Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just stuff you
Speaker 2: should know in it, doing some stuff you should know,
Speaker 2: kind of stuff on the Stuff you should know podcasts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Hey, can I make.
Speaker 1: A couple of quick announcements?
Speaker 2: Oh boy, is it a correction about me?
Speaker 3: No, that's a listener mail. Okay, just a couple of
Speaker 3: quick things. Firstly, I have had my front tooth implant redone,
Speaker 3: So the next roughly eighty episodes might be a little
Speaker 3: lispy here and there.
Speaker 2: Can you say sibilants, sibilants?
Speaker 1: It's actually more f's.
Speaker 2: Can you say fibilants fibilance.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sometimes air just shoots out of that a little toothhole
Speaker 3: tooth the thh at the end. That's problematic. So you know,
Speaker 3: here we are again everyone, and bear with it. And
Speaker 3: I appreciate your support.
Speaker 2: You can't even tell Chuck like, had you not said something,
Speaker 2: maybe one person would have noticed. I think it's fine.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, but you'll have some some words you will
Speaker 3: stand out. The other quick one is just for this
Speaker 3: episode massive CoA trigger warning any vegetarians or vegans or
Speaker 3: really anybody who is just grossed out by gross food stuff.
Speaker 1: This is choc bowl.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If you find the human body and the stuff
Speaker 2: it can do odious two, you might want to just
Speaker 2: be prepared. Yeah, all right, So that was good, good
Speaker 2: CoA buddy. Yeah, because we are talking about what things
Speaker 2: were like before America started regulating the meat that we
Speaker 2: bought in ate and it turns out it was a
Speaker 2: total free for all until then. But it was really
Speaker 2: just kind of nestled in a short period. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: know where like the Second Industrial Revolution happened and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, everybody moves to the cities and you
Speaker 2: can't buy your bacon from the guy down the street anymore,
Speaker 2: or make your own milk or whatever. You have to
Speaker 2: buy it. And so these companies sprung up to supply
Speaker 2: that stuff and they started cutting corners immediately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the American way time and time again. We've
Speaker 3: seen from the very beginning corporate interest, corporate lobby all
Speaker 3: in the name of profit. And this isn't just US railing.
Speaker 3: This is the history of the United States.
Speaker 2: Yes, for sure, most of them are advertisers on stuff
Speaker 2: you should know too, probably so so people needed this
Speaker 2: stuff and if they filled a void, like it was
Speaker 2: a necessary thing that they were doing. But the problem
Speaker 2: is because there's zero regulation, I mean none, Like there
Speaker 2: was an author named Deborah Blum, and she wrote The
Speaker 2: Poison Squad colon One chemist's single minded crusade for safety
Speaker 2: at the turn of the twentieth century, and she said
Speaker 2: that there was nothing that could be done to food
Speaker 2: that was illegal because there were no food safety laws.
Speaker 2: There was nothing you could do aside from kill your customers.
Speaker 2: And even then you might just get some bad press
Speaker 2: and everybody's like, oh, well it happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I wonder if it was because they just assumed that
Speaker 3: these new corporations would just sort of deliver food the
Speaker 3: right way, or I just don't wonder if it was
Speaker 3: naivete I mean, eventually it was. Obviously stuff started coming
Speaker 3: out as we'll see in this episode, and Congress, you know,
Speaker 3: bows down to the donors, as they still do today.
Speaker 3: But I just wonder what they thought at first, just like, no,
Speaker 3: this is great, and you know, they're supplying more food
Speaker 3: and I'm sure they're doing it right.
Speaker 2: My take on it is because this is like set
Speaker 2: largely in the Gilded Age, that there was a general
Speaker 2: like hands off approach like, hey, this business is zooming
Speaker 2: this economy into the stratosphere. Sure, and we don't want
Speaker 2: to interfere with it, and I'm sure they're going to
Speaker 2: do the right thing anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2: So that's my take. I think that there was a
Speaker 2: combination of not really realizing that we needed regulations because
Speaker 2: we never needed them before, and then not wanting to
Speaker 2: meddle with this red hot economic engine that was flaming,
Speaker 2: just with so many flames.
Speaker 1: Yeah, flames on the side of your base.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I guess we should start with milk, huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why not? Because it was pretty bad stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: Pasturization had been around for a long time. It was
Speaker 3: a minute in the eighteen fifties, but they didn't get
Speaker 3: on the widespread pasturization of milk till about the eighty
Speaker 3: or so years later. So if you went and bought
Speaker 3: your milk, you know, I think the understanding for a
Speaker 3: lot of people is like, oh, well, back then you
Speaker 3: would buy your milk from the local dairy, right, and
Speaker 3: it was that's way better just to get it fresh
Speaker 3: from the teat like that, and that was not true
Speaker 3: because this milk was nasty. It was killing babies. Four
Speaker 3: hundred thousand babies a year from drinking bad milk.
Speaker 2: In America alone. That's not a global stat that's just
Speaker 2: in the United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah, unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: It's nuts. So everybody's like, yeah, this just happens. But
Speaker 2: I guess people just thought that's what happened when you
Speaker 2: drink milk sometimes, or I don't know what the thinking was. Yeah,
Speaker 2: But a guy named John Newell Hurdi h R t Y.
Speaker 2: He became the chief Health Officer of Indiana in eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety six, and we should say by this time, just
Speaker 2: kind of to give it some context, the pure food movement,
Speaker 2: which was a progressive movement in the nineteenth century, along
Speaker 2: with like temperance, suffrage, abolition, it had really kind of
Speaker 2: started to gain steam. So this guy wasn't laying the groundwork,
Speaker 2: but his work was very noteworthy. But he became the
Speaker 2: chief Health Officer of Indiana and he immediately started investigating
Speaker 2: the state's dairy farms and found what they were doing
Speaker 2: is what was killing, you know, infants who were being
Speaker 2: fed cow's milk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was because it was cow's milk that was
Speaker 3: watered down so they could stretch profits. But it was
Speaker 3: watered down. It's not like they had some beautiful filtration
Speaker 3: system from a Poland spring.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Actually, I don't even know what a Poland spring is.
Speaker 2: It's a specific spring. It is ironically not in Poland.
Speaker 1: I had a feeling so they weren't using that.
Speaker 3: Of course, they were using like the farm's pond water,
Speaker 3: which was disgusting. It was stagnant at one point, like
Speaker 3: he literally held up a bottle of milk from Indiana
Speaker 3: and saw actual worms inside of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, isn't that awful?
Speaker 1: Live worms they were moving.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that wasn't all he found. He found insects, hares, blood, pus,
Speaker 2: cow manure. He estimated that just the residents of Indianapolis
Speaker 2: ingested about two thousand pounds of cow manure every year,
Speaker 2: just from the milk they were drinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's collective, not each person, of course, but that's
Speaker 3: still a lot of I.
Speaker 2: Think you would ode on cowpoop if you ate that much.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it would make you into like a superhero.
Speaker 2: There is another really gross one that Dave turned up.
Speaker 2: I think it was originally in an Atlantic article about
Speaker 2: the early days of milk. But one of the things
Speaker 2: that they would do so like if you thinned milk
Speaker 2: with water, it was very clearly thinned it. It didn't
Speaker 2: look like milk it because it was bluish gray. So
Speaker 2: they put like chalk or flour or plaster of Paris in.
Speaker 2: Not great, but still it gets much worse. You also,
Speaker 2: when you got a bottle of milk, expected the cream
Speaker 2: to still be there on top. The cream rises to
Speaker 2: the top, as they say, right, well, if you've been
Speaker 2: watering down your milk, there probably isn't much cream left
Speaker 2: in it, but you need to put that cream back in.
Speaker 2: There's something that looks like it. So they said, aside
Speaker 2: from stagnant pond water, what else do I have on
Speaker 2: the farm that's basically free that I'm not using that
Speaker 2: I can use for this? Oh yeah, these little calves
Speaker 2: that I'm slaughtering and selling is veal. I could use
Speaker 2: their brains impure because it has kind of a creamy texture,
Speaker 2: and that will stand in for the cream that I'll
Speaker 2: put on top of the watered down milk that I'm
Speaker 2: selling in the bottle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that is a horrifying thing to hear. Yeah,
Speaker 3: with human ears, we should point out that wasn't It
Speaker 3: wasn't like everybody was doing that. This is like an
Speaker 3: example of you know, who knows, it could have been
Speaker 3: one farm. But what they did find out what was
Speaker 3: being used widespread and just sort of with regularity in
Speaker 3: the industry was using formaldehyde to preserve milk pre pasteurization,
Speaker 3: which is you know, we all know it's an embalming
Speaker 3: chemical used for dead bodies to make them last longer.
Speaker 3: And this was literally killing babies if you were a
Speaker 3: kid in Indianapolis in an orphanage, or actually anywhere in
Speaker 3: the United States. They didn't have a baby formula back then.
Speaker 3: You can listen to our episode on do we do
Speaker 3: one just on baby formula?
Speaker 2: Yeah, one on formula and one on the breast.
Speaker 3: I think, oh, that's right. I thought there was two
Speaker 3: on the breast, but it was too total. That wasn't
Speaker 3: trying to be funny.
Speaker 2: There, Well, it was hilarious.
Speaker 3: They would you know, you would get cow's milk as
Speaker 3: a little bebie in an orphanage, so it would you know,
Speaker 3: it would it would kill a kid very quickly if
Speaker 3: you're drinking formaldehyde.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it doesn't take much for a little infant, right,
Speaker 2: And it's apparently one of those things I read that
Speaker 2: it's it will just kill you, like almost immediately if
Speaker 2: you ingest the right amount. So it's not good. And
Speaker 2: even if it doesn't kill you right away, it's it's
Speaker 2: not a pleasant way to die. And again, four hundred
Speaker 2: thousand babies a year we're dying in the United States
Speaker 2: just from bad milk. So it was definitely more than
Speaker 2: just one one dairy farm in Indiana. It was a
Speaker 2: widespread problem.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, So you know that's hero number one. Hero
Speaker 3: number two also comes to us from Indiana.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait, before we move on, you got to tell
Speaker 2: him that great, great quote from doctor Herdy.
Speaker 3: Oh, I thought it was kind of smarmy. Sure, I
Speaker 3: guess he had the right to be smarmy. A reporter
Speaker 3: asked if formaldehyde and milk was dangerous, and he said, well,
Speaker 3: I guess it's all right if you want to embalm
Speaker 3: the baby.
Speaker 2: That didn't strike me as smarmy.
Speaker 1: Is it smarmy for the nineteen twenties or whatever?
Speaker 2: I guess, But he's he's saying like that's what the
Speaker 2: milk producers are doing. They're embalming babies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just I don't know. I thought a man
Speaker 3: of science would say it is extremely dangerous.
Speaker 2: I see, you know, I see, yeah, I get so.
Speaker 3: Still a hero, a little smarmy maybe, but who is
Speaker 3: to spare him?
Speaker 1: The second hoo's your.
Speaker 3: Hero that's coming in is a gentleman named doctor Harvey
Speaker 3: Washington Wiley. In the eighteen eighties, he got to be
Speaker 3: in his bonnet about the problem with food.
Speaker 1: He was a boiler.
Speaker 3: Maker professor there at Purdue, and then the USDA, the
Speaker 3: fairly new USDA, said all right, we're going to start
Speaker 3: a Bureau of Chemistry, and you're the guy that's going to.
Speaker 1: Run it, right he was.
Speaker 2: He essentially dedicated his entire adult life and career to
Speaker 2: fighting for like making the American food market wholesome. Essentially,
Speaker 2: like that's what that guy did. And he actually had
Speaker 2: a bit of the showman in him. He had a
Speaker 2: huge ego. Apparently, most of the people who were talking
Speaker 2: about today had enormous egos, and they rubbed up against
Speaker 2: one another, and even though they didn't like one another,
Speaker 2: most of them they still managed to work together to
Speaker 2: affect real change. Which is kind of a cool little
Speaker 2: hats off to everybody. So one of the first things
Speaker 2: that doctor Wiley did when the USDA hired him to
Speaker 2: run the Bureau of Chemistry, which apparently was a new
Speaker 2: department at the time. This is in the I think
Speaker 2: the eighteen eighties or the late nineteenth century at the
Speaker 2: very least, he started testing syrup and jam and all
Speaker 2: sorts of stuff. I'm not quite sure if he was
Speaker 2: doing it to compare because he was actually researching corn
Speaker 2: syrup at the time, to find out if this was
Speaker 2: actually okay to use as a food because there was
Speaker 2: that whole pure food movement was like, hey, I don't
Speaker 2: know what we're putting into our food to preserve it,
Speaker 2: Like we didn't used to do that ten years ago
Speaker 2: before everybody moved to the city. I'm not sure how
Speaker 2: I feel about this. So doctor Wiley's job was to
Speaker 2: find out if these things were actually harmful or if
Speaker 2: you could use them. One of the first things he
Speaker 2: found out was that most of the maple syrup and
Speaker 2: the honey, like ninety percent of the honey was fake.
Speaker 2: There wasn't a drop of honey in it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was corn syrup. They would flavor a little
Speaker 3: bit with maple. For the syrup, they would flavor it
Speaker 3: like whatever fruit.
Speaker 1: I guess. For jam, I'm not sure what they flavored
Speaker 1: it with.
Speaker 2: For honey, I don't know either, Like how would you
Speaker 2: take a bite and be like, this is honey?
Speaker 1: I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 3: But that was just sort of a jumping off point
Speaker 3: where he was like, well, wait a minute, if they're
Speaker 3: doing this to honey and maypay syrup, we need to
Speaker 3: start looking into other things. And he started to learn
Speaker 3: about formaldehyde in foods. Borax, which is a it's a cleaner,
Speaker 3: you know, like boric acid cleaner under the brand. I
Speaker 3: think it was a brand, wasn't it Borax?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think it was like twenty Mule team Borax.
Speaker 1: Oh, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Was the name. That was the name of the brand.
Speaker 3: But he started realizing this stuff was in our food.
Speaker 3: He got obviously pretty upset about it and goes to Congress,
Speaker 3: and Congress is not interested in passing anything because, as
Speaker 3: you will see, just like you know the things that
Speaker 3: go on today, the food lobby was strong and rich
Speaker 3: and powerful, and Congress sat on their hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah that. Author Deborah Blum also said that like there
Speaker 2: was no political will, not just because they were in
Speaker 2: the pockets of like the food producers. They a lot
Speaker 2: of them, most certainly were, and basically all of them
Speaker 2: were getting money from them at the very least. But
Speaker 2: that also if you introduced one of these bills, you
Speaker 2: were like a crackpot. You were a quack. You were
Speaker 2: you had no idea, right, you had no idea what
Speaker 2: it meant to like be in the business world. You
Speaker 2: were just a dummy. That's how. That's how these things
Speaker 2: were reviewed. And I think something like a hundred or something.
Speaker 2: I think like more than one hundred bills were introduced
Speaker 2: and just within a decade or so, and only like
Speaker 2: eight or nine of them managed to get passed. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's how that's how looked down upon the idea of
Speaker 2: food regulation was at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Wiley is a pretty smart guy, he said, He's
Speaker 3: kind of had a little bit of showman quality to him.
Speaker 3: So he got together an experiment, also sort of a
Speaker 3: PR stunt. In nineteen oh two, he took twelve government
Speaker 3: clerks and put them in housing in the basement of
Speaker 3: the Agricultural Department building there in DC, and they were
Speaker 3: exposed to what they called Hygienic Table trials, where half
Speaker 3: of these young men were secretly fed formaldehyde, borax, sodium benzonate,
Speaker 3: all kinds of nasty chemicals like the stuff that was
Speaker 3: going in food, and it was conveniently leaked to the
Speaker 3: press and doctor Wiley. They were called the Poison Squad,
Speaker 3: and doctor Wiley was dubbed Old Borax.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he he actually became a national figure, like
Speaker 2: people like just as the average American knew about him.
Speaker 2: If you read the newspaper, you probably were familiar with doctor.
Speaker 1: Wiley, the old Borax, old Borax.
Speaker 2: And we talked about him in the Poison Squad in
Speaker 2: I think that does the FDA Protect Americans episode? Yeah,
Speaker 2: just kind of briefly, But I mean that whole book
Speaker 2: that Deborah Blum wrote was about doctor Wiley and the
Speaker 2: Poison Squad and the work he did amazing, and Wiley
Speaker 2: definitely deserves a lot of credit. He gets less credit
Speaker 2: than he probably should get because around that time people
Speaker 2: started to kind of look at Teddy Roosevelt, as we'll see,
Speaker 2: as the person who really got the legislation pushed through.
Speaker 2: But it probably would not have happened it when it
Speaker 2: did without doctor Wiley. But in addition to doctor Wiley,
Speaker 2: there was also Teddy Roosevelt and another guy, a muck
Speaker 2: ranking journalist, a socialist named Upton Sinclair, and those two
Speaker 2: were considered to be some real driving forces behind food
Speaker 2: regulation in America.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you know what that means.
Speaker 2: It means that it's time for a message break.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: It means I'm going to go try and find a
Speaker 3: tiny chick lit it to shove into my tooth hole.
Speaker 2: You should just switch the colors once in a while.
Speaker 1: Aaron Cooper has my flipper.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's right, man, quite a gift.
Speaker 3: I don't think it would fit now anyway. Okay, So
Speaker 3: don't feel bad, Coop. Just keep praying to that thing
Speaker 3: every night and it'll be okay.
Speaker 1: So weird, all right, we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 3: So we left off with quite a teaser that a
Speaker 3: gentleman named Teddy Roosevelt and a socialist writer named Upton
Speaker 3: Sinclair would change the course of America.
Speaker 1: And boy did they.
Speaker 3: A little background on Teddy Roosevelt just because it really
Speaker 3: applies here to how he got sort of swept up
Speaker 3: in all this. To begin with, he was a soldier.
Speaker 3: He led the rough riders and the invasion of Spanish
Speaker 3: held Cuba. And the reason that is important to this
Speaker 3: story is because that invasion and that whole war was
Speaker 3: a lot of Americans died, but not from the battle itself.
Speaker 3: I think about four hundred Americans died in combat, but
Speaker 3: about fifty five hundred died from disease, from malaria and
Speaker 3: dysentery and typhoid. So President McKinley, after the war started,
Speaker 3: just a big military commission to investigate what it was
Speaker 3: like to be a soldier in all these awful conditions.
Speaker 3: And that very key to this story included the food.
Speaker 1: That they ate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there was at least among the people who
Speaker 2: had fought in the Spanish American War, there was this
Speaker 2: awareness that the roast beef, especially the canned roast beef
Speaker 2: god that had been delivered as rations. Yeah. Yeah, you're
Speaker 2: walking a fine line just even attempting canned roast beef, Right,
Speaker 2: it better be good. This was so not good. It
Speaker 2: was it was like it would make you immediately start vomiting.
Speaker 2: According to Teddy Roosevelt, Yeah, they called it embalm meek
Speaker 2: because some of it was clearly rotted. But then they'd
Speaker 2: added formaldehyde. This wasn't even like, Okay, this is fresh meat,
Speaker 2: we're gonna add formaldehyde. They would put the formaldehyde in
Speaker 2: after it was rotted to try to counteract the.
Speaker 1: Rod you know, to bring it back to life.
Speaker 2: Exactly to frankenstein it up. And they found that that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: when you ate the stuff, it didn't matter what you
Speaker 2: did to cook it or anything like that. It would
Speaker 2: just make you throw up or just start pooping your pants,
Speaker 2: like almost immediately. And Teddy Roosevelt and all the other
Speaker 2: veterans of the Spanish American War were pretty miffed about this.
Speaker 2: So when Roosevelt got the chance to go testify for Congress,
Speaker 2: he was the governor of New York by this time,
Speaker 2: about that beef, that tinned beef, he definitely took the chance,
Speaker 2: or took the opportunity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he called that canned beef a disgrace to our
Speaker 3: country and also had a little testimonial description when the
Speaker 3: cans were opened to the top was nothing more than
Speaker 3: a layer of slime. It was disagreeable looking, that's putting
Speaker 3: it mildly and nasty. Sometimes we stowed it with potato
Speaker 3: and onions. But I could have eaten my hat stewed
Speaker 3: with potato and onions rather than the beef. Nearly all
Speaker 3: the men sickened after eating it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, isn't that cross?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Any you know, like you said, by this time, I
Speaker 3: mean he was already a war hero, but governor of
Speaker 3: New York, he has you know, some clout all of
Speaker 3: a sudden.
Speaker 2: For sure. Yeah. He was fairly well known enough that
Speaker 2: when McKinley stood for reelection in nineteen hundred, he chose
Speaker 2: Teddy Roosevelt as his running mate. Yeah, and he was
Speaker 2: still young. I think he was forty two. Less than
Speaker 2: a year into the second McKinley administration, McKinley was assassinated
Speaker 2: and died, and so suddenly Teddy Roosevelt, the vice president,
Speaker 2: is president, and he became the youngest president in history.
Speaker 2: K was forty three, Roosevelt was forty two. And it's
Speaker 2: really weird. It's one of those moments in history where
Speaker 2: the right person happens to be in the right place
Speaker 2: to really make things happen that seemed intractable before.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I don't know enough about Teddy Roosevelt to fully
Speaker 2: sing his praises, but from what I can tell, just
Speaker 2: the brief stuff I've read about him researching this. He
Speaker 2: was a really interesting, level headed dude, at least as
Speaker 2: far as balancing the interests of the United States went.
Speaker 2: Dare I say that, Well he was.
Speaker 3: He figured big in the foundation of our national parks.
Speaker 2: So that was a big part. But also like in
Speaker 2: this specifically, he saw a very important need that needed
Speaker 2: to be filled, which was the meat producers, but the
Speaker 2: food producers in general, the meat producers in particular needed regularly.
Speaker 2: They were doing some nasty stuff, he found out, and
Speaker 2: he went to Congress and was like, make this happen.
Speaker 2: If you don't make it happen, I'm going to basically
Speaker 2: expose all of you who are in the pockets of
Speaker 2: this beef trust as they call it, the Big five
Speaker 2: beef producers, which included Armor, Swift, and Libby. Who are
Speaker 2: all three still around making meat in the United States.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know his hands were even as president,
Speaker 3: tied by Congress and the lobby.
Speaker 1: Until that is.
Speaker 3: Our final hero of the day comes along a gentleman
Speaker 3: named Upton Sinclair, like you said, a hardcore socialist and
Speaker 3: a writer who wrote the very very famous book The
Speaker 3: Jungle about well most people, if they've never read the
Speaker 3: Jungle would probably say, yeah, it's about exposing the meat
Speaker 3: packing in Chicago, right, But fourteen I'm sorry, fifteen pages
Speaker 3: really covered that meatpacking disgust that we are going to
Speaker 3: have to talk about.
Speaker 1: So just get ready.
Speaker 3: The book was really about an immigrant worker who comes
Speaker 3: to America and has sort of just stopped on by
Speaker 3: capitalism because again, he was a socialist and this was
Speaker 3: his cause.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in the end of the book, the worker
Speaker 2: who's I think only identified as Urgis j u Rgis,
Speaker 2: he just keeps getting like, he loses his family, he
Speaker 2: loses essentially anything good to his life by being ground
Speaker 2: through the gears of capitalism. And on the other side,
Speaker 2: he comes out and finds that socialism is the answer
Speaker 2: and starts dedicating himself to building a socialist paradise or whatever. Right.
Speaker 2: So that was, like you said, the point of the book.
Speaker 2: But when America read this book, they did not pay
Speaker 2: any attention to that socialist message at all. In fact,
Speaker 2: plenty of them ignored the fact that there was an
Speaker 2: overt socialist message and still read the book and got
Speaker 2: something out of it. And what they got was those
Speaker 2: fifteen pages of disgusting descriptions of what was going on
Speaker 2: in Chicago's meatpacking district where essentially all of the beef
Speaker 2: and pork and I guess sheep mutton was processed this
Speaker 2: one area and just where they kept the live live
Speaker 2: stock before slaughter, just when they arrived by train and
Speaker 2: put them into a pen. Just that pen, chuck was
Speaker 2: a square mile big.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was known as packing town. And in order
Speaker 3: to get this information, he went undercover. He spent seven
Speaker 3: weeks posing as a worker in this meatpacking district, which
Speaker 3: was like I said, it's called packing town, but it
Speaker 3: was in the heart of the Union stockyards, and like
Speaker 3: you said, they would bring in by train. It was
Speaker 3: the most efficient system on earth for processing animals. Ten
Speaker 3: thousand cattle, ten thousand hogs, five thousand sheep a day
Speaker 3: coming in being processed. They were doing I think they
Speaker 3: were going through eighteen million animals a year at this
Speaker 3: point because of a very innovative new system called assembly
Speaker 3: line work, which is you know, we know what it
Speaker 3: is now, but back then it was kind of revolutionary.
Speaker 3: And that they would put make one person do one
Speaker 3: job and one job only, all day long, for twelve
Speaker 3: hours a day, and as fast as they could.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you screwed up. The four men would
Speaker 2: be like, you had one job.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't get your finger cut off and put into
Speaker 3: a sausage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that would happen, right. They would use everything
Speaker 2: they could from the animal. Apparently there was a widely
Speaker 2: known phrase that was used there that they used everything
Speaker 2: about the hog except for the squeal just haunting.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I want to point out though, like not in
Speaker 3: the way that like an ethical master chef wants to
Speaker 3: use or a hunter that you know, provides meat for
Speaker 3: their family tries to use every you know, good edible
Speaker 3: part of the animal.
Speaker 1: That's a different deal.
Speaker 3: We're talking about like you know, grinding up hoofs for
Speaker 3: you know, filler exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So when he wrote The Jungle, he interviewed, first of all,
Speaker 2: he witnessed what he wrote about firsthand. But he said,
Speaker 2: like I did not I did not like exaggerate this stuff.
Speaker 2: This is not me embellishing, Like I witnessed this firsthand.
Speaker 2: And the stuff that I didn't witness firsthand, I interviewed
Speaker 2: people who witnessed it firsthand. Yeah, and so he's like,
Speaker 2: this stuff in the book is real. People and we
Speaker 2: haven't even really kind of cracked into what was in
Speaker 2: those fifteen pages. I say we do that.
Speaker 1: Now, should we take a break into it.
Speaker 2: I think that's a fine idea.
Speaker 1: Chuck, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Okay, Chuck, So we're back. It's time to get into
Speaker 2: the grizzly details of the jungle. There's some pretty famous
Speaker 2: stuff in there, just because it just it got out
Speaker 2: so far and wide. It was a very widely read
Speaker 2: book and an even more widely discussed book because of
Speaker 2: the disgust that it generated. But for example, when they
Speaker 2: when they generated when they created sausage, like Upton Sinclair
Speaker 2: told everybody how the sausage is made, and everybody's like,
Speaker 2: we didn't want to know, but now we know, and
Speaker 2: we can't unknow it. They would grind up moldy sausage
Speaker 2: that had been rejected from Europe so it was bad
Speaker 2: when it got to Europe, and then they shipped it
Speaker 2: back to America, and then they used it in the
Speaker 2: sausage they fed Americans. That stuff would also be mixed
Speaker 2: in with scraps of meat that had been shoveled off
Speaker 2: of the floor. Probably at that couple of times a day,
Speaker 2: they would shovel meat scraps and flesh and blood off
Speaker 2: of the floor put it into the sausage mixture. That's
Speaker 2: bad enough that it was on the floor, but the
Speaker 2: workers frequently had things like tuberculosis and they were spitting
Speaker 2: bloody tuberculotic spit onto the floor, so that would get
Speaker 2: mixed in with the food scraps, the meat scraps that
Speaker 2: would be put into the sausages. There was a rat
Speaker 2: problem there, so they would put out poison pieces of
Speaker 2: bread for the rats, and then when the rats ate
Speaker 2: the bread and died, they put the rats in the sausage.
Speaker 2: And then furguod measure, they put the poison bread in
Speaker 2: the sausage too. This was just the sausage that they
Speaker 2: were making.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I get the feeling that there was. If
Speaker 3: there was a poster on the wall of this workplace,
Speaker 3: it was if it's on the floor, it's in the sausage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: Tobacco spit, That's that's probably the best thing you could
Speaker 3: hope for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you being a flavor tobacco spit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if anyone's still listening, you know, obviously potted meats,
Speaker 3: you know, mystery meat is kind of a funny thing
Speaker 3: to say these days, but back then it was truly dangerous.
Speaker 3: It was you know, organ meats, It was tripe. This
Speaker 3: is a quote, and it's hard for me to even
Speaker 3: say this word for because of my tooth and because
Speaker 3: it's disgusting. But the hard car cardalin is cardlinagenus, cartilaginous, cartilaginous. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there we go, hard cartilaginous gullets of beef after the
Speaker 3: tongues had been cut out, was in this potted meat
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the potted chicken in particular. It always appears
Speaker 2: in quotes because it was later determined there was no
Speaker 2: chicken at all in the potted chicken. It was just,
Speaker 2: like you said, every piece of the animal they could use,
Speaker 2: not for ethical purposes, but because they could sell it
Speaker 2: as potted chicken and tell everybody, yeah, it's just ground
Speaker 2: up chicken, just to eat it and shut up.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So you know this is awful. The workers themselves
Speaker 3: are working in deplorable conditions, twelve hours a day in
Speaker 3: these disgusting rooms, doing this stuff, the same job over
Speaker 3: and over and over, which was a new thing. Like
Speaker 3: people weren't used to assembly line work much less like
Speaker 3: if your job all day is to I don't even know.
Speaker 3: I can't even imagine what they were doing.
Speaker 2: Skinning, slicing, removing, deboning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there you go. They I made the joke about
Speaker 3: losing a finger, but they did. They would lose digits,
Speaker 3: they would lose limbs. This stuff would go into the food.
Speaker 3: There were even people that fell into lard vats and
Speaker 3: boiled alive and that.
Speaker 1: Went into the food. Yeah, there was a well, they
Speaker 1: went into the lard.
Speaker 2: There was a quote that well which eventually went into food,
Speaker 2: you know exactly. There was a quote from Sinclair that said,
Speaker 2: all but the bones of them went out into the
Speaker 2: world as DRAMs pure beef flowed.
Speaker 1: I don't think Derams is around anymore.
Speaker 2: Durhams couldn't survive that one. Yeah, there's another quote from
Speaker 2: Upton Sinclair that he said, I aimed at the public's
Speaker 2: heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach,
Speaker 2: which is him. Yeah, with him recognizing that he wrote
Speaker 2: this book about socialism and everybody just focused in on
Speaker 2: the really gross food stuff and that even still it
Speaker 2: affected change. It just wasn't the change he was trying
Speaker 2: to affect. But he wasn't one of those guys who's like,
Speaker 2: oh great, I'm a celebrity either way, I don't care
Speaker 2: how I got there. He turned out to be like
Speaker 2: really bitter at everybody missing this message. Like his book
Speaker 2: was widely read and nobody got it, at least they
Speaker 2: didn't get it the way that he intended them to
Speaker 2: get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is another good quote. He said that he
Speaker 3: was made to a celebrity not because the public cared
Speaker 3: anything about the workers, but simply because the public did
Speaker 3: not want to eat tubercular beef.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, that word. You start messing with that word,
Speaker 2: it gets grosser and grosser.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tubercular beef should open for diarrhea planet.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I think you've just come up with a tour.
Speaker 1: So this is a very sort of a bombshell book.
Speaker 3: It was released in nineteen o six in January, sold
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand copies right out of the gate, which
Speaker 3: was just a ton of books back then. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of books now, as we've learned. Within about five months,
Speaker 3: it was translated into seventeen different languages and eventually became
Speaker 3: a silent movie as well in nineteen fourteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was, like you said, it was a bombshell. Basically,
Speaker 2: that log jam in Congress of you know that had
Speaker 2: kept any food regulation bills essentially from passing this book
Speaker 2: like broke it open. It dislodged all that stuff, and
Speaker 2: the reason why was multifaceted. In addition to grossing out
Speaker 2: the public and being like, we're eating this, government, do
Speaker 2: something about this. Somebody do something about this, you had
Speaker 2: that public outcry, which is kind of in line with
Speaker 2: the progressive drum beat, right, you also had a developing
Speaker 2: drum beat coming out of the business side, because that's
Speaker 2: where that's the whole The debate was divided between the
Speaker 2: progressives who were cranks and crazy and didn't understand business,
Speaker 2: and the business side who were like, to shut up
Speaker 2: and eat this stuff. We're trying to make a profit
Speaker 2: here and get the engine of the United States revving.
Speaker 2: There was a group in business that was like, hey,
Speaker 2: we're already following like food safety practices totally and it's
Speaker 2: really expensive compared to our competitors who are cutting every
Speaker 2: corner possible and selling unsanitary products for way lower than
Speaker 2: we can sell our safe products. So if these guys
Speaker 2: start getting regulated, we're going to even the playing field.
Speaker 2: And as a matter of fact, they'll be behind us
Speaker 2: because they're going to have to play catch up expense
Speaker 2: wise to get to the same level that we're operating
Speaker 2: at and have been all this time. And I said, ketchup,
Speaker 2: which is ironic because one of those companies that was
Speaker 2: already doing things safe was the Heinz Company.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hats off to the Heinz Company.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, not just Heines, but also old Taylor Whiskey.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know there were it wasn't everyone. And
Speaker 3: that's a really good point. I'm glad you made it
Speaker 3: because Heines probably since that has been saying. By the way,
Speaker 3: you know, we weren't a part of all that, right,
Speaker 3: you know, it should have been called the Jungle Colon
Speaker 3: except for Hines. So Roosevelt all of a sudden is
Speaker 3: getting one hundred calls I'm sorry, not calls. He was
Speaker 3: getting one hundred letters a day, calls. He would have
Speaker 3: been like, what's happening here about food safety? He calls
Speaker 3: up Upton Sinclair. These guys should not be buddies, And spoiler,
Speaker 3: they did not end up being buddies. Yeah, it wasn't
Speaker 3: like some crazy like you're like this and I'm like this,
Speaker 3: but you know, we have a lot in common. As
Speaker 3: it turns out, the only thing they had in common,
Speaker 3: it seems like, was that they wanted to clean up
Speaker 3: the food situation in the United States. They didn't trust
Speaker 3: each other, of course, they didn't really like each other.
Speaker 1: Of course, Roosevelt.
Speaker 3: Did not like a muck breaking journalist, and of course
Speaker 3: Sinclair was like, Hey, the Beef Trust is giving you
Speaker 3: two hundred thousand dollars for your presidential campaign, which in
Speaker 3: the future, in twenty twenty four, that would be seven
Speaker 3: million dollars.
Speaker 1: Wow, so you're in.
Speaker 3: The pocket of the Beef Trust, which he denied, of course,
Speaker 3: because he had to eat that beef in Cuba.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he said, mister Sinclair, I bear no love for
Speaker 2: those gentlemen, for I ate the meat they can for
Speaker 2: the army in Cuba.
Speaker 3: Yeah, comma, but their checks cashed all the same.
Speaker 2: Well, he lived up to that quote. He took on
Speaker 2: the Beef Trust, and he got this legislation essentially passed
Speaker 2: through as we'll see. And then, just as a side note,
Speaker 2: you mentioned muckrakers. Apparently Teddy Roosevelt was the one who
Speaker 2: inadvertently coined that term. He was giving a speech about
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what the whole point of the speech
Speaker 2: was about, but he was basically railing against journalists to
Speaker 2: go look and dig up scandal. And he allowed that
Speaker 2: there's a role that they play in the public forum
Speaker 2: that's a good role, which is if there's somebody doing
Speaker 2: something shady, these guys are going to go find out
Speaker 2: and tell everybody, and that's a public good. What he
Speaker 2: was saying is even when given the chance to just
Speaker 2: write legitimate journalism, after that, they still go look for
Speaker 2: scandal and like try to cause problems that might not
Speaker 2: necessarily need, that aren't really problems. And he compared them
Speaker 2: to a character from Pilgrim's Progress who was the muckraker
Speaker 2: and muck is poop by the way, who had the
Speaker 2: chance to trade in his muckrake for not a muckrake
Speaker 2: and didn't even look up to didn't even bother looking up,
Speaker 2: just kept looking down at the muck he was raking
Speaker 2: for not a muckrake exactly.
Speaker 3: So he doesn't like Sinclair, like we said, he certainly
Speaker 3: doesn't trust him. He thought that the account in the
Speaker 3: Jungle was he called it hysterical. So he's like, I'm
Speaker 3: going to look into this myself, and by myself, I
Speaker 3: mean I'm going to have other people do it for me.
Speaker 3: Charles Neil, who was a Commissioner of the Bureau of
Speaker 3: Labor at the time, and an attorney from New York
Speaker 3: named James Reynolds would do the same thing. Well, I
Speaker 3: don't think they posed as workers, but they did the
Speaker 3: investigation in packing town in Chicago. It resulted in the
Speaker 3: Neil Reynolds report. And basically, I mean the long story
Speaker 3: short of the Neils Reynolds report is, by the way,
Speaker 3: everything he said what's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's even more more than than he put
Speaker 2: it in his book. That was the thing you said,
Speaker 2: they didn't pose as packing workers. The packing companies knew
Speaker 2: they were coming, and they yes, and they were so
Speaker 2: like the stuff they were doing was just so bad
Speaker 2: and entrenched that they still were caught doing all this
Speaker 2: stuff knowing that these were coming to investigate. So now
Speaker 2: Teddy Roosevelt has documentation from two people that he trusts saying, yes,
Speaker 2: this is actually going on. This is a huge problem
Speaker 2: and we need to do something about it.
Speaker 1: Should we talk about the bathrooms.
Speaker 2: Yes, let's because we haven't been super gross for a minute.
Speaker 3: So like we said, they exposed even worse things than
Speaker 3: in the book, and this is one of them. The
Speaker 3: bathrooms weren't really bathrooms. Sometimes it would just be a
Speaker 3: little cordoned off area of the same workroom floor where
Speaker 3: they're scooping up god knows what to put into the sausage.
Speaker 3: There was obviously no sinks, there were no open toilets.
Speaker 3: You would just pee in that corner. There was no soap,
Speaker 3: no toilet paper, and that's when it was just sort
Speaker 3: of cordoned off.
Speaker 1: There were also places where it was just nothing.
Speaker 3: They would just pee where they were so they could
Speaker 3: keep working as fast as they could. They said, the
Speaker 3: fumes from the urine, I'll just read the quote hints
Speaker 3: in some cases, the fumes from the urine swell the
Speaker 3: sum of nauseating odors arising from the dirty, blood soaked
Speaker 3: rotting wood floors.
Speaker 1: Fruitful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fruitful is hard for me to say. Fruitful culture
Speaker 3: beds for the disease germs of men and animals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and don't forget. Multiple times a day they scraped
Speaker 2: up the stuff that had dropped on the floor and
Speaker 2: put it in the sausage. And I saw a description
Speaker 2: of those floors that really turned my stomach. They called
Speaker 2: them spongy. Isn't that awful because they were rotting from
Speaker 2: spit and blood and urine. That's what the meat was
Speaker 2: coming into contact.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it held even more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so gross, dude, spongy wood as bad enough as
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 1: Oh man.
Speaker 3: So the other thing they did was said, and by
Speaker 3: the way, President Benjamin Harris former president, in eighteen ninety
Speaker 3: you signed a very weak meat inspection bill that basically
Speaker 3: put USDA inspectors at these meat packing plants. But all
Speaker 3: they were charged to do was say, well, this cow
Speaker 3: was healthy before they slaughtered it, and I'm going back
Speaker 3: to sleep now. They had no authority to oversee what
Speaker 3: happened after that point exactly.
Speaker 2: So even the rejected animals that those USDA inspectors would
Speaker 2: be like, this one doesn't pass, muster, get rid of it.
Speaker 2: They would get rid of it, and then when the
Speaker 2: inspector left, they would go back and get it and
Speaker 2: process it anyway. So there was no actual like oversight. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Even the oversight that was there was just completely undermined.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this this was like, this was bad news for
Speaker 2: the Beef Trust and other packers. This something was now
Speaker 2: going to happen because Teddy Roosevelt had this report, and
Speaker 2: in addition to the jungle being out in public, he said, Hey,
Speaker 2: I've got this report, Congress, I want these I want
Speaker 2: some reforms to be pushed through. Make it happen, or
Speaker 2: I'm going to release this report that I've commissioned that's
Speaker 2: really getting to blow the lid off of this stuff.
Speaker 2: And he got cooperation from the Senate. They passed a bill,
Speaker 2: passed a great bill, and then it started to get
Speaker 2: blocked in the House, and I think it came down
Speaker 2: to like two senators or no, two congress people, congressmen
Speaker 2: who were so in the Beef Trust pocket that they
Speaker 2: staged a last ditch effort at stopping these meat inspection
Speaker 2: bills from going through. And that finally did it for Roosevelt,
Speaker 2: and he released the Neil Reynolds report, and it just
Speaker 2: made anybody sticking up for the Beef Trust look so
Speaker 2: bad that you just couldn't get in the way of
Speaker 2: it any longer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think didn't someone leaked it beforehand too?
Speaker 3: Didn't Upton Sinclair help leak it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, supposedly, And I guess Teddy Roosevelt angrily wired Doubleday,
Speaker 2: the publisher, the actual guy named Doubleday, and said, like,
Speaker 2: can you please tell up upting Sinclair to leave the
Speaker 2: is of ruting the country to me? For once?
Speaker 1: That was smarmy.
Speaker 2: You see smarm everywhere in all the quotes.
Speaker 1: I see smarmy people.
Speaker 3: So this resulted in two things, the Meat Inspection Act
Speaker 3: of nineteen oh six and then eventually the Pure Food
Speaker 3: and Drug Act, which outlawed the sale of any altered, adulterated,
Speaker 3: mislabeled foods, drug, medicine, or liquor. Became known as doctor
Speaker 3: Wiley's Law or the Wiley Act. Contribute to doctor Wiley.
Speaker 3: That was not the creation of the FDA, though that
Speaker 3: would come along a little bit later. And like you said,
Speaker 3: we have a great episode on the FDA.
Speaker 1: What year was that though nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2: Seven, nineteen thirty. The Bureau of Chemistry was part of
Speaker 2: the USD until nineteen twenty.
Speaker 3: Seven, all right, So then finally in nineteen thirty we
Speaker 3: get our FDA.
Speaker 2: And then finally in nineteen thirty eight, after FDR came
Speaker 2: into office, the federal government was the agent. The FDA
Speaker 2: was finally given real teeth to actually regulate stuff. It
Speaker 2: was kind of nominal for a while until the late thirties.
Speaker 1: You gotta say real teeth right now.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I'm sorry, I mean as a slam.
Speaker 1: That's all right.
Speaker 2: Well, if you want to know more about this really
Speaker 2: interesting period in history, go research up Sin Saint Clair,
Speaker 2: Teddy Roosevelt, doctor Harvey Washington, Wiley, read the Jungle, do
Speaker 2: all that stuff, and just see how grossed out you
Speaker 2: can get before you vomit. And since Chuck laughed at vomit,
Speaker 2: that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I read this.
Speaker 3: It's an email about our live show in Seattle, and
Speaker 3: I read this as sort of a hey, here's what
Speaker 3: you get at a stuff you should know show. Because
Speaker 3: we've got we've got the cities lined up. We haven't
Speaker 3: announced on sale dates or anything, but I think we
Speaker 3: can probably say what cities were going through.
Speaker 2: Right Yeah, Yeah, I think it's pretty much in the bag.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 3: So we're going to hit Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, all
Speaker 3: the apolis is and then where are we going in
Speaker 3: the Northeast this year?
Speaker 2: In the Northeast, We're doing DC, We're going to do Boston. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we're going to us New York City, which we haven't
Speaker 2: been to in a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been a minute since we've been to New York.
Speaker 3: And then we're going to finish out the year in Durham,
Speaker 3: North Carolina, and our final show the year in Atlanta,
Speaker 3: like we like to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the schedule as it stands now, and it's
Speaker 2: pretty close to baked, close enough that we're willing to
Speaker 2: say this in the hopes that we don't have to
Speaker 2: edit out of town.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: So I read this because this is a little taste
Speaker 3: of what you can get here. And this is from
Speaker 3: Mary Benedict, a grandma to a grandson, and they went
Speaker 3: to the show together.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is a great email.
Speaker 3: It was Hey, guys, been listening for about ten years.
Speaker 3: I'm a huge fan and retired teacher. I introduced my
Speaker 3: grandson just stuff you should know, and he too has
Speaker 3: become a devoted fan. So for Christmas, I gave him
Speaker 3: tickets to the live event in Seattle. He was thrilled.
Speaker 3: We went to the show, absolutely loved the experience. The
Speaker 3: topic was fun. You two are as great as you
Speaker 3: sound in your episodes. As the questions move forward, so
Speaker 3: we do a little Q and a at the end. Surprise,
Speaker 3: surprise if you haven't been to a show. So as
Speaker 3: the questions move forward toward the end, you declared one
Speaker 3: final question which would have left my grandson at the mic.
Speaker 3: I was repeating to myself, please please see that he's
Speaker 3: a kid. Please see that he's a kid, and Chuck
Speaker 3: did exactly that. You asked him how old he was,
Speaker 3: as well as the girl behind him, both were fourteen.
Speaker 3: You apologize to the other side and let the two
Speaker 3: young people talk with you. Please know what a remarkable
Speaker 3: moment that was for my grandson, A euphoric life experience
Speaker 3: in memory.
Speaker 1: So thank you.
Speaker 3: I also want to share my appreciation for how kind
Speaker 3: you were to all the people in Q and A.
Speaker 3: You always asked a question about them or thoughtfully commented
Speaker 3: on personal things they shared with you.
Speaker 1: That level of.
Speaker 3: Compassion and kindness is extraordinary. In my regard for you,
Speaker 3: both rose even higher. And lastly, Josh, thank you for
Speaker 3: your vulnerability sharing that you need to avoid the news
Speaker 3: right now, for your well being, demonstrated strength and emotional
Speaker 3: intelligence to everyone present, and thank you for modeling great
Speaker 3: life strategies. Are you familiar with highly sensitive people? You
Speaker 3: may not be one, but I am and my grandson.
Speaker 1: Is as well.
Speaker 3: It is a character trait, not a problem, and that
Speaker 3: would make a fantastic topic for a podcast for sure.
Speaker 3: Sorry this ran long, but in the world where people
Speaker 3: are quick to point out what's wrong, Mary, we love you.
Speaker 3: I believe it's important to tell people what they are
Speaker 3: doing when they are doing great things. And you two
Speaker 3: are doing great things.
Speaker 1: That's awesome, That is wonderful.
Speaker 3: That is Mary with an I Benedict and Mary's grandson.
Speaker 1: So thank you both for coming.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks a lot, a lot, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The life strategy example I'm setting is avoidance.
Speaker 1: Now, avoiding the news is not avoidance.
Speaker 2: If it's true. If you want to be like Mary
Speaker 2: and her grandson and come to one of our shows,
Speaker 2: we will eventually put the information and links and all
Speaker 2: that for tickets up and in the meantime you can
Speaker 2: get in touch with us by email at stuff podcast
Speaker 2: at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.