It says like, voter fraud is a felony. And apparently these billboards that are sponsored by dark money groups that have no direct ties to say, like the GOP or the campaigns of a candidate, they sprout up. They tend to sprout up in poorer neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, neighborhoods that are more likely to be intimidated by billboards like that rather than just laugh at them and flip them off. Apparently the jury is out on whether they have an effect or not, but it's intended to be voter intimidation. Yeah. They use threatening language, like you said, like someone behind bars and all of a sudden, let's say you're a newly naturalized citizen or you are a felon that's now out and cleared your parole and everything, and you see those bars and you're like, well, I'm not going to take a chance and go into vote because I might be locked up. And again, the disingenuous argument number 8092 as well. If you're not a criminal, you got nothing to worry about. Right. Which just completely disregards the psychological impact that something like bars and crime and felon have on a person seeing a billboard that's shouting that at them. If you actually are fight your way through that and say, you know what, I'm going to vote anyway, I'm not scared of the billboard. And you might show up to your polling place to find what's known as a poll watcher who are there to scout out potential voter fraud, what has generally in many cases amounted to intimidation squads kind of right there at the front door. Yeah. Do you remember I said that the RNC got in a lot of trouble for the 1981 election for a bunch of stuff? Yeah. This is another one. One of the things that they had in this 1081, I believe, New Jersey election was called the National Ballot Security Task Force, and it was basically off duty cops wearing guns, wearing blue armbands, patrolling polling stations who were basically ostensibly looking for voter fraud. But the court sided with the DNC's contention that they were meant to intimidate voters who were likely to vote for Democrats. Why? Just because they were there with guns? Yeah. You don't want some dude just walking around looking at you, watching you, what are you doing here? Kind of thing. No, the polling station doesn't belong to one group. It belongs to everybody. And no one should be made to feel like they're a threat or they are not welcome at this polling station. It's not that guy's polling station. He doesn't have any right to walk up and down with a gun intimidating people. What a despicable thing to do with your time. Yeah, I mean, how about this? The conservative group threw the vote. Their national elections coordinator, he was talking about pole watchers. He said that he wanted voters to, quote, feel like they are driving and seeing the police following them. Yes. It's not how you're supposed to feel when you go vote at the polling precinct. Like that's a quote. Yeah, he wanted them to feel scared. And that wasn't that was from the 2016 election. Yeah. That's not an old one. No, it hasn't just been, say, GOP leaning voters who have done poll watching. There was a very famous case in the 2008 election in Philadelphia where the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which as we pointed out in our Black Panther episode, is not affiliated with the Black Panthers. They're kind of like this new offshoot group that took over the name. Right. I think they were arrested for voter intimidation for basically doing the same thing, but with a police baton rather than say, a gun. Yeah. I don't care who you are or what side you're on, don't intimidate voters at the polls. No, I don't know if I said that clearly enough yet. That's a disgusting thing to do. Josh is going to come after you. Yeah, I'm watching you. Early voting is one thing that you say in your writing here, that I agree with that. Who could argue with early voting? Because it works. People love it, voters like it, elected officials like it. It's been a really big success in the states that do it. Like almost a third of this past election, people early voted, me included. Right. So everyone should love this, right? Sure. Yeah. And it really works. It gets voter participation up. And like you said, the lines are not long. There's not like long waits on Election Day. And yet, despite that, despite everybody basically loving early voting, there have been cutbacks since 2011 in eight states rather than this decades long trend which had been leading up to the 2008 election, which is when it really came on, there's been cutbacks rather than continuing forward with getting early voting out there. And these eight states are except for West Virginia, GOP governored states. And the reason why people who are critics of these laws or changes to the rules point out the reason why that these are being done is because in the 2008 election, this early voting was used by far and away more by African American voters who voted for Obama and the Democrats, then white voters and specifically white GOP voters. Right. Something like 70% of African Americans in the 2008 election voted early, compared to like 50% of white voters in the 2008 election. I'm not sure what the breakdown was for Democrats to GOP, but I'm quite sure it was lopsided in favor of the Democrats in that. Right. So that happened and then all of a sudden, the midterm elections of 2010 were just a bloodbath for the Democrats and swept GOP governors and legislatures into power. And as a result, early voting was cut back under new laws that were introduced in these new sessions. Yeah. And Sunday voting was a big deal, too. Historic black churches have had a big, great success story in organizing this campaign called Souls to the Polls, where they would get their church members to the polling stations on Sundays to vote. It's been a big success. And so what happens when there's a big success for a minority group organizing and getting registered is states push back. Ohio and Florida specifically banned voting on Sunday, the Sunday before the election. Sorry. Not just any Sunday. And that's when the black churches had organized a vote for the Salsa the Polls campaign, and it made a big deal. More than 18% of Floridians who voted on the last Sunday of early voting in 2008 did not vote at all in 2012. Well, maybe not just because they weren't allowed to vote, but that right. Was taken away from them. And so 18% didn't vote in 2012. Right. So you do the math. Yeah. And I mean, that's a significant amount of voters in Florida alone. And again, it's targeted. Like, they do the research and they find out the data on where these votes coming from, when are they being cast, who is casting them. And now let's put in as many laws, let's bend the law however we can to try and keep those people from voting. Yeah. Who was the guy that was a legislator in Pennsylvania that bragged during the Romney election, like, hey, our voter suppression techniques are going to give this to Romney. Right. There's a legislature. Yeah, that's true. So it's funny, to some people listening right now, we sound paranoid. So early voting is suppressed, and as a result, it can lead to voter suppression as well. Right? Yeah. You've also got voter registration. We already talked about Acorn registering people, but typically voter registration drives, like the Soul of the Polls campaign, have an effect on Democrats votes. So curtailing those can lead to a suppression of votes among Democratic voters. Right? Yes. And we've been picking on the GOP basically this whole time. Dude, I went all over looking for instances of Democrats doing robo calls and using intimidating billboards, and I didn't find it. They're just not out there if they are specifically robocalls, where they deliver misinformation right. Or send out deliberately misinforming flyers or supporting laws that end early voting. I didn't find it anywhere. This all seems to be, at least in this current incarnation, a GOP led wave of voter suppression laws. Right? Yeah. There is one type of voter suppression that Democrats do favor, though, basically across the board and around the country, and it's called off cycle election scheduling. Yeah. That's when, if you may notice, that there will be an election. And you're like, what? There's an election coming up? Why haven't I heard anything about it? It's because it might be for the city council or the local. It's very much locally based. And Democrats, they know that those are not very heavily voted. It's a very low voter turnout for that. So if it's a referendum on something that has to deal with the teachers or specific union or something, they know about it and they're really going to turn out to vote and basically have that one in the bag. Right. And teachers unions and city workers unions and basically any unions typically are Democratic leaning. Right. Democrat leaning. So through this off cycle election scheduling, by cutting down on voter participation, they're increasing the impact that these Democrat leaning groups have on that vote. Right. Yeah. Because everyone wants consolidated elections. Like you pull people. Sure. And everyone will say, I'd kind of really rather just vote on everything all at once. Right. But this idea of controlling local elections, especially local school boards, leads to accusations of controlling developing minds of America's children. So Republicans have taken notice of the strategy. And this is from this great article from Eaton Hirsch from 538, and he talks about a political scientist named Sarah Anzia who is studying this, and she found that between 2001 and 2011, over 200 bills aimed at consolidating elections, getting rid of off cycle elections were floated across the country. Half of them specifically focused on moving school board election dates, but only 25 became law. Most of the time the bills are sponsored by Republicans and killed by Democratic pushes. Yeah. So there is definitely voter suppression techniques. And apparently the Democrats will say, well, you know what? People who aren't that informed aren't going to turn out for these off cycle elections anyway. That's good. And people say, Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's the same criticism, the same justification that the GOP uses to justify their voter suppression techniques, and you're using it for yourself. So that really sucks when people do that. Yeah. What is that called? Hypocrisy? I think that's a word. So, you know, this is all still happening. I mean, a lot of these examples are kind of throughout history, but this is still going on. And especially after the 2000 election and this most recent one, it's pretty clear that a few thousand votes can swing an election. And so this stuff matters yeah. To fight it. And whoever's trying to suppress votes, it can make a difference. Right. Well, there's this one study that found after that huge surge so you remember after the 15th Amendment was passed where no, I remember the black population of Men at least suddenly had the right to vote. It threatened the status quo. So the status quo, the establishment went to come up with new loopholes and issues to make barriers to voting. Right. Yeah. After the 2008 election, there was a huge surge in African American voting threatened the status quo. So the establishment came up with new loopholes. Right. And there was a study from the University of Massachusetts should be totally disregarded because that's an elite academic education and therefore liars. But they did a study that the more states saw increases in minority and low income voter turnout, the more likely it was to have laws floated that pushed back on voting rights, that cut voting rights during this 2013 study. And apparently there is this wave of voter ID laws specifically that just hit the country after the 2010 elections, those 2010 blood baths. The country was suddenly just flooded with state and local bills that sought to require voter ID, right. And it came out of nowhere. Seemingly somebody this group called News 21, like journalism students who did an investigation under the auspices of the Carnegie Night Journalism Foundation. They traced us back to Alex. The American Legislative Exchange Council. And they deserve a podcast themselves. Sure, for sure. But basically, they're a group that was founded, I think, back in the 70s or 80s that brings together elected officials in the United States who pay something like $100 in dues every two years with corporations that pay thousands and thousands of dollars in dues every year. And they get them together and they say, hey, what do you need to make business easier for you? Oh, well, it would be great if we could get the Democrats to not vote quite so easily. So let's come up with some voter ID laws. They come together, they draft model legislation, and then the Alec members go back to their various state legislatures or national legislatures and say, hey, I've got an idea. Here's a bill, let's pass it. And so from this 2009 meeting in Atlanta, actually, a draft voter ID legislative model was produced, and it suddenly just appeared everywhere around the country starting in about 2010. Yeah. So apparently that's what's going on right now that's behind this current wave of especially voter ID laws, but also voter suppression laws that are going on. Like the history in this country of voter suppression is pretty shameful, but it's even more shameful that we're doing it again, it seems. Yeah. North Carolina is a pretty good example of recent years. In 2013, there was a law that led by the GOP that did a bunch of things that eliminated same day voter registration, cut a full week of early voting. It barred voters from casting a ballot outside their home precinct. They said you could no longer straight ticket vote. And then they got rid of a program that would pre register high school students who would be voting age by Election day scrapbook. Right. High school students that wanted to vote that would preregister them said, no, too dangerous. Yeah. And had one of the most strict voter ID requirements in the country. This one actually went to court and it was struck down and the judge ruled that it, quote, I'm sorry that the intention to suppress African American voters was, quote, with almost surgical precision. And the court noted that lawmakers first studied which racial demographics used which voting methods, then moved to eliminate those favored by black residents. So, like, they actually found out. They did these studies and looked at the data and said, all right, this is how black people are voting in North Carolina, so let's try and make that much more difficult for them to do. So I think the judge that overruled or struck down that basket of laws also said that it read like it was written in so North Carolina got pants in front of everybody because I guess they were too aggressive. But plenty of other states were able to pass new laws of varying strictness as far as voting suppression goes since 2011. North Carolina just got pants this week for the racial gerrymandering. Yeah, gerrymandering is another episode we need to do, too. Yeah. So the whole thing comes down to, I think we said earlier, too, chuck is with these laws, right? There's kind of a litmus test that's emerged. Are the results of these laws more likely to be to prevent voter fraud or to suppress votes? And ironically, it seems like it's going to be Donald Trump's commission that could conceivably put an end to this debate with what they find, with the voter fraud investigation, which, seriously, I cannot tell you how interested I am in finding out what they find and hearing all the grisly details from it. You think it will be on the note? Are on the up and up? I don't know, but I don't know if it's not. We'll hear all about it, I can tell you that. Yes. I don't know, man. I'm very curious to see what they find, or even if it just falls away. I think the worst thing for this would be if it's just allowed to just fall to the wayside. Because if we can get it out in the open and discussed and investigated and all that kind of stuff, I mean, who knows? What if they legitimately found that massive voter fraud is a huge problem? Well, then, sure, maybe we should have voter ID laws, who knows? But if they find that that's not the case, then we can say, all right, this law is going to suppress votes. There's no such thing as massive voter fraud, so this law should be struck down. Just let people vote. Yes. Agreed. Who is one person to say that they're not as up on politics and they don't really take the time, so they shouldn't be allowed to vote? I mean, that is so anti American. You have to be an elitist to think like that. That's an elitist thinking, regardless of what your party affiliation is. Yeah. You got anything else? Well, this is probably the last one we'll ever be allowed to record, so it's been nice, Chuck. I've enjoyed working with you. Been nice, Jerry. If you want to know more about voter suppression laws, you can type those words in the search bar@howstoughforks.com. And since I said voter suppression, it's time for listener mail. Yeah, and you know what? Before I do listen to mail to listeners who are upset at us right now, send us in a thoughtful, researched email of reputation. That's what I want to see. Yeah. Because I like to think, like, give me some proof of stuff. Yeah. All right. I'm going to call this Fan theory. Oh, this is a good one that you picked out. Yeah. Josh, I really enjoyed your show. Guys, on the crazy fan theories, thought I'd share one I came up with a couple of years ago. It involves Tequila Mockingbird Go Set a Watchman, which was the famous sequel to the book, and Back to the Future part one, and Back to the Future, part two, which was a very famous sequel to Back to the Future part one. Right. I added that. Nice. Did you know that the courthouse steps in the movie adaptation of Mockingbird the very same as the courthouse in the Back to the Future movies? I did not know that. Did you? Well, I didn't. I've been on the Universal lot and walked those steps, though, so I was just like in my mind, I was thinking, well, it's just a movie lot, dude. So he says, Aside from it being on the Universal lot, the reason for this has to be that both To Kill a Mockingbird and Back to the Future take place in the same town. Well, that's not true. No, but still, to go with the Chuck To Kill a Mockingbird depicts the town in the 1930s in the trial that exposes the deeply racist tendencies among its people. This is why in 1955, it would have never occurred to a black malt shop worker, I believe Goldie is that right? Future Mayor Goldie, that he could one day become mayor until some guy from the future accidentally suggests it. This is falling apart for me already. I love this idea. And Back to the Future too. Marty steals a sports almanac from 2015, which winds up in Biff's hands in 1955, creating an alternate timeline from that point forward. Some 20 years after the Killing Mockingbird, scout returns home and goes to the Watchman. But it's set in the alternative timeline, which is why at least one character, Atticus Finch, seems very different, because it is. He, like, racist in the sequel. Yes. And it's Marty McFly's fault. Ghosted a Watchman is written in 1957. It is the Tequila Mockingbird of the alternate timeline. Tequila Mockingbird was published in the version of the book written in the timeline. Marty fixes when he burns the almanac at the end of Deck of the Future, too. I'm completely lost on that one. And he says, how fitting that go? Set a watchman. Was published in 2015. Yeah. And that bit of fanness is brought to you by Brian Mcfarney. Nice job, Brian. That was outstanding. It did have its holes there's, a little rough around the edges, but you're using your noodle, and I like it. Yeah, that's better than Angela Lansbury as a serial killer. It is. If you want to get in touch with us like Brian did and send us a really cool fan theory you thought of yourself, that holds up, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. I'm also at Josh Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook@facebook.com. Charles W. Chuckbryt. You can also hang out with them at facebook. Comwicheno. You can send us both, and Jerry and Noel and Frank the chair an email to stuffpodcast athowstuffworks.com and as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school is 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 free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
8a305504-4a58-11e8-a49f-eb5a0633b130 | SYSK Selects: How The Hum Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-hum-works | There is a mysterious droning sound often described as like a diesel engine idling that is severely impacting the quality of life of 2 percent of people in places around the world. | There is a mysterious droning sound often described as like a diesel engine idling that is severely impacting the quality of life of 2 percent of people in places around the world. | Sat, 09 Jun 2018 11:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=11, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=160, tm_isdst=0) | 36672239 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its your old pal Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how the Works came out back in December of 2014, and it is probably the saddest, most aggravating, affliction section I can think of next to Morgolons, because people don't believe you when you have this thing. It's pretty interesting episode if you ask me. It's got everything. The X Files makes an appearance and so does vocal fry before our vocal fry episode ever came out. So I hope you enjoy it. Ball. And Shawn, welcome to stuff you should know from hasteworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And I would say it's stuff you should know, but it's not because I haven't said Jerry. And now I did say this is stuff you should know. Yes. Are people going crazy yet? I don't know. There's probably some people who started going crazy the moment they hit play. Yeah. That's Chuck's version of the capital H. Yeah. So the hum you just did, it makes sense. It's a but apparently if you listen, I wonder if you can hear the same thing I'm hearing, because you're hearing it in your head, but there's like a gravely quality to it. The vocal fry. Okay. If you want to call it that. Yeah, I say gravelly, but it wasn't constant. The gravely thing gave it texture, and it was kind of broken up a little bit. That is more akin to the than the unbroken part that was going throughout. Yeah. So apparently, while this is called the, we should eventually explain what we're talking about. It's not the classical definition of a home that people hear. Right. It's like a diesel truck idling. Engine idling is a classic description of it. Yeah. That term vocal fry is one of those you ever hear or learn of a new expression or a thing that you've never heard of, and then you see it everywhere. That is called the botter minehoff phenomenon, and it's happening to me with vocal fry. Where did you hear that? I can't remember where I initially heard it, but it's a thing now that they say, like, Kim Kardashian is who they always blame. It's a vocal affectation that supposedly young women are using now, where they go into that lower tone, that gravelly tone on certain, like, the ends of sentences, usually. I know what you're talking about. I heard that too. And that supposedly keeps them from being promoted at work or something. Yeah. It's the female equivalent of the guys who speak up. Yeah. Valley girl thing, which is upspeak. Yeah, like valley girls talking like that. But now he was a nice guy, but I really wasn't sure what his motivation was. Okay. Yeah, that's great impression. That's because it was dead on. Yes, I totally got that. You have pigtails just now. Yes. I was talking to Emily about it the other day. She's like, Do I do that? It's like, no, you don't do that. No, you don't. I just did that, didn't I? A little bit, but you were doing a different voice, so it makes sense. Yeah. Anyway, I can't escape it now. Every other day since I've heard it, I've seen something about vocal fry. And have you noticed people with vocal fry more? All the time. Okay. Yeah. It's annoying. Like, what you're describing now has really nothing to do with the home, but it actually does have a lot in common with the home and that it's driving me to suicide. The home kind of people who hear the tend to be able to focus in on it more and more easily the more that they're exposed to it, which is the opposite of what should happen to a noise that really is inconsequential in the environment. That's right. So what we're talking about here, Chuck, is the with a capital H. That's right. What is it? Well, it is a sound, mysterious sound that is heard in places around the world by about 2% of the local population. And we're going to get into the frequencies and all that, but let's just call it a low frequency rumbling right now. It's a drone. It's a vibration described sometimes as it sounds like it's coming from nowhere or inside my own head. And there are places all around the world where, like I said, a very small population of people experience this, and depending on where you are, they will name it that. Auckland home. The Windsor. The Bristol hum. Yeah. The Tows home. And it's been described going back to the one eight, hundreds people have talked about it in literature, but really in the in the modern world is when people have started describing hearing this thing that drives them baddie, basically. Right. And one of the ways that it drives them baddie is they'll say, do you hear that? And everyone else in the room will say, no. The other 98% of people said yes, and they'll be like, what do you mean you don't hear that? And everybody else in the room goes, okay, right. Maybe you're a little wacky. It's generally at night. It's worse at night, for sure. And generally in more rural areas. Yeah. Which makes sense because it's not as much noise pollution, I think. Exactly. It also tends to be worse indoors. So at night, which is a little weird, indoors means that you don't get much sleep because this is something that you can't not focus on. People who suffer from the home tend to say that it dominates the soundscape. It's not something they can just tune out. Right. It's not something that they're getting used to. And again, the more they're exposed to it, the easier they say it is to tune into it and I guess become cognizant of it yet again. Yeah. And imagine being plagued by a sound that does this to you and that everyone else says it's not real because they don't hear it. Yeah. We'll get into the reasons that it may not be happening, but it's been passed off as mass hysteria or mass delusion from everything from that to, like, government conspiracy to legitimate noise, whether or not it's acoustic or electromagnetic. And that's part of the problem. Is there one? Are there lots of homs? Is there no hom? Your skeptics will say there is no harm. It's tennis or something like that. Or some other inner ear noise. Like, odo, acoustic noise. Yes. So who knows? There are two ways that the home okay. So again, let's restate this and let's put ourselves in the position of the outsider. Okay. Because I don't experience the home, so I am an outsider. I don't either. Knock on wood. Because the more I researched, the more I'm like, oh, God, I hope I never do. Well, we left out one quality of it that is common around the world. And when we say around the world, it tends to be curiously concentrated in the west and in Europe. I didn't notice that. Euro ancestry west. Yeah. I didn't really see anything about any countries in the east. If you look at there is a guy who runs a Glen McPherson. Yes. Glenn McPherson runs something called the World Map and Database. And we ran into Glen McPherson. Before we get too far, we should give a huge shout out to Jared Keller over at Mike who wrote this amazing article called a Mysterious Sound is Driving People Insane and Nobody Knows What's Causing It. Totally worth reading. Yeah. And he talks about a guy named Glen McPherson who's a professor in British Columbia and he set up a website called the World Map and Database. And so anybody who hears the can go and fill out a questionnaire. And then it takes that data and puts a dot on the map and you can hover over the dot and get the data. Right. If you look at it, it's just the United States, Great Britain, Western Europe. Yes. Canada, South Africa. It's unusual that there's nothing in Africa except South Africa and it's just in these European ancestry Western countries. Right. On the one hand, you could say, well, that's because this is an English language database. Makes sense. And so, of course, somebody whose native language is like Swahili sure isn't going to go on to this. It'll be like, I have no idea what I'm typing here. But yeah, exactly. So that's one explanation. There are other explanations, too. And now we arrive at one of them. We're going back on the outside because you don't hear the hump. I don't hear the hump. And let's say that we're ear, nose, and throat guys and somebody comes to us and says, I'm going crazy. Like I'm seriously contemplating suicide because this hump is keeping me up at night. I haven't slept in weeks. I'm irritable. I have headaches, nose bleeds, I'm nauseated all the time. These are all common symptoms of home sufferers. You're going to think one of two things as a doctor, a physician. One is tinnitus. Yeah. And then the other one is you're crazy, that you're driving yourself crazy. Yeah. Both of them can kind of be explained away, and they are explained away by this guy named David Deming, and he is a geoscientist from the University of Oklahoma. And he wrote what is probably the definitive study on the so far back in 2004. That's right. So Dimming, apparently, if you look at his research, there is another theory, and this is where the US. Government comes into play, because there are a couple of theories revolving around the US. Military and whether or not they are causing this. One is with their high frequency active aurora research program. H AARP in Alaska transmit RF signals into the Onosphere. Well, should we go ahead and start talking about the frequency ranges VLF and Elf? Yes. VLF is very low frequency, and those are waves at zero 1. Other one is Elf. Right. Those are extremely low frequencies, and they're in the range of the same amount of hertz, but their wavelength is up to like 100,000 meters. Right. That's an extremely long wavelength. That's right. And people who think they call them investigators, they believe pretty much that it is VL and Elf tones that are driving these people crazy. And those tones can drive you crazy. They do have adverse effects on the body. You probably heard it about a lot when it comes to, like, cell phone radiation, that kind of thing. Yeah. But whether or not Elf and VL or are the is what's a matter of much debate. It is a matter of debate, and it's also kind of a matter of faith, because what you're talking about there with Elf and VLF frequencies is tones. Those are radio waves, and radio is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Right? Yeah. So it has been shown at very, very high frequencies, humans can detect electromagnetic sound. We take it as sound, which is weird because it's not supposed to happen like that. But that's how we experience it. It's not like at a high frequency. We suddenly see it, we hear it. And if you are familiar with the comet 67 P that the European Space Agency recently landed on, which is crazy, that comet was found to emit an electromagnetic clicking sound, which is how we experience electromagnets or electromagnetic sound at a certain frequency. And so because it's a clicking sound, it's not a at all. Some people are saying, well, that doesn't make any sense. This is a if we can hear it, it doesn't sound like an idling diesel engine. It sounds like a clicking sound or something like that. And then, what's more, what this guy is saying is that if it's a very low frequency or extremely low frequency, that's the opposite of how we hear electromagnetic radiation. We here at a very high frequency, not a very low frequency. So which one is it? So, yes, it's still a huge matter of debate even as to whether the first of all, if it does exist yeah. If it's a single source. Single source. And then if it is a single source or any kind of source, is it electromagnetic or is it acoustic? Right. And we'll unpack the difference between those things right after this. So as whether or not the exist. The Canadian government actually part of the problem is it's hard to get research done on this because a very small number of people experience it, and a lot of them are called crackpots. Yeah. So it's tough to get funding for research, but luckily, there's a country called Canada that will fund things like this. And Dr. Colin Novak spent a year listening to the Windsor home in Ontario, and what they found was the is real. And they traced the source in that case on the Michigan side of the Detroit River and basically a steel plant on Zug Island. Doesn't it sound like an industrial plant island? It does. And it supposedly generates a lot of VLF waves when they're operating. So in this instance, at least, the home was a real thing, and they found out it was a tone created from basically an industrial plant. Right. So they apparently took steps to cut down on whatever energy it was emitting. Yeah, they turned off the machine. Exactly. And all of a sudden, some people said, hey, that worked. A lot of people said, that did absolutely nothing. The home is still out there. And then the most people said, I still don't know what you're talking about. And that wasn't actually the first time government has looked into the home in Tows, New Mexico. There's something called the Tau home. And apparently somebody wrote in to complain about it to a local newspaper. And all of a sudden, hundreds more people said, yes, I hear the same thing. I've been hearing the same thing for years. What is going on? And enough people said something in New Mexico that it prompted an investigation by the University of New Mexico and Sandia Labs, which I think is like a government affiliated kind of well, it's a neat research lab. They do all sorts of cool, clandestine stuff. Nice, right? X Files? Very much so, yeah. And actually, the X Files mentioned the home in an episode called Drive. Yeah. Interesting. They talk about it. There was a couple of characters had to constantly move westward or else they would suffer from the pressure of this home that no one else could hear. Let me guess. Molder believe Scully did. Not exactly. How did you saw that one? No, I didn't. But, you know, so they looked into the Tower home, and they could never figure out what it was. So I think they kind of wrote it off as either mass delusion or a bunch of people had tinnitus or what have you, which is again, that's the easy answer. Like you have tinnitus. The problem is, if a person has tinnitus, the sound is internal. Remember, there's, like, the idea that the and isn't it a high pitch ringing? Yes. Usually it can vary in pitch. Right. But for the most part, you can tell it's internal with the home. Everyone who experiences the home says, no, this is external. And they're so convinced it's external that they'll go out at night when it's worse and try to find the source of it. They'll drive around their city or their neighborhood, or walk around and look for what it is that's driving them crazy and they'll never find it. Yeah. Or they'll turn off the power of their house. There's all sorts of extreme and of course, it's all like anecdotal, but people that are driven to suicide. Or this one guy who intentionally deafened himself with a chainsaw. Yeah. Which I'm not sure how you do, I guess I think you hold the chainsaw interior for a year yeah, exactly. And possibly even murder, which we'll get to in a bit, which is pretty interesting. But the point is that it's not just something that's just bugging people. Like it is having the there are people all over the world that don't know each other, that have never met, that are suffering from something that they hear, that other people can't hear in concentrated areas. Yeah. And that's affecting their quality of life. And I don't know if I ever finished the sentence, which is weird. That means I'm really interested in something. Okay. But did I say that people who suffer from the tend to be in their fifty s and older? Yeah. That's one of the markers between like 50 and 70. Okay. So this is something in the favor of acoustic sound. Right. So acoustic sound is a compression wave, and it's something that's carried through and propagates through media. So it's a vibration in the air, whereas an electromagnetic wave comes from an electrical or a magnetic or both source. This is like the vibration. It's a sound wave. That's an acoustic wave. Right, right. So as we age, say, you get to around 50 years of age, your ability to hear high frequency and mid frequency acoustic sound diminishes. Your low frequency capabilities go undiminished. So it's not like they increase. But comparatively speaking, you get better at hearing low frequencies around age 50. Interesting. So what some people think is that if it is electromagnetic, then there are some people out there who are capable of hearing electromagnetic waves while the rest of us can't, and they're being driven crazy by some source that we have yet to identify. Right. Or if it's acoustic, that there are some people out there who are superheroes of low frequency sound, which would also kind of do away with another diagnosis that a lot of doctors give people, which is hyperacus, which to me is worth a whole other podcast. It's another people kill themselves over this heightened hyper hearing to wear like this, the rustle of clothes is unbearable. Right. Oh, man. The thing is, if you have hyperacuses, it's not just going to be some that you hear and everything else is normal, which is what hum suffers experience. You would hear everything on this grand scale. Right. You'd be like spiderman. Exactly. So what they think is that there are people who are predisposed to hearing low frequency sounds way better than other people and that it comes as their higher and mid frequency capabilities diminish with age. Right. But again, what are they hearing? Well, that's right. I mentioned earlier the Haaa RP program that the US government military is doing in Alaska. The other one that I teased is the Tacoma the take charge and move out system. In the 1960s, the US navy basically adopted this program to be able to communicate with submarines, long range bombers, ballistic missiles during nuclear war, and they use very low frequency radio waves to do so. And it's a real thing. But is it? The other conspiracy theorists will say that the US government is also using these things to target individuals. And of course you want to say that's probably bunk, but you never know. But you know what the cool irony is that Jared Keller points out is that if the is electromagnetic in nature, tin foil hat and aluminum foil hat would actually work because it blocks out about yeah, it sense of humor about it, at least. Right. But just a thin layer of aluminum can block out like 98% of electromagnetic waves. So that's pretty ironic that it might actually work. Although I haven't heard whether that helps people with the if they put on a tinfoil a tinfoil hat, if that would help or not, or if it has. But speaking of Tacomo, if you read David Demming's journal article, it's called the Anomalous Sound heard around the World. And there is a journal called the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which is a peer reviewed scientific journal that accepts articles on things on the fringe of science. Sure. Which the home most decidedly is. Yeah. David Deming gets into Tacoma and he basically says, this is a secret government program, so obviously we can't get any real answers. We don't know how often it works or how often they're transmitting or anything, but we do know it is a real thing and it correlates some dates when there's like upgrades to the system. And then all of a sudden in this one area around the same time, there's the Kokomo, Indiana starts. Right. So he does a good job of correlating it. And I think that's kind of what he settles on. He believes that it's probably the Takamo program that this very low frequency transmission to submarines underwater from airplanes above is being propagated around the world. And that would suggest that it's a global source, right? That it's just some people can hear these radio waves that you're not supposed to be able to hear. Yes, or it's multiple sources, like a combined effect. Like if you live near an industrial plant that has a machine that's making the sound that maybe certain people are attuned to or not, I don't know. Well, that's another characteristic, is that it's mostly experienced in the country. But see, I just chalk that up to noise pollution being replaced. Like when I worked at a convenience store in the midnight shift, when I worked during the day, I would not notice anything. But when I worked up there at night at 03:00 A.m., I would hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights, right, and it would drive me crazy. I would turn them off, and people would think we were closed. So the thing is, you eventually stopped hearing that right, when I left work. That's called habituation. So habituation means that you are capable of you'd focus on these things the whole time you were there. Well, yeah, in the middle, I wouldn't focus on it, but I would notice I'd be reading a book and I would just hear that sound, but I never noticed it during the day when the lights were on, when you didn't hear it. That's habituation where you're exposed to something, your brain says, this is totally it's not a threat. I don't have to pay attention to it anymore. So anytime in this context that I hear that sound, I don't have to become cognizant of it. Now, apparently you did. You kind of like, fell into cognizance, like here or there, and like, you'd notice it again. But for a normal human being, when you're exposed to something like that over and over again, the less you notice it. Right, but like we said with the more you're exposed to it, the easier it is to tune in. Yeah. And what that's called? Escape it? No, not only can you not escape it, you can catch it easier and easier. Like you can become cognizant of it easier and easier the more you're exposed to it. That's called sensitization, where, I guess, another explanation for the suffers of the home, if they are hearing something, one of the reasons that it drives them so badly is because their habituation levels are low, but their sensitization levels are high. Right. So they're not able to ignore it. And some part of their brain is focusing in on it. And this creates this, I guess, a perfect storm of halaciousness. All right, well, right after this break, I did mention murder. So we're going to talk about one of the more interesting parts of the effects of the home right after this. All right, so I mentioned murder, like I said, and one of the things that what is the guy's name? Steve cohes. He's a mechanical engineer and home investigator in Connecticut, and I believe he was the one that traced the Windsor home to Zug Island. And he has done some research that he believes the Hom and others believe the Hom could be responsible for, well, for killing other people. Specifically in his case, he actually approached Connecticut State Police investigators after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. And he said the from a nearby gas pipeline might have driven Adam Lanza to, well, have contributed to driving him to do something like this. And I don't think he's saying this made him crazy, so he did this. I think he's saying fragile minded people could be pushed over the edge. It could be the last straw for somebody. And I don't know how much credence it has, but investigators did at least include that in the documents they released to the public. So they thought it was worthy enough to put among the 7000 other documents to release to the public. And he's not the only one. Remember the Navy Yard shooting in 2013? Aaron Alexis, he fully came out and said, quote, ultra low frequency attack is what I've been subject to for the last three years I'm sorry, three months. And to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this, end quote. And he scrawled and scratched Elf on the shotgun barrel that he used to kill twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard. Yeah, he scratched my Elf weapon on the stock, I think. Yeah. And basically, conspiracy theorists would say, well, this is clearly driving people to do things like this. Skeptics are going to say, no, these people are delusional, and they're the ones who believe the government is shooting them with these Elf tones and driving them crazy. But either way, it's a little startling that someone would scratch that in their shotgun before they did something like that and blame it on that outright. But that raises another point, like, how exposed was he to those conspiracy theories? A lot of people would say, well, there's a Yahoo group dedicated to the there's that one world map and database. And people who go see these things are they just suggestible, and they're like, oh yeah, I can hear it too. David Deming points out, like, that's crazy. The idea that people are tuning into this thing that's having a really diminishing effect on their wellbeing, as part of just a mass delusion or something like that, kind of goes against the typical psychology of mass delusion, where people join crowds to get some sort of positive benefit or effect from it. Right. And you can argue they're feeling a sense of inclusion or whatever by saying, I hear the too, even in a very small minority. But apparently if you are a home sufferer, like your life is screwed up and you're not a happy person, yes, I will say this. One thing I've noticed about conspiracy theorists is none of them ever believe one? It seems like they believe a lot of them. So that's all I have to say about that. Well, there's one other thing. Not only is this driving people crazy, there is evidence that if this does exist, if there is something that if there's some sort of what's called low frequency noise that's in the environment, and it is. It's everywhere, but if people are being exposed to it, there's evidence that, biologically speaking, it can have an impact. Sure. And there just happened to be this incredible realworld laboratory that sprung up in Portugal in the late 70s because a guy named Castello Bronco was put in charge of the Portuguese Air Force's maintenance, repair, and manufacturing plant. It's called OGMA. I don't know a Portuguese accent, or else I do it. We'll just call it OGMA? And he happened to just be sitting there, and he watched an aircraft technician wander around aimlessly in what apparently looked a lot like an epileptic seizure to this doctor. And it was during what's called an aircraft run up procedure, where they're, like, going through all the systems, and this guy was just standing there, and all of a sudden, he's wandering around. So he looked into it and found that 10% of the workers at this aircraft repair shop were diagnosed with late onset epilepsy. And if you look to this population and compared it to the population in Portugal at large, you wouldn't expect 10% to have it. You'd expect .2%. Oh, wow. To have it. So the fact that there are a lot of people who are being diagnosed with this really led them to believe that they were exposed to this Low frequency noise or that it was having a dangerous effect on them. And this one guy who is a worker there got really interested in all this, and he created a living will. His name was Philippe Pedro. And Philippe Pedro was like, you cut me open the moment I die and do an autopsy. And they found this guy was messed up. Like how? Like, his aorta. His heart was thicken. The walls were thickened inexplicably fried chicken? Pretty much, yeah. But no, that would be explicable. Oh, so he was a very healthy person, then, is what you're saying. Apparently, what they found doesn't jive with his lifestyle. All right. He was diagnosed with late onset epilepsy. He died at age 58. He had thickened heart tissue. He had a tumor in his kidney. He had a tumor in his liver. And apparently, now, thanks to this guy and his autopsy, he kind of, like, laid the groundwork for this investigation into low frequency noise being dangerous for humans, even though we don't feel anything. But on a cellular level, being exposed to this stuff has these effects. So apparently, if you have thickening of your heart tissue without any kind of inflammation response, that is a classic sign of low frequency noise damage. It's what's called fibroacoustic. Disease, which certain people may be susceptible to and others are not. In theory, supposedly anyone exposed to it would be susceptible to it. Really? The way that it ties into the is some people might actually be able to hear what they're being exposed to, while most people might not. So we're all exposed to it then? Yeah. In this article, I can't remember the name of it, but it was basically an overview of this aircraft place by some Portuguese scientists. They said it's almost impossible to get a control group to compare because everybody's exposed to low frequency noise. Just most of us aren't aware of it. Yes, it's just everywhere. But it's not considered a nuisance except for that two to 11% of poor people who suffer from hearing the home. Right. And their accounts differ wildly as well. So it's tough to study. And you can't get funding to study because it's fringe science unless you're in Canada. So they say turn a fan on at night. Really? That's what one guy does. Makes sense. Yeah. Turn on the fan or some sort of like they need white noise to john it out. And that helps. But yeah, get that app. Get the white noise out. There you go. That's what I sleep to again. Go read the awesome article by Jared Keller. Yeah, Live Science had a couple of good articles. Yeah. And then David Deming has the home and anomalous sound heard around the world. And then if this kind of stuff floats your boat, you might want to check out some of our friends fights, too. There's a great podcast by our friend Roman Mars named 99% Invisible who would be able to explain a lot of the science behind this kind of thing. Or did he do one on the home? No, but it's kind of up his alley. Like the vibro acoustic idea. I can totally see him getting into that. And I just think if somebody dug that, they dig 99% Invisible. Agreed. And then damn interesting. Another great site that would definitely probably have something about the home on it. Yeah, and watch The X Files. Yeah, right? Yeah, our palm molder. And of course you can hang out at how stuff works. You can just type the home in. I don't think it will bring up an article, but see what happens. Yeah, we don't have one yet. No, but yeah, type home into the search bar and see what comes up. It's just a fun game. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this limousine ranch. Hey guys. I finally have a story for you after listening for over five years. I live in super rural South Dakota. Not just the regular rural South Dakota. My town is only about 3200 people and it is the largest town within 100 miles radius. The main business here is agriculture and ranching. Not a big surprise after I married my plumber husband from St. Louis. We moved back to my little hometown six years ago where we started a plumbing business. He started a plumbing business. Shortly after moving here, we got a call to go to Anderson's limousine ranch. Limousine ranch with no e on the end. After driving out to the country and lots of gravel roads later, he came up on the ranch and failed to see any limos. He said he couldn't figure out where all the limousines were and why there would be a limousine company dealership in the middle of nowhere on an Indian reservation. I guess he asked the owners and they explained that they run limousine cattle on their ranch, which I looked up. It's a type of cattle from the limousine region of France. Okay. They don't look like they're wearing cloaks or anything. No. My brother and I teased them for quite some time on this to get a mental image of the absurdity. Imagine the vast prairie of dances with wolves or Fargo, and then expect to see a limousine dealership out there or just a bunch of limousines just kind of meandering around the field. That sounds like something that would happen in fargo. Sure. It's very coen brothers ESC, but not Kevin Costner esque. No, that's all he's pretty self serious. Yeah. He doesn't look like he has much of a sense of humor, does he? I don't know. He was in Bull Durham. It's funny. Well, yes. Back in the day when he was bible, I watched the preview only for that movie draft day that he did recently. Yeah. I can barely make it through the preview. Dude, the preview built it up. They were like, I can't believe he's doing it. Is he really going to do this? And it's about the NFL draft. He's like a GM. And they built it up to this thing. And finally, when it was in the movie theater, the preview, I leaned over to my buddy Scotty, who, you know, and I was like, what does he do? Does he open fire on the room and shoot people or is it just some sort of trade it's a trade team. Yeah. But they were building up like, I can't believe this is happening. Yes. Did you ever see the movie? No. What was Scott's take on it? He just laughed and said, yeah, exactly. That sounds like our Scott. That's he's the guy that laughs at things like that. That is from Jennifer Coleman. Oh, I forgot we were even doing listening to mail. That's right, Jennifer. And you should tease your husband for that. That's pretty funny stuff. And he should stick to the plumbing business. Yeah, for real. Not the limousine company finding business. If you want to mock someone you love on our show, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuff you shouldn't, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. You also can do the most important thing you'll do today or any day go to stuffyoushoreknow.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." | |
3f5e36a0-5461-11e8-b6d0-7b17abad369f | Selects: How Skateboarding Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-skateboarding-works | Skateboarding started out as something bored surfers did when the waves weren't breaking, but after a few improvements to the design, it took off like a rocket to become its own cultural phenomenon. Come gleam the cube with Josh and Chuck as you ollie over this classic episode. | Skateboarding started out as something bored surfers did when the waves weren't breaking, but after a few improvements to the design, it took off like a rocket to become its own cultural phenomenon. Come gleam the cube with Josh and Chuck as you ollie over this classic episode. | Sat, 09 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=9, tm_isdst=0) | 44052981 | audio/mpeg | "Alright. Folks, this is Chuck. It is in select time, March 11, 2014. And that's what we're throwing back to today because I picked out how skateboarding works. Boy, this is a great one. This is sort of vintage. Stuff You Should Know is all about skateboarding. Full of stories about our own skateboarding adventures as young posers that we both were. And it's good stuff. We talk about the history we talk all about. And of course, it's about a thing that some people are experts in. So we get a lot wrong, but we get it mostly right. And it was a good episode. So please do enjoy how skateboards work right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant's with me, so stuff you should know. And Jerry, of course, is here, who just celebrated a birthday. Yeah. Happy birthday, Jerry. Valentine's Day Runner indian Sweat lodge that we call a recording booth. Yeah. Man, it's hot. Yeah. Part of it is this thing. You want to turn this off because it really does put out a tremendous amount of heat. Yeah. Josh, we have a lamp on our table that we used to see. Well, we can't see any longer. Oh, well, flying blind. Yeah. That did make it like 3% cooler immediately. Yeah, it's that lamp. It's the lamp. And then just people generating heat in here. Yeah. Podcasters were a balmy bunch. Plus, there's a herd of oxen in the corner. That doesn't help. No. It's been the best intro ever. You think so? I think so. You're not being facetious? No. You know the word facetious? What do you got for me? Well, when I was younger, I knew the word facetius. It was a word that my dad used a lot, so I used it in regular conversation correctly. Yeah. Okay. But I'd never seen it written out, or so I thought. And then finally one day, I ran across in a book again, this word I kept coming up on, and I was like, what is that word? Fastidious? And I was like that's facetius. I don't know that I've seen it spelled either. Yeah, it looks like facet. Facetius. No, it looks like facet. Like a facet of a jewel or something and then es IOUs. Yeah. There's no way I would have so bombed the spelling of that. Right. But the thing is, I was using it correctly in conversation, and I had seen it in books. I just never put the two together until finally, one day, it clicked. You had to get your tattoo changed. Facetious across the back of your neck. Yeah. In the heart. That's right. All right, so skateboarding. Yeah. About the same time that I realized the word facetious, what? It was correctly spelled as I was skateboarding at the time. So that's how it ties in. Got you. I was a little skateboarder for a long time. Yeah, I was, too. I'm not old enough to where I saw all the different waves of skateboarding. Of the four you saw the first two? I didn't see the first one. That's pretty funny. That would mean I'm dead. So there's plenty of old borders out there. Sure. Yeah. But I was of the age where I definitely had the small sort of plastic board with the single little tail on the back only. And clay wheels. No. Oh, yeah. No clay wheels. It seems to me like the skateboards from biblical times like clay wheels. That's what I think of when I see clay wheels. What do they even look like? Just brown. Are they super dangerous? Well, yeah. And if you've seen the great documentary Dogtown and Z Boys, they go over. It's a really good dock, by the way. Like, amazing footage that they have and good music and highly recommended over the movie version. The Lords of Dogtown. Was Val Kilmer in that? No. Heath Ledger was he played the mentor I can't remember his name. Of Skip. The Zephyrcruise. Yeah, skip. Skip. Skip went on to found Santa Monica Airline skateboards. Oh, yeah. He stayed on it's like a big influence in skateboarding. That's good. So, anyway, Skip, I just wanted to point out that I have branched a few different. Like, I started out with a little clay one, and then in high school is when I got the big, huge, fat skateboard. When they were super obnoxious. Yeah. That's when I came into skating. 19 83 84. Had, like, a nice lance mountain. It wasn't my first board. My first board. Remember the Nash Tough Tops? No. It was blank. On the bottom, there are no graphics. But on the top, cut out in the grip tape, was like a star that looks kind of like a saw blade. Circular saw blade. And then the big difference was the different colors of the board underneath. Blue or pink or yellow or whatever. Mine was, like, neon green. Yes. Your big fat one. Yeah. And looking back, like, kind of corny. And I think after that is when true skaters started being like, we don't really care that much about awesome graphics. We just want a good board. Good board. You wanted some ribbons on the side. Do you remember those underneath? Yeah, but I don't think people like those now either. Oh, no, not anymore. Real skaters. No, the whole point of those, I think it was to let you rail slide or whatever easier. But I think it was also to protect those graphics, too. It totally was because I had a little big plastic bumper under the tailpiece, too, which is counterintuitive to tell you the tricks. Yeah, but I mean, who cares about protecting the tail? It's weird. Yeah. I was also a nose bone, too. I was never very good. Oh, I wasn't either. I don't mean to give that okay. I mean, I spent a lot of hours skating, and I never got very good. I think I pulled off one kick flip once. Really? Once. That's good. I thought it was pretty good, too. That is the trick that you most often see kids not landing driving down the street. If you ever see a kid, I rarely see a successful kick flip just on the sidewalk. Oh, yeah. If you see somebody who pulls off a kick flip, the chances are there's somebody filming them because they know that they're going to be able to pull off the kickflip. In La. Actually, I would see more, obviously, better skaters out there. Sure. Or New York. Yeah, true. All right, so, skateboarding, should we get going with a little history? Yeah, let's talk about the history of this. This is so close to my heart, man. I fell down the rabbit hole today watching old skate videos and checking out old Powell Pirata boards. That was my jam with Powell. Well, we mentioned that there have been four distinct waves of skateboarding starting in each new wave. It's just weaned in popularity here and there and then come back strong and stronger due to either advances, mainly in, like, skateboard technology right. And trickery. Yes. And parental acceptance. Yes. It never really goes away. Skateboarding is either ever since its inception, it's either been mainstream or else forced underground and practiced by juvenile delinquents, who kind of kept it going and advanced it quietly until it came back into the mainstream. And parents were like, oh, okay, totally. You guys can skate again. But the true origin of the skateboard, the first one that came out, the first commercially produced one, is called the Roller derby Skate. Yeah. And before that, if you've seen the movie Back to the Future, when Marty and White Fly rips the little milk crate off the front of the homemade wooden scooter, that was where skateboards really came from. It was sort of a homemade deal with, like, a peach crate right. As the front of your scooter. A couple of handles. Yeah. Steel wheels from roller skates. Yeah. And that was super dangerous. Right. But like you say, if you take the peach crate off and take the handles off, you have that two X four with the roller skate wheels. And they don't know exactly who did it. They think actually, several people probably did it simultaneously. Marty McClaud in the 40s, they think surfers in California did it. There are kids in France that we're seeing doing it in the it kind of spread. It arose independently around the world at about the same time. That's called the Zeitgeist. That is my friend. So now we're in the early 1960s, and it really took off like a rocket. In the first few years of the 1960s, like, 50 million skateboards were sold in those first three years. So crazy. And it was everywhere. Yeah. It was like the hot new craze. Well, it was like, also like hula hoops and things like that. America was in a crazy mood, a craze mood. Right. Like whatever the big thing was. Yes. And skateboards fell into that big time. The problem is they were pretty dangerous. There wasn't a lot you could do with them. No. Because, again, they're steel wheels. It's basically two by four on steel wheels. Yeah. You can ride down the street and you could fall off of it. Exactly. That was the extent of it, I think, because of the safety concerns. Overnight skateboarding just went away in, like, 1965. It was over. Yeah. But it still kind of stayed somewhat popular as a thing to do among surfers. When the waves weren't breaking right. They would just kind of sidewalk surface, what they called it. And they never really saw it as anything bigger than a supplement to surfing. Right. It was just kind of like it wasn't its own thing. Right. Until the Sixties, the late Sixties or the early Seventies, when clay wheels came about. You could do a little more stuff, I think. Well, clay was better than the steel wheels, but still bad. Right. If you hit a rock in the road, your toast. And like, that's when people started dying from skateboards, which kind of led to its decline again. Sure. And then some surfers, the Zephyr crew, are the ones who broke skateboarding out once and for all. Well, yeah, thanks to Frank Nasworthy's invention of the urethane wheel in 1072. Yeah. He found a Cadillac wheels, and all of a sudden, it was like a smooth, steady, silent experience on a skateboard for the first time. Right. And then you changed everything. It did. Because it could grip. It wasn't just that it wasn't rumbling any longer. Yeah. Your thing could grip like concrete or go over a smaller pavement. Yeah. Instead of just stopping. Exactly. Yeah. All of a sudden, there were way more surfaces that could be skated. And that plus the invention of the truck, which is basically an axle for your wheels, that not only allows the wheels to revolve more smoothly, especially when you add a set of bearings, but it also allows you to maneuver to the left or the right, which is a big deal. It kind of opens things up. They're twisty. Yeah. And then the kicktail also changed everything. All these kind of came together at about the same time. Yeah. And you mentioned the Zephyr crew. In 1975, they held the first, basically, competition in Del Mar, California. And if you've seen the documentary, it's pretty great. I mean, they had sort of the holdovers from the 60s doing, like, handstands and all these sort of square antiquated moves, and then these little punks came in there and just, like, tore the place up. And the judges didn't know how to judge them at the time. Right. Because they'd never seen anything like it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It was a pool. They were skating in pools. Right. Or a pole, at least. Yeah. The pool thing came a little later because there was a big drought in the mid 70s in Southern California, and water was actually in short supply, so people would drain their pools or not refill them or whatever for the new summer. And so they started busting in the backyards and skating pools. Yeah. And they would bring their own pumps and hoses to drain, like, all the muck out entirely, and then just, like, skate that pool. And there was at one of those pools, a kid named Tony Alva, who was in that Zephyr crew was Tony Alva, J. Adams, and Stacey Perelta. Yes. Among others. Yeah. Right. But those are, like, the big three. Tony album is your guy. Right. Stacey Perrelta. I thought you were, like, a huge Tony Alba dude. Okay. No, I respect sure. For Tony Alba. No, I was always palpal to okay. But Tony Alva, at one of those pools, kept going and going and pushing himself harder and harder. And then one day he cleared the coping of the pool and caught air. Yeah. With his hand at first. Oh, he did. Like a hand plant. Yeah. That was how that originally came about. But he did leave contact with the pool. Right. And no one had ever done that. And everyone's like and that was, like, the creation of Vert style skateboarding. And Alva went on at age 19 to found his own skateboarding company. He was the first one to use Canadian maple Veneers, which we'll talk about. And it was really innovative, especially for a 19 year old skate punk from Southern California. Yeah, they all were. It's pretty amazing. Like, this collection of kids, most of them ended up being, like, very savvy, like wealthy businessmen later on. Yeah. And right after the Del Mar competition, the Zephyr crew kind of scattered to the wind and went and found purchase and expanded skateboarding as a sport and as a theme. And one of the things that they brought with them from having been part of a crew is to form their own crews of people that they sponsored, which made those people pros. Right. And those pros would go on tour. And when those pros went on tour, they were skating, say, Palm Parrelta Skateboards, and showing local kids what can be done with a skateboard. And those kids would go by Palm Paralta Skateboards and go out and skate. And that whole idea of doing demos on tour with pros who are sponsored by skateboarding companies really helped expand skateboarding in the created that third wave where skateboarding just became it. Yeah. I mean, it was big in California and Florida. My cousins were way into it in Florida early on, but it really took off when kids like me in Georgia and you in Ohio were skiing, skating up my steep driveway and trying to do little 180 turns going back down like it was a wave. And I was one of those silly little kids was so caught up in it at first. Well. I had a kid who lived across the tracks for me. Who had a half pipe. Like a good half pipe that his dad built him. And that was part of that rise in 1983. I think. That third wave. Because I should say we didn't really mention in the late 70s. After Alva Skateboards was founded and Palparalto was founded and all that. Skateboarding took a hit. Mainstream wise. And it became associated with punks and just punk kids. Bad kids. Yeah, the bad kids who literally gave skateboarding a bad name. And so it was kind of driven underground again. And then in the early 80s, it experienced another rise and its image kind of changed a little bit, thanks to the Pal Pieza team, the Bones Brigade, who were actually, like they were all young kids and they were skateboarders, and all they cared about was skating, but they were also kind of clean cut as far as skateboarders went. They didn't do drugs. At least they didn't publicly do drugs. Yeah. Stacey Pratto was a good kid. Yeah. And so the kids that he sponsored, like Tony hawk, mike McGill, steve caballero, christian, his soy all those kids were good kids, too. And they had a tremendous amount of influence on the skaters who were into them. And so it kind of changed skating's image a little bit, too. It went from being something that punk kids were into to something all kids were into. Yeah. It did go into another four year law toward the end of the 70s, before it started coming back in the mid eighty. S and BMX had a lot to do with it. Oh, yeah. That became more popular and, you know, some skateboarder magazine shut down or changed names to a different title. And it just like you said, it never went away to the adherence of the true underground skateboarders. Right. There's always somebody who's been skating at some point ever since 1959, but in the mid eighties is when it definitely came back to the big time mainstream. Yes. And I can't tell if it's just nostalgia on my part or else if that was when it really exploded, but that was my wheelhouse now. Remember the videos, man bons Brigade video. Yeah. And that was another thing, too. One of the reasons why skateboarding was able to spread as a sport or recreation or whatever, was in part the access to cheap VHS players, because the Bones Brigade made videos and people bought them. Like, you could go to your local skate shop and buy, like, a Bones Brigade VHS tape for 25 or $30. You kind of had to if you wanted to learn the cool tricks. Right. That's like the only place you could see them at the time. Yeah. And then they were produced in a way like you'd want to watch them again and again. Like, I think the fourth one, the search for animal chin, actually had, like, a plot and everything. Really? Yeah. Interesting. So you would watch these things again and again. These guys became, like, your heroes. And not only were you watching them do their tricks and watching their videos, but you also wore their t shirts. You got their deck. And it said a lot like, I had a Mike McGill deck. I really was into Mike McGill. I had a lance mountain deck. I was really into lance mountain. And I like Tony hawk and everything, but I never had a Tony hawk deck. You identify with a skater based on your personality type on it. Yeah. And your style. Your style had a lot to do with it, for sure. Then there was another law in the early 90s because of the recession, is what everyone seems to blame it on. I know I thought it was weird. I don't remember that happening. But now that I think back, late high school, early college, there wasn't a lot of skate stuff going on in the world, and I wasn't skating at the time, but I was still just young enough to pick up on that fourth wave in the early mid 90s. Well, thanks to the x games, that's what really brought it back big time. And Tony hawk, too. He kept it going. His video games definitely helped spread that fourth wave, too. And I guess it's never really gone away. No, he's bigger than ever skating. Oh, yeah. Well, another thing I think that helped is that 80s nostalgia craze how the 80s inform everything today. Part of that was, I guess, re exploring that third wave of skateboarding. So, like, if you go into a band store, they're all, like, old Powell decks or old vision streetwear decks. Vision handwear. Yeah. And slime balls. Yeah. And I still have a pair of vans. Old schools, the black and white checker. No, those were the I can't remember the name of those. The slipons. Yes. The old schools are the black. They had the lowtop and the high top that has the little sort of white wave on the side. But yes, I have to wear those shoes. Yeah. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else. Like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So Chuckle, we're going to talk about the skateboard itself. You promised. Yes. There are three main parts. You have the deck, you have the trucks, and you have the wheels. Yeah. And like we said, the trucks connect the wheels to the deck and they service the axles on the front and the back. Little T shaped thing. Right. And I remember definitely, like, taking a lot of time to get your trucks the way you wanted. Oh, yeah. Some people like them really loose. Yeah, I did. And some people like them a little tighter if they're looser, you can turn more aggressively. Yeah. But you also get wobble wheels. Wobble wheel, yes. But yeah, I like mine a little tighter, too. You want to be able to turn, but you also I like the stability of a tighter truck. Yeah. You've also got your wheels, which have a set of bearings. Yeah. And the wheels haven't changed too much. They're still polyurethane. They've changed in size a little bit, but it's the same basic concept. Right. And again, it still depends on your preference. Like, you can buy a pre made skateboard that's all put together, but as you know, any skater worth of salt buys the deck, buys the truck, buys the wheels that they want, puts it all together. You might as well just go to a department store and buy your skateboard if you're just going to buy it all together. Yeah. With a little outfit that comes with it. Your Skater 101 outfit. Yeah. So the last part, arguably the most important part, but one of three most important parts is the deck. Yeah. And the deck has evolved over time. We talked about how the tail kicked up in the early 70s in the rear. Yes. That allowed a lot of tricks. And if you look at a skateboard from the top or the bottom, where you're looking at the outline, that's called the plan. And then if you look at how the tail or the nose is kicked up, and then the concave to the interior of the skateboard, which allows more control and stability, that's called the concave. So you got the plan and the concave. And those are part of the deck. They inform the shape and size of the deck. And then on top of that deck, you have the grip tape, which I thought that would have been a recent innovation. Apparently, grip tape was invented all the way back in 1948 for Scooters. Oh, really? Yeah, they did it back then. And a guy named ferdinand Switzhoffer invented it. Nice. Yes. And they changed the name from Switzer Tape to Grip Tape. Right. And in the 80s, too. The thing now is your whole board is covered with grip tape in mid eighty s. I remember there were graphics on top, so I just had tape at the front and the back, and it really didn't make any sense. Like, the whole thing should be grippy. Yeah. But, I mean, again, the Powell graphics are pretty awesome. Steve Cavallero has that dragon, or, like, at least you have the bones, guy. The decks are not a solid piece of wood. It's actually thin layers of veneer, and they are laminated. And then you spread adhesive, and you just, like with a lot of furniture. It's just many layers of thin wood compressed together into a mold. And it's a hydraulic press that just smashes it all together until you've got a really solid piece of wood. Yeah. And it's definitely a lot stronger than just the sum of its parts. Yeah, for sure. From being molded plywood. And then you cut that plan out. Yeah. And then after that, you spray it with some seal. It because you don't want to accidentally ollie into a puddle or a fountain or something like that and have your board warp or purposefully into a fountain. And then the graphics are put on, and then the grip tape. I get a sense that graphics aren't, like, super cool anymore. Am I wrong? I think it's a matter of fact, the basic thing. I think it's a matter of preference. It definitely isn't. Like in the mid 80s. It was like they were so obnoxious. Oh, yeah. Remember the gator one? No. It was, like, kind of like, I guess, a Vertigo thing, but it was made out of different spikes. You would recognize it immediately. I definitely had the stickers on my car, and it was a thing. We had a shop in Stone Mountain called Surfs Up. In Stone Mountain. Yeah. That was obviously open for four and a half years. Right. And they had skate gear and surfer gear, and for all us in inland living people. Yeah. We thought they were cool initially. At the early wave, in the early 80s, you had to go to a ski shop because skiing was already established. And then they'd open up a little section for skateboards. Totally. And then eventually it got a little bigger, and then all of a sudden, there were actual skate shops. Yeah. All right. So that is the actual skateboard in all its three parts. Right. And I guess we need to talk about how to ride this thing. Yeah. Because the fourth part is you. That's right. Although it looks cool just hanging on your wall. Yeah. If you want to impress the ladies. Sure. Like, check out my skateboard. Yeah, I was all into that. But it is like surfing. And the reason they compare it to surfing is that it's sort of like a smaller version. You have the side stance just like on a surfboard. Right. And if you heard our surfing podcast, you heard us talk about regular foot and goofy foot. Is there a mongo foot on surfing, too? No, because you're not pushing off of any regular foot. Is your left foot forward and you're using your right foot to push. Goofy foot is the opposite of that. Your right foot forward, you're pushing with your left, which does not feel right. No. And I was manga foot and I never knew it until I looked this up. That is when your left foot is forward. I'm sorry, your right foot is on the board, but you're using your left foot to push and your foot is at the rear and not the front. Yeah. And that just feels supernatural to me. But not supernatural, but very natural. There's ghosts, but apparently Mongo foot is I think you're sort of frowned upon as a person by real skaters if you're Mongo like, lay off, I've watched you. You can't even kick flip. So you pay attention to how you stand. That's what you say to people if they give you guff about being Mongo foot. Well, the problem with mongo foot is you have to shift your feet a little bit once both are back on the board. And I guess you can't, like, bust a move immediately with a trick. Right. Which matters if you're competing for half a million dollars, but not if you're like on your way down to the 711. Yeah. If you've never skated before and you want to try it, I would advise to not start with mongo foot at all if you don't know any better, because you won't be made fun of. Right. Maybe is that what kept you back? Maybe you'd be like pro right now. That was what it was. But I've never seen this before. No, it makes sense if you don't know which foot you're prominent with. Although I would say if you're right footed, you're probably going to be a regular foot. And if you're goofy footed, you might be goofy foot. I think it has to do with handedness. So like, if you're right handed, your left foot is going to be forward. You're going to push with your right foot. If you're left handed, you're going to be goofy foot where your right foot is forward, you push with your left foot. I think you push with your foot in the rear of the dominant hand side or foot side. Right? Yeah. But I think your dominant hand is typically your dominant foot as well. Yeah, it seems right. And then if somebody came up and pushed you yeah. That's the test. The foot you put back to steady yourself, that's the one you want to use to push with before you crow hop and punch them in the face. Right. With the H man. Yeah. So I never heard. That that's a little trick you can do. And I guess you're not maybe surprised somebody because if you think about it too much, like, all right, push me. So you try to put both feet back at once and you end up just hopping. So there are quite a few different things you can do. Back in the day, it was all about the downhill slalom, which is boring. No, I mean, super speed is not boring. Scary. It is a little scary. I suffered a pretty decent head injury once. Really? Yes. I got the wobble wheel going downhill and I was like, I got a bail out. And right before I went to go jump on the grass, the board went and I went forward and landed on my head and skidded on my head entirely. No helmet at all, right. No, it was something yes, I remember. Not been the same since. Most neighborhoods have one hill that you don't dare go down. And my best friend, his name was Chuck, actually, at the time, in mid high school. Must have been very confusing. No, he had a hill like that. And I remember standing at the top of it and thinking, there's no way I should be doing this and getting on the skateboard and trying to go down. And like you said, bailing out into the grass was always, if you're in a neighborhood, a nice way to go about things. Is that what you did? I think I went all the way down nice, actually. But yeah, it's a little scary, you know? It is. No way I do that now. I remember a car was driving past and stopped and went, oh, my God, are you okay? I was like, wow, is that bad? And they finished their beer and drove on right through their can. Abby so you also have freestyle, which is doing tricks and things on a flat surface. And we're going to get into the tricks a little bit in a minute. What's freestyle? It sounds stupid. Look up Rodney Mullen or Pair? Well under on YouTube. Check out some of their specially their 80s stuff, the early mid eighty s. Yeah, they were doing some pretty cool stuff. And some of it is like that stuff that you are saying that California dudes doing, like handstands on moving skateboards. Or just the 300 and sixtys standing in one place with a nose in the ear. But then they would take their hands and flip their board 360 deg and land on it. They're pretty good. Pretty great stuff. It takes creativity, for sure. It's definitely like choreography and a skateboard. Yeah. Well, I have a feeling you're about to say vert skating. I wasn't. But I will. Are you ready? You didn't give rise to vert skating or skating. Well, vert skating. Yeah. That came out of those Dog Town guys. Yeah. In the swimming pools. Yeah, because a pool is considered skating is short for vertical right. Because you're skating on vertical surfaces, like a pool or a bowl or a half pipe or a quarter pipe or whatever. Right. Or if you're like me, two milk crates and a piece of plywood. Did you do that? Yeah, the Josh pipe, it was not that stable. So vertical is when people started leaving and catching air, leaving the side of whatever surface they were on, which was really exciting at the time. Yeah. I can't imagine having been there. And it's only gone up and up since then. Yeah. And then you got street skating, which is if you've seen ladies and dudes on the street, like, jumping up the air onto a park bench and grinding that park bench, or a railing, or smashing themselves trying to grind a railing. That is street skating. Or if you've ever played the Tony Hawk video game, did you ever play that? Yeah, the first one. Yeah. If you play that enough, people who play that enough know what I'm talking about. You start walking around in life and everything you see, oh, man, I could grind that right. So hard if I could really skate. Yeah. Not in real life. No, but yeah. So street skating kind of I guess you could say it combines freestyle with obstacles, using obstacles in the built environment. That's street skating. Yeah. And that's the stuff that usually you'll see frowned upon by businesses and people thinking like, these hooligans are out there. Right. Which skateboarding is not a crime, man. No. Although if you use a skate, go to jail. But to combat all that crime stuff, a lot of cities built skate parks in the 70s. Yes. What they didn't realize is that when those kids fell and cracked their heads, their parents were going to sue. And so all of a sudden, the insurance premiums for skate parks went through the roof and all the cities shut them down, and they went away for a very long time. And then, I guess there were some changes in liability laws that allowed skate parks to come back. And so now skate parks are back. Yeah. But they're very frequently put up by cities that are like, we'll build a skate park, and they don't ask the skaters how to build a skate park. So they build, like, a terrible skate park, and the skaters don't use it. And the cities are like, you skate punk. Kids use the skate park. And they're like, Your skate park sucks. And they're like, no, it doesn't, and yes, it does. And the skate away. Or they do it well and it's too crowded. Well, there's one thing I know, is that for every skate park in any city, there will be a group of skaters saying, this place sucks. Sure. I remember when we shot at a skate park. Remember? Yeah. These local kids, and it was a new skate park. One of them that one kid was pretty good. Yeah, he's all right? But I asked him, I was like, Guys, this is great. Right? This is new and it's in Decatur. And they're like, it sucks. Yeah, well, then that one kid lied. He said he lived from CD or part of Atlanta, hit us up for bus fare. He's a total post. Yeah. One of the crew saw him go into his house, like a block away in this very nice neighborhood of Decatur and hide a skateboard in his backyard. They can be different. They can be like, smaller half pipes and ramps and rails and things. And obstacles to my recommendation if you ever visit La. Is to go to Venice Beach to their new Ish skate park there. And it is like the cement bowl. It's like a huge series of connected swimming pools. Yes. And this is where you'll see some like you'll see the old school guys that aren't leaving the bowl, that are just like, carving it up as sweet as pudding. And then you've got guys that will really know what they're doing. Yeah, like catching air and doing three hundred and sixty s. And there's a bulldog that rides a skateboard there, too. I've heard of that. You should see him. It's quite amazing. Sure it is. Like, you can't catch air or whatever, but just the fact that a dog is using a skateboard is pretty awesome. So should we talk about some tricks? Let's. Well, almost every trick on Earth is based on the ollie. The trick named after Alan Ali Galfand. He invented it in the early 1970s, mid 1970s, and that is basically when you jump up in the air. And if you've seen skateboarders do it, you might wonder, how on earth do they jump up in the air and have that skateboard seemingly attached to their feet? I never was very good at it. Oh, really? No. I could ollie pretty good. I was more of a sidewalk surfer than a trick aerial guy. Yeah, well, I wasn't a trick aerial guy either, but I could ollie. Well, explain the ollie. Oh, well, okay. So the ollie is let's say you're on your board and you're on a flat surface. You kick the tail of the skateboard down really hard against the ground. And what this does is this exerted force allows you to overcome the force of gravity. And since you're jumping at the same time you jump into the air, you're taking off your own downward pressure on the board. So the front of the board, the nose, goes up high in the air. And the fact that you've slapped the tail against the ground means the tail comes up into the air until it's even with the nose and the board's flat in the air and it looks like it's attached to your feet if you do it right. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you and the board are 4ft into the air, and then you come back down and you land. It that's an ollie. It's funny you mentioned 4ft. The world record. Danny Waynewright of I think he's from England, recorded a 44 and a half inch alley. Wow. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. Was that like, standing still? No, it's like they just set up something to jump over. Got you. You keep adding layers until you can't jump any higher. Yeah. And then you've got, like, 10ft to get going, and then just pop up, and it looks like it's attached to his feet. The ollie is so integral to so many other tricks that it's almost not a trick any longer in and of itself. It's like the basic mechanics of whatever other trick that follows. Right. But you pretty much can't do anything without ollie. And that's how those guys originally caught air convert skating, was to ollie off of the coping, the top, and then you would catch some serious air because you already had that extra momentum behind you as well. 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 codes stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, we're back. Chuck, we're going to talk about the names of tricks, different types of tricks. Yeah. All right. So if you've ever watched the X games and you hear the sort of annoying announcers admittedly using all these words you've never heard, we're going to explain what some of these words mean just to help you follow along a little bit. That's all right. You might hear feet got. Front side there or whatever. Front side is when you're facing the obstacle and performing a trick, as opposed to backside when you're back is to the obstacle. Yeah. Like you're basically going backwards on the skateboard. That's right. Yeah. Let's see. 180 is a pretty basic trick, but it's where you ollie, and you and the board turn 180 degrees to facing the opposite direction. Yes. Like, you go up the ramp and then you turn in mid air, and you come right back down. You can also do it on a flat surface, or you could 180 onto like a park bench or something, whatever. But the 180 also kind of forms the basis for a lot of other tricks, especially vert tricks, like three sixty s and five forty s all the way up to 1080s, and you can grab the side of your board and just do all sorts of cool stuff. Yeah. Tony Hawk famously completed the first 900 degree turn, and for many years they thought that was it. Until a twelve year old named Tom Sharp in 2012 pulled off the first 1080. And they filmed that. It wasn't in competition. The first one in competition was a guy named Mitch Brusco. He did it. The X Games. And that is three full rotations in the air. And obviously you have to land successfully for it to count and to live and live. And it's amazing, man. Three full rotations in the air. These dudes are getting up super high now. Yeah. You ever heard the word fakey? I have. Fakey is basically where you remain in your regular stance, but you're going backwards, so you're doing like you're going into a backside trick. That's right. A pop shove. It is when you do an ollie with the 180, but your body isn't moving. You're just popping up in the air and flipping the skateboard around underneath you and then landing on it. Yeah, then we talked about grinding. There's a couple of ways you can grind. A true grind is when you're on the actual axles, so you got to be going forward or you can go sideways and grind on your board. And that's called a board slide. Yes. Or a rail slide. And then the kick flip, of course, is the one that you see people busting butt on, which I've pulled off once. That's right, the famous Josh kick flip. And then of course, Chuck, there's the manual, which is another way to say a wheelie. I was good at those front side manual. Yeah. Backside manual. I could do like I was not good. I think that's becoming clear. Like, I thought it was cool if I could do a little wheelie and do a little 180 turn on the ground. Yeah, no, I'm with you, man. I understand. I wasn't very good either. But Chuck, I had years of enjoyment. Twice. Third wave and fourth wave. Yeah. Loved skateboarding. Love it. I just love skateboarding. I think everybody should go out and skateboard all the time. She's never going to be one of those old men that quit grinding my rail. Well, yeah, if I had a nice rail out front, I'd be like, hit the hell off of my rail. But it's not like I hate skateboarding in general. Yeah, but you chip in and help build a half pipe in your neighborhood, maybe away from my really nice rail. Right. It's a good idea if you do want to try skateboarding. Obviously, these days, with the safety consciousness of people, you should get a helmet and some knee pads and elbow pads, and if you're smart, maybe some wrist guards, although that might not be cool. Well, no, actually, that's another reason skate parks often go in use is because there's local ordinances that says you have to wear a helmet and pads. And of course, skaters are like, that sucks. Yes, but the wrist guards, that's a common injury because you'll often go to brace yourself with your arms when you fall, and they say to try and fall on your fleshy parts of your body, but you're really kind of at the whim of where gravity takes you, I think, at that point. Well, you know, that was another reason I think I wasn't ever that good, is because back when I was a kid, they were all fleshy parts. It's hard to get air. We should have been safe. It was when you fell. It was. You got anything else? No, man, that's it. Skateboarding. If you want to know more about it, you should type skateboarding into the word search bar@howstepworks.com. That's the first thing you should do. You should follow that up by watching skate videos and going by a skateboard and go skating. Yes. I want to get a longboard now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the old man style. Yeah. Just cruising. You get on a flat surface and use it as carving the concrete way. A mode of transportation. Yeah. Are you going to learn to do handstands on it? No. Let's see. Since I said handstands and then laugh, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this josh, what are you hiding? And I'm glad to get this email because I knew I wasn't crazy. So let's just get into this. You know, what can I say? I don't even remember this most recent reference. All right, well, let's just explain here what's going on. This is from Ben. Ben says, hey, guys, I've been living like a troglobidic troglodyte for the past six years because I just discovered your amazing podcast a few weeks ago. As penance, I've been listening to several per day and has since gone to over 100. So he's binging. He said, just notice something. And during the Kincats scuba dive episode, not one of our best, on August 12, 2008, Josh goes into detail about he was a certified scuba diver, and the one time he was in open water, he not only got seasick, but also got a slight case of the benz due to surfacing too quickly. Then in 2013, in the Diving Bell episode, Chuck says, I thought I remembered many moons ago you mentioned something about getting the bins. And Josh quickly and confidently retorted, I've never had the bins. So I know this is almost five years later, but it begs the question, what are you trying to hide? Josh, you have answered some of the greatest long lasting questions in history. But this is one of the few times where you've simply added another mystery into the pile of the enigma and conspiracy that is our world. So, have you ever had the benz? In 1990, I was skating down a hill and it fell in, hit my head. Yeah, I would call it a mild case of the benz. Okay, so you just don't remember denying you had the benz. Right. Okay. All right, well, there's your answer. Yeah, well, not only do I not remember denying having the benz, when I denied having the bins, I had forgotten that I'd had the benz before. And again, this is a very mild case. But it wasn't just sea sickness. It was directly related to having just spent a half an hour underwater. All right? So I would call that a case of the Ben. I think that clears it up, then. That is from Ben Helms from Mount Shasta, California. I'm sure Ben will be unsatisfied with your explanation of Ben. I just forgot. That's pretty much it. Yeah. Let's see. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and I, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comwichnow. You can see us on our YouTube channel. Just look up Josh and Chuck on YouTube. Tons of fun there. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstep workss.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 Terraforming Will Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-terraforming-will-work | 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. | Thu, 27 Nov 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=331, tm_isdst=0) | 38068218 | 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 picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your City Advantage Platinum Select Card so you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage Miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more@citycom adventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom hanging. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. Chandler's over. Chuck Schuller in the window. Creepy. Everything's 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? Chuckle from Mars. Justin Bing, seller 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 clack? You know, I always got that confused. It was Tom, right? I want to say Click, but it was Tom who died. Yeah. His younger brother Ray is still around. Yeah. Very sad. Yeah. That was a great show, man. Yeah. My house off the NPR for immediately lowering the flag and making a big deal out of it. It was cool. Yeah, 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 yeah, 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. It's a lot of stretch on resources for agriculture, for fuel, energy, all that kind of stuff. And it's caused a lot of people numbers like this. Studies like this has caused a lot of people to say, how are we going to support all of these people? Yes. Do 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. Yeah, 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 will 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 Caine 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 1854 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 Goldilocks Zone. Not too hot, not too cold. 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 an asteroid or something and turn it into something habitable for us. And that's terrifying. 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 40,000 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 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, which is 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 the cycle. Do there what we don't want to do here. Exactly. Jump start 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. They 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 flying 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 was 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, like 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. So it's cost prohibitive. Yes. But compared to the moon, which you can get to, like, lickety split. Yeah. That's like a weekender, six months. That'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. 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@ibmcom this July on Disney Plus. Don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange 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. 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 Michio Kaku has the right idea. There are polar ice caps on Mars which have a lot of CO2, and if you jumpstart 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 degrees Fahrenheit. 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 vaporizing the 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 degrees Fahrenheit. 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, right. 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 Kaku's mirrors and melt the polar. I took care of his mirrors, but yeah, right. It's just nice to say his name sometimes. And you melt the polarized 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? Yeah. 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 degrees to start melting the water, which requires even more energy. Where are you going to get 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. It's not. 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. Yes. 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, there's no reason, what was 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 dimming glimmer, 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 that. 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. Sure. 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 mountain top 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. Yeah. 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 likened it to giant snowballs. And if you send 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 comets that way. Which apparently is not I mean, using astrophysics, I guess it's not out of the realm of possibility. No, it's not. Sphere 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 theory 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 is right, if it would ever, like, 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 yes. 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, 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. 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 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 awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. So 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. Namely, 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. Yes. 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, that's 116 days is the length of their day. Got you. 116 Earth days. 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 comment 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. Yeah. The problem is we haven't found anything on Earth any hypothermphiles 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 hyperthermophile that could sustain that and ate sulfur yeah, they do, though. Yeah, because I think some of them are bi thermal vents underwater. Yeah, we know they serve 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. Yes. 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. To spit 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, you know, 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 the 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. 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 in advanced human understanding over the course of a few generations, you could conceivably hit something like that in 100 years. So, I mean, 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 OK 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. A 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. I think it would just be held in place by, I think, gravity and what, solar bubblegum. And then, of course, Chuck, there is the moon. 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 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 the 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's all that dirt coming from? 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. Yeah, 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 start terraforming in time. Yeah, 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. Yes. If you want to know more about terraforming, you can type that word in the search bar@howstepworks.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. Because, 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 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. 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, this is 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. Evolveworkforce.com. Is that where the mug came from? Yes. Okay. I thought that was a hint. New York, New York. The band send us a promo CD, which is terrific. So we always like getting music from our musician friends. So thanks for that. Yes. Mike Dodeck from theclikypost.com Clickypost sent us cube pen holders of his own making. He also sent us some awesome Pilot metropolitan fountain pens and Rodeo 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. Yes, 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 Mackinal Island, Michigan, where I used to go sometimes as a child. So I was very happy to get this. Yeah. 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 very good. Man, this is Ozzy's. 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 Henyon from sending 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, quality stuff. Yeah, it is. Kevinpaloquin from Kevinpaloquin.com. That's Kevinpeloquin and Raddad TS. I think those are both of his sites. He gave us an amazing illustration of Steve Zissou from The Life 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, they're 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. Yeah. 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 frosting 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. Woohoo. Send us a postcard from Cambodia while in Borneo. I know. Wrap 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 Galafrayan. 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. Lewis 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 drugs. 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. 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 a copy of the DVD. American Amazon. They gave 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 think 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. 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 Kilgarriff and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading? Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | ||
How Barbie Doll Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-barbie-doll-works | In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore the history, cultural impact and feminist ire raised by the Barbie doll. The boys are joined by Gordon Javna, the founder of the Bathroom Readers' Institute and publisher of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. | In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore the history, cultural impact and feminist ire raised by the Barbie doll. The boys are joined by Gordon Javna, the founder of the Bathroom Readers' Institute and publisher of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. | Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:08:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=21, tm_min=8, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=355, tm_isdst=0) | 59221127 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom. Wait, wait, wait. We have to talk about our TV show. That's right. We have a television show that's coming out on our beloved Science Channel. January 19 at 10:00 PM. Follows the premiere of Idiot Abroad season three. And after it is broad at 10:00 PM. Eastern Standard Time will be the world debut of Stuff You should Know. The TV show, not one new episode, but two new episodes, back to back, 10:00 and 1030. That's right, saturday night, January 19. It's going to be pretty neat. What are we doing? What are the people going to see? Are they going to see a game show which we've been asked? Are they going to see a reality show which we've been asked? No, Josh. They are seeing a scripted TV show that features the real us playing ourselves along with actors on a set that we recreated of our office. It's basically an office comedy about our lives as podcasters featuring the podcasting itself and real knowledge and factual stuff. So we think it's a good combination of fun and humor and facts. And we think you'll like it. Yeah, we hope you'll like it. That's. January 19, Saturday, 10:00 PM. The world premiere. And don't forget to check out Idiot Abroad season three. Absolutely premiers before very funny show. And for those of you clamoring that you don't have TV or cable, you, if you have a computer device, can watch this on itunes. Now you're going to be able to purchase these, I believe, the day after each episode is released. Go to itunes, buy it for Buck 99 and watch it on your laptop. Nice. And Science Channel is so cool, they are making the first episode available for free. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. On itunes just to get you hooked. So we appreciate the support. And now on with the episode. Sir? Yes. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant and that stuff you should know. Two of us together. The anatomically correct doll models version. I guess. So I call myself a doll model once in a while and I need a little perk. Yeah, you're looking very keen like these days. Sure. Hey man, not magic. You're in Ken? No, we'll get to that. I like shave Ken. Shave Ken. I know you know this, but I'll tell you again, back when I was a little pup, I had this series of books that were very significant in my life. Yeah, the Uncle John's bathroom reader. Yeah. I would get one for Christmas every year and I would go through it in the first hour I had it, my legs would be numb. How old were you in the bathroom when you first got these? I think I started when I was about twelve. Yes. I love that your parents knew that you were just a sponge for information even at that age. Yeah, I don't remember how I first came about it, but I think somebody got it for me, and they were blown away at how much I liked it. And it really helped shape me in many ways. Sure. In the way I understand things, the way I look at things, like just general knowledge. I've had some right, some wrong, but it's been a big deal. Yeah. What you do in the bathroom? Reading. Yeah. So this episode is kind of special to me because all this material we're doing, how Barbie Doll works, almost all this material is from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. They got in touch with us and gave us everything they have on Barbie, and we compiled it into this podcast. And we actually have a special guest later. The founder of the Bathroom Reader Institute, Gordon Jovna, is going to be joining us on this to talk about Barbie, too. Very excited. And they're also kind enough to give us hats and I think shirts as well. Right? Yeah. Because they listened to us, and we found out they listen. I was like, you are kidding. The circle of life is complete. Like we hear from Mad magazine. Archie comics. Damn interesting. Damn interesting. Have we heard from Crack yet? No. We love them. They're the one people. The one people. The one group out there that I would like to contact us. This is just the one. Just them. And, like, Barry Male. I've been holding out for Obama. I know he listens. Don't even pretend Obama. Just send us an email, will you? You know, I remember when they released what was the conduct of his iPad one year. And we were both like, oh, my God, we had it. And we were like, of course, we're not on it now still. All right. And before we get started, I want to give a shout out to one of our horror fiction contest entrants. Remember we said if you publish something, let us know and we'll tell everybody? Sure. Jay McMurray submitted his story. The Mind Reader. It was very good. Yeah, that was a good one. And he's got it up on Amazon.com. And you can search J. McMurray, McMurry and The Mind Reader, and it will bring it up for you. He's self published, so it's pretty awesome. Awesome. So where to go? Jay? Thanks for letting us know. So, Barbie. Yes. It all started with a lady named Ruth Mariana, who eventually became Ruth Handler. She grew up, I guess, kind of poor, in Denver, Colorado. Yeah. Well, her mom was ill, and I have the feeling that it was just her mom. So she ended up having to go live with her sister at a fairly young age. Yeah, and at a young age as well. Met her husband to be, Elliott, and they moved to California, as Nulioeds did in the 1930s, with prosperous land out there, opportunity. And they had a very long lasting marriage and business partnership. 63 years pretty great. It is great. Elliot turned out to have a knack for creating giftwear, specifically the start picture frames, wooden picture frames. And Ruth turned out to have a knack for marketing and merchandising them. That's right. And they together form mattel, which sounds familiar, I imagine. Yeah. Well, with Harold Matson, that's where the matt came from. Nice. And the l was Elliot. Very nice. That's nice. And they also had a couple of kids named Barbie and Ken. Yeah, there you have it. We should just end it right there. That's how Barbie works. It's pretty cool, though. It's a nice little fact. Well, I think one of the things that I think is interesting about Barbie is that the Barbie doll was directly inspired by Barbie handler. Ruth's daughter. Yeah. Barbie used to play with Barbie, the real girl. She used to play with dolls. She had her little baby dolls and she had little girl dolls or whatever, because that's all that was available. Sure. But she also played with paper dolls, and these paper dolls were kind of fashion dolls, so they were older, mature women, and they had different outfits, and apparently Barbie was just crazy for them. So Ruth went to her colleagues at Mattel and said, we need to come up with a three dimensional doll. That you can change outfits is going to be a huge hit. And all of the mail suits poopooed. It's a boo boo. Sit down. Give me some coffee, lady. Exactly. And she was like, all right, well, fine. I'll see you all in hell. Yeah. Well, they did poo poo it for a legitimate reason, though. They said it was not possible to manufacture it. I don't think it was just poopooing her idea, although there was probably some of that mixed in. Sure. Luckily, Europe called, and the handlers went on a European vacation, and I think and while they were in Lucerne, Switzerland, they were in some toy shop, I guess, that happened to be selling a German doll called a Lily doll. And Lily was based on a I guess you could call it a body comic strip. And this doll that was based on the strip was meant for men, maybe as hosts gift for a stag party or something like that. I get the impression you got them in shops of ill repute at the time. Yeah. Did you look up Lily? Looks like Barbie. Looks like Marlene Dietrich. They kind of ripped it off. Although I shouldn't say that because I might get sued. And we should also say, as you'll find out why in the not too distant future, that every time we say Barbie, there is an implied registered trademark symbol following it. That's right. All rights to Mattel, we claim zero rights or copyrights on Barbie or her products. Right. So Lily was a prototype, and she was a grown up lady that you could change the clothes on, and she was like, you know, what? This is what we've been wanting. This is what I've been waiting for. It's possible to manufacture these, and I want to make Barbies at Mattel because a woman has choices, and the fact that you can change your clothes proves it. Right. It took a little convincing, but she got Mattel the other guys at Mattel on board. Yeah. They resisted because of the large breasts on the doll. Yeah. They basically said, no, Mom's going to buy a doll with breasts for her daughter. Remember, there is nothing like this out there at the time, at least in America and even in Europe, the one doll that was like this, that Barbie was based on, was based on a sexy comic strip. Yeah, exactly. So it wasn't for little girls. So this is a really revolutionary idea for Handler to be like, no, they'll get past it. Like, this is what we need to do. Got Mattel on board and debuted this thing at the Toy fair in New York City in 1959. Yeah. In a zebra striped bathing suit. Yes. Very alluring, I guess. And her eyes were cast to the side, she can never meet your gaze, which, as a sidebar, no, it'll never meet your gaze. The eyes move. No. The only way for eyes in a painting or in a doll to meet you is for them to already be painted looking ahead. If they're painted looking to the side, they'll never meet you. Well, unless you turn the doll to the sun. I'm telling you, you tried it. You tried. You've told the story about the painting. I still disagree. So in the Shinto religion, anything that has eyes, including a doll, can capture your spirit. So in Japan, a lot of dolls are made with sideways looks so you can't look them in the eye. And every year you keep your spirits. At the Meiji Shrine in Japan, they have a doll burning celebration where they burn unused and unwanted dolls so that they can't get anybody. That's an environmental nightmare. Yeah. So Barbie debut in 1959, right? Yes. She goes to Sears because they sold tons of Mattel products at the time. Sears said, no, this thing is too sexy. No one's going to buy them. It's too sexy. So Mattel turned out to be smarty pants, though, because five years later, barbie was a million dollar doll, I guess because of all the Internet orders that they were getting. Well, the little kids, finally, some stores said, yes, okay, we'll take them. And little kids sold them in that first year, Chuck, they sold 350,000 of these things, and they were selling them for $3 apiece, which I looked at 22, 83, and $2,011. So there was a substantial amount of sales for the first year. So Rick Handler was proven right pretty much out of the gate. Yes, that is true. The cool end of Ruth story actually not so cool because she died of cancer, but she eventually got breast cancer. And when she was unable to find a prestigious that she thought was good enough, she said, you know what? I'm going to make my own, and I'm going to form a company, and I'm going to call it Nearly Me. And they manufacture prosthesis for cancer survivors. Yeah. Pretty cool. She sadly lost her battle, but I think she was like in her late 80s or mid eighty s. And even after the handlers were basically forced out of Mattel after some questionable earnings reports in the late seventies, early 80s, she still regarded, like, this titan of the toy industry legend of this woman who, like, helped build Mattel from scratch and made it what it is today. Yeah. And I think Elliot just passed away last year. He lived in his 90s. That's great. So we have a few stats here. New Barbie doll today sells approximately every 3 seconds. Just sold one another. Just sold one. Yeah. It is a $1.5 billion business for Mattel, and the average girl from three to six has twelve of these. That is mind boggling. The number one Barbie from 1959 cost you about 27 grand these days. And what else? The best selling Barbie of all time. Oh, yeah. It was the totally hair Barbie who had hair from head to toe. It strikes me as strange that that's the best selling Barbie of all time. I looked it up for guys like us. You look at this thing and say, wow, what a redneck doll. Has anyone been into the crystal gale look since the 70s? Yeah, but I think little girls enjoyed styling the hair. All that hair and all the hair that you could do all these interesting things with. So, Barbie herself, if you want to know a little bit of a backstory, if anyone ever asks you Barbie's full name. Barbie the doll. Yeah. Not the daughter. We're no longer talking about the daughter. No, we're talking about Barbie the doll in this weird fake history. Isn't it strange? It's a little weird. Yeah. That's why we went in and then we're coming back out for a second. But Barbie's real name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, apparently, which is my aunt's name, not her middle name, but her name is Barbie Roberts. Oh, really? And she hails from not my aunt, but the Barbie doll hails from Willows, Wisconsin, and she has friends specifically, and most notably Ken Shawn Carson, who was introduced in 1961. They're both PISCES, I guess, like me, I think. So they're both early March. Well, I'm mid March. Another cut off is sometime in March, though. But they were both born in March. Okay. We'll call them PISCES. And Barbie has some relatives. Her best friend is Midge, by the way, who's been introduced a couple of times, pregnant, and really caused controversy. Both times. Yeah, one time with an actual baby in the belly that you could take out in the womb. Yeah, that is looked upon and Cracked magazine as one of the horrific toys in history. I think it was necessary and educational. All right. What was surprising to me was that she was pregnant. And the second time it caused waves as recently as, like, 2002. Really? 2002 or 2006? It was fairly recent. It seems the world still has hang ups about pregnancy for some reason. Well, it's probably a single woman pregnancy. Probably not just the fact that she was pregnant. I don't think anyone has any problems with pregnancy. You've also heard of Skipper? Yeah, little sister. She was the little sister debuted in 1975. Then there's Stacy, Todd, and Chelsea, who are named after the Handler's grandchildren. And then about Ken. He's gone through some transitions over the years. Malibu Ken Laid Back Dude. Sure. Magic. Erin Ken, who will talk about a little more in depth, shall we introduce, embraced by the gay community and have you seen pictures? Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's got a how do you not look up earring magic ten. That's the first thing I did see through. Kind of a sheer purple tank. Mesh. Mesh sleepless. There's a matching purple jacket and a medallion. Doesn't he have, like, a wrist, like, corsage or something, too? I didn't see that part. He looked like a gay raver. Yeah, we can say that. I mean, like, dead on a gay raver. I don't want to offend any ravers out there. And apparently the fact that the gay community bought a large portion of these things sure was a big surprise to Mattel. And they're like, Wait, we didn't mean that. So they took it off the shelves. Well, they're pretty stupid registered trademark. Registered trademarks? They were making big sales. There had long been joking whispers about Ken's sexuality in pop culture. So when they made this one, I think people thought, all right, they're finally giving us the real kin. And then for them to yank it back off the shelves, it's like, come on. Yeah. Well, that's kind of a thread you'll see throughout that Mattel is very protective of Barbie's image. Yes. And by proxy, Ken's image as well. That's right. And apparently they don't think Ken's gay. Ken and Barbie broke up once, very famously, in 2004. Yeah, well, after Blaine, the Australian surfer, showed up. They just happened to break up then. But of course, like all noted lovers in history, they got back together on Valentine's Day 2011. And apparently Barbie was even on match.com for a little while, and Ken designed a cupcake for her at Magnolia Bakery and posted billboards asking for Barbie's hand again. And it worked. They got back together. Of course. She's never been married again. Never? No. They got back together in Valentine's Day 2011. That's right. What about her jobs? Barbie is a factoadm. She has done a lot of things. Fashion model, astronaut, 130 careers, total hot dog stand owner. She's been a cop, a paleontologist. McDonald's franchisee was she a franchisee? Because I saw the one where she worked the drive through. It depends, like, if you really start thinking about Barbie, she owned the place. Okay. But that's a big difference of the image you're sending out. Like, is she a business owner or she's slinging fries? Well, she's also owned, like, tons of boutiques. Sure. Again, she owned that hot dog stand. Like, pretty much everything she works at, she's owned. That was the impression I had. Race car driver, aerobics instructor. She owned Aerobics. Right. While she did it, she had a band, Barbie and the Rockers, that formed in that's. Right. I've not heard any songs, but I should go look that up. And then animals. She said more than 50 pets, first of which is a horse named Dancer. She said 21 dogs, twelve horses, three ponies, six cats, a parrot, a chimp, the panda, a lion cub, a giraffe, and a zebra. And that is it for the fake history of Barbie. Yes. Because if there's one thing about Barbie, it's that she collides with society, both in academic circles and pop culture, like you said, and every aspect. Barbie has her little plastic toes dipped in some part of our society at large for tiny little plastic toes. And probably the group that she's run afoul of the most are feminists. Right? Yeah. And this article makes a great point. Like, feminism, barbie and Barbie co evolved right about the same time in the early 1960s is when these things were going on. Yeah. Barbie came out in 1959. Betty Freedom published a Feminist Mystique in 1963. Right. So they're just right there, head to head, intertwined at each other's throats for pretty much the whole time. Yeah, because a feminist will point out, Barbie is her figure is ridiculous. She's wealthy, she's vapid, she's materialistic. Girls shouldn't even be playing with this thing because it sends all the wrong messages, possibly dangerous messages. And there are times when Mattel's kind of made the point for feminists or just any critic of Barbie specifically. Yeah. I feel bad for them sometimes with the stuff because they've made some terrible mistakes a lot. I know, but I don't know. I picture, like, an out of touch boardroom, and they're trying to do the right thing. Sure. And it just blows up in their face over and over. So would team talk. Barbie. Yeah. They recorded this barbie could talk back to you, thanks to a computer microchip, and it would say four phrases, and they had 270 phrases total, and each doll got four at random. I love shopping. Let's have a pizza party. Or than 1% of dolls. Math class is tough, which is a pretty high percentage for just one thing. So, like, the worst thing that teen Talk Barbie could have said ended up in the most alls yeah. And of course, that perpetuated the girls are bad at math thing. And the American Association of University Women said we don't like perpetuating these stereotypes. Mattel said, fine, you know what? We'll pull these. And if you got one of these, I don't like math dolls, you can send it in and get another one. But it was kind of too late. And then the best thing in history happened. Yeah. The barbie liberation organization struck. They bought hundreds of teen talked barbies, and they also apparently bought hundreds of talking duke GI. Joe action figures, and they switched the microchips out in them. So awesome. And then they took them back. So a lot of little girls got barbies that said things like, vengeance is mine, and a lot of little boys got GI. Joe's that said things like, let's plan our dream wedding. Yeah, that's pretty great. And there's actually a really excellent version of the saga that's told in a simpsons episode, lisa versus Malibu Stacy. I remember that. All this background based on roof handler and Mattel barbie and the barbie liberation organization. I'm glad you mentioned that. I've forgotten all about that. That's such a good episode. That's a good one. At least a lion heart. So, mattel and Ruth have always shot back or countered, maybe more politely. Yeah. They're not shrinking violence when the feminists are on them. No. They say, you know what? Barbie was created by women. Barbie has always had jobs, sometimes traditional male jobs. Yeah. They say she breaks the plastic ceiling. Yeah, like she was day to night CEO barbie, barbie for president, astronaut barbie. And they basically said, you know what? She's never been married. She's never had kids. Barbie is a feminist. Right. Although I bet a lot of feminists would argue back, and they have been for years. Well, yeah, but some feminists also actually grudgingly support barbie as a champion of women's rights. There's this one article I read by deb moore henneckey. It's called rethinking barbie. Yeah. And she points out that, quote, ken dolls come in several outfits, but really, he's just there. If barbie happens to want to go on a date, she does not stand around waiting for ken to show up or she needs someone to go shopping with her to help her pick up. She got her friends for that. And the next sentence, she basically said, she goes shopping with her friend. She basically does whatever she wants, so she's no lackey for Ken. Sure. And they'll also point out that, you know what? Before we came along, it was just like baby dolls, and all it said was, here. You can only be a mother to a child right. Or have a little imaginary best friend little girl doll. There were no adult dolls that had adult jobs and things not adult jobs. Yeah. And even from the outset, ruth handler created barbie with the idea that little girls could use this older doll to imagine themselves in their life and maybe hopefully make a better path for themselves. And that's kind of been a point of Barbie all along. And actually there was this one study out of Washington and Lee in 2010 that supported that, that found that when groups of little girls were shown a Barbie doll getting into the outfit of, like, a male dominated occupation, like firefighter, they tended to report that they could grow up to be a firefighter, too. Sure. So, I mean, there is support for that very much, but still, there's a lot of easy shots that one can take. A mattel is basically making Barbie a sexualized doll. Yeah, but I mean, since the very beginning, until yesterday, this has been going on, and it's just one of those lifelong battles. Mattel is never going to back down. Right. And I'm sure the feminist probably won't either. Studies aside, everyone has their opinion on Barbie. Yeah. And I think that's a really good point about Barbie. I feel like she is a giant mirror for society. Everything that's wrong with it, everything that's right with it, depending on how you look at Barbie, and on a much more microcosmic level, depending on how an individual little girl plays with Barbie sure. She can be a tool for aspiration or something that teaches the girl all the wrong things. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, so we should talk about Barbie and race, because Mattel has also made some missteps over the years when it comes to their cringe. Yeah. Cringe worthy episode coming up in 1967, they conceived of a black friend for Barbie, and they called her colored Francis. I know. I'm not sure how well that went over. It's hard to tell now because it sounds so ridiculous, but I don't know how it was received at the time. I couldn't find anything on that. Apparently not that great, because colored fancy is not around any longer. Their follow up wasn't that much better. Now, in 1980, they came out with black Barbie. Yeah, that's what they called it. Yes. Black Barbie. Black Barbie Ken came out two years later. African American. Ken sensational. Malibucan. And 1982 was black. And the problem was until 2009. Until three years ago. One of the problems yeah, one of the problems, aside from the naming conventions yeah. Is that they still use the quote unquote white dolls and just made the skin tone darker. Yeah. Dark hair. Yeah. And they didn't change any other aspect of the doll until three years ago when they finally made African American Barbies kara, Grace and Tracelle, and they had designs, apparently, to replicate features of real African American women. Right. Finally. And have you seen these dolls? I have. Yeah. They're great. One of them looks sort of like Beyonce. That one. That 2010 Washington leaf study that we mentioned, that author also started to wonder, like, how does what Barbie isn't doing affecting little girls as well? Yeah. So the point she made was if a young African American girl goes into a store and there's not a black President Barbie. Right. What does that tell her? Sure. It's just the white president. Barbie. Right? Yeah, it's a good point. Again, prepare for cringing. Because, like you said, apparently Mattel's boardroom exists in a cultural vacuum. In 1996, they got a ringed in from Nabisco who said, hey, we need to move some Oreos, so why don't you guys make an Oreo theme Barbie? And they said, sure, no problem. We should point out they've done a lot of deals with companies over the years. Yeah. So this wasn't anything big or newer? No. Cook. Barbie. Pepsi. Barbie. NASCAR. Barbie. It seems like anytime they have a new I have a Barbie. Do you really? No. Josh Barbie. Oh, I thought you meant you owned one. No. There's a podcaster. Barbie. Yeah. So they contracted with navisco, and they came out with an Oreo theme Barbie, and all was fine. They got a few complaints, saying, like, this promotes junk food. Sure. But nothing big, no biggie, the usual stuff. And then they released a black version of Oreo Barbie. Yes. And that caused some controversy, because, like you said, apparently their boardroom is in a vacuum. And they did not realize that that is a racial epithet leveled by black people against other black people who they feel like are being too, quote, unquote, white. So they're dark on the outside, white in the middle. Oreos. And Mattel wasn't aware of this? No. And they released an African American Barbie that said Oreo all over yeah. On the shirt and, like, in the purse. And they're now a collector's item, of course, because they quickly were yanked from the shelves. And as Cracked.com put it, they, quote, picked the one cookie in the universe that could ever be construed as offensive. Ever. Pick the one cookie. It could have been the nutter butter Barbie. No problem. Yeah, you're right. Or cracks. Right. So, Mattel, also, there's a lot of stuff that they do. Right. Like, in that case, they didn't mean to offend anybody. It was just a horrible mistake. And they released an African American Barbie, and they released a white Barbie. Right. They do the same with multi ethnic Barbies from around the world. They've been releasing them forever. And it's great because there's a place called Spain. A little girl says, like, that kind of thing. It's good for that. But at the same time, it's like the clothes they dress them up in are beyond stereotypical. Yeah. Like Native American Barbie. The Dutch Barbie looks like the Swiss miss girl. Yeah, as a matter of fact, it probably is. Yeah. And then vintage Ken from Mexico in 1964, he's wearing a sombrero. Yeah. It's just agonizing. Sometimes they're trying to just miss the mark once in a while. Yeah. I get the feeling that the boardroom is not only in a vacuum, but it's a lot of old white people making these decisions. I think you may be right. Yeah. Okay, so. I would say probably the most controversial aspect of Barbie always from the outset, before she was even created as her body. Yeah, that's what kept her from being created in the first place. As we mentioned, Mattel CEO said, you can't release a doll with big breasts. I'm glad you finally got that out. I just didn't even know how to say that. Yeah, but that's what they said. And since then, Barbie's figure has been notoriously called out as unsupportable, fake, not realistic, and at worst, like, really bad for these little girls in their body image and what they think they're supposed to look like. Like a tool of body dysmorphic disorder, basically, yes. It's not impossible to look that way. They say it's depending. Okay, so what's very interesting, I think, Chuck, is that this design of her body was actually a design decision made by her designers, who were all women, career women, successful career women, to allow her to wear miniature versions of real, like, fashion clothes. So, like, her crazy hips and small waist, they were designed like that so she could wear these clothes that gathered at the waist, and she had breasts so she could wear these blouses or whatever that were based on real clothes and designed by real designers. Yeah. So it's actually a design decision, but it quickly took on its life that Barbie is this evil tool that spreads this unhealthy body image to little girls. Yeah, I think it was the 1950s, and it was just like, let's make her a full figure and a tiny waist, and girls will love it. Or she looks like us. Yeah. This is just my personal opinion here, if you allow that's all well and good. Since then, maybe since they've taken all these steps to introduce more correct versions, maybe they should release realistic Barbie, dumpy Barbie, aka normal looking person Barbie. I don't think it will ever happen. I don't think it will. Either they have made changes to her figure, so she's nothing like she was when she first came out, or she's not like she was. She has changed some, but for the most part, there's not going to be a dumpy Barbie. Not if you call it that. So that's part of the problem, is looking average. You call dumpy. Oh, come on, man. I am definitely not part of the problem. I wouldn't call a normal looking person dumpy Barbie. Then, compared to Barbie, you would call her dumpy Barbie. I think that's definitely the whole zeitgeist behind this whole thing. Like, if Barbie is perfect, then anything else that's different is dumpy. Well, I disagree. Well, national organization of women would probably disagree, too. They've frequently cited Barbie as, again, this instrument of delivering an unhealthy body image to little girls. Yeah, and like you said, sometimes they don't make it any easier on themselves, because in the 1963 Barbie sit upset, there was a pamphlet called how to lose weight and one of the tips, barbie says, don't eat, and that's it. So two years later, there was another booklet, barbie Slumber Party, that said there was a bathroom scale that was permanently set at \u00a3110. Right. It sounds like that's a little weird. The same booklet was included. Yeah, it's weird. And even if it's not weird, and again, if you take just the conventional idea of what the thought is behind this, they said, okay, well, what is Barbie way? Barbie way is 110, but we can't make a real scale that moves back and forth. So we're going to set it at 110 without any thought that possibly this little girl is going to think that if she doesn't weigh 110, she knows. Pretty as Barbara. Yes. It never will be. And it will always hate herself for not weighing \u00a3110. It's just these decisions made without this wider thought has kind of given Matilda's reputation. That's right. They've done studies on this. They did one in 2011 in Holland, and they said that girls who played with average sized dolls for ten minutes ate significantly more during a taste test following play than girls who played with the Barbie dolls or a thin doll like Barbie. Yeah, to be fair. And another study, which I thought was pretty interesting well, obviously, they found it promotes materialism and sexualizes play, but this other study found that there's more torture play and anger play involved with Barbie, like a little girl will rip off Barbie's arms or head. And they found that they ripped off more Barbie parts than other dolls because this one girl said, quote, she's the only one that looks perfect. Right. So I can see that this is huge, massive body of work on the effect that Barbie's body has on the little girls that play with her. More often than not, they find that it creates a poor self image body image in little girls. But interestingly, it tends to disappear in tweens. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, say they're studying girls three to ten. It'll really appear in, like, 3456, but then, like, seven, 8910, it doesn't appear as much it's not as prevalent. Interesting. Yeah, it is. But you wonder, like, what's the lasting effect of those when it hits those three, four, five and six year olds? Yeah, that's true. Formative years. There have also been a lot of studies and reports of what Barbie would look like where she's a real person. Right. Yeah. They're always a little disturbing. So you said that it's impossible to look like Barbie? Not entirely, but close. South Australia University researchers calculated that a woman's chance of naturally having Barbie's figure was one in 100,000. I'm surprised it's not more than that. I am, too. But for Amanda to have Ken's figure, you have, like, a one in 50 chance. You and I, we don't have good chances. And in Finland, at their university central hospital, they say Barbie were life size. She would lack the 17% to 22% body fat required for a woman to menstruate. So she's so thin, she medically can't even menstruate. Yeah. And the BBC did this comparison of Barbie and one of their employees named Libby. And if Livi were to keep her 28 inch waist but stay in step with Barbie's other proportions, she would have to be 7ft six inches tall, which, again, isn't impossible. The world's tallest woman is Yow Defend, who is 7ft eight inches tall. Yeah, but she didn't look like Barbie. And then if she kept her height, if Libby kept her height but shrank to Barbie's proportion waste, she would have a 20 inch waist, which is three inches smaller in circumference than Victoria Beckham's waste, who is like a beanpole beyond the beanpole. She's got to be like one of the she's like, vampire waist wise. She's thin. And did you see this Ukrainian woman? She said she hasn't had plastic surgery. She's not being truthful. Valyria Lukyanova. Yeah. The quote unquote real life Barbie doll. She's a model, artist and singer, supposedly. And just look up a picture of her and prepare to get creeped out. She's very anime. Have you seen her friend that's like the real life anime girl? Yeah, she photoshopped. She denies it, but I saw untouched before pictures. And she's clearly had plastic surgery. And she doctors her photos, but it's creepy. She looks like a doll. She doesn't look real. She doesn't look alive. She's in the uncanny valley. But she's a real person. Yeah. There's a woman named Cindy Jackson who's a Brit, who actually holds the record for most plastic surgeries in a lifetime. 52 as of April 2011. And she started undergoing those at age 21 after deciding that she wanted to look like Barbie back when she was six. Yeah. So she moved to London and started going under the knife. I didn't see a picture of her, did you? Oh, yeah. What does she look like? She looks Barbish. Yeah. So we mentioned the litigious nature of Mattel guarding Zealously guarding Barbie's image over the years. And you have dug up via the bathroom reader and notable examples. Number one Paul Hansen in the 1090s San Francisco artist began selling Barbie art. Basically, drag queen Barbie. Tanya Harding Barbie, exorcist Barbie, having a lot of fun with it. Tanya Harding Barbie. I guess it comes with a little mini crow bar. There's dumpy Barbie right there. Oh, boy. He sold about $150, earned about two grand, and Mattel sued him for $1.2 billion. This is what these corporations can do. They'll just be like, I'm going to sue you for $90 billion exactly. In damage. What are you going to do? So Hanson is like, all right, everybody just calm down. How about this? I will sell my dolls only in art galleries. No more stores, just the galleries themselves, and I will donate all of the profits to charity. Matilda said no. We're going to court, pal. Yeah. So they went to court, and eventually a judge lost patience and granted a partial judgment and said, against myself for not having a sense of humor. So, a little smack on the face, but I'm sure the attorneys smugly left with their head held high. Yeah, and it's kind of similar to another artist's case. Mark Napier, who is from New York. He's got a website that was originally called the Distorted Barbie Website. And it was pictures of Kate Moss barbie fat and ugly barbie dolly Parton barbie and Mattel sansiz and Desist letter. Apparently they were a fan of this guy or something. Yeah, I imagine they have people trolling the world for this kind of stuff. No, I mean, they sent a cease and desist rather than suing them for a billion dollars in damage instead of just suing them. But Napier said you know what? I'm not going to really do this 100%. I'm going to blur the images a little bit and then change the b in Barbie to a dollar sign. I wonder if it's still up. I haven't looked. I haven't looked, either. And then there's Barbie Bell, aka barbara Bell. Yes. This one is a little she's a little wacky. She claimed that Barbie was speaking to her. Is that right? Yeah. And started selling chances to channel Barbie's spirit and answer personal questions via Barbie for 3-3-A pop, barbie will, directly through me, tell you whatever you want to know. Well. And Barbie sent her first message to Barbara Bell. The message was, I need respect. So Bell also this is probably what pushed her over the edge as far as Mattel is concerned. She started publishing the Barbie Channeling newsletter. So Mattel threatened a multi million dollar lawsuit. Bell is like, okay, fine, that's fine. I'll shut down. But first I'm going to make a statement. Look, she says, for $3, nobody's getting hurt. I don't claim to be the only voice of Barbie, and I'm sure not taking any other Chandler's business. I've carved out my own niche in the market. There are 700 million Barbie dolls in the world with no voice. My favorite part is I'm sure not taking any other channels. Nobody else would be this crazy is what she's saying. This one turned out a little odd, if you ask me. In 1997, there was a band called Aqua from Denmark. They recorded a song called Barbie Girl. You know the song right now? Oh, here it is now. Do you recognize it? No. Yes, you do. I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world plastic is fantastic yeah. I don't know. I don't believe you. I don't think you realize that I don't listen to radio. I don't believe that you've not heard this song. I haven't. All right, so Mattel filed suit, of course, against MCA. So this is actually slugging it out with a big corporation for a change, right? Yeah. And it ended up as a bigger battle because of that, I'm sure, because they can all afford big, high powered attorneys. So they sued Mattel. I'm sorry. MCA countered, and you know what? We're suing you. And we can even bring in expert witnesses that basically will testify that you base this on a little German sex dolly sextol but sexy doll back in the day, in the 1950s. And Mattel was probably like, oh, yeah, we did kind of do that. They had a really good point. They said what Aqua was doing in the song Barbie Girl is not to make Barbie into a sex object, as Mattel alleged, but to point out that she's been one all along. And then Mattel went over. Exactly. And so, in an ironic twist of fate, they ruled the song was protected as parody and tossed out the defamation suit back at Mattel. And then in 2009, Barbie actually recorded a cover version of the song, and it's released on YouTube to promote a line of Barbie fashionistas. That's crazy. So they sued them for the song, and then they use the song. They covered it, I'm sure, for free, because it was a cover version, I wonder song by whoever does the Barbie songs. This one is my favorite. Paul David I just felt bad for this guy. He was a Barbie collector, a big time Barbie collector. Like, he was on their team. Yes. So much so that he published the Barbie catalog. And in the mid 19 nine, s wrote in one of his catalogs that if there were an ugly contest, elizabeth and Queen Barbie would definitely win. Did you see that one? Yeah, it's Elizabeth. I was notoriously dumpy. Yeah, it looked like Queen Elizabeth, I sure. But this guy, who they had trusted to help protect Barbie's image, had written something snide, so they brought down the hammer of God on them. Also, they point out that there were some he didn't put the registered trademark symbol next to some of the photos, which is like, if you want to get Mattel after, you just forget to put the registered trademark next to a photo Barbie. Yeah, we should put that on our podcast title. We don't want the Barbie hammer coming down on him. We don't. So Barbie susan mattel accuses him of copyright infringement, and eventually, Paul David signed a settlement agreement. And as the Wall Street Journal reported, it stipulated that Barbie may only be portrayed in his catalog as wholesome, friendly, accessible, and kind, caring and protective, cheerful, fun loving, talented and independent. And what did he do? He was disgusted and sold all his parties and I guess quit writing his catalog. That was the end of that one, which is that's why that was so sad to me, because he was such a huge supporter of the company, like, to be such a fan, to go out of your way to publish a catalog, and then they essentially just squash the guy. Yes. I remember reading this many years ago and thinking like, yeah, that was pretty awful. But who knows? Maybe it's a turning point for the guy. Maybe he's like, I'm free. Yeah, he walked outside and talked to real humans. Yeah. What about Barbie being banned? Chuck yeah, this year, actually, in 2012, she was abandoned Iran for destructive cultural and social consequences. They came up with their own little doll, and girls called it ugly and fat. I couldn't find a picture of this one. I couldn't find anywhere. It doesn't look anything like Barbie. It's just a doll. Yeah. Oh, then maybe I did see it. Yeah. The one toy seller called Barbie worse than an American missile. But I also hear that all over Tehran, like, you can still get Barbies, no problem under the counter, but for like, is this what your hook up in Tehran tells you? This is what I hear. Got you. Saudi Arabia banned Barbie in 2003, saying she was offensive to Islam. And even in the States she can't get no respect. West Virginia outlawed Barbie in 2009 or tried to with a bill citing emotional intellectual impact she has on girls. But I doubt if that went anywhere. It did not. It's time now. Yeah. We're about to talk to Gordon Jovna, the founder of the Bathroom Readers Institute, the guy who introduced me to all this stuff, and we're going to talk to him. What about the missteps of Barbie? Some even more missteps. Yeah. Mattel has got a great and wonderful history of it. So let's bring them up. So, Chuck, we're sitting here talking to the guy. Gordon Jovna, the founder of the Bathroom readers Institute and publisher of the Uncle John's bathroom reader series. His name is on Uncle John. No, it's Gordon. Okay. We tried to call him Mr. Jovan. He went crazy. Yeah, he did. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. How are you guys? We're great. We're fantastic. Thank you very much for joining us. We're talking about Barbie. And of course, we've let everybody know all the material from the episode today. This is a special one because normally we do this from how stuff works articles, but we're doing this from just stuff that's come out of the Bathroom Readers. We're talking Barbie here. I feel like we've kind of done a pretty good job setting all this up. We've gone into Barbie, and Mattel's, I guess, troubled history a lot. We've kind of made it clear that Mattel is pretty good at making missteps. And you've brought along some other examples of ways mattel has just missed the mark a little bit, I guess you could say, with some of their Barbie releases, right? Yeah. We have some examples of Barbies that created controversy. I don't know that you call them all missteps. At least one of them is not a missed step, but certainly controversial. Sure. So the first one I would mention is share a smile Becky, which introduced in yeah, we laughed. Didn't feel bad for laughing. No, it's kind of funny. They were actually originally going to call it Wheelchair Barbie oh, excuse me, Wheelchair Becky. But they had an eye toward diversity, and this was a friend of Barbies who was confined to a wheelchair for an unspecified disability. And incidentally, the doll came with a wheelchair, little pink wheelchair. And that was fine until Mattel got a complaint from a 17 year old girl from Washington named Kirstie Johnson. She complained that Barbie's Dream House was not wheelchair accessible, but she had a personal interest because she had cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair herself. So then she also mentioned that the Dream House, although the Dream House had an elevator, it was too to accommodate the wheelchair. So this thing falls into another example we pointed out earlier in the podcast. I believe that Mattel probably trying to do the right thing here, but in the end sort of takes a ham fisted approach and doesn't cover all the angles. Sure. Yeah. And their response was to promise a redesign of the Dream House, but instead, they just dropped Becky from the Barbie line. Very sad. Sad end of it. That is all Mattel right there. What else do you have for us? I know, totally styling Barbie kind of raised some eyebrows. I believe it did. And this is the one that I don't know if you call it a misstep, but it certainly caused a scandal. They released this one in 2009. I had a set of stickers that came with it that were like temporary tattoos. They have two sets, actually. One for the doll, and an example of that would be The Heart with Ken, the name Ken. And they also came with a set of temporary tattoos for the girls who played with the dolls to put on themselves, and they were also on the package. They encouraged girls to put them on their lower back, which is what those of us most people know as a tramp stand. Right. So parents were up in arms because it did two things. It encouraged girls to give each other homemade tattoos, they said. And they also said there was a message that it was okay for girls to do trampy things. And this is one of those things. I don't know if I would call this a misstep because Mattel didn't agree and they left it in the line and it's still available. Yeah, I guess it would be kind of the definition of a misstep. If Mattel doesn't back down, then it's not a missed out. Well, which basically means does the doll sell? Right? Exactly. It's a misstep if it doesn't sell and gets bad breasts. And can't you see little girls sitting around like, oh, we're out of our Barbie temporary tattoos. Go get a sewing needle in some India ink. Let's get down to brass tags here. And we talked Gordon about Skipper already. We talked a little bit about Barbie's family circle, and we mentioned Skipper, but we didn't mention the controversy that came with her, like, right out of the gate right. When she was released kind of early on in the Barbie saga. 1975. Right. Yeah. Skipper was Barbie's little sister, and she was introduced actually in the 60s, but the original plan was for them to make her a little older with each subsequent release. In 1975, they introduced growing Up Skipper, which was controversial almost from the very beginning, because what it was was when girls cranked her arm, she grew a quarter of an inch taller, and she sprouted breasts, and she got an hourglass figure and a tramp stamp, and you have to put that one on yourself. Yeah. I would be curious to see just the mechanism behind this. I guess I'm saying I'd like to play with one, but I would like to see how that worked. I want to see the doll grow. I'm interested. That's very complicated. If you want to play with it, you'd have to buy one, like, on ebay, and it would cost you around $100. It's not worth it. That's not so bad. There are YouTube videos of the doll in action. Perfect. You go, Chuck. We'll have to link to one of those after this thing publishes. But again, this isn't a misstep, because as I understand it, Mattel was like, well, we'll see you all in hell, because we're not taking this one off the shelves, because, again, it's selling very well. That's correct. But they did phase it out. In 79, they introduced Super Teen Skipper, which was the breasts didn't grow, but they were a little larger than the previous Skipper. And then a couple of years after that, they made her a little bit took away a little baby fat, and she became Hot Stuff Skipper. No. Is that really what they called her? Yeah. Hot Stuff Skipper. Wow. So, Gordon, you and your brother started out before the Bathroom Reader. You guys wrote a book about the you guys mentioned Barbie in that book, right? Yes, indeed. So what did you guys say? It was a pop culture book. Very early pop culture book about the we said in the introduction that Barbie was as important a cultural icon as anything that happened in the 1960s. And we were lambasted whatever in the press or in reviews for somehow putting Barbie over the war in Vietnam or civil rights or anything, and we weren't. But we just felt that this was going to be a lasting cultural image, and we were a little ahead on that. Yeah. Laughing now. Exactly. Well, let's talk about your books. You guys are releasing the 25th anniversary of Uncle John's Bathroom reader. Congratulations. That's enormous. Tell us a little bit about this. Well, we never thought we would be doing this for 25 years, and I should say that the actual inspiration for doing the bathroom here was my brother's idea to give credit where credit is due. But that first book was 228 pages long. And our latest one, uncle John's Fully Loaded Bathroom Reader. We made it 608 pages. Wow. So it's quite a giant book, but it covers a zillion topics, and it's just like any other bathroom reader, only a little more. So. Where can everybody find the 25th anniversary? Well, all of your books, where's the best place to find them? Well, hopefully your local bookstore will have Uncle John's fully loaded bathroom reader. Certainly the chain bookstores like Barnes and Obama will have it. You can get it at Costco Sam's Club, get it online from Amazon, or you can get it online from us@bathroomleader.com. That's great. Cool. We love to have people visit us, and sometimes they make suggestions of what we should be including, and that's fantastic. Hey, thank you very much for joining us. You guys are doing the 25th anniversary edition of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. It's available pretty much anywhere you can find a book, right? Absolutely. I will be looking forward to reading it this Christmas. So thank you very much, gordon, Jovner, we appreciate you. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Chuck. Thanks. So long. Bye bye. Well, Josh, that was awesome. Yes. Thanks for hooking it up, man. Sorry. I was a fanboy, kind of. No, it was great. Whenever you can get the real people on the line, and sometimes that happens, you just got to do it. I'm just glad he answered. I mean, like, we were really running a gamble by calling him in the middle of recording it's. True. All right, so should we finish up with a few of the more odd Barbie dolls throughout history? These aren't missteps, they're just unusual. Yeah. And I'm sure there was not a marketing campaign behind any of them. There's a tied to another country or a company. There is Alfred Hitchcock the Birds. Barbie and this Barbie looked like Tippy Hedrin from the movie, and it has three blackbirds attached to her, so they're, like, perpetually attacking her. Yeah, she's being attacked by blackbird. This, Barbie. My favorite is pooper scooper Barbie. And I guess this is to teach girls or I guess boys if they play with dolls. We've been seeing girls the whole time. Comes a little golden retriever named Tanner who eats in poops and really poops. And Barbie has a little shovel and pale to be a responsible dog owner and curb her dog. Yeah, that's what you can aspire to do. That's right there's. The McDonald's one, which we talked about. She's wearing a headset, which I think threw you off. But can a franchisee work at his or her own store? Yes. No. Taken. To me, the most bizarre one of all time is what you're going to say is, I love Lucy Santa Barbie. That's not what I thought you were going to say. Oh, yeah. I thought you were going to say George Washington barbie. It's pretty bizarre. All right, so what's the I Love Lucy one? The I Love Lucy Santa Barbie is based on a specific episode of I love Lucy from 1956. And Barbie is dressed as Ethel Mertz, who is dressed as Santa Claus. That's the weirdest Barbie ever. She's not dressed as Santa. She's dressed as Ethel from I Love Lucy dressed as Santa. Like my mind is mush. Yeah. I think some Mattel employee higher up was hammered on eggnog on Christmas Eve watching this George Washington episode and said, oh, I got a great idea, and I guess George Washington Barbie followed are actually that proceeded in 1997. Yeah. And that's pretty much straight up. She is dressed like George Washington in his Revolutionary War uniform. That's right. Except that's pink in it. There's an MBA Barbie, which doesn't seem all that weird. You can get all the different teams right. But there's never been a WMBA. Barbie that's the weird part. X Files Barbie. That's a little strange. Yeah. There was a can dressed as two companies, fox, Mulder and of course, Barbie dressed in a pantsuit as Scully. Yeah. Goldie Han Barbie. I love that. Goldie hawn and laugh in. Yeah, that's who it's based on. Yes. With the bikini and the tattoos. It's just sort of an iconic television figure. Yeah. I mean, what are you going to do? Wildcats. Golehon, that was terrible. Yes. Or Ruth Buzz Barbie. Wildcats. Goldie Overboard. Goldie Haunt. Right. There is Harley Davidson. Barbie is a biker chick with head to toe leather. That's right. Weird. And then there's a bunch of other just slightly noteworthy ones. French made Barbie lady of the Unicorns Barbie civil War nurse Barbie? John Deere Barbie urban Hipster Barbie. Yeah, I looked up urban hipster Barbie and I thought it was going to be like some Brooklyn chick with horn room glasses, and it looked more like Foxy Brown, like black exploitation Barbie. Really? That's what they called urban hipster. Like big afro, sort of like African American goddess. Wow. Yeah. If it was urban hipster today, it would be she would have a mustache and glasses. Live in Williamsburg. There's Star Trek, Barbie and Ken and Barbie's dresses. Lieutenantura NASCAR and John Deere. Barbies bowling champ. Barbie. This one is one of my favorites. Barbie and Ken is the monsters. Yeah. They have so much fun, though, too. And then, of course, the Pepsi Barbie also had the Coca Cola Barbie to do battle in the cola wars, because if there's one thing Mattel doesn't want to do, it's to offend any segment of the American population. Nope. That's it. Man you got an email? No, I think in lieu of listener mail, we had the interview and we just want to say thanks again to Uncle John's bathroom reader. Yes. Thank you very much for everything all these years. I appreciate you guys. And we appreciate you guys, too, for listening. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with. US, you can tweet to us at siskpodcast, join us on facebook. Comstepiesnow or you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com." | ||
96e0d2c6-440c-11e8-82c5-03051634c858 | How Occam's Razor Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-occams-razor-works | You know the rule that says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one? That’s called a razor and it’s meant to guide logic. But over time it’s become a broadsword used to disprove opposing arguments. Learn how to spot a faux skeptic in this ep. | You know the rule that says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one? That’s called a razor and it’s meant to guide logic. But over time it’s become a broadsword used to disprove opposing arguments. Learn how to spot a faux skeptic in this ep. | Thu, 24 May 2018 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=144, tm_isdst=0) | 39722497 | 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. Hey, everybody, tour announcement. It's just me, Chuck. Josh isn't here for this one, and we had to get it out the door. So apologies for Stuff You Should Know, but we have added two dates to the 2018 tour, and there may be another couple to come. You never know. But everybody, we asked Salt Lake City in Utah should we come there? And, boy, we heard from you, so we're coming. It's that easy. Tuesday, October 23, we are coming to Salt Lake City for an evening with stuff you should know at the Grand Theater. And we are super excited. I'll tell you what, you guys really came through on the emails and social medias and let us know that we would see some love if we came to Salt Lake City, a city we've talked about often in the past. So we are coming tuesday, October 23, and we decided, hey, we're going to be out there. We might as well add another city that we've never been to. So it is your lucky day. Phoenix, Arizona and dare I say Tucson and the greater Phoenix area. Drive over to Phoenix and come see us on Wednesday, October 24 at the Van Buren. And this is also an evening with stuff you should know. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds a little more regal than normal. So come see us. October 23 and 24th. Salt Lake City in Phoenix. You know what? I don't even know if tickets are on sale. I believe by the time this announcement goes up, tickets will be on sale. And you can go to the Van Buren website or to the Grand Theater website to get your ticket links. I will try and have them up very soon on Sysklive.com, but I don't know if I'll get to that today. But look forward soon and we can't wait to see you guys. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's guest producer Tristan over there. So it's stuff you should know. I don't know how these are going to release, but as you notice, tristan weirdly grew out his mustache in the last hour. Again, he's quick. He is very fast. He can make it go in and out, in and out. What is that like? He's growing his mustache and it's, sucking it back in and out. Sucking it back in. Like reverse playdoh. Right. Do you remember that playdoh set with the, like, a little meat grinder? No. There was one where you could grow a mustache on a dude correctly. I think I remember that. Yeah, but imagine if you could reverse it, too. It was called the Plato Nightmare set. Is that your nightmare, growing a plato mustache, waking up like that? Yeah, I've had that dream about once a week for about 35 years. Like, all the rest of you is Chuck, but just your mustache is Wallace and Grommet. Yeah, dude. Yesterday there was a bad smell. Emily and I were having a glass of wine at a wine bar. There was a bad smell nearby. I think it was a dumpster or something. And they were growing fresh herbs at this wine bar, and I rubbed a rosemary bush and then swiped it all over my mustache. And Emily's mind was blown. She was just like, oh, my God, I can't believe that's an actual use for facial hair. Yeah, I guess it's to hold in that smell. I was like, well, you can wipe it on your upper lip. It's probably the same thing. Sure. Maybe the hair retains more essential oils. I don't know. Maybe with essential oils. Man, people are clamoring for that episode. Yeah, we should do that. We will eventually. It's been a big part of my life for ten or twelve years now. Essential oils. We'll talk about it someday. But not today. No, because Chuck is going to stumble through a philosophy podcast. I guess it is philosophy. It's the philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology is another way to put it. But specifically, Chuck, we are talking today about a little ditty you may have heard of before called Occam's Razor, called The Gambler. You've heard of Occam's razor before, right? Well, so much so that I thought for sure we had covered this, but I realized that we just talked about it quite a bit in the Scientific Method episode. I'm not at all surprised, because a lot of people say that the basis of science, which is how humans approach nature in our universe and us and everything scientifically, the basis of that is accomplished. Aaron and if Occam's Razor sounds familiar, but you can't quite place it, you probably heard it as something like, given two possible outcomes or explanations or whatever, the simplest version is probably the right one. Yeah. Even that, in its simplicity, is beautiful. The mere statement itself is an example of its simplicity and how wonderful it can be just to think like, yeah, you know what? Let's get through all the gobbledygook. I think the easiest way to explain this, whether it's what do you call the orb in a photo? An orb? Yeah. It's not your great grandfather coming to visit you on a different plane. It's really just an error with your photograph. It's the flash reflecting off like water vapor in the air. Or Kennedy probably acted alone. Kennedy, he shot himself from afar. Yeah, I clearly meant to say Oswald acted alone because that is the simplest explanation, not this very convoluted deep plot that 100 people were involved in to assassinate Kennedy. So we'll talk about all that because what you're doing right now has become pretty standard. You're using Occam's razor to disprove other people's points. Yeah. This is a total and complete misuse of Occam's razor. It's not the original intention. The original intention had nothing to do with saying that's wrong. It is just a heuristic device, a guide, a rule of thumb that tells you that because things tend to be more simple in the universe, if you're doing something, don't make it harder than it has to be. Don't add more to it than is needed to get the job done right. And there's actually a couple of ways to put this, and both of them get attributed to William of Akham, who we'll talk about in a second. Yeah, Billy Acham. He sounds like a baseball manager. But one is called the principle of plurality. Harder to say fast than you would think it is. And that is translated from the Latin plurality should not be posited without necessity. The other is the principle of parsimony, which is it is pointless to do with more what is done with less. From what I understand, they are one and the same. Oh, really? I could not find anyone who could explain the difference. And I see them interchangeably, not just like, on some dude's blog, but on the Internet encyclopedia philosophy or the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy. They don't seem to be different. Well, parsimony it seems different to me because that specifically is like not using resources, not spending money if you don't have to. And that seems different than plurality. Okay, well, then let's explore. So plurality adding to something, doubling something, maybe just making it more than just the singular. He's saying plurality should not be positive without necessity. Right. So I guess what he's saying then, if they are different, then if you're guessing at something, if you're trying to explain something, don't make it harder than it is. Don't make it bigger than it is. Absolutely necessary to explain it. Yeah, that makes sense. And this is a really big point that we'll see in a minute. William of Ockham really was saying, don't add on to something beyond what you know to be true and correct, which a lot of people over time and I think he actually maybe explicitly was an empiricist have said William of Ockham was an empiricist. He was saying that you need to experience things through your senses to know that they are true. Yes. Empirical evidence. If I can look at it or smell it or taste it or feel it, what's the fifth one? Tickle it. Tickle it. And then the 6th one, of course, we know means Bruce Willis is really dead. See the ghost of it? Yeah. If there is no empirical evidence, if you cannot experience it with one of your senses, then it's poopooed. So it is in those two things, especially modern science, especially science these days, you put them together, it's given two things, go with the simpler explanation, and you don't believe anything that you can't sense one way or another through your senses empirically. Right. You put those together, you have the basis for modern science. And so the idea that things that are simpler are better, or the idea that the universe is simpler, when you start to think about it, it's all over the place. Right. The idea that the universe is based on simpler being better is found everywhere. Right? So things have fewer parts, things that require less energy, the encapsulation of larger ideas into smaller amounts of words or theories or whatever, all these things are very much prized by humanity. So it just kind of makes sense that Occam's Razor is a sensible thing and that you could actually use it to uncover the mysteries of the universe. But again, that's not really necessarily the case, to tell you the truth. No, I mean, there's going to be a lot of and this stuff is kind of fun, just a lot of back and forth on Occam's raiser throughout this whole thing because there is no answer. That's kind of part of the whole jam of Occam's Razor is there is no right or wrong here. Right? What's weird is that right. A lot of people point to it, though, that this is right. I just proved you wrong. I am a razor, and that's just not true. Man. All right, should we take a break early? Okay, yeah, I think we should take a break now because I need to get my head wrapped around this and we'll come back, get in the way back machine and visit Billy Auckham, okay. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast that's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate 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. So now Billy, Akam sounds like a recording star. Oh, sure. Like Billy Ocean. Yeah. Get off of my razor and get into my car. Was this a kid? So we should say the razor, too. It's a philosophical term. It's a term of philosophy. The razor used to scrape away unnecessary stuff. So it's Occam's razor. So let's go back and meet Billy Occam, shall we? Yeah. And you wrote this, by the way, back in your article writing days. And you point out, very astutely, that this is from a time in our history of the world where you might not have had a surname, you may have been William of Ockham, which is the case here, which is in England. And he lived between about 1285 and 1349, and he was a philosophical dude and a Franciscan monk. And he very much like you point out, took his vow of poverty very seriously and lived a very meagre, humble life. Yeah, he did. He also expected the church to take the same vow policy, and he actually butted heads with the church quite a bit, so much so that he ended up getting excommunicated, as we'll see. But he was the real deal as far as, like, a true believer went. The weird thing about William of Occam was that he was also a genuinely independent seeker and a rationalist, which at the time, rationalism. And the church did not go hand in hand. There was really not much rationalism. So the idea for this upstart Franciscan monk to start questioning the ideas of the Church, and not only that, but how the leaders of the church conducted themselves and how much money they surrounded themselves with and how much power they had politically, it was a big deal. Right? Yeah. And he did not, invent this line of thought, as much as he's probably attributed to this, to people that just know him from a Jeopardy board, this is already a line of thought well established by this time in the medieval times. And he kind of boiled it down to those two sentences that you were talking about so anyone could understand it and he could put it on a bumper sticker and a T shirt and sell it. Right. So it was Aristotle who was the guy who came up with this idea first, that simplicity equals perfection and perfection equals simplicity. He said the more perfect the nature is, the fewer means it requires for its operation. Right. I love that. So that makes sense. That speaks to me. But then over time, in between Aristotle and William, it kind of got expanded. So let me give you an example of that same thought from Robert Gross Test, who was an early scientist, also a theologian, I believe, too. Here is his version of it that is better and more valuable, which requires fewer other circumstances being equal. For if one thing were demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better, which is from fewer, because it makes us know quickly, just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from fewer premises. Is that the end? Similarly, in natural science, in moral science, and in metaphysics, the best is that which needs no premises, and that better that which needs the fewer other circumstances being equal. Boy, the ironies there are rich. Right. So within less than 100 years, william of Occam comes along, and he's just like, plurality should not be positive without necessity. Robert yeah. And Robert was like, well, yeah, I guess that's one way you could say it. So I want to say something, though, before we keep going, Chuck. I actually found a correction of my own article that I missed before. What's that? It turns out that they think now that another theologianscientist from William of Occam's era named John Dunn Scottus was the one who really encapsulated this principle of plurality and principle of parsimony, and that it was a guy from the 19th century, william Rowan Hamilton, a British mathematician, that he was the one who misattributed it to William of Occam. So is William of Occam just know nothing? No, his writings definitely included this stuff, and he never took credit for this. Okay. But they think that it was actually John's Dunn Scott who encapsulated it the way that we tend to think of it now. So he told you the bumper stickers. Right. But William of Occam thought this way, and he was a radical thinker and a rationalist, as we'll see. Right. And, like you kind of teased out earlier, he did butt heads with the Church over this. He wrote a lot about it, and the Church was not into it. And Pope John. The what is that? 22nd, they kind of squared off on this. And of course, the Pope wins all battles, at least back then, and he was excommunicated and several of his monk brothers and I take that to mean not real brothers. Right? Right. We're excommunicated. In 1328, he went to Munich seeking refuge. He was protected there by Emperor Louis the Fourth. And ultimately, he went out because he started writing papers about Pope John the 22nd saying he's a heretic. And people ultimately believed him. Right. He definitely made some pretty convincing points. And he also again, if you're saying I took a vow of poverty, the Church really should, too. And the Church isn't poverty stricken, and you are. That gives you a little more credibility from the outside as well. Sure. So there's some reasons why William of Occam is this theologian. A devout Franciscan monk is looked upon as one of the fathers of Western science, like the foundation of Western science, right. Or science in general. And the reason why is he argued against the prevailing ideas at the time, which is called medieval synthesis. And this is very much championed by Thomas Aquinas, who's a famous theologian. I believe he was a saint. And one of the reasons he was canonized was because of this, thinking about this. But the whole medieval synthesis thing was that God was first and foremost everything, right? You were a member of the Church just as much as you were a member of your country, a citizen of your country. Right. All human knowledge came from God. And Thomas Aquinas, it wasn't just like the end. Thomas Aquinas used philosophy to prove that sentiment, that all human knowledge came from God, and here is how. And basically, it took the idea of cause and effect and said that you can trace every effect back to a cause, back to another effect, back to another cause, but ultimately you're going to end up on God. And that all of our conceptions of everything arose from God's conception. And that God will, that we understand things this way, which means that this is the perfect way to understand it, which means it's right. So that is not what William Walkham thought. He was, again, a rationalist who said, no, we tend to think things are things because that arises in the human mind from cognition, not from God. And this dude was not a heretic. He believed that you didn't apply rationalism to God, that God required faith, and rationalism stood on its own. It was a different thing. And you couldn't know God through your senses. God was elsewhere. Leave God out of this. And the fact that he was able to really successfully lay, like, a philosophical groundwork for this, a rational groundwork for it. It's one thing today to be like, I'm a secular humanist. I'm rational forget the church. That's today. This is at a time when this guy is saying this as a church has the power to burn you at the stake. He was a stand up, rational thinker, which kind of makes him a hero of rationality today. And this is another perfect example of how AKAM's Razor gets confused. Occam himself gets confused, too. He's a hero of science, but he was also one of the more devout human beings walking the earth at the time, and was a monk for basically his whole life, and also had a metal band called medieval synthesis. Oh, that is a good name, isn't it? He was just a conundrum. Yeah, he was a conundrum, for sure. And again, he got excommunicated. He had to escape by horse. Stolen horse. No, I mean, he was not very monk like. No. All right, so we were talking earlier about empirical evidence and how that kind of fits in here, and the fact that if you can't, you know, the sky is blue because you look up and you see it's blue. You know, a bird makes a whistle because you can hear the bird make a whistle. So it's very easy to sort of use that and say, sure, but if you can't see it or hear it empirically or any of the senses experience it, it's very easy to poo poo. And you give a great example here with Lawrence and Einstein and kind of which one would win out. So both of these guys, both physicists, einstein obviously more popular, we'll see for a very important reason. They both had the conclusion mathematically, that with the space time continuum, the closer we get to moving at the speed of light, the more we slow down, which is hard to wrap your head around. So Lorenz comes out and says, explains it away because of changes that take place in the ether, which he might as well have said, a bit of magic happens. Einstein didn't. And so the one we talked about today is Einstein and not Lawrence. That explanation of Einstein was more rooted in science, and he didn't say something wacky like the ether, which is something empirically you can't see or smell or taste. Right. So Einstein, he won that great battle. Yeah. He very famously said, he goes, I don't know what's what, but I know it ain't got nothing to do with no ether. And one day my brain is going to end up in a jar and some guy's garage in New Jersey, right? And everybody will love that picture of me with my tongue sticking out and Walter Matthew will play me in romantic comedy. So Lawrence violated that principle of plurality. Right. He added something to this that required an additional basically like a leap of faith. There was no empirical evidence that there was such a thing as the ether. And he said, did I say ether? I didn't mean ether. And everyone went, no. Late, Loretta, we heard you, buddy. And he's still I mean, he's a respected physicist. It's not like he was some crackpot or anything like that, because if you put his equations and Einstein's equations side by side, they came to the same conclusions. It was just explaining how Lorentz seems to have missedepped. Right. But he was obviously at least as brilliant as Einstein when it comes to that. He's just a little nuts, apparently. Right. So he violates the principle of plurality, and now we understand relativity rather than Lorenza's manic raving. Yeah. And I don't believe we mention there's a word for that. If you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's called positivism. Yes. Positivism isn't about having a good attitude. Right. And this also happened during Einstein's working days, too. There was a guy named Ernest Mock, and Ernest Mock was so ernst ernest Mock. Thank you. Yeah. That's way better than earnest or just funny. Yeah. Ernst Mock, he was so nuts on empiricism. It was early. I think he was a physicist, if not a mathematician, one of the two. And he basically said, like, molecules don't exist. All this whole bubble over molecules and atoms and all this stuff. You're all crazy. We can't see them. They don't exist. So there's this kind of ironic twist that came from Einstein's working career where he actually beat Lorenz, his rival to this theory, through Occam's Razor. But he also disproved this idea of that Ernst Mock this thing about only believing what you can sense with your senses. This kind of other part of Occam's Razor in a subsequent paper that came a few years later that showed that molecules do exist. So the idea that Occam's Razor can be used both ways is something that just keeps coming up again and again and again. And we'll talk about how after a break. How about that? Let's do it. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Okay, Chuck, so who uses Occam's razor? Obviously, everyone who was throwing money down on the cockpit between Lawrence and Einstein were using Occam's rays. They all went with Einstein because this is the simplest, right? Yeah. Who else uses it? Well, I mean, you have a great section in this article about skeptics, and I know over the years of the show, over the past ten years, we've had a lot of minor scraps with the skeptic community. Yeah, that's pretty minor. Is that fair to say? Yes, because we have our skeptical side, for sure. But when it comes to skepticism and skeptics, it's sort of on a sliding scale. There's a range of how you might feel about certain things, and you very astutely, I think, point out that if you are a true skeptic, then you will not use Occam's Razor, like I did earlier, as a tool to disprove something, that you will only use it as a tool to consider different explanations. And there's a big difference there. There is. So the whole idea of seeing a ghost on film, right? So there's this example where somebody could say, so you just explained something about light and refracting and something with the film and there was moisture in the air. Isn't it just simpler to say, no, that was a ghost? Exactly. And in that case, if you're a skeptic, you pull a little tuft of your hair out, maybe just start scraping at your cheeks until you bleed. Ideally, what you would say is, I get what you're saying, but you're bringing something into this that we don't know exists. Like, we do know light exists. We do know it backs off of vapor. We do know how this can be captured on film. So, yes, that sounds very complicated, but the ghosts don't exist as far as we know. We can't sense them empirically. But I would keep my mind open to the idea that ghosts could conceivably exist. The fact that I just showed that this is the reflection of light off of water vapor in this graveyard does not mean that your hypothesis about ghosts existing is wrong. It just means that's what's in this picture right, that's a true skeptic. Right? Because things happen, and later on, the more fantastical explanation could be true and has been true. And you point out very plainly here that there's a couple of problems with this. And to me, this kind of says it all, is that it's subjective. Like the whole notion of determining is this is the most simple explanation is completely subjective, because the ghost explanation, one person might say, no, the ghost explanation is clearly the simplest because I can just say one word ghost. See there? And then you could fire right back. Well, no, I can fire back two words, photographic mishap. Right. Or maybe just mishap if they want to keep it completely equal. And that's the most simple. So it's completely subjective as to which one or anything that is the most simple, right, exactly. And then again, the idea that you can use Occam's Razor to disprove something just by showing that it's not the simplest explanation, that's not correct. That's not right. And so scientists will use Occam's Razor in all sorts of different disciplines. Like, for example, if you're making an artificial neural network, right, like a learning machine, you might use decision trees, and you will use some sort of simple decision tree over a more complicated one that can get the same job done. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right one. But there are demonstrably good reasons for picking a simpler one over. It's less likely to break. It takes less time, it takes less energy to come to the competition. There are. Things that are valuable about it, but it doesn't mean that the other one is just wrong. And again, when you're using Occam's Razor, say if you're making a neural network or you're pouring through a data set or something like that, or you're trying to interpret a big data set yeah. You're making, again, like you're saying not just a subjective judgment about what's simpler, but that's all there is to it. You're making a subjective judgment about what's simpler, not what's right. It's not saying what's right. And this is a recurring theme that you just have to know, because there's so many people out there that use Occam's Razor to disprove other people's ideas. And that's just not at all what it was originally intended for. It's just a complete perversion of it, and it's just wrong. And that's not how science works. So if you see somebody out there doing this, dump him in the forehead. Yeah. And, boy, then when you get into theology, it gets really interesting, because this is sort of a prime example of the simplest explanation from a believer's point of view, is very easy to say. No, the Big Bang is incredibly complex and complicated, and it's pretty clear that the easiest explanation here, and the simplest thing is God created life in seven days. Right. But that's also discounting the process that it took God to create Earth, if that's what you believe, and just kind of bundle it up in a tidy package. Say God created life. The Big Bang is super complicated and very coincidental, if you really look at it. So this is the simplest explanation, akam trays, or proves that God exists. Right. That's been used time and time again by creationists. Right. Or people who believe in ghosts or people who counter empiricism in a lot of ways. Right? Yeah. But on the other hand, you can find atheists who use Occam's Razor to show that God does not exist, because their point is, if the universe tends towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection, then if God exists in the universe would be a lot more simpler. There wouldn't be this Big Bang thing that we have that happened. You would be right. Creationist and the fact that you're wrong means that there is no God, which is just like my head is starting to spin a little bit with this. But it's a good example of how you can use Occam's Razor. Both sides can use Occam's Razor to disprove the other person's point, which, again, shows how it's not meant to be used that way. Well, yeah, and then you point out, too, and talk about a head spinner, like something like Photosynthesis is a pretty complex mechanism in nature, but who's to say that that isn't the simplest way to achieve food production in a plant? Maybe that is the simplest. Yeah. We have no way of knowing that there is a simpler model of the universe or photosynthesis of a shark or anything like that. And that even something that does seem superfluous. We can't say that in the larger scheme of things that it's actually the simplest way to do that. Right. So like a shark seems like maybe do you need that extra fin or something like that? Or does a cow really need eight stomachs? Or do we really need two kidneys? Right, but what this point is saying is that we don't have the information to look at everything on such a grand scheme of things to say, no, if humans only had one kidney, this other larger system would break down and this is actually the simplest way to do it. Right. Or there's a cow with one stomach that we can compare it to. Right, exactly. So this whole thing this is the point, Chuck, where I reach this very glaring idea that Occam's Razor, or what Aristotle said, that simplicity is perfection, that's all man made, that's human made. Sure that's a human made concept to value simplicity is human made. It is possible the universe is complicated. You can come up with all sorts of examples of the universe being seemingly pretty complicated. Just the universe itself seems pretty complicated, frankly. Right. So that doesn't necessarily mean that the universe tends towards simplicity. It seems like humans value simplicity and the universe uses simplicity a lot. But that doesn't mean that simplicity is perfection or correctness. That's a human construct. Well, yeah, but let's say in terms of engineering, it's probably a decent model to think, hey, the more complex the system is that I'm engineering, the more things there are to break. So we should probably try and make it as simple as possible. That still gets the job done. But that's not to say that it can be rudimentary. Like it might need to be a little bit complicated to run at its most efficient. Yeah, exactly. Or art. I mean, that's a whole different kind of worms. That's entirely subjective. You might find one drummer that says less is more. You just need to provide that basic backbeat and leave room. And then Stewart Copeland comes in the room and laughs and punches you in the face because you look like Sting dumps you in the head. That's entirely subjective. When it comes to art, you've been to a museum and seen a twelve inch by twelve inch square painted red. And then you've also seen Jackson Pollock or frieda kahlo halo. So again, it's just subjective. As to simplicity and maybe, I don't know, can you apply it to art? Am I wrong there? No, not necessarily. I think that's a good point. Because it's subjectively. Valuing something, whether it's complexity or whether it's simplicity, it doesn't mean it's right. That's the point. Right. That's I think that's your point is one's not right over the other. Yeah, I think that's my point. And then there's also plenty of circumstances where AKAM's razor just doesn't help very much. Like, very famously, Ptolemy's idea of the universe, the Earth is the center of the universe. The geocentric universe, I think, is what it's called, where the Earth is the center of the universe. The sun, the Moon, all the planets and all the stars revolve around earth is known to be wrong now, but for a long time, that's what everyone thought until the Copernican revolution, where we realized that not our universe, but our solar system is sun centered, the sun is at the center, and the Earth is actually moving around it. The thing is, if you look at the explanations between the two, they are pretty close, and one's not necessarily less simple than the other. And if you put them side by side, achilles razor doesn't really help. You have to dig a little deeper and figure it out. That actually no, this one's right. Based on these observations, we think this one's right, but it has nothing necessarily to do with complexity. And then on the other side of the equation, just because something is complex doesn't mean that it's wrong. So the next time somebody starts flailing some accomplish razor stuff at you, you tell them, josh, I'm going to thump you. Do you want to be thumped? Are you thumping everybody? Me? Yeah, because they're asking for it. Is it just a very mild act of violence? Yeah, you don't want to punch someone in the face. No. And plus, I mean, like, you shouldn't dump anybody anyway. I was totally kidding. It okay. Okay. Thanks for setting me up for that one. Sure. Oh, one other thing. A lot of people say that Occam's razor squashes free thought, so I think that does kind of tie in with your art thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, feel free to go be complex. There's nothing wrong with it. Not everything has to be funneled through this Occam's Razor thing and made simpler just to make it better. Yeah. Well, Chuck, we made it through this one, sort of. It's better than Jackhammers. They'll tell you that. I think you did well. I think you did as well, man. That means that it was a good episode. If you want to learn more about Occam's Razor, you could read my so so article on the site houseofworks.com. Just type it in the search bar. And since I said so, it's time for listing or mail. All right, I'm going to call this North Korea, part two. We heard from a woman in Australia. We were corrected. It just starts with an S. There is no a right woman in Australia named Claire Sutherland who actually had an interaction away with North Korea when she was editor at Australian newspaper called Little M, big X. Okay. It's MX, but it's just X. Oh, is it? No, I don't know. They don't say awe before Australia. Oh, I got you. Probably not the little lamb. Well, she's based in Elborn, and they have additions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. And she says, during the London Olympics, in our daily medal tally graphic, we listed north and South Korea as naughty Korea and nice Korea. Just kind of a cheeky thing, I guess, she said. We've been doing this for about a week when we received a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Seoul seeking comment about the fact that North Korea just issued an official condemnation of our paper and its editor. At first our assumption was we were being punked, but he directed us to the official PR website in North Korea. Sure enough, there was a flowery diatribe in communist English which misnamed their paper metro, by the way, and called us sordid, bullying and petty thieves, declaring we would be cursed long in Olympic history. I think my favorite extract is this, she says. Editors of the paper were so incompetent as to tarnish the reputation of the paper by themselves by producing the article like that. There is a saying a straw may show which way the wind blows. A single article may exhibit the level of the paper. Well came down on her, she says. The Wall Street Journal described the official statement as most unusual, and we ended up making some minor international headlines because of it. We ran the statement in full with a story about our sudden entry into world affairs on the front page. The headline was north Korea Fires Missive. At the time, we thought it was equal parts ridiculous and funny. It happened today. I'd probably try and arrange new identities for me and my staff. Anyway, thanks from me and my dog for the show. Looking forward to seeing you in Melbourne. That is from Claire Sutherland. Thanks, Claire. That was a great story. Well, you really want this one over, don't you? Sure. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck with a great story, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua mclark Chuck's at moviecrush. We're both at S YSK podcast, chuck's on Facebook.com Charleswchuckbryant and we're at facebook. Comstyshno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at how stuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're 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. 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032d3f32-3b0e-11eb-947e-933930ac894c | How Sarcasm Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-sarcasm-works | In this episode, we get to the bottom of why people sometimes talk like jerks some and how sarcasm isn’t all bad. Stand back everybody, this one is just soooo great.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | In this episode, we get to the bottom of why people sometimes talk like jerks some and how sarcasm isn’t all bad. Stand back everybody, this one is just soooo great.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 29 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=210, tm_isdst=0) | 41678958 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant, dave Kustin's in here with us. I just heard him laugh and snicker to himself, which is always a heartwarming sound. I think it says you mispronounce his name. No, I said it right. Coustin. I thought it was gustin. No, that's what you want it to sound like when you're French. No, this is Coustin. Okay. Like Houston. Exactly. But with C instead of an H. Houston means that I'm one day closer to you. What? That's? A song, right? Houston means that I'm one step closer. Got you. Closer song. Country jam. Okay, I was going to guess Deion Warwick. She always liked singing. About Houston. Yeah. About San Jose, et cetera. Okay. That was a Bacherk song, and she popularized it because she did it so well. Do you know the way to San Jose? Oh, okay. I didn't know she sang that. Oh, yeah. I guess she popularized it with everyone but you. That was sarcastic. No, that was pretty straightforward. Directly sarcastic would have been like, oh, I'm sure you didn't know that. Yeah, I guess that would be sarcastic. It wouldn't have made much sense, but yes. You know what's funny, Chuck? In researching this, I kept trying to come up with examples of sarcasm. And it's one of the hardest things in the world to do with thought. Sarcasm is like, almost always off the cuff or not very well thought out, which I think is one reason why most people agree that somebody who is employing sarcasm, even when they're not very good at it, is the funniest person in the world. Right then. See, that's sarcasm. I can't help myself. Yeah, researching sarcasm really makes you take a long, hard look in the mirror, doesn't it? It really does. And at people who are big fans of Deadpool. I do like Deadpool. Oh, yeah. Here's my deal with sarcasm, lady. I mean, I definitely can be sarcastic. I think all of us can be, and I think it can be used for funds. But I definitely see where I can be a real ahole sometimes by being sarcastic, like, to Emily. And that's like the sort of that goes back to my invoice. I'm sort of revealing some stuff here. Okay. It falls under the umbrella of my communication issues. Instead of being, like, straightforward with something, maybe being sarcastic but passive aggressive, and me and sarcasm all kind of go hand in hand, I think. Yeah. So you hit upon something that I think is not really necessarily obvious to just anybody when they are confronted with sarcasm. I'm a big jerk. No, sarcasm is a way to hide it's a way to hide from emotions. It's a way to hide from direct conflict if you're not big into conflict, it's a way to hide from criticizing somebody when you're not big into that, but you really need to or you want to, and you said it. It's passive aggressive, but I think we should make the distinction. And I came across this very late in research, but it makes a lot of sense to me that there's a distinction between sarcasm and verbal irony, and that sarcasm is at its core, insulting, mocking, harmful and hurtful, whereas verbal irony is just basically like a joke where no one gets insulted, where maybe a situation is being made fun of. It's great weather today. Exactly. If it's raining cats and dogs, yeah, that would be verbal irony, not sarcasm. I saw a really great example about the distinction on I can't remember, it was like a TV and film writing website, but they basically said, in that sense, that would be verbal irony. But if you were the spouse of a meteorologist who forecast a sunny day when they came home and it was raining cats and dogs and you said, Great weather today, that would be sarcasm because you're insulting or mocking them for getting it wrong. Right. Like, let's say you and I are neighbors. Great weather today. Josh, you said it their neighbor. Hey, I can speak for myself. You said it there neighbor. Different than a nice job with your front lawn, josh right. And I'd say swimming under water. You're the six year old that takes everything literally. Exactly. Because I have noticed that what made me think of sarcasm. You picked this article, but I was like, it's kind of perfect because having a kid will make you realize how often you're sarcastic because they don't get it. At least not yet. She's just turned six. Same days you happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday. Ruby, too. And very sweet gifts that you sent. And you guys exchanged video messages, which was adorable. But she's six and she still doesn't get sarcasm. And I've had to say, like, that was sarcasm. And she's like, what? And I'm like, man, why just keep that purity alive of them taking things literally. Yeah, it's probably don't introduce sarcastic kids, but you can't help it. No, and that's the thing. There's a whole school of thought that it's like, to heck with sarcasm. Like, we don't need it. People who use sarcasm are annoying, insecure people. It's not a nice thing to do or say. Like, there's better ways of getting your point across, and it's not even particularly funny. But the thing is, I've found that when you follow that thread, there's, like, something inherently problematic with it, and that there is some value to sarcasm in some instances. It's just one of those things that should be wielded very delicately and infrequently in the right context. But if you do it like that, sure. And if you do it like that, though, it can be very useful. And actually, some studies have found that it's actually beneficial BrainWise, too. Although researching all the sarcasm stuff has just reiterated my belief that social psychology as a field should be completely dissolved and they just start from scratch again because it is almost exclusively useless. Yeah, it is so bad. Dude. Every time you go off on social psychology, we should have a sound effect. We need to start employing more sound shows again. Just get that part. We should hire a barbershop quartet just full time to stand behind us. Made up of exclusively a social psychologist. Exactly. Who can also sing the sweet, sweet tunes. So Webster's defines that's a great start, Chuck. It's actually the Oxford English Dictionary. If you want to go back to the original definition, which I think it is useful, we don't love to read definitions, but its first definition was a sharp, bitter or cutting expression, or remark, a bitter jibe or taunt. And the word itself even derives from ancient Greek to tear flesh, gnash the teeth and speak bitterly. So it seems like from the beginning, sarcasm was not like a nice and super funny thing for people. No. And apparently the ancient Greeks had their own famous sarcast in Socrates, who was known for what's now known as Socratic irony, which is terrible, where basically you play dumb when you're talking to somebody in order to kind of get their true opinion out about something, and then you destroy their opinion and you suddenly become intelligent and destroy their opinion. It's a terrible, terrible thing to do. But apparently Socrates was well known for that kind of thing, so much so that they named it after him. That's right. It's called the how about them apples approach. Right. Interpreting sarcasm, that's where it gets tricky. And that's why a six year old and we'll get to kids more, because some people say that by that age they can detect sarcasm. But we'll get to that. I'm glad that my daughter can't yet, because that means that she's not a jerk yet. But as far as picking up on these clues, the words themselves you can't rely on. So what you're looking for are other kinds of clues that are myriad, one of which is obviously the tone of voice. Let's say you can't even see the person. If you see someone say, great weather today without even looking out the window, that probably means it's raining or something. Yeah. Don't even need to look. They just saved you the effort. Right. And some people say that that's a nasal tone. This kind of seemed a little hinky to me. But some researchers have said that there's a connection between that sarcasm and extreme disgust, and that's why it comes out nasally, like you're trying to expel something through your mouth. And your nose. Great weather. Like your nose wrinkles, I guess, a little bit. I can see it, maybe. And then, of course, there are physical cues, like a good eye roll or at least like looking up when you say something is a big, big clue. Yeah. That one in particular is because your brain is going haywire because you're saying the opposite of what you mean. And researchers have concluded that looking up, which kind of looks like an eye roll, is actually processing difficulty, your brain is like, I don't know what to do here. Just make the eyes look up while I try to figure out what I'm doing here. Wow. Yeah. There's social psychology's big contribution as far as the intonation. There's some researchers that have called that inverse pitch obrusion, which great weather is. If it was really great weather, you would say great weather today, and if not, you'd say great weather. So your tone and your intonation goes down as a clear signal of sarcasm. Yeah. Which supposedly intonation or inverse pitch obtrusion is pretty universal as far as languages go, or different cultures. Yeah, because other cultures are sarcastic. It's just American. No. And there's a big debate online about whether it's a universal whether sarcasm is universal. And some people are saying, like, yes, it's everywhere. Like, even if a culture has a taboo against it, which some could, although I couldn't find which ones I think China's widely pointed to is not a very high sarcasm culture. But if your culture is a taboo against sarcasm, you have to be aware of sarcasm to have a taboo against it. So it's still, in that sense, universally, even if it's not universally used or accepted by each culture. Yeah, for sure. I could see Japan is not being super sarcastic, so I read an article about Japan. It was like a business writers experience, like a British expat working in Japan, and he said he used sarcasm, and he didn't really get much laugh. Much of a laugh. And later on he said he was explaining it to his Japanese colleague, and the colleague was like, oh, I know it was sarcasm. We know all about sarcasm. You're an al. Grossly inappropriate to use it right, then. Good to know. I love it. We know what sarcasm is. That was just not good. Sorry. Another thing you can do is elongate your words. It's much different to say, oh, sorry, than to say sorry. Yes, that's a great one. That's intonation and elongating a word. I guess combined with that, I roll. You can also go the opposite way and take a word that should be said, kind of with oomph and deflating it. Yeah, right. I'm big on that one. Wow. Yeah, great. I say that a lot. Yeah, we are very sarcastic people. I've come to realize for some reason. I know you didn't see Fletch and you hate Chevy Chase. Wait, no, I'm sorry. I love Chevy. Yeah, he's my favorite. He's so funny. I would use a line from his fletch occasionally. I don't know why I would use it. I guess whenever there was a cop or something, I would say, thank God, the police. And he says that line like that in the movie. Yeah. I can totally see it. Wearing a baseball cap, too. All wager, probably. Maybe you mentioned other cultures. If you are a teacher of ESOL English as a second language, that is one of the trickier parts of teaching English to people as a second language, as adults or as kids even, is trying to teach them things like sarcasm if they're not super familiar with it. And sometimes apparently, they will say, here, watch this TV show because there's quite a bit of sarcasm on TV sitcoms. Yes. Supposedly that's a really good way to pick up on sarcasm is watching sitcoms. Probably friends in particular, I would guess. I'm guessing they assign Friends a lot. Would they be any more sarcastic? So, Chuck, this is kind of a willy nilly episode and I kind of like them that way. I'm just going to go ahead and confess. So there's no clear place where we should put an ad break in. So I suggest that we put an ad break in right about here. That's a great idea. That's the name of it. It's a great name. Stuxnet with an X. You know, I have to say, when I was researching this truck, I was wondering if we were going to just do the weird thing and not be sarcastic. No, I just think that was never going to happen, was it? No, I think it was clear from the beginning to me that we were going to throw our own little brand of sarcasm in. Can't help it. Junk. I can't tell if you're being straight. I can't either. So we're talking about kids and whether or not they understand sarcasm. And there's been some research on this kind of thing and of course it's come up with contradictory findings. One thing I saw was that kids you kept mentioning six year olds not really getting sarcasm. That's about when they start to pick it up, somewhere around age six. That's when they start grade school has anything to do with it. Maybe so, but from what I saw, they might recognize it as sarcasm, they just don't understand it as a way to employ humor. And that comes at about age ten, which happens to coincide when kids become obnoxious. Yeah, and then you reap what you sow as a parent because you're like, I taught you this method and now it's being used against me. Yeah, like a weapon. There was a study in France of French speaking kids in 2005 that showed kids the age of five understood sarcasm when the sarcastic speaker was using intonation where it took to be over seven, to be able to tell by context. And context is when like, I think the example they used in the article was if you're like having a longer conversation about a family member being a bad gift giver, and then at the very end you say, but I love my sweater that they got me. Right. And maybe see, like I said, even sort of regular, but contextually, it would still be sarcastic. I don't know. Even in that example, I just found it confusing to tell you. Well, I guess it could be I was a little too I sold it too. Well, yeah, it sounded really genuinely earnest. Right. That's the slippery slope of sarcasm. In addition to kids not necessarily getting sarcasm, people with dementia or Alzheimer's or brain lesions have been found to not necessarily get sarcasm. And if you stop picking up on sarcasm, all of a sudden, that's a really good indicator that you might need to go get an MRI too. Sweet. Yeah, for sure. And not just that. There are all kinds of neurodiversities that people can have that make them not able to pick up on sarcasm. I know that sometimes people with autism have difficulty understanding sarcasm. They might take things a little more literally than neurotypical people might. So you got to know who you're dealing with when you're throwing sarcasm around and be sensitive, that kind of thing, right? For sure. People with autism are famously kind of associated with an inability to detect sarcasm. And from what I've seen, that's not really the best way to put it, that many people with autism can detect sarcasm, use sarcasm. Some find it funny, others can recognize it, but don't necessarily find it funny. But there's different I don't know if they're competing or not. There are different theories as to why that's the case. Right. It's supposedly people with autism tend to use more literal thinking. Well, let me just say sarcasm is known as a form of unplanned speaking, along with some other kinds, like forced politeness, where you are nice to somebody who got you hate, or using aphorisms or ritual language, like when you say I'm fine, when somebody asks you how you're doing even though you're not fine, sarcasm falls under that it's not saying what you mean directly. And so if people with autism tend to use direct thinking and literal thinking, if you use indirect or unplanned speaking, it's going to be hard for them to pick up on. They're going to take it at its literal meaning. They might not pick up on the sarcasm. And so that kind of tendency to think literally combined with an undeveloped theory of mind, which is where you can put yourself in the other person's shoes and imagine what they're thinking easily, which is what sarcasm requires you to do because they're saying something different, but you know, that's not what they mean. And that requires that you go into their mind and tool around. Those two things combined tend to explain why people with autism are kind of thought of as not detecting sarcasm. Right. All right. Okay. You got it. Okay, thanks. If I had rainbow suspenders on right now, I would have just snapped them after that. I actually had those when I was a kid. I wanted those for a long time. Yeah, I mean, it was the whole Mork and mindy thing. I even had those buttons on them, and I wore the khaki pants. I did my best to be MORC from Mork. Yeah. So Mork suspenders are obviously primo, but there's an overlooked vest, a puffy vest that he wears in the credits when they're on the football field that I would say even top the rainbow suspenders. I would love to get my hands on that. Yeah. Looking back, I was trying to be Morph from work, but I was Dork from Dork. I don't have any pictures of that, unfortunately. Can you imagine wearing those with, like, a spinning bow tie, like, now? No, especially as a kid. Now, I don't know about this guy, but the kid wearing that. You'd be all right. If you're talking about the brain, there was a study in 2005 that and this kind of stuff is always I feel like we just have to say it, even though people are like, okay, those are the three parts of the brain. Nothing to me. That's it. But the three parts the language cortex in the left hemisphere, the frontal lobes in the right hemisphere, and the right ventro medial prefrontal cortex. You're going to hear the comment, and your language cortex kicks in and understands the literal meaning. Great weather. Right. Then the frontal lobe in the right hemisphere have the context. It's raining. And then that right ventromediall prefrontal cortex puts the two together, and it goes sarcasm, dummy. Right. And the laugh region goes bananas. The laugh region. Sometimes it can be funny, but you got to really be good at it. So, Chuck, I was talking about how sarcasm qualifies as unplanned speaking. That's like the general umbrella that it falls under, right? Yes. And the fact that it is unplanned speaking, where you can get a message across just as easily directly saying, the weather sucks today. What is the point then, of using sarcasm, of saying, great weather today, rather than this weather sucks today? So linguists, researchers, speech scientists, talkie, doctors, all these people together have come up with this idea that there must be some additional thing that's going on. There clearly that there is something gained by using sarcasm over using the direct message that gets the same point across, because sarcasm has got a little extra mustard on it, and they've tried to get to the bottom of exactly what that mustard is. And I'm sorry to use mustard. I know you don't like it very much. Yeah. And by the way, my dog might actually be barking some in this episode. There's just nothing I can do. I think that makes it folksy. We usually try and edit that out, but we'll just see there are a couple of ideas on why people do it, like, when it's a purposeful thing, and not just like, I'm trying to be funny or whatever. Well, sometimes it could just be as easy as you have a very hard time being straightforward with someone, and like you said, you use it to hide use it as a defense or something like that, cloaking something in a positive term. Oh, you did a really great job with that episode, Josh. That sarcastic criticism. Whereas you can do the exact opposite if you and I were out. I mean, the example they use in the article is fishing, and I'm not catching any fish. And you're just like, catching tons of fish, right? I'm like, oh, boy, you really suck at that fishing thing. Right? That is a sarcastic compliment. And this is all wrapped up under what's called the tinge theory of sarcasm, which is you're trying to mute either your criticism or your praise of somebody by slapping that mustard on it. Yeah. By tinging it with irony, hence the name. Right. There's also, like, a related one that really just kind of looks at the criticism part. It's called politeness Theory, and it basically just says that we use sarcasm to criticize because it makes the criticism more palatable. And so you put that together, and that is one interpretation of what sarcasm is. Therefore, it's meant to mute either the compliment or the praise or the criticism. But then there's another one that basically says the exact opposite, that sarcasm is meant to be, like, more biting, that it's meant to really make the mustard spicy and put it right into your eye. Yeah. Here's the thing. I get the value somewhat of using sarcasm rather than god, if you're just straightforward about everything. It's sort of boris if let's say you were with a friend who you're hanging out and your friend is always talking over you, and you don't get a chance to get a word in edgewise and you made a little sarcastic dig in front of people like, oh, no, I'm sure they're going to let me speak any minute now. That person would go, all right, I see what you're saying. It may be a little bit of an a hole sarcastic comment, but what if someone was always just, like, pulling you aside and being like, you just never let me speak, and it would just really, like I think there are times to be straightforward, but like that but if you're like that all the time. God, no one's going to be around you either. Yeah. Or even if you didn't pull them aside at the table, if you were like, Chuck, I'm sorry, but it's my turn to speak. You're not letting me speak, so I'm going to speak now. Okay. Yeah. That's just like there's going to be a record scratch. Like you said, no one wants to hang out with you. That's what I was talking about. The outside of this, that it's like, the idea of just getting rid of sarcasm altogether, there's something inherently wrong with that, because if used correctly, sarcasm, it's a social lubricant that just keeps the party going totally. Because at least everyone gets a laugh. It might be at their expense a little. They get the message. And you don't stop the fun of the party by having a real serious talk about interrupting people. Right. And then starting your point. Right. Yeah. Then everyone wants to hear what you've got to say. Right. So the other idea is that sarcasm is used to make criticism more biting. That it's basically like, if I did just say, you didn't screw that up, or no, if I said, Josh, you really screwed this episode up, I can't even criticize you hypothetically. I'm sorry. If you said to me, Josh, you really screwed this episode up, I would be like, oh, well, go sit on it, Chuck. But if you said, Boy, you didn't screw that episode up at all, Josh, I would be leveled for months, basically. And I think that's what that theory is the rival theory to tinse theory, that it actually gives an even more emotional impact to criticism than it otherwise would have directly. Yeah. Not to get too personal, but I think you and I, as partners, have learned to deal with each other a little more straightforwardly over the years. I think that's how we both prefer to be handled by each other. Sure. And that's with us, it's not like I can be super sarcastic with other people, but I know that wouldn't be a very nice thing to do to you. Does that make sense? Sure, it makes sense. I think that you can be sarcastic with me. Well, I can be. Give it a try. Come on. I can be just held their breath. They're like, Is he about to level? Josh? Go ahead. No, I can be. And I am sarcastic with you, but only in fun ways. I would never know. Now, to not try and make a real point with you, I i see what you mean. Sure. Yeah. And have, like, a real conversation. If it's real, yeah. Okay. I got you. Sure. Chuck the other thing about this, too, is there's another theory. It's like, no, this is everybody you're just overthinking. This is just humor. Like, people are dressing up an otherwise boring or pedestrian point that they want to get across with just a little bit of humor. And it's like sarcasm is an easy way to use humor. Oscar Wilde said it was the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence. And that second part, I think he was referring to the fact that it takes some thinking to make a sarcastic comment, and it also takes some thinking to decode it, too, but it's not necessarily funny. Right. But that is supposedly the humor in it is another theory for why we use sarcasm. That is just humor. And I think from researching all this, all of those make sense. And social psychology in typical fashion has found findings that support all of them, and none of them at the same time. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, let's take a break. We'll talk a little bit about that and a little bit of the use of it throughout history and culture and arts and stuff like that right after this. It's a great name. Stuxnet with an X. All right. If you want to talk literature, you can't get any more sarcastic at times than Mark Twain. Shakespeare was pretty sarcastic at times. Chaucer was fairly sarcastic at times. They used an example in this article of the Bible that I didn't read as sarcasm. I thought it was a bit of a stretch myself. We'll go ahead and read it. This is from Ecclesiastes Rejoice. Young man during your childhood. And let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood and follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes, yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things. That feels more just sort of like a one two joke than sarcasm. I guess so, yeah. I think they were like, there's got to be something in here and that's the best they could come up with? Maybe like, we got to find some sarcasm in the Bible, guys, right. Get to work. Right. The thing is with that, that kind of reveals one of the problems with sarcasm is that when it's just written, especially when it's written a couple of thousand years ago, it's really difficult to discern sarcasm. You have to use whatever cues you can get because you've had a lot of the normal cues stripped, like all those facial expressions, the intonation, all of that stuff is gone. And now it's just the printed word. So basically what you have is context. And for that reason and because we are entering I guess we've already entered this digital age where the written word is basically how we convey thoughts. Now, sarcasm has really taken a beating lately because study after study keeps finding that people grossly overestimate how clearly their sarcasm is coming through in like texts and tweets and emails and stuff like that, and that it actually isn't being understood as sarcasm on the other end, even though the person who's sending the email or text thinks sarcasm is clear as a bell. Just don't try to be sarcastic in emails, especially for work. I think it's just a good rule. Yeah, don't even try because it's not going to come through. And like you said, you probably think it does. It's not obvious to other people if you're texting with friends and stuff, you can do things like over spell things like say great or say, insert the eye roll emoji, or even say sarcasm in parentheses or something like that. The one I've seen is the backslash. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely s. No backslash. Which one is it? It's one of the slashes. It's a backslash followed by an S. Okay. Because I remember. For the first few years of, like, social media and texting and stuff like that, there was a lot of talk about like, how do we indicate sarcasm? And the emojis kind of help solve that problem. But you can't do that in emails, like professional emails. You're not going to send an emoji, eye roll emoji, no, don't do it. Okay. You might as well put three exclamation points at the end of that's. Great. Are we not doing that either? This is why I don't email anybody. I don't know what I'm doing, but when I do email them, it's at like 10:00 on a Saturday night. One of the cons of sarcasm. Like you said. You can use it and employ it in certain circumstances. But there are people who just think it is a hostile act and it is a way to say something and also let yourself off the hook for saying that thing at the same time. And that it is hostility veiled as humor is how they put it in this article. And at times it very much can be that. Yeah. So the marriage counselors, therapists, basically anybody who's dedicated to improving you as a person in exchange for money has kind of zeroed in on the worst version of sarcasm. The very strict definition of sarcasm is not verbal irony, but as an insult, as mocking somebody, as it being veiled hostility. Like you're saying passive aggressiveness, that kind of thing. And that is no way to communicate, especially with somebody that you care about or love that you should be forthright, direct, honest with them. They're not saying like, make sure you cut out humor. They're basically saying sarcasm isn't humor. And if you think it's humor, seriously, just go find better humor because there's plenty of better stuff out there. Here's a knock knock joke book, right. They're basically saying, just cut that out of your interpersonal relationships, at least again, with people you care about, because it probably does mask passive aggressiveness and it's not doing anything but harming your relationship. And in fact, John Gottman, who is a very renowned couples therapist, he and his wife are together, it says that sarcasm is one of the indicators of contempt, along with eye rolling, along with raising a lip like kind of in disgust while you're talking together, that you are signaling that you have contempt for your significant other. And that contempt is one of the he calls them the four horsemen of a marriage. That it's a really good predictor of divorce when couples speak to each other with contempt. And one of those ways that they'll speak to each other with contempt is through sarcasm. Yeah. And it's just not a pleasant like, it's one thing to be sarcastic here and there, but I have a friend whose father, stepfather, rather, is the most sarcastic eye rolly person I've ever met in my life to an alarming degree. And it's just so, like it's such a turn off to be around this dude. You're like, I don't want to have sex at all when I'm around him. Certainly not with him. And you can tell his marriage has suffered and he can't be straight and it's just a chore to be around this guy. I hope he listens to this and is like, who's he talking about? He's talking about me and he changes his life. No, he would never listen to this. He wouldn't give me the satisfaction. Wow, that guy, huh? Yeah, he's that guy. This is not to say that there's, like, nothing good about sarcasm. There's this one group of social psychologists who made names for themselves by basically saying, no, no. We figured out that if you take a test of creativity immediately after engaging in a sarcastic exchange, you're going to score higher on that test of creativity than you would had you not been involved in a sarcastic exchange immediately beforehand. And that has been turned into in the popular process, sarcasm boosts creativity across the board. Yeah. I guess the idea that it challenges you to think in a different way because it's not straightforward may have a little something to it, but I don't know, it's a bit of a reach. There's other things it provides social bonding, like you and your friends being sarcastic about stuff. Especially if you're being sarcastic about, like, a shared target. Yeah, like your teacher. Sure. It's a great example. It maintains social egalitarianism. Like taking that fisherman down a peg before he gets a big ego for catching some fish. Sure. And it can make you seem, apparently, as far as Harvard Business Review says, more competent and intelligent at work. Which makes sense in that you do kind of have to be sharp. At the very least, you're paying a little more attention, probably if you deliver a sarcastic remark successfully. Right. It's also risky by that you can also really come off looking like your friend's dad, basically. Yeah. And just professionally, like, I'll let stuff back. That's my advice. Yeah. So the one thing I saw was I came across a K State I think it's Kansas State newspaper from 2011 maybe, where they were talking about how sarcasm just totally pervades our society. And they gave an example of how primed we are for sarcasm that when we encounter earnestness, we might be confused at first in some situations. Right. The writer gave this great example of Michael Richard's apology after he went on that racial tirade at the Laugh Factory and then, like, a couple of days later went on Letterman. And the audience did not get some of the audience who hadn't heard about this, I guess did not get that this was like a real apology. And part of it was his presentation that it seemed like he was doing a bit kind of and the audience remember Tittering and Jerry Seinfeld, who was like, in the studio with Letterman, had to turn to the audience to be like, stop laughing, it's not funny, and tell them that this wasn't sarcasm, that this was for real. If you go back and watch it, if you're a fan of laughing at things that make you deeply uncomfortable, you will love that bit. I remember it at the time. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was Kramer and it was hard to just take him seriously. Right? That's exactly what it was. Yeah, man, what a mess. Yeah, it was a mess. It made it even worse. Yeah. I'm going to go watch that again today, actually. I could use some cringe humor. Yeah. You got anything else? Oh, no, josh, I had nothing else. Yeah, check this. Went real well. We did a great job. I'm annoying myself even now. So let's just say that since I said I'm annoying myself, let's go to listen to mail. I'm going to call this Elton Johnson because why not? Hey, guys, love your podcast and making my way through the whole catalog. I've been tempted to write, but I didn't think I had anything interesting to say before. You may not think it's interesting now. I do, though. But what finally prompted me is when you were talking about Elton John and the Soul Train episode so long ago, josh said he'd never heard the song Burn Down the mission that made me think of the powerful song Ticking from Elton John's 74 caribou album. Song was way ahead of its time in the way that it foretold many future events. I can't ever remember it being a popular, well known song. But you've not heard it. Go listen to it. It gives me chills every time I hear it. Keep up the good work, guys. And this is from Dinah Clay Melvin in Fort Worth, Texas. And I went back and looked at the lyrics and dude, Ticking is a song about an aggressive, ticking, time bomb white male shooter. Oh, yeah. From 1974. And it's all right there. I'm assuming Bernie Talpin wrote it. I didn't look it up, but I think he was kind of writing all of his stuff back then. Bernie Taupin. Yeah, you do. That's a referential joke to another episode from the conversation we had, I guess probably in the episode that this guy is talking about. Oh, boy. But yeah, it's interesting to go back and listen to that song from early 1970s. And of course, it wasn't a big hit like she said, but it's just interesting to hear that and be like, man, you couldn't write a song that on the nose today. So he wasn't the only one who was predicting at the time. Like, Stephen King had a short story about a kid who comes in and just shoots up at school and it's basically like this teenage revenge fantasy. But it was exactly what ended up happening. Like 20 years later. He wrote that I don't think I knew that. Can't remember what that one was called. And then there's like remember falling down that movie with Michael Douglas from the lady? That was basically about that as well. Yeah, I could see. I just want to make sure we don't give Elton John undue credit here is kind of what I'm going after. Oh, man. Okay. You're classic beef with Elton John. All right. So I think we're at the end of this episode, aren't we? I hope we are. All right, well, there's a little bit of short stuff crossover right there, so let's end this as we normally do. If you want to get in touch with us, like Dinah did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of IHRA Heart Radio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Marijuana Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-marijuana-works | For millennia people used marijuana for fun and medicine. Not until the 20th century that was it vilified, unfairly say many. Weed has done lots of good things, from alleviating cancer symptoms to unlocking secrets of the brain. Learn all about pot here. | For millennia people used marijuana for fun and medicine. Not until the 20th century that was it vilified, unfairly say many. Weed has done lots of good things, from alleviating cancer symptoms to unlocking secrets of the brain. Learn all about pot here. | Thu, 01 May 2014 15:29:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=15, tm_min=29, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=121, tm_isdst=0) | 58931061 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good, it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles WTOK. Brian getting his demons out, man. How about this music? Yeah, this is thanks to our guest producer Noel, who Jerry is actually producing, but he's got the musical touch. He's our dub producer. Yes. If you want to reggaeify your podcast, Noel is the man. Yes. Big thanks to Noel. Yeah. A great idea by you. I love that. How are you doing, man? I'm great. You got some good feelings going on. Yeah. I mean, we've covered growth houses and we have medical marijuana, right? I don't think so. No. Because a lot of it didn't seem familiar when I was looking into it in this article. So we've definitely done grow houses, which is kind of backwards. Well, not really. Got to grow up. That's true. So, Chuck, here we are, we're talking about pot, and as is our thing, we're going to talk about pot in a very, like, above the board's, mature way. Are we? I think we can, sure. We've talked about some other stuff before. Poop. We've talked about poop plenty of times. Yeah. Well, every time we cover drugs, we like to cover the scientific aspects, social ramifications. Right. How it's impacted culture. Yeah. Why would this one be any different? Well, and this is probably the biggest it's the most ubiquitous, I would say. Yeah. Maybe the gateway to all the other episodes. Very funny. So I guess we should start at the beginning. How about that? Okay. Let's talk about pot and its history. It's very long history, and actually, for most of that history, it has been widely beloved and appreciated. Apparently, pot has been cultivated. Or marijuana. We're going to use all that interchangeably. Weed. Pot, marijuana. Yeah, but cannabis, that's probably where it will stop if either one of us says ganja or sticky icky. Sticky icky, like it's in this article. We should just shut it down right then. All right. We'll do the hey, take that back. Yeah. One of us will say that okay. Yeah. But like I said, this is going to be an overview because we could do, honestly, four shows on the history of pot. There's quite a rabbit hole we could go down here. Yeah. We got to avoid it. Yeah. But we'll give you a historical overview. How about that. Sure. So, like I said, pot has been cultivated for 8500 years, and I also said that it's mostly been appreciated most of the time for two reasons. One, it is an industrial, or it was until the rise of the synthetic, a major industrial fiber hemp. Sure. And then, secondly, it was still is a medicinal herb that kind of spills over into recreational use as well. So in the 28th century in China, it looks like it was probably used medicinally. Yeah. And not recreationally. But they're definitely records written records of the cultivation of cannabis. Well, yeah. A guy named Shen nung, who was an emperor but was also China's first physician, wrote about how ma, that's what they called pot back then in China, was good for the yin and the yang, both of them. Right. Which is actually, as we'll see, that's a pretty astute observation early on, because what he's talking about is balance or homeostasis, which pot definitely affects. Yes, for sure. They have found a mummy, a 3000 year old Egyptian mummy, and looked into this, and it contains quite a few drugs, but it definitely contained THC. So the Egyptians were getting down. Yeah, maybe medicinally. Who knows? In 1001 Arabian nights, it makes an appearance called bang, B-H-A-N-G. Sambad apparently loves the stuff, but supposedly his was hatch mix with opium, which is way more hardcore than what we're talking about. Yeah, probably. So they think it originated perhaps in India and north of the Himalayas is their best guess. Yeah, they really have no idea. And actually, there's, like, a lot of debate still over whether there's more than one type of plant. What do you mean? So there's cannabis indica. Cannabis sativa. Yeah. They're different. There's another one called cannabis rooter. Alice and there's an ongoing debate among botanists over whether they're all actually just different, like, varieties of the same plant right. Or if they really are different species of plants in the same family. Oh, interesting. Yeah. But I think the current common wisdom is that there are at least two cannabis sativa and cannabis indica. Yeah. We may as well get into that a little bit. The plant itself is shorter and fatter and better suited for indoor growing. And the sativa is taller. It can get really tall, like 25ft. And it's spinlier. Yeah. And thinner. Although I think for cultivation, even though it's grown outdoors, I don't think they're growing the 25 foot plants. No. I would imagine the helicopters can seem a lot more easily. Yeah. And the indica is known for more of a body high, quote unquote, couch locked mellow. And the sativa is more known for more energetic and cerebral and creative. More of a brain high. Right. And then, conversely, one can make you more paranoid and one can make you more drooly. Yeah. And typically these days, if you are a recreational or medicinal user, you're probably getting some sort of hybrid strain. Good point. And actually some of the strains those hybrid strains have some of the best names like Green Crack. It's a pretty good name. Yeah. AK 47, white Widow. White Widow is actually pure strain, isn't it? Of indica? I'm not sure. I think it is. Yeah. Maui WOWY. The pot names are pretty funny. They've definitely gotten better from the 70s. Like Maui WOWY. Yeah. That sounds very lapping. Should we talk a little bit about its history in this country? In the United States? Yeah, so I think we should get to that because as I said, Chuck when you look back on pot all of these years and it's how it was used it was generally like appreciated used, medicinally used recreationally, not vilified. It wasn't until it hit North America that it really started to become vilified. Yeah. Well, I had a good run here too in the States for a couple of hundred years. Hemp was grown and cultivated and widely used. Some people say it's the most versatile plant on earth as far as the different uses you can get out of it. And it was in the 1619 Virginia Assembly. They even said you have to grow hemp if you're a farmer in Virginia. So not only was it encouraged it was actually law in Virginia at least. Well, so I had a good run until the early 1009 hundreds and 1920s. Well, what's interesting is back in this time you remember that part and days to confuse where the biggest owner of the whole group is talking about George Washington like planting camp all day and then comes home and smokes a big bowl of it. Yeah. Martha ready? It's not clear whether or not any of them were smoking pot. It's entirely possible that they weren't sure because the idea of smoking pot was lost to the ages for a very long time. And the Greeks actually grew marijuana but they didn't smoke it, they just use it for its fibers. Right. And it almost appears like they had no idea you could smoke it and it was psychoactive. So it's possible that our forefathers didn't smoke pot and they were just growing it for industrial uses. And meanwhile Native Americans were like you guys are crazy. Rope is nice, but you know yeah, it can be both. That's right. In the early one nine hundred s, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 this was one of the big turning points because a lot of Mexican immigrants came to the US and they were like hey, you can smoke this stuff. It's pretty nice. And because Mexican immigrants had sort of looked down upon all of a sudden pot was looked down upon. Really? Mexican immigrants were looked down upon somewhere in the US. History. Yeah, the whole thing about pop being vilified or I guess there was a moral panic basically is what they call it that erupted around it. Yeah. And a lot of it was based in racism toward Mexican Americans or Mexican immigrants. Yes. In the 1930s, especially in the Depression, they sort of had a bad name because they're immigrants in this country and we're Americans and we're in Depression and we want the work. And kind of a lot of the same arguments here these days. Right. But the association with pot was definitely part of it. It definitely was. But also, I read this MPR blog, Code Switch, about this very topic, and they were saying, like, yes, there's a lot of racism that led to the criminalization of pot, but Mexico was 20 years ahead of the US in criminalizing pot as well. So you can't just say, well, it was just Americans disdain or dislike or distrust of Mexicans. Right. It's more complex than that. And this guy was saying that really you can conclude there was a fear of what this drug drug did. Right. And the reason why there was a fear of what the drug did was because the newspaper reports at the time had people, like, killing entire families and wandering around the streets, like, with somebody's head covered in blood because they just smoked a joint and they were really trying to unpack this. Like, why would that happen? Did it happen? Were all of them just overblown reports? The fact was, when you picked up the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, there were front page stories about this and they were like, brown skinned Mexican kills white family of eight on marijuana cigarette. Yeah. And that's why and actually the word marijuana was kind of used as a derogatory term to kind of Mexicanify cannabis, which is what it had been called prior to that. That was where it came from. Yeah. Did not know that. I'm off my soapbox. Look at you teaching me. Well, movies like Reefer Madness definitely didn't help. In 1936, the famous propaganda movie from French director Louis Gas Nier, it's required viewing for any college student. Really? Yeah. It's not very good and it's not very enjoyable, but it is kind of funny showing the refratic driven to insanity by the marijuana cigarettes and somebody gets murdered. Right. I think someone murdered somebody else because they smoked pot. And then in 1937, a year after Reefer madness, congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. And this is basically where the tide turned. And it was essentially criminalized because it called for restricting possession just to individuals who paid a tax, which is like $1,000 for medical or industrial use. Right. So in other words, if you're just sammy pothead, you can't live that way anymore in this country now you would basically have to set up a shell organization, pay the $1,000 tax, and then you'd be able to import marijuana. But if you were caught with smoking it, you'd still get busted. Yeah, it was a big deal when that happened. And you can kind of lay all of this at the feet of one guy a moral crusader who ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the until the 60s. His name was Harry Anslinger, and he was the one who really kind of started this crusade against pot and got the government to turn against it, got the press to turn against it, and got the Marijuana Tax Act passed. But even while this guy's, like, sitting there shouting, like, marijuana is going to kill us all, it's a horrible drug, and it's as bad as it gets. There were studies, independent studies that were funded by the government that were showing, like, you guys are kind of overstating this a little bit. Yeah. In 1944, Mayor LaGuardia of New York issued a report that basically said that it doesn't induce violence, insanity, or sex crimes. Yeah. And he was a moral reformer himself. Remember, he went after the Minsky Brothers in the burlesque episode. So it's not like he was just some big pothead. Like, he was a moral reformer himself, and he still found this report yeah, that's a good point. That led to the sentencing laws over time. It kind of waffled back and forth. In the 50s, they were pretty strict because of the Bogs Act and the Narcotics Control Act, and that's when they started setting mandatory minimums for basically any drug, but including marijuana, of course. Yeah. Like, you would go to prison for a long time if you got caught with pot, yet two to ten years for a first time offender in the 1950s getting caught with pot. Yeah, that's it. Any amount. Right. And in the 60s, things relaxed a little bit in every way you can imagine in this country. And President Kennedy and LBJ issued reports that found kind of the same thing as they found out in the 40s, it doesn't induce violence. And in these reports that said, it wasn't a gateway drug either in the 1960s, which is still up for debate. Really? Yeah. No, because you read every other report you read is going to say something a little different about what the gateway drug is. And plus, I think defining what makes a gateway drug, too, has never been fully established. Yeah. How can you test something scientifically if you don't have it defined? Yeah. And that led the 1960s led to a repeal of a lot of the mandatory minimums in the 70s. But then, of course, Ronald Reagan in the 1980s got a lot of that stuff back, and Nixon, too, he fought that tooth and nail. Like, even though the tide in the country was turning one way, nixon was like, no, we're going to keep as illegal as possible, and as a matter of fact, we're going to put it on the same level as heroin and cocaine. Yeah. And during the Nixon administration, the Chaffer Commission was a bipartisan commission found again that it should be decriminalized. And Nixon was just like, well, I don't want to hear that. Sorry. I'm going to make up my own mind about it. I'm the President. Exactly. Yeah. So like you said, the Reagan era brought it back. Not brought pot back. No. Any kind of anti government sentiment toward pot itself was redoubled in the 80s under the Reagan administration. Just say no mandatory minimums or mandatory sentences were reenacted in 1986, thanks to the Anti Drug Abuse Act. If you got caught with 100 marijuana plants, you got the same jail time as if you were caught with 100 grams of heroin. Yeah, that's interesting. Plants versus grams. It's sort of an apples to oranges comparison. Yeah. Plants versus heroin. Like plants versus zombies. I know at one point this is sort of off topic topic, but I don't know if they've changed it, but at one point they were sentencing LSD users, by the way. Right. And wasn't that the deal is if you were an LSD dealer and you had 20 sheets of acid, they would weigh it and they were like, well, wait a minute, you can't weigh the paper. That's like weighing the suitcase side. Cocaine comes in. Right. Yeah. And I think that's still the same, though, isn't it? I don't know. But I do know what you're talking about. And apparently if you had it mixed in with liquid or something like diluted into liquid form, they'd take the weight of all the liquid rather than the proportion of it. Yeah. I don't know, we could be, like, showing our availability for urban legend or not. No, I know that's the case. I don't know if it still is, but I know it definitely was. Definitely was, yeah. Because I saw, like, an HBO special on these LSD dealers who are basically serving, like, life sentences for dealing acid. Right. Alongside murderers and rapists. Yeah, we'll have to check into that. And people who are caught with pot in the 30s. That's right. So pot these days, cost wise, varies a lot, depending on the quality. Obviously, it ranges I love that in this article, it says a dollar, $77 to $17.66 per gram. I'd like, 1 gram of marijuana, please. Yeah, that's interesting. But these days you can expect to pay for what people consider good marijuana. About $120 for a quarterback, which is a quarter of an ounce. Right. Which is 7 grams. Right. Because it's 28 grams in an ounce. Yeah, I think between seven and 8 grams. It depends on if the dealer likes you. Exactly. Yeah. But that's generally how it breaks down as you have it by the pound, which is the pot dealer, I guess, and then they break it down into ounces and then to quarterbacks and dime bags and whatever people can afford, I guess. Well, it's funny, because in the state of the country right now, you can take dealer and dispensary and basically flip them and interchange them, and no matter what you're talking about, virtually, the sentence is going to remain unchanged, basically, because the marijuana dispensaries are following, like, basically the same format that marijuana dealers in this country have for decades. What do you mean, like pricing? Yeah, the pricing, the way it's sold by weight. Sure. I think you still buy quarters and half ounces and ounces and stuff, which makes sense. But they're also getting a lot of stuff from people who are growing indoors in their basement. And it's like, now they have licenses for all this, but it's basically like, all the people who are doing it illegally before, or some of the people who are doing it illegally before right. And applied for licenses, and now they're doing the same thing, but they just have, like, a license to do it in a frame on their wall. Yeah. And dispensaries, you're going to find a lot of other things, like edibles. And they even have now cannabis strips. Like, you know, the little listing breath strips. Oh, yeah. They have little cannabis strips. It's just a little edible strip of concentrated cannabis. And I guess you put it under your tongue and that's better for your lungs, I would imagine, if you're a cancer patient or something. Yeah. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. Let's talk about the plan itself. Chuck. Okay. Maybe the most recognizable plant, that leaf, you know? Yeah. Here's a little fact for you. The botanical description of the way that marijuana leaves are arranged, it's groovy called palmately, like the palm of a hand with five fingers outstretched. That's the pot leaf that you can find on lighters and baseball caps. Gas stations. Exactly. And like you said, the plan itself, depending on which variety it is, either very tall or kind of tall, depending on whether it's trimmed or not. Right. And the buds or whatever that are smoked are actually the flowers of the plants. Yeah. The flowers of the female, which apparently that's sensame. So the definition of the word sensima are female flowers that have reached maturity without being pollinated. I can't hear that word without thinking of catty shack. I don't remember that part. Del Murray, California, cincinnati. Yeah. So that's what that means. Yes. Interesting. The term sensor, basically, unless you're, like, 14, if you're smoking pot, you're smoking sensa. Mia okay. So, yes, the term sensimo means pot. Okay. The pot that smoked. Although the male flowers do have some THC, it's just far less of female than female. Yeah. As a cultivator, males are not what you want. In fact, males can disturb the cycle of the female plants. So the goal of the cultivators to get the male out of there as quickly as it can be identified, basically. Yeah. And weed is actually good moniker for pop because it spreads very easily. Pollen is like 24 microns, which apparently is very easily windborne and goes very great distances. There's very few obstacles to pollinization. So if you have female plants and you have what you suspect to be a mail plan, anywhere nearby. You want to get rid of the mail plan, right. And then tell the officer they must have just blown over here and taken roots. 800 plants in my backyard came from my neighbor right there. Pollen is 24 microns. Come on. Yeah. He says, tell your story to the judge, my friend. Right. There are about we should also say there are hermaphroditic plants, hermaphroditic plants that feature both male and female flowers. Those are probably a mess. Yeah, I think or maybe that's a good thing. I think it's like a lot of hybrid ones are hermaphroditic. Okay. Yeah. Well, there are hundreds of chemicals in the marijuana plant, 109 of which are cannabinoids. About 33 are cancer causing. And we'll get to that stuff later, too. But ironically, they also are cancer killing. Some of them. It is an unplanned yeah, but we're going to get to all that stuff, too. Right. Okay. And your THC is really the main psychoactive ingredient. What's the long name for it? Delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol. That is THC. That is what the high that you're seeking? It lies within that chemical. Yeah. And actually you can point to the part of the plant where it is if you've ever seen a marijuana plant and it has kind of this hazy appearance from far away, and you get up close and you realize that haze is actually made up of a bunch of little clear, sticky protrusions coming off of the leaves. Those are called trichomes. And that is where the THC is stored. That's right. And depending on the plant and the variety and how it's grown and when it's harvested and the genetics and how you process it, that's all going to affect the THC level. And as a cultivator, your goal is to have the THC level as high as you can get it. Yeah, that is up for debate as well. From what I've seen, apparently they're just going higher and higher and higher as far as THC content goes. And there's a lot of recreational pot users and medicinal pot users. We're seeing too much. Dude has a bit about how when he was in the 70s, he could smoke, like, a whole joint and be like, totally mellow or cool. I was saying it takes, like, one hit and you go totally insane. And apparently there is, like, a point where it's just like, that's too much. Well, Louis C cake can afford better pot these days, too. No, but you're right. It all depends on the end user, what they're into. Sure. But generally speaking, the cultivator wants to deliver the most bang for the buck. You would think so. Sure. So, Chuck, let's figuratively smoke some pot and follow it through the body. Okay, you know what? We probably shouldn't do this ourselves. No, we like our jobs. Exactly. Yeah. And we might be fired for even figuratively smoking pot. Well, yeah. And who wants to? How about that scruffy looking guy? Farmer Ted. Yeah. Look at him. He's game. So a lot of people don't know this, but we have a friend named Farmer Ted who has the very strange characteristic of having entirely translucent skin. He's kind of like the Invisible Man or something like that. Yeah. And what better person than to follow the trail of THC in the human body than you can actually see? Yeah. Because the rest of his organs or anything aren't translucent. It's just a skin. Yeah. And thank you for coming in, Ted. So Ted is going to smoke a joint, a marijuana cigarette. Yes. And he's going to smoke what is a typical marijuana cigarette, approximately 500 milligrams of marijuana, which translates to roughly, I don't know, maybe ten milligrams of THC. Okay. So he's going to take a lighter and take it to the end of this joint. I'm making air quotes here because it's vernacular, and the THC is going to be burned and carried into his lungs. So Farmer Ted is kind of high already. Yeah. The THC in the smoke is carried to the Aviola in the lungs, and the Avioli is where gas exchange occurs. It's where your oxygen deprived blood comes to get a refill of oxygen to be replenished. And since there's THC smoke present in that oxygen in the lungs, the THC is going to hit your ride into the bloodstream and travel through the body. It just takes seconds. Yeah. One of the places it's going to go is the brain. And when it hits the brain, it starts doing some pretty funky stuff. That's right. We could ask Farmer Ted how he's feeling right now, and he'll probably say, yeah, he can't talk. He might say that my eyes are dilating and the colors are a lot more vivid. Yeah. I'll be hungry soon. I'll be hungry soon. My other senses are enhanced as well. But hold on, I'm starting to feel paranoid. Yes. Let's get into this. Let's get into how pot affects the brain, because it is pretty gosh darn interesting, if you ask me. Yes. And this is how the physiological effects the end user might have different reactions to it that make everyone paranoid, necessarily. No. And I've really looked into it hard to find out why some people are paranoid and some people don't. Part of it is, well, there's two things. One, and I didn't find anything definitive, which I'm sad about. But the two things I came up with, one, it depends on the pot. Sure. If there is a difference between indica and sativa, the prevailing wisdom is that if you smoke indica, you're going to be less likely to be paranoid. Okay. The other reason is it would depend probably on the existing brain chemistry of the user. My brain chemistry is not the same as yours. Right. Neither one of ours is the same as Jerry. So, of course, when we introduce a psychoactive chemical into that chemistry, it's going to affect it differently. Yeah. So that's what I came up with, basically. I wonder if one of the reasons indica is less likely is because that's the couch bound one, and you're less likely to be paranoid sitting on your couch rather than the more active one. Like smoking and going to the Renaissance Festival, where you'd be freaked out, where you'd meet John Strickland and he would mess with you if you found out you were stoned. Anyway, I'm curious. Yeah, it makes sense. There's recent research that shows the cannabinols there's a precursor chemical to them that's called cannabidiologic acid. CBD. Right. And CBD has been found that to actually counteract the schizoid effects of pot, like the stuff that makes you paranoid, that symptom. If you smoke a pot that has a higher CBD to THC ratio, maybe it's even or something like that, the CBD is going to cut down on the schizophrenic symptoms while leaving, like, the rest of the stuff intact. Interesting. Isn't that weird? So I wonder if indicated just by nature, has a higher CBD content. Yeah, maybe so. There are people that know this. Okay, so back in the 60s, there was a researcher his name escapes me, who started looking into what the heck made pot make you loco? And he found THC. So THC was isolated in the from that they reverse engineered how THC affected the brain and effectively discovered an entire system that we didn't know existed, thanks to pot research. It's called the endocannabinoid system, and it's a very ancient system that's found in everything from sea squirts to every vertebrate on the planet, including sea squirts? Sea squirts. Very primitive animals all the way up to us. Well, I know that I didn't quite get the endocannabinoid part, so take it away. Okay. I know it works backwards. Yes, that's a very important point. So, you know, when we do anything from our brain, says, grab coffee mug, right. To us thinking about how we're feeling at any given point. All of that is based on the transmission among neurons, right? Yeah, we've covered that a lot. The neurotransmitters kind of cover that gap between the neurons and deliver the message. Right. And then depending on where the neurotransmitter is and what chemicals come across, then different things happen. Right. Well, the endocannabinoid system is this kind of dimmer switch that is around all neurons that work backward to kind of say, whoa, let's not pump those neurochemicals out as frequently or in as much abundance. Right. And the whole point of the endocannabinoid system is to maintain homeostasis or good for your yin. Good for your yang. Right. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Okay. So when you smoke pot, your endocannabinoid system, which has receptors all throughout the body, there's CB two receptors, which are mainly associated with your immune system. And then CB one receptors are throughout the brain. And when you smoke pot, the cannabinoids, the phytocannabinoids, which is THC in this case, go. Into these regions of your brain and stick to your brain, to your endocannabinoid receptors. Yeah. They basically just kind of hijack the system. So the systems that the endocannabinoid receptors are meant to regulate are no longer being regulated by our body's endocannabinoids. They're being hijacked by THC, which is not subject to our body's whims and all that. We just basically have to ride that snake out until it's over. So you end up with all these different weirdo symptoms that you normally wouldn't have, which is basically the result of your endocannabinoid system going haywire because it's been hijacked by THC. Right. So, like your hippocampus. Yes, we've talked about that. That's good for learning. Yeah, it is. And when the endocannabinoid receptors are full of THC, you're not learning or making memories as well as normal. Yeah. We're talking short term memory. It definitely impairs that. And that's why if you've ever hung out with a bunch of potheads, you'll hear the phrase, what are we just talking about? Quite a lot, because it's going to affect the hippocampus in that way. Yeah. You're not forming memories. It's also going to affect your coordination, which is the cerebellum. So you may be a little clumsier, and then you have the basal ganglia, and that directs your unconscious muscle movements. Yeah. So the reason Farmer Ted is paranoid, he doesn't like the plant looking at them the way it is. Right. He's paranoid because his basomedial amygdala has been affected. Endocannabinoid receptors have been hijacked by THC, and it's this region of the brain where we learn to fear dangerous situations. Farmer Ted is learning to fear things you normally wouldn't fear. Right. Because the endocannabinoids that the body normally makes are not operating the way that they're supposed to be. So he's not afraid of that plant. Now, aren't the endocannabinoids the same system that they have finally pinpointed the munchies or activates the munchies? Yeah. And your hypothalamus, your ghrelin production. Remember ghrelin? It's that chemical that makes you feel hungry, so you go eat your ghrelin production and absorption is mediated by endocannabinoids in the hypothalamus, which gets hijacked by THC, which suddenly all food looks irresistible. Yeah. And which is why it is prescribed for people going through chemotherapy and other things because they lose their appetite and lose a lot of weight. And aside from helping to stem nausea, it also will stimulate the appetite. Yeah. So that's the endocannabinoid system, and that is how pot affects it, I feel like. Yes. We left out the biggest part. It also causes a release in dopamine, which is what makes you feel high. Sure. Any euphoric feeling comes from that release of dopamine. But it's also possible that any paranoia or the schizoid symptoms that come along with it are from too much dopamine. Right. Too high a release of dopamine can lead to feelings of paranoia and anxiety. Yeah. And these feelings, the effect of THC period is going to last a couple of hours, depending on, obviously, how good the pot is and how much you smoked. Right. But the chemicals are going to be in your body a lot longer than that with the terminal half life of 20 hours to ten days after you've smoked it. So if you're one of the how many percentage of companies drug test? 57%. Yeah. 50 something. 53 maybe. Yes. Depending on your weight and how much you smoked and how long you smoked. 57. You're right. You're going to either pass that drug test or not. It can stay in your body for weeks, though. Yeah, there's no way to tell because it depends on you, your metabolism and the pot. The potency of the pot, too, but yeah, your body breaks it down into five metabolites, and they test for all five just using a basic immunosay where they introduce an antibody to your urine and it reacts or doesn't react and turns. It a pretty color. A pretty bad color. All right, Chuck, we got a little more on the body. Okay. But we'll get to it after this break. 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 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 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. Okay, farmers, head back up. Let's abuse you some more. Although he seems like he's enjoying it, he's a little cooler now. He was petting that plant, I think, made up. Yeah. Good. So if you can see his liver right here. Right there. So farmer Ted is going to eat some pot this time. Okay. So what's going to happen? He has ingested pot orally one way or another, whether cooked in a brownie or just eating the pot. Sure. And the body is going to take this and break it down, metabolize it, and send it to the liver. And when this happens, the THC is going to hit the bloodstream in his stomach anyway. So it's going to get some sort of buzz or whatever, but in the liver, he's going to metabolize it into another psychoactive chemical that isn't really present when you smoke it. So the effects aren't quite as pronounced, but they last longer. And there's an additional weirdo thing to it. Well, it's going to take longer, but last longer and the effects of it. Yeah, exactly. But there's also the extra psychoactive chemical that's produced in the liver that's not really produced when you smoke it. Yeah. Isn't that weird? It is weird. And it's also the reason why new young travelers to Amsterdam want to try their first pot brownie. They don't think it's working. Then they try another one. And this is the one you see, like, sitting alongside the canal rocking themselves. Yes. Because it takes a little while. It does. When you ingest it via smoke, it's almost instantaneous. When you ingest it by eating it, it's going to take a lot longer. That's right. So I guess we should talk a little bit about whether or not it's addictive, because that's another raging debate for years and years. How addictive is pot? There are all kinds of studies that contradict one another, and I think it's one of these things that probably comes down to the person somewhat, if you have that addictive personality. But they do see effects of pot cessation, irritability, anxiety, depression, maybe sleeplessness and insomnia, restlessness. And that's if you quit the pot after having been a user. And it's psychologically addictive, like any drug, you're going to crave it if you want it. Sure. Apparently, it can have an impact on your levels of anxiety. Like, you might not feel anxious when you're stoned, but you could feel anxious when you're not stoned, so you get stoned more often. Right. Which, while not necessarily a classic addiction, because the addiction model follows strictly the limbic system. And pot, I think, activates it somewhat, but it's not really acting specifically on that, acting more on the endocannabinoid system. So indirectly, it might be hitting the limbic system, but it's not following that classic addiction route. Yeah, but at the very least, that's habitual. If you need to smoke something to get back to normal, that's a habit and a bad one. Because you have a crutch there. Yes. Unless you're willing nelson and then you're just like, what's the problem? You just keep smoking it. I love my crushes, Willie Nelson. Well, I guess we can talk about some of the medicinal uses. We did talk about cancer and AIDS patients to stimulate appetite. The old glaucoma card is a big one to play if you're applying for your medical marijuana guard. It relieves eye pressure. I couldn't find how it does that. Yeah, but that's one of the earliest uses of it. You remember I remember when all this first started to hit. Yeah. California passed legal medicinal marijuana in. It was almost all glaucoma at the time, in which it seemed like everybody was like, you are so faking. Right. Glaucoma. You need pop for glaucoma. And then it just became more and more established as factor became associated with helping more and more maladies. And of course, if you go to get your card and you go to the dispensary, they have a long list of things that it can help. Right. Basically anything you can think of, yes, they will put on their list. As long as you have a prescription card. I think they're cool with that. Well, no, that's to get the card. Oh, got you. Like the card. Doctor wears birkenstocks. Yeah. You can probably get an additional marijuana card from them, but don't see him for anything else. It can help with epileptic seizures. In fact, here in Georgia, that's been on the table due to a famous story of a boy here in Georgia whose seizures were massively cut down by taking marijuana oil, which has no THC, like the kids not getting high, basically. It doesn't have psychoactive properties. No. And Georgia is, believe it or not, trying to speed through. I know it didn't go through initially a few weeks ago, just because I think they didn't have time to get it through. Right. But there seems to be support for it. Yeah, very surprising. Yeah. Just for the marijuana oil though, not like dispensaries or anything like that. Yeah, well, I mean, it could be the beginning of it or it could be a sea change in how in Georgia, some states legalized marijuana. I'd be surprised. But I'm wondering if it's a change like, okay, if this medicinal marijuana oil works, we can legalize that and that's it. That'll be like the model for other states. Oh, I see what you mean. And then Ms multiple sclerosis decreases muscle spasms. And I've seen this firsthand with a good friend. It really helps him out. And Montel Williams has famously come out as an Ms sufferer who is a longtime advocate for using marijuana. Well, it makes sense again. I mean, if you're having muscle spasms, perhaps your endocannabinoid system is not functioning correctly and the THC goes in and actually supplements it. And also, I remember I said that it fights cancer. Yeah. If you go into cancer dot gov and type cannabis and medicinal cannabis, I think it brings up basically a laundry list of all of the ways that marijuana helps. And it's been found to fight to destroy cancer cells. Like THC goes in and destroys cancer cells in the liver. Apparently it's been shown to destroy breast cancer cells, not helps you feel better when you have cancer. Can actually cure cancer? Well, in some cases it was a carcinoma in the liver that it was shown to be able to cure. So it's definitely worth checking out too. That's awesome. And it also alleviates pain and inflammation associated with injury or disease. The way it does that is with the other cannabinoid receptors, the CB, two receptors in the body are related to the immune system. So it goes in and messes with those and says, hey, everybody calm down. Let's stop being so inflamed. I guess that's why it's prescribed a lot for arthritic conditions these days. Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah. Rheumatoid arthritis, is that what it's called? Yeah, I don't know what the difference is between rheumatoid and regular arthritis. You should do an arthritis. All right, let's do it. How about that? Despite all the medical research, it is still scheduled or classified as a schedule one substance, which is the most dangerous drugs that currently have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. And there have been many pushes over the years to get it reclassified. And not in the same group as heroin and cocaine and ecstasy. No, but that has not been successful as of yet. But I think that will probably happen at some point soon. It seems like it's going that way, but supposedly around the time Normal was founded, the National Organization for the Re Legalization of Marijuana legislation. Is that right? I'm pretty sure. Okay. It's quite a mouthful. I went to everybody Normal festivals, e seven P month park in the Normal rally, hash Bash. Yeah, I saw the black crows there once. It was great. Right? But yeah, Normal was found in the when it looked like Carter was president, willie Nelson had smoked a joint on the White House roof. It was the time for pot to be decriminalized. And everybody thought like, it's going to happen, it's happening, it's happening. And apparently, no, it didn't happen. They pulled back from the brink. So it's entirely possible that what looks right now to be the wind of change that is very much sweeping through the country, it could be stopped. Baffled? I guess. So the fat lady has not sung yet. Well, I think the first step toward the federal and the difference here is federal laws versus state laws. It's still federally not accepted, but in states like, course, Colorado and Washington and then how many states have medical? Like 1120 or 20. Yeah. Okay. If anything's going to happen federally, it's got to be reclassified away from schedule one first. Right. So until that happens, you're probably not going to see any federal laws enacted. No or repealed. And we should say the mood of the country right now is about split a little bit in favor toward ProPot. Yeah. So like in Washington and Colorado, both votes were like 554-4554 three, something like that. And a CBS poll from 2014, I think in January found about the same 55% of Americans favor legalizing pot opposed to like, I think 44%. 43%. Yeah. So it's clearly moved out of just the hippie sonars at the Normal rally into people supporting that kind of legislation that don't even use marijuana because there is a groundswell of support that, hey, it's not a schedule one drug. It's not a schedule one drug. Alcohol is more destructive to your life and your body. And why are you going to outlaw this plant and put people in prison with a war on pot that isn't working? Right? It's like wasting money, whereas we could tax it and raise money. So there's been a big tidal shift in the past decade, really? In the past 20 years, but in the past ten years. If you asked me ten years ago if there would be recreational use allowed in any state, I would have said probably not. Right. But here we are with Washington and Colorado. Here we are, like, where you can grow it, you can buy it, and I don't know how much, but I think you're allowed to have a certain small amount, right? Yeah. But you can't drive around \u00a310 in your trunk or anything. I don't know how much you can it's definitely more than just, like, a small amount, and you can just literally go to the store and buy pot. There's actually an awesome new Yorker article called buzzkill from late last year, and it's about this economist that Washington state hired to basically create the framework for their legal pot industry. Like the economic model. Yeah. And on a macroeconomic level, on a micro economic level, whether you like it or not, you're going to be competing with dealers still. And so you want to make your tax money, but you don't want to make so much that you price yourself out of the market and the black market stays open. You want to get rid of the black market by basically competing against them, competing them out of business. Right. And there's all these different factors that this guy was kind of laying out, and it was really interesting. Buzz kill. Check that out. Yeah. All right, let's take another break here, and then when we get back, we'll talk a bit about the potency of marijuana over the years. Hi, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need, right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right. There's a debate that I don't quite understand about the potency of marijuana in like, the versus today. The debate is that pod is much more potent than it was in the all. They didn't test a wide variety of marijuana strains in the it was like stems and seeds. Mexican, like raggedy. Yeah. So that's the only way you can tell a true test of potency is to study a wide variety. They never did that. They didn't test the Maui Waui. They never did that in the can't go back in a time machine. So what's the point in debating it? The pot today is how it is. It is. And basically the best you could hope to do is have Dennis Hopper smoke some pot and be like, huh? And he can be like, oh, he's dead. Hopper is dead. I just saw him on like an insurance commercial years ago. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's sad. Sorry. A state of Dennis Hopper. Get Willie Nelson, though. Peter Fonda. Yeah, he's alive. Okay, so you just have Peter Fonda tell you. He can tell you. There's plenty of people who could say the point is that is largely irrelevant because we're not dealing with creating pot policy based on the we're dealing with pot policy today. And we know very clearly that pot is more potent today than it was even a couple of decades ago. And we know that in part because of something called the University of Mississippi Potency Monitoring Project. Basically they get their hands on seized pot that the cops get their hands on. Yeah. They send some of it to Mississippi. And Mississippi tested it for potency and they said that between 1993 and 2008, the average amount of THC across all samples rose from 3.4% to 8.8% from 93 to 2008. And it's going up apparently now with the rise of dispensaries and the openly shared knowledge of how to cultivate and do what you want to genetically select for it's up to like 25% supposedly. And I didn't see that figure disputed. 25% THC content. That's insane. That will drive you and say I can't imagine that if the average is 8.8, it was 3.4 and 1993 and is now up to 25%. That's potent. Yeah. And that's I guess for the top of the line most expensive pot you can buy. Yeah. But I predict that there's going to be like kind of a retro vintage pushback, a return to flag. Not necessarily that, but something that's like way more toned down or it'll be like marketed to people who don't want that level of high, I guess. Yeah, like 70s weed. Yeah, like all they have to do to market it. Green leisure suit or something like that. Yeah. Boom. Success. Although I don't know if anybody would want to go back to the 70s because I think it really was very low potency, comparatively speaking. Yeah. All right. Should we cover some of the ways that it smoked? Well, I already covered the joint. Right. Yes. That's what Slim had. Slim had the joint. I do know that Slim happens to prefer the blunt. Oh, yeah. And that is a cigar that is sliced open and tobacco is taken out and generally mixed back in with some of the pot. I is that right? Yes, it's called a blunt. I didn't know that the tobacco was ever mixed back in. It depends on I mean, you don't have to like a split is popular in Europe that's with regular tobacco, like drum. Yeah, whatever. Just any kind of loose leaf tobacco mixed in with the pot. Yes. I think the blunts usually they take most of the cigar tobacco out. I think you're probably right. And then you don't even need to buy a cigar. Now they have blunt wrappers, like, basically cigar rolling papers. Oh, really? Yeah, and flavored ones, too. Yeah, I've heard of those. Interesting things. You can have your just traditional pipe. If you go into any head shop, you're going to find a big variety of all sorts of handmade glass pipes. Or remember the brass ones with the little kind of tiedye plastic thing in the middle for holding because the brass would get so hot, apparently. No, I remember that. Do you remember that from the 90s? Did you go to Lapalooza? Yeah, I went to Lapalooza. Well, then you saw those things. Okay. I remember the first time I smelled pot. It was at a concert. Yeah. And it was, like, 13, and it was such a foreign I think I've talked about this on the show. I was like, what in the world is that? I've never smelled anything like that in my life. Like someone burning a spare tire or something. Yeah, and then you've got the bong or water pipes, and that uses water to, I guess, cool down the smoke. Right. And I remember that from the Scott Bayo after school special. Stoned, did you ever see that one? No. I saw Zapped. That was a regular movie. But he was growing pot in that one. He's growing it at school. Yeah. And Stone was one of the classic after school specials where he was a pothead that ended up accidentally killing his brother or something. Like he went swimming and knocked him on the head with the ore of a boat by he may not have died, though. He may have rescued them. The after school special that I remember most vividly is the one where Helen Hunt took PCP oh, yeah. And jumped out the window of her school. I mean, they scared the pants off of it. Yes. Which is the point. And Nancy Reagan was off on the set like mor. But I remember hearing the bong. He smoked out of the bong. Scott Bayo did, and I heard that the bubbling sound and I was like, well, that's a weird sound. And then you heard it on the Cypress Hill album years later and you're like, hey, Scott Bayo. And then, of course, we talked about the edibles and vaporizing, which is like, all the rage these days. Yeah. And I imagine it just hit me the other day. I'll bet everyone who smokes pot uses ecigarettes as like, little vaporizer. One headers, don't they? Some do. I would imagine so, yeah. In fact, you can buy, like, pre made cartridges of hash oil and things to stick in your little e cigarette. I know they sell those in Colorado. Stick that in your ecigarette. But we should point out we say kids these days, and teenagers. Although marijuana use and teenagers has escalated over the years, you can't pin it down to one demographic. I think you'd be surprised if everybody who smoked pot on a semi regular basis was outed about who you would see. I've heard stories from friends whose fathers were like, CEO executives, and they had cannabis clubs where all the other CEOs that they were friends with grew their own specialty pot and traded it among each other. So a wide range of people use it, although the vast majority supposedly I don't know if vast majority is right, although according to polls or surveys, the vast majority are teenagers, followed by post teens. Yeah, but between marijuana use among teenagers doubled. And you know what, I lay that almost exclusively, at least at first, at the feet of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. You think so? I put it out there yes. With The Chronic. Absolutely. Yeah. That was a great album. Yeah. When I hear that album, I think of Street Fighter Two. Did you play a lot of that? Then? We would sit around in college, listen to the chronic and play Street Fighter Two. Yeah, it was a good album. It was a great game. I never really played street fire. Yeah, they were really good. So I found a study here I have to interject one other thing. Okay. Have you seen the YouTube of Mike Tyson clips set to Street Fighter sound effects? It's pretty awesome. From his one man show? No, from his boxing career. And it fits, like, perfectly. He's like, sure, you're getting at one point, I have to see that. So if you're smoking pot, it's obviously not going to be great for your lungs and your body because you're inhaling smoke. And like we said earlier, there are 33 cancer causing chemicals in marijuana and it's going to deposit tar into your lungs, just like cigarettes. And in fact, if you smoke equal amounts of marijuana and regular tobacco, it's going to deposit about four times as much tar as regular tobacco. What's called the tar burden. Is it? However, there was a large scale long term study released recently by the University of Alabama at Birmingham and they collected data from 5000 adults for more than 20 years, which these are always my favorite studies, because you can tell stuff long term. And they found that low to moderate use of pot is less harmful to your lungs than exposure to tobacco. And I think they measured air flow rate, which is the speed, which you can blow out air, and then lung volume, which is the amount of air you can hold in your lungs. And they found that with tobacco, there's a one to one relationship. The more you lose, the more loss you have lung wise. And with marijuana up to a certain rate, it actually increased the airflow rate. And their rationale was that a cigarette smoker, like a moderate to heavy smoker, smoking like 20 cigarettes a day. Sure. Whereas no one's going out there and smoking. Well, that's not true. 20 joints a day. Yeah, but it would be probably less than that because it's more concentrated. But you don't see people smoking five joints a day either, unless they have their Willie Nelson snoop Dogg. I'm sorry? Snoop lion. Is he still on Snoop Lion? I think so. I could see how pot would have an effect on your lungs, though, as well, especially compared to cigarettes, because no one uses a filter on their joints. Well, yeah, and you inhale deeper with marijuana than you do with tobacco, so those are both factors. Yeah, but if you're smoking a pack a day and you're smoking a lot of weed, you're not doing yourself any favors in the long department. Yes. Even though it might help you fight that cancer. It may give you cancer to begin with. Yeah. Just use non psychoactive marijuana oil like they give that little kid or Marinol, although that's psychoactive. It's a THC pill. Yeah, they use it for, like, wasting disease and increased appetite and that kind of stuff, just to mess with the endocannabinoid system of people who need it. That's right. You got anything else? No. I mean, this could have been a two parter, but this is a good overview. I think it is. I hope everybody enjoyed it. Yeah, you learned a little something. Anything else? No. If you want to learn more about marijuana, aka cannabis, type either of those words into the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And let's see, since we said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Australian smokejumper. Hey, guys, just thought I'd like to let you know how you've influenced a major change in my life a couple of years ago now, you did a podcast on Wildfires. I already had a strong interest in firefighting, but never heard of the things like smoke jumpers or some of the science involved since I joined the Rural Fire Service last year as a volunteer, and last week I completed my first full bushfire fighter accreditation. Wow. It's been a great change. And it's inspired me to get fitter and more active with my community. I'm. Now working towards getting fit and fast enough to be a smoke jumper, which we call raft units in Australia Remote Area Fire Task Force. So thanks guys, for giving me the inspiration and drive to get out there and challenge myself. I could imagine doing anything else in my spare time. Now, as always, love the show. 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c430c7e0-5460-11e8-b38c-fb4d9f2a48dd | SYSK Selects: How Labor Unions Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-labor-unions-work | Yes, it's true: Unions have a shady mob-related past and were originally championed by anarchists. Born from medieval trade guilds, these organizations also helped grow the American economy, and not only protected but established workers' rights. | Yes, it's true: Unions have a shady mob-related past and were originally championed by anarchists. Born from medieval trade guilds, these organizations also helped grow the American economy, and not only protected but established workers' rights. | Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=109, tm_isdst=0) | 47810437 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone. Since its political season, I thought for this Saturday Select, we'd go back in time to May 22, 2012, and learn a little bit about labor unions. That's bound to be a hot topic in debates and as we ramp up to the primary season or through the primary season into the dreaded November date. But give it a listen. Educate yourselves on how labor unions work right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant, which makes this stuff you should know. Heck no, we won't go that's different. Heck no, we won't record that's more along the lines of what we're talking about. Better pay for podcasters. Yes. As a matter of fact, we could get together with Adam Curry and Joe Rogan and Mark Manner, maybe even IRA and form, like some sort of local he would be our Jimmy Hoffa. Yeah, IRA would be is that a threat? No. Are you threatening Iraqi? No. He would be our Jimmy Hoffa. He would make things happen. James P. Hoffa. The one that the current Teamsters president. Either one. I'm not saying get rid of them Barium and Giant Stadium. I'm saying IRA would make it happen. He would break legs. Okay. If need be. Well, he's well, not a thing. There's a leg breaking goon. So for those of you who have already seen the title of this, you understand the banter, I guess. Sure. If you have no idea what we're talking about, I'll bet you guessed by now that we're talking about labor unions today. It's a good one, man. We had this request a lot last year from Scotties, right. When the whole Wisconsin Scott Walker things I know. And we're just not getting to it because the Scott Walker thing is like my intro. Well, let's hear it. So you remember last year in Wisconsin? Yeah. There was this big hubbub that was going on, and a lot of people were wondering if this is going to be like the beginning of the Arab Spring in the United States. This is going to be the flashpoint for it because Governor Scott Walker was accused of trying to de unionize the public sector employees. State employees. Yeah. Through a little bit of legislation that he was trying to introduce. That is very true. And it caused quite a stir. Like thousands of protesters. Yeah, there was some serious protests going on. And at the heart of this whole thing with some legislation where he was trying to get the public sector employees unions to get their union members eg the public ie. The public sector employees. Yes. Ie means that is eg is for example, I realized that to basically pay in half of their pensions to give up some other concessions, like if they were going to get a raise, that had to be through public referendum. Yeah. Anything over rate of inflation, I think. Yeah. But probably the biggest one was that they were stripped of their ability to collectively bargain. Yeah, that was the big one. And it worked. It got pushed through. And now if you are a state employee union member in Wisconsin, you can't collectively bargain anymore, which means you are effectively neutered as a union member. In a lot of ways, that is one of the hallmarks of the unions, and depending on where you come from, what you believe, who raised you, whether or not your grandpa was still alive when you were old enough to understand what he was talking about. I think that largely depends on how you feel about unions. A lot of people think they're a good thing. A lot of people think they're bad. A lot of people think they're necessary. A lot of people think they're evil. A lot of people think they're a necessary evil. And in fact, they're kind of america, as it stands, is kind of split down the middle these days. A Pew poll that was taken during this whole hubbub in Wisconsin showed that 45% of Americans had a positive view of organized labor. Okay. Which I found surprising. You thought that was high? Yeah, I was surprised because the decline of union has also been attended by a change in perception toward them, like they're kind of bad or that the Hamstring business is another big one. But they also found that 51% still believe unions are needed to improve working people's lives. Right. So necessary evil. I nailed it. You did. And unsurprisingly. A lot of times your feelings on unions are drawn along political lines these days. Yeah. They're often as huge as being, like an organizing backbone for the Democratic Party. Sure. But that's not always true. Like very frequently, unions throw their weight and their support behind Republicans as well. Sure. At any rate, let's get to the bottom of what all this is. Our union is good. We're probably going to avoid this kind of qualitative descriptor and instead just kind of stick to the facts and let the people decide. Power to the people to decide whether unions are good or not. I think that's a good move, Josh. Thank you. So we got stats. We'll get to those later. Unions, Josh. Industrial Revolution is kind of where actually, we go back further, which we will. With what? Medieval times. Yeah. The Trade guilds. Trade Guilds sort of were the beginning seeds of the unions. And they originally sort of came about, though, just to swap techniques and recipes and then that sort of evolved a bit into, hey, why don't we get together and also share aside from our knowledge, get together and maybe share expertise on how to do things better and get better wages, maybe, or fixed prices. That's one. Yeah. Before they figured out that that was immoral. This is medieval Europe a long time ago. Yeah. And the trade guilds were definitely the origin of unions. It's just a bunch of workers getting together and figuring out, because this is essentially what a union is, that they have more strength in numbers. Exactly. And it's also an indication of workers understanding their value in the production process. Sure. That what they're essentially doing in return for their salary is producing a profit for business. You have labor and business. Right. And that gives them a certain sense of value, whereas in a lot of situations, workers feel like they're very grateful for their job and they don't want to make any waves or anything like that, and they're not fully aware of their value. And unions, one of the roles that unions play is to point out to a worker, hey, you're doing something in return. This isn't some sort of welfare situation that you're involved in. You're producing labor and that has value. Yeah. And certain rights as well. Exactly. All right, so flash forward a bit to the Industrial Revolution, 19th century, things moved away a little bit from agricultural jobs moved into the factories, as we all know, and kind of right off the bat, factories weren't a good scene for fair wages and safe conditions and kids working in factories and women and children not being paid as much as men. Triangle Shirt Waste Fire. That was a big turning point. What was the Triangle Shirt Waste Company fire where the working conditions were really dangerous. It was a clothing company, clothing manufacturer, I think in Chicago or New York, I can't remember. And it caught fire, the factory did, because there was all this fabric in the air. Right. And it just ignited, and the whole place went up, and all of these women had to jump to their deaths. And that kind of brought working conditions into the limelight and helped their union sentiment, I guess. A flashpoint, if you will. Exactly. From your favorite Mr. Cladwell tipping point of tipping point. Good Lord. Get it together, Chuck. Okay, I've got it together now. Tipping point. Yeah. I had to take a little break. In the 19th century, they would do things called striking, which they still do today. But back then, it was a more contentious and violent affair than it is today. Like, people died, bombs went off, guns were shot. Yeah. And it was on both sides, too. I mean, the workers were striking. The point was the same where we're not working anymore, and you're not going to make any money because we're not producing the product that you need to go sell. Right. But during these times, like, the National Guard would show up, or the cops would show up, or maybe the Pinkerton Detective Agency would show up and just start beating the tar out of the striking workers in order to scare them back into working. Workers also would defend themselves. There was this one I can't remember what strike it was. I just read about it, where the workers managed to chase the cops off. Really? Because they were shooting two pound hinges in these oversized slingshots, like at the cops. And I can imagine getting hit by a two pound hinge. So it's a hinge factory. It had to have been. Yeah, sure. But yeah. So the strikes were very violent. People, like you said, would die, and the cops are like, why couldn't the cotton ball factory have been on strike? But not funny, though, because people did die. Not making a lot of it. Like the Haymarket riot for incidents. That was a big one. For instance, that was a turning point, a flash point, if you will. It was early May, 1886. There was a nationwide strike saying, we only want to work 8 hours a day. And in Chicago's Haymarket, there was a violent protest. Not a lot of people were there because the weather, thank goodness, because someone threw a bomb into the crowd, went off, and shots were fired by the cops, maybe by the protesters. They were not just striking laborers, but they were anarchists there. And those anarchists, they are trouble. Well, this is one of the places where, in the public imagination, at least, that anarchists and socialists became married to labor. Like pro labor. Yeah. And that's always kind of haunted labor unions, is that idea. But it was born out of this era, if not this riot, I'm sure. Yeah. In the end, eight people were charged and convicted. The labor leaders try to get them out, saying, this is not fair. One of the people committed suicide by placing a stick of dynamite in his mouth in prison. Yeah. In the end, a few years later, the governor of Illinois granted a full pardon to the remaining three convicted, and that ended up leading to an observance of Mayday or Labor Day in other countries. Right. May 1. It's supposed to be Labor Day. This whole affair, though, you left out that four of the guys who are convicted were hanged, and then one guy committed suicide, and then three were but they were charged with basically agitating violence. This was back when free speech wasn't protected quite as much as it is now. Right. And they were pardoned. And as a result, this whole Mayday thing, this Labor Day thing came up in May 1. But then within five years, Grover Cleveland was like, well, this is kind of a sordid, like, scary association with labor. Let's just celebrate labor. I'm going to move it to the first Saturday. No, the first Monday. Monday in September. Saturday be no good because we wouldn't get off work. Exactly. Did he move it to disassociate from that interesting. Specifically. So that's why you can't wear white after September. Exactly. That's exactly the origin of that. All right, so maybe let's talk about some of the basics of a labor union. Josh, there's many different kinds, and like you said, it's all about strength and numbers to get together to form what's called a bargaining unit with an elected leader to deal with the employer. Right. Because, I mean, think about it. If you have somebody who is advocating for your success, for your rights, higher wages, better conditions, whatever it might be, you are removing yourself to a certain extent from that negotiation. So it's a little less sticky for you. Sure. Because you're not talking to your employer. You're not saying, I really want some more money. Somebody else is going, these guys are making a bunch of money for you and you need to share it a little better. Like an agent. Exactly. Right. In a way. And at the same time, you also have that element of that bargaining unit being a collective bargaining unit, meaning there's that strength in numbers. So it's a bunch of people becoming satisfied at the same time. And implied in there is if you don't do this, then you're going to lose a bunch of people all at once and you're going to have some trouble. Right. And they do this agreement in the form of the CBA or collective bargaining agreement. Any fan of any professional sports will understand what a CBA is and how tenuous they can be. Yeah. Once you have negotiated this agreement and everyone on the employer side says, we can live with these terms, and everyone on the employee site said, yeah, we can live with this. We both give a little bit, they sign it, and it is set for a certain period of time. And you cannot break the CBA on either side without there being legal action or grievances filed, which usually means an arbitrator will come in and say, let me get involved. Right. You, I feel like, just hit the nail on the head, though. For an ideal union presence in business, everyone give a little. Yeah. You know, you can't have too much on one side or the other. But I think that's kind of the history of the presence of unions and business in America. If you look over time, it may be evened out, but if you look at in any specific decade, it's more on one side than the other as far as who's in the beneficial position right. Or who's asking more, who's extracting more like Samuel Gompers, who got together the American Federation of labor. I think when he was asked what the AFL wanted, his answer was more in this quote. Yeah, but at the same time you have to say, well, business isn't going to just give it away. Very rarely do they the whole presence of unions is to extract that. At least that was the original idea of them. Yeah. Unions, like any organization, costs a little money to run, so you have to pay dues. It's a membership thing. Right. If I was in the Screen Actor Skilled, which I'm not, I would pay dues to the Screen Actors Guild every year to keep my membership current, and then they would go fight for me and they would have a staff that gets paid out of that money. Right. I love in here that it says dues vary, but many are around $50 a month. What a deal. Yeah. I think it completely varies depending on what union you're in. So I don't know that you can put an average number or maybe you can if you average it. Well, if you counted them all up, and I don't think that's what they did here. No, it was $50 a month. Yeah. Act now they're also supposed to be democracies with elected officials, elected leaders who take action based on referendums and votes and basically just using voting to take the pulse of the union members to see what they want to do. Ideally, that's how it works. Yeah. I get the feeling it doesn't always work that way throughout history. Yeah. Especially once the Mob got involved. Yes. Which we'll get to a lot of times. You can be local union member, which is sort of like being a fraternity member of a larger national charter. And if you're a local union, that means that you may be working in that same business sector, but you're employed by a different company. But it's like, hey, and I keep going back to film business stuff because they were lousy with union, still are like, hey, I work in the art department. I'm a props guy, so I'm a member of the local I can't remember the number union here in Atlanta, but it's a national charter, probably right out of La. If not mistaken. Yeah. It's like a chapter of a fraternity or a sorority, which is what I said. Yeah. Did you say fraternity or sorority? Yeah. No, you didn't. I said fraternity. Well, you didn't add sorority. No. Good point. Sororities as well, Chuck, what's the point of all this? I think we've kind of touched on a little bit of it, especially in the strength and numbers thing. But there are other benefits to being in a union, correct? Yeah. Should we throw out some stats here? I think this is high time for stats. Your wages, for one. Your median weekly income is going to be, as a union member, about $940. It's going to be about $730 if you're nonunion. Let me see here. You've got something about health care, correct? Yeah. So 88% of union workers and this is from the Department of labor, this isn't like from the AFLCIO or anything, right? 88% of union workers have health coverage. 69% of nonunion workers do. Yeah. Same with dental plans. The disparities even more. 44% of non union workers have dental plans where something like 66% have a dental plan. If you're a member of a union, half of union jobs have vision coverage, and only about a quarter of non union jobs have it. In reading this, also, I was kind of like, man, we have pretty good benefits here at Discovery. Yeah, we do. If you're a minority, if you're a woman, African American or Latino, you're going to make more money. Women earn about 9000 more a year if you're in a union. African Americans 8000 more a year, and Latinos close to 12,000 more a year if you're a union member. Yeah. So aside from safe working conditions and health insurance and things like that, which are great, wages are really the big deal, right? Wages, benefits. Pensions are another huge area as well, and they're also there to protect workers from being unjustly fired. We're non union, and somebody could come in here and say, you know what? I didn't like the way that you looked at your boss. I saw you scowling. You're fired, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired. And we'd be like, you can't do that. And they'd be like, oh, yes, we can. And that would be that, right? There was like a big hub in Florida about some workers that all wore orange, either depending on who you ask, because they were all going to happy hour together that night, or because they were simulating prisoner garb to protest the working conditions of this law firm, which is really what they were doing. And twelve of them were fired. They were just taken into a conference room, and the guy was like, you're all fired. And that's that. And they're like, you can't fire us for wearing an orange shirt. And actually, yes, very much so, since it's a right to work state or an atwill work state. Yeah, right to work. The employer very much can fire you for wearing something as seemingly arbitrary is wearing orange. If you're a union member number, that is not the case. The union protects you from unjust dismissal. And basically, if you feel like you've been fired for wearing orange, you can go to your union rep and a big stink comes about. Right. That's another big one is protecting them. But I also feel like here is a good point to mention a lot of the criticisms of unions, okay. Because that same protection from unjust dismissal, unions are frequently criticized for that extending to workers who perform poorly. Sure. It's part of that give, I think, with unions among labor to say, okay, yes, we're going to protect you, but you have to be productive or you have to be good at your job or whatever. Right. Don't hide under the shield of the union just to go phone in your job every day and collect your paycheck exactly. And flaunt that protection. That's not what it's there for. Another big criticism is that union, just the presence of unions in any country harms economic progress on the whole by hamstringing business and making it less competitive among countries that don't have unions. Right. So for states that have state employee unions, a big one is that state employee pensions can be a drain on tight state economies. Right. That's another big one, too. So there's criticisms of unions that are very legitimate, too. But again, I think it comes down to where your political affiliation is. Well, yeah. I mean, these days, Republicans are more likely to not be in favor of unions, and they have consistently been called the backbone of the Democratic Party. That wasn't always the case, though. The 1950s Republican President Dwight Eisenhower said that unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbored the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving. Working men and women have the right to join the union of their choice. And also throughout history, unions have kind of dabbled outside their own labor negotiations and protection to fight for things like Medicare, Social Security, civil rights. Civil rights is a big one. I think Missouri Congressman Richard Bowling said, quote, we would have never passed the Civil Rights Act without labor. They had the muscle. The other civil rights groups did not. So you don't want to see anyone strong arm, but there is certainly something to be said for strength in numbers, especially when it comes to something like the Civil Rights Act. Yeah. Who was it, Eisenhower, who had that quote about union? Right. Eisenhower speaking at a time that was just after the peak of union membership in 1945, 35% of all non agricultural workers, which is like everybody but farmers, belong to unions now it's down to 11.8%. Yeah. And the public sector, 37%. But where they're really getting hurt is the private sector. Less than 7% of the private sector is unionized these days. Right. And there's a lot of people that say a lot of the problems that we have in Washington and a lot of the financial troubles we've had in this country have been, to a certain degree, because of the non unionizing of the Rust Belt in the private sector. So two sociologists, Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, actually wrote a paper that said that the decline of organized labor unions from the 1970s on can account for as much as a third of the increase in income inequality in the US. Which has been significant, and they can attribute a third of that increase just to the decline of labor. Well, and I think it also coincided with the some say that big business really went hard at Washington, not for the first time, but in a way that they never had before, and that changed the landscape of the distribution of wealth in this country. Yeah, and that's a really interesting point, Chuck. We were raised after that period, so that's just kind of like the Secret of My Success or American Psycho, all those great movies about the 80s or set in the 80s. That's just the way it was. All these you just go after money and you spend that money on cocaine and pinstripe suits and maserati or whatever. We were kind of raised with that sentiment. But there was a time prior to the 1970s where it was labor who was running the charge. It was the unions and they were fully in control. And business figured out how to regroup and reassert itself. And that's the age that we're in now. Back to Eisenhower, though, when he was talking, he was kind of carrying on a tradition where the US. Government figured out that, okay, there is a balance of power that has to be struck between labor and business. Yeah. Because business is part of this economic engine. Labor helps fuel the economic engine. But they really kind of represent two different sectors of the US. Not just the economy, but the population. And we need to keep them happy. We need to strike this balance. So the federal government got involved starting in 1935 with the National Labor Relations Act. And they basically said, okay, we can't have strikes where you guys are shooting two pound hinges at cops and we can't have strikes where cops are like, murdering striking workers. Let's get to the heart of this matter and figure out how to strike a happy balance between what labor wants and what business wants and progress from there. And it was a really smart thing to do, but they figured out that it was very much like Homer trying to keep pinchy lobster alive with the goldfish in that freshwater tank, adding salt, adding water. And that was kind of the mark of the 20th century in American economic history was that adding the salt and adding the water over time through legislation. Yeah. Well, and the NLRA was, like you said, the first one. And prior to that, companies didn't even have to recognize a union or negotiate with a union leader. Right. So this actually required by law that they not necessarily give workers what they want, but they had to at least negotiate in good faith right. And sit down on the table with them. Yeah. Which effectively said, brought unions out of the dark and legalized them and gave them a legal voice and legal recourse. That's right. And to enforce that, they soon pass the National Labor Relations Board to oversee what was going on with the NLRA. And the article points out here that they accomplished three things. It allowed workers to have elections to elect their own union leaders, established laws protecting employees from discrimination based on union activity. So, like, are you union? Well, we don't want to hire you. That kind of thing. Or even worse, like in the case of Ford Motor Company, ford Security Wing, led by Harry Bennett, a 2000 man strong goon squad that used to beat up workers, beat up organizers, beat up union reps, and do it on camera. They really were kind of above the law in a lot of ways, but that was targeted at guys like that for the goons. Yeah. And this kind of sneaks by, but an important thing to note here is an L. RA also protected collective bargaining, even if you're not in a union, and the ability to bargain for better conditions for all workers. So, I mean, the unions was one of the main things, but it protected everybody. But not everybody. There are a bunch of groups that were left out of this. Agricultural workers, domestic service workers, federal, state, and local government employees, which obviously went a different way. Sure. Railroad and airline employees. That one kind of became important, like we talked about in the air traffic control, one under Reagan when he fired all the air traffic controllers who went on strike. Yeah. And that's important, I guess, was that the Taft Hartley that insured? Yeah. Taft Hartley Act came along in 1947. Or the Labor Management Relations Act. And one of the important things it did was said, you know what, if there's any strike that's going to put the public health in danger, then we can issue an 80 day injunction that basically says you cannot strike. Right. And in the case of the, I guess, did that put the country in danger? Necessarily. It put the country's economy in danger. But at the same time, Reagan didn't have to file an injunction through the Labor Relations Board. He fired. Fired. Get back to work. No, you're fired. Man, that guy. I know. And what else did that outlawed secondary boycotts? The Taft Hartley Labor Act, which was a big deal because the example they use here in this article is really good. Like, let's say you're a brewery and you're striking against your employer. You might have a boycott against the glass company that makes the beer bottles just to put the strong arm on the company from another direction. And you can't do that. It's called the squeeze. You can't do the squeeze. It's not legal. You can't as a union, but consumers frequently do that kind of thing. Sure. It's like trying to get like, Rush Limbaugh off there boycotted. A lot of people boycotted his advertisers until they said, you know what, okay, we'll stop advertising with them. And then all of a sudden, Rush Limbaugh has the double squeeze on them. Right. Same with the I can't remember there was some special interest group, some pack that was getting funding from McDonald's, Wendy's, a bunch of people. And because of their alleged unfair and very much pro business only practices, like all of these companies has kind of abandoned them recently. Really? Yeah. Alec. A-L-E-C-I don't remember what it stands for. Alec Baldwin. No. Okay. The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of Josh. What's that all about? Well, this was during a time when the winds had really shifted toward not only the unions having the labor business under their thumb, they also had their union members under their thumb. Right. The mob was involved. The democracy or the democratic basis of unions had eroded. And there. Was a lot of shady stuff going on. What I thought was cool was rather than the federal government going, oh, well, then we need to reinvigorate the power given to business under these union laws. Instead, they went and invested more power in union members. That's right. Yeah. Like, you couldn't use union dues anymore to promote one candidate over another in a union. For union reps, the elections were really pretty heavily monitored from that point on. Every single union member has to be notified by mail at least 15 days before the election. Like, you can't sneak an election by them, which probably used to happen in the old days. Yes. To increase transparency in the whole union thing. There was a lot of disclosure and reporting requirements that were added, and not just for the unions, but for also, like, employers, consultants. They want to know where the money was going, and basically, they wanted to see how the mob was involved as a big one. Right. Well, and speaking of money, I don't think we pointed out that a lot of times unions will have a strike funds, and some of the money that you pay into it will actually pay you when you go on strike to keep you from going hungry. Yeah. It's like Afflac. You know that Gilbert Godfrey doesn't do that anymore, I don't think. I know. And I wonder how ironic would it be if he had Affleck insurance and that it kicked in once Aflac fired him. Interesting. Why do you think he got fired? Because he wanted too much money? No, he got fired for making Twitter jokes about the Japanese tsunami, like the day of I thought it was a money issue. Yeah. I'm worried about the sense of humor in this country in the direction it's going. Stand up comedians have always, almost always been allowed to exempt it from a lot of the standards that average Joe's are held to. Like, they're stand up comedians. It's their job. Sometimes they make taste with jokes and all that stuff. Yeah. They'll go over the line and they'll just go people go and they'll go, what? Too soon? Right, exactly. And then people will be like, yes, it is. But it seems to be open season on comedians. Well, because of platforms that they've never had before. Probably like Twitter, I guess, all of a sudden that's like your official statement instead of a joke you made. Yeah. And the audience is much wider and much more varied and diverse, too. Yeah, true. I bet God reads so pissed off. I would imagine so, because you got to tell me there's, like, not 10,000 people lining up voice actors to go for a huge paycheck. I think you just made a pretty good argument for yourself that wasn't as good as GG. But, I mean, the problem is, I realize what's at risk is cultural sensitivity, even individual sensitivity toward people who are going to be offended or hurt. But also there has to be a balance between that and I mean, the other thing that's at risk is, like, our national sense of humor, which is really important. It's one of the things you could be like, well, that's just a stupid joke. No, our ability to take a joke is a very vital and important thing about keeping us from killing ourselves. And one of the roles that stand up comedians provide, or any kind of comedian provides, is to keep that healthy and vital and going. Agreed. There's nothing more of a turn off to me than when you see a humorless celebrity, like when Ricky Gervais is doing a singing in the golden clubs and you see the people out there that just are offended by this. I'm like, come on, man. Yeah. I don't know. Laugh at yourself. I can see Ricky Gervais being make him a sacrificial lamb. Leave over God for you alone, you know? Man, that was a sidebar. Yes, it was. Are we talking about labor unions? I don't remember labor unions today. Josh, you mentioned the AFLCIO. A lot of people might not know that that is actually a collection to labor federation made up of 54 member unions, 10 million strong. That's a lot of people change. The win is sort of a new one. In 2005, it was formed, but it is also a labor federation encompassing seven unions and 6 million workers. Big time. Yes, the AFL, founded by Samuel Gompers, who I mentioned earlier, and he got some cigar makers and some other industrial laborers together to form that. And then that was in the late 19th century, and I can't remember exactly when, but maybe in the 40s or the 50s, he got together with the CIO to form the AFL CIO because he loves cigars. UAW is a huge one. Auto workers. Yeah. They have something like 1.4 million members. No, I'm sorry. The teamsters has 1.4 million members, and they're the ones who are probably the most well known by the average job, thanks to one jimmy Hoffa. Yeah. Do you know his story? A little bit here and there. The whole mob involvement, I think, with any union was they realized that there's a bunch of guys who are sitting on enormous piles of money, and let's see how much of that we can steal or get our hands on or used to build ourselves casinos. Right. And Jimmy Hoffa was in with these guys, and he just went missing. Right. In 1975. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's any secret would happen to him, but they definitely don't know exactly what happened. I thought the whole point was it was a secret of what happened to him. Well, he was snuffed out. I don't think he just had a heart attack while hiking in the wilderness, and his body decomposed naturally. Well, he was supposedly going he was last seen waiting on two mafia associates. Giveaway too but his son, James P. Hoffa has really kind of brought the family name back tremendously. Yeah. He's the head of the Teamsters today, right? Yes, he is. He's the president of the Teamsters Union and is doing a lot of work toward religitimizing unions again in this country, which is pretty cool. Well, anyone who's ever been on a film set and has seen a 275 pound man eating a doughnut sitting in his truck, you can say, I've met a Teamster and they do great work, and they're basically I can't remember the number, but if you're an industrial worker, you're basically eligible to be a Teamster. Yeah. In just about any kind of industry. I'm going to get hate mail for that? Oh, you'll be fine. There's, like, two guys that you described who listened to this podcast. So you get two pieces of hate mail. If I was a Teamster, I would do nothing but listen to this podcast because you're just sitting around. That's not true. Teamsters do great work, but on film sets, it's sort of the old joke is that they'll park the truck and then they sit in it until they leave in the truck. There was another Simpsons reference, just came up with the one where that film for Radioactive Man comes to town and Homer tries to see who can outlays the Teamsters. Good stuff. That is just a stereotype. Yes, but stereotypes are there for a reason, right? It's not funny. It's not funny. What else? I don't have anything else. You got anything else? No, I think we covered pretty much everything. Yeah, it's a nice broad overview. And like you said early on, man, you hit it on the head, my friend. Thank you. Whether or not you are pro union or anti union largely depends on your family's background. Yeah. It's a very tried and true thing through families, through generations that people feel very strongly about it that are involved in unions or, like, actually, my parents are in the teachers union. Oh, yeah. You're a union kid. Yeah, but it wasn't, like factory stuff. I never heard them, besides complaining about not making up money, which every teacher should complain about. Sure. And if you don't have any kind of passionate feelings about it whatsoever, I would advise you to look into it. Yeah. And if you do have passionate feelings about it, I think a great exercise would be to explore how the other side sees it and see if it changes your mind one way or the other. Look at you. You can do that by reading this fascinating article that we just based this podcast on how unions work. You can type in the search bar athouseofworks.com you could also go into Wapho. There was a pretty cool editorial. That's the Washington Post, by the way. That's right. The Wisconsin Union Fight isn't about benefits, it's about labor's influence. From March 6, 2011. That's a good article. That was a good article, too, and I already said search bar, which means it's time for listening to mail. You know our buddy Joe Garden? He's a scony. He was really upset last year. You can tell. You can see right through his skin. He's so pale. He's translucent. Boat. Joe Garden? Yeah. Big craft work guy. Oh, yeah. Did he get tickets? No, he promoted his own craft work. I believe it was a craft work covers show. Oh, cool. And he got different bands to come and play craft work. And it's a big deal for Joe. It was awesome. He wore a white suit and introduced everyone. That is sweet. When was that? Very recently. Did you see footage of it or were you there? No, he wouldn't shut up about it on Facebook and even admitted, like, guys, I know you're tired of hearing about craft work. That is significant for Joe. Yes. There's also, I guess, kind of with the music sampling episode there's I think a DJ Food or DJ Shadow. I think. DJ food craft work cover mix. Yeah, there's, like, maybe three volumes of it, and it's like just mixing together all these people who, like, sampled craft work for their songs. Yeah. They just did a big thing at some museum at MoMA. Yeah. Oh, my God. You mean I tried very hard to get those tickets. Did you try? No, dude, it was such a good cluster. I'm not into craft work. And this solidifies it when I saw the reviews of it and said they did, like, a 20 1 minute of auto bond, and I was just like, Somebody put a gun to my head. Oh, you're just supposed to zone out and forget where you are for a little bit and see where it takes you? I'm not a craft work guy, but I know people are. People don't no, I'm not a craft work guy either. But I will say that that would have been just a momentous thing to see. Momantus pretty much. Okay. Like the tupac hologram. I'm sure seeing that at Coachella is just amazing. Yeah. And a bit way more amazing for some people than others even. Sure. All right. Should I read a listen or mail? I guess I'm going to call this a good cause. We like to promote these and attach it to our labor union episode. How appropriate. Big fan, guys. I was just down at south by Southwest where I caught your variety show and shook your surprisingly supple hands. I've never done a lick of work. I know. I also sat on a panel called Harnessing the Power of the Benevolent Internet something. You guys seem pretty skilled at yourselves, which is why I thought you might be game to help students across the country learn all sorts of stuff they should know. In many cases, it's stuff they need to know. I work for a nonprofit website called DonorsChoose.org where anyone with a dollar can give support to classrooms in need. Teachers from all 50 states post requests for resources they feel their students need. And kind folks from all over the world help bring those lessons to life. Sounds almost like a kiva for teachers. I need 50 tickets to craft work in Walmart. Since our founding in 2000, we've delivered over $110,000,000 of resources directly to public school classrooms supporting more than 6 million students. And if you or my fellow listeners would like to help you or my fellow listeners you have listeners? Fellow listeners. Okay. We have listeners. That listener has fellow listeners. Okay, check out the page I set up. He set up a page with our name, and I was like, that's cool, you can do that. But we're not like we can't officially sign on because then it has to go through corporate and all that stuff. I already signed upon officially. You did? I made T shirts and everything. So you can go to DonorsChoose. Orgstuffkidschildnow and let me know if you have any questions. And this is from Zack. And he said, by the way, we recently hired a system admin a couple of months back. Drove me crazy for a few weeks, then I realized he sounds exactly like Josh. Weird. And he said, I've enjoyed working with you, Josh. Who is the other voice double for me? There's another person? There was some dude. Well, there's a writer that writes about running. He wrote one thing about running, Jack Clark, and I've been asked 500 times if it was me. What's ironic is now I actually run. You should write your own article. Yeah, I can't remember there was some other voice person that did, like, bike videos or something. Yeah, I don't remember. Yeah, okay. Who is that? That was Zac, Zack. DonorsChoose.org. Kids should know that's. Great DonorsChoose.org stuffkidshood. Know indeed. Nice. If you have a great charitable organization you want us to let everybody know about again, we're always happy to do that. And if I sound like somebody, let me know because it's driving me crazy who it is. I've heard from a bunch of people. Oh, you sound just like this, or whatever. Yeah. Or I want to hear from people who have actively been on a worker strike. Or if you have been a scab, as they call them, and been a strike buster, I want to hear about that too. If you've ever been beaten up by the cops, we want to hear about that too. Yes. And anarchists. Any anarchists out there? We're always interested in hearing from anarchists, I guess. I got shut down by the cops and Athens one night. Do you get beat up there's? Different? No, but they, like, threw me against the wall and we're kicking my legs out from under me and yeah, it was weird. And then they just left. Are you sure there are cops and not just some eternity boys dressed up as cops? Athens police in a car, me and my three friends. I don't know what they thought we were doing, but they got out of there really quick. I'll say that they must have thought you're somebody else, kevin Smith. Or the reality of their situation hit them and they realized that what they were doing was wrong. Maybe you can communicate with Chuck and I electronically via Twitter at SYSK podcast. That's our handle facebookcom stuffycheatnow. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstephors.com. STUFFYou should know is a production of iHeartRadio's Houseworks. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
What's the deal with the Bermuda Triangle? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-the-bermuda-triangle | There's roughly 500,000 squares miles encompassed in a triangle with points in Miami, Bermuda and San Juan. There shouldn't be anything different about this area, but some people believe it's a hotbed of supernatural activity. Tune in to learn why. | There's roughly 500,000 squares miles encompassed in a triangle with points in Miami, Bermuda and San Juan. There shouldn't be anything different about this area, but some people believe it's a hotbed of supernatural activity. Tune in to learn why. | Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:17:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=17, tm_min=17, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=12, tm_isdst=0) | 42274575 | audio/mpeg | "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. 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 this refreshing crowdpleaser 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 Stard, available at a wine aisle near you and on 19 Crimes.com. Please drink responsibly. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from houseworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know. The podcast, the rip off of stuff they don't want you to know in this particular episode. That's right. But that's not the case at all. I was just singing Barry Man Alert to Josh right before you recorded. Yeah. What song is it? Bermuda Triangle. Yeah. He had a song called The Bermuda Triangle, and I think I remember the gist of it was that the Bermuda Triangle not only makes ships and planes disappear, but people from your love life will disappear, sail through the Bermuda Triangle. I don't know. I don't remember. But as I told you, I was big into Barryman when I was a kid. For some reason, when I was eight, I just thought he was the bee's knees. He's very cool. Yeah. Yummy. Has every single one of his records at home, so I have to go home and read that song out. I still have to get to the bottom. That's all of mine in the attic. Do you? Oh, yeah. Sweet. Do you have a nice record collection hidden up in the attic? I've got about two crates. Oh, wow. Not a ton, but I'll bet their choice. Yeah, they're pretty good. Yeah. Okay. Well, there you have it, the Bermuda Triangle. Thank you, everybody. The records range from Barry Manilo to, like, Molly Hatchet, so that tells you what happened between ages nine and 15 for me. Chuck. Josh, you want to get to this? Yeah. You were a kid. You just admitted to being a kid once. I was once. So, of course, the Bermuda Triangle must have struck your fancy at some point. Well, in the 70s, it was a big deal. Like, I remember it being a big deal in the was kind of thinking, you never hear about it anymore, but I think it was due to the book. Charles Berlitz's book came out in what was it called? The Bermuda Triangle. It's the Bermuda Triangle. Oh, no, that's a different one. No, his was just a Bermuda Triangle, but his sold 20 million copies. And I remember this being a big deal at the time. It was like on The Mike Douglas Show. I think that's why it was so big in the 70s. People were dumber back then. Plus Barry Melon. That was in the 70s. It was. I'll bet he wrote that song after the book. Well, do you want to just talk about this? My intro isn't that good anyway. So you want to just get into the Bermuda Triangle? The intro disappeared like so many ships at sea. It was very good. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Thank you. So we think of the Bermuda Triangle as this old, possibly ancient, possibly lost mystery that forms a triangle. It's a geographical, made up, fictitious geographical area, bounded or with its points between San Juan, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, greatly enough, and Miami. Yeah, it's real, but it's not recognized by any official geographic bodies. Right. But if you look at a map, you could also make Bermuda Quadrahedron with eight other places too. So, yeah, it's as real as the Bermuda Quadrihedron. It's not real if you are a member of the US board of Geographic Names because they don't recognize it formally. Most people don't. Not officially, at least. That's right. But I was saying that it seems like it's been around a long time. It wasn't until 1964 that it got its name. Did you know that? I did, because we actually researched this a long time ago and didn't do it for some reason. So I knew it from then. Okay, but only from then. If you are into this kind of thing, you are well aware that there have been hundreds and hundreds of ships that have gone missing over, say, the past century. Planes, ships, cars, somehow people just gone. It depends on who you ask, right? Well, it depends on, like I say, if you're into it or not. And basically the key to the Bermuda Triangle is statistics. How you take statistics, how you either manipulate them yourselves or how you accept statistics at face value is probably a pretty good indicator about how you feel about the Bermuda Triangle in life. There's been all sorts of explanations from basically natural phenomenon sure. To the idea that Atlantis is down there somewhere, which we'll get into, to the idea that it's really no different than anywhere else, and it's just a bunch of sensationalism. Yes. But no matter how you look at the Bermuda Triangle, it encompasses about 500 0 sq. Mi. Yeah. It's huge and extremely well traveled area. It's not off the beaten path at all. No. A lot of people want to go to Bermuda. Bahamas is in there. Come on. Yeah, plus it's just a heavily traveled route in the area. Right. As far as shipping goes, I imagine, too. Right. Yes. Supposedly, there's been as many as 100 ships and 1000 lives lost in the Bermuda Triangle in the last century. Right. That's what some say. Some say part of the problem is the Coast Guard supposedly says that there's not an unusual amount of incidents there. That okay. 1000 people have died and 100 ships have been lost in the last 100 years. Big whoop. Yeah. That's nothing. Yeah. Other people say, no, that's not the case. Lloyd's of London, which, by the way, Chuck, if you listen to the coffee podcast, the tie that binds coffee to Bermuda Triangle is Lloyds of London. That's right. In 1975, the editor of fake magazine, Mary Margaret Fuller, she contacted Lloyds of London and said, hey, can you give me a list of payoffs for the Bermuda Triangle? And Lloyd said, sure we can. Of course. We do this thing all the time. And 428 vessels were reported missing throughout the world between 1955 and 1975. And the Bermuda Triangle didn't have any significantly higher incidence than any other area, supposedly. Right. Which is why the insurance premiums, the Bermuda Triangle are no different than anywhere else as well. Yes. We should point out yeah. If you ask a guy I love this guy's name Gian, with A-G-I-A-N-J kasar. Let's just come on and say it. Kasar. G and Quasar. G and J. Quasar. Is that supposed to be that's what I'm calling have you been to his page? No, actually, that's not true. He's the administrator of Bermuda Angle.org, and I believe I have been to that page before. And he's the author of into the Bermuda Triangle. Cohen pursuing the truth behind the world's greatest mystery. Yes, I went to his site because I felt like I owed it to him to check this out. And it is another one of those sites that looks like my space page from 2002. And it doesn't draw you in as far as looking valid. Not saying it's not, but it doesn't look super professional. There's, like, text that's overlapping the images, and some pages don't load. Like a good user experience adds tremendous veracity to one's fantastic claims. It really does. Mr. Quasar, we mean it. If you update your user experience, people will listen more. Yeah, I would have honestly stayed on the site a lot longer. I mean, like, let me look at this. But as soon as I saw it, I went, come on. But despite his lack of web design skill yeah. He has put a lot of time and effort and energy into researching the Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, he's one of the ones that says, hey, Lloyds of London, why would you go to Lloyds of London? That's what he says. Well, he says that Lloyds of London doesn't even keep track of smaller craft. And a lot of the smaller crafts are missing and they don't even insure yachts, which is not true. I look that up. I thought that was odd. I'm glad you looked. I don't know if maybe he means yachts of a certain size, but they definitely insure yachts. In fact, they were, ironically, if I'm not mistaken, the originators of maritime insurance way back when. Wow. I might be wrong, but I thought I remember reading I don't think you're wrong. Okay, well, Mr. Quasar went to the Coast Guard instead. Queso? The Coast Guard has definitive records on missing vessels, but they call them overdue vessels. Like a three hour tour that hasn't come back? Yes. So it's overdue. It's supposed to be there after 3 hours, 180,000 hours ago. Right. So it's a very long overdue. So Mr. Quasar found that he says that he was given data on overdue vessels after asking for twelve years and found that in the previous two years, the Coast Guard had records of 300 missing or overdue vessels. Now, does that mean that they were still overdue or they were overdue by a couple of hours and they were just at one point listed as overdue? That is an excellent question. I didn't get that. That is a very good question. Well, I hope this guy listens to the podcast. Maybe he can tell us. I'll bet we could contact him through his website, too. I bet it's not that hard. He also went to the National Transportation Safety Board and looked at their database and said, hey, okay, let's just take a random place then, if the Bermuda Triangle is no different than any other area. Sure. How about off the coast of New England? And we'll say for the last ten years there's only been a few disappearances of vessels in the Bermuda Triangle over that same time period. 30. I would ask Mr. Quasar, just give me more stats. Like, did he compare the amount of travel? Was it all equalized weather? Did he take everything into consideration? Right. And I mean, maybe the coast of New England has a disproportionately low amount of missing vessels, whereas the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean has higher than the Bermuda Triangle. Right. It also depends on what you're comparing it to. Or did they have a lot of boats sink that they found because the water wasn't as deep or was easily accessible? Because he's talking about disappearances, right. Like where you never find wreckage. Right. So I guess GNJ Quasar is a torchbearer of a very long line of people who have really sunk their teeth and time and energy into solving this mystery, or possibly even promoting something that isn't a mystery as a mystery. Yes. Because they genuinely believe it. That's true. And probably what kicked the whole thing off, at least in the public's imagination, was the missing squadron, the Lost flight, flight 19, which Chuck actually disappeared 66 years ago last week. Oh, yeah, they had a little ceremony down at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport to honor the 14 servicemen who were lost on that flight. Flight 19. Very sad, but that made huge headlines. Yeah. You want to go ahead and tell the story? Yeah, let's talk about Flight 19. And I want to point out that this is one of the leading stories. And, in fact, when you go back and look at all the research, a lot of this is based on a handful of stories that have been retold over and over and over by all these different people. So it seems like there's more than there are. No, the whole mystery of the Bermuda Triangle is based on a handful of disappearances that are noteworthy. I got you. And not like, 100. Right. Okay, so US. Navy avengers flight 19 1945. Five missing Navy pilot. Avengers, I guess. Is that the kind of plane yeah, they're Navy grumman TBF Avengers. They were propeller planes, fighter jets, or fighter prop planes from the end of the war. Okay. So they set out on a routine patrol. Sunny day, five highly experienced student pilots. Which is a little bit of a contradiction in terms. Yes. But, I mean, these were Navy Pilots. I'm sure if you put them side by side to any other student pilots, they would dog fight them into humiliation, into oblivion. Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor led the mission, and the mission included a few course changes. Departed at 115. Scheduled course changes? Yeah. Basically, Taylor knew what he was doing, and this was a routine flight. That's what some say. There's also speculation that Taylor wasn't super experienced. Really? Well, actually, the other pilots weren't super experienced and that he had a consistent record of navigation troubles, including ditching airplanes twice into the Pacific Ocean. Well, that's just routine Navy hazing back then, but we'll get into that. So Taylor led the missions. They took off. We're flying over Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when they heard a signal that they thought was from a boat or a plane in distress. No, that was Cox that heard that signal that he was part of the crew. Right. Or was he at the base? He was another guy who was flying over a different part of Florida. Okay. Yeah. He kind of tried to help them. He got the distress signal, and he tried to figure out where they were and was giving them instructions. Okay, that makes more sense. So Cox told Taylor, fly with the sun at your left wing and up the coast until you see Miami. And you'll know Miami when you see it. Sure. Taylor said, no, we're over a small island and there's no other land anywhere. If it was the Florida Keys, which he thought it was, he would have seen a bunch of islands, obviously, and Florida sure. Sticking down there. And they only had a couple of hours left of fuel. And then Taylor described a large island that they assumed was Andros Island which is the largest island in the Bahamas. Right. And so they sent him back further instructions to get him to Fort Lauderdale. Is that right? Yeah, but there's a big part that you left out here, and this is important. Taylor reported that everything looked wrong, quote yeah. And that his compasses were going haywire. Well, yeah, true. And those are big. Yeah, those are big. When he started on this heading, his voice started coming through clearer and louder, which they took to mean, all right, you're headed in the right direction. Right? Because the base he was talking to is in Fort Lauderdale. Yeah. So, like, you're getting closer. You're on the right path. Right. But Taylor said no. I don't think you're right. I don't think we went far enough east, so we're going to turn around and go east again. At that point, the voice got less clear and further away, indicating that he was probably going in the wrong direction. And then that was it. They never heard from him again or anybody else. They never found any wreckage. As far as I understand, they were just lost all five Navy avengers, and there were two seaplanes that were sent out, and one of them exploded right after takeoff, and the other one never found any trace of Flight 19. Yeah, that's in 52. And author George Sand wrote an article for Fate magazine called Sea Mystery at Our Back Door and first described a, quote watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. And then Argosi magazine finally gave the triangle its name in an article by Vincent Gaddis called The Deadly Bermuda Triangle, which is a pulp magazine that writes fiction, but somehow people missed that and took it to be a real thing. Right. It even says that the magazines tagline is a magazine of master fiction. And when you look at it like I looked it up, it doesn't look like a valid or not valid, but it doesn't look like a Newsweek, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know what you're saying. Hey, everybody, Chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air cover for host is completely free every time you host on airbnb free with a capital F with air cover for Host. It makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts 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 the apps required. Five G may not be available in your area. For coverage details, see att. Comfiveg for you, visit www. Dot att. Comcallprotect for details. Part of the other, I think, thing that captured the public's imagination and that was kind of lost on people was originally the Navy. They said that Flight 19 was lost due to pilot error. And Lieutenant Taylor's family was like, no, he was way too experienced for that. There's no way he would do this, or something else. So the Navy was pressured to change it because this is back when the Navy was like, all right, we don't want your feelings to be hurt. Right. And they changed it to something cause unknown. Yes. Which sounds very mysterious. Exactly. Yeah. And if the Navy is saying, we lost five fighter planes to causes unknown in this area that people are calling the Bermuda Triangle, that's what really gave the Bermuda Triangle its initial boost, capturing the public imagination. Yeah. And like I said, I looked up more on Taylor, and apparently the truth is the only four pilots didn't have significant experience. Taylor had a history of getting lost, and by the time of his final transmission, they were low on fuel, they weren't near land, bad weather came in, and they probably crashed and landed on the bottom of the ocean. Right. Not very mysterious. But the fact that they were never heard from again, I mean, that does, again, capture the public's imagination. That's what happened. They're just gone. Things aren't supposed to go, especially not airplanes. You're not supposed to not find a trace of something. There have been plenty of other things that have gone missing. Like you said, a lot of them are very famous. One, the Mary Celeste, is commonly listed as it disappears to the Bermuda Triangle. Not so. No. The Mary Celeste, which is a brig from the late 19th century, I think the 18th 70s, set sail from New York to Spain and shouldn't have come anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle when it was found around the Strait of Gibraltar floating adrift with an area, a sole board, because bean still on the grill, a pipe still smoking. I think when they found it, no explanation whatsoever, just gone. But it had nothing to do with the Bermuda trying. I wonder how it got mixed up in that. Just public. People just claim it. Yes, that's the problem. It's like, okay, if there is something going on here, you're not helping your case in getting it across to incredulous skeptics. Right. By saying, plus the Mary Solest and that's something. And that was a ghost ship. Exactly. But there was one that is legitimately chalked up to the Bermuda Triangle. The Milwaukee 440th Airlift Wing plane. 680? Yeah. Let's hear about this. So in 1965, on a clear night, flying box car, the Fairchild C 119. Huge old plane. It's like the Spruce Goose. Huge. It lifted off from Milwaukee on its way to Grand Turk in the Bahamas, which is nice duty, I'm sure. And it landed at Homestead Air Force Base at hung around for almost 3 hours and then lifted off at 07:47 P.m. On its way to the Bahamas and was never heard from again. After about halfway there, I think never heard from again. No one ever found a trace of it. One of the things that really captures the imagination about this one is it had a full crew of really experienced flight mechanics and flight engineers who knew what they were doing. So if there was anything that was wrong with this plane, there are plenty of people on board to fix it, right? Seemingly, but nothing. The planes are gone forever. No trace. No one ever heard of it. Well, it said they found a few scraps of debris. Yes, but they think that that could have been scuttled. It didn't appear to have undergone any damage or anything like that. Just in case of a good scuttling, there's the Sulfur Queen, which was a ship that had like 150,000 tons of molten sulfur aboard. And they found scraps of ore and stuff like that that would indicate an explosion. There is nothing that indicated that with plain 680 it just sank. Or maybe it was lifted to a distant planet. Well, that is one explanation that people use. So let's talk about we're going to divvy up the explanations into far fetched theories. Yes. Which is what the article, I think, very fairly calls them. Sure. And at least using Occam's razor and then to more scientific explanation. So let's start with the intensely more fun and entertaining far fetched theories. Yes. I mentioned UFOs and alien abduction and that is a pretty hot bed of UFO sightings down there. And some people have theorized that that's what's going on. They're porting these ships and planes, abducting them to their universe, their planet, or it may actually be a portal to other planets. Yes. They think that possibly if there are portals, a blue hole, which there are several in the Bermuda triangle are wormholes through dimensions or time and space, and that this is a highly trafficked portal in the Bermuda Triangle and ships and planes get sucked into it accidentally. Some, Josh, think again. These are the far fetched theories that we're going over now. Yes. Some think, Josh, that it is home to the lost city of Atlantis, which may or may not have been populated by a race of aliens. Correct. They had advanced technologies, some say, including a death ray weapon. Some say that destroyed Atlantis eventually. Edgar Casey said it. Have you heard of him? I have. A sleeping psychic or the sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach. Yeah, he was really hot for Atlantis. He was. And he predicted, actually, that in the 60s he didn't predict it in the 60s. He predicted that in the 60s, people would find evidence of Atlantis off the coast of Bimini. And surely enough, in 1968 was it? Yeah. They found what's known as the Bimini Road. Now, this is pretty interesting. I think it is. It depends on your viewpoint. Bermuda Triangles as a whole, but yes, there's a long, what looks to be a road of shaped blocks of rock in about 15ft of water off the coast of Bimini. Yeah. And it's cool looking and a lot of people say, no, this is just something that happened naturally. Yes. Like a coral reef might. And others have studied it and said, you know what? These stones are shaped and they're placed there very purposefully as a wall. So it's also called the Bimini wall or road. And this could have been tied to Atlanta somehow. Could have been. A lot of people say, also, look, there's tool marks on there. And then critics say, yes, underwater tourists like you have used tools to take chips off of it as souvenirs studying it interesting. But if you look at the Bimini wall, it is very suggestive of being shaped by man and being put in place. But these are like enormous rocks, so it would have taken a marvel of engineering to get those there. You know what? Jerry just interrupted the podcast, which she rarely does, and says, I dove the Bimini Road. So she's seen firsthand. I thought she said I drove it at first. Jerry is an alien underwater doom buggy. We should have just had her say it. Do you want to say it? No, she'd want to say it. Okay. Because that would mean she exists. Did she beat first? She did. Wow. Jerry. So let's get back to Atlantis. They supposedly relied on the power of special energy crystals, one of which has been recovered by a man named Dr. Ray Brown. Allegedly, Dr. Ray Brown was a diver, and in 1970, he said that he was diving down there and discovered an underwater pyramid made of mirrored stone. Mirrored stone? It might be just weird to see underwater Mississippi. Seeing a mirror pyramid doesn't seem like the 70s, like 1970s yeah, sure. He said he entered the pyramid and saw a brassy metallic rod with a multifaceted red gym hanging from the apex of the room. And directly below this rod was a stand of bronze I'm sorry with bronze hands holding a crystal sphere four inches in diameter. You know what? I'm just going to take that. It sounds like something he found. It like Kirkland's, you know, that sounds like a candle holder from Kirkland said it. Yeah. So he thought it was a good idea to take this. He removed it. He said, I'm not only going to take it, but I'm not going to tell anyone for five years until the great psychic seminar of Phoenix, Arizona, in when he revealed the crystal. And what did they see when they gazed upon it? Not one, not twice, but thrice pyramids inside of smaller sizes, the smaller in front of the other. And some people have been said to have seen a fourth one in a deep meditative state. That's right. So basically, Dr. Brown says, hey, man, these pyramids are evidence that there's some sort of electrical properties going on in this crystal, and there's probably more of these crystals down there, and that's probably what's causing all of these problems in the Bermuda Triangle. But scoff as you might, there's apparently evidence of an underwater urban complex off the coast of Cuba that was recently discovered in the last ten years or so. Yeah, I think it was like rocket ball courts and other stuff. No, that was definitely 75. I looked this up, but I didn't get a whole lot out of it. What did you see? I saw that they're still looking. They're still looking. God, I've become dated in my old age. Was that making my scoff face when you said that? Scoff as you may? Yeah. Okay. Magnetic abnormalities. This one, I think, is sort of interesting. There's a guy, a pilot named Bruce Gernin, and he co wrote a book called The Fog, a never before published theory of the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon. He says that in December of 1970, he was flying to bimini clear skies when he saw this weird cloud almost perfectly round and hovering over the Miami shoreline. Right. So he goes to go around it. Goes to go around it, and the cloud moves. Cloud moves. Couldn't go around it. So he said, you know what? This thing's like a tunnel. Now I'm just going to fly into this tunnel. Big whoop. Fly out the other side and get to my destination. He's not much of a Freudian. No, he got inside the tunnel. He said he saw lines on the walls that spun counterclockwise. And this guy, all of a sudden, you're channeling Bruce Gergen. Gernon. His navigational instruments were going nuts. His compass was spinning counterclockwise. He said there should be blue sky at the end of the tunnel, but there's really nothing. There's no sky. There's no ocean. There's no horizon. There's. No, nothing but gray haze as he's flying. Yes, which is why I said Lieutenant Taylor saying, everything looks weird. My compasses are haywire. Yeah, that's why it counts. Okay. He contacted Miami Air Traffic Control to get some identification. They said, we don't see any planes over on our radar, over. And then a few minutes later, they went, Scratch that, we see a plane now. Over. No, they didn't. They said that somebody spotted a plane over Miami, over. Oh, they didn't spot it on the radar? No, it never popped up on the radar in the electronic fog. Somebody reported a plane flying over Miami, over. So he said to himself, that's not possible, because it takes a good hour, 15 minutes to get to Miami. I've only been up here for 47 minutes. At that moment, the cloud tunnel peels away. Yeah. And the instruments goes back to normal. And he looks down, and he sees Miami Beach. Dwayne Wade on the beach of Miami at South Beach, playing basketball. So Gordon said that this happened to him not just once, but another time with his wife, and he wrote a book on it, the Fog and never before published theory of the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon. He basically says that there is some sort of the force of gravity is weaker there, and so electromagnetism is allowed to escape more easily from the Earth's core. And when it does, you've got an electromagnetic storm that dissipates very quickly, but leaves this electronic fog that can just screw you up, send you off course, make you lose time, and then the next thing you know, you're 100 miles off course with your compasses showing that you're dead. Well, he claims it's a time travel tunnel. That's what he says. And he had another dude that said, hey, the same thing happened to me ten years ago. I went through this time storm, and my watch confirmed it. Yeah. So there you have it. I'm sorry. He's saying that the magnetism is weaker in that area. Is that what he's saying? Yeah. Okay, so that's Electronic Fog, I think he had a band called Bruce Gernin and the Electronic Fog. They played at that same psychic seminar that Ray Brown debuted. Pyramid Crisis. That's a hopping party. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there were millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation. Or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids'college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection too. And are you ready for this? Air Cover for Host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air Cover for Host, it makes hosting a nobrainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more, and Host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts. 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 comdealsforditals. So, Chuck, there's also basically they're saying, okay, all right. So no aliens, no Atlantis. Okay, let's get scientific here. Sure. How about that? The Bermuda Triangle is the only place where the compass, the magnetic north, true north and geographic north line up. One of two places, right? Yes. The other one, get this, is named the Devil Sea. It's off the coast of Japan, but it doesn't necessarily hold water either. But they're saying, okay, so how about this? And that makes compasses go crazy, makes a malfunction, and therefore even a seasoned pilot could be let off course to die. So here's the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle laid bare scientifically. So, what's magnetic declination? Go ahead and explain that. So magnetic declination is the distance. So you have your geographic north pole, which is constantly located in the same place. We're saying about right. About 1200 miles north of the magnetic north pole. Yes. Okay. Magnetic declination is the difference in compass degrees between the two north poles. Yes. North. And you have to compensate for it when you're charting a course. Yeah. It moves as you travel. Well, yes. And it's not constant. Like, it's not always separated by the same number of degrees depending on where you are. Right. There's a line. Supposedly, it's an imaginary line where true north and magnetic north are in perfect alignment. Well, it's not supposedly okay, I'm sorry. The Agonic line is real, but it's an imaginary line. Yes. Right. So Sir Edmund Haley, the guy who discovered Haley's Comet, said, you know what the Sagantic line? Yeah, the Saganic line. It's moving westward at about two degrees per year, right? At one point. Yes. The iconic line was in the Bermuda Triangle. But it hasn't been that way for a while. It's now about in the Gulf of Mexico. You know when it was? I don't but if it's moving .2 degrees per year yeah. It probably wouldn't account for all of the stuff that's going on in the Bermuda Triangle. If a lot of stuff that's going on in the Bermuda Triangle. Right. And the other debunk. But the other thing to consider is that they're assuming that these pilots aren't accounting for the magnetic declination, which, if you're an experienced pilot, then you're accounting for that to get your proper course. Exactly. Like these aren't spring chickens who were sailing through the Bermuda Triangle. No, not all of them, at least. We talked about blue holes already, aka wormholes to other dimensions and parts of the universe. Now, Chuck, let's go on to the scientific or plausible theories. I like these more. Okay. Weather patterns. It is a very turbulent area. You can have violent, unexpected storms that pop up seemingly out of nowhere and that dissipate really quick, as quick as they came, that are undetected by satellites. So they can't point and say, well, there was a big storm there. They'll just pop up, leave. You can have a water spout, which is a tornado over the ocean. They are really cool looking, but it can whip water up to about 1000ft into the air. Sure. And if you're a small plane or even a large, you could get taken out by one of those. Or if you're a boat or ship parked over a water spout or traveling over a water spout, you're gone. You're gone. So that's one plausible explanation, which is just bad weather. Yes. Underwater earthquakes. Currently there is a lot of seismic activity in the Bermuda Triangle and that can cause what are called freak waves, which is just sad for those waves, but they can get up to 100ft high. And if you are a little boat, even if you're a big boat, 100 foot wave, you're gone. Yes. And one of the reasons you're gone, Chuck, is because of the underwater topography in the Bermuda Triangle. There's a gentle slope away from the North American continent. Yes. And then it drops off. And some of the deepest trenches on planet Earth are in that area. Right. So if you're a plane or boat and a water spout sinks you take you out of the air or a freak wave gets you yeah. And you sink off of that shelf, the continental shelf, into the trench, you're never, ever going to be found except for maybe a civilization a couple of thousand years into the future, maybe 500. It sounds way more exciting on a TV show to say something like, and it was never spotted again. Especially if Robert Stack is saying it. But it's not as exciting to say it was never spotted again because it sank so deep we cannot get down there to see it. And isn't that weird in itself. It's not weird. It is weird. That's pretty creepy. That creeps me out more than the idea of a wormhole. Oh, like what's down there in the deep? Or like just the thought of a plane that's supposed to be up in the air is down there. That part of the ocean is home to three water currents the jet stream, the easter leaves, and the Gulf Stream. And the Gulf Stream moves really fast, which is why Dexter dumps his bodies in it, because it's going to get washed out to sea at about 5 miles an hour, which doesn't sound like much. Trust us. That is fast for current. That's fast when you're moving in the water. And if you are an inexperienced sailor, and apparently this area has a lot more inexperienced pilots and sailors because it's, I guess it's a vacation hotel touristy. Yeah. It's going to throw you off course hundreds of miles if you're not compensating for it correctly, and if they're not looking in the right place, you're 100 miles over there. You might as well be on another planet, especially if you don't know where you are. Because if you're 100 miles off course and you don't realize you're 100 miles off course, you're gone. What about this methane gas? Sort of like the exploding lake. I think this is my favorite explanation. So there are significant deposits of things called methane hydrates, which is basically super dense methane gas in the form of ice crystals on the sea floor. And when these crystals, which keep the gas in place, rupture, a huge gas bubble can make its way to the surface without any warning whatsoever in just a few seconds. And in the area of this gas bubble, the gas mixes with the water, making the water significantly less dense, making a ship that happens to be in this area sunk, like, immediately. Yeah. It also kicks up a bunch of sediments. So conceivably a ship that is pulled down, sucked down to the bottom of the ocean, and then it's covered with sediment is, by all intents and purposes, missing forever. Right? Yeah, it makes sense. I like the methane gas one. Also. If you're plane conceivably this gas explosion, this rupture would be flammable. Sure. And if you have electrical equipment, you could conceivably catch fire. Who knows? I like it more for a ship because it makes sense. Like, just the water basically bottoming out beneath the ship, maybe. But that's basically the same concept as the death ray crystal, except, like, we've seen these things, right, and they're there. That's true. I read this one guy's article this morning, and he talked about a guy named Larry Kush or Kush. And this guy, he was at the conference. He wasn't, was he? I don't think so. If he was there, he was throwing tomatoes at them. Okay. Because he's one of these guys. It's like, you know what? I'm going to really investigate everyone who's investigating. And he researched dozens and dozens of articles and books and TV shows, and he said, you know what? Not many of these people did any real investigation. They're all telling the same stories over and over and over to sell papers or advertising on TV. And he says, you know what? They're just passing on speculation as it's truth. And what we've got here is communal reinforcement over the years of people that really got into this whole thing. And that's really all it is. Boats sink, planes crash. Sometimes they don't get found. End of story. That's what he says. And here end of your childhood pirates, too. They say. I'm modern day pirates could be missing, especially before the DEA shut down the Caribbean for smuggling and basically through Mexico into a pit of living hell. So some plausible, some far fetched. There's a Bermuda Triangle. I think this is a good lesson, and it's like what we do when we're doing research. If you've come across the same story and it's told in almost the exact same way, using the same wording across site after site after site, just like you said, communally reinforced. And it's not necessarily true, but if you while away your hours and spend your time researching the Bermuda Triangle and getting into it and it tickles your fancy, more power to you. Yeah, I'm not going to poopoo it. It's fun. He just spent, like, 40 minutes poopooing it. Now I believe it's just boats sinking and planes crashing. Well, it also raises the question, is there even a significant amount of loss compared to other places? Doesn't seem like it. Well, anyway, that's a Bermuda Triangle. If you want to learn more about it, you can read the article on the site called Bermuda Triangle. Just type that into the search bar@housetofworks.com, and it will bring it up. And I said, search bar. It was time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. I'm going to call this Nas Thomas nasty mail. Okay. From Nas himself. No, he's not alive anymore. This is from Evan B. And Evans says, I was just listening to the podcast on political animals. This is the one on the Republican elephant. Sure. Democrat donkey. I have an interesting story involving Thomas Nast. I have an elderly neighbor about a year ago, my mom started working for him as an aide. He was going through I'm sorry, he's going through financial troubles. Mentioned selling a painting he had bought years ago when he lived in Pittsburgh. It was a painting of the head of Christ, and it turns out it was a Thomas Nast original. This is very interesting to learn because Nast is known for his political works and not necessarily religious ones. My mom took the painting to be appraised, and it was valued at about $200,000. Holy cow. Turned out to be somewhat of a generous estimate, but the painting was still very valuable nonetheless. The painting was placed in Skinner's auction house set to auction in the fall but did not sell. Unfortunately, however, it is going to be backed up for auction again at the next Skinner's auction. And I'm happy that I finally have a relevant story to email you guys about. When people say that, like, I've always wanted to email in, but I've never had anything to say until now. But usually when they say that it's something significant, you can email them to say hi. That's fine. Yeah, but you're not going to get right on the year unless it's significant. Oh, is that what it's all about? That's what I said. Nothing to do with telling it's high. So that's Evan B and his mom. That's a great story. Yeah, I love ones like that. Have you ever heard the one about the lady who found, like, 150 grand in cash and, like, a fire extinguisher? That never happens to me, or rarely. I love those. Yeah. Well, that is it for Unsolved Mysteries. We appreciate you joining us, and if you want to get in touch with us, if you want to tell us how, you can just tell us how. It's fine. 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87079b18-3b0e-11eb-9699-375ecf66281c | Harry Houdini: More than Magic | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/harry-houdini-more-than-magic | Harry Houdini was a master magician. He was also a movie star. And an inventor. And an aviator. Listen and learn all about the late great illusionist. | Harry Houdini was a master magician. He was also a movie star. And an inventor. And an aviator. Listen and learn all about the late great illusionist. | Thu, 21 Oct 2021 14:20:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=14, tm_min=20, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=294, tm_isdst=0) | 44733835 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio Kazam, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck. Brian over there, and Jerry's here. Invisible, but here. And this is the Mystery Magic Podcast Hour. Aka, stuff you should know. I feel like we haven't covered much magic related stuff, have we? Not nearly enough. Oh, yeah. Are you into it? Yeah, I find it interesting, for sure. And I think magicians are pretty cool people, typically. Oh, really? Yes. Toby, our friend Toby, he and I were talking about working on a magic podcast. Kind of like a magic skeptics podcast that'd be great. With a couple of his good friends, and they're just cool dudes. Chill people. Interesting. Very witty. Sharp. Not pink boys at all. You guys should totally do that. This is years and years ago. Well, he's a big movie producer now. Yeah, that ships. He's like, magic podcast? No, thank you. Well, I'm glad to know that you found some cool magicians. Yeah. Are you not familiar with cool magicians? No. I mean, the magicians I know about are decidedly uncool. Oh, I see. Like Ben Stiller and Arrested Development. Ben Stiller and Arrested Development. Yeah, he was job's rival. Oh, right. I forgot about that kind of a white snake thing going on. I think I'm thinking mainly about the time I went to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and I felt like one of the cooler people there, which is unusual of a lot of people. I don't mean like, fond cool. I mean cool in the fact that they're, like, interesting. They are sharp, they're witted. They will take your wallet from you if you're not careful. That kind of cool. You know what I mean? Okay. Yeah. Was Houdini cool? In a lot of ways? He was very cool. Not the band. No. That's pretty cool. They were very cool in a lot of ways. I think he was cool in some other ways. He wasn't necessarily super cool, but I think overall, you could say, yes, Houdini was cool in the sense that a good magician is cool. Yeah. This is one of those guys where I did a little digging to see if we needed to, like, see if he was a monster in his personal life. Right. I didn't see anything like that. I think he was a pretty intense guy and I'm sure a man at the time, but I didn't see anything that jumped out at me. And we should mention big thanks to boy, a bunch of things. History.com, Smithsonian magazine, which is always great, PBS, New Yorker, and of course, theghtharyhoudini.com yes. There's also a couple of other sites that I got some stuff from, like Wild About Harry is a good Houdini site. And there's this documentary series by a site called Timeline, and the one I saw was hosted by Alan Davies. It's called life and magic of the real Harry Houdini. And it was just like this hour long, pretty cool little documentary. I thought it was very neat. I got good info from that, too. It's on YouTube, too. Well, I was into Houdini when I was a kid for a short time, and I think that it was probably just because it was a short time where I was. And I think a lot of kids go through a magic phase, whether it's going to a trick shop and getting a fake deck or learning your first dumb little card trick. That's not very good, but you think it's awesome. It's just something that I feel like almost every kid goes through a brief little magic phase, and sometimes it sticks and you become super cool, evidently. That's right. Exactly. So I saw a couple of things that seemed to support that. He wasn't a monster, by the way, Chuck. One of them was that he would go to the children's ward in hospitals and perform magic for the kids and beat them up and take their money. Yeah. But if you think about it, that's not something that just anybody does. Sure. Like that's time he could be spending doing something else. He was almost pathologically devoted to his mother, making sure that she was well taken care of. I think also one of the I saw that was like, possibly a driver of his ambition as well, that he wanted to be Mom's favorite and impressor more than any of his siblings because he was one of six. Yeah. And also that his father was never much of a success, which we'll get to, and I think those are definitely the big drivers. And he himself called himself a mama's boy. Like, he used those two words together. Yeah. There's a famous picture of him with his wife Beth and his mother, and he's got, like, his arms around both of them, and he calls them my two girls or my two sweethearts or something like that. I know. Hats off the best for being like, all right, let's go with it. We're going to go with it. I'm definitely not going to try to pry that one loose. It's not going to work. So we're just going to go with it. And I say, good for her. All right, well, should we get into it? Yeah, let's. Because you said something about his father, and I think that's an important thing to understand about Houdini from the get go is that he was essentially born into poverty, and it just got worse as he got older because his father was a rabbi, and if there is such a thing, his father was a failed rabbi. He couldn't make it as a rabbi. I know. I was surprised to see that because everywhere I looked, it would continually say, like, boy, his dad just couldn't make the rabbi racket work. Right. And I don't know, I kind of naively assumed that if you were sort of giving up a life of trying to make money as a capitalist for a living by going to the church and being a steward of the church, then you would at least do okay. You'd think so, but I think that means that he was so charmless, he couldn't even muster up a congregation to surround him. So he was a hard luck kind of guy. And as a result, Harry was raised in poverty, had to go to work from a very young age, and also missed out on a formal education as a result, too. And so those things kind of converge to also, I think, kind of drive him to prove himself that, yeah, maybe he didn't go to school, and maybe he was born poor, but he could still be a superstar. He could still amaze people. He could still be idolized, basically. Yeah. His dad's name was Meyer Weiss. His mom was Cecilia Steiner Weiss and he was born Eric E-H-R-I-C-H vites in March of 1874 in Hungary. In Budapest. But when he was four, he came over and joined the family in Wisconsin. And his dad did manage to have a small congregation in Wisconsin, I think, in Appleton. And they changed immigration officers, changed the name to Vice with two S's instead of an SZ. And Eric went by Arie. Ehrie. The only reason I mentioned Erie is because that comes into play later when he takes on the name. Harry is sort of an Americanized version of that name. Right. That's where the Harry came from. Yes. He started working, I think, when he was still single digits, but he started performing also around that same time, too. When he was nine, he made his debut as a trapeze artist. Eric, the prince of the air. Nice. And he was always a rather short stature. I think he topped out at 5.5ft, five inches, 5.5. But he was extremely fit. He decided early on that he wanted to be very athletic as much as he could be. So he really, like, he was doing things like when he moved to New York a few years later, he was doing things like running 5 miles around Central Park every day, which is super commonplace today, but in the 18th century, that was weird. Yeah. Like, God knows what kind of shoes he was wearing for that kind of thing, but he would do that kind of stuff. So he was short of stature, but also very athletic. Self taught, too. Yeah. So, like you said, they eventually landed in New York after, again, Rabbi Weiss was not doing so well. He was kind of always on the move, trying to find somebody to listen to him. And they eventually get to New York and in 1891, which would have been what's the math there? 1617 ish wait, are you trying to figure out before Ghostbusters? No, I was trying to figure out how old he was. Okay. He's like 16 or 17 when he teamed up with his buddy Jacob Hyman. I'm sorry. Hymen. Hyman. Why did that look weird on the paper? You may be having a stroke. I hope not. The brothers Houdini is what they call themselves, and Harry, again, is what he went by because of Harry. And then as far as Houdini goes, his favorite French magician's last name was Robert Houdin. So he threw an eye on there, and all of a sudden, he's Harry Houdini for evermore. Yeah. I think I saw in the documentary that somebody told him that adding an I to a name in French means that you're saying you're like that person. So he was saying houdini. He's like Houdin, Houdin, Houdin, who was his idol for at least while he was growing up. And then apparently later on, he kind of turned on him and exposed all of his secrets after the guy died, which was actually not cool. It is not cool. I think there was also a tradition of the eye name on those kind of acts. Yes. But I think he may have started that. Oh, really? I'm not sure. But he was the blondines. Right. I think as far as magic goes, he may have been the originator of that because I saw one of his other contemporaries who helped kind of train him was last name Heller. There was a Haller. Like, there was no other eyes that I saw. Interesting. Yeah. All right, so he kicked off the big eye craze. Yeah. That's still going crazy today. It is the iPhone, I think. His dad died in 1892. Harry is 18 at this point, and he does a very unusual thing, and he actually leaves his mom behind along with his brothers, which was a big deal for him, like you said, because he was a self professed mama's boy. And he took off on the road. Doing his act through New York, through the Midwest, was doing okay. He was performing kind of all around. It was a bit of a grind with Hyman. Still sounds weird. And not because of what you think. Right. And then 1894, his younger brother replaced Hyman just for a short while because later that year, he would meet 18 year old Brooklynite to name the villainna Beatrice Ronner, or Bess, and she became his magic partner. They called him Assistance. She would have been the one on stage looking pretty and doing all the flourishes. And it's a tradition of magic that I know I don't want to use the word problematic, but it has changed in more recent years. Sure. Yeah. But this is at the time when a magician's assistant was a lady in a bathing suit. Yeah. Basically, Best was no exception to that. Although if you read some of the descriptions of some of the illusions and tricks that they did together, she was just as much a magician in her own right as he was. She definitely got her training from him. I think he discovered her in a singing troupe, but she grew to be just as adept at magic and sleight of hand as her husband, which is pretty cool. Yeah. It's interesting the things that have become boys clubs over the years, and magic is definitely one of them. That's changed a lot over the years, but it always going to the Magic Castle, and you're mainly going to see male performers and a bunch of old men dressed in suits. I find it odd that it's something that maybe just appeals to young boys. I don't know. My sister wasn't into magic, and my brother and I were. I know, but how much of that is just, like, the gender norms and expectations of society where it wasn't presented to your sister in a way that it's like, hey, isn't this interesting? Like everything else. Yeah. There was a documentary I saw I'm sure I mentioned it before, years ago, about these up and coming teenage magicians who are all trying to make their way through competitions to the Magic Castle, to a grand showcase, and they follow these ones. There was at least one girl that I remember, and she was good, but, I mean, she must have been 1314 at the time and had been into it for years. So clearly there's something that appeals to some girls, too, even if it's not directed toward them. I love it. That's a great documentary. You got to see it. And by the way, since we're speaking of documentaries, you have, of course, seen Love on the Spectrum, have you not? No. You recommended that a few weeks ago. We'll just stop. I'll give you about 6 hours, okay? You just go watch, and we'll come back and finish recording. Okay. All right, then another three weeks. You can bring it up again. You just have to see it. Okay, I'll see it. I'm giving you a gift here. Oh, did you make it? No, just telling you about it as a gift is what I'm trying to say. It's that sweet. All right, well, everyone watch Love on the Spectrum, and we're going to take a break. We're going to talk about Houdini's eventual success right after this. All right? So we got Houdini, and we got BES together, and now things can begin in earnest, and they kind of pick up together what Houdini had started, which was very small, little venues, sometimes a side show, sometimes a museum, like a PT. Barnum type museum. If they were lucky, they were just kind of there almost part of the woodwork or the furniture with other stuff going on. They weren't doing actual shows, and if they were doing a show, it was a small act in a larger circus, and it was a grind, from what I understand. Yeah. I mean, travel back then was not still a grind, but it definitely wasn't fun. And they were on the road all the time, and then finally, in 1899, they met a man named Martin Beck, who was a big name and a big up and comer in the vaudeville scene, which at the time you think of vaudeville now as like these kind of little shows. But at the time, that was kind of the peak of the touring world and the live theater world. If you were doing vaudeville, that was sort of Top of the Pops. And he saw them perform in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was really knocked out. He did this one of his handcuff escapes. And he also took these challenges. He was very famous for people saying, hey, can you do this? Can you get out of these? And really, he would do this in public. And it would help promote his brand, basically, and get a lot of press. And he was challenged with a pair of handcuffs from Beck. And he got out of those. And Beck said, Kid, you got it. Being Omaha in March. And I paid $60, which is about one 8000 hundred dollars today. So it was good money. And all of a sudden, they are killing it on the vaudeville circuit. Yeah, his cable to them said, I might proposition you for all next season as well. So it was a big deal. It wasn't just that one show was like, okay, you've just made it to the big time. And so all of a sudden, they're in with Martin Beck, who basically is the king of the Western circuit of the Vogue, and they're playing all over the place, making a lot more money than they were before, playing fewer shows, putting in fewer hours on stage and getting compensated better for it. They're like, all right, this is pretty great. I can go with this. Yeah. And I mentioned that when he would go to these towns, he would do these challenges and stunts for the public and the press. And one of the things he did that would later come back to bite him a little bit was he would always like, the cops would come out and he would have the cops lock them up and put him in handcuffs and do all this stuff. Which was great for us, of course. But as we'll see later on in Germany, that didn't go over so well with the cops. But he was known because of this as the king of handcuffs and also the celebrated police bathler. Yes. And not only did it kind of drum up attention in a new town where they may not have heard of them, this guy shows up to a police station, says, put me in jail, and then gets out like in five minutes, or something like that. But also the cops end up talking to the press. And they say, we have no idea how he did it. So now you have an official endorsement that you just got for free out of the cops and the local police so it was a very smart thing to do. And he would do that from town to town, like you said, drum up publicity and also to sell tickets. This would be a way that his shows would go from moving Hohum and then to sell out with one of his publicity stunt. So he was really good at that kind of thing. All right, so he's making all this dough. He tries to get a tour together with Beck to go to Europe, because back then, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. It was if you could make it in Europe, you could make it anywhere. And Beck was sort of not too high on that idea. So I think they had a falling out and Houdini put a tour together. He and Best, for themselves to go kind of run their own show. And they did. They went to Europe and were equally as successful all over Europe and the UK performing these feats of escape. Yeah. In Russia, too. He basically did a world tour over the course of five years. He invested. They said, let's do it. We're going to try to really kind of make this to the next level. And he took the same kind of publicity chasing stuff from town to town that he did in the US. That served him so well. He did the same thing in Europe, too. He embassy really kind of up the act. Around that time, they started coming with more and more grander illusions and tricks and stagecraft, and the European thing was a huge success. And that's what catapulted him into a superstar. He became an international star thanks to that five year tour. Yeah. And that was in Germany. How I mentioned earlier, the police there, I don't think, liked the fact the German police aren't known for their senses of humor. And I don't think they thought it was super cool that he would go over there and sort of not make a fool of them. But I think they may have some of them may have taken it that way. So a police officer in Cologne, Germany, accused him of fraud. At one point, Houdini fired back. That is slander. And then I think he had to go to court and expose some of his tricks, which he wasn't too wild about, but in order to get out of it, he had to kind of expose how he did some of these tricks. But it did work and he did get out of it. Yeah. And now he had an official court endorsement that he was no fraud. He was an actual true magician. And it was a big deal, too, because Germany at the time was under the Kaiser, who ruled it with an authoritarian state or ruled an authoritarian state. To take on Germany and then prevail, it took hutsba, as his dad might have said. After that, they kind of go back to America, I think in 19 five, after five years of touring Europe, a lot of money. Yeah, a lot of money, a lot more stardom. This could have been a really easy time for he and Best to just settle down and say, you know what? We've made it. We're rich. We're good. We can retire forever. Let's just live the good life. And they made some attempts to that, I think, that's really was ready to settle down. And I think Houdini was, like, saying he would. So they bought a brownstone in Harlem. There was a farm in Connecticut they bought mom moved in with them, and he was making the gestures of settling down, and then he said, you know what? I got to get back out there. I'm getting stale. Yeah. I think one of my big takeaways from reading about his life and we'll get into some of his inventions later, but he was really an innovator, and he was never content to just sort of sit back and do the same old tricks. I think he always wanted to invent new stuff, new gadgets and new tricks to do for people. And I think it was in 19 eight that he developed his milk can Escape, one of his more famous, because he did a couple of things where basically he was like, I might die if this doesn't work. And those are always the biggest tricks. Yeah. And like, in that one, it was a milk can, an oversized milk can, which is like a giant metal can that a human could conceivably fit into if they were very small, in five foot five. Right? And it was filled with water, and he would get in there, and they would padlock the top and put it behind a curtain. And then two minutes later, he would tell the audience, try to hold your breath along with me, which just really raised the tension in the theater. And then two minutes later, he would come from around the curtain, like, soaking wet and out of breath, but triumphant, and everybody would just go nuts. And then that milk can, I don't know if it was his originally or if he innovated it from somebody else, but he found out later that there were imitators doing the same thing, and he hated that kind of stuff. He hated imitators. He hated people, like using his work, whether they credited him or not. He just did not like that kind of thing. But then that would push him to innovate further. So he just abandoned the milk can altogether, which had brought him so much success, and moved on to, like, increasingly more dangerous things. His greatest invention was the Chinese water torture cell, which is kind of similar to the milk can, but just even more nuts and even more dangerous. Yeah, that's easily his most famous trick. That's the one that you always see if you look up Houdini's greatest tricks, like, you said it's the same thing, but it's a clear tank of water and he is lowered from his ankles, I think sometimes cuffed, sometimes in a strait jacket, and you can see them. And of course, then they raise the curtain so you can't see what's going on. Are we going to tell people how he does some of this stuff? I'll tell you what, since there's so much to say about him anyway, we probably don't have time. But there's a really great Gizmodo. Article that says the secrets behind Houdini's Ten Greatest Tricks. That really does a great job of explaining it imo. Yeah, I mean, let's just say this. Houdini was very good at things like getting out of handcuffs. He was a master of locks and lock picking, so he did learn, like, tons and tons of skills. It's not to say that if a magician has a trick and you learn how to do it that they're not skilled, but when it comes to these contraptions they're rigged, of course it's not real magic. He didn't purport to be doing real magic. He just wanted to be a performer and delight audiences. And he did that. Yes. Sometimes the answer is really simple, like, oh, there's hinges, or it's not really limits. Yeah, exactly. Like when you find these explanations, you're like, that's still pretty interesting that he was able to do this. And a lot of times he would take longer purposefully than he needed to. He could get out of these things in a matter of seconds, but he might say, take two minutes to appear, just to keep the tension ratcheted up. Right. Make it that much more amazing. But he also like some of the sleight of hand that he and Beth would do. I read that his handcuff tricks, he was the guy who started handcuffed tricks, like escaping from handcuffs. And when somebody came up and said. I had these cuffs specially made for you and I want to see if you can get out of them. He would ask to examine them. Ask to examine the key. And Best would just kind of be standing there looking. Too. And she'd make note of what the key looked like and then she'd slip away without anybody noticing backstage to their huge. Giant ring of keys. Find a key that looks similar. And then give Harry a kiss or something like that. And they would exchange keys. And then he would hand their key back to the person and palm the key that they had been letting him inspect, and then managed to swap it out again later on. So the sleight of hand and the trickery that was involved in and of itself is masterful. If you take actual magic out of the equation, I don't see how this could be any less impressive. You know what I mean? Yeah. Every time I've seen, and I haven't been to many magic shows, but like at the Magic Castle, you want to be entertained, and you want someone to perform a good trick. No one in the audience. I mean, you want the audience leaving, going, boy, how did they do that? Was that real? Were they conjuring the dark magic? Right. I enjoyed the magic castle. I know. I told this on Movie Crush. I don't know if I ever talked about it here, but they have all these small parlor rooms in addition to the big main room where the big show is. It's just like Eyes Wide Shut. Yeah, exactly, Fidelio. But the little parlor rooms is really what I enjoy. They were very small, like, not many people in there. And that was just like good old fashioned card tricks and stuff like that, where you're just so well practiced. And those were just always the most fun for me, the big shows. I could take it early. But you would have liked Sudini's early work, because that's pretty much what it consisted of. Close up magic and card tricks. Yeah, it's like David Blaine. I love all those early specials, but then when he was like, let me go stand on this thing for three years, I didn't really care as much. He didn't like his three year standing face. He stood on the thing, right? Yeah, he stood on a big, tall thing. He did. I think he was also frozen in a block of ice, too, maybe. Sure. It was a thing. Who did? He got like this whole he just keeps innovating and innovating and just wowing the public more and more, and he keeps going. But there's also these other things happening at the same time. Like, the early 20th century is like a really innovative time, if you think about it. One of the things that came out of it was the beginning of movies, and so who didn't? He was like the kind of person who is like, yes, I can use that to do magic. All I have to do is perform one trick once captured on film. We can just show everybody the film. It's going to be great because I'm, like, 43 now, and I'm really starting to feel it hanging upside down in a straitjacket from a crane six stories up or underwater in a tank that wears on a person having to do it night after night after night after night. Right. 200 people. Exactly. Well, sometimes thousands. He could draw a crowd at the height of his stardom, for sure. But he was very much drawn to film for that reason. One of the big problems was he was like, zero good at acting. From what? By all accounts, yeah, he was like, me zero good at acting. I've seen you act. You took that beasting. I thought you actually got stung by a bee. I was one good. I wasn't zero good. Okay, we're on a scale of one to 100. Yeah, I was one. But I was better than Houdini. But. It was the beginning of movies, and people would go see anything that you put up on the silver screen. So he was a big star. He was like one of Hollywood's big first action heroes. And everything he did when at, it full bore and said, all right, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start a production company, and all these other movie ventures. And none of those were super successful, but he did have a brief stint as kind of the big action guy of the day. And these are things that I think most people, houdini aficionados, of course, know all this stuff. But if you just know Houdini is a magician, you may not know that he was a movie star or that he was a pretty advanced inventor because he's coming up with all of these contraptions and machines himself to do these tricks. And so he realized early on. Part of the problem with that was if you want to safeguard something, you would file a patent. But in order to file a patent, you have to explicitly show how the thing works. So he was caught between a rock and a hard place, magician wise, because he hated being ripped off. But he didn't want to reveal these tricks to get a patent on these machines. A lot of them, if you look through his list of patents that he got, a lot of them he never even ended up using or were abandoned kind of midway through the process of getting them patented. But he found a loophole in performing these things on stage and getting them copywritten as a live act. Right. So with a patent, you had to explain technically how the whole thing worked. Not the case with copyright. Now you do a play and you copyright it, and you're good to go. And that's essentially what he did with the Chinese water torture cell. He did a performance in front of Legendarily. I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a pretty good story. In front of one single person live on stage as a one act play, and that enabled him to copyright it in England. Yeah, I think he also copyrighted maybe the metamorphosis, which was one of his earlier tricks. Yeah, he would just write a play, and then in the play, this trick would happen. We described the trick, but he didn't describe how the trick to work. He just described, say, from the audience's vantage point, and then, bam, it was copywritten. And anybody who tried that same trick would be infringing on his copyright. Pretty smart, I think. We got to talk about that metamorphosis for a second, though. It's worth saying he turned himself into a butterfly. He turned himself into Franz Kafka. That'd be even better. It's a very literary joke. So Best would be standing there helping him get into a sack, would pull the drawstring at the top of the sack. He would get into a box. The box would be chained trust padlocked. And then Beth would put a screen up, clap three times, and then on the third clap, the screen would come down, and it would be Houdini standing there. He would unlock the box and open up the giant mail bag. And there was best popped out, and we're talking in a matter of seconds. A matter of seconds, this thing happened. And that was the metamorphosis. That was a really good example of how good Beth got, because apparently they could trade places in reality with this trick. And you can find out how it worked with the Gizmodo article, but they had it down to where she could change places with him in 3 seconds. You're doing Gizmodo a big service here. Well, Gizmodo did the world a big service by writing that article, so I'm just paying it forward, backward, I guess. Before we break, let's talk a little bit about his aviation career. Can we do that? Yeah, because if you're thinking aviator Harry Houdini, the answer is yes, because he was such a driven man and performer. The Wright brothers had proved that you could fly, so he was like, I need to get in on that, because what's better to draw a crowd out in public than to do something like flying? So he bought a biplane for about five grand in Europe, which is a lot of money back then. Still a lot of money, but it's even more because it's modern times. Right. Because of inflation. Sure. And he took it to Australia, supposedly took out the first life insurance policy for an airplane accident in the history of the world, and toured Australia and was the very first person to fly an airplane on Australian soil. Yeah, that's pretty historic, if you think about it. That was, like, another good example of there was this new, innovative thing going on, and he wanted in on it, so he went and did it until he didn't want to do it. Right. Once it became kind of commonplace, he's like, oh, I'm done flying. Yeah, that was Houdini. All right, so we'll take our last break here, and we'll come back and talk about his battle with his spiritualist and his odd demise right after this. Okay, Chuck, you promised a battle with the spiritualist, and I want to hear about it. Even though I think we kind of talked a little bit about Houdini in our spiritualism episode, and I know we definitely talked about it. We had. To death. Yes. There's just no way. And I know we talked about his death in our appendix episode. Not to give too much away. Yeah, he's kind of appeared a couple of times. So he hated the spiritualism movement from the very beginning, it seemed like. Again, he was a performer and a magician who performed these really well thought out tricks. But the idea from him was never, I'm really doing this stuff. I'm a master at performing these escapes. He was really rubbed by the spiritualist because he thought they were trying to con everybody, because they were by saying, we're really doing this stuff. And he's like, no, you're just performing like me, but you're saying you're really doing it, and I don't like that. Yeah, you're taking advantage of people's grief, probably fleecing money out of them. Like, there's a lot wrong with what you're doing. And apparently so. He was good friends for a brief time with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, who was at least as famous as Houdini by this time. We're talking the early 1920s, if not more famous, because of Sherlock Holmes. And Doyle was a huge adherent of spiritualism, enormous. One of the most gullible, smart people who ever lived. And Houdini really wanted to be friends with them. So he kind of kept his sentiments about spiritualism to himself. And the Doyles invited Houdini over for Seance because by this time, Houdini's mom had died. And apparently he feigned dead away when he got the news, like he was in Europe at the time. And when he woke up, he's just sobbing uncontrollably. I'm sure he still went on stage. That was just what Houdini did. But he took it rather hard. So when the Doyles invited him over for Sean, he went into it openminded, hoping beyond hope. He would have loved to have spoken to his mom. But also, I think he has already had the kernels of skepticism in the modern sense of the word growing inside of him, and it really rubbed him the wrong way. Like, the whole thing started when his mother inhabited the body of Mrs. Doyle, Lady Doyle, and made the sign of the cross, which a lifelong Jewish mother would never do. And apparently it went downhill from there, and it really rubbed him the wrong way, and he really resented it. And that led to the following out of his friendship with Doyle, but also his all out, just war on spiritualism and spiritualist. Yeah, I mean, he ended up in court. He testified in front of Congress in support of a bill that outlawed fortune telling in DC. And he specifically took on we took on a lot of people, but Marjorie the spiritualist marjorie Mina Crandon was the wife of a Boston surgeon and pretty big in that movement. And he got together with Scientific American magazine on a committee that they formed and exposed her, basically, and even put out a pamphlet, a 40 page pamphlet called Houdini Exposes the Trick Used by the Boston Medium. Marjorie yeah, it's very specific title. It was a very public war between them. At one point, they had dueling stage presentations in Boston, which within days of each other, and Houdini finally got he was part of a committee for Scientific American who is looking to award $2,500 for evidence of actual mediumship information from the other side or whatever. He saw to it that she didn't get that she lost. But it was apparently a Harvard student who ended up unmasking her. He just wrote that pamphlet suggesting how she was probably doing it. And then also he added an act to his larger act, which was kind of like a seance, and he would explain how this was all being done, which is pretty cool. It was cool. What wasn't cool was how he died. Yeah. Is that fair to say? And I'm sure I've made fun of Jay Gordon Whitehead before, but I'll do it again. Yeah. So here's what happened. He fractured his ankle in a performance doing the Chinese water torture Cell, and that kind of started this run of bad luck, if you believe in that kind of thing. So he fractured his ankle. He's already a little bit hobbled. His doctor said, you probably shouldn't be performing right now. He said, no, I'm going to do it anyway. I'm on tour. And he went to Montreal and gave a lecture at McGill University, where he invited these students backstage. And the story you've heard is true. Like, hey, can you take a punch to the stomach? I've heard you can. And Houdini is laid up on the couch because of his ankle, says, yeah, I'm pretty good at that. And this guy, Jay Gordonwhitehead, and this is a quote it says, abruptly delivered four or five terribly forcible deliberate, well directed blows. Like, just started wailing on his stomach, apparently. Yeah. He wasn't ready for it. He wasn't tightened up or didn't have those ABS rock solid. Right. And it was decidedly uncool. Yes. Not magician cool, not fond cool, not cool by any definition. Apparently, the same witness said that Houdini was like, that'll do. His response to that. Really? Yes. And he tried to play it off, but he was like, that really hurt. And it just kept getting worse, too. Just that later that night, he had stomach cramps. The next day, he was racked with abdominal pain, and it was finally bad enough that he went to a doctor, and his doctor is like, I think you might have appendicitis. You should go to a hospital. And Houdini said, no, I have to perform tonight, and went on stage in Detroit and gave what came ended up being his final performance, I think, on October 24, 1926, because that doctor was absolutely right. It was appendicitis, and he was in big trouble. Yes. It was too late for him. It was a ruptured appendix. He died on Halloween, on October 31, with Bess and a couple of his brothers at his bedside. And what the debate is, there was a lot of debate over the years about whether or not he was murdered and had been being poisoned by the spiritualist or whether the spiritualist hired this kid to go beat him up and whale on his stomach or whatever. BIFF yeah, exactly. And I think most people that really know have come out and said none of that stuff is really true. That's really probably all speculation. But what the real question is is whether or not it's possible and whether or not those punches to the stomach actually ruptured his appendix, or did he already have an appendicitis happening and this might have just brought it to light or exacerbated it, or maybe it was just ill timed all the way around. Yes. I think in our appendix episode, we landed on the idea that, no, it definitely didn't rupture his appendix. And apparently there's a study that looked at 20 years worth of appendicitis and could only find just a handful of appendixes that were ruptured from violence or trauma, like being hit. So it can happen, but it's really rare. And even Jay Gordon whitehead BIFF probably didn't rupture Houdini's appendix. But what he did do was he gave Houdini a good reason why his abdomen would hurt right there, which would cause Houdini to just ignore it for longer than he otherwise might have had. It been a mystery sensation that he couldn't attribute it to anything. And so Jgor might have probably did at least indirectly lead to Houdini's death. But it was a neglected appendix or appendicitis that finally got him, and he died of sepsis on Halloween in 1926 in Detroit, of all places. Of all places. Yeah. So to put a tag on the spiritualist thing. Before he died. He told Beth. He was like. Hey. Listen. I've got an opportunity here. If I'm about to die. To really prove this spiritualism thing is really bunk. Because I'm going to try from the other side to get back in touch with you. And you're going to have to have these seances and try and get in touch with me. And this is going to prove it once and for all. And for about a decade after his death, bess did hold a seance. It never worked, of course, and she eventually quit. But the Magic Castle still has houdini seances I think every year. I don't know if you can just buy a special ticket or if you have to be invited to that. I know you have to be invited to get in, period. But I don't know how you get into that seance. You got to know somebody who at least knows somebody who knows somebody, probably. I want to make fun of that theory, though, one more time about spiritualism. Sure. There was a book called The Secret Life of Houdini where the author said that if one were to suspect Houdini, a victim of foul play, the section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit mediums must be considered likely suspect. It's like something off a History Channel or something. Yeah. And fun to make fun of. Yeah. You got anything else about Houdini? I got nothing else. All right, well, I don't have anything else either, but there's plenty more to learn. There's tons of websites dedicated to houdini. There's, like, lots of documentaries out there, and it's pretty cool to go check them out. And also check out the Gizmodo article. And since I misspoke Gizmodo, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this another correction. Okay, good. They're rolling in lately. Yeah, we're rolling in them. Hey, guys, just listen to the latest episode on criminal records, and we heard from quite a few people on this one, by the way. And as always, it was great stuff. However, I think Josh provided a bit of unfortunate misinformation and claiming that sex offenders have the highest rate of recidivism. While this is a common claim, the evidence does not support it. There are, as always, a lot of different variables in the research on the topic. Notes that there are so many different factors here to consider, but the straight statement that sex offenders have been shown to have the highest recidivism rates of any criminal is not supported by the data anyway, there's a lot more research out there as well, but I think that the statement about recidivism rates reinforces the false belief among many that sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. Keep up the good work, Mike and Mike's in a bunch of links that I went through, and it appears that is correct. Yeah, got that one wrong. So thanks to Mike and everybody who wrote in to say it's not true because we don't want to paint anybody in an unnecessarily bad light. Agreed. Okay, if you want to be like Mike and get in touch with us with a correction, especially a vital correction, we love to hear those. And you can shoot 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." |
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